In June 1986, my husband-to-be brought me over to his large family home in Sussex to plan the beginning of our life together. We were both recent graduates and decided to cross Europe, from Belgrade to the Sussex coast, in the cheapest possible way, by taking a couple of bus journeys. The first long leg was to be on one of the twice-weekly buses which took South Slav guest workers and their families to Paris. Our rucksacks were lodged between buckets of pickles and white cheese, and carefully wrapped sides of prosciutto, the food of homesickness. Large bundles and string-tied suitcases offered evidence of the travellers’ paradox: the poorer you are, the more you need to take with you.
My mother, my father and my sister drove us to the bus station in our white Skoda. It was a strange beginning to a voyage, a weird mixture of holiday and funeral. No one knew what to say. But go I must, and I went. We hugged for what seemed like hours, saying nothing, and I climbed on the bus in the full blast of some mournful southern tune. My parents and my sister stood outside and waved, silent, like creatures in an aquarium. My mother was the smallest of the three. I suddenly became aware that she was wearing one of my dresses, a frumpy floral print which only a few days beforehand I had thrown out as definitely unsuited to my new life in England. As the bus pulled away, she suddenly started running towards it, for no more than five or six yards, and stopped, frozen, just looking towards me.
In the long night through which I gave birth on the top floor of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, high above the terraces of west London, with epidurals coursing coldly through my spine, I switched from English to Serbian in the low moans I emitted between contractions. My Kenyan midwife, Esther, urged me on. ‘Brave thing. Brave thing,’ she kept repeating. ‘It’s almost over. It’s almost done.’ My son’s crown was already emerging into the world. I shouted ‘Mama,’ as, I gather, sailors do when drowning in the open seas. She came to me, silent, wearing that dress.
3. My Oaths of Allegiance
ONE OF MY FAVOURITE uncles, Zhivoyin, was once a guards officer in the king’s army and an important player in the coup of 27 March 1941, which brought down the Yugoslav regency and put an end to its attempts to appease Hitler. After a long internment in a German POW camp, my uncle returned to Belgrade and became some kind of big shot in the Yugoslav sports administration.
With his tailored suits, highly polished Oxford brogues and fine ankles in long black stockings, he stood out among the communist comrades in their strange costumes, vaguely related to some distant notion of a Western suit, and stranger shoes, cut like leatherette bricks. He resembled a bird of paradise in a poultry coop. Even his hand gestures, suggestive of great distinction, looked as though they might merit five years’ imprisonment followed by thorough re-education.
In his memoirs, Uncle Zhivoyin described the daily routines of a guards officer with a remarkable lack of pomposity. We loved the moments leading to grand parades – from the tips for high-gloss boot and brass-button polishing to the ways of applying a thin layer of face powder. My macho Serb compatriots were outdone by their Romanian neighbours, who favoured a barely discernible layer of lipstick on officers’ lips.
I’d never known anyone quite like my uncle Zhivoyin until I met my future father-in-law. The bearing, knowledge of shoe shine and brass, even some of the hand gestures: it was all there in this Old Etonian and Indian cavalry officer, but with a kind of dishevelled, devil-may-care dash which revealed the peculiarly British, old-fashioned and upper-class horror of anything that might be described as sissy, prissy or any other issy adjective.
I was sure that, in so far as any two people in our wider families would get on, my father-in-law and Uncle Zhivoyin would get on famously. My father-in-law, however, was having none of that. In the midst of some vigorous pruning in his Sussex garden, he declared that he couldn’t possibly understand a man who pledged his officer’s honour to the king and then worked for the communists. Not quite knowing how to respond, I suddenly grasped the sheer luxury of being a British male in the twentieth century. Every conceivable counter-argument notwithstanding – and I know there are many – the picnic rug on the moral high ground still came in khaki and red, the colours of his beloved regiment. My father-in-law stood on the high ground, wielding a pair of secateurs, chopping, felling and dead-heading, without a care in the world.
