Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Petar’s father was a cabinet-maker whose trade was killed off by the fashion for furniture from Slovenia, which first began to grip middle-class Yugoslav households in the late sixties. Most of the well-to-do families up and down the country owned one of about four different designs: Louis Quinze (at its most surreal when applied to wall-to-wall chipboard wardrobes known locally as regali), Bauhaus, rustic and ‘contemporary’. The furniture was normally bought with extremely low-interest loans. Yugoslav yuppies were flush with money from the funds with which the West supported Comrade Tito in his hair-dressing follies, to the annoyance of the entire Eastern Bloc. His crown was growing redder by the day.

  One tended to feel instantly at home in a flat one had never visited before. Give or take a painting or an upright piano in the corner, everyone’s dwelling was more or less the same. The marketing campaigns of the Slovene furniture industry, with happy couples opening the doors of richly carved bureaux to reveal brand-new colour television sets, also Slovene, and toasting each other with a glass of Slovene Riesling, left old-style cabinet-makers like Petar’s father with few commissions. Slovenia was our California, the land we all wanted to live in, and the Slovenes lived on that dream.

  Our own family furniture was a socialist take on Louis Quinze, my mother’s choice. I’ve also seen it on TV in the study of the head of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and, a decade later, in the living room of an alleged war criminal which was being ransacked by the UN police in what seemed like a futile attempt to find someone hiding under a small commode. The head of the academy had a large library; the war criminal’s wife must have had a taste for crochet, for there were anti-macassars everywhere, but the rooms were otherwise more or less identical to ours. I felt that, through furniture, I had a special path to understanding the world I came from. Whereas in the West the inexhaustible variety of interior design often manages to obscure surprising degrees of conformity, the enforced conformity of the society I grew up in concealed a bunch of eccentrics and sometimes downright madness. While the wives were crocheting, madmen were busily planning Armageddon.

  Petar’s mother was a Serb from Croatia, some years older than his father, a Croat concentration camp survivor, and a housewife. This last, a very rare thing, provoked in me a mixture of jealousy and pity. Socialist children tended to prefer parentless homes which were unsupervised until late in the afternoon, but envied the freshly prepared lunches and other comforts a mother-at-home implied. To my generation of kids, raised by women bus drivers and nuclear physicists, a mother-at-home tended to signify either extreme privilege or dire poverty.

  In most respects, what someone might see as the class differences between Petar and me mattered little in our classless society; I was hardly the Duchess of Devonshire myself. Even money – or the absence of it – did not seem to matter very much. You didn’t study comparative literature in the hope of making your first million before you were thirty. We barely needed any money at all.

  We loved to sit in workmen’s kafane, smoky boozers in which a drink cost only a few pence and no one we knew ever turned up. These places were staffed by surly waitresses in peeptoe canvas boots, borosane, designed to prevent varicose veins and quite possibly the ugliest footwear on earth. They were mandatory for workers in state-owned shops and hostelries. One of the waitresses would eventually come up to us, clutching an enormous leather wallet and dodging hands, stretched out from surrounding tables, which were bent on pinching her bottom. She’d say something along the lines of ‘What’s for you two lovebirds?’ in a voice coarse from cigarette smoke. While the state worried about varicose veins, these women were inhaling the equivalent of three packets of cigarettes a day.

  Petar and I were usually in the middle of a conversation about world politics. I said I had no interest in politics but I loved arguing with him and would often adopt a position which I thought might infuriate him, siding with some crazed bunch of nationalists in Spain or Sri Lanka who had just blown a few people up, simply in order to get him going. Arguing with Petar in the middle of a smoky kafana always managed to seem incredibly glamorous to me. He always gave each argument his best shot and would never give up until I conceded the point. Between the two of us, it was always 1917 all over again, the early snows of November danced in the air and Russia was ready to pull out of the war: the end of the world as I knew it. Except that I was about to escape to Paris and Petar was to ride the bullet train until the ice-pick got him. That’s how it seemed anyway.

