Ghosts by Daylight (25 page)

A Tentative Peace

Il faut en profiter
. Enjoy it. Enjoy him. Those earliest days, when Luca was wrapped in his soft white rabbit suit and I was holding him tightly to my chest, everyone told me how fast it went. How short their infancy, their childhood. Enjoy it. Watch him. Take the images and freeze them in your mind.
Sage comme une image
. A baby as good as gold.

People warned me that children grow up and they don’t need you any more. I could not possibly believe this. My son had been premature and unable to dress or feed himself; we had had to clean the stub of his umbilical cord. It seemed inconceivable that one day he would play on the floor without me, surrounded by Lego, or that he would even say, ‘Mama, close the door, I want to be alone.’

I had wanted, perhaps in a kind of rebellion against my early periphrastic life, to be a wife and mother, that 1950s kind, who makes her own pastry and wears a stick-out skirt. I wanted to be a good wife, to try to administer to a sick and wounded husband. I had tried, but ultimately, as Martha Gellhorn once said to me, talking about some dictator, a leopard does not change its spots. And when Luca was nearly six years old, I went to Afghanistan.

It was not a long trip, not long by my old standards when I’d be away for months and months; and it was not a trip that involved heavy drinking or wild flirtations or wonderful passionate nights falling back into bed with someone who spoke the same disoriented language of war as me. But it was certainly a trip that changed me. I had vowed, even written publicly, that I would never put myself in danger again. And while Kabul hardly seemed dangerous to me after Chechnya or Liberia, there were kidnappings. A security guard who came to pick me up to bring me to the airport was appalled at my guest house. ‘Do you feel safe here?’ he said, checking the roof. ‘Anyone could get in.’ He told me the guard at the gate was stoned and useless and that I was totally vulnerable to kidnapping and attack.

‘I’m OK,’ I said. The fear that had gripped me in Luca’s early days was gone. I did not feel as numb as I had during my most reckless period, but there was something of the old spirit that had returned. After that, I went to Cairo. On the flight back, we sat on the runway for an hour. I put on my dark glasses and tears rolled down my cheeks as Bruno sent me text messages about love, about redemption. About Luca.

Bruno left for Pakistan. He had not drunk in more than two years. He went to his meetings. He shaved his head, something he had once done before when he was in the midst of a dark period. He saw few people aside from Luca, to whom he was the most wonderful and loving father, and me. But when he spoke, it was in AA talk. His life was centred on the work he did inside the walls of the church at Quai d’Orsay.

There were times when I wanted the bond that we had, the promise he made to me that night in Sarajevo years before, to end. ‘I will never lose you.’ Sometimes, in frustrated and bitter moments, I had ugly thoughts: I wondered if it would be better if his plane went down in the Indian Ocean, or if the Taliban in Waziristan kidnapped him because then the union we had, the beautiful union, would be frozen for ever in time, and would not change so drastically.

I knew, in a sense, we would never be free of each other. Even if I chose a different life, a healthy one, one that was not tainted by war or illness or breakdown or even Paris, I would always have him in my life: he had vowed he would never lose me. And there was also our son.

Bruno always had the ability to read my mind, to know me sometimes better than I knew myself, and he sent me a note one evening on my telephone: ‘The promise I made to you in Sarajevo will always remain. I will never lose you.’

But we were separating. We could no longer live together, not as a couple, not as the two people who had brought the baby home from the hospital and built fires in rue du 29 Juillet or who had ridden the Ferris wheel in the Tuileries or taken off for weeks on the back of his motorcycle. He had changed and so had I.

One night, late, an SMS arrived from an old, old friend, another woman reporter I had met in Sarajevo. Karen was a beautiful woman with whom I had many shared memories, and we had a friend in common, a character, a strange and troubled man, a reporter who had fallen off the radar after the Bosnian War.

Karen’s message was short:
Marchand finally killed himself
.

