Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  The students of the ‘Town’ lycées were a weird mixture of the sallow offspring of the newly privileged who occupied the grand apartments hastily abandoned by the old elite in 1941 or 1945, grumpy ‘old Belgraders’ of all persuasions who remained in basement and attic flats, and the bright sons and daughters of the new working class. The last group spoke a multitude of dialects and frequently sported improbable jumpers, knitted in their villages of origin using the wool of sheep with which they were personally acquainted. They lived four to a room in dilapidated tenements around the multitude of courtyards which clustered like honeycomb between the central boulevards. Their parents’ names languished on the waiting lists for new apartments in the housing estates which were endlessly sprouting on the outer ring of the city.

  The Corbusian vision of social paradise, which this replacement for the honeycomb embodied, looked like a beekeeper’s nightmare. In it, settlements bore names of quaint old villages obliterated before an advancing army of cranes and scaffolding. There were as yet no lycées, only a few scattered and oversubscribed primary schools. Sleepy teenagers from the tower blocks arrived every morning via green city buses at the schools of the inner ring. The historic suburbs with wide tree-lined streets, where Art Deco apartment blocks on the main road hid fine houses with large gardens, were usually referred to as brda – the hills – and their gilded youth as brdjani – the hillbillies. The bus lines which brought the peasants – the inhabitants of the outer ring – into the demesne of the hillbillies of the inner ring bore the names of the old villages which marked their final destinations. Romantic names such as Cerak (Oak Grove), Bele Vode (White Waters), Visnyichka Banya (Sour Cherry Spa), Veliki Mokri Lug (the Great Wet Copse) and Mali Mokri Lug (the Little Wet Copse) obscured the drab socialist realities of what the Germans called Trabantenstadten, Trabant Towns. Bleak blocks of flats smelled of coal and sauerkraut. Amid them, children played on muddy lawns until summoned home by a piercing shout from a distant balcony. At dusk, parental cries multiplied, like the screeching of swallows or bats.

  The in-comers from the outer circle normally formed little groups according to the bus routes on which they travelled. Hillbillies, meanwhile, were the offspring of Belgrade yuppies, who, like the children of New Labour in the Britain of the late nineties, preferred to forget where they came from and instead enjoyed the privileges of where they were at the moment. They dressed fashionably, read glossy foreign magazines available only by subscription, drove smart little cars imported from the West and enjoyed holidays abroad or in one or two select spots on the Adriatic coast. The walled old towns were in. Any resort with hotels belonging to the trade unions or offering package holidays for the déclassés from abroad was out. Any foreigner who could afford nothing better than a holiday on the Yugoslav coast was by definition to be looked down on. Membership of the Communist Party was itself clearly coded in the Hillbilly Book of Etiquette: as a rule of thumb, it was socially smarter not to join (and particularly smart to endure a meaningless job as a punishment for not joining). I was obviously committing a social faux pas of tectonic proportions, but then, owing to my family’s somewhat eccentric movements, I was only a tentative hillbilly anyway. I was never entirely sure where I was supposed to belong, so I made a career of not belonging.

  In February 1980, in our senior common room new members of the Communist Party represented a more raggle-taggle selection than before. Some were visibly keen, some rather diffident, some were obvious (clever-clogs, careerists with a bad sense of timing, those who carried a briefcase to school, prominent members of youth organizations, children of well-known communists who could hardly afford to refuse to join), some rather less so (ditzy girls from old families who had fallen for the hammer-’n’-sickle chic, the school poet, the fourth-grade hunk, a good third of the school basketball team, encouraged to join as role models and highly visible because they were all six foot six and chewing gum). Working out which members of the teaching staff belonged to the party, information you wouldn’t normally have been privy to as a student, was part of the privilege conferred by this particular entry into the adult world. The rest of the evening was a blur. An oath was said, a paper signed, the red carnation dropped into a litterbin on the way home. I still tend to avoid buying carnations whenever I can: they remind me of communists and winter funerals.

