Ghosts by Daylight (6 page)

‘Forget about it.’ He picked up the remote for the video and paused the film.

‘Who did you buy it from?’

‘A man in the market.’ He turned to me. Anger darkened his face. ‘It’s my business. Not yours. You don’t own me.’ He turned the film back on.

The next day, he left for work. He turned to tell me what he’d told me every day since the
coup d’état
started in September: lock the door, don’t let anyone in, and don’t wander around the streets. Remember the curfew and have a nice day. Try to find a flight to go home.

He added that last part because day by day, things were rapidly descending into chaos in Abidjan, government forces against rebel forces. How many wars had I reported that always came down to that? Government troops against a doctored up, rag-tail army, usually composed of kids.

But every day the fighting got heavier in the Côte d’Ivoire and the air began to smell like the air in Central Bosnia during the terrible days of ethnic cleansing. Gangs were burning people out of their homes, and raping women. We could smell the smoke from Cocody, and one morning we drove out to see a freshly burned-out house, and a family of refugees from Burkino weeping by the side of the smoldering ruins, their dishes broken, and a cooking pot at the father’s feet.

What do you take with you when you run away? What do you take when you are driven from your house at gunpoint? How many times had I asked this question?

They always took what they could, what they could load on their shoulders, then they locked the door and ran away.

Bruno wanted me to go home. He did not like the risks I took when I worked, so he did not want me to work, though
The Times
and CNN phoned me daily, when they could get through, for updates. And, more, there was something he would not tell me, something he would never tell me, but I found out: he was in danger.

He did not feel comfortable working when I was alone at home. He worried about me. It was one thing to take responsibility for your own life, another to worry for someone else. He told me he could not concentrate, that my safety was a distraction for him. The curfews were earlier, the soldiers waiting at roadblocks more twitchy.

One night when I came back fifteen minutes after curfew from doing yoga with a friend in a nearby house, he was waiting outside, pacing. ‘Where were you?’ he shouted. He saw my friend inside, and shouted to her: ‘This is not a game! They will shoot you for being out past curfew!’

My friend, who came from South America and was calm and clear, apologized. ‘We didn’t realize it was this late.’

‘You didn’t realize? Are you crazy? Do you know what’s going on out there? It’s not a joke!’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. But for the first time, I sensed I was not really fine. I worked in my studio. I swam. I could not leave the house, but I wandered in the garden, picking the mangos and coconuts. I counted my books on the shelf, and tried my cell phone, which still did not work. I went to the kitchen to help Matthew make the lunch soup: carrots, turnips and something dark and pungent and bitter which I had never seen before. I held up the ugly vegetable and shook it. ‘What is it?’ But Matthew did not know its name. I suddenly felt lonely, isolated, strange.

One afternoon, in the north, we saw a truckload of men about to be taken away by government forces. The commander had gone, strangely enough, to Sandhurst and spoke some English. We sat with him in a garden, and he agreed to let me interview the prisoners.

I jumped in the back of the truck and one of them said, ‘Miss, please, take our names, our villages. They are going to kill us.’

So while the government forces soldier stood outside the truck, thinking I was interviewing them, I wrote, blinking back tears, all their names and villages, and their ages.

All that night, I tried phoning NGOs, trying to report the truck, the men and the incident. I finally reached someone on the overnight desk at the Red Cross. ‘We’ll look into it.’

Bruno said to me, with a touch of resigned cynicism: ‘They’re probably in a mass grave already. You know that, don’t you?’

But at night I kept dreaming of them, the way they grabbed my arm to write down their names, to tell their wives, their sisters, their mothers that they were on their way to death.

A few weeks later, Bruno came home at night in a dark mood. ‘I want you to leave.’

‘Because of the gun?’

‘No, because of the war.’

But it was because of the gun, or rather, what the gun represented. The real truth of the gun was this: if someone had come through the iron door that separated our bedroom from the other rooms in the house, Bruno would have used it. Sometimes I think because we were so close to the equator, so close to nature, so close to the smell of the earth, everything came faster – life, birth, illness, and then of course the inevitability of death. The terrifying thing was the neither one of us feared death enough.

We moved out of the house because it was no longer safe, to a hotel. I left everything but some dresses and my books. From the hotel, in downtown Abidjan, I had seen a crowd beat a Spanish tourist nearly to death simply because he was walking down the wrong street at the wrong time and they thought he was French. At this point, the French, the former colonials, were hated. I was watching from a window, drinking a can of Coke, and saw the crowd descend on the man.

‘There’s a man being beaten to death down there,’ I said to the three other reporters in the room with me who were frantically pacing, trying to get a phone line through to France. One French reporter came with me at the window and watched, but he said nothing. ‘Should we do something?’ I said.

‘Do what?’ he said. ‘Call the police? The police are useless these days.’

So we watched, helpless. The crowd got hold of the man’s legs and his arms and they pulled and pulled and beat him with sticks until some police managed to tear-gas the crowd and get to him.

I thought of the gun at my heart, the first day of the coup, when I tried to drag a wounded rebel into my taxi to take him to the hospital. The government soldier, young, probably scared, sweating, raised his gun to my chest.

A few weeks later, Bruno phoned a friend at the American Embassy as the evacuations of families and dependents, of NGOs and schoolchildren, missionaries and Peace Corps workers were going on. Planeloads of
les colons
, the colonials, headed back to countries they barely knew any more, leaving behind their big houses, their servants, their mango trees.

He put me on a flight to Paris. ‘It’s better this way,’ he said.

‘But I don’t want to go.’

It was late at night and he was driving to the north, to Bouake, to stay with the rebels, with a car full of other French journalists. I thought I might be pregnant, and without me knowing he had called the Embassy and asked a friend to bump me up to the next flight out.

