The Yugoslav Minister of Information, a tall and slightly rough-and-ready kind of guy, a former schoolteacher, invited me once to a white villa shaded by enormous chestnut trees in Dedinye, the Belgrade quartier where I lived between the ages of four and thirteen. We had a pointless conversation about the real nature of the conflict. In fact, I mainly translated the minister’s rambling sentences to an important British journalist I was accompanying (the real reason behind a sudden flurry of invitations), while thinking about the cycle paths unknown to either of my interlocutors, who were both members of the male ‘car and driver’ International. They ran just behind the villa’s walls right up to the hill above the military hospital, from which you can see half of Serbia on a clear day: its rolling hills, the shining ribbons of rivers, the flood plains, the plum orchards, the roofs of little churches like seashells amid lilac bushes.
The minister kept glancing over our shoulders towards a gigantic TV screen which showed muted footage of a basketball match. The villa was so eerily empty of furniture, it could have been the set for the third act of The Cherry Orchard. Both the party and the auction might have been in full swing, but we could see nothing from where we were sitting. ‘God, Vezzna, what a colossal waste of time,’ the journalist said as we caught a taxi back to the hotel, ‘what a bloody colossal waste of time.’ His sense of time-wasting was clearly different from mine, but I liked his wrinkled, intelligent face, with its mixture of gravitas and self-importance, a combination I couldn’t muster in a million years. It worked well in my native city. So did the neckties and the inability to speak Serbian, neither of which could I sport convincingly.
In fact, I allowed myself to be exploited for such meaningless little interpreting sessions because I enjoyed the inconspicuousness they granted me. I passed on words like tennis balls and examined hands, shoes, paintings, views from open windows, men being cagey with each other in a series of ornate salons while women brought in coffee cups on little silver trays. Some of the women shot curious sideways glances towards me, but most of the time I could walk through walls unnoticed. I was four months pregnant and knew none of this would last anyway. The entire city smelled of rubble and recent fires. We drove past the bombed-out hospital through the leafy streets towards the river, where we joined streams of traffic on the main road. The buses were so full that they tilted heavily on every bend. I saw the suffering faces of old men and women pressed against the windowpanes and thought of my mother and my father in their cold rooms, on these buses, in long hospital queues. I desperately wanted to escape the bombed city and at the same time longed to stay on for ever. The war again was over and there was no excuse for hanging on as far as work was concerned. The stories were allegedly elsewhere. At the Writers’ Club, the garden restaurant had already closed for the season, and Belgrade was gradually withdrawing into its smoky cellars and dives for the winter, the city willing itself to be invisible again.
Over the past couple of years, my body has been caught in a hormonal storm which wreaked havoc with all my operating systems. As a forerunner to cancer, I developed a disease of the eye muscle resulting in double vision, binocular diplopia, where each eye sees a single picture but with both eyes open one always sees two, partly overlapping, images. It is a strangely appropriate condition which I found almost comfortingly close to my inner ways of seeing. For some eighteen months I could read only with one eye closed. Then the illness suddenly lifted. My eyes settled back into their sockets and started to coordinate again.
Immersed in theorizing about double vision, mainly in order to convince myself that I wasn’t insane, I failed to notice the cancer (my cancer!) until the tumourchich became a proper, grown-up tumour, and was so large that it changed the shape of my breast. The healthy one lay flat on my chest like a milky pancake, the diseased one a beautiful glowing white mound straight out of a Renaissance painting, with a chocolate nipple which could have belonged to a fourteen-year-old. I now have a long duelling scar, like a smile, running diagonally across my right breast. On the scale of human misery, even within my own family, this barely registers at all. The doctors say it was simply bad luck – the illnesses could in no way have been connected. To me it seems that, for reasons which I can’t bear to think about just now, my body was simply giving up. But I am a lucky girl, all things considered.
Discussing one’s breasts in public is highly improper, particularly in my part of the world. I certainly hope this book is never translated into Serbian. This is not the kind of writing I had in mind when I penned my Nobel acceptance speech in pidgin French, in emulation of the Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric, who wrote sprawling historical sagas set in Ottoman Bosnia. Not that I had read any of them at that stage. I was only eight or nine, but I already had a fancy that matching anything that Ivo did would make my parents really proud of me. I practised the speech in front of the double armoire mirror, under the reflected light of my father’s green anglepoise and my mother’s bedside lamp, shaded in frilly duchess satin. The same ambition, the same desire to please, the same vanity, amazingly, is still at work. Remember me. Remember ME!
