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Ghosts by Daylight: Love, War, and Redemption Hardcover – Deckle Edge, September 20, 2011
by
Janine di Giovanni
(Author)
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An enthralling, deeply moving memoir from one of our foremost American war correspondents.
Janine di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, she has been under siege and under fire.
Along the way she meets Bruno, a French reporter whose spirit and audacity are a match for her own. Their love affair spans nearly a decade and a dozen armed conflicts before they settle in Paris to raise a family. But Janine soon learns that a life lived in war is inevitably haunted. Bruno struggles with physical and emotional pain, and Janine, a new mother and wife in Paris, is afraid both for Bruno and herself and for the work that they do—and doubtful that she can hold their lives together.
With stunning scenes of action, heart-wrenching accounts of profound love, personal loss, and redemption, Ghosts by Daylight tells the unforgettable story of a passionate life lived to the fullest.
Janine di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, she has been under siege and under fire.
Along the way she meets Bruno, a French reporter whose spirit and audacity are a match for her own. Their love affair spans nearly a decade and a dozen armed conflicts before they settle in Paris to raise a family. But Janine soon learns that a life lived in war is inevitably haunted. Bruno struggles with physical and emotional pain, and Janine, a new mother and wife in Paris, is afraid both for Bruno and herself and for the work that they do—and doubtful that she can hold their lives together.
With stunning scenes of action, heart-wrenching accounts of profound love, personal loss, and redemption, Ghosts by Daylight tells the unforgettable story of a passionate life lived to the fullest.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateSeptember 20, 2011
- Dimensions6 x 1.2 x 8.75 inches
- ISBN-100307265587
- ISBN-13978-0307265586
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Di Giovanni writes with sadness, love and generosity ... turned the harsh facts of a life full of extremity and chaos into a story of defiant elegance ..." -The Telegraph (UK)
"Emotional battles and how to survive them are the principal themes in Ms di Giovanni's beautifully written memoir ...Ghosts by Daylight is no misery memoir, but a powerful lesson. Two people can love each other deeply, have a child, but still, in the end, not make it together." -The Economist
"Di Giovanni has constructed this bitter and illuminating story with admirable artistry ..." -The Times (UK)
"A moving memoir...Ghosts by Daylight is a story infused with love. The book shows that seemingly unflappable war correspondents are human, just like the rest of us." -New York Journal of Books
"Di Giovanni is a graceful writer, blessed with the kind of lucid prose that might trick readers into imagining that penning a compelling memoir would be easy. Her skilfull blending of the lovely...with with the gritty gives her book a very authentic kind of texture" -Christian Science Monitor
"Emotional battles and how to survive them are the principal themes in Ms di Giovanni's beautifully written memoir ...Ghosts by Daylight is no misery memoir, but a powerful lesson. Two people can love each other deeply, have a child, but still, in the end, not make it together." -The Economist
"Di Giovanni has constructed this bitter and illuminating story with admirable artistry ..." -The Times (UK)
"A moving memoir...Ghosts by Daylight is a story infused with love. The book shows that seemingly unflappable war correspondents are human, just like the rest of us." -New York Journal of Books
"Di Giovanni is a graceful writer, blessed with the kind of lucid prose that might trick readers into imagining that penning a compelling memoir would be easy. Her skilfull blending of the lovely...with with the gritty gives her book a very authentic kind of texture" -Christian Science Monitor
About the Author
Janine Di Giovanni has won four major journalistic awards, including the National Magazine Award, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She writes for the British, American, and French press, and has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Algeria, Gaza, the West Bank, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Pakistan, East Timor, Ivory Coast, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.
She is the author of Madness Visible, The Quick and the Dead, The Place at the End of the World, and of the introduction to the international best seller Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo. Two documentaries have been made about her life and work. In 2010, she was the president of the jury of the Prix Bayeux-Calvados for War Correspondents. She lives in Paris.
She is the author of Madness Visible, The Quick and the Dead, The Place at the End of the World, and of the introduction to the international best seller Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo. Two documentaries have been made about her life and work. In 2010, she was the president of the jury of the Prix Bayeux-Calvados for War Correspondents. She lives in Paris.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part One
In his sorrow he found one source of relief in war
Tacitus, Agricola
chapter 1
Beginnings
We arrived in Paris in rainy January, the first week of the new year, shuffling our feet like little soldiers retreating from battle. The moving boxes and crates had followed us from places where there really was war: the Ivory Coast, Iraq, Sarajevo and Afghanistan, and were filled with remnants of the life that both of us were trying to leave behind.
The boxes were tall and foreboding. Mine were cardboard from an overpriced shipping agency in London. The movers came to my Notting Hill flat one afternoon and wrapped my entire London life in plastic and paper, nearly twenty years of it sealed away in boxes. They packed everything, even lipstick-stained cigarettes left behind in ashtrays from a dinner party the night before.
Bruno’s crates were more solid. They were wooden and imposing and came by ship from Abidjan. Together, our combined possessions lined the dining room of our rented apartment on the Right Bank, so there was no room to walk around unless you shimmied between them. Unpacking them seemed a distant chore, impossible, something that would happen far away in the future.
Inside my boxes were pots and pans with burn marks from omelettes that were left unattended for too long; velvet dresses worn once or twice at a forgotten London fancy- dress party; down-filled coats and sleeping bags still lightly coated in dust. There were hiking boots with red mud from Afghanistan; my mother’s delicate china tea set; my black-and-white photographs from Africa and the Middle East and the Balkans. There were pieces of a disassembled wooden Shaker-style chair I had bought with a previous boyfriend, ready to be reassembled in Paris, and piles of old, worn linen sheets bought in Ireland and Rome. There were towels and dishes, pie plates with bits of burnt pastry still left on them and hundreds of books.