I swore allegiance three times, even without counting my marriage vows, and I know a thing or two about both swearing and allegiances. The most recent ceremony took place back in 1991. About to become a British citizen, I walked up to the office of a local solicitor in Chiswick, in a room above an electrical supplier’s shop. A dark silhouette with fingers poised over a keyboard was clearly visible through the frosted door panel on which the partners’ names were etched in copperplate Gothic. The scene was reminiscent of the opening shots of a forties detective mystery, except for the sound, which was that of click-clicking rather than tap-tapping, and the no-smoking signs.
My Yugoslav passport: first visits to England
This was an important day for me and I was unusually diffident. My knock on the door was barely audible. I needed a commissioner for oaths to witness my signature on a document in which I ‘swore by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second Her Heirs and Successors according to law’. (That’s it, then. No republicanism in this house.) In fact, I could have ‘solemnly and sincerely affirmed’ instead – the atheist option – but I preferred the poetry of the wording which invoked the Almighty. I had never made any pledges involving God before, and solemn affirmations were a bit socialist for my taste. This was not to be a trade union Labour Day picnic. Sadly, given the Miltonian frame of mind, I didn’t even have to read the words out loud.
‘Just sign on the dotted line, please,’ said a small man wearing an orthopaedic shoe and a smile even shier than mine, as he stood up from the enormous desk which occupied a good half of his office. Everything in the room, including him, seemed to be mushroom-coloured and slightly mouldy, as though salvaged from a shipwreck. He shook my hand, I proffered a five-pound note and off went the form, in a pre-paid brown envelope, to the India Building in Liverpool, its name a solitary, faint echo of the kind of reading material which fired my childhood fantasy of Britain. I wasn’t sure if Messrs Henty, Haggard, Kipling and Buchan would have entirely approved of a foreign woman, a ‘sleeping dictionary’, signing any document in her own hand, but at least I now knew that I could dead-pan as well as any of their heroes. (I still can’t hear the words ‘Her Majesty’ without at the same time hearing a line of metallic bugles blowing heaven wards. Luckily enough, in my circles at least, one doesn’t hear them that often.)
My previous oath was given at a ceremony which took place in the dying days of February 1980, only a few months before my baccalaureate exams. These were called, appropriately, the Matura examination in Serbian, even if our maturity was not high on the list of aptitudes to be tested. The year ahead was full of initiation rites: my first heartbreak, my first holiday alone (in fact, with my sister, who, being a couple of years younger, enjoyed every hard-won freedom a couple of years ahead of me), my first autumn at university. This particular evening was to be the first of those firsts. With a small group of nervous fellow maturants gathered in the senior common room of my Belgrade lycée, each clutching a red carnation and a brand-new red membership card bearing a small black hammer and sickle, I swore allegiance to the Communist Party, which I was about to join. Not many of my former compatriots in that swathe of land between the nostril of the Adriatic Sea and the lush hips of the Balkan peninsula would now own up to having done the same (even if we all know who you are, my friends!).
In fact, the proper name of the organization I was joining was the League of Communists of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but there was no poetry in that. The jeunesse dorée of Belgrade called it the ‘Ka-Pe-Yot’. Its pre-war acronym sounded vaguely romantic, revolutionary and illegal, redolent of the heavy coats with ast
rakhan collars, thick silk stockings and night-pot hats of the twenties and thirties, and prisons in which you sat around a big table with the comrades, translating radical German philosophy and declaring that you recognized no court but the court of your own revolutionary party. If you missed the Spanish Civil War this was the next best thing.
Funnily enough, I don’t remember the words of the oath, although I can pretty well guess what they may have been. I remember that I made no note of the event in my otherwise impeccably detailed diary for that year (the last year for which I kept a diary – sadly, just as the details were becoming more interesting, I seem to have run out of enthusiasm for recording them). It might be that I was aware even then of the need to airbrush the event, subconsciously mindful of its impending absurdity. I take it as read that the oath was not entirely in keeping with the one I subsequently pledged to Her Majesty (Ta-rraaa!), but the Almighty, probably even QE2 herself, will surely understand. Her subjects seem to me an increasingly fickle lot. Why I joined the Ka-Pe-Yot, and in 1980 of all times, is another matter altogether. Its head, Comrade Joseph Broz Tito, was already in a hospital in Slovenia, waiting for a leg amputation in readiness for all those grisly jokes about knuckle stews that were to fill the many days of his grotesque obsequies in May 1980, and even I could hear the water sloshing on the lower decks.
