Ghosts by Daylight Read Online Free

first like a toy. Then it gets more dismal. Then you get more frightened. Then you lie down and cover your head, like a child going to sleep.
    ‘Some ceasefire,’ said the commander, Kristanovic. He was a friend, someone I met occasionally in some black-market bar and drank whisky with. He was blond and had lived in Germany for some time. When the shelling started, we sat tense for a while, then he grabbed the soft flesh of my arm, above the elbow, hard. They always did this, commanders. They did not mean to hurt you, but sometimes they left bruises in their effort to get you out of the way. He turned me towards him: ‘We go now, or you stay here for three days. No moving after that.’
    A mortar fell.
    Ariane looked up. ‘Your call.’
    Three days in a trench, without communications. I had to call my office on Tuesday. If I didn’t, I would lose the slot for my Sunday paper, and what was the point of risking our lives for no story?
    ‘Back, I guess . . .’ I said, but I was unsure. The feeling in my stomach said that we should not stay. There was nothing more to be gained for us. But the other feeling, the one coursing through me, was to stay with the soldiers until the end.
    Another mortar fell, a dull thud. We turned and ran, Kristanovic holding my hand and pulling me behind him, jumping over rocks. I turned behind me to look at the soldiers, already in position, trying to memorize their faces.
    ‘Now!’ Kristanovic said, yanking me, grabbing my shoulder. Another mortar fell, this one closer, and he pushed me on to the ground and we all lay flat in the dust and the grass. Then we were running again, and then Chris, the Reuters photographer, said, ‘Shit!’ as he dropped his camera.
    ‘Leave the camera,’ the commander said. But Chris ran back.
    I still have those pictures. Many years later I would look at them and see Ariane in her shorts running down the hill and me behind her in a helmet. Both of us look very young. I would also see something that I did not perhaps see that day: we do not look sufficiently frightened, even though most of our footsteps were being followed with shots. We look like we were coming home from a picnic in the mountains, two young girls, a bit dirty, but behaving normally, aside from the flak jackets and helmets. What was wrong with us that we felt nothing that day, other than sorrow for those boys? Why did we not think that one of those hot mortar slices could dig into our arteries, or slice off a leg, or that we could have stepped on a mine or got shot in the back by a sniper? What part of our brain had ceased to think of these things?
    And that perhaps was the most frightening thing of all. The ability to feel nothing, to be so far away, so removed, from the most profound fear.
    I came back from Zuc that day slightly stunned; and dirty and thirsty and longing for tea and a bath. Neither was available. There was a scratch down my cheek and my knees were bruised from crouching. Instead of the bath, I was going to go to my room to think, to write, to lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. I was thinking about the soldiers I saw in the trenches at Zuc; about the way the light fell between the leaves of the trees as we ran down the hill; about how the commander had taken my hand and said, ‘Either you leave now or you stay in the trench till the fighting stops.’
    We were all coming down, weaned off the adrenalin, the strained moments of the first mortar falling. I will always remember the way a mortar sounds like a whistle. And I will never be able to watch fireworks again. Once, many years later, I was on a boat parked in a harbour in Italy on Ferrogosto, the high summer holiday celebrated by the Italians. The fireworks went off at midnight, after the lavish dinner, and everyone else cheered and climbed the mast and jumped up and down on board. But I was huddled as far away from everyone as I could, unable to bear the noise breaking in the sky. It reminded me too much, too