Ghosts by Daylight (5 page)

When I think of Africa, I see myself lying in bed in our room upstairs, behind the thick iron door, on top of pale green linen sheets. I had bought those sheets with Bruno on the rue St Sulpice in Paris, at a shop called Maison de Famille; it was the first item we had ever bought together, after nearly a decade. I also see myself rising slowly in the heat – the sound of the birds squabbling noisily outside, the way they can only in Africa, a saraband of birds – and downstairs, I hear Bruno.

He’s moving slowly with his morning ritual: the news in French; the BBC World Service tuned to Africa; the tea in an iron pot on a yellow-and-green plastic tray brought by Matthew, a refugee from Burkina Faso, and a peeled mango for me.

The country where we live is in a State of Emergency. It happened very quickly, the change from being a place of parties and barbecues and champagne receptions with tiny little finger sandwiches in the vast garden of the French Embassy to a place that smelled of death.

On the last night of normal life, Bruno and I went out to an Italian restaurant and ate veal and drank martinis to celebrate my finishing my book – I had gotten the internet to work that day, and I’d sent it off to my publisher.

The next day, Bruno left to go on an overnight trip, leaving me alone in the house with Alassane, the guard. I felt agitated, but he reassured me.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. The country was so quiet, and news was so slow that he was going to make a film about French nuns who lived in the bush and made Camembert.

At night, I grew more wary, my childhood fears of the dark reflecting all the shadows in the room. I locked all the doors and turned out the lights and worked alone in the bedroom until very late. I was reading, I remember, a United Nations report on the genocide at Srebrenica. It disturbed me, and it was 3 a.m. when I finished. That was when I heard the shooting. I put down the report, turned out my light – I had learned that much from living in war zones before – and crawled to the window. In the sky were flares, shooting into the darkness like Fourth of July firecrackers. I could hear machine-gun fire somewhere further down the road, and the ominous sound of a Kalashnikov.

Not again
, I thought. We came here to live in peace.

I was tired, but I knew I should not sleep. I crept back to bed and turned on my radio to the BBC World Service. There was nothing about Côte d’Ivoire. I picked up my cell phone which had very little battery and tried to call Bruno. A recorded message came on.

Then Alassane came running up the stairs, panting. ‘Madame, Madame, it’s war! It’s a war!’ His eyes were wild. He had the key to the iron door that separated our bedroom from the rest of the house. He pushed me inside.

‘Wait,’ I said. I ran down to the kitchen and grabbed a gallon of water, some bananas and my phone charger. From my study in the garden, I took my passport and my computer. I ran across the garden, my feet growing wet from the evening moisture, and back into my house. Up the stairs. Then Alassane shut the door and locked it. I could hear him running down the stairs. I was locked in, from the outside.

‘Alassane!’ I screamed. But he was gone.

We had no landline phone in the bedroom, and I estimated I had ten minutes’ battery left on my cell phone. The electricity was going in and out. I phoned Fifi, the wife of another journalist who worked with Bruno. Fifi was languid and smart, Ethiopian by birth but educated at British boarding schools. She worked for UNICEF and was
branchée
, plugged in.

‘What the FUCK is going on?’

‘I have no idea,’ she said. She sounded calm. She had grown up as the daughter of a UN diplomat and had lived through the last round of violence in the Côte d’Ivoire. ‘It can’t be another coup. Let me make some calls.’

I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, fully dressed, and then packed a small bag: passport, computer with my recently finished book on it, notebook, press cards.

Fifi phoned back thirty minutes later. ‘No one knows. Just lock yourself in, and don’t go outside. Wait until the boys get back.’

At 4 a.m., I heard the screech of tyres. A car was pulling into our drive. I heard someone running up the stairs. A soldier?
God, I hope not
, I thought. Then a pounding on the door, and then Alassane, I think, also coming upstairs, then someone opening the door.

It was Bruno. ‘Get your passport, get your things, and let’s go.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Come on, baby. No time. Just get in the car.’

He didn’t know either, I realized. Nobody did. I got in the back of the car. Eric, Fifi’s husband, was driving. It was still dark, that time of night known as the hour of the wolf; the time, a doctor once told me, when most people died.

We took a shortcut through town and the hair stood on my neck. That intuition. That bad feeling.

‘Don’t go this way,’ I said suddenly.

No one listened to me.

I said it again: ‘I don’t like this road.’

I heard Eric and Bruno speaking rapid French. I could not understand them. Next to me was Sylvain, a young producer, crouched low in his seat.

A third time: ‘I don’t like this road . . .’

‘Tell your girlfriend to shut up,’ Eric said, annoyed. At that second, from the corner of my eye, I saw several young soldiers crossing the road in the filmy darkness, guns in their hands. They crept steadily across the road, as slowly as a caterpillar weaving across a pavement. They saw us and turned, guns forwards.

I slid under the seat, just as I heard the windshield crack from a bullet. Then another. Bruno had his camera in his lap and was filming. The glass shattered everywhere, and I heard him scream. A shard hit my arm.

‘Are you hit? ARE YOU HIT?’

More bullets. Eric reversed fast, the wheels grinding into mud, and went backwards at high speed. I remember thinking:
Thank God a French guy is driving
. Sylvain and I crouched on the ground.

‘I’m OK,’ Bruno shouted. His hand was bleeding. There was a cut on his face.

We got to the office of France Television in the centre of town, but no one knew what had happened. At 6 a.m., the phone rang. It was the foreign desk of CNN in London.

‘What’s going on down there?’ someone shouted down the crackling line. ‘We are hearing news of a coup, we are hearing news of another war . . .’

I got on the phone and did a live report about not knowing what was going on, but describing the scenes in the street, the fear, the disorientation, the feeling in the air shortly before a country blows sky high.

