Ghosts by Daylight (10 page)

He stopped in Paris first, dropped his bags, and went to Hermès to buy me leather gloves lined in cashmere for Christmas. He called me from the Gare du Nord. ‘In three hours, I am going to see my baby!’

On Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass. We ate caviar with a friend and went to bed, and on Christmas Day went to two separate turkey dinners. I began to pack, quietly folding the gifts friends had given me from the shower, unable to imagine a baby fitting into the blue-striped summer outfits, or the white Petit Bateau snowsuit.

After New Year’s Eve we bought our train tickets to France. By now, my own flat was empty except for the bed, and we closed the door and locked it, turning the heat low. We took an afternoon train, and arrived late, in the freezing rain. I remember thinking that this was the beginning of a new life, but no matter how much I tried I could not, in any way, imagine what it was going to be like.

Bruno fell asleep on the train and when he woke up he told me that he’d dreamed he saw the baby’s face.

There was sleet on the ground, grey and molded into the pavement. That night, with our bags and the key to the new flat, we took a cab to rue du 29 Juillet. But the elevator was not working. I sat on the bottom of the stairs, and looked up at the six floors above me with terrible hesitation.

‘Let’s go,’ Bruno said, hauling the suitcases on his shoulder like a mule, and pulling me up after him. At every floor, I stopped to pant. Even breathing had become impossible.

O. was in Italy, but he had sent a friend – a cool, blonde Frenchwoman with an elegant ponytail – to oversee our arrival. She was thin and brisk and abrupt, and, in retrospect, no doubt stunned by the sight of an immense pregnant woman at her door. Her face was heavily angled, planed, without softness or warmth. She eyed me suspiciously and spoke only to Bruno, explaining how to work the heating and the washing machine. She was as chilly as the ice outside on the balcony.

I walked through the rooms which were still full of O.’s things; nothing had been moved to make way for our arrival. A bright yellow sofa remained, as did the three sofas in the dining room. I sat on the bed, still made up with someone else’s sheets, and suddenly it washed over me how irresponsible it was to move to a foreign country where I knew no one two months before my baby was due.

And the elevator did not work, and I was out of breath and the cough I had had for the past month was making me bend over double. When I came back into the room to listen to the woman’s instructions, she broke off, mid-breath, and stared at me as if I had cholera. The flat that had enchanted me in August suddenly looked dirty and utterly uncharming.

I sat in yet another sofa in a corridor and tears rolled down my cheeks silently. The room was blurry. I did not have a tissue. The woman looked at me, more in annoyance than in alarm. Bruno said helplessly, ‘She’s pregnant,’ and the woman replied something, and from that moment on, they both ignored me. I took my backpack and began to unload it, doubting there was space for my books, let alone the forty boxes on their way from Africa and England.

‘Why isn’t the furniture moved?’ I asked her, for the first time addressing her directly. She stopped and stared at me. We were like two cats confronting each other, and I thought,
Oh no, this is how it’s going to be with all French women
. Everyone I knew had warned me about them, about the competition, about the lack of sisterhood. But Ariane was my best friend, and there was no one more French than she was.

‘If you want an unfurnished apartment,’ she said finally, ‘then go rent an unfurnished apartment.’

‘It’s dirty, it was meant to be cleaned,’ I said. ‘And there’s so much junk and we’re never going to be able to move in, and the baby is coming in a month . . .’

‘It will be fine,’ Bruno said, shifting a chair. He too looked shocked at the state of it, but he was more diplomatic than me.

‘But I told him to put his stuff away, and why, at least, could he not have thrown away the piles of newspapers . . .’

‘It’s fine. Really. It’s fine.’ He began to smoke.

The woman finally left, kissing him on both cheeks jovially and glaring at me.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘But you were a little hostile.’

He took my hand and brought me out on the balcony. It was cold and rainy and the plants and the grapevines on the terrace that were alive in August when I saw the place were now dead. Beneath us, Paris looked terribly cold and lonely.