  A year or two later my membership lapsed through nonpayment of my monthly subscription fees. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford the student rates, which were nominal; it was pretty obvious that the party was over, and not responding to the reminders for payment was the most elegant way of getting yourself expelled, if any expulsions ever officially took place, that is – I am not entirely sure. By the time of the first demonstrations of Albanian students in Prishtina in 1981, I had already ceased to pay attention to Ka-Pe-Yot and its sleazy eighties avatars. Long before the wall began to crumble in Berlin, Yugoslavs were busily denying any affiliation with their own Communist Party. You either tended to forget your membership entirely or put it about that you had been expelled, by the party secretary in person, for saying this or that straight to his or her face. There were usually no witnesses, and the secretaries were hardly likely to raise their heads above the parapet and put the record straight when they themselves were busily composing accounts of the dramatic events which surrounded their own expulsion.

  The only people who still went around saying that communism was basically a good idea were the Informbirovci, the old communists who remained loyal to Russia at the time of Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948 and did their time in the Goli Otok labour camp in the Adriatic as punishment. They were mostly senile and the only other thing they could remember was the Russian lyrics of the Internationale.

  In fact, by the time I settled in England, I managed to forget that I had ever been a communist, and cheerfully supported the Conservative Party campaign in Hammersmith in west London, where I lived at that point, in its efforts to win the 1987 election. My great-grandfather-in-law was the first ever MP for Hammersmith (Conservative, bien sûr), although he was never poor enough actually to live in his constituency. Both a desire for symmetry and an East European allergy to anything that could be described as leftist, which is so often the first phase in our westward movement, can be claimed as mitigating circumstances. Hands-on experience of campaigning was an invaluable initiation into the rituals of Britishness. I was delivering leaflets, canvassing, urging old ladies not to forget to exercise their democratic right, counting ‘our supporters’ in a well-thumbed copy of the electoral roll. The prospective MP was a thoroughly nice chap. I was even introduced to his parents. Championing Maggie Thatcher, by now, probably seems like something that should be more difficult to own up to than being a fully paid-up commie, but what the hell? Comrades, I am your comrade again, I promise.

  The Goldsworthy campaign trail

  For at least a couple of years after ‘we’ won that election, I remained an ardent royalist and a true-blue Conservative, in what was neither the first nor the last of my spectacular political U-turns (by then, though, I was sufficiently aware of my own fickleness not to be inclined to formalize membership of any organization). It was disappointing to learn that one didn’t necessarily become any wiser as one grew older, although the ‘wait and see’ policy – as advocated by my father – finally began to show distinct advantages. If you stood ‘waiting and seeing’ long enough, you were bound to catch me on my next revolution.

  The only time I had to account for the communism business was before a bespectacled young man in the consular section of the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. In the eighties, before I acquired British citizenship, I had some entertaining times there applying for a US entry visa on my old Red passport. Obviously, I had to tick the Yes box against the ‘Are you or were you ever a member of a Communist, Terrorist or similar organization?’ question on the visa application. I needed to provide explanatory details on the dotted line and the best I could come up with was ‘The Yugoslav Communist
Party was never really a communist party and I never paid my membership fees.’ Feeble, perhaps, but it seemed to impress the young man. In sheer bravado, I decided to tell him about my ongoing electioneering activities. The initial explanation was more than sufficient to get me into the United States, but I was not one to do anything by half. Before my very eyes, I was finally turning into one of those dissidents from Hollywood movies. I was the kind of woman who gamely sleeps with the hero on his brief assignment behind the Iron Curtain and is then sentenced to life imprisonment or casually shot at a checkpoint. The bespectacled young man played with the cuffs of his Brooks Brothers shirt. I loved his accent. I loved his college ring. I wanted to become his friend. Like Maggie, I was, at that stage, in love with everything American. I was eager to hit the road with my thirty-day Greyhound pass, counting on doing a state a day at least, with a copy of On the Road in my rucksack. A rejection would have been devastating.

