Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Even the most loving autobiography involves betrayals and they do not necessarily end with the moment of publication. An obvious implication of writing a story with real-life characters is that their privacy remains an ongoing concern. Dorothea and Ladislaw do not have a life beyond the last page of Middlemarch. George Eliot was not expected to account for their activities. My ‘characters’ do and I am. In public readings and in interviews, readers and journalists regularly ask ‘What happened to X after you left?’, ‘How did Y react?’, ‘Does Z still live in town N?’, as though the door to a life, once opened, must remain continually so, ever wider ajar. The desire to protect privacy (my own but also my family’s and that of others who feature in my book) remains in continuous tension with the commercial desire to create publicity (my own, my university’s, my various publishers internationally). Publicity always and only exists as the ‘next question’. I don’t believe that Czeslaw Milosz was necessarily right when he said that ‘when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished’. The boundaries are more easily set on the page than in an interview or a Q&A session, but I tread carefully and try not to hurt either those who happen to be part of my story or my readers.

  All memoir writing is both the representation of a life and an interpretation of it. Like a photographic album, it replaces memory – fluid and shifting — with a collection of snapshots. The original assemblage may have been a random process, the scenes may have been unimportant, yet their status changes the moment they are selected: they become, metonymically, ‘the life’. The Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that each memory consists not only of itself but of all subsequent recollections of it. The memoir freezes the memory and cuts it off from future accretions. Fixed and unchangeable, it eventually becomes a strange artefact in the life of its own creator – the sourcebook. One views it with the same mixture of distance and recognition one feels when an old photograph drops out of an envelope, or one hears a forgotten recording of one’s own voice. The forty-two-year-old woman who wrote this book ten years ago now seems almost as young and as remote as the twenty-three-year-old one. I wish I could go back, if only to promise that those long, livid scars would fade.

  A decade on, as discussions of the book have progressed from reviews to scholarly articles, student essays, and finally to a small handful of MA and PhD dissertations, I still find it hard to think about it as anything other than a miracle. I am used by now to talking about the memoir in what you could describe as rational terms. I have examined its structure and discussed its themes with my own students, often slipping into third person, as though the book had been written by somebody else. I have even provided a three-hundred-word account of the ‘research’ which went into its making – also in the third person — when such a document was required for one of those productivity audits to which British academics are regularly subjected.

  All such work notwithstanding, aspects of its publication continue to seem just as unreal, or even surreal, as the process of writing. The memory of myself, bald and drooling (one of the weirder effects of chemotherapy) yet laughing over the keyboard, seems nowhere near as strange as catching the sound of my own voice reading an episode from my Montenegrin grandmother’s life on someone’s car radio as I waited at traffic lights to cross a London street, or that supremely Freudian moment when, stepping out of the airport shuttle at Stockholm railway station, I beheld an enlarged version of a familiar black-and-white photograph of my parents in the window of an English-language bookshop, and – just below it – my own two-year-old face staring at me from a small pile of paperbacks. Or an evening in a Viennese theatre when I sat on stage facing an audience of several hundred people and watched a famous Austrian actor perform the part of Vesna in German, in a semi-staged reading. I could see why someone might have chosen her, for we had superficial physical similarities, but she was a superior variant of me, a beautiful, willowy woman who wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-Raphaelite painting. I felt both proud and embarrassingly self-conscious as I tried not to shift in my plush seat. Her expressive language was almost unintelligible to me, but I recognised every proper noun: names of family members, teachers, school friends and boyfriends bubbling up every now and then on to the surface of the elegant German flow. These are the moments – as though dreamed up by Buñuel — which seem designed to make you feel alternately self-possessed and bored with yourself.

