Ghosts by Daylight (18 page)

My son was born less than a year after I came home from Iraq. When I first saw him, seven weeks premature and vulnerable, it seemed impossible that I’d ever want to report a war again.

And yet when he was barely six months old I would go back to Baghdad, leaving him with his father and his nanny Raquel in Paris. Bruno told me to go. ‘You will understand how you want to live the rest of your life. Whether you want to continue this path or not.’

I went in late summer. My breasts leaked milk and I missed my baby with a ferocity that I could not understand. I moved slowly, I could not focus, I had no interest in Sadr City or the insurgents. There was a new generation of reporters who had never been to Africa or the Balkans, and one day, trapped in an elevator with some of them, I thought:
Leave it to them
.

Dear Janine. Congratulations on your baby. You’ve done your bit. Now pass the baton to someone else. Enjoy your son.

This email from a famous war photographer after the birth of Luca, when I said I would never go anywhere without him ever again. But Luca was still an infant and I was back at the al-Hamra Hotel. One afternoon I went to lunch with a famous Iraqi politician who sat in a large empty room surrounded by his staff.

He looked at me over his spectacles. ‘How’s Luca?’ he asked. I said that he was well, at home with his father.

‘There will always be other wars,’ he told me sternly. ‘But if you miss him growing up, miss his first tooth, his first step, you will regret it for ever.’

After nearly three weeks there, I was at Baghdad Airport and my flight home via Jordan was overbooked. There were only three seats left. A crowd of people was waiting for those seats, crushing forwards, and I surprised myself with the intensity of how I fought to get home. I shoved people out of the way, bribed someone and got the last seat. The plane took off and I looked down at Baghdad and thought:
No, I am not going to miss this life at all
. I cracked it. I ended the addiction.

And for the next five years, I watched my son, and I fed him and laughed with him and lay down with him at night to tell stories that always started with, ‘A long, long time ago in a place far, far away . . .’ My assignments were done with less passion: that passion was reserved only for my husband and my son, and the bubble of happiness that I lived in in Paris.

When I worked, I crammed what I would have done in one month into five days. I got off the plane in South Africa or India or Nairobi and I worked solidly, dreaming at night of the smell of my son’s breath, milky and soft.

I did not miss my old life at all. And very slowly, the fear began to go away.

Part Three

‘War is a violent teacher.’

Thucydides, reporting on the

Peloponnesian wars, fifth century
bc

11

The First Straw

Sometime in the autumn of my second or maybe my third year in Paris, when the leaves got wet and slippery and stuck to the pavement like skin, Bruno’s back broke. It did not exactly break in two like a stick, but the discs fell from their places and suddenly he had grown into an old and tired man who could not sleep and could not walk and had to lie in terrible pain for long hours on a wooden floor.

The French doctors gave him white tubes of drugs with poetic names, all opiates that dissolved in water and made him languid and glassy eyed. As one doctor began loading him up on oxycontin, I thought of my brother Richard, his eyes fired up by the morphine that he was given at the end of his life for the cancer that would eventually kill him. He was my second sibling to die.

But that was after years and years of American doctors, bored and cynical, not interested enough in patients like my brother who did not have health insurance, misdiagnosing him with an untreatable stomach condition and giving him drugs, though he begged them not to. All along, cancer was eating my brother alive, starting in his colon, his liver, his lungs and eventually working its way to his brain. But even in the days before he died, in extreme agony and wasted to the weight of a child, they would not give him the dignity of putting him in a hospice.

My brother was dying in America of a mysterious disease, and my husband’s back was breaking, and I saw both of them tormented with unrelenting physical pain. Bruno withdrew with the agony. I continued to live my life as a mother, going on assignments occasionally, but with premonitions of catastrophe. I tried to push the dark thoughts back, away, to the corner of my mind, the place that housed the war memories. But Bruno was getting sicker and sicker. Most of the time when I woke up at night, he was not there in the bed next to me, and it was four or five or three in the morning, and I found him alone in the living room watching television with a full ashtray next to him. I began to feel afraid. My household, the warmth, the pink light of Paris were all fading.

But Luca grew. He was now two and a half years old, fluent in French and English, with a sweet nature. He was an easy baby who played with boats in the Tuileries, who liked to be read to, sung to, rocked. He rarely cried, did not have temper tantrums, and did not mind being transported everywhere his father and I took him.

His first aeroplane flight was when he was several weeks old, and he lay in a box provided by Air France that we strapped on the seats in front of us. Now he went back and forth to America with me three or four times a year to see his grandmother, and planes, trains, buses and taxis were as familiar to him as his toys at home. He seemed not to notice his father’s withdrawal.

As autumn arrived that third year in Paris, and the leaves came down, the Tuileries grew more desolate with their black bare trees until soon there were only a few nannies walking fat babies in their strollers. The clock across the gardens on the Musée d’Orsay, which Bruno had pointed out to me with such hope for our future, seemed frosted over with the cold.

Winter came. When Luca was eight months old, for his first Christmas, Bruno took us to Strasbourg for the Christmas market. He knew I loved Christmas, loved snow, loved fir trees brushed with white, and
pain d’épices
and carols sung in incense-filled churches. But this Christmas, two years later, even while we put up the tree and hung wreaths, I felt something ominous creeping into our lives.

At 5 p.m., when I walked to the Place du Marché Sainte Honoré, it was dark. I still passed St Roch on the way home, where as a five-month-old baby we had baptized Luca and thrown a huge party after, and lit a candle meant to represent the scattering of light into the darkness of the world. I still stopped and lit candles when I passed St Roch where, in October 1795 Napoleon’s batteries fired on rebles hiding inside the church. But now I did it with more trepidation.