It was nearly midnight when I got the message, and I got out of bed. I wanted a drink, but there was no alcohol in the house. I wanted to smoke, and I searched in my desk drawer for an old cigarette. I could see Paul Marchand’s face: his smirk, his strange cruelty but also his humour. I called Bruno in the small studio where he used to stay while he was in recovery, in rehab, as he called it. And where he now lived.

‘Paul Marchand hanged himself.’

‘Holy fuck.’

‘It could have been you. It could have been me.’

‘It wasn’t us. Go to bed, baby. You’re alive.’

But I could not sleep. I lay on my pillow with tears running down my face, trying to call my friend Ariane, who had come back from five years in Afghanistan wounded from living for too long in violence, and who now lived around the corner. ‘I’m tired of living around guns,’ she said. I had shared an office with her in Sarajevo, and she had first introduced me to Paul. ‘I know,’ she said sadly, when I told her. ‘I feel like I’m surrounded by death.’

I remembered things I had forgotten long before: escaping from the besieged city for forty-eight hours to meet Bruno in Germany, and not telling my office. Returning to Sarajevo, and seeing Marchand. His joking, teasing. ‘Hey Janine, your editor called and I told him you left your post to go meet your boyfriend.’ How he shared his food, his cans of Gini orange soda that he brought into the city by the caseload.

He had apparently been a beaten child, the child of alcoholics who abused him. None of us ever knew that. He stuttered as a small boy and had been bullied at school. We only saw a tall, rather handsome man with a city coat and shiny shoes who seemed reckless and crazy and addicted to war. Who stupidly drove around a city that was targeted by snipers with the words on the side of his car:
don’t waste your bullets, I am immortal
. Who then famously got shot and severely injured, losing part of his arm.

But there was a gentleness to him, too. One time, shortly after I first arrived in Sarajevo, I was not able to wash because there was no water, and I remember sitting in his room while he patiently heated a can of water and helped me wash my hair, then dried it by hand. ‘Now you are beautiful!’ he said.

Another time he rang my room at 2 a.m. ‘The water is running and she is hot!’ It was December 1992, and for a rare hour the electricity worked in the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo. There was water coming out of the creaking pipes. The toilets flushed! The telephone rang!

Or the time we found the old people frozen to death in their home near the front line, and his outrage, his indignation: ‘We are going to the UN and telling them to take away the bodies. Or we put them in my car and we do it ourselves.’

Kurt Schork was there too; he was dead, now Marchand. And Juan Carlos, a Bolivian journalist who always made me laugh, who had shot himself after he said he saw too much. The last time I saw him was 5 a.m. at my apartment in London, after a long drinking session:

‘I won’t see you for a long, long time,’ he said, walking down the stairs.

‘What do you mean? I’ll see you soon.’

‘No. It’s time.’ I knew then what he meant. ‘I’ve lived enough, seen enough, and drunk enough. It’s time.’ He died too.

The years had rolled on, and I had married that strange man who fell on his knees in front of me in Sarajevo. My father died. My brother died. I became a wife and a mother. ‘You are alive and they are not,’ Bruno had told me.

No one tells you when you give birth about the real sadness of parenthood – that children grow up. The baby who smiled at you, and stared in your eyes with undying love, looks at you and says, ‘Mama, please don’t talk – I am thinking.’

The man you marry, who stood before you in church, or in a registry office, who held your hand when you gave birth, and kissed your forehead with such unbridled tenderness, also changes. People who deeply love each other cannot always live together; this is the real sadness of life.

Eventually I slept, but the old nightmares came back, and in the morning I wondered if they would ever go away.

‘Your French passport is here.’ Bruno calls me while I am in the souk in Cairo. In the background is the call of the muezzin, a sullen and melancholy sound that will for ever remind me of my early twenties and Jerusalem, before I became a mother, before I became his wife.

‘You’re now officially French. Congratulations, baby. I’m so proud of you.’ Then softer: ‘But I have always been proud of you. No matter what you do, I am always proud of who you are, and what you are.’ His voice was full of sorrow.

