Ghosts by Daylight (2 page)

Jeremy said, ‘There are cameramen, and there are cameramen. And then there are
French
cameramen.’ Then Jeremy took my arm rather protectively and we walked to the stairway, leaving the Frenchman – Bruno – still standing there.

I have asked Bruno so many times why he did that, why he fell on his knees, unembarrassed, unencumbered, and nimble – and he has always shrugged, or muttered something, never giving me an answer, only sometimes quoting Montaigne about not wanting to know why you loved a certain woman, and if you knew the answer to it, you would love her no more. I asked him for years and years, but I never did find out.

I did not see Bruno again for what seemed like a very long time. I did not see him in the dining room where the reporters gathered to eat humanitarian-aid rice and cheese twice a day, and drink wine from the cave that was left over from the siege. I did not see him during the days as I worked alone with my driver, Dragan, and we moved amongst the buildings where I preferred to do my work in the city – the psychiatric unit of Kosevo Hospital, the morgue where I counted the dead, the presidency building where I went to see the Vice-President, and the orphanage where I went to hold the babies that nobody wanted.

Every Saturday was my deadline at the Sunday news­­­­­­­­paper for whom I worked, and I wrote in my dreary orange-tinted room with the plastic-covered windows – the glass was blown out during a mortar attack – and then went downstairs to eat my rice and cheese alone. I worked until 5 p.m., and then went to the Reuters office to file my copy by satellite phone at a cost of $50 a minute, knowing that an editor in London would pare it down and pare it down till nothing was left of it but 800 words. At night, I slept on top of my sleeping bag – it was too hot to get inside – and listened to the sound of fighting from the open window. Sometimes, if it was loud enough, it woke me from my dreams.

Once I saw him standing in the mezzanine. He whistled loudly and said something in Spanish. ‘
Senorita!
’

‘I’m not Spanish,’ I said. I had decided that I would flirt back.

‘But your dress is.’

In fact, it was a housedress that had been bought in a marketplace in Split, on the Croatian coastline, for $5 during a rare break a few weeks before. It came to my knees and had virtually no sex appeal, but in a place like Sarajevo, it stood out.

‘You look like a flamenco dancer,’ he said, leaning over the balcony. And then: ‘When can we spend time together?’

‘I don’t know, I’m leaving for Central Bosnia,’ I replied.

‘We’ll see each other,’ he said. It was more of a statement than a request. Then he was gone.

One Sunday in the middle of August, some weeks after I met him, a time when the rest of the world seemed to be at a beach and no one cared at all about a siege in the middle of the Balkans in a city whose name they could not pronounce, I woke at dawn to a knock on my door.

I wore my cotton nightgown, and I covered myself as I opened the door a crack. It was a Bosnian kid in a soldier’s uniform, smoking, with a message from a commander written on a piece of paper. The teenage soldier spoke no English but made a motion for me to follow him. I knew what he was doing. I had been waiting for this message for weeks. I dressed, brushed my teeth with a bottle of mineral water, and ran up a flight of stairs to wake my friend, Ariane.

Ariane was my best friend in Bosnia. Tiny, fluent in three languages, the daughter of a French fighter pilot and a Franco-Argentine mother, she was a champion skier and rock climber. She was curvy, green eyed, and her mouth was generous. She was sexy and smart, and said what she thought, a little too loudly sometimes. She was bossy, and irritated me often. But she was frightened of no man, no woman, and no thing. Inside her tiny frame was a very big heart. In time, she became my dearest friend in that city, and much later, as the years went by, we have grown older together in Paris. She was the first person to visit me in the hospital when my son was born. Back then, she was in love with a tall French colonel, a UN peacekeeper, and I was having an affair with his friend, a captain from Brittany.

