Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  This is the moment, I thought, looking at them both. Remember it. Remember the details, the colour, the smell. Remember the sound of Luca talking quietly, whispering to his father in French. His baby teeth, still shiny, not yet lost. Remember the faint light coming through the windows. The smell of the sugared crepes, the colour of the orange juice I had squeezed for him.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Bruno said suddenly, rising from the floor. ‘It’s time. The bus leaves at nine sharp.’ Luca and I looked at each other. I saw in his face the softness of a child, but also something else: a slight defiance, the emerging of an individual. He was half Bruno and half me, for sure, but he was also very much Luca Girodon.

  They took the motorcycle, Luca in his new red helmet, and I walked along rue Notre Dame des Champs, pulling his suitcase to the meeting point at La Closerie des Lilas, where long ago Hemingway was usually found getting drunk with his friends. A shot of brandy, I thought, would make me feel better now, and I briefly thought of the old Bruno, the fun one, the one that ran down the length of a bar in Nairobi while the barman tried to catch him, just so that he could lean down and kiss me passionately.

  ‘That was the most romantic thing I have ever seen in my life!’ my Kenyan friend, Anna, had said. Her husband, Tonio, was there, too. Tonio and Bruno were doing shots at one end of the bar, there were pretty hookers from Somalia everywhere, and soon a fight broke out, and we got kicked out. Then Anna and Tonio had a fight, and Tonio ran off, and Bruno went after him, then Bruno and I went to sleep while Anna and Tonio kept fighting. There was a crash in the middle of the night – Tonio had broken through a wall of glass. Bruno rushed down to stop Anna from beating him. Everyone went back to bed. In the morning, there was the pure, hot Kenyan light and the smell of coffee. We were due to fly to Samburu land, but Bruno woke and said he had to go back to France, he was too disturbed, too ‘perturbé’ by the scene the night before. He drove to the airport and changed his ticket while I stood in shock, but remained stoic.

  ‘When will we meet again?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but we will.’

  This was us. No map, no rules.

  There were crazy nights, and even crazier resolutions. The most romantic thing I ever saw. The most romantic man I ever knew. But now we were parents, Bruno was sober and the intensity of those days was exhausting us. We wanted peace. We did not want the ghosts around us any more.

  Bruno always told me the reason he loved me, the reason he married me when he had always said he never would marry anyone, was that no matter how much it hurt, I always let him go where he wanted to when he needed to, when he had to. It was not about other people, about other women, other places. It was about his need to be alone, to be free, to be unencumbered.

  ‘Go if you have to go,’ I said, and kissed his cheek. His eyes filled with tears. I knew he loved me. I knew no one could ever replace me. What else mattered?

  I knew there were others like me with complicated spouses. Simone de Beauvoir once said it about Sartre and his hundreds of flirtations: ‘Once you know there is something irreplaceable between you and another person, nothing else matters.’ This was the way our relationship went – in and out, back and forth, two steps forwards and three back.

  Before Luca, it was our life. That day in Africa, Bruno flew back to France, we broke up again, we got back together again, we lived continents apart, we reunited in a wave of passion, we stood in front of a priest and took our vows, we made a little boy, we became parents.

  Then Bruno broke down, a carjacker in Nairobi killed Tonio, Anna got married again to a Samburu warrior, and Bruno and I tried to live the best we could with the brutality of our history, sometimes scratching out the pain and with a compulsion to be better, but always trying – at least we felt – to be honest.

  At the meeting point, we loaded Luca’s red suitcase on to the bus, I gave his teacher Stephanie the two letters I had written. I had drawn hearts over them in yellow (‘Mama, what is your favourite colour? Mine is yellow because it is happy, it is the sun!’) and red and green (‘Green for Christmas, yellow for summer, right, Mama?’). Bruno and I went for a coffee at the café on rue d’Assas, and I ate a tartine and read Le Figaro trying to take my mind off my anxiety.

