Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  In my second year at Belgrade University I decided to become a palaeographer. I gave up work as a youth radio presenter in order to join a course in Byzantine Greek. My mother was distraught. My bright media future was evaporating before her eyes, giving way to musty old libraries and mustier salaries. Working with old manuscripts did not seem at all glamorous to her. She thought I was too good-looking to be a palaeographer. Granny was worried that I might catch bubonic plague from a bug dormant in some twelfth-century manuscript which I happened to open for the first time since its scribe collapsed, hands covered in horrible, pus-filled fistulas, clutching his quill pen. Only my father saw some consolation in the fact that it was the kind of work which was unlikely to lead to imprisonment. There seemed to be nothing remotely political in transcribing thousand-year-old prayers, whereas as a media star I was likely to shoot my mouth off sooner or later.

  My medieval literature tutor, an erudite Byzantine scholar who was quietly anti-communist and unapologetically elitist in his ideas of higher education, took much of both the credit and the blame for this sudden conversion. He guided me and Irena, a fellow literature student and one of my closest friends, to every manuscript collection in Belgrade, there to discover the secrets of book-copying. Irena was a gentle, blonde Montenegrin girl who reminded everyone of Mariel Hemingway in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, and our tutor – in his tweed jackets, turtle-neck jumpers and round spectacles – was most comfortingly donnish. Of the three, I was the one who was least like a palaeographer. I could never decide whether to dress like the businesswoman of the year, a lover of Jean-Paul Sartre or a punk.

  The archives, with their old bookcases and desks, provided a refuge from an increasingly impoverished, polluted city. Belgrade was becoming like Cairo without the pyramids, or Erzerum with traffic jams and queues. The quiet world of faith inscribed in red initials and black continuous script seemed to provide the best sanctuary I could find. I might not be able to believe in God myself, but I was awed by the belief I witnessed. Irena and I looked at textual variants and transmission errors, we measured column widths, counted accents and breathings, and tabulated the family trees of manuscripts, feeling frighteningly, wonderfully grown up. I am not sure if any English undergraduate would be allowed to lay his or her hands on such treasures. Irena is still a gifted palaeographer. I obviously had no staying power. My mother was right: I was not cut out for archival work. I wanted to be quiet and at peace, but I was one of those children who are always, and in spite of their better judgement, driven to giggles by too much silence.

  In fact, while it was highly unlikely that a palaeographer would end up in prison or without a job, as has been known to happen to the critics of contemporary literature, my father was wrong in thinking that the vellum-bound world was apolitical. You could say, for example, that a manuscript was ‘probably Bulgarian’ or ‘possibly twelfth-century’, and cause an international dispute of major proportions. In the Balkans, there has always been an unspoken competition as to who was the first to be civilized as well as to who was the most civilized. Manuscripts provided forensic evidence. Given that medieval monks left relatively few clues pointing to their chosen national identity, one sometimes felt a bit like a Mormon, rechristening one’s ancestors. Certainly, whether Methodius the Hypothetical was a Bulgarian, a Serb or quite possibly Greek seemed so much more important than whether T. S. Eliot was British or American. My on-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other attitude was never going to be an asset. As a palaeographer, you were expected to have an opinion, and I’ve never had an unqualified opinion in my life, at least not until I was forty-one.

  I gave a lecture on Danilo Kis’s novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in London in the late eighties. Together with quite a few of my compatriots, I was a teeny-weeny bit in love with Danilo, who was a tall, slim, Jewish-Hungarian-Montenegrin Byron. I remember seeing him walk along Belgrade’s Knez Mihajlova Street through a thick curtain of snow, with snowflakes melting in his dark curls. A woman called out his name and he responded in a deep, smoky voice. I remained smitten for three weeks at least: I was barely fourteen and hadn’t yet read any of his books.

  As I explained Kis’s post-national credentials, a Hungarian woman in the audience stood up to ask me whether I thought Danilo was in fact a Hungarian Jew or a Jewish Hungarian. ‘You and I know what the difference means,’ she suggested conspiratorially. Danilo called himself ‘the last Yugoslav’ but I wasn’t sure if that really meant anything to him. At that stage he was already dying in his Parisian exile, and a couple of years later I put a pebble on his grave. I often described myself as Yugoslav simply because I kept forgetting that the country did not exist any more. I felt utterly defeated.

  When I gave up palaeography, I decided to try my hand at deconstruction. I read every volume on post-structuralism I could put my hands on in Belgrade – not that many, in those days – and started penning book reviews neither of my parents could make any sense of. Soon enough, I became editor of the student literary magazine Znak, ‘The Sign’. It was one of the most coveted positions a young literary thing could have. The budget was considerable and there was no pressure to sell, which, curiously, often produced better results than more financially minded publishing ventures. I began to describe myself as a fellow-traveller of the postmodernist school.

  In the eighties, the debate between the ‘realists’ and the ‘postmodernists’ had suddenly become very public and very bitter. Mostly middle-aged and mostly men, the realists thought that an author should be engaged or, as they put it, ‘rise up to the challenges of their society’. In those days, this meant being a nationalist, or – as the realists would have it – ‘patriotic’. The postmodernists were mainly young and smart, and responded to the ‘challenges of the society’ by writing fiction which had very little to do with anything, and was so sophisticated it hurt. I tried to publish as much of their work as possible in my two years at the helm of Znak. In fact, I was probably never as happy as when going to our printers in New Belgrade with my hands full of galley proofs of experimental prose. I took unnecessarily long routes and stopped to chat to everyone.