My father, my national defence teacher, and Tom Courtenay have a lot to answer for. My father was a reluctant communist himself (membership was part and parcel of his job description) and a strong advocate of a wait and see’ policy in all things, but in matters political more than anything else. Where I come from, it is the option of the wise, yet I would ‘wait and see’ for no man. ‘Wait and see’ was my father’s way of saying you might well regret this later. The more he reasoned, the less reasonable I became. I had to join and that was that. My mother didn’t help. Not a member herself, even when her refusal to join the party was clearly detrimental to her career as a bureaucrat in public transport, she was none the less exceedingly proud whenever one of her daughters was chosen for something, whatever that something might be, and the comrades were no exception. They were still running the country after all. The careers she saw me in – Yugoslav ambassador to the UN, director-general of Belgrade TV, editor-in-chief of the Politika newspaper – all involved party membership. The fact that she did not wish me to join was clearly a bit awkward, but we never addressed that particular problem, just as we never spoke about the sheer logistics involved in chairing a session of the Security Council on the Hudson while making it home to Belgrade in time for dinner en famille, another thing that she would always expect of me. Such minor inconveniences would surely sort themselves out one way or another. As, indeed, they did.
If anyone, Tom Courtenay may have been the main culprit. In all those long afternoons of the seventies which I spent sitting in matinée screenings at the National Museum of Cinematography, in the roomy basement of a building in Kosovo Street in Belgrade, emerging bleary-eyed into the blinding light of the Balkan summer, few films affected me as deeply as Dr Zhivago. Granted, part of me knew even then that it was fundamentally a piece of sentimental trash, but the Great Russian Soul, as sieved through the quintessentially English melancholic view of history, was absolutely irresistible. The English played the Russians with the sort of respect and care that was only ever matched by Americans playing the English – one empire nodding to another in recognition that we are all heading in the same direction.
And Dr Zhivago was, for me, mainly about Strelnikov. Lara was an absolute blank, and the others were hardly worth bothering with. A wounded male in an armoured train cutting its way through Siberian snowdrifts (red flags a-flutter, gold-rimmed spectacles a-twinkling), embracing communism as a cure for a broken heart, Courtenay’s Strelnikov was clearly irresistible. Like some blond angel of destruction hurtling towards his death because of that evil, corrupt Komarovsky, he was the man every silly fool in Belgrade (even if, quite possibly, nowhere else) wept for. There was no need to read Pasternak if you had David Lean, with all those comrades bleeding on virgin snow under the assaults of cruel tsarist Cossack cavalry, all the rich fur and rows of trembling birch trees, boots falling on the frozen surface of snow like silver spoons on crème brûlée, and all that lingering, annoying, sentimental music!
I knew even then that my communism was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy in which tall men and slim, bookish women argued passionately, and painstakingly printed illegal leaflets on small presses hidden in back rooms whose doors were as taut as the membrane of a drum, always about to burst under the policeman’s heavy boot. There was no room in that fantasy for murderous stocky Josephs – Dzhugashvili the Georgian (a.k.a. Stalin) and Broz, the Slovene-Croat (a.k.a. Tito) – not even for the fatherly, dumpy Karl and Friedrich (Tweedledum and Tweedledee), let alone their ten (or was it eleven?) theses on Feuerbach we had to know by heart for our philosophy lessons. They were all clearly deviating from my party line. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point surely was to make it more beautiful.
