Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  It was unsurprising, perhaps, that I liked the idea of two handsome, good-looking kids from the same side of the tracks making it together in the big world, writing books and building bridges. Neighbourhood grannies smiled at us benevolently. Even my mother got over Tomislav’s habit of turning up on our doorstep in a pair of cropped shorts and a tattered shirt, carrying different bits of sports equipment or a camera around his neck. He was a nice boy from a nice family.

  In the two summers we spent together, Tomislav and I would pack our rucksacks and get on to the railways of Europe, spending long, lazy days in Paris, Heidelberg or Lisbon, sometimes crossing the continent in a long seventy-two-hour sweep, or inching our way from Genoa to Barcelona for days on end, stopping to swim and eat watermelons on the white beaches of the Mediterranean. Very often, we’d simply slip into sleeping bags on the beach and watch the stars light up. We met friends from Belgrade in the most unexpected places – a Portuguese bar or a Swiss station café – and exchanged notes about youth hostels and train routes. At the end of the season, we rented a room in the walled town in Dubrovnik in which to see the summer out, floating between the azure waters and the skies of the Adriatic, without a care in the world.

  At some point between those two summers, I began to feel trapped by the pretty tapestry I was weaving. This feeling was starting to seem oddly familiar. I could not pinpoint anything grave, but I was dissatisfied with a myriad of small things. For example, Tomislav would take my photograph all the time, in a way which began to irritate me. I look at those photographs now and I see myself happy and at peace – eating my banana splits, swimming, rock climbing, sleeping, whatever – even though I know that this wasn’t true. I was restless, eager not to make this my life, wishing to try other things and other people. I’d convinced myself that I was the mistress of seduction, but was increasingly bothered by the fact that I did not seem to know how to be seduced myself. And, more than anything else, I began to want to be seduced. ‘You think too much,’ said my younger sister wisely. I dreamed of losing my head.

  It was strange and quite unexpected, for many different reasons, that I finally shared my life with an Englishman and by sharing it became, almost, English. Almost – in this context – is a word I am happy with, for I love the sense of being ‘foreign but not quite’. I love the opportunity of reinventing myself every morning. I even love writing in a foreign language, although – after twenty years in this country – I still can’t quite control my English. Like a fast new car, it takes wide swings around unfamiliar corners and leaves me vulnerable but exhilarated.

  None the less, for whatever reason, I have fewer inhibitions in English – perhaps because for me it doesn’t yet carry subcutaneous layers of pain. In fact, I sense – however irrational this may seem – that the I who speaks English is a very subtly different person from the I who speaks Serbian and the I who speaks French. That, perhaps, has something to do with the old chameleon tricks or the nature of the language itself. At any rate, the English speaker is a bit more blunt and a bit more direct than the other two. She is and isn’t myself. She takes risks and admits to loss.

  In theory, I didn’t much like the idea of Britain sight unseen. All those years of Francofolly and the fact that my knowledge of these islands was based mainly on fiction had combined to make it seem a vaguely forbidding place. Beyond the white cliffs of Dover sat a rainy plateau populated, in my adolescent imagination, by depressing creatures from Hardy, Dickens, Gissing and Orwell. This is the kind of reading that my socialist educators deemed useful in exposing the reality of late capitalism. In practice, I felt at home here from the very first day.

  That is not to say that I don’t feel homesick for Belgrade, for its cosy domesticity and its fragments of hard-to-find beauty. During the years of the Yugoslav wars, I often saw my native city on the news. As I watched its familiar shapes recorded through the infrared camera lens – the bomber-pilot’s-eye view – I often ached with longing to be there. The outlines of the hills, rising from the murky confluence of the Sava and the Danube, were as well known to me as the curves of my own body. It might not be an accident that the two were wounded and disfigured so soon after each other.

  In the summer of 1984, the Orwell year, I spent a month studying Bulgarian at the Karl Marx Institute of the University of Sofia. I rarely travelled eastwards in those days, where all there was to see seemed to be more of the same thing. I was doing some research on Byzantine prayers for my final dissertation at Belgrade University, and signing up for a Bulgarian language course, all expenses paid by the communist government of Bulgaria, was a way of getting me into the rich manuscript collections and archives of Sofia. I knew that communist propaganda would be offered in large dollops, and I didn’t mind hearing some to earn my keep. I was in no danger of being reconverted.

