A War Correspondent’s Personal Coronavirus Exile

While quarantining in France, a veteran Vanity Fair reporter takes stock.
BY JANINE DI GIOVANNI

This new “war” of 2020 takes me back to an old war of 1992…

When I worked in Sarajevo, during the three-year siege, my closest colleagues were French reporters. I was drawn to them, mostly, because they handled themselves in stressful times with more aplomb than anyone else. The French dressed better—even though we had neither showers nor clean clothes—tying their écharpes into chic knots. They had neat little student notebooks; thick pages lined with quadrangles. They had all kinds of practical gadgets from Fnac.

In their backpacks they brought good wine, mustards, and saucisson, sourced from the French U.N. peacekeepers. One reporter, Paul Marchand, who later took his own life (a recent film was made of his wartime exploits, Sympathie pour le diable) found cups of water and offered to wash my hair. A radio reporter named Ariane Quentier wore a fur hat and looked like Simone Signoret. The rest of us Anglo-Saxons, in our ugly fluorescent parkas and Gore-Tex hiking books, looked like lost travelers in the mountains.

Sarajevo was also where I learned about système D—the great wartime equalizer—which essentially translates to “resourcefulness.” “The symbol of France is the cock, the only bird that sings with its feet in the shit,” the man who became my husband, a reporter for France 2 television, told me the first day I met him, after I remarked how well the French looked despite a crippling siege.

That was many years ago. But it is système D that has been keeping me sane during my recent days of quarantine in France.

Système D means making the best of a rubbish situation. In Sarajevo, I learned to organize my ugly room, with its blown-out windows covered in plastic, into a cozy, safe space. My copy of Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War went on a shelf along with my precious candles, the medal of Our Lady that my mother had given me, some spare batteries, and a minute bottle of Chanel No. 5—if only to inhale when things got really bad.

I laid my sleeping bag neatly on top of the stained bed and read by flashlight each night. I didn’t have a Walkman, but the Italian journalist next door whistled every morning when he woke, and his cheerfulness sustained me.

In the time of corona, I’m using système D to stay sane.

On March 12, when the coronavirus seemed far from my world on East 77th Street, I boarded an Air France plane to Paris. Paris had been my home for 16 years; the city where I gave birth to my son, raised him in the 6th arrondissement, and sent him to a French school. I flew to France armed with my Carte Vitale, the green-and-yellow French social security card that enables you to obtain French medical treatment. Even if I got ill, I thought, I’d be better off in Paris than from my perch in New York City, overlooking Lenox Hill Hospital.

Four days later I sat with friends in shock watching Emmanuel Macron, the eighth president of the Fifth Republic of France, giving a speech that warned the French population that we were at war.

I tried to remain calm. War is something I know well. I operated in war zones, sometimes on autopilot, for three decades, mainly writing for Vanity Fair. I knew how to find my way out of a minefield and when to seek shelter during a bombing raid. I knew how to get through just about any checkpoint in wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. Don’t make eye contact. Have your papers ready. Be polite but firm. Never get out of your car, especially if child soldiers wielding RPGs are aiming them at your heart.

On March 12, when the coronavirus seemed far from my world on East 77th Street, I boarded an Air France plane to Paris. Paris had been my home for 16 years; the city where I gave birth to my son, raised him in the 6th arrondissement, and sent him to a French school. I flew to France armed with my Carte Vitale, the green-and-yellow French social security card that enables you to obtain French medical treatment. Even if I got ill, I thought, I’d be better off in Paris than from my perch in New York City, overlooking Lenox Hill Hospital.

Four days later I sat with friends in shock watching Emmanuel Macron, the eighth president of the Fifth Republic of France, giving a speech that warned the French population that we were at war.

I tried to remain calm. War is something I know well. I operated in war zones, sometimes on autopilot, for three decades, mainly writing for Vanity Fair. I knew how to find my way out of a minefield and when to seek shelter during a bombing raid. I knew how to get through just about any checkpoint in wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. Don’t make eye contact. Have your papers ready. Be polite but firm. Never get out of your car, especially if child soldiers wielding RPGs are aiming them at your heart.

But an invisible enemy—an angry and stubborn virus whirling its way around the globe—was a new concept and one that terrified me beyond belief. Within hours I had moved out of the apartment where I was staying alone, on Rue Bonaparte, with a view of Saint-Sulpice, and moved in with friends in the 7th, near Rue de Grenelle.

