Ghosts by Daylight (24 page)

I had written two letters to Luca which would be given to him at mealtimes, saying how much we loved him, how proud we were. I had packed his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack with ‘one snack, one small bottle of water, one
doudou
– a stuffed animal – and one game.’

At 7 a.m., I carried my sleepy son, who still had his round baby cheeks, reddened by the impression of his pillow, and smelling like lavender soap, to the sofa in the living room. As I passed the hall mirror, I saw myself with Luca, whose legs were now so long that they hung down to my knees when I carried him. His size shocked me. In my mind, he was still a baby, but his size, his language, his actions – he was, after all, going to spend two nights alone with his classmates in a forest outside of Paris! – told me my little boy was growing up, very fast, and very sweetly.

I wrapped him in the striped blanket, a larger version of the one I had swaddled him in when he was an infant. I laid him on the sofa. He closed his eyes and smiled, moving his face towards the sunlight coming from the east, from the Luxembourg Gardens. I made him lemon crepes with brown sugar and fresh orange juice. I picked out a red Spiderman vitamin, bought in America, and carried it to the low table by the sofa, the one Bruno had bought in Indonesia.

I cuddled my son in my arms, fighting anguish, and he woke up and began to talk about a lemonade stand that he would build in the summer. This was one of the few bits of Americana I had instilled in him: Thanksgiving, a song I had learned as a child called ‘Over the River and Through the Woods’, and lemonade stands and blueberry pie from Maine. I fed him the crepes, and in between bites, he said how he would build the lemonade stand:

‘You take scotch tape and put up a sign. Then you mix lemon with sugar and water, but . . .’ he leaned his mouth towards my ear, ‘it’s a secret recipe. Then like Bugs and Daffy on Baby Looney Tunes, you build a desk and sell the lemonade for one cent. You put your piggy bank on the desk and people put money in. One cent.’

‘You can charge more than that, sweetie,’ I said.

‘Five Euros?’

‘Twenty cents is fine. And you can give them a free cookie with it.’

‘Yeah! Anna’s cookies.’ Anna was his American au pair, who made peanut butter and sugar cookies and played American games with him like Mother May I? and Hopscotch.

‘Anna’s cookies,’ I said.

But as he was dressing, he became a baby again. ‘Mama, I don’t want to go to the big house,’ he said, shivering slightly.

‘It’s OK, it’s going to be fun,’ I said, unconvinced.

Bruno brought a bag from the bakery across the street: warm croissants and
pain au chocolat
, and he and his only son lay on the floor together. I watched their faces, so much alike, and I wondered why Bruno did not seem to feel the sharp pain I did that Luca’s babyhood was finished. He would tell me, often and solidly, when I spoke of how hard it was to let the days on rue du 29 Juillet go, ‘They were beautiful days, and these are beautiful days. Don’t grip on to things. Let them go and other things come.’

Many years ago, in Maine, Marc, who would become my first and very young husband, before I had begun reporting war, when I was still a student who wanted to grow up and become a professor or a novelist, had said to me when I complained that I remembered so little, ‘You’re not hanging on to enough of the moment.’

This is the moment
, I thought, looking at them both.
Remember it
. Remember the details, the colour, the smell. Remember the sound of Luca talking quietly, whispering to his father in French. His baby teeth, still shiny, not yet lost. Remember the faint light coming through the windows. The smell of the sugared crepes, the colour of the orange juice I had squeezed for him.

‘Let’s go,’ Bruno said suddenly, rising from the floor. ‘It’s time. The bus leaves at nine sharp.’ Luca and I looked at each other. I saw in his face the softness of a child, but also something else: a slight defiance, the emerging of an individual. He was half Bruno and half me, for sure, but he was also very much Luca Girodon.

They took the motorcycle, Luca in his new red helmet, and I walked along rue Notre Dame des Champs, pulling his suitcase to the meeting point at La Closerie des Lilas, where long ago Hemingway was usually found getting drunk with his friends.
A shot of brandy
, I thought,
would make me feel better now
, and I briefly thought of the old Bruno, the fun one, the one that ran down the length of a bar in Nairobi while the barman tried to catch him, just so that he could lean down and kiss me passionately.