  Bruno drank an espresso silently, smoked two filter-less Camels, then pecked me on the top of my head and went off on an assignment, ‘To the suburbs, the rough neighbourhoods.’ It struck me that for the first time in five years, we were alone without our son. Even though we sometimes went away together for the weekend, in the old days, before AA, while Moineau and Bapu watched Luca, this was different: our son had left us, not the other way around.

  ‘Do you want to go to a movie tonight? Or hear some jazz? It’s the St-Germain Jazz Festival,’ I said. Bruno loved jazz. He had listened to it endlessly all those long but wonderful nights when he stayed up with the infant Luca.

  My wounded, fragile, impossible husband frowned. His beautiful face, creased with pain that I could not read. ‘I have my meeting tonight at eight-fifteen. It’s about the Big Book.’

  The Big Book, the bible of AA. The meetings at the American Church, Quai d’Orsay. Right next to the Musée d’Orsay that I had stood and looked at from my balcony at rue du 29 Juillet, the huge illuminated clock at the top of the building, feeling such hope and happiness. Now I hated passing that church. I hated the smell of the rooms where the AA held their meetings. It was the alien spaceship that had opened its doors and taken away my husband.

  But this was selfish, I know. Because AA, of course, had saved him.

  I smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I was not disappointed. This was a version of me in Kenya, saying goodbye; me in Los Angeles after a passionate two weeks together when the final night consisted of us both crying because we could not give each other what we wanted (me, a baby; Bruno, the ultimate freedom); me in Jalalabad, saying goodbye to him for ever.

  I was saying goodbye again; I was exhausted by the comings and goings. And Bruno hated long goodbyes. He called it ‘red eye blinking eye’ because when he took a photograph of the two of us in Los Angeles airport after that particularly painful break-up, I had been crying for hours and he was rapidly blinking back tears. When I boarded the plane – in those pre-9/11 days, when your companion could accompany you all the way to the gate – I turned around to see him blinking over and over, tears falling down his cheeks. How long was it after that I did not see him? I lost count. Once it was weeks, another time months. I would try to put him from my mind, but it would always be impossible to forget each other, to find a replacement. We would always reunite somewhere with the ferocity of firecrackers. We found each other again in airports, in war zones, in cities.

  And he would always save me. Me running in the door after a brutal bombing in Kosovo, wearing a funny wool hat a soldier had given me, and Bruno playing poker with some of his TV colleagues in a seedy hotel in Northern Albania. He put down his card and dragged me by the hand outside. ‘Such joy!’ he said, seeing my dirty, bedraggled face. Me in Afghanistan, after months and months travelling with the Northern Alliance towards Kabul, sleeping in tents, sleeping on the ground with bronchitis so severe it hurt to breathe, and Bruno sending with a colleague antibiotics and a warm nightgown that he had bought at Princesse Tam Tam, a shop I loved on rue Bonaparte. Then our meeting, in Jalalabad, months later, him kissing my face over and over.

  ‘Did you miss me?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Him in Burma, undercover, filming child labourers, me in Sierra Leone, two of my friends murdered, hiding secret papers linking the government to blood diamonds. Bruno on a Burmese train, opening his washbag and finding a small bottle of my perfume he always kept. ‘And I opened it, and I wished I had not,’ he wrote to me later, ‘because all of the memories came flooding back.’ Our meeting in Paris: me running up the seven flights to his apartment, him opening the door with a huge smile.

  After Grozny: ‘You’re alive. I told you would be
alive.’

  After East Timor: ‘What happened there?’ Then a pause. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  Our days in bed, sleeping together, getting up only to buy food at a Greek delicatessan and take it to the Chateau de Vincennes on a summer day, lying on a blanket and listening to jazz.

  And the meeting after months and months apart when he was in Africa, fighting his demons, the war waging outside his door, and me at home growing bigger and bigger with his baby; opening the door to my London flat, and there was my new husband. I threw my arms around him, and buried my face in his neck. We would never ever be apart again, I vowed. Neither one of us would ever be in danger again.

  I had wanted, he had wanted, so desperately a clean life.

