In the Bible, both Sarah and Rachel who had very late and very yearned for babies are told that the child who is much desired, much waited for, is always special. And I had waited so very long for my Luca.
When I finally held him firmly inside me, I tried to act appropriately: I thumbed through my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, but I only got through the first chapter. Nothing in it seemed to relate to me. Someone loaned me a Moses basket with long handles so I could carry the baby everywhere, which was my plan. When people asked what I would do about work, I would shrug and say I would take the baby with me in the basket. In truth, I had no clue what I would do or how I would manage my life.
When my boss, a man with many children, found out I was pregnant, he brought me into a small office, his face full of anger. ‘I’ve got a war correspondent who can’t go to war,’ he said.
‘I’m allowed to get pregnant, aren’t I?’ I responded, but he talked about contracts, and Iraq, and maternity leave and getting back to work, and I knew then that I could never do it again, not the way I had before. I knew that I would miss reporting the war that was breaking out in Baghdad, in Basra, in Mosul, but I realized for the first time I had made a choice, and that I had to stand by it.
He finally stopped talking, still angry, and I sat in my chair, slightly dazed. I’m not sure I knew then how deeply the addictions of being in those places, those times, watching countries fall apart and being put back together again, had affected me.
In my London flat with the crooked wooden floors and the windows that did not shut firmly, I lay on the bed and talked to the baby, just like every other mother-to-be. I told him everything: about his father, who was far away in Africa, about the mango tree and the green studio where I wrote, about how we met, about our wedding in the Alps during the heatwave, about how the entire wedding party had trooped through the wheat fields, past the barns, to visit the statue of Our Lady and lay flowers at her feet. I asked him to come out healthy and strong and brave.
On several occasions, before she died at the age of ninety, I met Martha Gellhorn, the third wife of Hemingway, and a war correspondent herself.
The first time I met her, in the early 1990s at the start of the war in the former Yugoslavia, she was remote. Mutual friends had warned me she was difficult: she was tricky, she did not like other women, but somehow I had convinced myself that when we met, it would be different. Above all, her friends whispered, do not mention Ernest Hemingway.
For our first meeting, I was going to interview Gellhorn for a reissue of a collection of her war reporting, and it took me all day to get from London to her remote cottage in Wales. I took trains, buses and finally a taxi, which dumped me at the edge of a field. I hiked in the blazing sun, and wondered what I would say to this woman who I was hoping would be my mentor, would tell me things about how to live my life and where to go and who to meet.
I was twenty-eight years old, and had recently left my first husband, a photographer I had met at university. I was free. I wanted her to advise me how to be an independent woman, how to work in a man’s world, how to report real issues, how not to be afraid. I had felt the same way when I met the legendary Vietnam War reporter Gloria Emerson at her home in Princeton, and she had been equally distant. Both of them were powerful writers who understood chaos and destruction and death, but both were notoriously difficult in real life, had complicated love lives and neither had ever given birth. Was it war that had done this to them, had somehow frozen them in time away from real life?
Gellhorn, who Hemingway once described as ‘grace under pressure’, opened the door, elegant and beautiful in slim trousers, a neat blouse, and a burning cigarette. She was as lovely looking as Lauren Bacall. ‘Don’t think you’re getting lunch,’ she said a bit fiercely, ‘because you’re not.’ Instead, because it was hot, she gave me a glass of iced water. Later on, she did show me her upstairs bathroom, and she had laid out a fresh towel for me, so perhaps she was not as thoughtless as she was trying to appear. In the end, we talked for many hours. She called me ‘my dear girl’ – I must have seemed very young to her – and although I longed for one of her long, slender cigarettes, I did not have the courage to ask. We watched television together. The war in Slovenia had just started, and she made historical references to Yugoslavia that I did not yet understand.
Nothing ever happens to the brave – that is what they said about her, and that day I realized above all what she had: courage. I wanted a life like hers, courageous, free and unencumbered.
