Eventually I slept, but the old nightmares came back, and in the morning I wondered if they would ever go away.
‘Your French passport is here.’ Bruno calls me while I am in the souk in Cairo. In the background is the call of the muezzin, a sullen and melancholy sound that will for ever remind me of my early twenties and Jerusalem, before I became a mother, before I became his wife.
‘You’re now officially French. Congratulations, baby. I’m so proud of you.’ Then softer: ‘But I have always been proud of you. No matter what you do, I am always proud of who you are, and what you are.’ His voice was full of sorrow.
I thought briefly of all we had done, all we had gone through – the war, Africa, the coup, his back, the drink, the cigarettes, the fax from Kurdistan. All the love letters, and that very first, left by my window in Sarajevo: I won’t lose you.
Then the desire for Luca; all those miscarriages, the loss, the tears, the sorrow, the bitterness, the eventual triumph when he was born and Bruno called out, ‘He has your hands!’ The hand-knitted jumpers, the ruffled white blouses like Pierrot; the trips on Air France in a little box, the first day of school, the rolling adventure. Our life in Paris.
And that summer, for the very first time, our son learned to swim. At Ascension, we went to St Barts, the place we had taken him when he was three months old – in those infant days he slept on two chairs pushed together – and he waddled out into the pool without floaters, and he swam, one arm in front of the other. ‘Mama! Look! Look!’
I picked up my passport at the St Sulpice police station, alone one late summer morning, careful to get there in plenty of time before the window slammed shut and all the officials went to lunch. Bruno had wanted to come with me, to film it, but he was in Pakistan at the time, and besides, I felt there was something important about me going alone. A moral victory, of sorts.
I dressed carefully, respectfully, and walked to St Sulpice, taking the long way down rue d’Assas. I felt like a bride, fresh, arriving somewhere for the first time.
I arrived at the police station, and spoke my careful French to the person on the information desk and found the right office, a maze of French bureaucracy, but this time, my stomach did not get in a knot, and the French words came easily to me. The man behind the desk who took my receipt was rude and unpleasant – typical of a French officials – but like millions of Parisians, I did not react. Who cares what he thought, how he frowned as he searched through the piles of burgundy passports till he found my complicated name, how he barked at me to put my right hand on the biometric meter. I had my passport. I was French. He did not congratulate me, and I did not sing ‘La Marseillaise’, as I had expected. I put it in my bag and held the door for an African woman wheeling a pousette into the room. I hoped she was picking up her passport too.
I walked outside and it was a bright shiny morning. I wandered through Bruno’s favourite park, the tiny triangle of green across from the Hungarian Cultural Centre on rue Bonaparte, and cut through the Luxembourg Gardens. It was that time of year between the end of summer and the beginning of autumn and the trees were full and still green, but I could see the first chestnuts of the year falling on the dusty pathways. There were some children playing in the sandbox; my son had loved that sandbox but now he was too big – he said it was for babies.
I wished, on some level, that Bruno could have been with me and he could drink a glass of champagne at the Café Vavin, where once we had celebrated my birthday with bottles of it; and where once, years before, I had a sore throat and he ordered me a hot whisky; and where we had broken up, tearfully, again, one winter day after the war in Chechnya. I knew he would never be able to drink champagne with me again, that the bubbly, early, frantic and crazy days were over.
But it was all right. I sat on a bench and examined my new passport, wished myself well. I had done it. I had gotten through the tears and trauma and I had lived through a dozen wars, even though some of my friends had not. Bruno was still alive and had not killed himself on his motorcycle, or with drink, or with his gun.
From the other side of the park, I saw Luca coming towards me, wearing a pair of red corduroys and a beige jumper, skipping, holding Anna’s hand. He was happy, his smile as big as a pumpkin. ‘MAMA!’ he shouted. He let go of Anna’s hand and raced to me. I scooped him up, and held him as close as I could. He would always be mine, even when he grew, even when he no longer needed me. ‘Look what you made,’ my friend Roy, now also dead, had said to me the first time he saw him, when I opened the door with the baby in my arms. Look what you made!
I pulled Luca tighter to me, and waited for the next big thing to happen.