  Sofia was like the Belgrade of my early childhood, a smaller, cosier town, with fewer cars and fewer and emptier shops. Although I was there for the first time, nothing appeared to be really new. To the native speaker of Serbian, the language and the alphabet hid no secrets. The features and the physiques of Bulgarians were barely different from those of Yugoslavs, and even the food was the same. I felt almost at home, but for that noticeable difference in atmosphere which I associated with being behind the Iron Curtain, in the Eastern Bloc proper. The volume was turned down by a few notches and the lights dimmed.

  My schedules were full. We had meal coupons which we were supposed to exchange in particular student canteens, and concerts, folk dances and theatre performances we were supposed to attend almost every evening. We were clearly not supposed to wander too far off the programme. Still, I did not really mind this. I’d steal a few hours in churches and museums, and after about a week I had a feeling that I’d known Sofia all my life. The feeling was compounded by the way that I seemed to keep running into people who knew me. I once popped into a post office at the other end of town, only to be stopped by a stocky young man who asked me if I’d lost my way. For some reason, he knew exactly who I was and where I was studying.

  I loved the sombre Soviet atmosphere of the Karl Marx Institute. Our orderly mornings were split evenly between language lessons and history lectures explaining the glories of Bulgaria. There was a lot in those lectures that might have been challenged. The Serbs shared a great deal of history with the Bulgarians, and ‘shared’ was, more often than not, a euphemism for a complicated and sometimes fractious tangle. I was aware of different points of view but I never queried anything. It didn’t seem courteous to my hosts, and they were nothing if not hospitable.

  My month in Bulgaria was marked by some gloriously incongruous moments. There was, for example, a foreigners’ disco at the students’ hall of residence, which was obviously the place to see and be seen in Sofia. Every evening, it reverberated with the latest Western hits and young things turned and twisted under a complicated light show. Then there were cocktail parties and receptions for young foreign scholars, with a seemingly endless series of toasts to international friendship proposed by illustrious Bulgarian academics.

  One of these cocktail parties ended with a secret ballot in what was effectively a beauty contest. You participated simply by being present, and I came third, some ten votes behind a striking Kazakh girl called Leila and a tomboyish Australian blonde. I still remember Kazashka’s exotic face, and her elegant, slim body, which looked glorious even in unflattering Soviet clothes. Somewhere among my papers in Belgrade I keep a diploma which congratulates me on being ‘Miss Bulgarian Summer School 1984: Second Runner Up’, my trophy from the land behind the looking glass.

  What ‘Miss Bulgarian Summer School...’ doesn’t quite know how to explain is the fact that that summer in Sofia she finally managed to lose her head. What a fantastic, dizzying feeling that was! It began the evening I arrived, while I was checking into my spartan room in the student hall of residence optimistically named Spring Quarters. Sitting just outside my room, there was this amazing young thing. His long body was
sprawled across an armchair. He was wearing a blue cotton shirt in the most surreal print imaginable, a pair of green agricultural labourer’s trousers and tennis shoes. Behind a pair of unusual gold-and-leather-rimmed glasses glinted a pair of green eyes. His hair was reddish-brown, and his skin hinted at a freckled childhood. His name was Simon.

  He was obviously English, as English as the running tèam in Chariots of Fire, as English as Sebastian Flyte and the moustachioed First World War officers in my grandfather’s albums of the Salonika campaign. Indeed, before long I found out that his grandfather had been just such an officer, fighting the Bulgarians alongside my forebears. He was the kind of Englishman that I spent much of my English literature courses taking apart and yet had never met before. His Englishness was fascinating, but it wasn’t quite what seduced me. Rather, it was the fact that he was both strange and different and yet entirely familiar at the same time, like a long-lost twin. Coming from opposite ends of the continent, we had somehow managed to acquire the same tastes in books, films and music, and we were drawn to the same kind of places. There was no need to be chameleon-like at all. I sensed that he could be dark and difficult and broody, but he made jokes which still make me laugh after twenty years.