‘That was the most romantic thing I have ever seen in my life!’ my Kenyan friend, Anna, had said. Her husband, Tonio, was there, too. Tonio and Bruno were doing shots at one end of the bar, there were pretty hookers from Somalia everywhere, and soon a fight broke out, and we got kicked out. Then Anna and Tonio had a fight, and Tonio ran off, and Bruno went after him, then Bruno and I went to sleep while Anna and Tonio kept fighting. There was a crash in the middle of the night – Tonio had broken through a wall of glass. Bruno rushed down to stop Anna from beating him. Everyone went back to bed. In the morning, there was the pure, hot Kenyan light and the smell of coffee. We were due to fly to Samburu land, but Bruno woke and said he had to go back to France, he was too disturbed, too ‘
perturbé
’ by the scene the night before. He drove to the airport and changed his ticket while I stood in shock, but remained stoic.

‘When will we meet again?’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but we will.’

This was us. No map, no rules.

There were crazy nights, and even crazier resolutions. The most romantic thing I ever saw. The most romantic man I ever knew. But now we were parents, Bruno was sober and the intensity of those days was exhausting us. We wanted peace. We did not want the ghosts around us any more.

Bruno always told me the reason he loved me, the reason he married me when he had always said he never would marry anyone, was that no matter how much it hurt, I always let him go where he wanted to when he needed to, when he had to. It was not about other people, about other women, other places. It was about his need to be alone, to be free, to be unencumbered.

‘Go if you have to go,’ I said, and kissed his cheek. His eyes filled with tears. I knew he loved me. I knew no one could ever replace me. What else mattered?

I knew there were others like me with complicated spouses. Simone de Beauvoir once said it about Sartre and his hundreds of flirtations: ‘Once you know there is something irreplaceable between you and another person, nothing else matters.’ This was the way our relationship went – in and out, back and forth, two steps forwards and three back.

Before Luca, it was our life. That day in Africa, Bruno flew back to France, we broke up again, we got back together again, we lived continents apart, we reunited in a wave of passion, we stood in front of a priest and took our vows, we made a little boy, we became parents.

Then Bruno broke down, a carjacker in Nairobi killed Tonio, Anna got married again to a Samburu warrior, and Bruno and I tried to live the best we could with the brutality of our history, sometimes scratching out the pain and with a compulsion to be better, but always trying – at least we felt – to be honest.

At the meeting point, we loaded Luca’s red suitcase on to the bus, I gave his teacher Stephanie the two letters I had written. I had drawn hearts over them in yellow (‘Mama, what is your favourite colour? Mine is yellow because it is happy, it is the sun!’) and red and green (‘Green for Christmas, yellow for summer, right, Mama?’). Bruno and I went for a coffee at the café on rue d’Assas, and I ate a tartine and read
Le Figaro
trying to take my mind off my anxiety.

Bruno drank an espresso silently, smoked two filter-less Camels, then pecked me on the top of my head and went off on an assignment, ‘To the suburbs, the rough neighbourhoods.’ It struck me that for the first time in five years, we were alone without our son. Even though we sometimes went away together for the weekend, in the old days, before AA, while Moineau and Bapu watched Luca, this was different: our son had left us, not the other way around.

‘Do you want to go to a movie tonight? Or hear some jazz? It’s the St-Germain Jazz Festival,’ I said. Bruno loved jazz. He had listened to it endlessly all those long but wonderful nights when he stayed up with the infant Luca.

My wounded, fragile, impossible husband frowned. His beautiful face, creased with pain that I could not read. ‘I have my meeting tonight at eight-fifteen. It’s about the Big Book.’

