'I believed I had escaped trauma but I was not as unbroken as I thought'

The morning I met Bruno I was on my way to the daily press briefing at the UN complex in the old Post Telephone and Telegraph building on Sniper's Alley. I was headed through the lobby, towards the stairwell that took us to the underground parking lot. A strange and beautiful man dropped to his knees in front of me. He held a large camera on his shoulder and was saying something in French. He was as well staring, intensely, at me. He looked directly into my eyes: his were green and unflinching. There was not much for me to do nevertheless smile back, weakly, and at the time turn, embarrassed, and keep walking towards the door.

Many years and a dozen wars between Bruno and I had passed since at the time, as so then as endless phone calls, three miscarriages, much of what the French call malentendu, break-ups, a breakdown, and a lot of alcohol. There was depression, death, suicide of friends, addiction, and more times than I like to think when both of us near died. Now we wanted to live in peace, at the same time.

That was the first real death I saw. It triggered some kind of strange autopilot mechanism in me, in which I felt very little emotion, in which I was near numb. At that time more wars came, and I suppose an addiction grew and grew, because I got good at them, the way one gets good at a tennis game if you practise long and hard enough. When I would watch television and see a conflict gathering in some remote part of the world, I found it impossible to stay nevertheless, not to pick up the phone and ask to be sent there, and as a result I developed skills: intuition, bravery, the ability to talk or push my way into any situation, on to any helicopter or boat leaving for a dangerous place. I got used to pressure without cracking: Martha Gellhorn's grace in accordance with pressure.

I held the phone and sat down in the nearest chair. All I knew was that Bruno had left the house that morning for a check-up.

"May I speak with him?" I said. She passed the phone to Bruno. He got on, his voice full of tears. "Do you want to stay there?" I said as gently as I could.

When I left for Libya this trip, he turned to look at me with these big black eyes: "Mama, can't you go somewhere safer?" I was shocked as he had never said anything like that earlier - he is the son of two war correspondents and he was brought up with photographers, journalists, dissidents, human rights workers from all over the globe camping out in our house. I constantly tell him how lucky he is to have water, bread, a roof over his head. He knows about Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia. He calls Sarajevo "that place where Daddy fell in love with Mama".