I counted on my fingers the three people I really knew in this entire city. In Notting Hill, I knew a hundred. Why didn’t we have the baby in London, then move to Paris? Why hadn’t I thought this through? Why hadn’t I taken the advice of a Norwegian colleague, a beautiful and rather pragmatic reporter who once told me she would never marry someone who was not her nationality. An affair, yes, but not marriage. Never marry outside your culture. It’s just too complicated.

But Bruno and I had thrived on complications.

On the terrace, he pointed to the clock at the Musée d’Orsay, and said it once was a train station, and told me that he had climbed on to the roof with his friends when it was being rebuilt. We could see all the way down to the Place de la Concorde. He pointed to the outlines of the Louvre still visible, the carefully sculpted labyrinth where, in a few years, our little boy would play.

‘You see? It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful city. And we are going to have a beautiful life. You’ll see.’

I believed him. Because I was in Paris, because I was in love with someone I had met in a war zone, and had never really lived with before under normal circumstances, or under any circumstances, for that matter. But most of all I believed him because I was about to have a baby and what choice did I have? He handed me a tissue to dry my eyes. I nodded to him, and took his hand. It was leaping before looking.

6

Birth

The public hospital where I was to give birth was chosen because it had the best neonatal unit in France and mine was deemed a high-risk pregnancy.

Like the apartment, it was dirty. And crowded. And it was unfriendly. Sour coffee came from a machine in the lobby and you had to bring your own pillows and tea kettle. But the doctor who would deliver our son was famous for his skill, and had a Zen-like office with Buddha heads and statues of African fertility gods, and was writing a book about the bond between fathers and sons. If anything went wrong – which was what Bruno was gloomily expecting, because in our world, things always went wrong – I would be safe.

Professor F. had more or less retired from active work, and spent most of his time writing books and lecturing around the world, but he occasionally delivered a baby. To convince him to take our case, we had gone to see him early on in the pregnancy, right after I had gotten back from five months in Iraq, and Bruno was on a break from Africa.

We waited a long time in his antechamber, and I read old copies of
Paris Match
while Bruno went outside to smoke. When F. called us in, I saw the kindness in his face. He asked about our lives, and Bruno began to talk and talk, nervously, about our work in conflict zones, about the time I disappeared in Kosovo and how he thought I was dead; the time Grozny fell and he thought he would never seen me alive; and how he had been beaten up by crowds in Africa. About how we met, how we lost each other, how we found each other, how we strived to have this baby.

‘It’s a beautiful story,’ the doctor said, and it must have convinced him we were sufficiently difficult because he took on my case.

He put me on the table and did an ultrasound. He warmed his hands and rubbed jelly on me and moved the wand over my stomach. There was a heartbeat, a small one because the baby was only ten weeks old, the size of an apple seed. But it was alive.

I had lain on these tables and seen, too many times, the look on the doctor’s face when he moved the wand and realized the baby was gone. ‘Tell me what it is,’ I had once begged an Indian technician in an emergency room in New Jersey when the baby I was carrying was thirteen weeks old. I saw the blank look on her face.

‘I’ll just go and get the doctor.’

‘Is my baby all right?’

‘I’ll just go and get the doctor.’

But now, there was a heartbeat. We stared at the screen and there was a tiny pumping heart. And suddenly, Bruno was crying.

The doctor did not seem surprised, but I was. My husband had climbed the Eiffel Tower with ropes and outstayed everyone in the Côte d’Ivoire when the fighting was at its worse. There was that hike through the mountains with the love letter in Kurdistan. I had never, ever seen him frightened.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘He’s alive, see?’ I pointed to the screen.

Then he said, ‘The baby is so big,’ and wiped his face. In fact, the baby was tiny. But I knew what he meant, and so did the professor, who said nothing, just swabbed the ultrasound wand clean of the gel and told me not to eat too much sugar and to be careful.