I met her one more time. A few years had passed, and now I was what they called a war reporter, although I could never say it without great embarrassment, because it was not what we – the tribe I worked with, who travelled round and round the world from conflict to conflict – called ourselves. It was something other people called us. I was older, and we were on a panel together about the ethics of reporting. Although I had agreed to sit on the panel, I had done so with trepidation – after my article on Gellhorn had appeared several years back, she had written me a letter in a neat, spidery handwriting on pale blue paper with MARTHA GELLHORN embossed at the top. She hated the article. She called me a liar for describing her cottage as ‘light filled’. She said it was not full of furniture as I had described – she counted the pieces and listed them. She said I had committed the cardinal sin against journalism – lying. And worse of all, I had mentioned Hemingway when I had promised her publicist I would absolutely not. Hemingway had treated her terribly during their marriage. He had cheated on her, stolen her stories and her contacts, humiliated her, and her life after him was spent trying to live down the shadow of being the third Mrs Hemingway. My editor had insisted I mention him at some point, and I did not fight it enough. In those days, I was very intimidated by editors.
But I was more intimidated by Martha Gellhorn. I cried and cried when I got the letter. By then, I had another kind man in my life. He made me a cup of tea and rubbed my arm and told me, ‘Darling, don’t worry about it – she was probably having a bad day.’ But I did worry. I put the letter in a wooden box high on my shelf, and it stayed there, a burning shame then, and sometimes even now it hurts.
And so, with this letter in mind, I faced her. In fact, I sat next to her on the panel, and we were photographed together. Somewhere that photograph still exists. She greeted me warmly and kissed me on both cheeks. The meeting in Wales a decade earlier seemed to have been forgotten. Martha was very old but still very beautiful. She was draped in scarves, tall, slender, with snowy hair and exquisite bone structure.
She called me ‘dear girl’ again.
Martha died when she was ninety. It was whispered, but never confirmed, that she killed herself. She was found alone in her flat with a letter. Her close friends were distraught, but I remember thinking: How much more could she have gotten from life? The beautiful books, the beautiful words, the many men, the love affairs, the disappointments, the pain, the war, and all the things she saw.
When I met Emerson in Princeton – she killed herself, alone in her apartment in Manhattan – she reminded me of a more raw Gellhorn. She did not have Gellhorn’s beauty, but she was clever and smart and lived by herself in a lovely house, surrounded by male friends and admirers. I loved the fact that a male reporter I knew who had reported with her in Vietnam called her a ‘pain in the ass’. I loved any woman who irritated the male press corps, who was strong enough to be described like that.
I loved these women, and what they stood for. They lived alone and played alone and worked alone in a world that did not like women to do that. I wanted to learn from them how to do it. I wanted to be like them, and not – as much as I loved and admired my mother – like the women in my family.
But the thing about these amazing women was that they did not hand out their secrets, or directions of how to live one’s life because, I suppose, they did not know. I learned no secrets of how to live my own life without a map from either Emerson, or Gellhorn (or even Gloria Steinem,
who I met one winter morning in Manhattan, beautiful in silk pyjamas and bare feet, a few days after her sixtieth birthday) except something I had once read that Gellhorn had written: ‘I always leaped before I looked.’
And this was how I was having my baby. There was no birth plan, no name choice, no knowledge of how to change a nappy, breastfeed, prepare a bottle or even live with the father of my baby. Gellhorn would have coped, I thought. And I could cope.
My shell-shocked husband arrived back in London from Africa the day before Christmas Eve. I was now more than six months pregnant, and he was joining me before we moved together to Paris.
He was gutted, exhausted. And while he seemed joyful and exuberant at seeing me and touching my stomach, he seemed grief-stricken about leaving Africa. He was cutting short his three-year contract. He had closed up the lovely mango-strewn house in Cocody, the place he had loved and decorated with so much pride with teak tables, ivory inlaid mirrors and bright fabrics, and packed his things. He was happy to be home – but he looked so incredibly tired.
