My mother never forgets to ask Stanka about the health of her only child, Stanko, a little boy whose legs are thin and spindly, like cooked spaghetti. The security officer is the only single mother we know in the whole of Belgrade, and we feel sorry for her little son, as though he were an orphan, or worse. We cannot begin to imagine what his sad, fatherless life must be like. Stanka often repeats that Stanko is the only man in the entire world she would cook and wash for. ‘Men, they are all the same,’ she laughs, and puts her big hand over the pistol holster. ‘They all deserve to rot in hell.’ My mother doesn’t laugh. ‘Off to work, woman. Off to work,’ she says, and gives Stanka a pat on the back with her small hand, a large amethyst and gold ring glinting against the heavy leather jacket. Stanka seems almost a foot taller than my mother.
There are three telephones on my mother’s desk. They ring all the time and she often speaks on two lines simultaneously. My mother’s secretary, a middle-aged white-haired man called Toma, without the index finger on his right hand (a hunting accident), comes in and out of the room carrying bits of paper for my mother to sign. (I can’t remember whether the absence of a digit affected Toma’s touch-typing speed.) Many of the supplicants assume that Toma is the boss – communism notwithstanding, Yugoslavia is still a patriarchal place – and start repeating their stories of misfortune when he enters. When Toma points out the error of their ways, they return to my mother with a syrupy flow of apologies.
I sit in one of the armchairs with a glass of raspberry squash and listen, waiting for my mother to finish work. She keeps telling everyone about my exceptional school results and the supplicants smile at me ingratiatingly. I am embarrassed, proud and pleased at the same time. I tell everyone I want to be a poetess when I grow up.
It is 8 March, International Women’s Day. Most of the visitors and quite a few employees bring in a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates. My mother’s desk is covered with cards, some of them with the picture of Klara Zetkin, the German communist leader, whose square jaw reminds me of Stanka. By the end of the afternoon, the hyacinths almost overpower the smell of smoke. I am here to help Mother carry the presents into the car: it is one of my annual treats. For days and even weeks after 8 March we visit relations and friends, distributing the boxes of chocolates and potted hyacinths Mother got.
My father waits in our white Skoda outside. During the drive home, as always at the end of the working day, my mother runs through events from the office in detail, but Father switches off after a minute or two. You can tell when he is not listening any more from the automatic intervals between his yeses, but she carries on regardless. It is the telling rather than his responses that seems to matter to her. My sister and I know all of the many dramatis personae of Mother’s office life by name, ethnic origin and family situation. We know their illnesses, their children’s misadventures at school, the location of their summer houses and allotments, details of their spouses’ jobs. My father never talks about his work. If you ask him what he does at the office, he normally says that he sharpens pencils or some such lark.
My parents, before me
Mother leaves home at five-ten every morning in order to be at work at six-thirty. The ticket kiosks throughout Belgrade open at seven o’clock and she has a whole series of telephone calls to make beforehand. At seven, she telephones home to wake up my sister and me for school. She tells us what she’s put out for breakfast on the kitchen table and which clothes she’s hung on the towel rail, and sometimes asks, ‘What’s new?’ absent-mindedly, as though anything much could have happened in the two hours of sleep we’ve had since she left. At other times she says, ‘Molim’ – ‘Yes please’ – as though we’d rung her. When we play office, my sister and I emulate this particular tone on imaginary air telephones. In fact, we often play office, and my mother brings empty form books, paper clips and pieces of used indigo paper so that we can issue forms in triplicate. We even have our special office names for the game. My sister – who is normally my secretary – calls herself Clementine. I chide her about sloppy form-filling, and she bangs her imaginary carriage return in noisy protest.
Most people in our street go to work an hour later than my mother. Often, when I leave for school, I see her small footprints like rows of hurried exclamation marks in untouched snow. I know that she was the first person in the entire street to leave her warm house in the morning, to take her seat on an empty bus whose wheels churn the icy slush in semi-darkness. At eleven, I am already taller than her, with longer, wider feet. I feel strangely protective towards Mother’s traces: their edges soften and blur as the day progresses.
My favourite time of day is the early afternoon, when we are back from school and my parents are not yet home. My sister and I riffle through the mail, telephone friends, cut pictures out of magazines and play music very, very loudly. We are latchkey children of sorts. My paternal grandmother lives on the floor below (our New House is three storeys high), but she is at work on her land most days between late February and late October. She tends to return at dusk with bags of fresh vegetables. We still own half a dozen acres of land in the Makish valley, most of it under maize, and my grandmother keeps an acre or so for tomatoes, peas, beans, lettuce and radishes. My sister and I love the smallest of new potatoes, which are barely bigger than pearls. Granny’s vegetable patch is reached through a narrow path in fields of corn, with long dark sabres of leaves which make the wind sound like a distant waterfall.
My mother comes back from work at four o’clock, with bags of ingredients for supper, breakfast and the next day’s lunch. She prepares the evening meal and the next day’s lunch at the same time every evening. Between five and seven, the kitchen is a noisy, steamy cauldron of activity; this is the best time to hide away in one’s room pretending to be doing urgent homework, while in fact writing poetry or simply staring out of the window, daydreaming.
