Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  The engagement ring itself was a beautiful thing. He had spent hours with the head of de Beers in Johannesburg, staring at stone after stone till he found this one. He had called me that day, excited. There was one that shone so much that it was magical, he said, but it was smaller than another which was equally startling, but bigger. He could not decide. ‘You choose,’ I said. He bought the bigger one and had it cut into a princess design. Because he said I was a princess.

  But of all things he gave me, the thing I loved the most was my wedding ring. It was simple and gold, nothing elaborate, no diamonds or engraving. It was just a simple band, but when I wore it, it slid back and forth on my ring finger, the same long fingers my son would inherit, and the first thing his father saw when he popped outside of me, hands first. I loved that ring. It symbolized so much: stability after madness; settling down after roaming; softness after so much hardness. It meant we were a unit. The three of us.

  Bruno understood me. He got me. The only decent line in the film Avatar is when one alien says to another: ‘I see you.’ Bruno saw me. No one else, I realized, in my entire life, ever had.

  An Afghan friend once explained their mourning ritual: someone dies and for forty days the family mourns. They cry, they weep, they remember the dead, and they go through their days miserable and forlorn. They meet for lunch after prayers on Friday and recall the life and death of their loved one.

  But on the forty-first day, life begins again. I decided that I had cried and mourned enough, that the funeral was over. It was my forty-first day.

  One afternoon, in the early summer, I put the ring away in a cedar box that a friend who had died – from overdosing on a mixture of cocaine and heroin known as a speedball – had given me for my thirtieth birthday. The box was rimmed with black and had a small key. Inside I put the diamond ring, the plastic man and wife from the top of our wedding cake, which had been a beautiful mound of caramel and crème anglaise, a pièce montée. I put a tiny note inside too, scented with the last of my Tocca perfume that he loved so much. The smell of happiness.

  Love affair with Bruno, 1993–2009.

  Last, I laid the wedding ring inside a tiny green leather box with a gold catch. I closed the box, locked it and put it on a shelf. Even as I was doing it, I realized it was dramatic, but it was something – a crazy, mad ritual – I had to perform.

  Afterwards, I thought what other people would say: but why can’t the two of you who love each other so much live together like normal people? Why can’t you be, as the writer Isabel Allende once called it, the kind of people who fit under the umbrella?

  Because we weren’t.

  Long ago, when I met him, I knew Bruno was like Ulysses. He would roam the earth but would always yearn for home and mourn those whom he loved. But when he finally reached the home he wanted and needed, he would pace like a wounded tiger in a cage. He could not settle. He could not be settled. He had tried because of how much he loved me, and his son. But it was impossible, and it was killing me, and it was killing him to try.

  Even after I locked his things in that box, he still brought me more gifts. A piece of rare green stone that hangs on a thick chain and changes colours in the sun, that matches the green in my eyes. A peace sign from Woodstock. Silk pyjamas from China.

  My friend Bettina saw the green stone hanging around my neck and took it in her hands. ‘My God,’ she said solemnly, ‘he really sees you.’

  ‘I know.’ I said.

  He saw me when he met me, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn on Sniper’s Alley. And when he found me again, five years later, in a rose garden in Algiers. In a grimy pension in Jalalabad; a rooftop in St Louis in Senegal; a seventh-floor walk-up near the Bastille; a lush garden overflowing with coconuts and mangoes in Abidjan; a Balinese bed on the Swahili coast of Kenya; a fluorescent-lit boarding house in Benin. And, finally, in the house he built to keep Luca and I safe, in Paris, near the Luxembourg Gardens.

  And he sends me messages that no one else would understand. What do the messages say? They are always about love, but a certain kind of love. They are always about destiny, fate, surrendering. Redemption. They are always about us. ‘The promise I made to you in Sarajevo. I will never lose you.’ They are always about uncompromised emotion. ‘My tenderness is with you always.’

  At a party one night in London, I saw someone I knew from my other life. She said brightly and a little drunkenly, ‘Now that Luca is nearly six, will you go back on the road? You said you would.’

  I put down my paper cup of bad wine. ‘Did I? I don’t remember.’

  But the next morning, I woke up and thought: Now, it is time. A few months later, I was on a Minnow helicopter in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, headed for a Forward Operating Base in Sangin to embed with British troops fighting a fierce battle against insurgents. The day I arrived was the memorial service for two soldiers killed the day before; one of them, Luke Farmer, was eighteen and a half years old. I thought of Luca at eighteen as I stared out the back of the helicopter at the brown and dusty Afghan landscape. I had always hated working in Afghanistan. Why was I back here?

  The day before I left Paris I saw a clairvoyant on the rue Rambuteau. It was bitterly cold and the clairvoyant, who was from Haiti, was wrapped in a long sweater the colour of the sea. She made me a cup of Nescafé. She had just found out that an earthquake had struck her island that morning, but she did not yet know the gravity – that hundreds of thousands of people would die, and she would spend the rest of the day desperately trying to reach her father. ‘If the phone rings, I may have to answer it,’ she said, laying down her tarot cards.

