Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  I was there illegally, without a work permit, without a Russian visa, and there were no aid workers, no UN peacekeepers, no Médicins Sans Frontièrs. There were Thomas and me, and earlier I had met a French reporter dressed as a Chechen woman, but that was it. There was no way for us to leave the village, and the shelling that was raining down on us was heavy. The soldiers were planning on following the railway tracks in the mountains at daybreak, dragging their dead behind them, and they said we could follow them high into the mountains where it was safer. Thomas thought it was a good idea, but I thought it meant death: for sure the Russians would pummel the column of soldiers, and then us.

  I walked through the fields with a young soldier to see the commander. The soldier spoke some English, the kind learned from television. ‘If you could only see Chechnya in the spring,’ he said, ‘the flowers are so beautiful!’ Night fell and we looked up at the stars, and I remembered Bruno telling me that I was born under a lucky star. ‘And it’s always there and you are never alone.’

  Back in the house with the other soldiers, we ate pickled cabbage from a jar an old woman had given us, and bread. I sat on a bench with my arms wrapped around myself from the bitter cold and thought, All right, this is it. This is really the end. With the last battery of my satellite phone and no electricity, I filed my story: Grozny had fallen to Russian forces. Then I called Bruno. ‘I can’t get out. I’m trapped here.’

  ‘Listen,’ he told me in the calmest voice, ‘I can’t do anything for you from here. No one can, do you understand? But you have to get out of there, somehow. Find a way to leave that village, don’t stay with the soldiers any more. And don’t be scared. You are going to live. You have angels all around you.’ Then he hung up, telling me that saving batteries was more important. ‘I’ll see you soon – do you understand? Now get out of there, fast.’

  I stood with the receiver in my hand, and disconnected my satellite phone. I spent all night in the potato cellar with the old woman while the shells fell, and then in the morning light, I saw the soldiers retreating in a long column, some angry, some throwing their guns in the snow, dragging the dead. There was so much blood in the snow.

  An hour later, the man from Ingushetia who had brought us into Chechnya drove into the compound in an old car. ‘Get in, get in,’ he shouted. ‘Now!’ He had bribed the Russians to get through. The old woman dressed me like a Chechen, and someone handed me a baby for me to smuggle out.

  ‘Not a word,’ the driver said. ‘You’re a deaf mute. This is your baby. We’re leaving.’

  On the way out, we wove through the tanks and he handed each crew money. When we got to the road, he broke into breakneck speed and told me, ridiculously, to put my seatbelt on. The baby did not cry at all. I turned to look at the village one last time and saw the tanks moving in.

  We found refuge in another village that seemed safe, but which got rocketed a day after we arrived, killing schoolchildren I had seen earlier, walking in the snow with little backpacks. From there, I phoned Bruno.

  ‘I knew you would live,’ he told me. ‘The best reporter is the one who gets out to tell the story. And also,’ he added, ‘there are the angels.’

  Then, and later, I felt nothing. I never talked about what happened in those places, but I wrote about them. I disagreed that reporters suffered from trauma; after all, I argued, we were the ones who got out. It was the people we left behind that suffered, that died. I did not suffer the syndromes, I did not have the shakes. I did not have psychotic tendencies. I was not an alcoholic or drug addict who needed to blot out memories. I was, I thought, perfectly fine and functioning.

  Much later I met another trauma specialist in a café in London, who told me that PTSD can also appear later, long after the events. He asked me to describe all I had seen, in detail, but nothing was as painful as Luca’s birth: the helplessness, my inability to protect him, and the sense that anything could and would happen. He listened carefully, wrote everything in a notebook, and recorded my words, which he later sent to me in transcript form. ‘There are people who live in extremes,’ he said, ‘and you are one of them. You cannot think that will not affect you in some way. It has. It always will.’