  Where does an autobiography begin and where should it end? The idea that a life is ‘book-ended’ by two events which one can never describe as one’s personal experience – birth and death – is banal, but in narrative terms frustrating for a writer. These are, literally, the unaccountable moments. Unless one is being fanciful, Tristram Shandy-style, the birth-story is passed down, second-hand. The memoirist could never provide ‘the’ ending either: the act of writing declares her alive even as the moment she chooses for any provisional closure colours the tone of the narrative.

  I remember a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Orson Welles. On hearing a producer complain about the downbeat conclusion of a film he had just presented, Welles allegedly said: ‘If you are after a happy ending, simply cut fifteen minutes earlier.’ Did I want a happy ending, I wondered, and if so where do I leave myself: at the wedding or in the delivery ward, the traditional sites of happily-ever-after? If I choose a less upbeat option, which one of the many stations of the cross of a cancer patient should I opt for — the cliff-hanger moment of that first biopsy result (‘I am afraid it doesn’t look good,’ the doctor said), or the point when, after scans and repeated tests, I was told that the cancer hadn’t spread (‘Things may not be so bad, after all.’)?

  I face a similar dilemma as I search for another provisional closure now. Where can one see the passing of a decade more clearly, what does it affect more? The book, or the person it depicts – the person the reader will soon get to know, yet who is also no longer there, who is both dead and alive, like that cat in Schrödinger’s experiment, not only ten years older but changed by the book itself?

  Therein lies the problem in writing about Strawberries. I am reporting from that future which so easily might not have happened yet which looks superficially more similar to the past than I think most readers would like to hear. I have been back at work for ten years, lecturing, marking, and sitting in meetings much more often than is good for my soul. But this book has also changed my writing life quite profoundly. Since it appeared, I have felt freer to write exactly what I want to write in any given moment because, somehow, I no longer felt I needed to prove anything to myself. I have published a book of poetry and I have written a novel which is about to be published, a story of Slavonic London borne out of my own deep love for this city, which I wouldn’t have dared attempt without Chernobyl Strawberries.

  My genre hopping sometimes frustrates the reviewers, because it makes it difficult to describe my work neatly (I commiserate), yet, if you take away the trappings of form, the themes which preoccupy me have remained remarkably unchanged. It is meaningful, therefore, that this edition is being published by John Nicoll, who edited my first book, Inventing Ruritania, eighteen years ago.

  I wish I could say – as people sometimes expect of cancer survivors and immigrants alike — that I am grateful for each and every new day on this green island. Ask me how I am today and chances are that I will respond with that very English ‘Mustn’t grumble.’ Which doesn’t mean that I don’t. Which doesn’t mean that I am not grateful.

  West London, August 2014

  ‘It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning, and not to try to go further back.’

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

  1. The Beginnings, All of Them

  I HAVE TASTED Chernobyl strawberries. Every spring, winds from the Ukraine bring rain to the fruit nurseries in the hills south-west of Belgrade. In the city, the trees and cobblestones glisten. The scent of glowing berries – the colour of fresh wounds and as warm
as live blood – spills through the streets around the market square. The fragrance lingers in the rusty tramcars winding their way around the old sugar factory and the promise of summer overpowers for a while the familiar smells of sweat, tobacco, machine oil and polished wood.

  In 1986 – the year of Chernobyl and the spring before the summer of my move to England – their smell seemed headier than ever. I was twenty-four and in the kind of love that makes the oceans part. I was about to leave an entire world behind without a second thought in order to live that feeling to its end, wherever and whenever the end happened to be. There was no other option. I was, obviously, still a child: not because the move to the other end of the continent wasn’t worth the effort (it was, it was!), but because I could, at that stage, think about love only in grand operatic terms. As far as affairs of the heart were concerned, when the faites vos jeux moment came I simply had to stake everything. Anything less and I might have lost my nerve.