  My earliest oath of allegiance, way back in 1968, is the only one I still remember word for word, even after all these years. ‘Today, as I become a pioneer, I promise that I will study and work industriously, respect my parents and my elders and be a sincere, trusted friend who keeps a given word,’ I echoed in a choir of thin, seven-year-old voices, sixty or so kids from the first grade of the 22 December Primary School. We were gathered on the glorious stage of the central hall in the guards’ barracks in the Belgrade suburb of Topchider, in front of dozens and dozens of men in uniform, teachers, parents and older pupils, all dressed up to the nines to celebrate our school day. It was also Army Day hence the top brass: such attempts at across-the-line socializing were clearly good for army PR. The room was dripping with gold braid.

  The new pioneers were dressed in identical white shirts, navy trousers and pleated skirts, white stockings, black lace-ups or patent-leather shoes, and brand-new triangular red scarves around the neck, with the emblem of the Pioneers’ Union. The officers stood up and saluted with an outstretched hand, fingers aligned at an angle of forty-five degrees just above the right temple; the pioneers responded with a clenched fist, the longest way up, the shortest down. Fatherly figures looked down at all of us from the photographs suspended in large frames above the stage. In one of them Comrade Tito and his wife, Comrade Jovanka, were sharing a laugh with a group of young pioneers just like us. He was dressed in a white naval uniform, she in a demure little black dress with a posy of flowers in her hands, the beehive hairdo fashionable in the fifties towering over his officer’s hat by a couple of inches.

  Layers of fine snow, thick and softer than goose-down, covered the valley of Topchider, bedecking its former royal hunting lodge and sprinkling the hills around it. Snowflakes went on falling silently beyond the tall French windows, and their glorious light filtered through the white silk curtains. I stood out in front of the group and started reciting a long ballad about the glory and pain of the Fourth Partisan Offensive in 1943, when the heroic troops (‘our fighters’) marched for days from north-west Bosnia, across the Neretva river to the safety of Montenegro, with 4,000 wounded and thousands of refugees in tow. (A film version of the battle, with Yul Brynner, Orson Welles and Franco Nero, was one of those spectacles we later saw whenever no one could think of a better thing to do on a school away-day.)

  My voice trembled as the presenter lowered the microphone by a foot or two, then steadied itself. I fluffed not once. My mother, resplendent in a sky-blue Chanel suit, with a little white fur collar and pearl earrings, her eyes filled with tears, led the applause from the fifth row. She was thirty-four, small and elegant, her eyes the colour of cornflowers, her hair the colour of mahogany, a glorious crown of thick curls. She was the most beautiful woman in that vast room. I was clearly the chosen one.

  My sister and I spent the following day sledging on a hillock which was known to the local kids as Hiroshima. Halfway down, it had a bump which made the sledges jump and land about a foot further on, with the thuds of wood followed by thuds of little bottoms and excited screams. My sister, aged five, was a picky eater, weighing barely two and a half stone, with the long face of Anne Frank. She was endlessly pursued by my mother and my grandmother with spoonfuls of cod liver oil and tasty morsels of this or that. She subsisted mainly on crusty bread with homemade damson jam. We were known to take jars of jam on holiday with us for fear that she would not want to eat any hotel food, in spite of the protestations of my father, who argued that children never starved themselves to death if food was on offer, whatever it may be. On Hiroshima, my skinny sister flew higher and screamed louder than any of us.

