Ghosts by Daylight (7 page)

‘Your lucky star again,’ Bruno said when I phoned him in Abidjan later to tell him, as I stood on the balcony. But I had worked hard to get the owner to rent it – it was owned by a young Italian artist who did not particularly want to give it up, had no need to, and besides, the place was stuffed with easels and paints and enormous canvasses that he did not want to remove. If he had wanted to, he could have rented it for much more than I could pay.

I had met O. at an English christening in Somerset, on a scorching July day, and I tried to convince him, even though I had never seen it, that we had to have this apartment. I did not know the neighbourhood – the Right Bank and the Tuileries were not places I would have gone often – and he tried to tell me, gently, that it was perhaps too big for us, code for too expensive. But I was pregnant, we were getting married in a month, and Bruno was still in Africa. The job of finding our home had been given to me.

It was the middle of the European heatwave when people were dying in the scorching temperatures, old people could not breathe, and we got warnings to stay indoors. During that English countryside lunch, most of the guests got up and stripped off their clothes and swam in the river, and I sat balancing my salad and trying to convince O. to lend me his flat. By the end, O. – still uncertain – scribbled down instructions on how to find the apartment, the code to the front door that led to the courtyard, and where to find the cleaning lady who would let me in.

A few weeks later, with the taste of iron in my mouth from early pregnancy, and fighting morning sickness with a bag of ginger sweets, I took a very early train from Waterloo Station. By the time I arrived in Paris Gare du Nord, feeling utterly sickened by the suffocating heat, there was a long row of people waiting for cabs. I did not  then know that in France, if you are pregnant or have children you can go to the head of the line and no one complains. I waited, and took a cab to the address O. had written down.

The driver wove down Boulevard de Magenta through the grimy streets of the 10th arrondissement with the Turkish bars, then the 9th, past old theatres and nightclubs from the 1950s, past airline offices from obscure countries (I noticed a sign for Air Ivoire and flinched) and old-fashioned dance hall restaurants. He passed the Grands Boulevards, on to the rue Sainte-Anne with all the Japanese noodle bars, turned into the lovely, leafy area of Palais-Royal where I would later take my son and sit under chestnut trees to happily breastfeed him. He took me down rue de Richelieu, left on rue Saint-Honoré and deposited me on the corner of my street, pointing out that it was a one-way.

There was an intimidating trendy boutique called Colette on the corner, with a gaggle of Japanese tourists and a man inside the window dressing a naked mannequin. There was a patisserie across from that, and the smell of almond cakes. There was a church with stone stairs leading to the entrance, St Roch, which Napoleon once shelled with canons, where our son would be baptized, and where I would push him nearly every day as an infant in his stroller to light a candle. And where, my mother-in-law told me, the wife of Louis XIV prayed and prayed for a child, and when her child was born, he was held in front of the baptismal font, which is why every child who is baptized there, mine included, is held up to the font.

There was a café where a few people sat drinking Coca-Cola and fanning themselves in the heat. There was a friendly pharmacy, a clothes shop, and an optician. It was, as Bruno would later say, a working neighbourhood. This was to be my new quartier, my new home.

In London, my street smelled like nothing. In the spring, there was sometimes the faint fragrance of blossom when the dogwood trees outside were in bloom, but usually there was just the flat metallic smell of the rain. But my first street in Paris smelled of yeast: of baking bread, of cakes. That morning, and nearly every morning for the three years we lived there, there was the same smell which hit me as soon as I reached the green door that was the entrance of our courtyard: warm, half-baked bread. Every morning it was like this, except in January, right before the baby came. During that time when I was at my most enormous and most desperate to get a good night’s sleep, it smelled of almond paste from the galette des rois, the cake that is eaten for the Epiphany, the feast of the three kings.