  I don’t go to clairvoyants, but I went to see Malou because I wanted to know if I was going to die; if this trip to this remote army base in the most backward part of Afghanistan, a country already so backward that life and death practically intertwined, was going to be my last.

  ‘I would like to know why you are going,’ my son’s godfather asked me. It was hard to explain. Was it that I wanted my life back? The promise I had made long ago in the church at Our Lady of Victories, to give up everything, was I stealing back my promise, made in front of rows and rows of lit candles?

  The clairvoyant was not sinister or remotely witchy. On the contrary, she was a French clairvoyant and decidedly chic with her high leather boots and her tight jeans. The trip, she said, staring at the cards in the wintry, frozen January light, was going to be difficult but important. ‘This is the beginning of a new life,’ she said. ‘I can’t really tell you why, but it is.’

  I was in Afghanistan for nearly three weeks, and I came home a few days before Luca’s sixth birthday, I stood by my son’s bed, looking at his face. Watch your son, my friend Adam had always said to me. Don’t stop watching him. That was his advice to me when I was in my darkest days. Watch your son. And my brother Richard’s dying words: Take care of your little boy.

  My little boy was bigger. He still looked angelic, but the fullness, was leaving his cheeks. I was no longer terrified of being alone with him. I was no longer haunted by images of catastrophic disasters. I no longer hoarded water. I had finally abandoned the trauma of turning into a mother, to become a good mother. But he was growing up – and tragically – away from me. At night, reading Peter Rabbit to him, I tried desperately to hold him, as if to hold on to the years that were speeding by, too fast, too slippery for me to grasp.

  As for his father, he was still lost in the world, seeking. We spoke to each other every day, from whichever country we were in, because we had both begun our voyages again. From Africa, where I lay in a bed open to the stars and watched the moon and swatted away mosquitoes and missed them both desperately; from Pakistan; from Kabul; from Dubai; from Libya and Egypt and Baghdad; from America; from Indonesia; and finally, from Sarajevo, the place where long, long ago we had met and fallen in love.

  While there was deep sadness, there was no bitterness. We both knew we had given something incredible to each other, and out of the war, out of the
violent teacher that had both tainted us and in some way damaged us for good, came this.

  There was this child. Had Bruno not kissed me on the Pont des Artistes and run back and forth across the world, following me and running from me, this child would not be here. What we had given could never be taken away.

  A friend tells me a story. The poet Robert Frost, late in his life, and already a hugely important poet, was asked by a student magazine to contribute a poem. The students could not afford to pay the famous poet, and they were intimidated to ask someone of his stature. But when they summoned the courage, Frost not only gave the poem, he said he believed that by giving it away, he would hold it closer to himself. He told them that anything strongly given is always kept.

  Epilogue

  Going Back

  In what seemed like another lifetime, I met the love of my life in the lobby of a hotel in Sarajevo. Now it was fifteen years after the war had ended, fifteen years since Srebrenica where eight thousand men and boys were herded to their deaths, and fifteen years since the autumn day when my father died.

  Everyone had forgotten what happened in this city, but I never wanted to forget, in the same way I never wanted to – and never would – forget what passed between Bruno and I. And so, one midwinter day, I went back to Sarajevo.

  As the plane circled the thick, grey Balkan clouds, I heard a strange fairy-tale voice inside my head, and things I had long forgotten, I suddenly remembered. The story is this: once upon a time, in a place not so far away, a city on the river, a city in Europe at the end of the twenty-first century, a medieval siege lasted for nearly five years.

  It was a time of great darkness for the inhabitants, physically and mentally. Inside the city, which was surrounded by mountains, there was no water, electricity, heating, petrol, food or comforts. Packs of hungry wild dogs roamed the street, picking up pieces of human flesh. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of artillery shells fell on to the city and on the river, whose banks were smashed to pieces. Evil snipers perched on hillside mounts, taking aim at women and children running across the street. Knees and thighs were particularly vulnerable: easier to hit.

  Surgeons operated by candlelight, or with miner’s flashlights attached to their heads, and tried to keep their hands steady as the artillery rocked the foundation of the buildings. People burned their books to keep warm, and gathered twigs in the city parks. The elderly died in their beds, freezing to death, alone. An old man was shot between the eyes by a particularly accurate sniper. He had been chopping wood to heat an old people’s home that was on a front line that everyone – including the United Nations – forgot about.

  As for the children of this siege, they learned to live with fear, to comfort their parents during artillery attacks, and to understand madness. Schools stopped and time froze. There were no birthday parties, no cakes made with fresh eggs, no chocolate bars, no Christmas trees for the Christians or toys for the Muslims at Bajram, no play dates or sing-a-longs.

  And no one came to save these people, not for a long, long time.

  The bitter months continued, life went on. People made love and children were born. I held my baby godson in my arms at the Catholic cathedral one morning for his wartime baptism, and he screamed and screamed as water was poured on his head. Afterwards we celebrated with rice, bread, cake and chocolate bars bought in the black market. Those that lived through these awful days were bound together for ever.