And still, Luca grew. He wore a blue gingham snowsuit, a hand-me-down from his godmother’s boy, and Raquel glued a fleece into his
pousette
so she could take him to the park for hours in the cold and come back with his cheeks bright red. As the lights got darker near the Tuileries one afternoon, I sat at my desk and took a phone call from a doctor.

‘Madame Girodon,’ she said in a flat tone. It was someone I didn’t know. She explained that she worked at Val de Grace, the military hospital known for treating Arafat and Jacques Chirac, and that she was a doctor treating my husband.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ she said, ‘that I am here with your husband and I am keeping him here under orders for several weeks.’ When I asked why, she said it was her belief that he was exhausted and suicidal.

I held the phone and sat down in the nearest chair. I had no idea who I was talking to. All I knew was that Bruno had left the house that morning for a check-up.

The doctor was waiting for me to say something.

‘I know he’s not sleeping,’ I offered. ‘I know he has nightmares.’ I told her that he was having EMDR, a treatment for removing trauma. I began to explain what it was but she stopped me.

‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m a doctor.’

‘But he’s not suicidal,’ I said, trying to find the words. ‘He’s just tired.’

There was a lingering pause.

‘May I speak with him?’ I said. I heard her say something and she passed the phone to Bruno. He got on, his voice full of tears. ‘Do you want to stay there?’ I said as gently as I could.

He said, ‘I’m so tired.’

‘All right then; stay, stay as long as you need to.’ I kept my voice quiet, low and calm.

‘All right, baby. I’m sorry,’ he said.

He passed the phone to the doctor and she told me how to reach him and when I could come.

I stayed at the desk in the dark, my head in my hands, till I heard Raquel come in, her key turning in the lock, and the happy sound of Luca singing. I ran to him, pulled him from the
pousette
and pushed my warm cheek against his cold one. The baby laughed and pulled my hair. Raquel took him from me and went to the kitchen to make his pureed courgettes. I could hear her talking to him, and I sat at the desk thinking of Bruno in the hospital, alone, tired, scared. I thought of how much responsibility he had taken on, so quickly after coming back from Africa. A pregnant, demanding wife. A new city. A premature baby. ‘My shoulders aren’t that big,’ I remembered him once telling me.

For so many years, people asked me about war. What was it like, did you get shot at, were you raped, how many times have you seen action, were you on front lines, what do dead bodies look like, how many dead bodies have you seen, were you scared, what do chest wounds look like, have you been shot, have you seen someone die? The more interesting ones asked: And how did it affect you?

But I was fine, I said. I did not like to talk about the places I had come back from: they went into black bound notebooks and the notebooks went into a box and the box went into the basement. From there, I could look at them some day and remember all the people, the places, the red dirt, the rain and the mud. But for now, I was fine. I always thought Bruno was too.

The trauma psychiatrist in London also said I was resilient, and resilience had saved me. That, and being able to write it out of my system: write about being marched into the woods by Serb paramilitaries in Kosovo with a gun at my back; about the child soldiers in Africa surrounding my car with the RPG; about the dead around me. The bodies in wells, the bodies in the sewers in East Timor, the hundreds and hundreds of bodies in Goma, after the Rwandan massacre, when people – mainly Hutus – were dying in hundreds of cholera. People dropping in front of me, puking green stuff, till there was no more fluid in their bodies, then dying.

‘And how many dead bodies have you seen?’

The heightened danger and ubiquitous threat that journalists confront carries significant psychological challenges. Exposure to life-threatening events creates potential risk for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and substance abuse, and journalists are not immune. Data collected from a group of 218 front-line journalists who worked in zones of conflict for 15 years revealed, on average, rates of PTSD five times higher than those found in the general population. Moreover, rates of depression and alcohol abuse in this group well exceeded those found in journalists who had spent their careers far removed from the danger of distant conflicts.

PTSD and War Correspondents

So I survived, sort of. Bruno’s voyage out was much harder.

I did not know how to heal my husband, and even if I had, he would not have let me.

My mother always comforted her sick children with food. It was the best way she knew of showing the love that she had. She was never one to throw her arms around you and smother you with kisses, the way I do with my son, but she was a great one for making poached eggs on toast, or farina with sprinklings of sugar, or cinnamon toast when we were home from school ill.

For this reason, I loved getting sick as a child, and perhaps psychosomatically, I was sick often, with colds, with flu, with bronchitis. I was thin and weak and pale, and my favourite moment was the morning when she would shove a thermometer under my tongue and find a fever. ‘OK,’ she would say briskly. ‘No school, get back into bed.’

Then she would abandon whatever she had planned for her day – girlfriends, shopping, lunches. She would change the sheets, pile the bed with pillows, tell me to wash my face and teeth and fold me into the bed, pulling the sheets around me and tucking me in. Then she would bring tea with lemon and honey, orange juice and my medicine on a little dish with a spoon. It was the only time – except for in church – I remember as a child feeling that I had my mother’s full attention.

She continued to pay more attention to us when we were ill even when we became adults. When my brother Richard was dying in her bed, and was always freezing cold, wrapped in layers of Patagonian fleeces and rag socks and blankets, unable to eat, and weighing about 80 pounds, she would try to feed him. She made milkshakes with extra eggs and a child’s pasta – pastina – with spoonfuls of sugar. She made chicken noodle soup or grilled cheese sandwiches, none of which he could eat.

She could not address what was killing him – nor did she have solutions about what we could do. She did not know how to save him, but she could feed him. One day, she came back from his bedroom with an untouched chocolate milkshake, still frosted in the tall glass, and she was crying. ‘He’s fading away before my eyes,’ she said. I remembered, as she said that, her using those same words about my father as he lay dying in the same bed ten years before.