  So much joy, Bruno had given me. And today, the middle of May, there was other joy. Our son was growing, Bruno was not drinking, and I was leaving, finally, the sadness of the past behind. And out of this chaos, there was a child. After him, perhaps there would be more children, Luca’s own someday. Marguerite, Bruno’s Hungarian acupuncturist, a woman he called ‘my angel’, had said when Luca was born: ‘Now you and Janine are immortal.’ It was no longer us. Our time, in a sense, had finished, together or not, but that little boy for ever bound us. And I knew, even if I never saw Bruno again, or if it was years before I saw him, I would never have nothing to say to him. He would always be the person who spoke the same language as me.

  My husband rode off on his motorcycle down rue d’Assas, smiling behind his new helmet, driving to the suburbs to work, and I finished my tartine and read the day-old news in the Herald Tribune, while Luca, on the school bus headed to Burgundy, rolled off to his first adventure.

  15

  A Tentative Peace

  Il faut en profiter. Enjoy it. Enjoy him. Those earliest days, when Luca was wrapped in his soft white rabbit suit and I was holding him tightly to my chest, everyone told me how fast it went. How short their infancy, their childhood. Enjoy it. Watch him. Take the images and freeze them in your mind. Sage comme une image. A baby as good as gold.

  People warned me that children grow up and they don’t need you any more. I could not possibly believe this. My son had been premature and unable to dress or feed himself; we had had to clean the stub of his umbilical cord. It seemed inconceivable that one day he would play on the floor without me, surrounded by Lego, or that he would even say, ‘Mama, close the door, I want to be alone.’

  I had wanted, perhaps in a kind of rebellion against my early periphrastic life, to be a wife and mother, that 1950s kind, who makes her own pastry and wears a stick-out skirt. I wanted to be a good wife, to try to administer to a sick and wounded husband. I had tried, but ultimately, as Martha Gellhorn once said to me, talking about some dictator, a leopard does not change its spots. And when Luca was nearly six years old, I went to Afghanistan.

  It was not a long trip, not long by my old standards when I’d be away for months and months; and it was not a trip that involved heavy drinking or wild flirtations or wonderful passionate nights falling back into bed with someone who spoke the same disoriented language of war as me. But it was certainly a trip that changed me. I had vowed, even written publicly, that I would never put myself in danger again. And while Kabul hardly seemed dangerous to me after Chechnya or Liberia, there were kidnappings. A security guard who came to pick me up to bring me to the airport was appalled at my guest house. ‘Do you feel safe here?’ he said, checking the roof. ‘Anyone could get in.’ He told me the guard at the gate was stoned and useless and that I was totally vulnerable to kidnapping and attack.

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said. The fear that had gripped me in Luca’s early days was gone. I did not feel as numb as I had during my most reckless period, but there was something of the old spirit that had returned. After that, I went to Cairo. On the flight back, we sat on the runway for an hour. I put on my dark glasses and tears rolled down my cheeks as Bruno sent me text messages about love, about redemption. About Luca.

  Bruno left for Pakistan. He had not drunk in more than two years. He went to his meetings. He shaved his head, something he had once done before when he was in the midst of a dark period. He saw few people aside from Luca, to whom he was the most wonderful and loving father, and me. But when he spoke, it was in AA talk. His life was centred on the work he did inside the walls of the church at Quai d’Orsay.

  There were times when I wanted the bond that we had, the promise he made to me that night in Sarajevo years before, to end. ‘I will never lose you.’ Sometimes, in frustrated and bitter moments, I had ugly thoughts: I wondered if it would be better if his plane went down in the Indian Ocean, or if the Taliban in Waziristan kidnapped him because then the union we had, the beautiful union, would be frozen for ever in time, and would not change so drastically.

  I knew, in a sense, we would never be free of each other. Even if I chose a different life, a healthy one, one that was not tainted by war or illness or breakdown or even Paris, I would always have him in my life: he had vowed he would never lose me. And there was also our son.

  Bruno always had the ability to read my mind, to know me sometimes better than I knew myself, and he sent me a note one evening on my telephone: ‘The promise I made to you in Sarajevo will always remain. I will never lose you.’

