Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Photograph by Martin Figura

  VESNA GOLDSWORTHY was born in Belgrade in 1961 and has lived in London since 1986. She writes in English, her third language. Chernobyl Strawberries, first published in 2005, was serialised in The Times and read by Vesna herself as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. It has had fourteen editions in the German language alone.

  She has written three other widely translated books: Inventing Ruritania (1998), on the shaping of the cultural perceptions of the Balkans; the Crashaw Prize–winning poetry collection, The Angel of Salonika (2011), one of The Times’s Best Poetry Books of the Year; and her debut novel Gorsky, the tale of a Russian oligarch in London (2015).

  ‘A lilting, lyrical and poetic musing on Vesna’s comfortable childhood, her marriage and move to Britain in the mid-1980s, cancer, and what it was like to see her country disappear – bit by bloody bit . . . a hauntingly honest account.’

  Eve-Ann Prentice, The Times

  ‘Richly evocative.’

  Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Three qualities make Goldsworthy’s memoir stand apart from ordinary accounts: her honesty, her skill as a writer and the fascinating circumstances of her life . . . She writes evocatively about the experience of being caught between cultures, belonging to neither, and describes how illness finally allowed her to fuse the two different personalities between which she had felt divided, one speaking Serbo-Croat, the other English . . . Chernobyl Strawberries blows away the dust; Goldsworthy writes well, often beautifully . . . Memory provides her structure. Rather than writing chronologically, she leaps back and forth in time, following threads – love, music, family, war – that send her zigzagging across her life . . . Goldsworthy’s ability to find unexpected subtle connections in the pattern of her own life elevates this absorbing memoir into something extraordinary.’

  Josh Lacey, Guardian

  ‘Engrossing . . . She writes of her dual life as a Serb and an Englishwoman with refreshing candour . . . This is, in every sense, a reflective book, the work of a fiercely honest and cultivated intelligence . . . What is remarkable here is the combination of melancholy and absurdist humour . . . But this unusual book is chiefly concerned with survival and loss – the history that led inexorably to communism, and that of the frequently complacent West – and with lasting love.’

  Paul Bailey, Sunday Times

  ‘Many good books are travel books in one sense or another, and this one charts a more complex journey than most . . . An exceptional memoir. If there has been a more honest, calm, and profoundly moving one written in the last few years, then I’ve missed it.’

  Andrew Taylor, TLS

  ‘A charming book . . . Vesna Goldsworthy writes with wit and nostalgia about the vanished country in which she grew up . . . Beautifully written – an elegy to a world that now seems so far distant that it is difficult to remember that it began to vanish just half a generation ago.’

  Victor Sebestyen, Spectator

  ‘Heavyweight and rewarding . . . Goldsworthy’s treatment of her adopted homeland is masterly, using irony and self-deprecation to evoke affection, respect and clear-sighted criticism . . . She is equally sensitive but fair-minded as she considers her native Serbia, perpetrator of atrocities, but bombed by the country she now calls home . . . [The book is] a help to understanding the European continent’s past woes and current muddles.’

  The Economist

  ‘A profound and witty memoir.’

  Neal Ascherson, Sunday Herald

  ‘Hers is a story that reaches inside you and leaves you with just a little more wisdom, a little less fear . . . Our own stereotypes of eastern Europe are cleverly excised in a book that is part a recounting of family life, part exploration of lineage and part quizzical portrait of a disappeared Europe.’

  Fiona Ness, Sunday Business Post

  ‘A beautifully written memoir, you’ll be left in no doubt about Vesna Goldsworthy’s strong sense of herself, nor about her courage and her honesty . . . An uplifting but utterly unsentimental memoir of a life lived truthfully and without compromise.’

  Roslyn Dee, Sunday Tribune

  Two years old

  WILMINGTON SQUARE BOOKS

  An imprint of Bitter Lemon Press

  First published in 2005 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Reprinted in 2015 with new Foreword by

  Wilmington Square Books

  47 Wilmington Square

  London WC1X 0ET

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  Copyright © 2005, 2006, 2015 Vesna Goldsworthy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-908524-48-5

  987654321

  Designed and typeset by Jane Havell Associates

  For Alexander

  Contents

  Still Life

  (Foreword to the 10th Anniversary Edition)

  1The Beginnings, All of Them

  2The Name of the Mother

  3My Oaths of Allegiance

  4A Poem for Comrade Tito

  5Peter the Great, Peter the Earless and Other Romances

  6God and Books

  7Homesickness, War and Radio

  8Fathers and Sons

  9England, My England

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Life After Strawberries

  (Epilogue to the paperback edition)

  My eleven favourite books

  Still Life

  (Foreword to the 10th Anniversary Edition)

  I STARTED WRITING Chernobyl Strawberries in the shadow of a life-threatening illness and as a record for my son, a common enough impulse for autobiographical writing. I wanted to leave an account he could read when he became old enough to feel curious about his own background, and in particular about his mother’s early life in Yugoslavia, a now-vanished country. He was not yet three in the dying days of the winter of 2003, when I wrote what became the first lines of this book in English, his ‘father tongue’.

