Ghosts by Daylight (16 page)

But two days after I arrived with a German photographer, Thomas, the city fell. We were caught in a suburb with the retreating Chechens, who were covered in blood from crossing a minefield to get out. I stood in a freezing school building with my feet sticking to blood on the floor as the lone doctor chopped off limbs with minimal anaesthetic, and I saw the men’s eyes open on the table, bracing themselves against the saw.

That night, I gathered with the soldiers in a small wooden house and we told jokes, but there was nothing to joke about. The Russians were circling the village with tanks; by daybreak they would enter and probably waste everything in sight, the way they had wasted villages like Shamaski, nearby, when special forces went in high on drugs and killed and killed and killed.

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 remember 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?