  My first LP

  I was just pulling her on a sledge back towards the house, our fingers and toes frozen solid and our lips and noses blue, when my father turned the corner, tall and imposing in his black Crombie coat, with a paisley scarf, black beret and black leather gloves. He looked like a fifties matinée idol, a cross between Cary Grant and Clark Gable, with a thicker moustache and larger, more sensitive eyes than either of those two. His face was beaming and he was carrying a small black valise with metal trimmings which looked like an old-fashioned explosive device. Once inside the house, he opened the valise to reveal a set of speakers and a turntable with a button which could be pointed towards 16, 33 and 45. It was the Beat Boy, our first ever, East German-made, gramophone. From under his long coat my father produced a vinyl record in a dark green sleeve. The faces of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif were staring at us from the cover, his puppy eyes dark brown, hers improbably green. In the corner of the room, below a tall Christmas tree which stood, still undecorated, on its wooden cross, I was being led into the foothills of my love affair with Strelnikov.

  My father slowly took his coat off, carefully put the record on and asked Mother to dance. My sister went to fetch herself a tartine of bread and jam. The two of them, he large and tall and dark, she fair, tiny and childlike in her size-three flat fur slippers, just stood there looking at each other, and then at me looking at them.

  I last saw Strelnikov in early 1987, on the frozen platform of Budapest’s Keleti Station, walking the twenty or so yards alongside my carriage, up and down and back again, little heaps of dirty snow crunching under his highly polished boots. His grey officer’s overcoat and grey fur hat with a shiny enamel red star on it made him appear even taller than he already was. With his cropped blond hair and blue eyes he looked like a lost deity from some Slavonic Götterdämmerung.

  My Belgrade-bound train was coming from Moscow and he had obviously been sent to meet someone who had failed to materialize. The station was dark and full of smoke and my carriage smelled of wurst and coal. People with yellowish skin, badly cut clothing and strange footwear, once so typical of winters in the Eastern Bloc, gave him a wide berth as they passed, their expressions filled with barely disguised hatred. He could not have been much older than twenty-five, a Russian boy who stood alone in an empty circle on a crowded platform, not looking at anyone, until, at one moment, he lifted his head towards the carriage and his eyes met with mine. I smiled. He gave me a long absent-minded glance, but his face remained inscrutable and distant. He never smiled back.

  4. A Poem for Comrade Tito

  BETWEEN THE AGES of four and twenty-four I wrote poetry every day. It is debatable how far one could divide the days into good and bad as regards the production line, but on some I wrote as many as four hundred lines of verse – running up to ten separate poems – while on others I polished a single couplet until it had not a single word in common with the original version, and then back again.

  I am not at all sure where all that poetry came from. Ours was a reasonably bookish house, but not a particularly poetic one. We possessed hardly any books of poetry. In fact, before I started buying books, our library consisted of my father’s mathematics collection, mainly in Russian, and a haphazard assortment of nineteenth-century novels in an equally random selection of languages. Our entire book collection fitted into a single bookcase with fragile glass doors, locked by an ornate key with a win
e-coloured silk tassel. A row of porcelain figurines which stood in front of cloth-bound editions of overviews of higher mathematics, Kursi vishei matematiki, published in Moscow and Leningrad in the late forties, suggested correctly that the books were seldom moved from their places, although that would be misleading as far as our reading habits were concerned. We all read like souls possessed, even if we did not own many books.

  Books were very expensive, and if a neighbour or an aunt bought a copy of a novel – it might have been anything from the Croatian translation of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published when I was four, to Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don in its original Russian – we all read it, irrespective of age and pedagogical advice. I was barely out of primary school when I asked an elderly great-aunt about how exactly – quoting D. H. Lawrence – one was meant to ‘fuck a little flame into being’. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was, in fact, my favourite novel before I discovered Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. That’s how topsy-turvy my reading world was.

  All of us knew a lot of poems by heart. Yugoslav lycées tended to make their students learn a couple every week. They adhered to strict learning programmes, which meant that the entire population of fourteen-year-olds up and down the country would be learning the same poem in the same week, and that my parents knew exactly what we were up to, because they learned exactly the same poem in exactly the same week when they were fourteen (except, of course, for those poets who have since disappeared from the face of the earth because they have said or done something not said or not done). We all agreed that the only poetry you truly possess and enjoy is that which you know by heart.