  The morning I started (although I did not yet know what I was embarking on), I sat at the kitchen table, staring out on a small patch of our London garden. It was easier to look at without crying than the boy who, at that same moment, was pushing a toy train in a wide circle around me. He would soon go to his nursery, and I would be left alone for a few hours. For the outside world, including family members, I maintained, for quite a while after the diagnosis, the illusion that I was working on a study of travel writing, an academic project I was researching when cancer stopped me in my tracks. I pretended, even though no one expected that of me, that some kind of momentum was being maintained, that I was carrying on as before.

  I had been on sabbatical from my academic job. The long-awaited study leave indirectly – and perhaps ironically — saved my life. It freed me from teaching schedules and, in turn, left me with no excuse to continue dodging some much-postponed medical tests. I had suspected that something was wrong with my right breast for the best part of the previous year but I thought it would ‘go away’. Blind optimism makes life easier. It makes death easier too.

  That particular morning, I woke up soon after three a.m., thinking that I could be dead before the year was out. This was becoming a new routine. I was trying to devise a project which could keep such thoughts at bay. Tiny black birds landed on wet branches and took off, sending beads of raindrops into the air. I had no idea what type of bird I was looking at, or wha
t species of tree. I could not name either in any of the languages I knew. I wished for a moment I could be the kind of writer who would nail a description with precision – who would write something along the lines of “a blackcap shivered on the branch of an elm” – but it seemed far too late to start learning taxonomy. What do you do with a remnant of time too long to cry your way through and too short to give any other activity much point?

  I had always kept the natural world at arm’s length. I was an urban creature, one of those people who stayed up all night brimming with energy in the city, and who claimed to feel morose away from noise and pollution. I once welcomed such notions of myself with humour, even smugly. They now had a new and sinister shadow, an ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ of cancer, which I kept trying to drive away while at the same time raking obsessively through the past in search of its beginnings. What caused it? When did it start? Any distraction, anything that threw me off of the wheel of anxiety, felt good — even confusion, sadness, or anger, so long as it was about international politics or the defeat of a football team, so long as it had nothing to do with my body.

  I tried self-consciously to imagine a sunny picture of Belgrade, my native town. It felt a bit like preparing to write a poem – there was vague sense of buzz, an advancing mood rather than a story. Although I thought of these early jottings as a letter to my son, they were not as formal as that. Anything that began with “Dear Son” or “Dear Alexander” would have made me howl with self-pity. I had no plan. I saw houses tightly packed on the hills rising above the two wide ribbons of Belgrade’s rivers, the Ottoman fortress at the confluence, the domes of its churches, a mountain with a needle of a TV tower to the south, and then the plains which stretched to the north of the Danube for hundreds of miles. I saw Belgrade not in the way I remembered it as a young woman, but as I now commonly beheld it from a plane coming in to land, making a loop above the city after a two-and-a-half-hour flight from London.

  Unexpectedly, as my mind’s eye moved in for the close-up, I remembered a bend of a street I hadn’t been on in years. It was the slope of a hill close to my grammar school. There was a market above it and, below, a causeway leading to an island in the river. Nothing important ever happened to me on that street, yet here I was, an empty tram rattling somewhere to the right, the smell of strawberries and the calls of stall-holders somewhere behind me, a canvas filling with detail in the vivid and incontestable logic of a lucid dream. The strawberries set the sequence of images off. The blood, the tongue, the heart, the body: everything the fruit reminded me of in that particular moment is still there on the first page, as if to define the implicit agenda for the rest of the book.

  Although I was writing in English, the language pulling me onwards had an odd affinity to Serbian. It could have been simply the suppleness of an adoptive mother tongue, a feeling finally achieved after decades of practice, but it seemed like a new sound, as though I had attained a kind of fusion. Once upon a time, in Yugoslavia, I used to write creatively in the language then called Serbo-Croat. (I use the term ‘creative’ faute de mieux, to describe poems, essays and short stories, while disliking the implication that academic writing lacks creativity.) Like someone jumping on a bicycle, or diving into a lake for the first time in many years, and finding that the body knows exactly what to do, I plunged into this new mode of writing in English to find that young self was still there, as though she had been waiting for this moment all along.

  You can hear the voice of the young woman on almost every page. It was the sound I wanted to recreate: she was optimistic, ambitious, invulnerable, and in some ways insufferable. I needed a dose of her youthful courage, but behind the brave face I now saw insecurities as well — an eagerness to please, certain conformity, a sense of being stifled, a desire to escape. She dreams about the wider world, and writes poems about exile long before her actual departure. The broader backdrop is the country of her birth, a land which I gradually came to view as being caught in the same hubris of youthful pride. It became a mirror of that particular self. Too good to last. Too good to be true.

