Ghosts by Daylight (8 page)

But the question I could not ask the doctor who took care of me – English, competent, remote – was the one that tormented me the most: could I do this? Had I been too damaged, had I seen too much, walked through too much, lived too much, to give this baby good things? How could I ever show him the world was a beautiful place when I was not sure I believed it myself?

The doctor examined me every few weeks, bemused and slightly impatient at my strange questions. He answered them in a straightforward but not particularly enthusiastic manner, one by one, dispassionately dealt with.

I went for all my tests. The technicians rubbed gel on my belly and made jokes, but I was frantic until I could see the baby’s heartbeat on the screen.

‘Is he dead?’ I asked, and they would turn to me, frowning, uncertain.

‘Why would you say that? Here’s his heart. Here is his beautiful little face.’

The day I found out Luca was a boy – I had assumed, as had Bruno, that he would be a girl – I phoned Bruno in Abidjan and told him. There was a pause, the usual crackle of the terrible phone lines connecting us from London to Africa. Then he burst into tears.

And so, perhaps in denial of my new role, and unsure of my identity, as the autumn grew colder, I went to Palestine, in the middle of the second intifada, to work.

I landed in Ben Gurion Airport and took an early morning taxi to Jerusalem, the car climbing higher and higher into the city which had meant so much to me in my former life – my first big story, the first time I walked into the American Colony Hotel in the late 1980s and saw a gaggle of foreign correspondents gathered around a Reuters machine spurting out wire copy and realized I wanted to be part of it.

My very first trip was the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, and it was the first time I saw a refugee camp, or met someone who had been brutally tortured and survived. It was the first time I went to the Gaza Strip, and heard gunfire. It was the first time I experienced a checkpoint, soldiers pointing guns, and adolescent fighters, their faces covered in
keffiyehs
, hurling stones at windscreens.

I met teenagers who were on the run from the law, for whom I waited anxiously in safe houses; mothers of Jewish soldiers who had been killed serving in the territories; a Palestinian mayor who had lost both his legs in a car-bomb attack; and a woman who would change my life for ever: an Israeli lawyer defending Palestinians in military court. She told me to go everywhere, write everything, and gave me a brief, a blueprint for life: if you have the chance to give a voice to people who do not have a voice, she told me in her decrepit office in West Jerusalem, then you have an obligation.

I was only in my mid-twenties and I took her words very seriously. I was so young that I remember being embarrassed by my youth, by my inexperience, by my lack of nerves – those would come later – when a veteran correspondent bought me a drink and said, ‘How old are you, anyway?’ And when I answered, embarrassed, rounding off my age to my next birthday, he laughed and looked even more perplexed.

Now I was returning, pregnant, much older, and this second intifada was even more violent, even more tragic than the first. There were more settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank since my last trip back just a year before, and the children I had spent years interviewing in Gaza and Ramallah and Jenin and Nablus were grown-up, some dead, some in jail, some in exile. The man who had stood in Gaza with me during my first trip and told me he imagined peace sometime in the next fifteen years was long gone. The tactic used by Palestinians, who felt they had nothing to lose, was to employ their young as suicide bombers. Everything and nothing had changed.

The light on the ancient stone walls in West Jerusalem was turning pink the morning I arrived, the same way it had that first journey all those years ago, and I could see people rushing to work: the men in their long coats and side curls and beards and nineteenth-century hats, the women in scarves and long dresses, the tiny children, everyone moving rapidly towards something. I saw the fierceness of the pink of the bougainvillea that grows against the stone walls. The grey hill towns, the light on stone. I counted back the events of my life and my visits to Jerusalem.

I remembered once arriving a few days after my father’s funeral. I was still numb. Yitzhak Rabin had just been murdered and my office had phoned me in the middle of the night, as soon as the news broke. I took an early flight from Heathrow, packing one of my father’s cotton dress shirts which I had stolen from his drawer the day after the funeral. It still had his smell. At night, in my hotel room in Jerusalem, I slept in it, and one morning I went to the Mount of Olives and left a piece of paper with his name.