In the spring of 1986, I made strawberry jam for the first time. I stirred the fruit carefully to avoid bruising. I dried rows of glistening jars in the oven. I filled them with sweet-smelling thick liquid. I wrote and dated the labels, adding short pensées on love and waiting to each, all in an effort to make time pass more quickly. Warm strawberry juice melting into the mountain of sugar made me think of the opening scenes of Snow White. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the sweetest of them all? The princess of the Balkan kitchen might have been foolish but was no sacrificial virgin. I did not bring a single jar of my Chernobyl jam to England. I left them all in Belgrade, glowing on the shelves in neat rows. Or did I? The strawberries may or may not have been radioactive.
2. The Name of the Mother
BACK IN THE EIGHTIES, still a young bride, I called myself Vesna Bjelogrlic-Goldsworthy. On paper, the name seems longer than its nine syllables. The grand double-barrel was a compromise between patriotism, the knee-jerk feminism of a Belgrade princess and that romantic-submissive impulse which leads women like me – two-thirds Simone de Beauvoir, one-third Tammy Wynette – to promise to obey till death do us part. Spelling the name out, however, soon became a bore. My fellow Serbs, not even willing to contemplate Goldsworthy, preferred Goldsvorti, Golsforti, Golzuordi and even Golsvorti, by association with the novelist John Galsworthy, whose high literary status in Serbia is reflected in the fact that he has his own street in north Belgrade. Most of the time, I did not bother to correct anyone over there, just as I’ve never put to rights anyone over here who expressed surprise that ‘Vanessa’ was a Serbian name. More appealing than Vesta or Vespa, Vanessa suited me well. It was my onomastic equivalent of an invisible cloak.
Bjelogrlic, pronounced Byelogerlitch, turned into an obstacle race for the native English speaker. It was indeed a fine Slav ‘itch’, as Evelyn Waugh once said, and anyone called Ivlin Vo must have known a thing or two about itchy names. Byelogerlitch means ‘son of white throat’, which, admittedly, sounds somewhat Sioux-chieftainish in English but is quite OK, even a soupçon distinguished, in Serbian. On my wedding day in November 1986, the registrar in Hammersmith took a deep breath every time he approached it and, remarkably, succeeded not once. I felt sorry for the poor man. The bride, the groom and the two witnesses (our entire wedding party) took a collective gulp of air every time he reached the B. What a job!
Since then, a rare few have been brave enough to try. Blog-litch was as close as one normally got. I dropped it after a while. I felt I had nothing to prove by endlessly repeating the tedious sequence – b-for-beetroot, j-for-jam, e-for-ecdysis, l-for-Levant, o-for-oh dear – and the variants thereof. I had too many names to care about any one. Even Goldsworthy is more than one should normally need to burden people with. Occasionally, however – today, for example – I still feel a sudden impulse to teach the world and his aunt to pronounce Bjelogrlic properly.
The first Bjelogrlic was really, or allegedly really, a son of a ‘white throat’. That belongs to the matriarchal story of my patriarchs. Early in the nineteenth century, escaping from a forgotten Montenegrin blood feud, my ancestral mother crossed the border into Ottoman Herzegovina with two young sons, unwilling to reveal her name to anyone. She settled in Lipnik, a mountain village no more than a stone’s throw from her ancestral lands, but with a tribal frontier between her and whatever dispute threatened her sons’ lives. The young widow’s Montenegrin dress revealed more of her neck than those of her Herzegovinian Orthodox sisters, whose costume was barely different from the head-to-toe coverings of Muslim women. The colour of choice for clothing was black: ideal for both mourning and camouflage. It wasn’t a world in which beauty brought anything but trouble.
