Ghosts by Daylight Read Online Free Page A

painfully, of Sarajevo.
    That afternoon, I pulled off my flak jacket and headed towards the stairway but someone was calling me. The man who had fallen on his knees in front of Jeremy and me was sitting at a plastic table in the lobby with the same kind of ease as if he were in a bar in Paris. It was Bruno. He was with a Bosnian girl, an interpreter, with long hair and glasses. There were a bottle of rosé and two glasses in front of him. He was entertaining the girl. She was laughing. Then he was in front of me. ‘Have some wine!’ he said. He stood so close I saw that his eyes were truly green, slanted, with flecks of gold. He was smiling and relaxed. He had the wonderfully confident air of someone in Provence on a summer’s day.
    I touched the scratch on my cheek. I did not want wine, or jokes, or someone smiling at me. But the man, who looked so small, lifted me into his arms, even with my flak jacket on, and carried me over to the plastic chairs. The pretty Bosnian girl was laughing.
    ‘You need a glass of wine,’ he said, and brushed the dried mud off my flak jacket. ‘And you should take that off.’
    And, like that, we fell in love. One grey and hot afternoon a few days later, I crossed the river to interview refugees in the Egyptian battalion side of Sarajevo and he was there, asleep on a wall, his camera next to him. I drew close and saw how delicate the bones of his face were, how beautiful. I thought I had never seen anyone as arresting. As I hovered overhead, leaving a dark shadow over his sleeping form, he opened his eyes. Smiled. ‘I thought you were an angel,’ he said.
     
    That love story lasted a week. Then Bruno left for Paris.
    He had a girlfriend there, a beautiful and elegant blonde woman who worked in advertising and had no idea of my existence.
    I had a boyfriend, whom I loved, that apartment we shared – decorated with Moroccan rugs and lamps we had bought together in Marrakesh – and an entire circle of mutual friends. But if I loved him so much, why was I always running away to Bosnia? And why, when he flew to Zagreb one wintry day and asked me why we could not get married and have children, did something inside of me recoil? Not at him, because I loved him. But the notion, the expression of confinement, meant death to me, the end of freedom.
    Did Bruno and I see this in each other, this resistance to conventionality? One morning, very early, he went back to Paris, leaving me asleep in my room in Sarajevo with a note that said, ‘I won’t lose you’, some tins of food he no longer needed, and some Power Bars. I knew where he was going – to the south-west of France on holiday with his girlfriend – and I felt no jealousy. This was his life. And I had mine.
    As he crept out in the near dark – someone had knocked on the door and he called out: ‘ J’arrive! ’ and jumped out of bed – he kissed me lightly on the forehead and said, ‘Take care of yourself. No risks.’ Years later, he would add something to those lines: ‘The best journalist is the one who stays alive to bring back the story.’
    Then he was gone.
     
    Weeks passed in Sarajevo, and rumours that the city was on the verge of falling to Serbian forces were rife. We did our work skittishly, listening to the short-wave radio, desperate for information. And we tried to live. Ariane grew browner from her window and I grew bored of the stalemate of the war. One day, a message came from a French reporter called Aubry, a wry woman with short dark hair and freckles who worked at France Television with Bruno.
    ‘Hey you,’ she called down to me from the mezzanine of the Holiday Inn. ‘I’ve been looking for you for days. Bruno is going crazy trying to reach you.’
    She ran down the stairs to give me a number to call, and I went to the television centre at the end of Sniper’s Alley, where all the TV journalists worked, to borrow a satellite phone from the European Broadcast Union, who always took pity on those of us