Another afternoon, rainy and cold, the skies open and menacing, I took a taxi to Bethlehem, passing through the ancient stony hills, past the shepherds who looked as though they could be in a tableau a thousand years old. I went to the Church of the Nativity, and left another paper with his name. ‘You are there. You are always with me,’ I said out loud to no one; school children and pilgrims gathered around me.

This trip to Israel, now pregnant, would be different, more cautious. Bizarrely, the doctor was not concerned about buses being blown up by suicide bombers, he had said it was all right for me to come, as long as I was careful what I ate.

‘Well, the food’s fine there, isn’t it?’ he said cryptically. I thought it was the strangest question. Because as it turned out, I could not eat much. I sat in the bar of the American Colony, where I had sat on and off for the past two decades, and ate roast beef sandwiches and Coca-Cola, and then got ill. The barman, who had known me since I had started coming to the hotel, made jokes about the time when another journalist and I swam naked late one night in the pool. That wasn’t me, I said, and in fact, it seemed like it was not me at all – someone else living my life through me, perhaps.

At 8 p.m. most nights I went to bed. I was sick in the night and sick when I woke up in the morning. Something felt wrong, and I phoned my mother in America. ‘I’m sick all the time,’ I told her.

‘Honey,’ she said patiently, ‘I had morning sickness for nine months with all seven of my children.’

In the early morning, I went out to refugee camps with my driver to seek out stories about suicide bombers, but the dust made me cough. Six months earlier, a doctor in New York had discovered that I have had a rare blood-clotting disorder – two, in fact, so rare that she asked permission to teach her students about it – and told me that throughout my pregnancy I should take injections of blood thinner to prevent a miscarriage.

I had lost three babies before this baby, and I was determined not to go through that again – the trauma of a profound loss – and I would have given myself ten needles a day if I had to. This baby, this one inside me, made with the man I loved more than anything in the world, was hard-won, and I would do everything to keep him. Every morning I sat on the bed, clenching my teeth in fearful anticipation of the sting as I slid the needle under the skin of my thighs and belly, trying to find a spot that was not bruised.

Worse, though was the larger intramuscular needle – this one full of progesterone, which allegedly would keep the baby inside me – which hurt. I could not reach the spot on my back where I needed to inject it, so I had to enlist friends or whoever was near me at the time to give it. I rated my friends on a scale of how skillful they were at piercing my skin. ‘Just throw it like a dart,’ I told them, wincing.

Some were good and some were bad. Some hit nerves that made me jump.
I am doing this for someone else
, I thought.
I am doing this for my baby
. My friend hovered above me in the bathroom of a Japanese restaurant holding the enormous syringe in her hand, squeezing out the air bubbles; she was so nervous her hand shook.

‘Fuck, I can’t do this.’

‘Yes you can,’ I coached. ‘And more to the point, you have to.’

She stood back, shut her eyes, and jabbed.

The mothers of the suicide bombers and the potential suicide bombers, women my age who had given birth ten or eleven or twelve times, told me something was wrong. They brought me cup after cup of mint tea, heavily sugared, and made me lie down on their dusty cushions. They would lay their hands on my stomach and tell me the baby was strong, but their faces looked worried.

When I walked through the markets I had once loved, in the Old City or in Salahadin Street, I smelled everything intensified, and it made me sicker. I could smell the cardamom in the coffee and the raw meat hanging in the halal meat stalls. I sat in the back of a taxi on the way to East Jerusalem, and breathed the aroma of old cigarettes, and asked the driver to go slower; sometimes we stopped near olive groves and I got out and sat until the waves of sickness passed.