Love in those days was so very easy. It was the last time in my life I would love someone so lightly, without any repercussions, guilt, drama or desperation when the time came to leave. Everything about falling in love during wartime, perhaps because our exterior world was so chaotic, was so effortless. It was almost adolescent in its lack of complication. The four of us – the three French and me – would sit around late at night watching the flares and drinking whisky. The soldiers liked to be away from the confines of the United Nations base whenever they got the chance, and they brought us gifts: ready-to-eat meal packets which included small bottles of red wine. Once a week they would take us to the base to shower. This was the most amazing gift: in a city mostly without water, Ariane and I had clean hair.

Ariane liked to be tanned, and she refused to give up her summer skin just because she was living in a city under siege. Instead, she would sit in a chair close to her open window, naked except for her panties, wearing suntan oil and sunglasses. She claimed she needed the vitamin D, and she was getting UV rays even if the glass partially blocked them. She did, in the end, get what she would call a siege tan.

‘I hate looking like a man,’ she told me that summer, staring at her jeans and sneakers. We had been going around in flak jackets and helmets, heavy shirts that covered our arms, and trousers. I had not worn a dress in months. So we took a trip to Split, that seaside Dalmatian town that was becoming overrun by United Nations soldiers and humanitarian aid workers and journalists, and stayed for a few days recuperating. We ate risotto with black ink squid and went to the beach – a real beach – and came back with a handful of cotton dresses we bought in the market, one of which was the so-called flamenco dress. They were knee length and respectable; no cleavage, no legs on show, and we wore them with our dirty sneakers to the daily press briefings. They were just cotton housedresses that Croatian cleaners would have worn, but we felt liberated.

The morning the Bosnian soldier knocked on my door, I could tell that Ariane had spent the night before with her colonel. She looked groggy and sleepy; her eyes rimmed with exhaustion. She always smoked as soon as she woke up and she smelled of cigarettes. On her dresser were a big bottle of perfume by Guerlain, a bottle of suntan lotion, and a bottle of whisky.

‘What?’ she said, a little sharply, hazy from sleep.

‘Zuc,’ I replied, and she was quickly awake.

‘Christ,’ she said. She saw the little soldier gaping at her in her short T-shirt and said, ‘I’m coming.’ She knew what this meant. We had been trying to get the Bosnian commander to take us to Zuc for weeks. Zuc was the final line of defence in Sarajevo, where a battle was raging, where young boys were dying and their bodies were rotting in the sun.

Ariane picked up a pair of shorts from the floor, grabbed her flak jacket – she refused to wear a helmet – and said she needed coffee and another cigarette. Next we woke a photographer who lived next door, an Italian named Enrico who looked like a young Robert Mitchum and who wore an MTV sticker on his helmet as a way of bringing some humour into the blackness of this place, and then picked up another friend, Chris from Reuters, before heading out the door in a pack. Everyone was smoking, carrying our flak jackets, not sure what we were going to see, what we would feel, in less than an hour on the front line.

And this was the day, a bright, shining August morning in the Balkans, that I was to meet Bruno again.

2

Bruno

There were green and yellow butterflies on Golo Brdo, a place northwest of Sarajevo whose name meant Naked Hill in the Bosnian language. And they were big butterflies, floating high in the stagnant air. When I was a small girl, my grandmother had told me that butterflies were the spirits of the dead, of people we loved, who had come back to give us a message, something secret and special that the living were unable to tell us.

And during those long, hot August days, there were dead men on Naked Hill. Most of them were very young. They were soldiers, they had been killed and it was too dangerous to remove their bodies. And so they lay where they fell, in the shimmering heat.

The men who came down from the trenches for resupply every few days said the smell of the dead wafted down into the trenches where the living cowered, waiting for the next round of gunfire. I did not know what the dead smelled like when they rotted in the sun, but a year later, in Rwanda, I would understand it: I would see rows and rows and rows of bodies, the dead, mothers holding their children, stiffened by rigor mortis, fathers with their eyes melting from the heat, and I would remember again Naked Hill.