16
Endings and Beginnings
For two years in a row there was snow in the Luxembourg Gardens after New Year’s Day. There was ice on the duck pond, the fountains were frozen, snow piled outside the gates. The runners in their winter layers of Gortex and wool skidded and glided, and used the exterior of the park to run rather than slip and fall on the narrow paths. Luca and I spent a Sunday climbing on the roped-off, forbidden areas of the Luxembourg, making snowballs.
Outside, in the real world, there was a crisis. The financial markets had collapsed. Across Eastern Europe, the gas pipelines had been turned off. Babies in maternity wards in Bulgaria were freezing: nurses warmed their tiny clothes on space heaters. One year, as I planned Luca’s fifth birthday, 900 people died in Gaza in an Israeli offensive. Had I not been baking his chocolate birthday cake and preparing for eighteen children to come and hit a piñata with a stick, I would have been there. Possibly.
There was a freeze around Europe, and Paris looked more like Moscow to me, with hanging icicles and dark mornings, than France. But the news of the world – Gaza, Kabul, Baghdad – still seemed far from me, wrapped in the warmth of my living room of rue Notre Dame des Champs, watching Baby Loony tunes dubbed in French alone with my son. ‘Sacré bleu!’ said a tiny duck wearing a nappy. I had never actually heard anyone say that except a duck in a French cartoon. Then the spring came, the summer where Luca learned to swim in Greece with his godfather, and where I was beginning to get used to taking him on holidays by myself and fielding questions from people who said, ‘Where’s your husband? How is he?’
One day, walking down the street holding Luca’s hand, I realized, the way you realize when the sun comes through a thick woolly cloud, that I was no longer afraid. Perhaps it was because my son was older, and I knew he would no longer stick his fingers into electrical sockets, or that I could tell him to be careful of cars, and not to go off with strangers, but suddenly the metallic fear that seemed to travel with me everywhere since his birth was gone. In its place were a lightness, a joy, and a habitable place where I could raise him without thinking about backyard wars in the Balkans or Africa where neighbours turned on neighbours with machetes or guns. I was like everyone else. At a party, I met a psychiatrist who told me about how trauma can occur – something happens in your past, lies dormant, then is re-activated by an event. So Bruno’s trauma came with the wars because something must have happened to him earlier, a wound unhealed.
I belived I had escaped trauma because I passed the wars unharmed, I thought, psychologically. But the birth of my son opened up receptacles of recall, of memory, of those wars. I was not as unbroken as I had thought.
Bruno’s demons remained. He continued not to drink, but it was, I could see, a daily battle, it took huge courage. He missed the taste of alcohol, and the padding it gave him from the reality and sharpness of life. He insisted, in a macho way, on opening bottles of wine for guests where he would sniff the cork and the wine, then pour. ‘You don’t have to do that, no one here wants to drink,’ I said one Sunday, when I had prepared lunch for three friends, none of whom were drinking. Bruno had run down to the corner shop and brought back a bottle of Bordeaux. He poured two glasses, one for a friend, one for me, even after we both said we did not want it. Later, when he went to his meeting, I emptied the wine down t
he drain and took the empty bottle to the bin in the courtyard.
And now another year had passed. Soon, Luca would turn six years old. I knew that I had to return to the world. Partly because Bruno had actively left it, or at least left the world we had built together.
After our separation, he had taken a room around the corner in the 15th arrondissement. The apartment on the Luxembourg Gardens that he called his nest, that he built by hand for Luca and I, no longer held his energy.
We rebuilt our lives. He bought a futon and used the blue Kenzo sheets that were on his bed in the Marais when I first met him, half a million years before. We still loved each other. I realized there would never be a day when I would not love him fiercely. But neither one of us could really function together in a world that was real, as committed to each other as we were, and to our son. Life, with its sharp edges and complications, did not work for us as well as we worked together in wars.
Outside, people were still living. When I looked out of my windows to my neighbours across the street, the rooms were lit up, and there were festive dinner parties. The Christmas holidays were approaching and even through the gloom of the recession, people were drinking champagne and good wine. Bruno went, sometimes, to two AA meetings a day to get through the holidays.
