My Communist Party membership card
Finally, the die was cast. It was to be a labour of love – literally hours of painstaking embroidery – by Olga, a formidable raven-haired, blue-eyed Montenegrin, who was hoping to become my mother-in-law one day, but sadly never would. My presque-belle-mère smoked fragrant cigarettes and produced sweetmeats and cups of bitter coffee on little scalloped silver trays throughout the long sessions of fittings and gossip which preceded the big event. She was the kind of woman I might have loved to have been in a different life, in a different world. Feminine to the core yet iron-willed, she was the Montenegrin equivalent of a Southern belle or a Sicilian princess, with ivory-smooth skin, high cheekbones and smoky, deliberate speech. The clothes she dreamed up for me reflected the sensual grandeur of a life she wished for her children but which I, definitely, was never going to lead. It was a life marked by subtle scents, jewellery and expensive clothes never worn more than once.
Olga lived in a large apartment with sunny, wide balconies overlooking the Sava river, with her two children and husband, a director of a large agricultural consultancy, who spent much of his time in the Soviet Far East. The walls of the apartment were decorated with dozens of needlework reproductions of Old Masters and an assortment of Wiehler ‘Gobelin tapestries’ in ornate ormolu frames. Years ago, her children embellished many of the Wiehlers with stickers which she never bothered to remove. Anselm Feuerbach’s Iphigenia gazed towards distant horizons dotted with low-flying US bomber planes, and a gargoyle stuck out a mischievous tongue from behind Empress Sissi of Austria, resplendent in her long butter-milk-coloured evening gown, a scene which uncannily evoked her end by the hand of an Italian assassin on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Olga’s ornate salon was, for days on end, the nerve centre of feverish planning for my big day. Every aspect of my appearance was discussed in detail and dozens of possible outfits and hairstyles analysed and rejected. Finally, it was decided that I would walk on stage in a wine-coloured shirt of gossamer-thread chiffon, revealing a charmeuse camisole of the same colour. The skirt was made to measure from expensive woollen material purchased especially from a clothier on Via della Spiga in Milan by one of my aunts. The same aunt produced a pair of silk stockings and a pair of patent-leather shoes in a box lined with midnight-blue velvet. I felt like a porcelain doll dressed up by a gaggle of excited eight-year-old girls, showered with luxurious items they would never have dreamed of wearing themselves. Around my neck was a necklace of Ohrid pearls, from the deep lake of that name in Yugoslav Macedonia, worn back to front. Its ornate clasp was more suited to the occasion than the silver cross at the front, bearing the date of my grandparents’ wedding and under it, in Cyrillic letters so tiny that they could only be read with a magnifying glass, ‘Take me with you and we will run together’, from the Song of Songs.
The stadium was full. Thousands of people filled the stands in an atmosphere which was in many ways the quintessence of the South Slav communist state. As it lay dying, the evening’s event represented one of the final twitches. The audience consisted largely of young, jeans-and-T-shirt-clad people, looking in every respect like a large, good-natured football or rock-concert crowd, but with the volume turned right down. On the grass pitch, translucent green under dozens of powerful reflector lights, hundreds and hundreds of children, wearing colour-coordinated overalls and waving multicoloured ribbons, turned their heads towards me. An amazing, unreal silence fell on the crowd like a blanket.
I began to read my poem. My voice rose towards the indigo-coloured night sky beyond the reflector lights against the sound of a Schumann piano concerto. Only the voice was not mine. Or, rather, it was mine, but it wasn’t live. I was simply opening my mouth, an expensive little goldfish dressed in raspberry, lip-synching to a tape which had been recorded in a studio deep in the bowels of Radio Belgrade a day or so earlier. No one was supposed to know that. I was too far away for anyone in the audience to notice, and the TV cameramen were told to go easy on close-ups. ‘To prevent any accidents,’ the event’s director said. I took that to mean accidents involving such seismic degrees of stage fright as would make one unable to utter a word. Dead on arrival in front of the 30,000. Now I wonder if what he meant was something altogether more sinister, such as saying things that one was not meant to say, things which might lose him a job and me my future. Or not saying a thing.