My father also returns around four with a briefcase and a newspaper, and often with warm loaves of bread under his arm. He and my mother sometimes catch up with each other on the short walk from the bus stop. She travels home by public transport and he in special army buses which pick him up from the same street corner every morning and drop him off every afternoon, like khaki school buses for grey-haired boys. The schoolboy impression is reinforced by the fact that Father often carries his gym bag in his briefcase. He regularly puts in an hour’s swimming or a game of five-a-side football at the end of his working day.
Between four and five he usually has his siesta. He summons my sister or myself to tell him about our day at school. Our stories, he claims, lull him more easily to sleep. At five, he wakes up and promptly disappears downstairs, to the manly equivalent of the kitchen cauldron – things which involve neat kits of screwdrivers, pots of paint and polish, the car with its bonnet open, like the shoe-house of the fairy tale.
Early on, I begin to think that I should have been born a boy. I can’t break an egg without making a mess of it, while I am usually exceedingly quick at grasping the interior mechanisms of every domestic appliance and the precise order of the bulbs behind the TV screen. A sole man in a household of four women, my father welcomes my interest, though the guilt associated with joining him rather than my mother in the kitchen most frequently keeps me in my room, writing.
The army bus is full of handsome, jovial men in fine uniforms. When it stops on the corner, its doors often release a stream of laughter, through which my father walks towards us. It is quite unlike the long snake of the city bus, full to bursting with angry people holding tight twenty or thirty to each pole. My mother parts the crowd with sweet apologies, like Moses crossing the Red Sea.
My younger sister and I
From ten minutes to four onwards, my sister and I keep watch for their return, looking up and down the road like spectators at a tennis match. When we notice the small silhouettes of Mother and Grandmother at the opposite ends of the street, we run to help carry their loads: a mattock and bags of vegetables for Grandmother, w
ho comes from the bottom of the hill; carrier bags for Mother, who comes from the bus station at the top. If my father is the first to emerge, we simply jump on him, clinging like limpets to each arm, and let him carry us into the house. This ritual is repeated until some point just before my twelfth birthday, when my mother takes me aside and tells me that such unladylike actions no longer befit me. After that, only my sister jumps, hanging off my father’s right arm like a baby monkey, for two more years. I walk beside them.
The women in my family are tiny – my mother five foot two, my grandmother barely five foot. Returning from work, they sometimes round the corner at the same time: Mother click-clacking in her high heels, Grandmother slowly dragging her lame foot in the thick woollen socks and flat rubber shoes she wears in the field. Both women take enormous pride in their appearance: the younger in looking as elegant as possible in her tailored suits, the older in appearing as impoverished as possible in her widow’s black, with a black pinafore apron and a black scarf. When she takes her scarf off, Grandmother’s face is divided into spheres of dark and pale skin, like a diagram of the crescent moon.
If a neighbour stops to greet her, usually saying something along the lines of ‘Why are you working so hard at your age? Why don’t you take a rest and let the children look after you?’ Granny sighs and responds, ‘How can I? There is an entire family to feed.’ Mother gets quite upset if she hears this. Supporting your elders is a matter of pride and yet – like that aunt of Proust’s who would never own up to nodding off – my grandmother is absolutely unwilling to admit to being supported.
Even when they are not carrying anything, we run towards them, trailed by the barking from the neighbourhood dogs, who run along the length of each garden as we pass, in a doggy relay race. Grandmother greets us with a line of criticisms and complaints (‘You take so long, you lazy children. I’m so tired. I’m so thirsty. Why do I have to work for you?’), my mother with a hug and a smile, but we know that they are equally pleased to see us. Once Mother’s back, the Arcadian atmosphere of our day is replaced by mayhem for three or four hours. She prepares our meals, dusts and cleans and washes, makes things for the deep-freeze and things for the larder, and compiles the ledgers of household bills. When all of this is done, she watches television, reads or knits. Rarely but quite regularly, she disappears to cry in the darkness of one of the bedrooms. She does so noiselessly, without sobbing. You wouldn’t know that she was crying unless you asked. We don’t ask. We know that if we did she’d cry even more. After a while she washes her face and comes back to us.
When she was eighteen, my mother came to Belgrade from a village in eastern Serbia to study French and Arabic at the university. Her father wanted her to become a journalist and, when he picked her up from the train station in his horse-drawn carriage, they often spoke of the distant places she was going to report from one day. Mother was from a wealthy restaurateur’s family which once had lots of land and several houses arranged around a shady central courtyard full of dahlias and sweet peas. They had plum, apple, and peach and apricot orchards; a large vineyard on one of the best slopes in the village; a pepper and aubergine nursery dissected by a grid of small canals with streams of clean water; and a bostan — a field set aside for orange, green and yellow melons, and huge emerald balloons of watermelons on a necklace of leaves trailing on dry, fragrant soil. Mother told me how sometimes, in the evening, they used to throw the largest watermelons into the lake at the bottom of the field, and let them cool through the night, bobbing on the translucent surface of the water. They were ready to be picked up during the following morning’s swim.