That summer day in Sarajevo I did not know what we would see when we finally reached the top of that hill. And so I was afraid. Fear, I decided as I climbed behind the sturdy little body of Ariane, my sneakers sliding on the rock, is always in your stomach. It’s a little bit like love: it freezes the guts, despite the heat.

The dead on the hill were Bosnian government soldiers, defenders of the city, mown down by howitzers, tank fire, shredded by mortars, run down by rifle fire. Those soldiers had been boys not much younger than me, singing U2 and Red Hot Chili Pepper songs. Like me, they wore sneakers and blue jeans. They did not have uniforms because before the war there had been no army. They had begun to fight to defend their streets, their neighbourhoods and their families.

It was high summer, and the orchard groves outside Sarajevo were lush with fruit trees: plums, apples and pears. In another time, the local women would be picking them, boiling them, preparing them for jams or
šljìvovica
, the heavy brandy that Bosnians love to drink. Maybe now it was what the soldiers were eating. Plums, apples, pears, fallen from the trees, eaten before they died.

It was a desperate front line, this place known as Zuc, and a place where the men who went knew they would probably die. Sarajevo was already blockaded on the southern and western side. Zuc was the last stronghold keeping the Serbs from tearing through and marching straight down to the city centre; if in fact what they wanted was to take the city – most of us were not even sure that was what they really wanted. The war seemed to be much more about terrorizing civilians.

It had been ferocious for weeks, and we had sat in the city waiting for news. Every day Ariane and I walked to the army command and sat with a lawyer turned commander, and petted his dog as he woefully told us how they were losing the war, and the most devastated front line was Zuc.

‘We’ll go with you,’ we said. ‘Take us with you.

He shook his head. ‘It’s so dangerous. And you’re
girls
.’

‘We’re reporters.’

‘It’s dangerous for everyone. Why do you want to take such a risk?’

Eventually though, we wore him down. Ariane and I, combined, had that effect.

The Bosnian troops had the height, but no weapons. The Serbs had everything: machine guns, pistols, anti-tank grenades. They had uniforms and food. They had numbers and strength. And since no one in the West was doing anything to help the weaker party, and the Bosnians were crippled by an arms embargo, it was David against Goliath.

I remember my friend P., a fighter, telling me how their military operations meant taking guns off dead soldiers. What does fighting mean? What does it mean when you go into battle? Does it mean aiming your gun at another soldier in a trench, or does it just mean staying alive long enough to steal someone else’s gun? P. told me about the dead he found face down in a small, muddy river, and how sick he felt, how guilty and sickened he felt, turning them over and taking their guns. ‘Maybe I would know them,’ he told me years later, his hand over his face. Shaking. The memory of war, the worst of it anyway, never goes away.

Now, they had to win Zuc. If they lost it, it was the end of their city.

It was already hot when we left Ariane’s armoured car at the last Sarajevo position and began to climb, up through the orchards, up through the butterflies. I heard bees and the buzzing of flies. I thought of my violet-eyed Italian grandmother, dead many years, and how she liked to sit in a chair in my parents’ garden watching the birds, and how she would never let me swat flies or kill spiders. ‘You might come back as them someday,’ she would say.

We sweated as we climbed. Ants circled my ankles. The dirt was red, like Africa. Far, far away, in Geneva – not really so far, only two hours by plane, but it seemed to be another life, another dimension – diplomatic talks were taking place between political and military leaders. Two days before, on a Friday night, General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military chief, had declared a ceasefire.

But Geneva meant nothing to us. And ceasefires were a joke, a chance to kill more. We didn’t believe in talks any more. The war was more than a year old, and by the time we climbed that hill that morning, half a million people had been cleared away from their homes. American F-16s screeched over the skies of Sarajevo from time to time, and we would run to the windows to look, hoping for something. But they did nothing: they were there to patrol Bosnian air space for Serb military flights. They were not there to bomb, to save the Bosnian people. That would not happen for two more years, when many, many people were dead.