Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Even as a ten-year-old, I was attracted to such contrasting extremes of masculinity that it was practically impossible to think of one Prince Charming who could unite all those aspirations into one. The quest for a self-destructive bad boy who would have a steady job, support the family and certainly never ever beat or cheat was soon on. I dressed up, I went out to dances and to concerts, I kept falling in and out of love. I grew my hair long, I cut my hair short. The world was barely moving. I was waiting for my life to begin. I believed in nothing very much, but – for reasons which I cannot now begin to fathom – I believed in the supreme power of romantic love. That, comrades, is the real opium of the masses: the belief that destiny and not you is uniquely responsible for our happiness; the obstinate belief that love will conquer all. It takes a lifetime to shake off. They peddle it in the West too; it is the most useful of distractions.

  My family has lived in the Belgrade suburb of Zharkovo, at the end of the same tramline, for the best part of the last ninety years. A pretty village on the town’s edge, it gradually grew into a grim socialist satellite town, a Legoland of ugly apartment blocks full of Serb refugees from Bosnia and Croatia. The only buildings of any beauty were old peasant houses, of which a few were left standing, an old Turkish inn which housed a forlorn cake shop, and one or two pre-war industrial edifices in the style of the European Modern Movement. With their shattered windows and rusty gates, they looked derelict and abandoned but for the fingers of sweet grey smoke pointing towards the changing skies from the tall chimneys.

  My paternal grandmother once ran a beet farm which supplied raw material for the local sugar plant, whose building now houses an experimental theatre. Cart-loads of jolly cadavers, plump white bodies speckled with wet earth, made their way from our land in the flood plains of the Sava river, just before its confluence with the Danube, to the grim industrial courtyard dominated by the saw-edged roof line under which molasses boiled and brewed throughout the autumn months. My grandfather worked in a quarry which provided stone for houses and graves in this part of town. Both the homes and the graves were inhabited by recently urbanized, dispossessed peasants and – in small houses with deep verandas hidden by gardens and vine pergolas – the few professionals needed to look after them: the priest, the teacher, the doctor, the small-time solicitor (wills and property disputes).

  In the cemetery on the edge of the village, now bisected by a four-lane motorway, my grandfather’s name – Petar Bjelogrlic – was inscribed just to the right of centre on a black marble gravestone back in 1962, and left waiting until 1990 for my grandmother’s to complete the celestial symmetry. Petar died at the age of sixty-eight. Fourteen years younger than him, my grandmother Zorka remained a widow for twenty-eight years. In its oval porcelain frame, my grandfather’s photograph, taken soon after the Second World War, shows a melancholy, handsome middle-aged man with grey eyes and a blond moustache twirled at the ends. He looks like a reluctant dandy, uncomfortable in his stiff collar and thin black tie. Next to him, in a photograph from the seventies, my grandmother gazes straight to the camera with her coal-black eyes, white hair in a neat chignon, with the faintest of smiles on her lips. She is still wearing her widow’s weeds and could almost be his mother. We are forever remembered at the age at which we die, but this particular funerary photographic mismatch makes it difficult to imagine what kind of husband and wife they might have been. I remember Zorka well; Petar, not at all.

  He was a bright Serb boy from Herzegovina who was drafted against his will into the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. He wound up in Belgrade after the Armistice with hundreds of others in tattered uniforms, victors by virtue of their nationality, losers in their poverty and in every other way. He started off as a porter under the neo-Baroque arches of the central railway station and suffered horrible fits of homesickness, which he eased by seeking the company of his compatriots. There were dozens of young men just like him, newly arrived from the barren uplands of Herzegovina, in each working-class suburb of Belgrade. Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century as a subject of the Ottoman sultan, Grandpa died a citizen of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Between the crescent moon of Islam and the hammer and sickle of communism, his life changed little. He remained impoverished, hardened by long hours of physical labour, never fully at home.