I had left the flat where I had lived for a dozen years empty except for the bed. That was staying behind; I could not bear to bring it to my new life. I had inherited it from an Irish girl, a banker, who had fled to Dublin with a broken heart, and it seemed time to pass it on again, this time to the blonde German lodger, a solemn psychoanalyst, who was renting my flat.
Also inside the boxes were things that would only make sense to me. Painful stiletto heels which were bought in New York on a whim and worn only once; an ashtray stolen from a hotel in Algeria; some bits of metal shrapnel twisted like an odd sculpture; a packet of love letters—some of them faxes, faded with time—tied with a pale pink ribbon; and two flak jackets with Kevlar inserts to protect the chest and groin and shoulders from bullet wounds.
There were also two helmets with my blood group taped on the front and carefully marked in indelible ink; a nylon bag of medical supplies; packets of the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin; a buddy injection of a liquid opiate that I had stolen from a miserable red-headed American soldier before leaving Kuwait for Basra. There was a satellite telephone and two digital cameras that I had never learned how to use, still in their boxes with the instructions. There was a waxy chemical weapon suit, wrapped in plastic and tied with elastics; an unused gas mask; and maps of Baghdad circled in red at strategic points.
There were eighteen black covered notebooks scribbled with names like Ali and Bassam and Mona and Ahmed—names of people I had interviewed in what seemed like another lifetime, and my canvas boots, still full of sands from the western desert in Iraq.
Bruno’s packing cases were more exotic than mine. His boxes were filled with things Claude Lévi-Strauss might have collected during his long and lonely voyages. There were bits of woven fabric in equatorial colours; long, feathered arrows from Brazil; black-and-white shimaghs from the Middle East; pink-and-white shells from the beaches near Grand-Bassam, outside of Abidjan; green and red and black beads from Mali; a dried-out starfish that still smelled of the sea; teak tables and mirrors with ivory inlays; brass trunks; a heavy white blanket from Ethiopia; and ancient Buddha heads from Afghanistan and Burma. He had a long cloak from the Tuaregs in the Sahara, and he knew how to wrap it so that he looked, as he put it, like a man from the desert.
There were six brass cups from somewhere in Central Asia. There were lapis lazuli necklaces from Iraq and prayer rugs from Kurdistan. There was a metal box full of photographs which he kept secret. There was his name written in Greek on a gold plate which an old girlfriend, a lawyer, had made for him. And there were rugs from a trip to Afghanistan where we had both met by chance and then dramatically split up, for absolutely the last time, I had thought. We were slowly, and with great tentativeness, lifting our old lives from the boxes and trying to make room for them in this new and frightening life.
Bruno looked the same as he did when I first met him, many years before, in the hotel lobby of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo. It was in another lifetime, and it was strange, how we met, how two people, two lives collided full force with as much impact as a donkey kick. And because of that chance collision, another life was made, a child was born, and our cycle went on. “Now you both are immortal,” someone told him the day our son was born. At the time, still bleary from drugs and pain, and the shock of holding another life in my hands, I did not understand the words. Now I do.
The lobby of the wartime Holiday Inn was an ugly, cavernous space that opened up to the hallways of the eight floors. It was freezing in winter, scorching in summer, and got shelled and shot at on a regular basis. It was positioned in one of the most dangerous front lines of the city, a place we called Sniper’s Alley. Journalists, penned up for months and months and growing bored, used to abseil with rope from the top to the bottom of the lobby. There were long periods without water, electricity and heating in the winter, and one season we had to drop red tablets into the water for fear of a cholera epidemic. The food, one of my colleagues once remarked, was worse than his grandfather ate in Auschwitz. We subsidized it with expensive black-market luxuries, or packages of chocolate picked up at the last minute in Zagreb Airport before boarding the United Nations flight that dropped us in Sarajevo for months and months and months.
In the summer of 1993, the second year of the war, Bruno and I arrived from our respective homes in Paris and London to report on the longest-running siege in modern history. He was a cameraman for the main French channel, France 2, and I worked for a major British newspaper. We were young, easily impressed, very green and young enough to have real passion for what we believed in. I believed then, as I sometimes do now, that occasionally what you write or photograph or film can reach someone somewhere, and make some kind of difference. But I did it with more fire in those days.
I had been in Sarajevo since the previous December, but it was Bruno’s first time. He saw me, he said, from a mezzanine, which was suspended between the first and second floors. There was a piano on that level, hidden in a corner near the bombed-out side of the building where we were not meant to go because it was particularly visible to the snipers, and sometimes I heard an Italian journalist called Renzo playing ghostly tunes—Schubert, or jazz, which sounded alien, coming, as it seemed, from nowhere.
In those days, we would try to go to the daily press briefing at the UN complex in the old Post Telephone and Telegraph building on Sniper’s Alley. If you had an armoured car, the journey was fine and took about seven minutes. If you did not, it was nerve-wracking: stuffed into the back seat of a VW Rabbit with your fellow hacks wearing flak jackets and laden with bags stuffed with computers and cameras, hoping a stray shot would not pierce the metal of the car. In those days, I remembered with frightening clarity the prayers the nuns had taught us when I was small: a slender white book I had forgotten, embossed with gold; prayers about seeking forgiveness before death.
The briefing was at 9 a.m. sharp and I was not a morning person. I usually woke, drank a watery coffee served in a makeshift dining room, grabbed a piece of hard bread and ambushed a television journalist—they always had armoured cars—to beg them into giving me a ride. CNN’s truck was always full, and they had the reputation of not helping anyone but their own. The BBC people, however, were more generous, and they usually waved me into the back of their truck. “Get in, hurry up.” The back of the car smelled of gasoline from the stores of petrol in tin cans.