The Big Book, the bible of AA. The meetings at the American Church, Quai d’Orsay. Right next to the Musée d’Orsay that I had stood and looked at from my balcony at rue du 29 Juillet, the huge illuminated clock at the top of the building, feeling such hope and happiness. Now I hated passing that church. I hated the smell of the rooms where the AA held their meetings. It was the alien spaceship that had opened its doors and taken away my husband.

But this was selfish, I know. Because AA, of course, had saved him.

I smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I was not disappointed. This was a version of me in Kenya, saying goodbye; me in Los Angeles after a passionate two weeks together when the final night consisted of us both crying because we could not give each other what we wanted (me, a baby; Bruno, the ultimate freedom); me in Jalalabad, saying goodbye to him for ever.

I was saying goodbye again; I was exhausted by the comings and goings. And Bruno hated long goodbyes. He called it ‘red eye blinking eye’ because when he took a photograph of the two of us in Los Angeles airport after that particularly painful break-up, I had been crying for hours and he was rapidly blinking back tears. When I boarded the plane – in those pre-9/11 days, when your companion could accompany you all the way to the gate – I turned around to see him blinking over and over, tears falling down his cheeks. How long was it after that I did not see him? I lost count. Once it was weeks, another time months. I would try to put him from my mind, but it would always be impossible to forget each other, to find a replacement. We would always reunite somewhere with the ferocity of firecrackers. We found each other again in airports, in war zones, in cities.

And he would always save me. Me running in the door after a brutal bombing in Kosovo, wearing a funny wool hat a soldier had given me, and Bruno playing poker with some of his TV colleagues in a seedy hotel in Northern Albania. He put down his card and dragged me by the hand outside. ‘Such joy!’ he said, seeing my dirty, bedraggled face. Me in Afghanistan, after months and months travelling with the Northern Alliance towards Kabul, sleeping in tents, sleeping on the ground with bronchitis so severe it hurt to breathe, and Bruno sending with a colleague antibiotics and a warm nightgown that he had bought at Princesse Tam Tam, a shop I loved on rue Bonaparte. Then our meeting, in Jalalabad, months later, him kissing my face over and over.

‘Did you miss me?’

‘What do you think?’

Him in Burma, undercover, filming child labourers, me in Sierra Leone, two of my friends murdered, hiding secret papers linking the government to blood diamonds. Bruno on a Burmese train, opening his washbag and finding a small bottle of my perfume he always kept. ‘And I opened it, and I wished I had not,’ he wrote to me later, ‘because all of the memories came flooding back.’ Our meeting in Paris: me running up the seven flights to his apartment, him opening the door with a huge smile.

After Grozny: ‘You’re alive. I told you would be alive.’

After East Timor: ‘What happened there?’ Then a pause. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

Our days in bed, sleeping together, getting up only to buy food at a Greek delicatessan and take it to the Chateau de Vincennes on a summer day, lying on a blanket and listening to jazz.

And the meeting after months and months apart when he was in Africa, fighting his demons, the war waging outside his door, and me at home growing bigger and bigger with his baby; opening the door to my London flat, and there was my new husband. I threw my arms around him, and buried my face in his neck. We would never ever be apart again, I vowed. Neither one of us would ever be in danger again.

I had wanted, he had wanted, so desperately a clean life.

So much joy, Bruno had given me. And today, the middle of May, there was other joy. Our son was growing, Bruno was not drinking, and I was leaving, finally, the sadness of the past behind. And out of this chaos, there was a child. After him, perhaps there would be more children, Luca’s own someday. Marguerite, Bruno’s Hungarian acupuncturist, a woman he called ‘my angel’, had said when Luca was born: ‘Now you and Janine are immortal.’ It was no longer us. Our time, in a sense, had finished, together or not, but that little boy for ever bound us. And I knew, even if I never saw Bruno again, or if it was years before I saw him, I would never have nothing to say to him. He would always be the person who spoke the same language as me.

My husband rode off on his motorcycle down rue d’Assas, smiling behind his new helmet, driving to the suburbs to work, and I finished my tartine and read the day-old news in the
Herald Tribune
, while Luca, on the school bus headed to Burgundy, rolled off to his first adventure.

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