  He was in his late thirties by the time he felt ready to marry. His chosen bride, my paternal grandmother, was a Montenegrin, a fierce little wasp of the best stock that the southern mountains had to offer. On her father’s side, her people had been frontiersmen and warriors for generations, and, on her mother’s, they were from the Nyegush clan, the ruling tribe of the theocratic Montenegro, providers of a succession of celibate prince-bishops who were Europe’s ferocious alternative to the Dalai Lama. The genes of the mothers of all those tall, dark-haired and bearded Orthodox prelates with large silver crosses around their necks and princes with fur pelisses over silver rifle butts lurk in my genetic soup. For Zorka, Petar was clearly an act of rebellion and a half. Plus ça change . . .

  Zorka’s grandfather was given land around the city of Nikshich by Prince Nicholas of Montenegro as a reward for valour in the Turkish wars. Wounded in both legs on the battlefield and unable to move, Grandpa bit the throat of a Turkish soldier who was attempting to cut off his nose and stuff it in his trophy bag, and was duly mentioned in the Montenegrin equivalent of dispatches. Not to be outdone, his son received in his own turn acres of fertile black soil on the Hungarian border as a reward for a good fight in the First World War. In my grandmother’s family, different estates are still remembered by the wars and wounds which brought them into our possession. The trophies came with a bloody string attached. Settlement on frontier land was always to be paid for with a pound of flesh.

  My paternal grandparents’ wedding (grandfather with full moustache, seated left)

  Zorka moved closer to the centre of things when she accepted the offer of marriage and settled in our suburb of Belgrade amid the throes of the Great Depression. The young couple worked hard and bought parcels of land, and Franz Joseph and Napoleon ducats. The ducats proved the more solid investment. In the early forties, they were sewn into the hems of long overcoats and traded for food and laissez-passers as far north as the Baltic and as far east as the Ukraine. After the war, the fields were taken away by communists in exchange for a drawer full of impressive-looking nationalization certificates. I learned a thing or two about possessions from my family history. If you are ever offered a choice between ducats and land in the Balkans, take the ducats. In fact, generally, take the ducats and run.

  All this happened after this war: that is how my grandmother used to refer to the Second World War. She died in 1990, talking about the imminent onset of ‘war again’. We never even tried to remember the difference between the many wars which seemed to divide ancestral lives into segments barely long enough to take a male child from his first nappies to his call-up. This war, which Granny also talked about as the ‘German’ war, brought the hated communists to power in 1945. Before it came the ‘Austrian’ War (that war, in 1914, in which we fought on both sides: Grandpa’s lot for the ducat emperor of Kakania, Grandma’s for the land-parcel kings of Serbia), and then one or two Montenegrin wars which coloured Granny’s earliest memories of the world. Even longer ago – before she was born – there were the many Turkish wars of the 1800s, which put an end to four hundred-odd years of Stamboul khadis and pashas. They now populate the sevdah songs, the Balkan fado, the soul music my father sang so well, his fine voice thrilling to the mournful words we barely understood.

  In the city of Istanbul, on the Bosphorus,

  the pasha lies sick, dying,

  his soul is breathing its last breaths,

  his body longing for the black soil,

  Allah, il’Allah, Selam Aleikum!

  Any of these wars could have served as the beginning of my story. However, even though I come from a nation of inhabitants of history, suppose
d to dwell upon medieval conflicts as if they are still raging, I will desist and move on. For the moment at least. I was born on the first day of July 1961, although I don’t remember any of it. I shared the day with Diana Spencer. Following one of my many career changes, I happened to be on the morning shift at the BBC World Service thirty-six years later to announce her death to Serbian listeners, who, in all likelihood, couldn’t have cared less. Among the few who showed any concern was one of my cousins, who rang to say that my voice was inappropriately sad, for – after all – the princess died not like a mother of two grown sons but like a midinette, a Parisian salesgirl, in the embrace of an Egyptian millionaire under a bridge in the middle of the night. How undignified a death, he went on, how undignified! (Where I come from one is supposed to live each day as though it might just be one’s last, not in any hedonistic sense but, rather, in trying to avoid – as far as one could – being caught by death halfway through anything of which your family might be ashamed.) The death of Diana, therefore, was supposed to be a lesson for me. From a distance of more than a thousand miles, I was being watched over by a clan of dignified diers, and self-restraint was the least I could offer in exchange.