The morning I met Bruno was sometime in August. It was hot, but the clouds in Sarajevo lay low and grey, and gave the impression of an autumn rather than a high summer day. After breakfast, I found Jeremy, a fellow journalist, who was kind and funny and who said there was no rush. “Drink your coffee,” he said, “then we’ll go.” We drank the coffee—bitter, black and without sugar—and Jeremy looked at his watch. We grabbed the flak jackets, which accompanied us everywhere. I swung mine over my shoulder, bearing the weight on my right side, and wincing slightly at the pain in my right collarbone, which I had broken twice already. We were headed through the lobby, towards the stairwell that took us to the underground parking lot. Once you got to a car, you strapped in and raced out of the car park as fast as lightning because the entrance lay right in view of the Serbian snipers.
But before we reached the stairwell, someone passed us, clearly in a hurry. I bent to tie my shoelace, then stood up, and saw something out of the corner of my eye. A strange and beautiful man had dropped to his knees in front of me. Both Jeremy and I stopped short. The man held a large camera on his shoulder and was saying something in French—or perhaps in French-accented English—we could not hear because he was whispering. I stared, and Jeremy stared, and the man was also staring, intensely, at me. Eventually, I made out his words: “Don’t ever look at me like that!” he said dramatically. He was laughing.
It was a strange moment, one that would ultimately change the entire course of my life. I looked down at this person on his knees. He was slender, almost Asiatic looking, wearing baggy combat trousers and a T-shirt. His boots were highly polished. He had a beautiful, wide smile. He was flirting, and laughing at my reaction. He picked himself up and stood in front of me. He looked directly into my eyes: his were green and unflinching. There was not much for me to do but smile back, weakly, and then turn, embarrassed, and keep walking towards the door.
Jeremy said, “There are cameramen, and there are cameramen. And then there are French cameramen.” Then Jeremy took my arm rather protectively and we walked to the stairway, leaving the Frenchman—Bruno—still standing there.
I have asked Bruno so many times why he did that, why he fell on his knees, unembarrassed, unencumbered and nimble—and he has always shrugged, or muttered something, never giving me an answer, only sometimes quoting Montaigne about not wanting to know why you loved a certain woman, and if you knew the answer to it, you would love her no more. I asked him for years and years, but I never did find out.
I did not see Bruno again for what seemed like a very long time. I did not see him in the dining room where the reporters gathered to eat humanitarian-aid rice and cheese twice a day, and drink wine from the cave that was left over from the siege. I did not see him during the days as I worked alone with my driver, Dragan, and we moved amongst the buildings where I preferred to do my work in the city—the psychiatric unit of Kosevo Hospital, the morgue where I counted the dead, the presidency building where I went to see the vice president, and the orphanage where I went to hold the babies that nobody wanted.
Every Saturday was my deadline at the Sunday newspaper for which I worked, and I wrote in my dreary orange-tinted room with the plastic-covered windows—the glass was blown out during a mortar attack—and then went downstairs to eat my rice and cheese alone. I worked until 5 p.m., and then went to the Reuters office to file my copy by satellite phone at a cost of $50 a minute, knowing that an editor in London would pare it down and pare it down till nothing was left of it but eight hundred words. At night, I slept on top of my sleeping bag—it was too hot to get inside—and listened to the sound of fighting from the open window. Sometimes, if it was loud enough, it woke me from my dreams.
Once I saw him standing in the mezzanine. He whistled loudly and said something in Spanish. “Señorita!”
“I’m not Spanish,” I said. I had decided that I would flirt back.
“But your dress is.”
In fact, it was a housedress that had been bought in a marketplace in Split, on the Croatian coastline, for $5 during a rare break a few weeks before. It came to my knees and had virtually no sex appeal, but in a place like Sarajevo, it stood out.
“You look like a flamenco dancer,” he said, leaning over the balcony. And then: “When can we spend time together?”
“I don’t know. I’m leaving for Central Bosnia,” I replied.
“We’ll see each other,” he said. It was more of a statement than a request. Then he was gone.
One Sunday in the middle of August, some weeks after I met him, a time when the rest of the world seemed to be at a beach and no one cared at all about a siege in the middle of the Balkans in a city whose name they could not pronounce, I woke at dawn to a knock on my door.
I wore my cotton nightgown, and I covered myself as I opened the door a crack. It was a Bosnian kid in a soldier’s uniform, smoking, with a message from a commander written on a piece of paper. The teenage soldier spoke no English but made a motion for me to follow him. I knew what he was doing. I had been waiting for this message for weeks. I dressed, brushed my teeth with a bottle of mineral water, and ran up a flight of stairs to wake my friend, Ariane.
Ariane was my best friend in Bosnia. Tiny, fluent in three languages, the daughter of a French fighter pilot and a Franco-Argentine mother, she was a champion skier and rock climber. She was curvy, green eyed, and her mouth was generous. She was sexy and smart, and said what she thought, a little too loudly sometimes. She was bossy, and irritated me often. But she was frightened of no man, no woman and no thing. Inside her tiny frame was a very big heart. In time, she became my dearest friend in that city, and much later, as the years went by, we grew older together in Paris. She was the first person to visit me in the hospital when my son was born. Back then, she was in love with a tall French colonel, a UN peacekeeper, and I was having an affair with his friend, a captain from Brittany.
Love in those days was so very easy. It was the last time in my life I would love someone so lightly, without any repercussions, guilt, drama or desperation when the time came to leave. Everything about falling in love during wartime, perhaps because our exterior world was so chaotic, was so effortless. It was almost adolescent in its lack of complication. The four of us—the three French and me—would sit around late at night watching the flares and drinking whisky. The soldiers liked to be away from the confines of the United Nations base whenever they got the chance, and they brought us gifts: ready-to-eat meal packets which included small bottles of red wine. Once a week they would take us to the base to shower. This was the most amazing gift: in a city mostly without water, Ariane and I had clean hair.
Ariane liked to be tanned, and she refused to give up her summer skin just because she was living in a city under siege. Instead, she would sit in a chair close to her open window, naked except for her underwear, wearing suntan oil and sunglasses. She claimed she needed the vitamin D, and she was getting UV rays even if the glass partially blocked them. She did, in the end, get what she would call a siege tan.
