Ghosts by Daylight Read Online Free Page B

without phones. I got through to Bruno’s office in Paris, and someone passed him the phone. I could hear him breathing over the crackle of the satellite connection.
    ‘This is not fair,’ he said at first. ‘Where were you?’
    He said he had come back from the south-west of France, where he had surfed. He had tried to find my newspaper to read my stories, but it was sold out. He went to three newsagents before giving up. And his girlfriend wanted to know why he was so frantic to buy a newspaper in English.
    His intensity surprised me. ‘But I thought we would never see each other again,’ I said. ‘I thought you left, and that was the end . . .’
    ‘Listen: I want you to come to Germany next weekend. I’m filming in Stuttgart. Can you make it?’
    I held the receiver between my hands, trying to hear him amid the noise of the television centre. Someone sat at a desk in front of me listening to his walkman. Another reporter was waiting impatiently to use the phone. A producer from ABC was motioning me to move out of the way. I tried hard to concentrate.
    ‘But if I leave and Sarajevo falls when I’m gone . . . I won’t be able to get back.’
    ‘It won’t fall,’ Bruno said persuasively. ‘Come to Stuttgart.’
    ‘I’ll try.’
    ‘No, don’t try,’ he said ‘just do it.’ The finality of his tone was comforting – he belived this was the right thing to do.
    I decided then that I would go.
    ‘It’s your choice,’ Ariane said later with a slight disapproving air. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn’t do it. It’s too much of a risk.’
    ‘But I have to,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know why, but I do.’
    She shrugged again, and turned back to her book and her cigarette.
    I disappeared a few days later, and told no one but Ariane, who along with Didier, another French reporter who shared our ‘office’, was in crisis mode – storing water, petrol and fuel for the generator in case the city fell. She drove me to the airport in her armoured car. I took a UN flight to Ancona, Italy, a train journey to Rome, a flight to Munich, a connection to Stuttgart. It took eighteen hours and cost around a thousand dollars. But I did not care about the expense. I was earning money and putting it in a bank account in London. I had nowhere to spend it. I did not have a normal life or normal bills to pay. There were no restaurants to go to or clothes to buy in Sarajevo.
    I got off the plane in Stuttgart, carrying my flak jacket, my polka-dotted Croatian housedress and my dirty Keds sneakers. Bruno was waiting nervously at the gate. When he saw me, his eyes looked wet. He picked me up and spun me around.
    We stayed in a small wooden hotel and slept squished together in a twin bed. I took a shower that lasted an hour. We went to an outdoor swimming pool and I dived off the highest board. He hid in the crowd and watched me. After, we walked in the forest and lay down on the dirt in between the ferns.
    I went back to Sarajevo and he went to Kurdistan to live with the Pershmerga, but he hiked for days to deliver a love letter by fax to me. There was a drawing of a mosque on it – he wanted to meet in Istanbul. I put the fax in a box. The affair seemed impossibly doomed, but I had fallen in love with this strange, spontaneous man.
    Then, purely by chance, his girlfriend found out. She went – quite understandably – nuclear. Bruno and I met in Paris one weekend and tearfully ended it with cups of hot chocolate on the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was autumn, and I wore a grey jacket and a long scarf. He picked at the fringe at the end of it and explained it was for the best. Then he took off on his motorcycle, to see his brother in Brittany. ‘I’m sad,’ he said.
    ‘I’m sad too,’ I answered.
    When I told Ariane, she snorted. ‘Coward. He could have left her for you, but French men never do.’ As for the hot chocolate, she added in an annoyed tone, I might as well have rubbed it on my thighs. ‘That’s where