The feast is traditionally celebrated after Christmas, in a time I have always associated with the Orthodox Christmas celebrated in Sarajevo with gunfire. Holidays and springtime traditionally heat up war: offensives are usually in the spring, and my calendar had been determined by battles and front lines. But now, it was about holidays and turning seasons and the smells in the street. The January tradition in France, in my new war-less life, was this: on that day, when the three kings brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the newborn baby Jesus, the French father brings home a round golden cake baked with warm almond paste.

The family gathers round the table, and the youngest child hides underneath it. He gets to point to which slice of galette goes to which member of the party. Inside one piece of cake is a small ceramic toy, and whoever bites into it gets to wear the paper crown and choose a beautiful queen. When I am impatient now, when I want something to happen quickly, I think of the taste of almond paste in my mouth. Because those days and weeks before my son came, when I would eat the galette des rois for breakfast, were also about impatience but twinned with the sense of wonder. I was anticipating something fearsome and ferociously wonderful that was going to come into my life.

But even in summer, even before I reached this crucial time of waiting and almond cake, even while the baby was the size of an apple seed, rue du 29 Juillet smelled of baking bread. It made me feel warm; it made me feel – for the first time since I left for Sarajevo in 1992 and realized that everything evil can and will happen – that perhaps everything would be all right.

I punched in the code to the green door, which was impossibly heavy, walked into a cobbled courtyard littered with light, a row of jasmine plants against one wall, and took the lift to the fifth floor.

O. had arranged for the cleaner to meet me, and she was there on time, a French working-class woman with a sweet nature. She waved away her hand when I apologized for being late. But even before she pulled the heavy keys from her pocket and opened the double green doors that led to the flat, I had the feeling I get when I know something will effortlessly work.
This is going to be our home
, I thought,
where my baby will be born, and where we will always be happy
.

Inside, the flat was darkened against the canicule, the killer heatwave that was by now decimating France, but I could see the largesse of the rooms, the hauteur, the parquet floors, the light streaming from a small glass room that led off the kitchen where a few straggly plants were dying in the heat.

The artist had not lived here for some time, and it had the smell of a place that had been shuttered closed. It was not clean, and there was too much grand, dark furniture cluttering the space. It looked like an elegant flea market: there were three or four enormous nineteenth-century sofas in one room, a dark wood dining room table squashed by a chaise longue, paintings, easels, books, the smell of paint and paint thinner, piles of old magazines, marble tables, a pointy obelisk that looked frighteningly dangerous, and a long canary yellow sofa that looked like it came from 1970s Sweden.

The cleaner opened one of the shutters to a door that opened onto a balcony. It ran the entire length of the apartment. I stood outside the bedroom balcony, next to a withered grapevine, and saw, across the Tuileries, the clock on the top of the Musée d’Orsay.

The cleaner said, ‘It’s a big apartment. For Paris.’

There was a long narrow hallway stuffed with yet more sofas and paintings, a bedroom painted dark maroon, another room – the baby’s room, I decided – with a wooden bed from Kerala in Southern India. The master bathroom had an old-fashioned claw-foot tub. There was an office with a balcony and a fireplace for me to work, and a large dining room for friends to gather and eat. The kitchen was painted apple green, like my study in Africa.

There were jars of pasta, and heavy iron pots hanging from silver hooks. There were salt shakers and thick dishes from Sicily. It felt, I thought, like a country house in Tuscany. I thanked the cleaner, handed back the key, and left.

In the Place du Marché Saint-Honoré, I found a café with long scrubbed wooden tables and I ordered a tea and a lemon tart and called O. from my cell phone. I am not sure who convinced whom, or what arrangements were made, or how he was eventually convinced, but in the end, I called Bruno and told him we had a home for our family.

The taxi driver who picked me up on the corner of rue de Rivoli to take me back to Gare du Nord came from Uganda. He spoke English. I told him I had lived and worked in Africa.

‘Then you know,’ he said. He did not have to say what I knew.