Looking back, I wish I had seen how thin he had become, how much he was trying to hide all the turmoil that he had left behind. I did not see it. I only saw someone who was in love, who took care of all the details. But do we ever see things that we really don’t want to see?
He stopped in Paris first, dropped his bags, and went to Hermès to buy me leather gloves lined in cashmere for Christmas. He called me from the Gare du Nord. ‘In three hours, I am going to see my baby!’
On Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass. We ate caviar with a friend and went to bed, and on Christmas Day went to two separate turkey dinners. I began to pack, quietly folding the gifts friends had given me from the shower, unable to imagine a baby fitting into the blue-striped summer outfits, or the white Petit Bateau snowsuit.
After New Year’s Eve we bought our train tickets to France. By now, my own flat was empty except for the bed, and we closed the door and locked it, turning the heat low. We took an afternoon train, and arrived late, in the freezing rain. I remember thinking that this was the beginning of a new life, but no matter how much I tried I could not, in any way, imagine what it was going to be like.
Bruno fell asleep on the train and when he woke up he told me that he’d dreamed he saw the baby’s face.
There was sleet on the ground, grey and molded into the pavement. That night, with our bags and the key to the new flat, we took a cab to rue du 29 Juillet. But the elevator was not working. I sat on the bottom of the stairs, and looked up at the six floors above me with terrible hesitation.
‘Let’s go,’ Bruno said, hauling the suitcases on his shoulder like a mule, and pulling me up after him. At every floor, I stopped to pant. Even breathing had become impossible.
O. was in Italy, but he had sent a friend – a cool, blonde Frenchwoman with an elegant ponytail – to oversee our arrival. She was thin and brisk and abrupt, and, in retrospect, no doubt stunned by the sight of an immense pregnant woman at her door. Her face was heavily angled, planed, without softness or warmth. She eyed me suspiciously and spoke only to Bruno, explaining how to work the heating and the washing machine. She was as chilly as the ice outside on the balcony.
I walked through the rooms which were still full of O.’s things; nothing had been moved to make way for our arrival. A bright yellow sofa remained, as did the three sofas in the dining room. I sat on the bed, still made up with someone else’s sheets, and suddenly it washed over me how irresponsible it was to move to a foreign country where I knew no one two months before my baby was due.
And the elevator did not work, and I was out of breath and the cough I had had for the past month was making me bend over double. When I came back into the room to listen to the woman’s instructions, she broke off, mid-breath, and stared at me as if I had cholera. The flat that had enchanted me in August suddenly looked dirty and utterly uncharming.
I sat in yet another sofa in a corridor and tears rolled down my cheeks silently. The room was blurry. I did not have a tissue. The woman looked at me, more in annoyance than in alarm. Bruno said helplessly, ‘She’s pregnant,’ and the woman replied something, and from that moment on, they both ignored me. I took my backpack and began to unload it, doubting there was space for my books, let alone the forty boxes on their way from Africa and England.
‘Why isn’t the furniture moved?’ I asked her, for the first time addressing her directly. She stopped and stared at me. We were like two cats confronting each other, and I thought, Oh no, this is how it’s going to be with all French women. Everyone I knew had warned me about them, about the competition, about the lack of sisterhood. But Ariane was my best friend, and there was no one more French than she was.
‘If you want an unfurnished apartment,’ she said finally, ‘then go rent an unfurnished apartment.’
‘It’s dirty, it was meant to be cleaned,’ I said. ‘And there’s so much junk and we’re never going to be able to move in, and the baby is coming in a month . . .’
‘It will be fine,’ Bruno said, shifting a chair. He too looked shocked at the state of it, but he was more diplomatic than me.
‘But I told him to put his stuff away, and why, at least, could he not have thrown away the piles of newspapers . . .’
‘It’s fine. Really. It’s fine.’ He began to smoke.