Lipnik lay in the lands ruled by Smail-Aga Chengich, a feudal lord notorious for bloodthirstiness and the subject of a nineteenth-century Croatian epic in which my ancestors, now prime specimens of the Christian rayah, the subjects of the glorious Turkish empire, were soon to feature with outstretched hands, begging, ‘Bread, master, bread,’ before joining in the heroic uprising in which Smail-Aga (pronounced, sweetly, Smile-Aga) ended up brutally murdered, which was probably no more and barely less than he deserved.
The account of Smail-Aga’s beheading, coincidentally at the hands of my Montenegrin granny’s fellow tribesmen, remained one of her favourite bedtime stories. Over the years, like some Christian Orthodox Scheherazade, Granny had developed two highly picaresque versions of the same plot. One was a big battlefield scene in which a turbaned head flew with a swing of a Montenegrin sword, like a cricket ball hit by a bat. The other was an altogether more luscious but less probable version in which Smail is lured away from his troops by dancing Montenegrin maidens with promises of music and sweetmeats. The ending is the same.
The ‘Turk’s’ head was taken to the Montenegrin court at Cetinje as a present to the Prince-Bishop and mounted on a contraption which made it bow to the ruler every time the door opened. If his subjects were anything like Granny, the Prince, who was a poet and a monk, would hardly have dared to complain about their gift.
‘Mama,’ pleaded Mother, ‘this is not a story for children. They will never be able to get to sleep.’ Her attempts to shield her daughters from such distinctly non-bourgeois versions of Balkan history were never an undivided success.
My mother’s family (my mother is the tallest child)
Many years later, Mother was again terribly upset when she overheard Granny telling my English husband how to preserve a human head. Their discussion, in which I acted as interpreter, focused on the relative advantages of pickling versus salting, a fresh take on recording Granny’s favourite recipe. Needless to say, Granny had no experience of headhunting, but she sensed what my husband, a recent English graduate in Balkan history, wanted to hear, and she also thought that a hint of menace might keep her exotic grandson-in-law on his toes.
She delivered her opinions with a girly twinkle in her eye, and a wide, beheading movement of her wrinkled hand, while bragging about the fact that her ferocious tribe had achieved the ultimate accolade of being called ‘whore’s bastards’ by their Turkish enemies. For a woman who had settled in a graceful and elegant former Austro-Hungarian town when she was barely in her teens, she seemed to me to have kept an astonishingly vivid link with the nineteenth-century Ottoman Balkans, as though nothing that had happened in the whole of the twentieth century could quite measure up to the triumphal defeat of the sultan in which her own grandfather had played a small part.
In preparation for the day when my hair starts to fall out from chemotherapy, I line up sepia photographs of my Herzegovinian great-grandmothers, the wives of the sons of the White Throat, and copy the ways they tied their scarves. I suddenly realize that behind the tortoiseshell frames of my spectacles, behind the reddish curls carefully layered by my Thai hairdresser, behind the smile, which none of them ever shows, I carry their face. The mirror and the photographs reflect each other in silent recognition and I take my place in a row of unsmiling mothers with strong chins, large brown eyes, high cheekbones and tall foreheads. The eyes have it all, however. Having known real sorrow, I finally seem to have learned to read them. Ours is not a smiling culture. My grandmother maintained to her dying day that it was unseemly for a woman to laugh in public and covered her mouth with her right hand whenever she did so, even with us at home. Hers was the most winning laughter anyone has heard.
I am not quite sure what happened to the White Throat and whether she existed at all. I dropped the beautiful, unpronounceable name, which was her bequest, soon after I got my first job in England. Unlike my ancestral matriarch and so many others in the part of the world I come from, I have never been a refugee. I am not an exile. Not quite an expatriate either: that term seems to be reserved for those coming from lands which are more fortunate than mine. A migrant, perhaps? That sounds too Mexican. An émigrée? Too Russian.
All these descriptions contain existential drama, cultural baggage which is highly inappropriate for someone who walked down the greenest lawn in Belgrade to the embassy of her adoptive country and, after a long but very polite interview with the consul, acquired a letter addressed to the ‘Under-Secretary of State’ – I had no idea who or what that was at the time – asking him (or her, or it) to grant me the right of abode in the kingdom of the lion and the unicorn. Everything about Britain seemed touched with angel dust at the time. I could sit through the most boring documentary about the miners’ strike or a royal wedding in order to catch background glimpses of my new home. I loved the embassy building, I loved the old-fashioned picture of the Queen on her throne hanging in the vestibule, I loved pouring little clouds of milk into my cups of Russian tea. Un nuage du lait: that’s what Britain was for me.