My mother’s father
After a year in Belgrade, Mother had to return home to eastern Serbia. Her father and grandfather were both in prison for failing to deliver an impossible quota of grain to the state. At the same time, land was being taken away in order to create large state farms in the process known as collectivization, through which the peasants became state employees. My grandfather was ill-suited to becoming anyone’s employee. He had already been jailed in the Second World War and was now on a big-time collision course with the socialist state. My earliest memory of him is of hearing the vilest of curses directed at the TV screen on which President Tito walked proudly, arm in arm with some African leader whose people’s liberation struggle my country was generously supporting.
Grandfather returned from prison with raging tuberculosis and something that my mother always referred to as ‘open caverns’, bleeding wounds inside his chest. Paradoxically, by the time he was released the government’s policy had changed and the plan to put all land under state control was abandoned, but the family was never the same. Their restaurant was requisitioned as warehouse space and the land – with low purchase prices and high delivery quotas enforced by the state – was insufficient to keep the family going. Their horses were sold off, their coaches rotted away in empty barns. They were hungry amid some of the most fertile fields in Europe.
I remember childhood visits to my maternal home, when I roller-skated through the vast dining hall. The derelict kitchens still smelled of smoked meat, the ice house echoed emptily. I made complicated figures around ornate pillars and through swinging doors, bathed in the jelly-bean spectrum of light which came through tall glass panels inscribed with my mother’s maiden name.
By the time she returned to Belgrade to continue her studies, she had switched to law, a subject she never much liked. She had to support herself and law promised a securer future. She got a job as a night-shift duty clerk with City Transport and stayed there for forty years. You used to, apparently, in those days: stay in the same job, in the same town, in the same country, with the same man, your entire adult life. You had to choose very carefully, and make your choices before you were twenty-five, after which the options narrowed dramatically. The dream of bylines from foreign shores was passed on to me.
During those summers I spent in my mother’s village, I grew easily bored with the open fields and the relentless sun. I hid with a book in a guest room full of dark furniture and fading photographs of long-forgotten weddings and christenings. I remembered the room being used only once, when I was seven. The family gathered around the open coffin in which my maternal grandmother lay, aged fifty-two, her arms carefully folded across her chest. A few weeks before she died, she had taken me to one side and asked me not to cry at her funeral but to sing instead. I respected her wish. Although it felt unbearably sad, sadder even than crying, I sat in the corner of the big room, quietly singing a nursery rhyme, until Mother ordered me to stop. She had never ordered me to do anything before, which is one of the many reasons I remember the day so vividly. The table on which Granny’s body rested in a luminous circle of candles was now laden with fragrant yellow quinces.
I searched through my maternal grandmother’s vast dowry chests, looking for God knows what amid the layers of starched linen with fading embroidery. At the bottom of one drawer, under the lining of greaseproof paper, I found my mother’s French exercise book. I leafed through pages and pages of neatly copied, carefully accented text. ‘Je suis heureuse. Tu es heureux,’ said the last line, dated December 1949. The exercise in grammar suddenly seemed very personal. I returned the notebook to its resting place. I wanted to know whether Mother was really happy when she wrote this, but there was no way of telling.
In preparation for her wedding day, my maternal grandmother had embroidered countless pillow covers and hand-cloths with elaborate initials copied from some pattern book, but she had never learned to read or write. Although she was the eldest daughter of a wealthy family, she grew up in a patriarchal world in which education, even in its most basic form, was seldom deemed necessary for girls. In her turn, however, this illiterate woman became immeasurably proud of her own daughter’s schooling. It was possible that she had kept Mother’s French notebook as a treasured memento of some kind, although she would not have been able to read her own daughter’s words; just as my own mother – in spite of
all her education – will not be able to read this book.
You chose freedom, says my future father-in-law, who had obviously read too many novels by Solzhenitsyn. It appeals to him, the idea of this particular choice, even if it is not the one I made. Later on, when Yugoslavia descends into its bloody death throes, it begins to look like that. I’ve chosen freedom from the war, freedom to define myself along any lines I choose, freedom to like the British Army officers, with their posh accents, well-cut uniforms and thoughtful faces, who now make a career of running the Balkans on our behalf, even when I can hear detonations as background noise during my daily telephone calls to my parents and can guess who is playing with the buttons. God knows, my compatriots have done their share and I am certainly not judging anyone.
Ten years into my marriage and queues of my fellow Serbs and Montenegrins stretch in front of every embassy you can think of. My own walk across the lawn of the British embassy in General Zhdanov Street and the consul’s invitation begin to seem unreal. None the less, I am still, at heart, one of the spoilt generation, brought up on the dream of Nabokov, Kundera, Brodsky, Milosz, Kis, the Great East European Novelists and Poets (why do I remember only men just now?), writing the Great East European Novels and Poems. We were an endangered and protected species, the pre-1989ers, equipped through the best education communism could offer and the unstinting love of our East European mothers to believe that the world owed us a living, arrogant from birth. Had the consul not invited me to tea, I might not have come here at all.
Chernobyl Strawberries Page 5