The woman finally left, kissing him on both cheeks jovially and glaring at me.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘But you were a little hostile.’
He took my hand and brought me out on the balcony. It was cold and rainy and the plants and the grapevines on the terrace that were alive in August when I saw the place were now dead. Beneath us, Paris looked terribly cold and lonely.
I counted on my fingers the three people I really knew in this entire city. In Notting Hill, I knew a hundred. Why didn’t we have the baby in London, then move to Paris? Why hadn’t I thought this through? Why hadn’t I taken the advice of a Norwegian colleague, a beautiful and rather pragmatic reporter who once told me she would never marry someone who was not her nationality. An affair, yes, but not marriage. Never marry outside your culture. It’s just too complicated.
But Bruno and I had thrived on complications.
On the terrace, he pointed to the clock at the Musée d’Orsay, and said it once was a train station, and told me that he had climbed on to the roof with his friends when it was being rebuilt. We could see all the way down to the Place de la Concorde. He pointed to the outlines of the Louvre still visible, the carefully sculpted labyrinth where, in a few years, our little boy would play.
‘You see? It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful city. And we are going to have a beautiful life. You’ll see.’
I believed him. Because I was in Paris, because I was in love with someone I had met in a war zone, and had never really lived with before under normal circumstances, or under any circumstances, for that matter. But most of all I believed him because I was about to have a baby and what choice did I have? He handed me a tissue to dry my eyes. I nodded to him, and took his hand. It was leaping before looking.
6
Birth
The public hospital where I was to give birth was chosen because it had the best neonatal unit in France and mine was deemed a high-risk pregnancy.
Like the apartment, it was dirty. And crowded. And it was unfriendly. Sour coffee came from a machine in the lobby and you had to bring your own pillows and tea kettle. But the doctor who would deliver our son was famous for his skill, and had a Zen-like office with Buddha heads and statues of African fertility gods, and was writing a book about the bond between fathers and sons. If anything went wrong – which was what Bruno was gloomily expecting, because in our world, things always went wrong – I would be safe.
Professor F. had more or less retired from active work, and spent most of his time writing books and lecturing around the world, but he occasionally delivered a baby. To convince him to take our case, we had gone to see him early on in t
he pregnancy, right after I had gotten back from five months in Iraq, and Bruno was on a break from Africa.
We waited a long time in his antechamber, and I read old copies of Paris Match while Bruno went outside to smoke. When F. called us in, I saw the kindness in his face. He asked about our lives, and Bruno began to talk and talk, nervously, about our work in conflict zones, about the time I disappeared in Kosovo and how he thought I was dead; the time Grozny fell and he thought he would never seen me alive; and how he had been beaten up by crowds in Africa. About how we met, how we lost each other, how we found each other, how we strived to have this baby.
‘It’s a beautiful story,’ the doctor said, and it must have convinced him we were sufficiently difficult because he took on my case.
He put me on the table and did an ultrasound. He warmed his hands and rubbed jelly on me and moved the wand over my stomach. There was a heartbeat, a small one because the baby was only ten weeks old, the size of an apple seed. But it was alive.
I had lain on these tables and seen, too many times, the look on the doctor’s face when he moved the wand and realized the baby was gone. ‘Tell me what it is,’ I had once begged an Indian technician in an emergency room in New Jersey when the baby I was carrying was thirteen weeks old. I saw the blank look on her face.
‘I’ll just go and get the doctor.’
‘Is my baby all right?’
‘I’ll just go and get the doctor.’
But now, there was a heartbeat. We stared at the screen and there was a tiny pumping heart. And suddenly, Bruno was crying.
The doctor did not seem surprised, but I was. My husband had climbed the Eiffel Tower with ropes and outstayed everyone in the Côte d’Ivoire when the fighting was at its worse. There was that hike through the mountains with the love letter in Kurdistan. I had never, ever seen him frightened.
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