Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  ‘Christ,’ she said. She saw the little soldier gaping at her in her short T-shirt and said, ‘I’m coming.’ She knew what this meant. We had been trying to get the Bosnian commander to take us to Zuc for weeks. Zuc was the final line of defence in Sarajevo, where a battle was raging, where young boys were dying and their bodies were rotting in the sun.

  Ariane picked up a pair of shorts from the floor, grabbed her flak jacket – she refused to wear a helmet – and said she needed coffee and another cigarette. Next we woke a photographer who lived next door, an Italian named Enrico who looked like a young Robert Mitchum and who wore an MTV sticker on his helmet as a way of bringing some humour into the blackness of this place, and then picked up another friend, Chris from Reuters, before heading out the door in a pack. Everyone was smoking, carrying our flak jackets, not sure what we were going to see, what we would feel, in less than an hour on the front line.

  And this was the day, a bright, shining August morning in the Balkans, that I was to meet Bruno again.

  2

  Bruno

  There were green and yellow butterflies on Golo Brdo, a place northwest of Sarajevo whose name meant Naked Hill in the Bosnian language. And they were big butterflies, floating high in the stagnant air. When I was a small girl, my grandmother had told me that butterflies were the spirits of the dead, of people we loved, who had come back to give us a message, something secret and special that the living were unable to tell us.

  And during those long, hot August days, there were dead men on Naked Hill. Most of them were very young. They were soldiers, they had been killed and it was too dangerous to remove their bodies. And so they lay where they fell, in the shimmering heat.

  The men who came down from the trenches for resupply every few days said the smell of the dead wafted down into the trenches where the living cowered, waiting for the next round of gunfire. I did not know what the dead smelled like when they rotted in the sun, but a year later, in Rwanda, I would understand it: I would see rows and rows and rows of bodies, the dead, mothers holding their children, stiffened by rigor mortis, fathers with their eyes melting from the heat, and I would remember again Naked Hill.

  That summer day in Sarajevo I did not know what we would see when we finally reached the top of that hill. And so I was afraid. Fear, I decided as I climbed behind the sturdy little body of Ariane, my sneakers sliding on the rock, is always in your stomach. It’s a little bit like love: it freezes the guts, despite the heat.

  The dead on the hill were Bosnian government soldiers, defenders of the city, mown down by howitzers, tank fire, shredded by mortars, run down by rifle fire. Those soldiers had been boys not much younger than me, singing U2 and Red Hot Chili Pepper songs. Like me, they wore sneakers and blue jeans. They did not have uniforms because before the war there had been no army. They had begun to fight to defend their streets, their neighbourhoods and their families.

  It was high summer, and the orchard groves outside Sarajevo were lush with fruit trees: plums, apples and pears. In another time, the local women would be picking them, boiling them, preparing them for jams or šljìvovica, the heavy brandy that Bosnians love to drink. Maybe now it was what the soldiers were eating. Plums, apples, pears, fallen from the trees, eaten before they died.

  It was a desperate front line, this place known as Zuc, and a place where the men who went knew they would probably die. Sarajevo was already blockaded on the southern and western side. Zuc was the last stronghold keeping the Serbs from tearing through and marching straight down to the city centre; if in fact what they wanted was to take the city – most of us were not even sure that was what they really wanted. The war seemed to be much more about terrorizing civilians.

  It had been ferocious for weeks, and we had sat in the city waiting for news. Every day Ariane and I walked to the army command and sat with a lawyer turned commander, and petted his dog as he woefully told us how they were losing the war, and the most devastated front line was Zuc.

  ‘We’ll go with you,’ we said. ‘Take us with you.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s so dangerous. And you’re girls.’

  ‘We’re reporters.’

  ‘It’s dangerous for everyone. Why do you want to take such a risk?’

  Eventually though, we wore him down. Ariane and I, combined, had that effect.

  The Bosnian troops had the height, but no weapons. The Serbs had everything: machine guns, pistols, anti-tank grenades. They had uniforms and food. They had numbers and strength. And since no one in the West was doing anything to help the weaker party, and the Bosnians were crippled by an arms embargo, it was David against Goliath.