“I hate looking like a man,” she told me that summer, staring at her jeans and sneakers. We had been going around in flak jackets and helmets, heavy shirts that covered our arms, and trousers. I had not worn a dress in months. So we took a trip to Split, that seaside Dalmatian town that was becoming overrun by United Nations soldiers and humanitarian aid workers and journalists, and stayed for a few days recuperating. We ate risotto with black ink squid and went to the beach—a real beach—and came back with a handful of cotton dresses we bought in the market, one of which was the so-called flamenco dress. They were knee length and respectable; no cleavage, no legs on show, and we wore them with our dirty sneakers to the daily press briefings. They were just cotton housedresses that Croatian cleaners would have worn, but we felt liberated.
The morning the Bosnian soldier knocked on my door, I could tell that Ariane had spent the night before with her colonel. She looked groggy and sleepy; her eyes rimmed with exhaustion. She always smoked as soon as she woke up and she smelled of cigarettes. On her dresser were a big bottle of perfume by Guerlain, a bottle of suntan lotion and a bottle of whisky.
“What?” she said, a little sharply, hazy from sleep.
“Zuc,” I replied, and she was quickly awake.
“Christ,” she said. She saw the little soldier gaping at her in her short T-shirt and said, “I’m coming.” She knew what this meant. We had been trying to get the Bosnian commander to take us to Zuc for weeks. Zuc was the final line of defence in Sarajevo, where a battle was raging, where young boys were dying and their bodies were rotting in the sun.
Ariane picked up a pair of shorts from the floor, grabbed her flak jacket—she refused to wear a helmet—and said she needed coffee and another cigarette. Next we woke a photographer who lived next door, an Italian named Enrico who looked like a young Robert Mitchum and who wore an MTV sticker on his helmet as a way of bringing some humour into the blackness of this place, and then picked up another friend, Chris from Reuters, before heading out the door in a pack. Everyone was smoking, carrying our flak jackets, not sure what we were going to see, what we would feel, in less than an hour on the front line.
And this was the day, a bright, shining August morning in the Balkans, that I was to meet Bruno again.
In his sorrow he found one source of relief in war
Tacitus, Agricola
chapter 1
Beginnings
We arrived in Paris in rainy January, the first week of the new year, shuffling our feet like little soldiers retreating from battle. The moving boxes and crates had followed us from places where there really was war: the Ivory Coast, Iraq, Sarajevo and Afghanistan, and were filled with remnants of the life that both of us were trying to leave behind.
The boxes were tall and foreboding. Mine were cardboard from an overpriced shipping agency in London. The movers came to my Notting Hill flat one afternoon and wrapped my entire London life in plastic and paper, nearly twenty years of it sealed away in boxes. They packed everything, even lipstick-stained cigarettes left behind in ashtrays from a dinner party the night before.
Bruno’s crates were more solid. They were wooden and imposing and came by ship from Abidjan. Together, our combined possessions lined the dining room of our rented apartment on the Right Bank, so there was no room to walk around unless you shimmied between them. Unpacking them seemed a distant chore, impossible, something that would happen far away in the future.
Inside my boxes were pots and pans with burn marks from omelettes that were left unattended for too long; velvet dresses worn once or twice at a forgotten London fancy- dress party; down-filled coats and sleeping bags still lightly coated in dust. There were hiking boots with red mud from Afghanistan; my mother’s delicate china tea set; my black-and-white photographs from Africa and the Middle East and the Balkans. There were pieces of a disassembled wooden Shaker-style chair I had bought with a previous boyfriend, ready to be reassembled in Paris, and piles of old, worn linen sheets bought in Ireland and Rome. There were towels and dishes, pie plates with bits of burnt pastry still left on them and hundreds of books.
I had left the flat where I had lived for a dozen years empty except for the bed. That was staying behind; I could not bear to bring it to my new life. I had inherited it from an Irish girl, a banker, who had fled to Dublin with a broken heart, and it seemed time to pass it on again, this time to the blonde German lodger, a solemn psychoanalyst, who was renting my flat.
Also inside the boxes were things that would only make sense to me. Painful stiletto heels which were bought in New York on a whim and worn only once; an ashtray stolen from a hotel in Algeria; some bits of metal shrapnel twisted like an odd sculpture; a packet of love letters—some of them faxes, faded with time—tied with a pale pink ribbon; and two flak jackets with Kevlar inserts to protect the chest and groin and shoulders from bullet wounds.
There were also two helmets with my blood group taped on the front and carefully marked in indelible ink; a nylon bag of medical supplies; packets of the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin; a buddy injection of a liquid opiate that I had stolen from a miserable red-headed American soldier before leaving Kuwait for Basra. There was a satellite telephone and two digital cameras that I had never learned how to use, still in their boxes with the instructions. There was a waxy chemical weapon suit, wrapped in plastic and tied with elastics; an unused gas mask; and maps of Baghdad circled in red at strategic points.
There were eighteen black covered notebooks scribbled with names like Ali and Bassam and Mona and Ahmed—names of people I had interviewed in what seemed like another lifetime, and my canvas boots, still full of sands from the western desert in Iraq.
Bruno’s packing cases were more exotic than mine. His boxes were filled with things Claude Lévi-Strauss might have collected during his long and lonely voyages. There were bits of woven fabric in equatorial colours; long, feathered arrows from Brazil; black-and-white shimaghs from the Middle East; pink-and-white shells from the beaches near Grand-Bassam, outside of Abidjan; green and red and black beads from Mali; a dried-out starfish that still smelled of the sea; teak tables and mirrors with ivory inlays; brass trunks; a heavy white blanket from Ethiopia; and ancient Buddha heads from Afghanistan and Burma. He had a long cloak from the Tuaregs in the Sahara, and he knew how to wrap it so that he looked, as he put it, like a man from the desert.