  Among early death’s role models, I also shared my birthday with Kalpana Chawla, the beautiful Indian astronaut who died in the Columbia shuttle disaster on the day I found out I had cancer, in February 2003. Numerical coincidences may well be poetry written by our autistic God: it is our duty to applaud. In fact, I feel a bit guilty about Kalpana, as though I had a small say in her death, for I walked back home from Charing Cross hospital half-expecting, half-wanting a greater disaster to obliterate mine, although nothing of the kind seemed to be happening. The boys from St Paul’s School were rowing in a grey rain which was no more than mist, delivery vans made their way along Chiswick Mall, the sweet smell of yeast from Fuller’s brewery filled the winter air. My husband was working, my son in his nursery, God on his throne somewhere above us all.

  One of us had died six years ago, the second was dying with a bang, and the third was just beginning her (possibly) dignified long whimper. The differences might have been obvious from the start. Diana, Kalpana and Vesna, like Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, the three Fates, began their journey on the same day, under the stars that seemed to favour short-lived astronaut-princesses. But now only poor old Atropos, destined to live under the sign of Cancer and left to measure her days in strands of falling hair, remains to tell her tale.

  On 1 July 1961, my Birthday Zero, Belgrade was blisteringly hot and my father was out on the Gypsy Island, where the voices of swimmers rose high above the river, and storks and fishermen shimmered in the haze of heat above the hazelnut-coloured water. My mother was polishing the windows of our little house when she felt the pain. No one had expected me for another month at least. I was a premature baby, weighing less than a loaf of bread. Nobody thought I would live beyond the first few months. I spent a couple of those in an incubator, while my relations consoled my mother by saying that she was a young woman, with enough time ahead to bear many more children, sons as well as daughters. She had taken a bus to the hospital, unaware that she was in labour. When my turn came, I walked from our little house to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in west London to give birth at four in the morning, watched by blinking street lights. Evidently, that’s the kind of stock I come from. What can this little cancer, this tumourchich, do to me now? Remember the Chernobyl strawberries? A pound of sugar for each pound of fruit and nothing else: that’s the recipe.

  The texture of warm strawberries mimics the texture of my tongue. The summer of my twenty-fifth birthday – my marriage, my journey to England, the early summer after the explosion at Chernobyl, of irradiated Welsh lamb and green lettuce – is just one possible beginning. There are so many stories one could tell. I am a bookish girl, a London university teacher, but I am also a great-granddaughter of shepherds from the Montenegrin and Herzegovinian limestone uplands, part of a cousinage of bishops and reluctant throat-biters. That’s the kind of world we live in. My movement is neither more nor less unusual than any of my ancestors’, at least not since they decided to leave the mountain ranges of the Balkans and get going.

  There was Great-great-uncle Petko, literally Man Friday, who went off to Chicago at the beginning of the last century, returning to teach the children of antebellum Nikshich to shout ‘Suck cock, son of a bitch!’ without telling them what the words meant. My grandmother repeated the words faithfully seven decades later, although she suspected that she was saying something bad.

  There was Great-grandfather Risto, Grandfather Christ – he of the Hungarian frontier fame. He worked in the mines of Butte, Montana, where apparently everything reminded him of Montenegro, until he finally returned, as a volunteer, to fight in the Great War. Montana and Montenegro became the mythical poles on our family globe. Throughout the long socialist afternoon, his grandchildren spoke wistfully of US passports which were allegedly all but ready when Christ volunteered to return. He never took his children back to the Land of the Free. We might have fought an entirely different set of wars.

  There was Great-uncle Jovan, John the Gentle, known as Chicha, who became a sergeant in the gendarmerie in western Bosnia and married the daughter of an industrialist. When his town was overrun by the Croats in 1941, he escaped the death camps en famille et sans un sou, down the river to Belgrade.