‘You’ve got to go, baby,’ he said. ‘I can’t work with you around.’

In the headlights of the waiting car, with someone shouting out for him to hurry up, he kissed me goodbye. A
Paris Match
photographer snapped the picture of that moment, me tearful, him with his hands on my shoulders, leaning in to kiss me, determined, and there we are, our last night together in Abidjan. I was wearing Mr Baa’s polka-dot dress and sneakers.

‘Please be careful,’ I said.

He smiled. Then he got in the car and drove away. The next day an armed escort from the American Embassy came to take me down the dangerous airport road – the first time in my career I ever had the luxury of any kind of protection – and I took the flight to Paris, tears of nerves and sorrow running down my face. The plane climbed higher in the clouds, and I watched the watery city of Abidjan below me fading from sight. I thought I saw the beaches of Grand-Bassam, where we had spent weekends walking on the long beaches; the shack where we ate barbecued chicken and drank beer before the war started; the long rows of roads fringed by bush.

I wasn’t pregnant after all, but Bruno was right, it was time for me to go.

The plane was packed with families fleeing. Some of them were crying, and children roamed the aisles in a daze. We landed in Paris at five in the morning, and I waited to get a flight to London, my three suitcases containing my short life in Africa. It was the last time I would go to the Ivory Coast. But Bruno stayed on and on and on.

Have you ever been really scared?

All the time, I always say, because it is ridiculous to say otherwise.

But the truth is, I was not afraid when I was in the middle of chaos. It was real life with its vast responsibilities and wells of insecurities that frightened me.

In Sarajevo or Pristina or Baghdad or Abidjan, life was permanently on hold. Bills, pensions, marriage, divorce, loneliness, debt could not reach you in a bush or on a front line. You lived – like yogis holding a particularly difficult posture – only in the moment, because if you lost your concentration for that moment, you might lose your life or someone else’s. You thought about your surroundings, you memorized what went by in the car you were driving, you concentrated on what people said.

War did not frighten me; cocktail parties in London, offices in New York, and checking my bank account frightened me. The thought of my mother or my siblings dying frightened me. The gun in the white house in Cocody frightened me. It was something secretive that I did not know about Bruno. It was a place he did not want me to know, that perhaps he wanted to protect. It was separate, and darker than both of us.

4

Moving to Paris

But now we were coming to live in Paris in the first week of a new year. We were refugees from the white house in Africa and there was a 30-week-old baby in my belly. Since my departure from Abidjan, I had gone to Iraq, got married and fallen pregnant. Bruno had stayed on in the Côte d’Ivoire until the final weeks before the birth. We were reunited at Christmas 2003. The gun wasn’t coming with us to Paris because Paris was a new life. Paris was taps with fresh water to take a bath, and electricity, and no flares in the sky scented with orange blossom, and telephones that worked, and doctors who had medicine to treat the wounded and sick.

We were coming to Paris as much for what it was as for what it wasn’t. Paris was a northern European climate that did not make you feel like you always had a fever when you woke in the morning. There were no car bombs or road checks or crazed 10-year-old soldiers waving RPGs in your face. Paris was not going to be mothers from Russia or Chechnya or Srebrenica crying that their sons had never come home while I scribbled in my notebook, trying not to cry with them. Paris would not be mass graves in Kosovo, and Sierra Leonean children whose arms had been amputated, deliberately, above the elbow or above the wrist to give them ‘long sleeves or short sleeves’ by insane rebels fighting a war no one understood.

More than this, we were coming to Paris because I was going to have a baby and I was in my fourth decade of life, the past two of them spent wandering the earth. And I wanted, I
needed
, to be stable, to wake up and know where I would be that day, that night, the next morning. I wanted to wake up next to Bruno and know that he would not be taken away from me by Africa, by Kosovo, by tsunamis in Asia or hurricanes in America.

Our apartment was on a narrow street that started at the Tuileries, the gardens where the children of Marie Antoinette once played; they say it was one of the last beautiful things that the Queen saw as she was being driven to prison. At the end of the Tuileries was the Place de la Concorde where she would be beheaded. There is sometimes a Ferris wheel there now, and once or twice, Bruno would take me up on it. From the top you could see all of Paris: the hills of Montmartre and the dome of Sacré Coeur, the Montparnasse Tower, the winding streets near the Sentier, and further out, the flatness leading to eastern Paris and Bercy. I could also, if I squinted, see the roof of our building, 5, rue du 29 Juillet. On the northern side, our street ran into rue Saint-Honoré, and then a bit further on there was a square with a market. Three times a week vendors sold vegetables, flowers, potted geraniums in season, Christmas trees, handmade embroidered nightgowns from Madagascar, salt from the Ile de Ré, and a few stalls with food from Napoli that was as familiar to me as my own name: the food of my childhood, from my grandfather’s house, and his long, long mahogany table. There were piles of de Cecco pasta, little hard Italian biscuits, roasted peppers, aubergine rolled with ricotta, slices of prosciutto laid out in intricate patterns behind glass, and, lined up in a triangle, jars of Brioschi, a lemon-flavoured stomach medicine that fizzled in a glass of water, which my father used to take when I was a child.

Our street was named after a law passed in 1881, which protected the freedom of the press and the right to hang posters on city monuments. Occasionally, I would see it scrawled for no reason at all on walls in other parts of the city –
Loi de 29 Juillet
– like a freedom cry. It was to be our first real home together outside of a war zone.

And our home in Paris was a beautiful place. The first time I saw it, I was let in by a cleaning lady who thrust open the heavy door and proudly showed me inside. There were huge great rooms with high ceilings full of light that poured on to the parquet floors, and corridors that led to room after room. I walked through, the cleaning lady following me, wondering how lucky I had been.