  That twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old voice is the dominant tone of this composition. The other sound, the voice of the forty-two-year-old ‘almost English’ woman, shadows it, chronicles, translates, and explains the odd detail. She sometimes subtly mocks and teases the young one, but she envies her too. The counterpoint of these two selves is not dissimilar to a fugue. The musical term suits not only the desired polyphony of the text but also the book’s themes, because fuga means both ‘to flee’ and ‘to chase’. The flight from the present and the quest for meaning in the past — because the future may no longer be there — provide the recurrent Leitmotifs.

  When you set out to write your life story, where do you start? What is the first thing you remember? I don’t mean the earliest memory, but the first detail that comes to mind when you face a blank sheet or an empty screen. Try it as an unrehearsed experiment, and the result is likely to be a surprise. It may seem counterintuitive to talk about surprises in writing about one’s past, but they were the most remarkable part of the project. They continued after the publication; the most exciting one, perhaps, being the warmth of its reception.

  I have, almost, become used to the double-take which happens when someone you have never met addresses you like a long-lost friend. The memoir seems to engender a familiarity which, unexpectedly, works in two directions. It is there not just in the way in which its readers ask after my parents or my friends, but in the way they talk to me about their own, as though I am, already, part of their inner circle.

  What kind of work is a memoir expected to do? What sort of need does it fulfil, for its author and its readers, who, in ever greater numbers, seem to find in the genre something that may be missing from fiction? Many readers asked if I found writing the book healing. I resist the term because it detracts from literary ambition (would one ask a novelist if his fiction felt therapeutic?), yet it is not an unfair question.

  My ‘memory project’ – to depict a life as seen from within — is not necessarily synonymous with an ‘intimate story’, although it is that as well. It skips between the personal and the public. It does not attempt to offer an inventory of my achievements or failures, as a biography might. Instead, it offers my account of ‘what it was like’ and ‘how it felt’ — to be a child and then a young woman in the Balkans during the Cold War; to emigrate; to enter an English family; to have a child; to watch your country fall apart in a sequence of wars; to face a life-threatening illness; to survive. But this last is hindsight.

  While writing Chernobyl Strawberries, I realised that memory was, to an extent, a capricious guide. There were months I could account for, almost hour by hour, even decades later, while whole years had faded into a blur. I once talked dreamily of wanting to visit a French cathedral town when a friend reminded me that we had been there together in the summer of 1980. By the time we get into our forties (and now fifties, in my case), many of us are bound to lose a town or two. Do we choose the ones we keep?

  The memories which stood out most sharply were far from always being predictable, the moments of happiness or trauma. On the contrary, I sometimes felt like a detective charged with the task of making sense, teasing out the ways in which the seemingly random recollections which floated to the surface, pushing others aside, added up to a particular idea of the self. Why write about David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, for example, and not about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood which had influenced me just as deeply? Why describe a youthful affair of the heart which happened in Paris but not one which took place in Dubrovnik? Why was I including some friends and not mentioning others who were just as close, if not closer?

  I now sometimes think about the things I left out, not because I ever had anything to hide, but because even the longest memoir could not contain the full story of a life, although readers understandably grow suspicious the moment a memoirist mentions any lacunae. I have become increasingly aware of the editoria
l – or curatorial – effort which is built into any memoir writing. In my case, it was not so much part of conscious ‘image making’ as a by-product of composition – creating the thematic clusters into which I organised my memories once I realised that I could not fully adhere to chronology. The chronological approach, when I initially attempted it, seemed designed to compel me to account for the uneventful, the boredom which covered long stretches of my life – particularly my working life – like fine dust.

  While I grappled with such conundrums, I also had to make the many unplanned decisions which accompany the process of offering one’s life story to the public. My personal narrative began to feel like something that was just as much – if not more — about others as about me. I did not speak to anyone about what I was doing until the project was almost complete, but I understood early on that my friends and family, my neighbours, the university where I worked, the radio station and the publishing house where I had worked before, all had their continued existence and concerns about privacy and publicity. No strand of the story was entirely ‘mine’. However lovingly written, the book might test others’ wish to remain private or to have a choice over the way they present themselves. My sister, for example, was holding a public position. Would she mind seeing episodes from her childhood in print? And how would my mother face her Serbian neighbours knowing that her clashes with her own mother-in-law, my wildly outspoken Montenegrin grandmother, would be known about by anyone who cared enough to buy my book? The same concerns applied at the British end. Would the university which employs me mind the world knowing that its concrete tower blocks look to me like the world I once knew behind the Iron Curtain? Would the BBC, for which I once worked, object to my comic takes on night-shift journalism? I had been too unimportant to have had access to earth-shattering revelations, but even the galley-slaves witness things which the corporate communications departments would rather not see publicly discussed. There is no private sphere on the printed page.