My lip-synching did not even seem particularly strange in the context of the birthday party for a man who had already been dead for four years. For a while Yugoslavs continued to celebrate the day in the traditional manner, with torches lit from eternal flames relayed around the country by handsome athletes, young workers and bright students, in a well-rehearsed marathon which was the first item on the news bulletins throughout the spring. The longer it was since his demise, the more there was to celebrate. Like the widow of a murdered Sicilian Mafia don, the country clung to his memory in an incongruous mixture of mourning and décolletage, as if knowing that a collective nervous breakdown would follow once the ritual was no longer observed.
There was something fated, something unavoidable about me being Tito’s posthumously chosen poet, even if I had never met him while he was alive. He and I had been narrowly missing each other since May 1969, when I was selected by my teachers, as a bright seven-year-old, to head a delegation of pioneers from my primary school in Dedinye on a trip to the White Palace.
Mine was a privileged school full of good-looking kids, in the right kind of neighbourhood, populated by army officers and party apparatchiks. It was a safe bet for this kind of event. Seeing us, Comrade Tito could not fail to observe the contentedness of Yugoslavia’s youth. I was supposed to hand him a bunch of flowers and give a four-line speech (composed by me and carefully vetted God knows where). Three days before the event, while practising a particularly difficult manoeuvre on my roller-skates, I fell on a rough piece of concrete by the garages behind our block of flats and broke my arm. The headmistress promptly declared that a plaster cast was inappropriate for even a member, let alone the head, of the delegation. Somebody else was to read my speech. I was ordered to stay at home, bitterly disappointed.
Tito’s main residence was on Uzhichka Street, a quiet road of neoclassical villas with carefully tended gardens, just down the road from the block of flats in which my father, recently employed by the Yugoslav National Army General Staff, was awarded the use of a one-bedroom apartment (pure luxury after our two-room bathroomless house: we were downwardly mobile for decades, but Dedinye marked the point when the tide might have begun to turn). With its wide pavements and hardly any traffic, Uzhichka Street was one of my favourite cycling and roller-skating grounds. Surly policemen would frequently ask me to get off my cycle and step to one side to watch a cavalcade of motorcycles and dark limousines turn through the heavy gates of Tito’s villa, flanked by hand-picked guards officers in aquamarine coats and shiny black boots, bearing black guns in their white gloved hands. I often detected Tito’s carefully coiffed and tinted reddish-brown head of hair behind the dark glass. Once or twice, he turned towards me and watched.
Later on, living in a different part of town and going to a different school, I’d often form part of the crowd bussed in to line the wide boulevards in order to greet him and his visiting dignitaries returning from the airport, all of us happy to be getting a day off school and armed with little paper flags (a Yugoslav tricolour with a red star and a different one, appropriate for the foreign guest and treasured by the school collector-nerds). We waved cheerfully for what was never more than a momentary glimpse after a couple of hours’ wait at the kerbside. The flags were particularly plentiful when the visitors happened to be from one of the friendly non-aligned countries: Comrade Tito and Comrade Sukarno of Indonesia, Comrade Tito and Comrade Indira Gandhi of India, Comrade Tito and Comrade Nasser of Egypt, Comrade Tito and Comrade Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization, etc. Our president’s uniforms were shown to their best advantage against
the colourful outfits of the Third World: the saris, the sarongs and the dashikis emphasized by contrast the details of the fine tailoring so beloved by the dandy of the socialist world. I can see him even now, smelling of cigars and eau-de-cologne and lording it like a male version of the British Queen at one of her Commonwealth jamborees. He was able to bring happiness unto the nations without her imperial burdens.