There were six brass cups from somewhere in Central Asia. There were lapis lazuli necklaces from Iraq and prayer rugs from Kurdistan. There was a metal box full of photographs which he kept secret. There was his name written in Greek on a gold plate which an old girlfriend, a lawyer, had made for him. And there were rugs from a trip to Afghanistan where we had both met by chance and then dramatically split up, for absolutely the last time, I had thought. We were slowly, and with great tentativeness, lifting our old lives from the boxes and trying to make room for them in this new and frightening life.
Bruno looked the same as he did when I first met him, many years before, in the hotel lobby of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo. It was in another lifetime, and it was strange, how we met, how two people, two lives collided full force with as much impact as a donkey kick. And because of that chance collision, another life was made, a child was born, and our cycle went on. “Now you both are immortal,” someone told him the day our son was born. At the time, still bleary from drugs and pain, and the shock of holding another life in my hands, I did not understand the words. Now I do.
The lobby of the wartime Holiday Inn was an ugly, cavernous space that opened up to the hallways of the eight floors. It was freezing in winter, scorching in summer, and got shelled and shot at on a regular basis. It was positioned in one of the most dangerous front lines of the city, a place we called Sniper’s Alley. Journalists, penned up for months and months and growing bored, used to abseil with rope from the top to the bottom of the lobby. There were long periods without water, electricity and heating in the winter, and one season we had to drop red tablets into the water for fear of a cholera epidemic. The food, one of my colleagues once remarked, was worse than his grandfather ate in Auschwitz. We subsidized it with expensive black-market luxuries, or packages of chocolate picked up at the last minute in Zagreb Airport before boarding the United Nations flight that dropped us in Sarajevo for months and months and months.
In the summer of 1993, the second year of the war, Bruno and I arrived from our respective homes in Paris and London to report on the longest-running siege in modern history. He was a cameraman for the main French channel, France 2, and I worked for a major British newspaper. We were young, easily impressed, very green and young enough to have real passion for what we believed in. I believed then, as I sometimes do now, that occasionally what you write or photograph or film can reach someone somewhere, and make some kind of difference. But I did it with more fire in those days.
I had been in Sarajevo since the previous December, but it was Bruno’s first time. He saw me, he said, from a mezzanine, which was suspended between the first and second floors. There was a piano on that level, hidden in a corner near the bombed-out side of the building where we were not meant to go because it was particularly visible to the snipers, and sometimes I heard an Italian journalist called Renzo playing ghostly tunes—Schubert, or jazz, which sounded alien, coming, as it seemed, from nowhere.
In those days, we would try to go to the daily press briefing at the UN complex in the old Post Telephone and Telegraph building on Sniper’s Alley. If you had an armoured car, the journey was fine and took about seven minutes. If you did not, it was nerve-wracking: stuffed into the back seat of a VW Rabbit with your fellow hacks wearing flak jackets and laden with bags stuffed with computers and cameras, hoping a stray shot would not pierce the metal of the car. In those days, I remembered with frightening clarity the prayers the nuns had taught us when I was small: a slender white book I had forgotten, embossed with gold; prayers about seeking forgiveness before death.
The briefing was at 9 a.m. sharp and I was not a morning person. I usually woke, drank a watery coffee served in a makeshift dining room, grabbed a piece of hard bread and ambushed a television journalist—they always had armoured cars—to beg them into giving me a ride. CNN’s truck was always full, and they had the reputation of not helping anyone but their own. The BBC people, however, were more generous, and they usually waved me into the back of their truck. “Get in, hurry up.” The back of the car smelled of gasoline from the stores of petrol in tin cans.
The morning I met Bruno was sometime in August. It was hot, but the clouds in Sarajevo lay low and grey, and gave the impression of an autumn rather than a high summer day. After breakfast, I found Jeremy, a fellow journalist, who was kind and funny and who said there was no rush. “Drink your coffee,” he said, “then we’ll go.” We drank the coffee—bitter, black and without sugar—and Jeremy looked at his watch. We grabbed the flak jackets, which accompanied us everywhere. I swung mine over my shoulder, bearing the weight on my right side, and wincing slightly at the pain in my right collarbone, which I had broken twice already. We were headed through the lobby, towards the stairwell that took us to the underground parking lot. Once you got to a car, you strapped in and raced out of the car park as fast as lightning because the entrance lay right in view of the Serbian snipers.
But before we reached the stairwell, someone passed us, clearly in a hurry. I bent to tie my shoelace, then stood up, and saw something out of the corner of my eye. A strange and beautiful man had dropped to his knees in front of me. Both Jeremy and I stopped short. The man held a large camera on his shoulder and was saying something in French—or perhaps in French-accented English—we could not hear because he was whispering. I stared, and Jeremy stared, and the man was also staring, intensely, at me. Eventually, I made out his words: “Don’t ever look at me like that!” he said dramatically. He was laughing.
It was a strange moment, one that would ultimately change the entire course of my life. I looked down at this person on his knees. He was slender, almost Asiatic looking, wearing baggy combat trousers and a T-shirt. His boots were highly polished. He had a beautiful, wide smile. He was flirting, and laughing at my reaction. He picked himself up and stood in front of me. He looked directly into my eyes: his were green and unflinching. There was not much for me to do but smile back, weakly, and then turn, embarrassed, and keep walking towards the door.
Jeremy said, “There are cameramen, and there are cameramen. And then there are French cameramen.” Then Jeremy took my arm rather protectively and we walked to the stairway, leaving the Frenchman—Bruno—still standing there.
I have asked Bruno so many times why he did that, why he fell on his knees, unembarrassed, unencumbered and nimble—and he has always shrugged, or muttered something, never giving me an answer, only sometimes quoting Montaigne about not wanting to know why you loved a certain woman, and if you knew the answer to it, you would love her no more. I asked him for years and years, but I never did find out.
