Janine di Giovanni - Ghosts by Daylight: Love, War, and Redemption

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 warthe Ivory Coast, Iraq, Sarajevo and Afghanistanand 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.

Brunos 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 mothers 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 letterssome of them faxes, faded with timetied 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 Ahmednames 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.

Brunos packing cases were more exotic than mine. His boxes were filled with things Claude Lvi-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.