  I remember my friend P., a fighter, telling me how their military operations meant taking guns off dead soldiers. What does fighting mean? What does it mean when you go into battle? Does it mean aiming your gun at another soldier in a trench, or does it just mean staying alive long enough to steal someone else’s gun? P. told me about the dead he found face down in a small, muddy river, and how sick he felt, how guilty and sickened he felt, turning them over and taking their guns. ‘Maybe I would know them,’ he told me years later, his hand over his face. Shaking. The memory of war, the worst of it anyway, never goes away.

  Now, they had to win Zuc. If they lost it, it was the end of their city.

  It was already hot when we left Ariane’s armoured car at the last Sarajevo position and began to climb, up through the orchards, up through the butterflies. I heard bees and the buzzing of flies. I thought of my violet-eyed Italian grandmother, dead many years, and how she liked to sit in a chair in my parents’ garden watching the birds, and how she would never let me swat flies or kill spiders. ‘You might come back as them someday,’ she would say.

  We sweated as we climbed. Ants circled my ankles. The dirt was red, like Africa. Far, far away, in Geneva – not really so far, only two hours by plane, but it seemed to be another life, another dimension – diplomatic talks were taking place between political and military leaders. Two days before, on a Friday night, General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military chief, had declared a ceasefire.

  But Geneva meant nothing to us. And ceasefires were a joke, a chance to kill more. We didn’t believe in talks any more. The war was more than a year old, and by the time we climbed that hill that morning, half a million people had been cleared away from their homes. American F-16s screeched over the skies of Sarajevo from time to time, and we would run to the windows to look, hoping for something. But they did nothing: they were there to patrol Bosnian air space for Serb military flights. They were not there to bomb, to save the Bosnian people. That would not happen for two more years, when many, many people were dead.

  So I climbed, in the heat, my jeans already sticking to my legs, my white sneakers – Keds, the same ones I had worn as a child – getting cloudy with dust, my flak jacket clinging to me. There was a lump of bitterness in my chest that would not go away and, though I didn’t know it yet, would be with me for a long, long time. I had been brought up to believe that good prevails over evil, that the good men wipe out the bad men, that the strong should protect the weak. The war in Bosnia showed me, very quickly, how wrong I was.

  In the trench were the youngest soldiers. We gave them cigarettes and chocolate. Their eyes were blank, glazed, frightened. I did not ask them how old they were, because once I had done that, late at night, in a trench with a soldier in Central Bosnia. He was on guard duty, and he was frightened.

  ‘How old are you?’ I said.

  He turned to me quickly, defensively, face dark and closed. He laid down his gun. ‘I’m nineteen.’

  Then he turned back to watching the darkness, the hills around us. After a while he said in the softest voice: ‘I know you were thinking.’

  ‘What was I thinking?’

  He paused. ‘That I won’t live another year. Is that what you meant?’

  I was glad for the dark, glad that there were no stars in the sky, glad, for once, that there was no electricit
y. I was embarrassed that my face felt warm, that he had caught me in the truth. It was exactly what I had meant.

  He was a soldier on the first front line. There were hardly any soldiers in his unit. That morning, around dawn, I had seen the dead body of a man wearing pink socks and no shoes in the back of a pickup truck. The day before I had noticed an old school bus packed with the youngest soldiers I had ever seen, their faces pressed against the windows, leaving puffs of breath on the glass, with a sign in the window: DEFENDERS FOR JAJCE. Jajce was another brutal battle, and another city, once the home of Croatian kings, that the Bosnians were losing. I wondered, when I saw them, their white, tightened faces, how many of them would die there.

  I had never thought so strongly of death before Bosnia. But then I saw how life leaves the body so quickly, the breath removed, the corpse left still, empty.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ I told that young boy quietly. He did not answer. He knew it was a lie.