The sun came up, full and hot. That was when we realised that the country was in a State of Emergency.

While Abidjan was falling to pieces, I was trying to get pregnant. The house near Nuit de Saigon was the only place we had lived together as a couple, and the only place that had any pretence of normalcy, any sense of a couple planning a future. We had a copy of a rental agreement with both our names on it. The bathroom was stocked with those sticks that tell you if you are pregnant or not and reserves of folic acid. By my bed was a copy of
What to Expect When You Are Expecting
. Grown-ups.

But the coup and the violence stopped all that. The news said the same thing every day: updates of more territory the rebels had taken in the north, who had been killed the night before, which minister had replaced which. People burned out of their houses, people killed. This was exactly the kind of world that Bruno had told me, for years and years, that we could not bring a child into.

It was a morning like that when I found the gun. It lay on the clean white tiles like the reptiles I sometimes found in the house. But, unlike lizards, this was more repellent: huge, threatening. I pulled it out and lay it on my lap.

I have always been afraid of guns; I have seen so much of what they can do. But they fascinate me too on some level: the power they have, the quickness of a bullet, the amount of time it takes to leave the barrel and reach someone’s brain. Every country I ever worked in had some rebel army that carried Kalashnikovs, and I hate the sound of an AK-47. It’s only the bad guys, the non-conventional armies, that use them. If you hear one, you are already too close.

I never carried a gun and had only picked one up once before, in Central Bosnia as the city of Jajce was falling, and a soldier grabbed it abruptly out of my hand, telling me not to treat dangerous things like toys. I had been marched into the woods with a gun at my back in Kosovo, and once, in a cattle market in Africa littered with dead and wounded bodies, a soldier had pointed an AK-47 at my heart, the safety catch off.

And yet, and I did not know why, I was magnetically drawn to Bruno’s gun. It was silver, like a little boy’s imitation of a sheriff’s gun. I weighed it in my lap. I ran my finger up and down the trigger, wondering what would happen if I pulled it. I even put it to my head to imagine what it felt like when people blew their brains out, as a friend of mine, another war reporter, had done shortly after he had said, ‘I’ve seen too much.’

I put the gun back. I wondered if it was loaded, and assumed it was. Then I took a shower and dressed, pulling a lightweight cotton dress, made by Mr Baa who had a shop around the corner, over my head.

Mr Baa. I had given him one cotton dress and a width of different coloured fabrics, and he had made me five African dresses. This one was a copy of a pink-and-black dress bought long ago in a boutique in Soho, and Mr Baa had taken pride in covering the buttons with fabric and finishing the hem with hand stitching.

But I did not go to Mr Baa any more, not since the day we drove to Bruno’s office and I saw, in the empty field near Mr Baa’s shop, the naked corpse of a man with his hands bound by wire behind his back. A few days later, Mr Baa took his son and his bolts of fabric and fled, north, I supposed. The country was now divided: north and south; Christian and Muslim.

Downstairs, the house was quiet. Bruno was on the patio, reading a two-day-old
Liberation
newspaper imported from France. I told him about the gun. He looked up with an unreadable expression. Then he looked down and kept reading the paper.

Matthew, the cook, a refugee from Burkina Faso – the Burkinabe were being burned out of their homes and driven north – brought me coffee, tasting of acid, bitter, thin and weak, like all the coffee in the Ivory Coast. (‘But how can a country that exports the most cacao in the world have bad coffee?’ I would ask over and over, and no one would ever be able to answer.)

Matthew was small with a deeply scarred face from some tribal ritual. He was in his thirties, but looked ancient. He wore the same thing every day: baggy grey trousers, a freshly washed print shirt, and sandals, which he left by the back door when he came in. He padded through the house on wide, calloused feet that seemed to have no arch at all.

I liked Matthew because he seemed not to take life, which included his job, seriously. He dropped dishes and laughed. He burned the food and laughed. He dropped trays of coffee; broke the brand-new washing machine; shrank Bruno’s trousers; dyed my white underwear navy blue and probably was responsible for the level of whisky in the bottle rapidly diminishing – though he blamed Alassane and Alassane blamed him.

The colonial French have never been good with domestic help, particularly in Africa, and Bruno often shouted at Matthew. I hated when he did, but Matthew did not seem to care. He laughed when Bruno raised his voice, laughed when Bruno left for work shrugging his shoulders in disbelief, and laughed when I asked him about his many children.

One day, Matthew came to work late and said that his brother had died. He had been electrocuted from a wire that the families living in the shanty ran between shacks. We both stared at him.

‘Go home, Matthew,’ Bruno said quietly. ‘You don’t have to work today.’

‘You should be with your family,’ I said.

But Matthew did not want to go home. In Africa, he said, people died every day and it was as much a part of life as waking up in the morning. It just happened.

The day of his brother’s death, Matthew washed up the breakfast dishes, and watered the plants, and did the laundry, padding up and down the cool stone stairs. He walked, as he did every day, to the market run by the little girl who had a withered leg from polio, who set up her shop on an old blanket in front of the video store, and came back with root vegetables to make a soup for lunch. I went back to my studio on the side of the garden to write. And I forgot, for the moment, about the gun.

Later on in the evening, we were eating more root soup covered with Gruyère cheese in deep bowls, and watching a video. We were lying on Mr Baa’s huge pillows, which he had made for the enormous living room. It was always hot downstairs, but upstairs Bruno turned on the air conditioning until just before we went to sleep, to kill the mosquitoes. We were watching
Annie Hall
, and the shots of the Upper West Side seemed so foreign, like another planet, from the tropical heat, the languid trees of the Côte d’Ivoire.

I asked again about the gun. ‘Where did it come from?’

Bruno looked away. So much of him, I realized, I did not know, and would probably never know.

‘But I don’t understand . . . Why do you have it?’