  The birth awakened fears that had been buried. It started when I hoarded water in our kitchen: plastic packs of more than fifty bottles, which I calculated would last us twenty days. Every time I went to Monoprix to buy food, I bought more and had them delivered. I hoarded tinned food, rice, pasta – food that I remembered stored well in Sarajevo during the siege – and things that might be hard to get – medicine, vast supplies of Ciprofloxacin and codeine – which I got my confused doctor to give me prescriptions for. I hoarded bandages, gauzes, even the brown-packeted field dressings that I had saved from Chechnya which were meant to be pressed against bullet holes to staunch the blood, and I read first aid guides of how to remove bullets and shrapnel, set broken bones and survive chemical attacks. Bruno would watch, concerned but non-judgemental.

  ‘We’re in Paris,’ he would say, ‘not Grozny. Not Abidjan. We’re safe.’

  ‘But how do you know? That’s what people said about Yugoslavia. One day they went to the cash machines and there was no money.’

  I began to hide cash around the house and took copies of our passports. I made lists of what I would grab if we had to flee, and I made Bruno make an exit plan if we had to leave Paris in an instant. Where would we meet? How would we get out? I read books about people escaping from Paris after the Germans arrived, and discovered the route was through Porte d’Orleans.

  Bruno finally said, ‘Maybe you should talk to someone about this?’

  But it was all about the baby. If I was alone and caught in a terrorist attack, or a flood, or a disaster, I could manage. But I was terrified of being alone with my son if something major hit and I had to protect him. I was convinced I could kill someone who tried to harm him, and the knowledge of that darkness inside myself frightened me. Everyone on the street I saw as potentially dangerous, and when I walked down the road, I felt invisible, like a ghost, even in the brightest Paris daylight.

  I knew I had to fight it. When my mother left, I began to strap the baby on to my chest with the kangaroo holder, and walk. I would start at the Place du Marché Saint Honoré, and if it was Wednesday, I went to the Italian traiteur, who drove his truck from Naples with fresh pasta, aubergine rollitini, mozzarella di bufala. I desperately wanted to feel at home, at ease, and I wanted to try to make this city – where everyone buzzed around so quickly and knocked into you with their skinny elbows – my home.

  But I often felt as though I was in exile. One day I realized that war, with all its dangers, seemed utterly normal to me. My real life, my story with Bruno, was behind closed doors in some conflict zone, safe from everything else, where we created our own history. It was what I understood about him best of all: falling in love in chaos.

  This real life, with all its sharp edges, was terribly difficult.

  When my mother left, and when Lesley left, and when Bruno went back to work, I took the baby and wrapped him in a striped blanket, laid him carefully in his pousette, and strapped him up, checking carefully to make sure everything was secure. Then I wheeled him down rue Saint-Honoré towards Place des Victoires.

  Behind the square was a church, the Basilica of Our Lady of Victories, and here I found a haven. I went every day and sat in the back row. Sometimes I lit candles, one after the other. One for my dead father, one for my lost brothers, and one to protect my baby. The baby always slept. He never cried.

  The church was set on the top of a long row of stairs. To get inside the church was an ordeal that terrified me: to push the baby in his pousette backwards and up what seemed like a mountain. Once, in the metro, I saw a woman doing this – angling her pousette down the stairs that led to the train – and she leaned back too far, and her baby slid out like a piece of fruit falling from a sack. She screamed, but the high-pitched screech of the baby that went on and on is what I remem
ber most. People rushed forwards to check for broken bones – the baby was fine – while the mother wept. That image stayed with me for a long time.

  And so we went to the safest place I knew, which was a church. Nôtre-Dame-des-Victoires was a basilica, and it was a place where the faithful had come for hundreds of years to leave their requests for Our Lady, and also to leave their notes of gratitude. I watched the Filipinos and the Africans and the Indians and the bent-over old, old French ladies praying. What did they pray for? Did they pray for sick family members, money, wandering husbands, cures to fatal diseases? I understood this. I had also prayed for a miracle – my son – and he had arrived.

  Against a wall were the intentions – plaques paid for by people – and one was the story of a man, an engineer, who went deep into Siberia and was there alone for twenty years.