I did not see Bruno again for what seemed like a very long time. I did not see him in the dining room where the reporters gathered to eat humanitarian-aid rice and cheese twice a day, and drink wine from the cave that was left over from the siege. I did not see him during the days as I worked alone with my driver, Dragan, and we moved amongst the buildings where I preferred to do my work in the city—the psychiatric unit of Kosevo Hospital, the morgue where I counted the dead, the presidency building where I went to see the vice president, and the orphanage where I went to hold the babies that nobody wanted.
Every Saturday was my deadline at the Sunday newspaper for which I worked, and I wrote in my dreary orange-tinted room with the plastic-covered windows—the glass was blown out during a mortar attack—and then went downstairs to eat my rice and cheese alone. I worked until 5 p.m., and then went to the Reuters office to file my copy by satellite phone at a cost of $50 a minute, knowing that an editor in London would pare it down and pare it down till nothing was left of it but eight hundred words. At night, I slept on top of my sleeping bag—it was too hot to get inside—and listened to the sound of fighting from the open window. Sometimes, if it was loud enough, it woke me from my dreams.
Once I saw him standing in the mezzanine. He whistled loudly and said something in Spanish. “Señorita!”
“I’m not Spanish,” I said. I had decided that I would flirt back.
“But your dress is.”
In fact, it was a housedress that had been bought in a marketplace in Split, on the Croatian coastline, for $5 during a rare break a few weeks before. It came to my knees and had virtually no sex appeal, but in a place like Sarajevo, it stood out.
“You look like a flamenco dancer,” he said, leaning over the balcony. And then: “When can we spend time together?”
“I don’t know. I’m leaving for Central Bosnia,” I replied.
“We’ll see each other,” he said. It was more of a statement than a request. Then he was gone.
One Sunday in the middle of August, some weeks after I met him, a time when the rest of the world seemed to be at a beach and no one cared at all about a siege in the middle of the Balkans in a city whose name they could not pronounce, I woke at dawn to a knock on my door.
I wore my cotton nightgown, and I covered myself as I opened the door a crack. It was a Bosnian kid in a soldier’s uniform, smoking, with a message from a commander written on a piece of paper. The teenage soldier spoke no English but made a motion for me to follow him. I knew what he was doing. I had been waiting for this message for weeks. I dressed, brushed my teeth with a bottle of mineral water, and ran up a flight of stairs to wake my friend, Ariane.
Ariane was my best friend in Bosnia. Tiny, fluent in three languages, the daughter of a French fighter pilot and a Franco-Argentine mother, she was a champion skier and rock climber. She was curvy, green eyed, and her mouth was generous. She was sexy and smart, and said what she thought, a little too loudly sometimes. She was bossy, and irritated me often. But she was frightened of no man, no woman and no thing. Inside her tiny frame was a very big heart. In time, she became my dearest friend in that city, and much later, as the years went by, we grew older together in Paris. She was the first person to visit me in the hospital when my son was born. Back then, she was in love with a tall French colonel, a UN peacekeeper, and I was having an affair with his friend, a captain from Brittany.
Love in those days was so very easy. It was the last time in my life I would love someone so lightly, without any repercussions, guilt, drama or desperation when the time came to leave. Everything about falling in love during wartime, perhaps because our exterior world was so chaotic, was so effortless. It was almost adolescent in its lack of complication. The four of us—the three French and me—would sit around late at night watching the flares and drinking whisky. The soldiers liked to be away from the confines of the United Nations base whenever they got the chance, and they brought us gifts: ready-to-eat meal packets which included small bottles of red wine. Once a week they would take us to the base to shower. This was the most amazing gift: in a city mostly without water, Ariane and I had clean hair.
Ariane liked to be tanned, and she refused to give up her summer skin just because she was living in a city under siege. Instead, she would sit in a chair close to her open window, naked except for her underwear, wearing suntan oil and sunglasses. She claimed she needed the vitamin D, and she was getting UV rays even if the glass partially blocked them. She did, in the end, get what she would call a siege tan.
“I hate looking like a man,” she told me that summer, staring at her jeans and sneakers. We had been going around in flak jackets and helmets, heavy shirts that covered our arms, and trousers. I had not worn a dress in months. So we took a trip to Split, that seaside Dalmatian town that was becoming overrun by United Nations soldiers and humanitarian aid workers and journalists, and stayed for a few days recuperating. We ate risotto with black ink squid and went to the beach—a real beach—and came back with a handful of cotton dresses we bought in the market, one of which was the so-called flamenco dress. They were knee length and respectable; no cleavage, no legs on show, and we wore them with our dirty sneakers to the daily press briefings. They were just cotton housedresses that Croatian cleaners would have worn, but we felt liberated.
The morning the Bosnian soldier knocked on my door, I could tell that Ariane had spent the night before with her colonel. She looked groggy and sleepy; her eyes rimmed with exhaustion. She always smoked as soon as she woke up and she smelled of cigarettes. On her dresser were a big bottle of perfume by Guerlain, a bottle of suntan lotion and a bottle of whisky.
“What?” she said, a little sharply, hazy from sleep.
“Zuc,” I replied, and she was quickly awake.
“Christ,” she said. She saw the little soldier gaping at her in her short T-shirt and said, “I’m coming.” She knew what this meant. We had been trying to get the Bosnian commander to take us to Zuc for weeks. Zuc was the final line of defence in Sarajevo, where a battle was raging, where young boys were dying and their bodies were rotting in the sun.
Ariane picked up a pair of shorts from the floor, grabbed her flak jacket—she refused to wear a helmet—and said she needed coffee and another cigarette. Next we woke a photographer who lived next door, an Italian named Enrico who looked like a young Robert Mitchum and who wore an MTV sticker on his helmet as a way of bringing some humour into the blackness of this place, and then picked up another friend, Chris from Reuters, before heading out the door in a pack. Everyone was smoking, carrying our flak jackets, not sure what we were going to see, what we would feel, in less than an hour on the front line.