‘This is real,’ I said as we climbed into the taxi to drive back to Paris. ‘This is really happening.’

It was so big.

And so began our new life in Paris.

Usually the expats in Paris gave birth at the American Hospital in Neuilly, or at chic private clinics in the 16th with french doors that opened on to gardens. One of my American friends had been born in the American Hospital herself, forty years earlier, and delivered all three of her boys there. She told me, laughing, of the menus presented to you when you were about to go into labour, with the choice of wines, and the croissants freshly baked on the premises.

You had a private room. You could give birth screaming in English if you chose to, and people would understand you. Bruno and I went head to head: I wanted to give birth at the American Hospital because it felt safe, and I was feeling terribly unsafe. I missed my mother and my girlfriends, I missed the chemist in London who had known me for a decade, and mixed special cough syrup just for me, and the newsagent, and the grocery store on Elgin Crescent. I missed being someplace where people knew who I was.

‘There is no way that our baby will be born here,’ he said after checking out the surgical unit, which was minimal compared to the French state hospitals. ‘If something goes wrong, they are going to move you to a hospital you really don’t want to be in – like Hotel Dieu.’ Hotel Dieu was the Victor Hugo-esque hospital where the prisoners from local jails were brought in in chains, and where crowds of people waited in draughty rooms for hours to see a doctor.

Combined with my blood-clotting disorder, which the doctors feared would cause me to haemorrhage during the birth, there was the metal stitch I had had inserted after Israel, to keep the baby firmly locked inside. There was also the problem of my age, which seemed young in New York, but ancient in France where women began their families in their twenties, and where, at thirty-five, you were considered old. And so it was decided, early on, that we would use the Zen doctor and his hospital.

A few weeks after we arrived in Paris, shortly after the Polish painters rolled up their dust sheets and closed the cans of white paint, after we stored O.’s things in a barn outside of Paris, after we painted everything so it was white and clean, after we finally bought a piece of furniture from IKEA on which to change the baby (but I forgot to buy nappies), the SAMU – the French paramedics – arrived for the first time at rue du 29 Juillet.

It started in the early evening. I stood in the bathroom, holding my toothbrush and began to cough. And cough. And cough, so that I could not stop and could not breathe. I leaned over the sink, and suddenly I heard something pop inside me, and felt a sharp bone sticking in my chest. Later I found out that one of my ribs had become distanced from the muscle from the strength of my cough, and the pain was excruciating.

Bruno found me on the floor, my arms wrapped around my middle. He pulled me to my feet, but I could not straighten my body – the bone was sticking into my skin. ‘Lie down,’ he said, but I could not. I stood as best I could while he called 15 – the number for the SAMU, the paramedics, and then, hanging up the phone, rubbed my back.

The SAMU arrived within minutes, a man from the Antilles and another thinner, greyer one, and they led me, hunched, into the elevator, which was thankfully now working. But the three of us could not fit in the tiny space – I was that large – so the Antillean man came with me, clearly terrified, and the other one took the stairs with Bruno.

‘
Ça va, Madame, ça va
,’ he said, trying to comfort me. ‘
Respirez! soufflez!
’ But breathing hurt too much.

They strapped me in the ambulance bed, and Bruno shouted that he would take his moto.

‘Don’t leave me,’ I said, and he touched my face.

‘Five minutes and you are at the hospital.’

On my back, I watched the lights of Paris above me as we drove down past Pyramides, then on to rue de Rivoli, past the Louvre, across the bridge, and on to one of the islands in the Seine.

Inside Hotel Dieu were drunks, shouting crazies, a man holding an arm with a deep gash, dripping blood. They all stared at me, this distorted figure twisted in half, like one of Victor Hugo’s characters. For once, I was happy to be in France, happy that the doctors were so good, that the nurses here who X-rayed me tried to soothe me, and told me they knew how much it hurt.