  Everywhere I looked in Sarajevo on that return fifteen years later, I saw things in black and white, like a film, because of course the film was still being played in my head. I did not see the modern shopping centres or the pizza parlours or the internet cafés. I saw the sprits of the dead, which hung for me, like the low clouds that always hang over Balkan cities.

  Gingerly, I went back to the Holiday Inn. There was the lobby, there was an elevator, now working, but I took the stairs, as I had always done during the war. In front of my old room, I saw all of my own dead, and all of my own memories, and my love story, my history with Bruno which had been built and played out behind that faded door. A long, long time ago, in a place far, far away.

  The collective pain, the collective memory was everywhere. A psychiatrist in Kosevo Hospital, which stayed open during the siege and operated valiantly without electricity, even when the generators went off, once told me the city was a walking insane asylum at the height of the war.

  Another told me that the best people had left the city or were killed.

  Another told me to do myself a favour and move forwards, forget the past. Say Dobje jenje Bosna. Goodbye Bosnia.

  But I wanted to remember. I cannot help but remember. It seemed imperative that after everything that had happened to me, I had to remember.

  And so, coming back, flying from Ljubjana in the slick Slovenian jet cruising over Mount Igman, which once was the only exit route out of the siege, I looked down and tried to see the tunnel which had once been the only way to get supplies in and out of the city. I scanned the ground near Butmir, across from the landing strip of the airport, but could not see it.

  I began to think of all I had lost, and all I had left behind, and I decided I must try to find – if he wanted to be found – Nusrat.

  Long before Luca, long before I ever thought I could hold an infant in my arms, let alone become a mother, I had met Nusrat. He came into my life at a particularly insane time.

  By the winter of 1993, I was beginning to go a little crazy, along with the 300,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo. The war that everyone thought would be over in a few weeks was dragging on in the brutal Balkan winter. The American flags that some families had hung from their frozen windows when a rumour went around the city that the Americans were coming to save them were beginning to look like a little tattered, a little sad.

  My friend Mario, a poet who had been caught in several artillery attacks, but survived, saw a woman’s shoe full of blood in the snow one day. He rarely talked, but that day, he told me sombrely, ‘You can kill a life without killing anyone . . . you can take a city, but you don’t snipe people, you don’t butcher people, you don’t burn down villages.’

  My friend Gordana saw a dog running with a human hand in its mouth. My friend Aida said, ‘We are all falling down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole.’ She remembers that first day of war in May 1992: she was walking down the street in her high heels and ponytail on her way to work when a tank came up behind her. As she crouched behind a trash can to take cover, she realized she was entering a new place from which she would probably never return.

  Me too; I fell down a hole, a rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland’s, and never returned.

  My room on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn on Sniper’s Alley had plastic windows that came from UNHCR humanitarian aid packets. On one side of the ugly, communist-era room was my flak jacket and my helmet, on my shrapnel-chipped ‘desk’ was a battery-operated Tandy, a high street precursor to a laptop.

  Physically, I was deteriorating. I had grown accustomed to not washing and I wore the same clothes several days in a row. I did not care. Oddly enough, even though no one washed in those days, no one seemed to smell. Once a week, I bribed the men who guarded the hotel kitchen with a few packs of Marlboro Lights for a pot of hot water, and with that, I would set aside an hour to laboriously wash my hair and my body. One night, in a fit of despair, I had chopped off my long thick hair with a pair of borrowed manicure scissors. I did not want to be pretty.

  My view out the plastic window was of a wasted, gutted city of burned-out buildings and metal canisters that were used to deter the snipers. It was so cold that my skin peeled off in dry patches when I took off my layers of clothes. I was living on a diet of chocolate bars, whisky and cigarettes I had brought in from Kiseljak, the Las Vegas-style frontier town which was the last stop before besieged Sarajevo.

  To this day, I cannot forget that cold. The large, cavernous Soviet-style unheated rooms where we would interview doctors or politicians; the freezing
cold houses where people sat huddled and frightened around an oil stove; the ugly interior of the lobby of the Holiday Inn, where one afternoon I came back to see journalists abseiling down from the roof with ropes.

  I shivered when I woke in my sleeping bag, I shivered when I climbed out and slipped into the same clothes that I had left on the floor the night before, and I shivered climbing back into the bag at night, to read by candlelight. Bizarrely, maids came every day to make up the beds – that is, to pat down the sleeping bags, and to move around the dust. There was not much they could do without water. The toilets did not flush and no water came out of the taps.

  I was mentally fried. Every day people came to me with some kind of request: get me out of here, smuggle a package to my sister, take my child to Germany, and give me some money for firewood. The worst was the knowledge that I could leave whenever I wanted to, and they could not.

  To compensate for the madness, I had some little routines that kept me sane, like someone stricken with obsessive compulsive disorder. One was to visit the morgue, every day. I usually did this in the morning, when Aliya Hadzic, a pleasant Muslim man in his early fifties who ran the morgue, would still be in a talkative mood. By the time I arrived, Aliya would have counted the dead who came in overnight from the front lines and the hospitals, closed their eyes, tried to straighten their limbs, or if there were no limbs, he would try to piece together the ravages of an artillery or sniper attack.