And this was the day, a bright, shining August morning in the Balkans, that I was to meet Bruno again.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition (September 20, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307265587
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307265586
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.2 x 8.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,004,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,458 in Journalist Biographies
- #20,094 in Political Leader Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
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JANINE DI GIOVANNI
janinedigiovanni.com
@janinedigi
Janine di Giovanni is a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She is currently directing a project sponsored by the UN Democracy Fund that promotes transitional justice in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, as well as consulting for UNICEF on gender and refugee issues. In 2019, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research in the Middle East, and in 2020, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters highest prize for non-fiction, the Blake Dodd, for her body of work spanning three decades. She is a Global Affairs columnist for Foreign Policy Magazine and The National, in Abu Dhabi.
From 2017 to 2018, Janine was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Administration. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria, which has been translated into 28 languages and was deemed “searing and necessary” by the New York Times. She is also the author of seven other books on war and conflict and her latest book, The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East chronicles the disappearance of Christian monitories in October 2021. The writer Salman Rushdie described it as: “A
tragic portrait of a disappearing world, created with all of the great Janine di Giovanni’s passion and literary grace.”
Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 2017, Di Giovanni was the Middle East Editor at Newsweek reporting on international security, human rights, and transitional justice. She was the Senior Foreign Correspondent for the
Times of London for many years. As a 2016 Pakis Scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Di Giovanni focused on international law and international security. Prior to that, she was a contributing editor for two decades at VanityFair where she won the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and many other awards.
Di Giovanni has reported widely on war, conflict, and its aftermath for nearly 30 years in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. She has investigated human rights abuses on four continents. She is the subject of two long-format documentaries, including the widely acclaimed 7 Days in Syria and Bearing Witness. Her TED talk “What I Saw in the War” has received over 1 million views on YouTube. In 2016, she was awarded the International Women Media Foundation’s prestigious COURAGE Award.
Janine is also non-resident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Associate Fellow at The Geneva Centre for Security Policy. She is a former Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, given in recognition of her work with victims of war trauma.
Di Giovanni has won more than fifteen major awards for her extensive work in conflict zones and during humanitarian crisis in Palestine/Israel, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, UAE, Algeria, Turkey, Greece, Vietnam, and other countries.
She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She carries British, French, and American nationalities and lives with her son, Luca Costantino Girodon, in Manhattan. She is a Board Member of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2013
I bought the book thinking i would read of her times in the midst of war and how she coped there and later. Well, i did get to peer into her war reporting days but it wasn't in depth. Note:It was Not vague but not in depth. So i continued reading and learned of an amazing woman and her life. How her career affected her and how she saw the world. This book lets you into the mind of a woman war reporter and allows you behind the scenes of it all. So if you'd like to read something along those lines buy it. The book is pretty good. If not read another one of her books, most of them cover other wars she reported for.
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2012
There is a lot of material out there on the effects of war on combatants, but what about the other players connected to these conflicts? This book provides powerful insights into the effects of prolonged exposure to war on journalists and its consequences for their personal lives. Di Giovani is an excellent writer and tells the story in a matter-of-fact manner, even when--as in the case of her reaction to her husband's recovery from alcoholism--it dones not show her in a particularly noble light. She deserves real credit for her willingness to face the truth about herself and others.
All in all, highly recommended reading for anyone interested in war, journalism, politics, writing, relationships...okay, highly recommended for anyone!
All in all, highly recommended reading for anyone interested in war, journalism, politics, writing, relationships...okay, highly recommended for anyone!
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2012
Janine DiGiovanni examines her relationship with her husband, family and son with such insight and tenderness that it makes her memoir impossible to put down. I simply loved this story about a woman's struggle to find inner peace once she leaves the madness of the war zones she has covered as a news correspondent two decades. A page-turning, must-read!
Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2011
I'd looked forward to reading this book but was disappointed and was glad when I finally finished it. The author wrote very well about her experiences in former Yugoslavia and other war zones and that was the reason I wanted to read her newest book. However, the struggles in her personal life held no interest for me and I'm glad I didn't pay the full published price for it.
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2014
My high expectations were met. It is an extremely moving story about two war correspondents who fall in love and try to live together but fail. The fact that they live in Paris in an area where I have lived myself adds to the attraction for me.
Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2015
It starts so well but then spirals into a monotonous monologue of tragedy. I'm guilty for not being more patient given the implicit tragedy. But the book doesn't work for me.
Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2014
Janine Di Giovanni is a veteran war correspondent who has seen wars in several countries. This memoir is about her life including her marriage to another French war correspondent, Bruno, and her difficult pregnancy with her son, Luca, in her forties.
This memoir also reveals the post traumatic stress syndrome and co-dependency with your partner. Janine is an American journalist from New Jersey and a supportive Italian Catholic family. Janine defies the stereotypes about Jersey Girls and Italian Americans.
This memoir shows the damage of war even on those journalists like Janine and Bruno will always be haunted by those ghosts but they are willing to risk their own lives to report the truth to the world.
This memoir also reveals the post traumatic stress syndrome and co-dependency with your partner. Janine is an American journalist from New Jersey and a supportive Italian Catholic family. Janine defies the stereotypes about Jersey Girls and Italian Americans.
This memoir shows the damage of war even on those journalists like Janine and Bruno will always be haunted by those ghosts but they are willing to risk their own lives to report the truth to the world.
Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2011
Janine Di Giovanni, a war correspondent, wrote this self-biography following the break-up of her second marriage with a French cameraman.
Although very well written, (the episode of her baby delivery are poignant), the book is a little bit too self-centered and soul searching for my own pleasure.
I ran through the last 100 pages, wanting to end it rather than savor it.
Although very well written, (the episode of her baby delivery are poignant), the book is a little bit too self-centered and soul searching for my own pleasure.
I ran through the last 100 pages, wanting to end it rather than savor it.