Of course, you may say, Strelnikov/Courtenay had it easy, cast as he was against not only that Orientalist devil Komarovsky (Rod Steiger could hardly erase the memory of evil Jud Fry from Oklahoma! with his bourgeois little beard) but also the equally dark-haired, doe-eyed and totally uncool Dr Zhivago/Omar Sharif, who, his jauntily tilted fur hat notwithstanding, looked about as Russian as John Travolta. Wasn’t that part of the plan? The West was clearly in love with its enemy, and I understood that love story perfectly well. It was underpinned by the same longing for simplicity, sharing and self-denial which now makes my British compatriots buy Shaker kitchens and wear Birkenstock sandals. Declutter, comrades, for heaven’s sake!
My national defence teacher, Brka, the Moustache, a graduate in Marxist philosophy from a provincial university, was a handsome young man brimming with energy and wit. He obviously had the annual task of enlisting a select crop of eighteen-year-olds. Who could have been a more fitting candidate than the school egghead who simply had to excel in every subject, including his own? I can still tell you how to measure the distance between the sight of the gun and the moving target, according to the visibility of particular body features. I still know the butt of my M-48 from the muzzle. In fact, the year before I joined the party I practised with an airgun for a week in our back garden in order to achieve the best results in the school’s annual shooting competition. Clouds of sparrows flew off our cherry trees with every shot, our dog leapt and barked, straight-backed and alert like an arrow by my right knee, in what was clearly some Jungian doggy memory of hunting (the only meat he ever saw came from the butcher’s block or a tin). Blossom drifted aimlessly in the air. But for the din we were creating, we could have been in a Japanese postcard. Once I knew which eye to close when aligning the sights, I was away.
While congratulating me on my marksmanship on the bus returning from the shooting range, Brka added that he expected no less of me. During his national service in Bileca, in Herzegovina, he was once inspected on a parade by a kosher five-star Yugoslav National Army general by the name of Bjelogrlic. He was clearly under the impression that the man was my paternal uncle. He still remembered the general’s grey hair, cut incredibly short and combed en brosse, the voice of calm authority with which he delivered a patriotic speech, and the missing index finger on his right hand. I have to admit that few things are potentially as manly as a finger blown off in the heat of battle. There are exceptions, such as my mother’s secretary, Toma, but the loss of his digit is not quite the same thing.
I could hardly own up to the fact that I was not having tea with ‘my uncle’ the general every Thursday afternoon. In a sense we must have been related – as the White Throats all are, in one way or another, since there are no more than a couple of hundred of us extant around the world. As far as Brka was concerned, I clearly hailed from the right side of the tracks. That quite a few, even perhaps a majority of my wider family, might have b
een on the other side, or sides (in any war you cared to mention), was not to be looked at too closely.
Whoever was to blame or to credit, I was undeniably among the group of students gathered in the senior common room of our Belgrade lycée on a rainy February day, waiting to join the party which would barely survive for another five or six years. I am aware that the quaint French tag of lycée hardly does justice to the fifties, Mies van der Rohe-inspired, modernist powerhouse of learning and teenage romance I attended between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. ‘Grammar school’ sounds to me too earnest and plain, almost Quakerish, and ‘gymnasium’ too weird and Germanic for my alma mater, known locally as XIII Beogradska Gimnazija, and situated on the brow of one of the city’s leafy hills. Today in Britain it would be called a city academy. It educated some of the most intelligent and most fashion-conscious young people east of the Iron Curtain.
The city of Belgrade and its lycées could in fact be divided into three rings. In the inner ring – the Centar or the Town, as it was often metonymically referred to — the lycées were numbered in single Roman numerals, and were, as a rule, housed in neoclassical, butter- or soot-coloured edifices with roofs supported by muscular stone giants. These had been the boys’ and girls’ schools of the pre-war Serbian elite. The education system continued to be highly selective, perhaps even more so, under the communists. You could not get a place in a good lycée without a solid combination of the right kind of home address, high grades, parental connections and sometimes even expensive weeks of cramming for the entrance exam. (My sister, for example, inherited the same tutor who had put my father through his paces some thirty years before, an out-of-work pre-war university professor with a whole shelf of books to his name.) At least the schools were now free of charge and co-ed.
Chernobyl Strawberries Page 6