We quickly installed a war room with rules: coats and shoes outside, washing hands vigorously with eau de Javel, a fierce disinfectant. Rubber gloves, masks, a WhatsApp group of friends intent on gathering logistics, hour by hour. It was a great comfort. If I awoke at 4 a.m. with my heart pounding, as I do most mornings, I only had to look at “Corona Logistics Paris” and I’d know that someone else was awake too.

For me the most immediately unsettling thing about this virus, aside from the uncertainty and the risk to people’s lives, was the separation from loved ones. I had left my ancient mother behind in the U.S., and my only child was deep in a remote part of the French Alps, the Vercors, with my ex-husband.

I knew my son was safe. But the 4 a.m. terrors filled me with images of him sick and crying for his mother; or a wartime scenario where, as had happened in countless crises I had covered, I might not be able to reach him for years. I imagined him growing from a gawky teenager into a man, apart from me. I kept revisiting scenes from the beloved wartime novel Suite Française.

Would I be reduced to writing a novel on matchbook covers like the heroine? Would I be under lockdown, as I was now, carrying papers to buy a bottle of milk for the next few years?

Last Thursday, unable to control the anxiety of being apart from my son, I boarded a train to Grenoble. Trains were running more infrequently, and mine was the only one running that day, with a connection in Lyon.

Into my carry-on I threw my rubber gloves—the last pair found in Monoprix on Rue de Rennes—my homemade masks, which I sewed from a piece of cloth; my eight boxes of Doliprane; and my St. Christopher medal, the patron saint of travelers (sent to me by one of my iPhone group members). Then I made my way to a pretty much deserted Gare de Lyon. The few travelers wore masks, gloves, and stood yards apart from each other.

I arrived in Grenoble to an empty station with armed soldiers on the platform. My ex and my son were there to meet me and take me to our village. Our car, weaving into the mountain passes, was the only one on the road.

I am now installed in my ex’s family’s 16th-century house, with its thick walls and unheated rooms and a fireplace large enough to cook dinner. It is the place where, in happier days, I was married (on a short break from covering the war in Iraq) and where, in the backyard, I would lie for hours under a lime blossom tree, on a pink blanket with my infant son, staring into a perfect sky.

It has been a dozen years since I was last here.

And yet the mountains have not changed, nor has the house—the old linens, the towels, the squeaky beds, even a tube of hand cream I left in a bathroom drawer 12 years before.

The villagers have not aged: They always looked fairly ancient. The local farmer, Maurice, who married us (he also serves as mayor), still has his many cows and still rises at dawn. Cousins who kept rabbits, where I brought my son to play, are now dead; but the woman who sells fresh eggs still sits in her garden on sunny days. When I go for walks, I pass the graves of ancient cousins who fought in the Resistance during the war, and were killed by Germans a few days before it ended. How senseless a war between countries seems now when we are all fighting a common enemy, an invisible one.

L’appel solennel, the somber message from Macron, came this week, a call for the country to join together in one of the toughest times we will face since World War II. I always thought Macron looked like the teenager he was when he fell in love with his wife, who was his teacher. But these days his youthful face has taken on an air of proud leadership and authority: more like de Gaulle; more like the anti-Trump.

As for my village life, I thought I would be here for a few weeks, but now I know I will be here for months: in a large mountain home with my ex, who graciously took me in, my son, and three French cousins. The numbers of cases and deaths are rising every day, but here in Grisail, I sometimes go days, like so many around the world, without seeing anyone but my family.

I’ve felt like a divided person since the day I left America in 1985 to live first in London, then in France. Now half of me feels connected to New York, the other half to this timeless land where someday I will be buried. Kind neighbors in Manhattan are looking after my cat. I can order food for my mother online, even from a remote village high in the mountains 4,000 miles away.

I am beginning to listen to the rhythm of the land—everything is far slower here. I rise at dawn, walk, and prepare meals in scarred pots that for generations have simmered pot-au-feu or blanquette de veau. My cousins and I pray in French on Sundays to a mass on a computer, and every day I walk to a small chapel built by one of my son’s ancestors, passing the fields where in summer, the cows graze. I am even thinking I might begin to write my own Suite Francaise—this, though, set during the time of corona.