Bruno called me again and again from Africa: from demonstrations, from the north of the country where he was living with rebels, from his office in the centre of Abidjan where I had filed my copy the first night of the coup. I missed him profoundly, and the sense of protection I always felt when he was near. At night, I dreamed of him, sometimes in peril, sometimes at peace.

‘Everything,’ he told me, ‘is going to be all right.’ No one in my entire life had ever told me that. And I believed him.

I came back to my room and lay on my bed watching CNN and writing up my notes about the logic behind becoming a suicide bomber. When I walked to the bar, the Palestinian cleaning lady, who had known me since I was twenty-five stopped me. She shook her head. She asked how I was sleeping. ‘You look sick,’ she said. ‘Not radiant, like a pregnant woman.’

One night, I began to bleed and bleed, and I took a taxi to the hospital with a friend. I remember walking through the sliding doors and making a deal with God:
Please don’t let me have another miscarriage. If I can have this baby, I will offer you anything: my own health, my job, even love. Just please let this baby be born alive
.

I was back where I had been so many nights over the past two years, since Bruno and I decided to become parents. But this time Bruno wasn’t with me. Another hospital, another dressing gown that opened in the back, another pair of stirrups, and another ultrasound. And now, another language: Hebrew.

The doctor arrived. He was Orthodox, had a strong Brooklyn accent and was efficient and pleasant. ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ he said, moving the cold ultrasound wand over my skin. ‘Do you want this baby? I mean really want this baby?’

‘Yes, of course I want this baby.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You are certainly not acting like someone who wants a baby. You’re dilating, but it’s much too early for the baby to come, and you’re wandering around the West Bank. If I were you, I would go to your hotel, get into bed, and stay there. Until the due date.’

It shocked me, his frank judgement. I went to another doctor at a different hospital, this one closer to Tel Aviv. This doctor was famous for operating on women with ovarian cancer and he was older, softer. He examined me and took my elbow to help me slide off the table. He sat behind his desk and looked at my records. He told me I needed surgery, and that I should fly home to England to have it. ‘I could do it,’ he said gently. ‘But I think you want to be with your husband.’

‘My husband is in Africa,’ I said, and suddenly felt very alone. My throat tightened.

‘You’ll be fine,’ the doctor said in a fatherly tone. ‘Go home. Have the surgery and then stay in bed. You are going to be just fine.’

I went back to the hotel and packed my bag, twisting my computer cables and folding my maternity dresses while Alex, the Italian photographer I worked with for years, watched me, smiling. He was the only person Bruno trusted me with when we were on assignment. ‘Pass the phone to Alex,’ he would say when Alex and I were together in Iraq or Afghanistan, Gaza or Kosovo.

I would hear Bruno talking. And I would hear Alex say: ‘I will, man.’

‘What did he say?’ I would ask Alex, and he would laugh. ‘Always the same thing: Take care of her.’

I went home to London and had the operation. Bruno was stuck in the Ivory Coast but he phoned every hour.  Endurance, I kept thinking, have endurance. I stayed in bed until the snow came, until Christmas, and then Bruno came back, and we packed my little flat up, and I gave away most of my books and clothes because I wanted to make a fresh start, and we went forwards, to Paris, together.

5

Settling Down into Pregnancy

Most women prepare endlessly for their first child; but I have prepared assignments with more attention. For this, my biggest assignment, I was lost, and torn with superstition. If I prepared too much, what if God destroyed my brittle happiness?

It was not a smooth pregnancy. Every bloodstain, every pull in my abdomen, every cough was a trip to the emergency room in panic: another scan, or nights in the hospital linked up to electronic devices. I spent weeks in an isolation unit while doctors checked me for TB and whooping cough or some infectious disease that lingered in my system from years on the road. The past, one of the doctors said to me, remains in the body’s memory.

I did not have a layette – I was too superstitious to buy baby clothes because of the past miscarriages – the only article of clothing I had was a tiny pair of mittens from Guatemala that I had bought years ago, thinking that someday I might have a child.