  The world I left behind, and which I am now revisiting from the distance of twenty years and well over a thousand miles, was that of Yugoslavia in the throes of the big communist experiment. As a social order it seemed invincible, yet it lasted just half a lifespan. Yugoslavia no longer exists, not even as a name, but in a kind of Rorschach test I still see the land of the South Slavs on every map of Europe. It is a vision which dates me: the way in which my eye still arranges its constituent parts into a country on the salty palm of the Balkans, the way in which I still call myself Yugoslav, and my mother tongue Serbo-Croat, without thinking, as though the very act of leaving, paradoxically, makes it impossible to let go.

  The shape of Yugoslavia marks the outline of my childhood like a fat silkworm or a ripe white mulberry on the eastern edge of the Adriatic, but I am not given to homesickness or nostalgia. I am English now; I wouldn’t begin to know how to return to Serbia, which is not the place I left anyway, nor even to Belgrade, the only city in that corner of the world to which I have a link that still breathes. In that city, I enjoyed a prosperous childhood and adolescence in a sequence of more or less comfortable homes which became increasingly opulent as my parents’ careers advanced and then poorer again as the country began to slide towards its final bloodbath. I rarely think of those homes and those streets nowadays. Nothing reminds me of them. Sometimes, none the less, the memory returns, uninvited.

  Mine is in no way an exceptional story. I was an ordinary bright girl in an ordinary middle-class world with its own rules and regulations, communist comrades notwithstanding. I obeyed when I was supposed to obey and rebelled at all the right moments. On the surface, it would appear that there is little that is remarkable about my life story. It would be difficult to turn it into either Speak, Memory or The Gulag Archipelago. I was no Russian dissident: I have never seen the inside of a prison cell, never been tortured for any beliefs. I didn’t escape to the West under a train or through barbed-wire fences. Much though I would have liked to, I’ve never had to memorize any poetry, mine or anybody else’s, in order to preserve it for future generations. The closest I ever came to a conflict with the communist power machine is a heated argument with Yugoslav customs officers over some LPs I was bringing back from Paris in 1980, shortly after my nineteenth birthday. Two uniformed ruffians threatened to make me get off a train in the middle of a Slovene forest for trying to smuggle Western goods into the country. It was an empty threat, the acting out of the rituals of an authoritarian state, a show of power and supplication aimed at putting a spoilt metropolitan brat in her proper place. You don’t stop trains for Georges Brassens, not in Yugoslavia.

  How could something that seemed so solid perish so easily? I am almost disappointed that the comrades didn’t put up a better fight towards the end. I know they were tired, but they owed that much to all those among us who had demonized them so wholeheartedly. How could they just pack up and retire to write memoirs full of dates and self-justifications? How could they metamorphose so easily into a bunch of cuddly grandpas with bad dental work? Even those who tortured and imprisoned, and pinned electrodes to grown men’s balls, now wear checked slippers and send grandchildren to Western universities. Their erstwhile victims, meanwhile, appear ever so slightly mad and certainly much less nice, much less affable, less well adjusted, as though they were, in some way, asking for it all along. Could it really be that I grew up in a world behind the looking glass, which had no more substance than the painted backdrop on a theatrical stage?

  In the year of my birth, 1961, my extended family of six lived in two earth-floored rooms – mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, great-grandmother and the baby (me) – without an indoor lavatory and with a water tap by the garden gate. The poverty was both that of the country and ours alone. We kept being punished by circumstance, but also by a certain unwillingness to adapt, until we learned to adapt all too well, on autopilot, and to live without believing. Only then did the rewards begin to accrue. By the time I was twelve, we owned an enormous house, approximately four rooms and a bathroom per person (there were five of us by now: add another child and subtract the grandfather and the great-grandmother). We must have learned a lesson or two.

  The New House stood, white and unmistakable, on the brow of a Belgrade hill, as a monument to my parents’ drive and willingness to do without, surrounded by pine saplings which promised a mature garden for the grandchildren. It took five years to build and it was best loved in construction. I played hide-and-seek in the trenches dug out for the foundations and, when the walls went up, signed my name furtively in wet, salmon-pink plaster.