The letter from the British embassy, printed on heavy white paper adorned with an impressive watermark, was to be produced at the airport on arrival. I left with an invitation from the consul to drop in for a cup of tea when visiting my native city again: I must have left a fine impression. That’s how it was back in the eighties. Or that, maybe, is how it was for me. I was used to taking my good luck for granted, so I never knew.
Only at Heathrow, briefly, did my story touch those of others. The immigration officer decided that I needed to have my chest X-rayed and I was whisked off from Terminal 2 to a clinic in Terminal 3 in a minibus driven by a chatty woman in a grey and navy uniform. There were other people waiting to be seen – a worried Indian woman in a sari, an African family, a man in a strange green suit reading an Armenian book – but I was out before I could take a good look at any of them, my X-ray filed somewhere in the airport building, where, for all I know, it may still be. Only minutes later, I was on the Piccadilly Line – the Ellis Island of London’s huddled masses – with a copy of the London Review of Books.
One and one eventually became three. I am now a mother of a little boy. I earn my living teaching at an underfunded university in a prosperous London suburb. Daughter of a self-managed workers’ paradise, I excel at my job. I criticize and self-criticize, I censor and self-censor, I compose self-assessment sheets about self-managed time, I sit on teaching and research committees, I attend meetings and take notes, I know that literature has hidden and insidious meanings. I have even written a book about those. My communist upbringing, my upbringing in communism – to be able to live with myself without believing in anything I say, to be able to accept things without asking too many questions – has certainly stood me in good stead throughout my working life. A virtue is a virtue wherever you are, East or West. A transferable skill.
Housed in a cluster of seventies buildings, the university is more like a piece of the homeland I left behind than anything still remaining in it. Remove the student union shop, empty the car park, add a few tramlines below and a mesh of trolleybus wires above, and you could be back at Belgrade City Transport thirty years ago. Walking towards the lecture
theatres on crisp mornings, when the Thames, hidden behind neat rows of Edwardian villas, smells of rot and clay, I sometimes feel I am becoming my mother. My pace shortens and accelerates, my arms no longer wave about, I tread as elegantly as I can in my cowboy boots, and when I sit down I keep my hands in my lap and my back upright. I say no thank you and yes please. I smile. My eyes are blue.
My mother’s office is full of supplicants – members of her staff asking for a swap on the work rota or a day off for a spurious funeral, pensioners complaining about the slow issue of travel-cards, foreign students with vouchers gone astray. The room is full of cigarette smoke. (My mother doesn’t smoke, but practically all of the men and quite a few of the women who work for City Transport are chain-smokers.) A picture on the wall shows Comrade Tito, the Yugoslav President, inside a brand-new trolleybus. He wears the grey uniform of a marshal of the Yugoslav National Army, with more buttons on it than on the dashboard he is leaning against. Below Tito’s picture is a large street map of Belgrade, with a spider’s web of bus routes in blue, trolleybus routes in green and tram routes in red. My mother knows each of these by heart. At home, we sometimes play a game which consists of asking her questions about imaginary itineraries – what is the best route, for example, from Patrice Lumumba Street in Karaburma to the International Brigades Avenue in New Belgrade, on the other side of town – and she reels off line numbers, interchanges and frequencies. It is a game my mother loves.
Her office houses two large desks with telephones and typewriters, a couple of heavy leather armchairs and a small table with a ficus plant and an overflowing ashtray. When a visitor comes, Mother telephones for small cups of bitter coffee from the canteen in the basement. Anyone important is announced by a security officer, a large woman called Stanka, who wears a black leather jacket and short boots which end just below her melon-like calves and look as though they were designed by NASA for Mars landings. Under her jacket, Stanka has a wide belt with a pistol in a fine leather holster. She is a gregarious woman. She often laughs loudly and her belly moves up and down. Her pockets are full of boiled sweets, which she hands out to my sister and me when we visit.
Chernobyl Strawberries Page 4