Ghosts by Daylight (17 page)

‘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 left 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.’

The next morning, I sat eating breakfast by the slime-green pool of our decrepit hotel with another journalist I’d known in Bosnia, Miguel Gil Moreno, the same man who would warn me of the bombs in Chechnya. It was the end of the rainy season in West Africa, and as we ate we could see dozens and dozens of frogs procreating by the edge of the water. It was like a biblical plague.

‘And now,’ said a CNN producer, a man wearing a cravat and carrying a cigarette in a long ivory holder, ‘we will watch the frogs engage in sexual intercourse.’ He lay on the ground near the pool with a camera, filming the frogs, trying to bring some humour into the utterly grim scene outside the hotel. Miguel and I ate stale cheese sandwiches, watching; some light relief.

Miguel once asked me about a home-made video I’d been given which showed men who might have been UN soldiers being tortured by rebels in Sierra Leone. It should have been a warning to both of us – look; this is the madness that happens here. But instead we said goodbye and Miguel followed Kurt and his crew up the road towards Rogbury Junction to find out if the video was real. By lunchtime both men were dead, ambushed and killed by rebels; probably stoned teenagers.

I wasn’t afraid then, not as much as I should have been. There really was nothing to fear, I always told myself: it was just fate, and maybe I would live or maybe not. If you take life that way, you don’t fear anything.

But I was afraid now. War is a violent teacher.

Most of all, I was desperate not to pass my nightmares, or my bad blood, on to my son.

The trauma psychiatrist, as part of his research, had once asked me: ‘How many dead bodies have you seen?’

I thought hard, trying to remember events and places; fields of bodies, mass graves, wells with blue corpses stuffed down them, the man in East Timor who washed up in the sewer, the slabs of dead flesh on my daily trips to the morgue in Sarajevo, the soldier in the snow in Chechnya, the miles and miles of dead Rwandans on a road near Goma. Skin stretched purple over bone. Bloated faces. How many? The fact was, I did not know. Dozens? Hundreds?

The psychiatrist was silent as he wrote in his notebook. After a while, he looked up. ‘Don’t you find that odd?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Most people only see the bodies of their grandparents, or their parents, and only at their funerals.’

Other than my grandmother’s, my first dead body was in Bosnia. I arrived in the early autumn of 1992; it was still warm enough to get stung by a wasp, the last balmy days before a brutal winter. The war that would ruin the country was still in its early stages. I wasn’t a complete ingénue – I’d been tear-gassed in the crowd during Israeli–Palestinian clashes – but Bosnia was my first war zone.

That first trip, I travelled with a nervous Australian photographer and a young Croatian interpreter down small roads that had been commandeered by various rag-tag militias. Vesna, the interpreter, gave a potted history of the former Yugoslavia and smoked all my cigarettes. We passed empty villages with shuttered houses and fields of dead animals. There were no people on the road. Through the car window came the smell of distant explosives and petrol and fire. Near Vitez we passed empty munitions factories which Vesna said had been a major industry during the Tito years.

There was another photographer in the car behind us. He was French and silent. Sometimes I drove with him. He was known to be fearless and somewhat distant, almost mystical in his intensity. Once, on a particularly spooky road, we came to a Bosnian checkpoint and I lowered my window to hand the soldier our passports. The soldier reached out, but instead of taking the passports, he stared hard at the photographer’s pale face.

‘What strange eyes you have, my friend,’ he said flatly.

The photographer frowned. ‘Strange?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean, strange?’

‘You have death in your eyes,’ the soldier said matter-of-factly. He handed back our passports, lit a cigarette and lifted the frayed rope that was the checkpoint. He motioned us through, not speaking, not smiling and not waving. The photographer was silent for the rest of the trip until we reached the car wreck. Then we saw the real dead, two of them, a couple who had been trying to flee something – fighting, a village being burned, none of us would ever know. Vesna had studied some medicine and she said they could only have been dead a few hours.
Long enough
, I remember thinking,
for their souls to fly away
.

They had driven into a tree at what must have been full speed, and they had flown through the windscreen so that their bodies lay half in, half out of the car. Their necks were broken and hung down at unnatural angles. Their eyes were still open. Their bodies fascinated me. I walked closer and stared, trying to memorize their surprised expressions caught in the exact moment of death.

That was the first real death I saw. It triggered some kind of strange autopilot mechanism in me, in which I felt very little emotion, in which I was nearly numb. Then more wars came, and I suppose an addiction grew and grew, because I got good at them, the way one gets good at a tennis game if you practise long and hard enough. When I would watch television and see a conflict gathering in some remote part of the world, I found it impossible to stay still, not to pick up the phone and ask to be sent there, and as a result I developed skills: intuition, bravery, the ability to talk or push my way into any situation, on to any helicopter or boat leaving for a dangerous place. I got used to pressure without cracking: Gellhorn’s grace under pressure.

What was harder was other people’s suffering. Those are the images that stuck, not the interview with the general who took out his knife and pointed at places on maps and talked about hardware and equipment. I could not bear the loneliness or physical pain of children. Perhaps that is why I feared my own child would be hurt.

The first time I saw a child crawling on a dirty cot in a field hospital with his guts ripped open and no painkillers, I went outside, leaned against a wall and threw up. But I did that only once. I learned how to observe, to write it in my notebook, and then at home, in the privacy of my room, to cry or to hold my head in my hands, to lie on the bed staring at the ceiling.

The arrogant truth was that I never thought I would die. It wasn’t only me who felt this. A famous war photographer, a woman who had hidden behind a bush in Africa to photograph an execution and was renowned for her bravery, once said to me years later, ‘I never thought I would get killed because my mother loved me too much.’

When my father was dying of cancer, I sat by his bed and we talked about many things: faith, death and war. My father emigrated from Italy to the United States as a young boy. My grandfather was an anti-fascist and the story is that they were run out of town with shot guns; I will never know what really happened because everyone I need to ask is dead. But the records do show that my grandfather, Costantino, made three voyages alone before he went back and brought his family from Naples.

My father spoke only Italian and remembers being terrified on his first day at his new American school. But he grew up to be ferociously American: an athlete, a college football player. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he enlisted in the American air force. But war frightened him. As he lay dying, he said, ‘That was normal. All the men were frightened.’ He looked at me from his bed, barely 100 pounds, ravaged by cancer. ‘I worry because you never seem afraid. That is not normal.’

I went to Iraq during the invasion in 2003 for nearly five months, but even as I was packing my bag to go, I thought it would be one of my last wars. I was getting married, and I wanted a child. I knew I couldn’t sustain the pace or the loneliness of those long assignments any more.

I would wander through the gardens of the Al Rashid Hotel in the early morning, waiting for the bombing of Baghdad to start, with only half my heart interested in reporting this war. I was already thinking of an escape, a life, a world with feelings and emotions and love. Later, sent to the desert with American troops, I felt no interest in the story, no excitement. A colleague who had reported wars as far back as Vietnam told me that when you lost your edge it was time to leave.