  At the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers: an early photograph by Simon

  If there was a difference between us, it was that I was intense and openly ambitious, while he affected incredulous ignorance as I went about giving mini-lectures on anything under the sun, particularly if it could be interpreted from a post-structuralist point of view. His amateurishness was a very English affectation, just as my earnestness was a very Central European one. We both earned our Firsts soon after that Bulgarian summer: I as though anything else was out of the question, Simon as though it was an afterthought.

  Between Sofia and our wedding day, we had eighteen months of Bavarian rendezvous, simply because Bavaria happened to be approximately halfway between London and Belgrade. The names of Munich underground stations still echo in my head like the most erotic of poems. Allowing yourself to be seduced turned out to be much more exciting than seducing. For one thing, you never knew what was going to happen next. I was ready to follow the boy to the end of the world, to England itself if need be.

  6. God and Books

  WHEN A MAJOR misfortune overtakes us, people sometimes assume that – if it offers nothing else in return for the anguish – it might bring some kind of deeper spiritual insight. Suffering makes us better people – or so they say; it enables us to exhibit bravery; it makes us stronger; it brings us closer to God. We use such words of comfort because we have difficulty in accepting that suffering may come without any compensation and we create elaborate narratives of redemption around the pointlessness of pain. I can report nothing of this kind. I didn’t learn anything, other than just how much pain I can take. While my cancer was attacked by poison, sword and fire, like a medieval beast, I didn’t fear death. If one creates life, one doesn’t just abandon the scene when the going gets tough. In a very unexpected way, the desire to be healed turned out to be about motherhood.

  I continued to set the alarm clock for seven just in case I overslept, but I never did. I worked, I looked after my son and I kept the house clean. I prepared food even when the thought of eating made my stomach turn. I went from room to room with a red plastic bowl, always ready to throw up cleanly. I left handfuls of hair on the carpet, like a moulting dog. My skull emerged white and smoother than an ostrich egg. My little boy caressed my bald crown and said, ‘Mummy, you look like a hatchling.’ I felt younger and more vulnerable than him.

  My mother visits my father on leave, 1959

  When I should have been resting, I wasted time in bookshops as though there was no tomorrow, or, judging by the extraordinary quantities of books I kept buying, as if there was a superabundance of tomorrows. I wasn’t really reading anything. I sniffed the fresh smell of print and caressed unbroken spines. I indulged in macabre calculations. If I had a year to live, then, at four books a month, there was enough time to read forty-eight books; five years – 240; fifty years – 2,400. That finally offered some consolation: even without cancer, I could hardly expect to be alive fifty years from now, and yet 2,400 books seemed barely satisfactory. I already possessed 2,000 books I hadn’t read, and was acquiring more each day. I was also devoting my hours to writing, which seemed a waste of precious time. I resolved to write less and read more. Reader, you are witness to my resolution.

  After the first operation, I was told that I had clean, wide margins, like the books I enjoy most. I was given the odds on surviving five years, and they seemed very good, even though I couldn’t really deal with odds. I am temperamentally inclined to believe that one in a thousand is somehow more likely to happen than nine out of ten.

  God never spoke to me. It might be that my particular pain did not really stand out in the white noise emanating from the planet like steam from a boiling pot. I certainly wasn’t unwilling to get in touch. I lingered in the semi-darkness of churches just before evensong, listening out for the thin, silvery rattle of incense burners. I said prayers in English, Serbian and sometimes even in Greek. (This last sounded most likely to get through, perhaps because I understood so little of it.) It felt a bit like praying for a favourable exam result when you’d already submitted the script: comforting but useless. It might simply be that I could never be sufficiently humble. Yellow-faced and radiation-sick, Baldilocks remained her obstinate self.

  None the less, only bookshops and churches gave me the feeling that anything might happen. I didn’t really believe in God as much as I believed in books, but I loved the sights and sounds of religion. The Byzantine chant of my ancestral Orthodoxy, curtains of incense and black-clad monks with beards untouched by razors, flocking like ravens on snow-covered forecourts; Anglican cathedrals in which stone seemed as light as ice cream; the sublime, darkened beauty of London’s Tractarian churches; the Baroque waxworks of ripe Catholicism – as far as I was concerned, they all provided a vision of humanity at its most endearingly hopeful. And London was the New Jerusalem: there was no religion in the world which didn’t have a meeting house in one of its suburban terraces. Being ill in the British capital at the beginning of the twenty-first century was a bit like being a leper in the Holy Land in AD 33: there was never a shortage of volunteers to wash one’s feet.