  Now I never asked their ages. I asked them what they did. They were all students. They all had messages for me to take to their mothers, their girlfriends; they wanted to know what was happening in Geneva, in New York, with the United Nations, with the world. They wanted cigarettes, always cigarettes: something to put in their hands instead of guns.

  On the hill above me, Ariane was moving towards the trench. In the distance was a Serbian flag. That’s how close we were.

  ‘I played football with one of those guys in that trench,’ one told me. Another said his sister’s boyfriend was fighting on the other side.

  We smoked. The sun rose hotter. By 10 a.m. we were getting shot at. The pop of gunfire always sounds at first like a toy. Then it gets more dismal. Then you get more frightened. Then you lie down and cover your head, like a child going to sleep.

  ‘Some ceasefire,’ said the commander, Kristanovic. He was a friend, someone I met occasionally in some black-market bar and drank whisky with. He was blond and had lived in Germany for some time. When the shelling started, we sat tense for a while, then he grabbed the soft flesh of my arm, above the elbow, hard. They always did this, commanders. They did not mean to hurt you, but sometimes they left bruises in their effort to get you out of the way. He turned me towards him: ‘We go now, or you stay here for three days. No moving after that.’

  A mortar fell.

  Ariane looked up. ‘Your call.’

  Three days in a trench, without communications. I had to call my office on Tuesday. If I didn’t, I would lose the slot for my Sunday paper, and what was the point of risking our lives for no story?

  ‘Back, I guess . . .’ I said, but I was unsure. The feeling in my stomach said that we should not stay. There was nothing more to be gained for us. But the other feeling, the one coursing through me, was to stay with the soldiers until the end.

  Another mortar fell, a dull thud. We turned and ran, Kristanovic holding my hand and pulling me behind him, jumping over rocks. I turned behind me to look at the soldiers, already in position, trying to memorize their faces.

  ‘Now!’ Kristanovic said, yanking me, grabbing my shoulder. Another mortar fell, this one closer, and he pushed me on to the ground and we all lay flat in the dust and the grass. Then we were running again, and then Chris, the Reuters photographer, said, ‘Shit!’ as he dropped his camera.

  ‘Leave the camera,’ the commander said. But Chris ran back.

  I still have those pictures. Many years later I would look at them and see Ariane in her shorts running down the hill and me behind her in a helmet. Both of us look very young. I would also see something that I did not perhaps see that day: we do not look sufficiently frightened, even though most of our footsteps were being followed with shots. We look like we were coming home from a picnic in the mountains, two young girls, a bit dirty, but behaving normally, aside from the flak jackets and helmets. What was wrong with us that we felt nothing that day, other than sorrow for those boys? Why did we not think that one of those hot mortar slices could dig into our arteries, or slice off a leg, or that we could have stepped on a mine or got shot in the back by a sniper? What part of our brain had ceased to think of these things?

  And that perhaps was the most frightening thing of all. The ability to feel nothing, to be so far away, so removed, from the most profound fear.

  I came back from Zuc that day slightly stunned; and dirty and thirsty and longing for tea and a bath. Neither was available. There was a scratch down my cheek and my knees were bruised from crouching. Instead of the bath, I was going to go to my room to think, to write, to lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. I was thinking about the soldiers I saw in the trenches at Zuc; about the way the light fell between the leaves of the trees as we ran down the hill; about how the commander had taken my hand and said, ‘Either you leave now or you stay in the trench till the fighting stops.’

  We were all coming down, weaned off the adrenalin, the strained moments of the first mortar falling. I will always remember the way a mortar sounds like a whistle. And I will never be able to watch fireworks again. Once, many years later, I was on a boat parked in a harbour in Italy on Ferrogosto, the high summer holiday celebrated by the Italians. The fireworks went off at midnight, after the lavish dinner, and everyone else cheered and climbed the mast and jumped up and down on board. But I was huddled as far away from everyone as I could, unable to bear the noise breaking in the sky. It reminded me too much, too painfully, of Sarajevo.