  Pendant les vingt années d’exploration mineralogiques que j’ai passées au fond de Siberie, seul, parfois en face de la mort, et constamment en priore à d’indicibles alternatives d’espoir et de découragement, j’ai prié la Sainte-Vierge, elle a toujours daigné me venir en aide.

  J-P.A (1869)

  (During the twenty years of mineral exploration that I passed deep in Siberia, alone, sometimes in the face of death, constantly preyed on by insurmountable despair and discouragement, I prayed to Our Lady: she always deigned to come to my aid.)

  Those days were carême, the season of Lent, and unlike my pious mother-in-law, Marie-Louise – known to us always as Moineau because she moved like a little sparrow – who ate a bowl of rice and nothing else on Ash Wednesday, I had given up nothing. I was not, though I believed in God and the power of the saints, a particularly good Catholic despite the years and years of schooling. But in those winter days, with my tiny baby, I was going to church sometimes two or three times a day. I made deals with God:

  Please God, protect my baby. Don’t let anything hurt him, don’t let him die like my sister; don’t let him get caught in a war or a genocide; please protect this bubble of happiness, this beautiful life. Please keep us safe. Don’t let my husband die on his motorcycle.

  In my pink changing bag I had endless supplies: enough to last a year rather than an afternoon excursion less than a mile from my home. Wet wipes, nappies, bottles, formula in a little plastic jar that slid open to distribute one dose, a portable nappy changer, aspirin for me, a bottle of water, several sets of rosary beads, extra blankets, extra hats for the baby, my mobile phone. In the phone I had stored numbers of the SAMU, the ambulance, the paediatrician and, of course, Bruno’s number.

  Sometimes I felt like a fraud for the deals I made with God when I had such a cushioned privileged life. When I got home one day, I made a pact with God again, a real one. ‘I will give you anything,’ I said, reaching down to unstrap the baby, ‘even all the love I have in my life, even my own happiness, if you keep him safe.’

  In Kosovo, once, I got caught in a bombing raid. Many of the solders in my unit died. I had to live in a trench for three days, and mop up blood and bind soldiers’ limbs. The commander, afraid I would report the number of dead, took away my satellite phone and refused to let me or Alex, the photographer, leave.

  One day, a young Peruvian reporter who was also living at the base came to find me. Someone named Bruno had gotten the commander’s satellite phone, and by chance, it was the Peruvian who picked up the phone. He had a message for me: Get out as soon as possible. You are in danger.

  Somehow he had found out that I was in trouble with the commander, who was apparently going to take his revenge on me. ‘He said he could not say what it was,’ the Peruvian said, ‘but he stressed that you must leave.’

  The next day Alex and I got a ride on the back of a farmer’s truck and left the base camp. When I reached the town where Bruno was, ten hours south in Albania, he hugged me tight and said he had checked the morgue every single day to see if I was dead.

  I could see now, in Paris, safe on rue du 29 Juillet, how hard he was trying to keep me calm, but it was exhausting him, this role as my guardian angel. Sometimes I think, in the midst of it, he began drifting out, further and further in the world, fading out of sight, lost.

  How could someone who went to wars and never felt fear when running through jungles and diving into ditches suddenly be terrified of a tiny baby?

  ‘Darling, you are the boss,’ my mother said before she left. ‘He’s a baby. He only weighs 7 pounds.’

  But my fears got worse and more dramatic. They were always seemingly irrational: cities becoming besieged in a matter of hours; water being turned off; television and radio going off the air; guns, machetes, burning tyres at roadblocks.

  I was sure, as sure as I was of anything, that this could happen at any time.

  Where do they come from, these fears?

  In April, when the spring began to come and the baby was growing sweetly, the nightmares started. Bruno’s were first, and they would wake him. I would hear him in the kitchen, moving around, opening bottles, pouring wine and listening to jazz. Sometimes he woke me up with his screams.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ he would say when I rose, pulled my nightgown round me, and stood in the strange light that always comes in the winter between darkness and the dawn.