  I’d light a Herzegovina, my favourite brand of cigarettes, and order a shot of loza, the fiery Montenegrin brandy made from vine leaves, and a glass of water: the kind of order which was practically a must for a self-respecting poet. During this particular phase I’d rather be seen dead than smoking Western cigarettes and drinking Western alcohol, with perhaps the sole exception of Gauloises, which – while undoubtedly Western – somehow seemed to have an Eastern heart. It wasn’t that I was anti-Western, quite the opposite, but that, by the early eighties, the comrades had become so fond of whisky and American tobacco that self-respecting literature students like myself had no other option but to support the domestic product.

  Sinking in my chair, I’d flick the ash with a devil-may-care attitude which belied the fact that, at that stage, I didn’t dare light a cigarette within a two-mile radius of my home. (The concealment of my smoking kit in the lining of my duffel coat and furious mint-sucking on the bus home were part and parcel of going out.) I loved the Serbian folk music which often played on decrepit radios in Belgrade’s kafane. The songs were about life, love and death, and could only have been written by people whose life experience was brutal and likely to be short. I rarely listened to that kind of music at home. It simply did not sound the same in Slovene Louis Quinze surroundings.

  Not so long ago, I discovered that this kind of music, when played very loudly on my Walkman, eased the nausea which I felt when the long cannula went into my veins to deliver the three-weekly dose of chemotherapy. My stomach heaved while Epirubicin, the drug known as the Red Devil, coursed through my body, hopefully doing away with my cancer, but also with my fertility and my hair. Even as I write this – many weeks after this particular phase of treatment – my insides move towards my throat and saliva floods my mouth at the memory. It made sense that the Red Devil should come to the rescue of the Red Princess, and that the price he demanded should be high. Serbian singers cursed their mothers from my earphones: ‘O Mother, O my cursed Mama, why did you give birth to me, when I have no luck at all?’ Their wailing protected me from fellow patients around me, some hairless, some with blue icecaps on their heads, some quietly sick, some crying, some eager to exchange cancer notes. We were all called brave, but we had no other choice. In the midst of all the suffering I was witnessing and feeling, I felt strangely elated by the songs which suddenly seemed to stand for the best of the world I came from. I too had given birth and was ready to be cursed in my own turn. There was nothing to be scared of any more.

  It took me a long while to accept that I left Petar because I was jealous. There was never any sign that he was seeing someone else, but I am not given to that kind of jealousy anyway. I am a continental European, after all, not like your average product of the Anglo-Puritan stock, always either on the wagon or off, either in AA or in delirium tremens. I tend not to worry too much about rivals, so long as I can be convinced that I am the centre of the universe. The key here is in the word ‘convinced’, rather than objective reality, towards which I’ve always maintained a Baudrillard-like sense of scepticism. I gradually began to feel more and more bothered by the fact that I seemed to be only the centre of a minor galaxy of Petar’s. There were other, inhabited galaxies around: his studies, his political activism and other, smaller things. I began to collect grievances like stamps. Soon nothing seemed right any more. I was preparing for take-off.

  I suspect that Petar would not see our history quite in these terms. Eventually we became friends. One summer, we toured
the monasteries of Kosovo with Simon, by then my English husband. In hot, crowded buses, trundling on dusty roads through yellowing crabgrass, Petar and I spoke English, a language he had picked up in the changing tides but in which he was not at all comfortable. We often preferred not being identified as Serbs. To be a Serb in the south was not dangerous – not yet at that stage – but it was increasingly unpleasant. The few Albanians we spoke to were thirsty for their own state. They maintained a fiery conviction in the justice of their cause. In the tragic story of Yugoslav dissolution, theirs was the most difficult chapter. They were wretchedly poor and did not even pretend loyalty to the South Slav state. Why should they have?