‘What do you miss about Africa?’ I said. I told him I missed the air right before the rainy season, when it was perfectly still, and then the rains came, and the time of morning when the light was still pink, just after dawn, when you saw everyone on the road walking to work. I thought briefly of Matthew, our cook in Abidjan, walking to work on the day his brother died. In Africa, people walk slowly, with great patience, but always with a destination.

We were stuck in traffic for a long time. I could see the Gare du Nord from where we sat, in front of an Egyptian café where a group of men sat reading Arabic newspapers and drinking tea and smoking water pipes.

I once had a friend from Zimbabwe, a writer called Shimmer. We were meant to meet for lunch in a café in midtown Manhattan one afternoon and he was late. When he arrived, he drank a large glass of water and told me he had spent the morning walking the length of Manhattan Island. ‘It reminded me of being home,’ he said.

‘You
walked
the entire island?’

‘Yes, walked. Is that so strange?’

Later, Shimmer told me, ‘You can always tell someone who is very far from the place of their birth by the sadness in their eyes.’

‘I miss the moon,’ the driver said finally when he dropped me off. ‘That’s what I miss the most about Africa.’

On the train, I thought about how I had spent most of my life missing something. When I left for England from America when I was very young to go to school, I missed my family. When I was working in strange places, with long days and no sleep, I missed laughter, I missed the normality of daily life and routines, and I missed faces whose features I knew and could feel safe near.

I already knew that I was going to miss London, the city, and the life I had before: the people in the cafés, the greyness of a November day, the newsagents and the Sunday papers, and the smell of roasted, slightly burnt potatoes on Portobello Road. My gypsy life. But I also knew that I was going to have a happy life in that dirty, cluttered, and over-furnished Right Bank apartment.

That was the summer, and the apartment did not become ours until the new year. As my body grew, people told me my life was going to change. This surprised me. They said it in a conspiratorial way, as if this would be a terrible thing. They did not know, I suppose, how desperately I wanted my life to change.

I did not want to wake up in a bed in Africa with a gun underneath it. I did not want to crawl to windows in the dark to see which direction the shooting was coming from. I did not want to hide underneath car seats to avoid getting hit by stray bullets. I was sick of bribing corrupt officials, begging for visas at outpost embassies, hiring interpreters, landing in a place where no one knew me, and piling chairs outside the doors of filthy, remote boarding houses, drugging myself with codeine so that I could sleep, terrified someone would rob or rape me.

I was tired of my maps, my notebooks, my penknives, my flashlights, my compass, and my spare batteries, my BBC World Service. I hated my wardrobe of khaki trousers and desert boots and linen shirts and sneakers. Or the winter things: thick padded coats, Gortex boots for climbing over snow-crested mountains to countries I was not supposed to be in.

September passed, October and November. I was aware, for the first time in many years, of seasons changing and being present while they did, not being on planes going into different climates and time zones. As my baby grew, Bruno stayed in Africa to work, throughout the rainy season, and the war in the Ivory Coast grew more and more violent.

But he told me nothing when he phoned every morning and every evening, he protected me from the bullets, the fires, the beatings, the abuse he was taking. He did not tell me that he locked himself in every night and drank to stop the fear from creeping inside. He did not tell me that everyone had run away, that he and his crew were practically the only journalists that had not fled. Fifi, my Ethiopian friend, had left with her small daughter. Most of the NGOs we knew had closed down.

All through that autumn, when the leaves shook down from the trees in front of my London flat, grey against the wet streets, and I planted purple heather in my window boxes for the last time, I took care of myself and the baby. But the more I read about childbirth and babies, the more I began to feel an emotion I had discarded long ago on all of those long rides through Liberian jungles and Bosnian mountains: fear.

It seemed likely, according to my books, that so much could go wrong at any second. I worried about the baby being born dead, or losing him weeks before he arrived. I worried that when I went for scans, there would be no heartbeat, and I would see again the startled look on the technician’s face as they had to tell me the baby was no longer there. I worried about the contaminated air I had breathed in Iraq for so long. I worried about birth defects.