My poem was the fourth in the cycle of sonnets about Jesus (it was, as it turns out, one of the last five or six poems I was ever going to write), but Our Lord was not referred to by name anywhere. The melancholy miracle maker of my youthful verse, could, at a push, have been anyone. The organizers of the birthday do might have been aware of this in a much shrewder way than I would have given them credit for when I was originally approached to submit a selection of my poetry for consideration. The approach itself caused a lot of anguish. Was I going to do it and, more importantly, could I refuse? Why had I been selected? OK, I had a full set of teeth and a full head of hair, as well as a fine voice and broadcasting experience, all of which amounted to a thoroughly unusual combination in Yugoslav poetic circles. None the less, mine was hardly a name of which anyone but the most avid reader of small magazines would have been aware. Let’s face it, I was as close to being a poetic nonentity as a winner of a few poetry competitions could be.
It turned out that one of the event’s directors was a fan. Having first met me at a provincial poetry competition when I was seventeen, he had taken a sporadic interest in my writing ever since, and kept a small selection of my poems in his office at the TV station where he worked (also bombed to smithereens, my manuscripts and all, by NATO in 1999). Politically, he was, I believe, a Titoist of the old guard, an old-fashioned communist idealist, and personally this side of nice – a rare trait in TV directors anywhere – that is, nice to me at least. He’d take me out for an occasional lunch or a walk by the Danube, and we’d have long conversations about poetry (he was a poet himself – an über-suit), life, death, men, women, the meaning of life, Herzegovina. To be of old Belgrade stock but also from Herzegovina was for me the winning combination – a bit like having a house in Mayfair and an old family castle in the wildest part of the Scottish Highlands – but that was perhaps only because I was of the same stock myself.
Although he lingered above it from time to time, he never crossed the line which I had, as he might well have suspected, drawn in the sand around me. I enjoyed his attentions and he enjoyed bestowing them on me, and was, to his eternal credit, wise enough to keep that enjoyment alive for a long while. If I were his wife (he had one), I would have been mildly annoyed, but not unduly worried. I was a good girl, I think. That is perhaps the main reason why I was chosen and that is perhaps why I had agreed to indulge him, even when every sinew in my body recoiled from Tito’s funerary fête. That, and the insistence of my mother and assorted aunts, for whom the idea of reading a poem in front of a live audience of 30,000, and TV audiences in their millions, was not one that should be turned down lightly. The fact that my reading would be sandwiched between the appearances of two of the sexiest bands in Yugoslavia did not seem at all incongruous to me; it was, in fact, what my female friends envied the most. I shared a taxi home from the rehearsals with the legendary lead singer of White Button of Sarajevo, with the hips of Mick Jagger and the hairdo of Jimi Hendrix, on at least a couple of occasions, and discovered that he had a habit of kissing goodbye most sexily, although I am not entirely sure that he would have remembered me, even a month later. We were the most unlikely of fellow-travellers.
That the event was kitsch, a peculiarly Yugoslav kind of kitsch – combining punk, poetry and sport, like a toaster with an in-built barometer and alarm clock – was perfectly clear to me even then. A proper Eastern Bloc country would have had a poet of a much greater stature than me and a bunch of opera singers of world repute, rather than a literature student wedged between a Croatian version of the Sex Pistols in black leather and ageing Bosnian rockers. Down on the pitch, there was none of the muscle-and-tone blond coordination familiar from similar German events filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, only rows of kids who cheerfully moved about waving their brightly coloured ribbons, lucky to have been given a couple of weeks off school for rehearsals.
With the hindsight of twenty years, the whole event seems perhaps much more tightly controlled than it appeared to me then. My voice was not my own. There was no place for improvisation, not an inch of space for manoeuvre. As I was sitting on the special guest platform, surveying the crowds after my historic non-reading and then enjoying a big congratulatory hug from Zagreb’s handsome response to Sid Vicious (his leather jacket rubbing noisily against my chiffon blouse), a familiar face appeared just behind me.
‘I just wanted to say hello,’ whispered Zoran, a school friend whom I barely recognized. His long blond Jim Morrison locks were now trimmed into the shortest possible crop. ‘Hey, Zocky, how’s tricks? Who are you with?’ I chirped, high on the taste of my newly acquired stardom. ‘The police academy,’ he answered. ‘I am a student there now. We are all around you tonight.’