  But we were separating. We could no longer live together, not as a couple, not as the two people who had brought the baby home from the hospital and built fires in rue du 29 Juillet or who had ridden the Ferris wheel in the Tuileries or taken off for weeks on the back of his motorcycle. He had changed and so had I.

  One night, late, an SMS arrived from an old, old friend, another woman reporter I had met in Sarajevo. Karen was a beautiful woman with whom I had many shared memories, and we had a friend in common, a character, a strange and troubled man, a reporter who had fallen off the radar after the Bosnian War.

  Karen’s message was short: Marchand finally killed himself.

  It was nearly midnight when I got the message, and I got out of bed. I wanted a drink, but there was no alcohol in the house. I wanted to smoke, and I searched in my desk drawer for an old cigarette. I could see Paul Marchand’s face: his smirk, his strange cruelty but also his humour. I called Bruno in the small studio where he used to stay while he was in recovery, in rehab, as he called it. And where he now lived.

  ‘Paul Marchand hanged himself.’

  ‘Holy fuck.’

  ‘It could have been you. It could have been me.’

  ‘It wasn’t us. Go to bed, baby. You’re alive.’

  But I could not sleep. I lay on my pillow with tears running down my face, trying to call my friend Ariane, who had come back from five years in Afghanistan wounded from living for too long in violence, and who now lived around the corner. ‘I’m tired of living around guns,’ she said. I had shared an office with her in Sarajevo, and she had first introduced me to Paul. ‘I know,’ she said sadly, when I told her. ‘I feel like I’m surrounded by death.’

  I remembered things I had forgotten long before: escaping from the besieged city for forty-eight hours to meet Bruno in Germany, and not telling my office. Returning to Sarajevo, and seeing Marchand. His joking, teasing. ‘Hey Janine, your editor called and I told him you left your post to go meet your boyfriend.’ How he shared his food, his cans of Gini orange soda that he brought into the city by the caseload.

  He had apparently been a beaten child, the child of alcoholics who abused him. None of us ever knew that. He stuttered as a small boy and had been bullied at school. We only saw a tall, rather handsome man with a city coat and shiny shoes who seemed reckless and crazy and addicted to war. Who stupidly drove around a city that was targeted by snipers with the words on the side of his car: don’t waste your bullets, I am immortal. Who then famously got shot and severely injured, losing part of his arm.

  But there was a gentleness to him, too. One time, shortly after I first arrived in Sarajevo, I was not able to wash because there was no water, a
nd I remember sitting in his room while he patiently heated a can of water and helped me wash my hair, then dried it by hand. ‘Now you are beautiful!’ he said.

  Another time he rang my room at 2 a.m. ‘The water is running and she is hot!’ It was December 1992, and for a rare hour the electricity worked in the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo. There was water coming out of the creaking pipes. The toilets flushed! The telephone rang!

  Or the time we found the old people frozen to death in their home near the front line, and his outrage, his indignation: ‘We are going to the UN and telling them to take away the bodies. Or we put them in my car and we do it ourselves.’

  Kurt Schork was there too; he was dead, now Marchand. And Juan Carlos, a Bolivian journalist who always made me laugh, who had shot himself after he said he saw too much. The last time I saw him was 5 a.m. at my apartment in London, after a long drinking session:

  ‘I won’t see you for a long, long time,’ he said, walking down the stairs.

  ‘What do you mean? I’ll see you soon.’

  ‘No. It’s time.’ I knew then what he meant. ‘I’ve lived enough, seen enough, and drunk enough. It’s time.’ He died too.

  The years had rolled on, and I had married that strange man who fell on his knees in front of me in Sarajevo. My father died. My brother died. I became a wife and a mother. ‘You are alive and they are not,’ Bruno had told me.

  No one tells you when you give birth about the real sadness of parenthood – that children grow up. The baby who smiled at you, and stared in your eyes with undying love, looks at you and says, ‘Mama, please don’t talk – I am thinking.’

  The man you marry, who stood before you in church, or in a registry office, who held your hand when you gave birth, and kissed your forehead with such unbridled tenderness, also changes. People who deeply love each other cannot always live together; this is the real sadness of life.