Top reviews from other countries
CASSINI24
4.0 out of 5 stars
An intimate insight into the private life of one of the world's greatest war journalists
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 4, 2018
An intimate account of the personal struggles the author and her husband faced in coming to terms with the terrible traumas of war they witnessed during their reporting assignments, and their attempts to create a normal home environment when their child was born. She talks eloquently about addiction - the addiction of reporting from the most dangerous front lines in the world (despite protestations in this book that she would withdraw from reporting from war zones, she subsequently went to Syria and reported extensively on that conflict) as well the addictions to alcohol and drugs that are, sadly, quite common among journalists returning from such conflicts.
Her reporting on the joys and challenges of motherhood are heartfelt, if a little indulgent, and I found her attitude towards Alcoholics Anonymous rather disconcerting - she describes it as replacing one addiction with another - I am sure many AA members would disagree with this statement.
The book is at its most eloquent when she describes how journalists who have witnessed the savagery of so many wars must then find a time and place to restructure their lives and relearn how to live in a society where fear and danger are less prevalent.
This is a dark book, with some inspirational moments, but then the subject matter of her reporting is dark too.
Her reporting on the joys and challenges of motherhood are heartfelt, if a little indulgent, and I found her attitude towards Alcoholics Anonymous rather disconcerting - she describes it as replacing one addiction with another - I am sure many AA members would disagree with this statement.
The book is at its most eloquent when she describes how journalists who have witnessed the savagery of so many wars must then find a time and place to restructure their lives and relearn how to live in a society where fear and danger are less prevalent.
This is a dark book, with some inspirational moments, but then the subject matter of her reporting is dark too.
Bill Dean
4.0 out of 5 stars
A brave, deeply personal and slightly flawed account of a life less ordinary
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 27, 2011
Ghosts by Daylight is less a book about war than author Janine Di Giovanni's struggles to adapt to life without the frontline. It is not always an easy read and the author can come across as being just as self-centred and tiresome as she does brilliant and courageous. The book seemingly mirror her flaws and unless one sees it - and in effect her life - in its totality, parts of it can seem overblown. In particular the way in which she writes about motherhood would seem at times suggest that she is the only woman in the world to experience the confusion of emotions that come with rearing children. Indeed I found some of these passages irritating and lacking self-awareness. But then few mothers have spent their lives travelling from the frontline of one humanitarian crisis to another, so who am I to possibly judge?
The most powerful passages deal with life on the frontline, notably in the book's closing pages when she returns to Sarajevo. These sections are too scarce and there is a sense that we are only getting the briefest of glimpses of the horrors she has seen and experienced. And yet we are often left with the sense that motherhood and marriage have been more difficult for her to deal with than mayhem and carnage in warzones.
This is a complex, slightly flawed book but one which probably reflects the life and personality of its author. Certainly it is worth perservering with.
The most powerful passages deal with life on the frontline, notably in the book's closing pages when she returns to Sarajevo. These sections are too scarce and there is a sense that we are only getting the briefest of glimpses of the horrors she has seen and experienced. And yet we are often left with the sense that motherhood and marriage have been more difficult for her to deal with than mayhem and carnage in warzones.
This is a complex, slightly flawed book but one which probably reflects the life and personality of its author. Certainly it is worth perservering with.
5 people found this helpful
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ijhodgson
3.0 out of 5 stars
Better on war than love...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 14, 2012
Well, just finished this vaguely autobiographical novel, and on the whole I enjoyed the read. The story describes the life and travails of a war correspondent, traumatised from covering wars in the Balkans and Africa. Rich descriptions of community devastation intermingle with sections covering the protagonist's marriage and motherhood, living in Paris.
There are truly moving moments, especially around love and loss, and di Giovanni writes well about war (she was foreign correspondent for The Times). Passages noting the impact of conflict on victims AND observers are well done, but I never truly connected with the domestic world back home presented here. The book did irritate me in places - all those nannies! All that Parisian cuisine and uber-Bohemian living (albeit with added angst)! Puffs on the back cover of my paperback edition, from The Daily Telegraph, Tatler, and Economist, confirm the market for this book . And the narrative is confusing at times, with flashbacks easily mistaken for current events.
An intriguing read, but unless you're keenly aspirational, your sympathy for the protagonist may be stretched at times.
There are truly moving moments, especially around love and loss, and di Giovanni writes well about war (she was foreign correspondent for The Times). Passages noting the impact of conflict on victims AND observers are well done, but I never truly connected with the domestic world back home presented here. The book did irritate me in places - all those nannies! All that Parisian cuisine and uber-Bohemian living (albeit with added angst)! Puffs on the back cover of my paperback edition, from The Daily Telegraph, Tatler, and Economist, confirm the market for this book . And the narrative is confusing at times, with flashbacks easily mistaken for current events.
An intriguing read, but unless you're keenly aspirational, your sympathy for the protagonist may be stretched at times.
One person found this helpful
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Ms. J. Jones
4.0 out of 5 stars
Two lives touching, painfully
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2013
Janine di Giovanni is a wonderful writer and a brave woman. This book differs, I believe, from most of her work as it is a personal story rather than reports from the battlefield and killing places of the world. If you have ever wondered how being a war reporter of photographer affects the person then this is a book for you as it tells of her attempts and her husband's attempts to live a 'normal' life together with their child. It's no secret that they don't succeed completely. Di Giovanni's account of their efforts made me wish that I'd had the restraint to read her other work earlier so that i could put this in the context of her life more accurately. Certainly something for the non-brave stay-at-home to read.
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Racoon
5.0 out of 5 stars
DANGER AND ROMANCE IN JOURNALISM
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 29, 2021
Ghosts by Daylight takes the reader into the complexities that life as an inverstigative war reporter brings. The excitement of her romance with Bruno, the elusive French bad-boy camerman who she bumps into from time, makes every woman wish she could be in Janine Di Giovanni's shoes. All my students agree, it was an absolute joy to read.