There was not much money, and the papers talked of the worst job and financial crisis since 1945. So I shopped carefully: one jar of honey from the Raspail market instead of two or three. I tried not to think of what we had done the years before: engraved Christmas cards, champagne, caviar dinners at Dominique, the oldest Russian restaurant in Paris, now closed, and presents of La Perla silk lingerie from rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Possessions had never meant much to me. What I had wanted, more than clothes or cars or books, was security. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted not to be lost in the world.
Twice, just before the holidays started, we had gone alone to eastern France, to Alsace. Bruno knew I loved Christmas, that it reminded me of the happiest times of my childhood: my father driving us home from my Italian grandfather’s Christmas Eve dinners and listening to a reindeer report on the AM radio. My Italian aunts and my mother spending days making seven fishes for the Christmas Eve meal. The church scented with pine, the way the children’s choir sounded when they sang ‘Silent Night’. My entire family, still alive, and all young and healthy, sitting around a long walnut table draped with my great-grandmother’s handmade lace tablecloths and no one fighting. Limoges china and a crystal vase, too heavy to lift, a wedding present to Grandma Buccino in 1916 that held lemon-scented water in the centre of the table. The taste of the special cakes, the bowl of walnuts with the heavy silver cracker. My father’s face. My brothers and sisters. My mother.
One Christmas with Bruno had been golden, the first year of Luca’s birth. It had been one of the first trips we took alone without our baby We left him with Raquel and his grandparents, and Bruno found a small inn outside of Strasbourg. There was snow on the ground, and we huddled inside. When we did go out to the Christmas markets, we drank mulled wine and ate things that came in juniper or cinnamon sauces, and walked through snow and down small streets that led to canals.
He took me to a holy place, a stone monastery perched on a crag of a rock. The legend was that a princess had fallen in love with a man against the wishes of her family, and something terrible had happened, and so the family had built the chapel in her memory. There was a church called the Chapelle des Anges – Chapel of the Angels.
‘Look,’ Bruno said, ‘it’s our son.’ Pictures of winged babies, cherubim with fat face and hands, painted on the frescoes.
We sat in churches and listened to organ music. We ate choucroute. We bought pain d’épice made into the shape of hearts and had everyone’s name engraved on it in white frosting: Daddy, Mama, Luca, and everyone in my family. Then we went to Paris, collected our baby and Bruno’s parents, Bapu and Moineau, and flew to New York. We stayed in a friend’s apartment on West 10th Street. It was icy cold in New York and my best friend Connie and I bought the baby a Gortex blanket for Luca’s pousette in a tiny shop in the East Village. I wrapped him like an Indian papoose and only his little face stuck out, with his red cheeks. I felt safe. There was nothing in the world, I thought, that could happen to us.
When Luca was nearly four, we went back to Alsace. It was just before Christmas but this was a darker time. Bruno had started on his ‘quest’. I was confused and melancholy. We sat in restaurants and tried to talk, but when he explained himself, I stared at him in disbelief. He was not, I thought one afternoon, the same person I had married. He buried himself in novels by a spiritual French writer named Christian Bobin. I tried to read them and found it impossible: difficult phrases, unreasonable behaviour, and ridiculous scenarios. Circus performers ran off with lovers. Men fell in love and became obsessed with dead women. The novels were about God, lonely journeys, men who spent their lives alone needing and wanting no one. Men who lived and died alone. The author himself, Bruno told me brightly, lived a solitary and simple life in the Burgundy countryside. He rarely saw anyone.
I hated Christian Bobin. I blamed him for this tsunami, this terrible and violent interference in my life.
We went back to the monastery and the chapel of angels but I was miserable. We sat in a refectory with Christian pilgrims wearing handwoven sweaters and thick shoes, and I drank mulled wine alone, but there was no joy in it. We bought more gingerbread, and ordered choucroute the same way we had when we had come the first time, but in the middle of the meal, tears rolled down my face into my plate. Bruno said nothing: what could he? I found, for the first time in my life – aside from when I had my tonsils out and had to be hospitalized – that I could not eat.