  That afternoon, I pulled off my flak jacket and headed towards the stairway but someone was calling me. The man who had fallen on his knees in front of Jeremy and me was sitting at a plastic table in the lobby with the same kind of ease as if he were in a bar in Paris. It was Bruno. He was with a Bosnian girl, an interpreter, with long hair and glasses. There were a bottle of rosé and two glasses in front of him. He was entertaining the girl. She was laughing. Then he was in front of me. ‘Have some wine!’ he said. He stood so close I saw that his eyes were truly green, slanted, with flecks of gold. He was smiling and relaxed. He had the wonderfully confident air of someone in Provence on a summer’s day.

  I touched the scratch on my cheek. I did not want wine, or jokes, or someone smiling at me. But the man, who looked so small, lifted me into his arms, even with my flak jacket on, and carried me over to the plastic chairs. The pretty Bosnian girl was laughing.

  ‘You need a glass of wine,’ he said, and brushed the dried mud off my flak jacket. ‘And you should take that off.’

  And, like that, we fell in love. One grey and hot afternoon a few days later, I crossed the river to interview refugees in the Egyptian battalion side of Sarajevo and he was there, asleep on a wall, his camera next to him. I drew close and saw how delicate the bones of his face were, how beautiful. I thought I had never seen anyone as arresting. As I hovered overhead, leaving a dark shadow over his sleeping form, he opened his eyes. Smiled. ‘I thought you were an angel,’ he said.

  That love story lasted a week. Then Bruno left for Paris.

  He had a girlfriend there, a beautiful and elegant blonde woman who worked in advertising and had no idea of my existence.

  I had a boyfriend, whom I loved, that apartment we shared – decorated with Moroccan rugs and lamps we had bought together in Marrakesh – and an entire circle of mutual friends. But if I loved him so much, why was I always running away to Bosnia? And why, when he flew to Zagreb one wintry day and asked me why we could not get married and have children, did something inside of me recoil? Not at him, because I loved him. But the notion, the expression of confinement, meant death to me, the end of freedom.

  Did Bruno and I see this in each other, this resistance to conventionality? One morning, very early, he went back to Paris, leaving me asleep in my room in Sarajevo with a note that said, ‘I won’t lose you’, some tins of food he no longer needed, and some Power Bars. I knew where he was going – to the south-west of France on holiday with his girlfriend – and I felt no jealousy. This was his life. And I had mine.

  As he
crept out in the near dark – someone had knocked on the door and he called out: ‘J’arrive!’ and jumped out of bed – he kissed me lightly on the forehead and said, ‘Take care of yourself. No risks.’ Years later, he would add something to those lines: ‘The best journalist is the one who stays alive to bring back the story.’

  Then he was gone.

  Weeks passed in Sarajevo, and rumours that the city was on the verge of falling to Serbian forces were rife. We did our work skittishly, listening to the short-wave radio, desperate for information. And we tried to live. Ariane grew browner from her window and I grew bored of the stalemate of the war. One day, a message came from a French reporter called Aubry, a wry woman with short dark hair and freckles who worked at France Television with Bruno.

  ‘Hey you,’ she called down to me from the mezzanine of the Holiday Inn. ‘I’ve been looking for you for days. Bruno is going crazy trying to reach you.’

  She ran down the stairs to give me a number to call, and I went to the television centre at the end of Sniper’s Alley, where all the TV journalists worked, to borrow a satellite phone from the European Broadcast Union, who always took pity on those of us without phones. I got through to Bruno’s office in Paris, and someone passed him the phone. I could hear him breathing over the crackle of the satellite connection.

  ‘This is not fair,’ he said at first. ‘Where were you?’

  He said he had come back from the south-west of France, where he had surfed. He had tried to find my newspaper to read my stories, but it was sold out. He went to three newsagents before giving up. And his girlfriend wanted to know why he was so frantic to buy a newspaper in English.

  His intensity surprised me. ‘But I thought we would never see each other again,’ I said. ‘I thought you left, and that was the end . . .’

  ‘Listen: I want you to come to Germany next weekend. I’m filming in Stuttgart. Can you make it?’