  There was my own grandfather Petar, Peter the Good, whose wars ended when he surrendered to the Russians in Galicia in 1916; there are defeats which are more honourable than any fighting. Petar, the lucky one, died in his own bed, the last rites and everything else performed, a dignified death.

  There was even my maternal uncle Lyubisha, the Loved One, who spent a week in Paris hoping to become a tailor, then returned homesick to his village in the valley of the Morava. The mournful farewells under the butter-coloured arches of the railway station in Belgrade lasted longer than his apprenticeship in the city of lumière. No sooner had we sent our first tear-stained letters than he reappeared on our doorstep. They are softies on my mother’s side, the story goes, children of fat eastern Serbian soil, vineyards and plum orchards, restaurateurs and podrumdziyas or ‘cave masters’, who mark their years by the rhythms of wine making and not wars. They travel badly and wither when transplanted.

  The novelty, this generation around, was that the women no longer stayed at home. They flew the nest, acquired incomprehensible degrees and sometimes wed foreign men, adding further unpronounceable names and new gene patterns to the monkey-puzzle that is our family tree. Unlike the men, once gone they tended not to look back. In addition to my own Anglo-Serb son, my wider family now boasts Franco-Serbs, children of a French-Swiss surgeon; Prussian-Serbs, fathered by a posh German banker; and even Hispanic-Serbs, the offspring of a casino owner from California.

  My Goldsworthys are hardly outlandish. At least they were once our allies, my grandma said upon meeting a selection of tall, pink-skinned, blond-haired and blue-eyed future in-laws back in 1986. Above all they were neither Catholic nor Turk. And Montenegrins are just like the Pathans, my future father-in-law realized, looking at my grandmother in admiration, his size-twelve brogue tapping on our parquet floor, his tweed jacket too heavy for Belgrade in mid-May. Even without a shared language, they knew each other’s type. While my grandmother smuggled guns from Belgrade to the hills, and lard back into town, under the noses of German soldiers, he spent that war in Razmak, in the North-West Frontier Province, an officer of the Guides Cavalry defending India from the Panzer divisions that never got that far. In Serbian, razmak means distance, so there was a shared language after all. It was a good marriage.

  As it happens, I have my own war stories too. Before I got my first university job, I had worked as a small-time journalist. That was in the nineties, during the ‘war again’. Balkan expertise could easily be sold and apparently I had a Balkan story to tell. In the early autumn of 1999, I visited the northern Serbian plains to look at the molten toa
dstools of oil rigs hit by NATO bombs – dropped not more than a few weeks beforehand by my adopted compatriots against my compatriots by birth. The smell of carcinogenic smoke and rotting animal flesh hung in the air. There was clearly a lesson to be learned there, but it wasn’t about who had started the fight. The goodies and baddies were named in the nursery rhymes everybody sang; there was no point in adding my little foreign voice to the choir. In order to write I had to see. In order to see I had to go – over pontoons thrown across bombed bridges, driven by shadowy figures who had spent most of the decade charging foreigners the equivalent of my mother’s annual salary for a ride around bomb craters and God knows what else. I learned how to deflect the ‘where are you from?’ question in my mother tongue. I lived a strange existence for a short while. I dined at the Hyatt Hotel with journalists in bulletproof vests getting drunk on expense accounts, with blonde rock-chicks and high-class prostitutes amid the sheen of marble lobbies where everything was for sale, while lodging in my parental home on the other side of town, where the windows were lit by the bright copper of autumnal trees and nothing could be bought. I could think of no questions to ask. I watched and wrote nothing.

  I met a variety of politicians, opposition and government, in wood-panelled offices as big as football pitches, in opulent restaurants full of coke-heads and smuggled caviar, in lorry-driver bifes where they served tripe soup as hot as hell with cornbread and tiny chasers of homemade brandy, on park benches and in parked cars. I never sensed I was anywhere near the real story, whatever that might have been, and I hardly wanted to get there.