Once a week, together, we saw Irene. I grew to love her, her petite frame, and her New York–French accent. She was incredibly kind. Her apartment always smelled of food: good, sturdy winter food, which she said came from her neighbour who cooked all the time. Some afternoons I smelled stuffed peppers, other times it was roasted chicken. But the smell of food made me feel sick, as did the panic that gripped me in the stomach when we came out of the elevator door and into her apartment, the feeling that for one hour, we would be totally exposed.
Bruno talked a lot. He said things that made no sense, long stream-of-conscious sentences that left me raw. He smoked, he said things that shocked and surprised me; he spoke in phrases lifted from AA meetings. Even the impassive Irene occasionally lifted an eyebrow.
‘It’s a cult,’ I said.
‘No, it’s not a cult really,’ she said quietly. ‘But sometimes it replaces one addiction with another.’
Christmas arrived. Bruno had always hated Christmas before I met him – it depressed him. He always was the one who volunteered to go to war zones over Christmas so other people could spend it with their families. Until Luca and I arrived, and then he spent hours threading coloured lights over the doors and the windows.
This year he had his studio. But he came home every day, saying, ‘This is tellement difficile.’ He bought us a tree – despite the recession and my protests that we were broke – for 150 Euros on the Boulevard Raspail. It looked Germanic and regal, and we draped the branches with the crystal and wooden ornaments that I had collected over the years. He spent hours decorating the window with fake snow and snowflake cut-outs. On the mirror above the fireplace, he sprayed two reindeer joined close together.
His mood pulled violently. He saw no one, went only to his AA meetings and spoke only to his sponsor. Some days he was lucid and kind, speaking in a calm and confident voice. Some days he came over and shook, and tears ran down his face. Some days I looked at him and did not recognize the person that looked back at me. He built fires and stared at them endlessly. He taught Luca how to build a fire, how to respect the fire, how to take care of the fire.
‘Please don’t let my son near the fire,’ I said.
‘Nothing bad can happen when Daddy is here,’ he said. It was his mantra. He had star
ted saying it the day we moved to Paris. But it sounded hollow. Because bad things had happened while he was there. I did my work and took care of my son. I read everything I could about alcoholics, spouses of alcoholics, children of alcoholics, sisters of drug addicts, dysfunctional families and post-traumatic stress disorder and war correspondents.
In the end, I gave up and decided I could only live by the rules that I knew. I tried to live joyfully, the way we had in the early days, even though I felt as though I had been burned alive. I played Christmas music in the early morning when I woke before Luca, and made him cinnamon toast and hot chocolate for breakfast. Then I roused him, warm and sleepy, his hair knotted around his shoulders, and carried him to the living room, wrapped in the striped blanket. Because of his sweet nature, or perhaps because Bruno and I constantly told him how much he was loved, he did not seem affected by this avalanche in our lives.
Those wintry mornings, I made and drank two dark coffees, then fed and dressed Luca in red wool sweaters and trousers for his Christmas show. Walking to school, in English, we sang ‘Jingle Bells’, and ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’. But at school, in French, my little boy sang songs about Père Noel.
Over the years, Bruno gave me some very beautiful things. They were not things that you would see in magazine ads. He bought me things that he took time to find, each one was individual and looked like me and came from places where he had been, and from when we were apart.
There were silver necklaces from Iraq inlaid with intricate pieces of lapis lazuli. There were silk evening gowns from Burma; midnight blue beads from Bamako: tunics that he said were ‘my colours’ (deep olive green and blood red) that he spent hours wandering in a market in Karachi trying to find that would suit me. He found things that matched my eyes and my hair and my body.
Every time he brought me something, pulled it from his worn-out backpack, coming back from a trip like a Victorian adventurer, I saw the expression on his face as he passed the box or the bag to me. It was pride. He knew me. He saw me. Of the jewels, there were delicate rings that slipped over my fingers like pieces of silk; one from Los Angeles, one made from sapphires that he bought in Madagascar after he had been beaten up by a crowd, an emerald from somewhere else in Africa. There was a charm bracelet made from milky moonstones and pale green stones, my favourite beach colours. There was a necklace with a tiny circle, a symbol of love, hung by gold that he once gave a waitress to present to me with a glass of pink champagne on our anniversary. There was a diamond that fit around my wrist on a black cord with a note that said the colour indicated serenity.
Ghosts by Daylight Page 19