  In the monasteries we visited, the tall figures of saints on frescoes had their eyes scratched out. The whiteness of their stares disconcerted me and I felt that they too were somehow unable to see past their own pain. We crossed into Macedonia, and with that crossing came a much greater sense of ease. We swam off rotting shallow boats in intense heat which hung like a curtain over the blue waters of Lake Ohrid. The mossy heights of Prokletije, the Accursed Mountains, threw dark shadows over the water from the southern, Albanian shore. Border patrol boats hovered in the distance like mosquitoes.

  For old times’ sake, Petar and I argued about politics over platefuls of white cheese and ripe tomatoes. Simon would join in, angry at the rise of Milosevic’s take on Serbian nationalism, logical and sharp, and then I’d slowly switch off, alert to the sound but not the sense of their discussion. When two men took opposing standpoints and I could no longer play devil’s advocate, I tended to feel I had nothing to contribute. I never seemed to have an opinion, and somehow always managed to see both points of view.

  It might not have seemed so in Belgrade, but in Kosovo you could already smell the impending war. The smell of hot metal, sweet blood and male sweat seemed to hang in the air. In fact, when the war finally came and thousands of Serbian men scattered across the globe, preferring exile to the draft, Petar put on his uniform. He was an old-fashioned man of duty, after all, noble Bezukhov, the kind who gets used by every regime in the world and rarely gets any reward.

  Simon and I took a late-night flight back to Belgrade, accompanied by a scattering of communist politicians on their way to more of the countless meetings which presaged the collapse of Yugoslavia. Petar stayed on in Macedonia. The little Yalta I engineered failed to bear fruit. They were both sensitive and stubborn, and neither was likely to change his mind. The Englishman – like a frustrated district commissioner – wanted to put the world to rights; the Serb felt his grievance too deeply to be able to be philosophical about it. We were talking about his land after all. Besides, the Englishman got the girl, and that did not necessarily make things any easier.

  An almost empty plane flew low above the mountains in near-total darkness. There were villages below, lit only by the stars. When we began to descend towards Belgrade, which shimmered like a small heap of crushed ice above its two rivers, I was glad that this holiday was over.

  The Yugoslavia I grew up in, like other socialist countries which grew out of patriarchal, peasant societies, was a strange mixture of liberalism and restriction. In the world of work, the society I knew was already post-feminist in some ways. We grew up thinking that as far as our career choices were concerned, our gender was pretty much irrelevant. At school and at work, feminism seemed neither urgent nor entirely necessary: it was a Western indulgence, intellectually challenging but alien to our ways of thinking.

  At home, however, matters were different. We had more freedoms than our mothers would have had but still lived in tightly knit, closely observed neighbourhoods. Controls were not necessarily imposed by parents, many of whom were pretty open-minded, but came from large extended families and – up to a point – the entire street you lived on. Everyone knew when you went out and when you came back. If anyone came to your door when you were not at home, neighbours would offer to take messages and invite complete strangers to await your return in their front parlour.

  In matters sexual, boys were allowed as much freedom as they could get, but girls were supervised. You were not expected to have a boyfriend before you were sixteen, and by boyfriend I mean someone to go to the cinema with – a hand to hold in the flickering darkness. While our school dances and birthday parties tingled with the charge of barely repressed sexuality, quite a few of my friends still debated whether or not one should be a virgin when one married. I was, as ever, a creature of contradiction. I occasionally dreamed of a virgin-white wedding, but I also wanted a string of lovers like a long necklace of pearls. The existence of such a dilemma and the sense of the erosion of the traditional it implies, coupled with the knowledge that in one way or another, whether or not you wanted it, you would marry, reflects the country of my adolescence. It was like the beginning of sexual intercourse in 1963, over and over again, for ever.