  I went to synagogues and mosques. On balance, I preferred domes to arches: building a sphere, a woman’s breast, seemed as close as both God and humanity ever came to perfection. Looking at the webs of unfamiliar script, I realized that the vocabulary of my own, non-existent faith was so bound up in the story of Jesus that I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I said God and, pop, up came the long bearded face. Although I might have tried to undo such conditioning, it seemed hardly worth the effort. Since it was unlikely that I was ever going to believe, I might as well remain a Serbian Orthodox agnostic. Other religions appealed as stories, Christianity as a storybook with pictures.

  If I believed anything, it was that – as the novelist Danilo Kis once said – reading many books could never be as dangerous as reading just one. My literary hoards offered a sense of peace that no single volume has ever been able to provide on its own, but I did begin to wonder what was behind my obsessive book buying. In my family history, building a library has always seemed a bad idea. Books vanished when your house was hit by a bomb or torched, and they were what had to be left behind when you moved abroad. In difficult times, a diamond ring could always be exchanged for a pot of goose fat in one of the villages surrounding Belgrade. All a book can do is burn.

  I am a compulsive reader. Quality doesn’t really come into this. On crowded underground trains, when there is no room to open a book, I will read safety warnings and advertisements, breaking the lines in different places to create a poem. Put me into a bare hotel room and I’ll go through the phone directories imagining local lives, the way other people may flick through satellite TV channels. On those occa
sions when I said ‘yes’ to proposals I’d never intended to accept and was then duty-bound to oblige, it happened because I was reading while pretending to listen. If I travelled anywhere, the safe bet is that I carried more books than clothes, fearing that I might run out of things to read. Even then, I went straight to the airport bookshop to buy more.

  Two years old, with my favourite book

  Feverishly starting a new volume, reading to page sixty or thereabouts, and then moving on to the next one, so that I always had at least six or seven books on the go, has always been my particular vice. Books gathered by my pillow, in my desk drawers, in bags abandoned at the bottom of my wardrobe, like sweet wrappers in a child’s pocket. The space under my bed was known in my family as the Library of Congress. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d reach down there and pull out a book to continue to read from where I last left it, the place marked by a bus ticket from Tel Aviv to Acre dated 1988 or a letter I began writing seven years ago. My memories of places became inseparable from the books I first read while visiting them. Sometimes the connections made geographic sense – like discovering André Aciman’s Out of Egypt in Alexandria – sometimes not at all. I read Kis’s Early Sorrows while staying with a retired colonel in Peshawar, and the book still colours my recollections of the North-West Frontier Province with Central European melancholy.

  My fondest memories from abroad are those of standing in bookshops, inhaling the familiar smell of leather, paper and fresh print. On one of my earliest visits to England, I discovered paradise in the shadows of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a bookshop where books could be had for free if you plausibly impersonated a visitor from behind the Iron Curtain. I am not sure which democracy-loving, communist-hating organization funded the enterprise. The little shop was well stocked with the works of dissident East European authors and right-wing economic theory. The former enthralled for hours. Every book ever banned in the East seemed to be there, from the grand-daddy of dissidents, my Montenegrin compatriot Milovan Djilas, to the Bulgarian Georgi Markov, who was murdered with a stab from a poisoned umbrella tip on London’s Waterloo Bridge. Elegant novels written by Czech rubbish collectors stood next to Albanian essayists, and imprisoned Romanian poets vied for shelf space with Lithuanian philosophers. When you chose your books, an elderly bookseller (or book-giver) produced a form which required your signature and address. For some unaccountable reason, I gave a Bulgarian name, feeling, perhaps, that the provenance was more suitable for a recipient of such literary gifts. It didn’t seem like the sort of place where anyone would ask you to produce your documents: that would be too much like home. By the time I settled in London, my paradise had gone.