  I am not sure what was in his nightmares, what people, what images. But my dreams were always of people, and usually the dead. People I had known who had died, people who moved in front of me, whose faces I could not see, but who I knew were ghosts. There was my father, occasionally, looking at me from some distance with profound sadness. There was my sister, still a baby, as yet unformed. Sometimes there were people I had seen with amputated limbs or bloody wounds.

  ‘Where did you think you would die? Where was the fear the greatest?’ This from the Canadian psychiatrist, examining me like a flea under a microscope. This was some time ago, and we were meeting for signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. We were in London, I was lying on a couch somewhere near Hyde Park, a couple of years before my son came into the world.

  I told him about the cattle market in Abidjan, on 19 September 2002, at a time I should have been drinking my first cup of tea. But I was not. I had not changed my clothes in two days and they were stained with dirt and sweat. A government soldier stood a foot away from me with an automatic weapon pointed at my heart. It was the first days of the coup, weeks before Bruno made me leave the country.

  The confrontation in the cattle market was the aftermath of a short, sporadic battle between the government forces and some mysterious rebels no one had yet seen. Like me, the soldier was confused. He didn’t know who was launching the coup, or why. A superior had most likely dragged him out of bed at dawn. He was probably scared and a little drunk from drinking bad gin the night before. He stood, soaked in sweat, boots too tight, pointing an AK-47 at me and looking as if he had every intention of using it.

  I wasn’t alone. There was an African man near my foot, groaning in pain. There were smears of blood on his clothes and small, neat bullet wounds in his legs. A moment before, I’d squatted in the dirt and tried to drag him into my taxi. I wanted to get him to a hospital. And so, it was a showdown between me trying to take the man to the hospital, and the government soldier wanting to shoot me. The soldier said the man on the ground was a rebel, and I knew if I left him behind, he would kill him.

  The soldier raised his gun, the safety catch off, and pointed it at my heart.

  By the time this incident occurred, I had been reporting from war zones for a dozen years. I should have known that you don’t argue with a man with a gun – particularly one who has just shot someone. The sensible thing would be to realize I had wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time – before an execution was about to take place – back up, apologize and run.

  But the same dozen years had also given me the overconfidence of the survivor. And I knew what would happen if I left. The injured man, who was grabbing my ankle, pleading, ‘Sister, help me!’, would be shot and tossed into a grave, or le
ft with the dead cows to rot. I had never seen this man before, but I knew what his dead body would look like by lunchtime.

  I squatted next to the wounded man and argued with the soldier. His impatience was turning to rage when Bruno, who was on the other side of the cattle market, suddenly spotted me and pulled me roughly by the arm away.

  ‘This is Africa,’ he said. ‘Are you crazy?’ He dragged me back to the car, silently fuming. And I was angry too; because I knew they were going to kill that man, because I had not been able to do anything, and because it was so easy and so senseless, the way people’s lives were extinguished as if they meant nothing at all.

  Two years earlier, in another part of West Africa, I ate a last meal with a friend renowned for his bad luck, Kurt Schork. We went to the best restaurant in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and had grilled prawns. Schork was then fifty-two, a Reuters correspondent who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford with Bill Clinton. He was legendary for his bravery and his humour. During the first Christmas season in Sarajevo, which was by then besieged by the Serbs, we’d attended a midnight mass together and then drunk a bottle of black market champagne as we listened to mortars falling on the snowy city.

  Now, drinking beer in the Freetown restaurant, I told him about a group of stoned teenage soldiers called the West Side Boys that I’d encountered earlier in the day. They’d surrounded my car, punched the hood, and aimed their RPGs in my face, and demanded money, cigarettes, marijuana and sex. While my driver cried with fear, a colleague in the same car shouted at him to drive through the crowd. ‘Just run them down!’

  ‘Total amateurs,’ Schork said of the West Side Boys. ‘They sound like a pick-up basketball team.’