  In the eighties, Yugoslavia – and most of us in it – went into economic decline. We could no longer afford to heat such a vast place and, even if we could, there was no oil to be bought anywhere in town and, because of power shortages, electricity on alternate days only. Our erstwhile buddies from the International Monetary Fund were beginning to tighten the screws on the comrades and they then turned on us, inventing more and more complicated ways of saving money to repay the foreign debt. Cars whose number plates ended in even numbers were not allowed to move on even dates, odd numbers on odd dates; Belgrade was divided into zones which had no electricity according to a complex rota announced every morning on local radio; sanitary towels were sold in particular chemist shops on particular days of the week, according to a schedule published in the daily newspaper; shops no longer gave out carrier bags, so you had to carry one in your pocket just in case you bought something; doctors’ surgeries ran out of latex gloves, so you had to bring a pair if you wanted to be examined. Nothing major, nothing dreadful, nothing worth mentioning ever really happened, just a series of petty obstacles to remind us all that Yugoslavia was no longer the golden child of the West, no more the cutest of the Eastern babies. There were new kids to be cared for, grown lean and hungry on the Soviet diet, opening their pink little-baby mouths towards the teat, cooing just as sweetly.

  I now realize that our housing and our family were never quite in sync and this seems to me the very essence of the East European condition. Built in the short-lived golden age of Yugoslav socialism, the New House represented an idea rather than an edifice of bricks and mortar. Like a mausoleum, it embodied – literally – my parents’ dream of a large extended family, of generations multiplying and staying put, a Mediterranean hubris flying in the face of so much Balkan history and so much displacement. Whenever I think about this, it hurts. I’ve never even thought, not for a second, of fulfilling their longing for me to go forth – or, rather, to stay put – and multiply. I entertained the very Western idea that my first responsibility is towards my own happiness. I have been paying for this presumption with the small change of guilt every now and then. Of all the languages I know, guilt is the one that my memory speaks most fluently.

  Throughout the sixties and the seventies my mother headed the finance department of Belgrade’s City Transport Company and my father was a code-breaker working for the General Staff of the Yugoslav National Army. My sister was, well, my young
er sister. My parents’ professions may sound quite grand, but they were an ordinary couple, the original yuppies of the sixties’ boom, preoccupied with the upbringing of their two daughters and everything that implied – from French and piano lessons (yuppies, as I said) to summer holidays on the coast and winter holidays in the mountains. My family moved from being shepherds to skiers in three generations. This had nothing to do with the socialist transformation of the working classes and everything to do with my grandparents’ ultimate realization that only that which is in our heads cannot be taken away. We were pushed so hard we’d have made the same leap on the moon.

  Three years old

  My mother’s job involved endless hours of overtime, when she was so immersed in bus-fare changes or the implications of zone alteration that she spoke of them all the time until even my grandmother and I began to discuss the issues involved with some authority. My father’s work was so hush-hush that I had no idea what he actually did until I reached my late teens. He worked in a room full of cupboard-sized computers which, I now realize, had collectively less memory than an average PlayStation. In order to visit him in his office, one had to go through multiple security checks, passing solemn men in khaki uniforms along the vast corridors of a forbidding edifice which was bombed to smithereens by NATO back in 1999. My boys smashed Daddy’s office. How much more can a father forgive?

  Compared to the world of my grandparents, the four of whom managed to live and die in a number of different kingdoms and empires without properly leaving home, all the while acquiring unwanted expertise in the finer nuances of the differences between POW camps, labour camps, concentration and death camps, my own world seemed as dull and stable as something out of a late nineteenth-century bourgeois play. I went to school and did my homework, I read, I played, I collected pictures of film stars and basketball players. Vladimir Visotsky and Robert Redford were my favourites. I marginally preferred the Californian over the Muscovite, not entirely without reservations, which may or may not be telling. The Muscovite was suicidal, the Californian in love with himself.