5. Peter the Great, Peter the Earless and Other Romances
I AM A RELUCTANT accountant of the heart. I’ve loved some men and others have loved me; and then there was a handful of times when loving and loving back kept the see-saw in balance, my feet in the air and my eyes on the sky. No life’s story now seems complete without ledgers of affection, yet they create hierarchies which betray and deceive. Time lengthens some horizons and foreshortens others. There are memories which haunt and memories which sleep like babies in little white coffins. With passing years, a single kiss can acquire more meaning than months of naked skin.
Andrei stood up from an armchair in his unlit, freezing room. French windows flooded with moonlight looked down on to a narrow, icy lane. The headlamps from passing cars pierced thick curtains of snow like searchlights. Pools of amber light lapped on the high ceiling for a few moments and withdrew. The entire building vibrated with stifled sounds of music. Across the road, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra was rehearsing by candlelight. The city was frozen in the middle of a blackout, without electricity and heating. Trams and trolleybuses stood abandoned in their tracks.
The Yeti woman walking through the snow drifts was me. I wore two vests, a checked flannel shirt, a heavy woollen jumper, two pairs of stockings, green moleskin dungarees and red snow boots, and – over all of that – a mink coat of syrup-coloured pelts, a birthday present from my parents, and a red fox-fur hat with earflaps drawn tightly under my chin. Around my shoulders, I wrapped my mother’s silver stole. The dead head of an animal with ruby glass eyes hung on my chest, biting its own tail. It was eighteen below zero, but I was also playing the Arctic queen. Nothing and no one could make me unhappy in those days. I ran on my own power supply.
The doorbell did not work. I knocked while shaking the snow off my boots and my hat. I removed nothing when I stepped inside. My frozen breath hung in the air. A row of thin yellow candles threw flickering shadows on hundreds of book spines in glass cases. The room was full of ghosts. Andrei came towards me and I stretched my mittened hand out to greet him, but he took a further step which made the handshake impossible. His white hair glistened in semi-darkness. The temperature was so low that I could feel the icy crescent shapes of each of my twenty nails.
He took his glasses off and carefully put them down on his desk in a gesture which somehow managed to be dizzyingly intimate. I heard my heartbeat and the sound of gold wire coming to rest on the surface of wood. I kept my eyes open when he closed his and lowered his head towards me. Our kiss lasted barely ten seconds: this was the first time I really touched Andrei, even though we had spent hours poised over books in this very room. ‘Your lips taste of snow,’ he said, still using the formal you.
Andrei’s jacket smelled of mothballs, and his fine, smooth, old-man’s skin of baby soap and talcum powder. This was not an erotic kiss. It was not the beginning of anything. He took a ste
p back and picked his glasses up. I was determined to pretend that nothing unusual had happened. I sat down in my chair, in which, over the three years which preceded this evening, I had learned everything that I will ever know about reading books; reading was – it turns out – my most enduring passion. In the whole of Belgrade, in the whole of the Balkans perhaps, there was no better interpreter of books than this small bespectacled man; and in the rest of the world it seemed to me that no more than a handful were his equals.
When I became a teacher of literature, I sometimes took his books out of the university library in Bloomsbury, where they languished, uncherished and unborrowed, in their modest Serbian covers. It was a mystery that the library had them at all. As I prepared my lectures, I remembered Andrei’s voice. He’d bend over a book and, jabbing a word with his finger, exclaim: ‘Here, Vesna, here is what we were looking for.’ I knew that he was attracted to me and I also sensed that our reading sessions gave him a thrill of self-denial. What I was not ready to admit, not even to myself, was that I enjoyed playing with him in the safety of his self-control. I’d lean too far forward or hold his gaze a second too long, fine-tuning my skills of seduction, as cruel and as ignorant of hurt as a young animal can be. Reading with Andrei was always both dangerous and thrilling, like holding a key to the fairy-tale chamber which might unleash the hurricane. Kissing him felt safe and a bit sad, but it was a taste I had to learn about too. The virtuous make the poorest of readers.
Chernobyl Strawberries Page 9