  None the less, Yugoslavia was certainly not a place of prohibition or arranged marriages, like many countries further east, but simply of increased control. One was ‘allowed’ one or two serious relationships before one settled down (three would be pushing your luck), and any number of suitors; in fact, the more the merrier. Suitors prone to grand gestures were the joy of every neighbourhood, and I had no shortage of those. One of these young men, a theology student, once built a snowman below my window overnight, so tall that its coal eyes peeked above the window sill of my first-floor bedroom when I opened the shutters in the morning. Another, a descendant of a Russian émigré family, once turned up in my street with a gypsy band singing ‘Ochi chorniye’, ‘Dark Eyes’, in broken Russian with heavy Romany accents. The bandmaster was given a sheet of paper with a poem by Rimbaud, in French, yet spelled out in large Cyrillic letters, to read at my garden gate. Neighbourhood grannies would look at me walking down the road with the trained eyes of race-horse breeders, and say to each other, loudly, to tease me, ‘Look at the daughter of Milos the Montenegrin, a wild filly. It will take a special man to tame her.’ I studied Homer in central Belgrade, but in this former village on the outskirts of the city, I could still occasionally enter his world.

  Our sex lives were controlled by the fear of pregnancy and the even greater fear of abortion, the trusty stand-by of socialist birth control. Harrowing stories of abortions gone wrong, of overworked, unsympathetic doctors and of young women’s futures devastated by the wrong turn of a curettage knife were the stuff of everyday gossip. In my grandmother’s day, there were two other options for a pregnant girl (three, if you counted suicide): a shotgun wedding or a cupful of caustic soda thrown in the face of the careless man. There were still a few shotgun weddings around in the late seventies, but caustic soda was not easily come by.

  I knew a number of young couples forced to ‘do the right thing’ by bringing up a crying baby in their parents’ flat, without any hope of ever affording their own place. Belgrade was a town of almost two million people and yet it somehow seemed that everyone knew everything about everyone else. Every taxi to hospital was observed and enquired about, every heartbreak carefully dissected and filed away for future reference.

  It was strange, or perhaps not so strange, that such a neighbourly, tightly controlled society, which seemed to me one of the safest places in Europe, could erupt into an explosion of violence, of rapes and slaughter fuelled by rivers of drink and drugs. Even stranger that the old neighbourliness could continue to exist side by side with horrors such as refrigerated vans full of corpses dumped into the Danube; camps in which people were herded like animals; and columns of refugees stretching for miles heading for Belgrade, sometimes on tractors driven by seven-year-old boys with bricks tied to their feet because they couldn’t reach the accelerator. Was it that our seemingly praiseworthy emphasis on the family reinforced our tribal identities and undercut our allegiance to wider society, so that we knew only how to defend our own? Strangest of all is that, once this nightmarish version of Mardi Gras was over, so many of the old prohibitions simply slotted back in
to place.

  Tomislav was an unexceptional student of civil engineering and a gifted photographer who had been one of my circle of friends since I was a teenager. Apart from coming from an almost identical family background, we had relatively little in common, but I wouldn’t let that spoil the beautiful picture. I seemed to have loved the idea of Tomislav much more than I ever loved Tomislav himself. We went on a skiing holiday in Montenegro with a group of friends, about a year after I left Petar. One evening, while he and I were trying to defrost the water pipes in his family chalet by lighting a small fire in the garage, the basic chemistry of our day-to-day communication changed. Tomislav became my boyfriend with a capital B. As any viewer of romantic comedies will know, when something like this happens in the first fifteen minutes of a film, everyone sits waiting for a dark brooding stranger to take the bride away.

  Tomislav was the God of Slalom: six foot four, with blond hair falling over his shoulders, eyes as blue as bluebells, and a sort of permanent tan that came from dividing his year between hours of skiing on the mountain slopes and hours of basketball on the riverside courts in Belgrade. I took him along to poetry readings. Among my fellow poets, he stood out in his white jeans and white shirt, like Michelangelo’s David. I even introduced him to Andrei at one of these evenings, but started dragging him away before they could begin a conversation. Without being condescending, Andrei still found a way of making any man younger than forty-five look like a child, which was worrying, given that I was barely twenty-one. He also had a way of making me feel like a cat with a live bird in its jaws, about to drop the catch at his feet. To my relief, Tomislav seemed to confuse him. He clutched his drink, looked up towards the mane of blond hair and asked me about my plans for the summer holidays.