I thought briefly of all we had done, all we had gone through – the war, Africa, the coup, his back, the drink, the cigarettes, the fax from Kurdistan. All the love letters, and that very first, left by my window in Sarajevo:
I won’t lose you
.

Then the desire for Luca; all those miscarriages, the loss, the tears, the sorrow, the bitterness, the eventual triumph when he was born and Bruno called out, ‘He has your hands!’ The hand-knitted jumpers, the ruffled white blouses like Pierrot; the trips on Air France in a little box, the first day of school, the rolling adventure. Our life in Paris.

And that summer, for the very first time, our son learned to swim. At Ascension, we went to St Barts, the place we had taken him when he was three months old – in those infant days he slept on two chairs pushed together – and he waddled out into the pool without floaters, and he swam, one arm in front of the other. ‘Mama! Look! Look!’

I picked up my passport at the St Sulpice police station, alone one late summer morning, careful to get there in plenty of time before the window slammed shut and all the officials went to lunch. Bruno had wanted to come with me, to film it, but he was in Pakistan at the time, and besides, I felt there was something important about me going alone. A moral victory, of sorts.

I dressed carefully, respectfully, and walked to St Sulpice, taking the long way down rue d’Assas. I felt like a bride, fresh, arriving somewhere for the first time.

I arrived at the police station, and spoke my careful French to the person on the information desk and found the right office, a maze of French bureaucracy, but this time, my stomach did not get in a knot, and the French words came easily to me. The man behind the desk who took my receipt was rude and unpleasant – typical of a French officials – but like millions of Parisians, I did not react. Who cares what he thought, how he frowned as he searched through the piles of burgundy passports till he found my complicated name, how he barked at me to put my right hand on the biometric meter. I had my passport. I was French. He did not congratulate me, and I did not sing ‘La Marseillaise’, as I had expected. I put it in my bag and held the door for an African woman wheeling a
pousette
into the room. I hoped she was picking up her passport too.

I walked outside and it was a bright shiny morning. I wandered through Bruno’s favourite park, the tiny triangle of green across from the Hungarian Cultural Centre on rue Bonaparte, and cut through the Luxembourg Gardens. It was that time of year between the end of summer and the beginning of autumn and the trees were full and still green, but I could see the first chestnuts of the year falling on the dusty pathways. There were some children playing in the sandbox; my son had loved that sandbox but now he was too big – he said it was for babies.

I wished, on some level, that Bruno could have been with me and he could drink a glass of champagne at the Café Vavin, where once we had celebrated my birthday with bottles of it; and where once, years before, I had a sore throat and he ordered me a hot whisky; and where we had broken up, tearfully, again, one winter day after the war in Chechnya. I knew he would never be able to drink champagne with me again, that the bubbly, early, frantic and crazy days were over.

But it was all right. I sat on a bench and examined my new passport, wished myself well. I had done it. I had gotten through the tears and trauma and I had lived through a dozen wars, even though some of my friends had not. Bruno was still alive and had not killed himself on his motorcycle, or with drink, or with his gun.

From the other side of the park, I saw Luca coming towards me, wearing a pair of red corduroys and a beige jumper, skipping, holding Anna’s hand. He was happy, his smile as big as a pumpkin. ‘MAMA!’ he shouted. He let go of Anna’s hand and raced to me. I scooped him up, and held him as close as I could. He would always be mine, even when he grew, even when he no longer needed me. ‘Look what you made,’ my friend Roy, now also dead, had said to me the first time he saw him, when I opened the door with the baby in my arms.
Look what you made!

I pulled Luca tighter to me, and waited for the next big thing to happen.

16

Endings and Beginnings

For two years in a row there was snow in the Luxembourg Gardens after New Year’s Day. There was ice on the duck pond, the fountains were frozen, snow piled outside the gates. The runners in their winter layers of Gortex and wool skidded and glided, and used the exterior of the park to run rather than slip and fall on the narrow paths. Luca and I spent a Sunday climbing on the roped-off, forbidden areas of the Luxembourg, making snowballs.