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Authors: Janine di Giovanni
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over-furnished Right Bank apartment.
That was the summer, and the apartment did not become ours until the new year. As my body grew, people told me my life was going to change. This surprised me. They said it in a conspiratorial way, as if this would be a terrible thing. They did not know, I suppose, how desperately I wanted my life to change.
I did not want to wake up in a bed in Africa with a gun underneath it. I did not want to crawl to windows in the dark to see which direction the shooting was coming from. I did not want to hide underneath car seats to avoid getting hit by stray bullets. I was sick of bribing corrupt officials, begging for visas at outpost embassies, hiring interpreters, landing in a place where no one knew me, and piling chairs outside the doors of filthy, remote boarding houses, drugging myself with codeine so that I could sleep, terrified someone would rob or rape me.
I was tired of my maps, my notebooks, my penknives, my flashlights, my compass, and my spare batteries, my BBC World Service. I hated my wardrobe of khaki trousers and desert boots and linen shirts and sneakers. Or the winter things: thick padded coats, Gortex boots for climbing over snow-crested mountains to countries I was not supposed to be in.
September passed, October and November. I was aware, for the first time in many years, of seasons changing and being present while they did, not being on planes going into different climates and time zones. As my baby grew, Bruno stayed in Africa to work, throughout the rainy season, and the war in the Ivory Coast grew more and more violent.
But he told me nothing when he phoned every morning and every evening, he protected me from the bullets, the fires, the beatings, the abuse he was taking. He did not tell me that he locked himself in every night and drank to stop the fear from creeping inside. He did not tell me that everyone had run away, that he and his crew were practically the only journalists that had not fled. Fifi, my Ethiopian friend, had left with her small daughter. Most of the NGOs we knew had closed down.
All through that autumn, when the leaves shook down from the trees in front of my London flat, grey against the wet streets, and I planted purple heather in my window boxes for the last time, I took care of myself and the baby. But the more I read about childbirth and babies, the more I began to feel an emotion I had discarded long ago on all of those long rides through Liberian jungles and Bosnian mountains: fear.
It seemed likely, according to my books, that so much could go wrong at any second. I worried about the baby being born dead, or losing him weeks before he arrived. I worried that when I went for scans, there would be no heartbeat, and I would see again the startled look on the technician’s face as they had to tell me the baby was no longer there. I worried about the contaminated air I had breathed in Iraq for so long. I worried about birth defects.
But the question I could not ask the doctor who took care of me – English, competent, remote – was the one that tormented me the most: could I do this? Had I been too damaged, had I seen too much, walked through too much, lived too much, to give this baby good things? How could I ever show him the world was a beautiful place when I was not sure I believed it myself?
The doctor examined me every few weeks, bemused and slightly impatient at my strange questions. He answered them in a straightforward but not particularly enthusiastic manner, one by one, dispassionately dealt with.
I went for all my tests. The technicians rubbed gel on my belly and made jokes, but I was frantic until I could see the baby’s heartbeat on the screen.
‘Is he dead?’ I asked, and they would turn to me, frowning, uncertain.
‘Why would you say that? Here’s his heart. Here is his beautiful little face.’
The day I found out Luca was a boy – I had assumed, as had Bruno, that he would be a girl – I phoned Bruno in
That was the summer, and the apartment did not become ours until the new year. As my body grew, people told me my life was going to change. This surprised me. They said it in a conspiratorial way, as if this would be a terrible thing. They did not know, I suppose, how desperately I wanted my life to change.
I did not want to wake up in a bed in Africa with a gun underneath it. I did not want to crawl to windows in the dark to see which direction the shooting was coming from. I did not want to hide underneath car seats to avoid getting hit by stray bullets. I was sick of bribing corrupt officials, begging for visas at outpost embassies, hiring interpreters, landing in a place where no one knew me, and piling chairs outside the doors of filthy, remote boarding houses, drugging myself with codeine so that I could sleep, terrified someone would rob or rape me.
I was tired of my maps, my notebooks, my penknives, my flashlights, my compass, and my spare batteries, my BBC World Service. I hated my wardrobe of khaki trousers and desert boots and linen shirts and sneakers. Or the winter things: thick padded coats, Gortex boots for climbing over snow-crested mountains to countries I was not supposed to be in.
September passed, October and November. I was aware, for the first time in many years, of seasons changing and being present while they did, not being on planes going into different climates and time zones. As my baby grew, Bruno stayed in Africa to work, throughout the rainy season, and the war in the Ivory Coast grew more and more violent.
But he told me nothing when he phoned every morning and every evening, he protected me from the bullets, the fires, the beatings, the abuse he was taking. He did not tell me that he locked himself in every night and drank to stop the fear from creeping inside. He did not tell me that everyone had run away, that he and his crew were practically the only journalists that had not fled. Fifi, my Ethiopian friend, had left with her small daughter. Most of the NGOs we knew had closed down.
All through that autumn, when the leaves shook down from the trees in front of my London flat, grey against the wet streets, and I planted purple heather in my window boxes for the last time, I took care of myself and the baby. But the more I read about childbirth and babies, the more I began to feel an emotion I had discarded long ago on all of those long rides through Liberian jungles and Bosnian mountains: fear.
It seemed likely, according to my books, that so much could go wrong at any second. I worried about the baby being born dead, or losing him weeks before he arrived. I worried that when I went for scans, there would be no heartbeat, and I would see again the startled look on the technician’s face as they had to tell me the baby was no longer there. I worried about the contaminated air I had breathed in Iraq for so long. I worried about birth defects.
But the question I could not ask the doctor who took care of me – English, competent, remote – was the one that tormented me the most: could I do this? Had I been too damaged, had I seen too much, walked through too much, lived too much, to give this baby good things? How could I ever show him the world was a beautiful place when I was not sure I believed it myself?
The doctor examined me every few weeks, bemused and slightly impatient at my strange questions. He answered them in a straightforward but not particularly enthusiastic manner, one by one, dispassionately dealt with.
I went for all my tests. The technicians rubbed gel on my belly and made jokes, but I was frantic until I could see the baby’s heartbeat on the screen.
‘Is he dead?’ I asked, and they would turn to me, frowning, uncertain.
‘Why would you say that? Here’s his heart. Here is his beautiful little face.’
The day I found out Luca was a boy – I had assumed, as had Bruno, that he would be a girl – I phoned Bruno in
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