  I had a little office at the university, which became the meeting place of the smart set, or so I fancied. I spent my nights translating chunks of deconstructionist philosophy, smoking out of my bedroom window, nurturing my conceits and weighing my career options. Many of my postmodernist brethren were ending up in America. I imagined a professorship at Columbia (good location, good university), but Yale seemed to be the place where deconstruction was happening. I wasn’t so sure about New Haven, but decided that – if the package Yale offered was good – I’d reluctantly have to move out to the sticks. The wielding of literary power – however small – was obviously corrupting.

  For students of literature such as myself, who thought themselves men and women of letters, Belgrade was in many ways a sort of down-at-heel Elysium. It might be true that there are more literary events in London in any given week than in a whole year of book publishing in Serbia, but the illusion that you could do everything and get everywhere had tremendous compensations. From the protest meetings at the Writers’ Union to the decadent, avant-garde happenings at the Students’ Cultural Centre, our little duffel-coated coterie of literary critics in their early twenties seemed omnipresent. We asked questions and collected signatures, we booed and applauded across the town. We hung on the tails of famous literary visitors to the capital, in the illusion that we were – in the wider scheme of things – somehow part of the world into which people like Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg and John Updike casually dropped. I was star-struck by writers. I built up a collection of books with personal dedications from the great and the good of the writing world, many of whom weren’t sure whether they were in Belgrade, Bucharest or Budapest.

  I have a file of poems with rhymes for Vesna in a number of languages, written amid the bibulous aftermaths of the many readings I attended. Being, as my mother insisted, a good-looking gir
l, as well as the editor of Belgrade’s most avant-garde literary journal (or so I kept telling anyone who cared to listen, and many did), I even received marriage proposals, one of which was delivered in Welsh, by a grey-haired poet kneeling in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Belgrade. I am not sure if it was the thought of being in Eastern Europe which brought out the romantic (or opportunistic) streak in visiting Western writers. I was still too naive to enquire whether a hand offered in marriage was a euphemism for anything else. That naivety was also perhaps what protected me from actually finding out.

  On occasion, I acted as an interpreter from French for the Writers’ Union. I soon realized that the thrill of being in the East, where books mattered more than life itself, was what many of our literary visitors found exciting about the idea of coming to Belgrade. They always wanted to know about banned authors and banned books, about poets imprisoned and tortured for their verse. I loved the idea of dangerous books myself, but it often seemed that most of Yugoslavia’s banned authors were nationalists, and that didn’t seem romantic at all.

  It seemed, in a way, disappointing that we were not more like Russia used to be in the thirties, or earlier. One French poet enthused over my alleged ‘striking resemblance’ to Tatiana from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. ‘TatiaNA,’ he called across the lobby when I came to pick him up from his hotel for his morning meetings, sweetly emphasizing the last syllable. ‘TatiaNA’, he sang in the official limousine all the way to the state dairy in Panchevo, at the other side of the Danube, a visit to which was organized by some clever-clogs bureaucrat in the town hall. ‘Don’t worry, TatiaNA,’ he whispered as I struggled in my efforts to convey comparative data related to the milk production of Holstein-Friesians and Brown Swiss cows into French. ‘Just tell me sweet nothings, if you prefer. No one will ever know.’

  When I came to live in London in 1986, it took me seven months to find a job. I might have got one sooner had I not – in a fit of newcomer’s stubbornness – restricted myself to replying to the few job ads published in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. Eventually, an Anglo-Czech science-fiction writer, who earned his living by working for a Cambridge publisher in an office high in one of the turrets of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, was sufficiently intrigued by my unconventional CV to want to interview me. Soon afterwards I became an editor, but I edited nothing. I spent most of my time drawing up production grids for a microfiche collection of books about plants and insects, a job for which the one essential qualification was an ability to count to forty-nine, the number of frames on the microfiche.

  I spent my days in a bizarre mimicry of reading. I turned the pages of literally thousands of books, and plotted out the microfiche frames, which I then passed on to an English history graduate who was the ‘photography editor’. From this angle, British publishing seemed to be full of people whose job titles were far too grand for what they actually did, as if to compensate for salaries which would barely keep one afloat in Kishinev.

  For the first time in my life, I worked with books which contained nothing I was remotely interested in. Not being English, I was left pretty cold by botany and entomology. I was a town girl, uninterested in plant and insect life; in my native Serbian, I knew the names of hundreds of species, purely for poetic purposes, but when it came to recognizing any, I am afraid that identifying the most basic – a butterfly, an oak or a rose – was as far as my expertise went.

  None the less, I was surrounded by some of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen. Just being in a library made me happy: it was a world whose driving forces and divisions of labour were as familiar to me as a beehive is to a bee. Librarians pulled out catalogue drawers crammed tight with index cards; scientists waited for large volumes to be delivered to ornate, numbered desks. From my little cubbyhole, high under one of the neo-Gothic arches of the museum, I observed them going about their business and entertained myself by inventing elaborate stories of plant and insect gathering in Belize or the Caucasus. One day, I was a writer in exile, recently escaped from East Berlin or Kaliningrad with a 100,000-word masterpiece, another – a princess in her castle.

  I had a chatelaine of keys which took me through underground corridors full of stuffed animals, bizarre specimens in formaldehyde and all kinds of other exhibits that were no longer appropriate for show, to cellars and then up to turrets full of books. I occasionally spoke to an entomologist with an interest in Russian coleoptera, who told me that many of his colleagues in the museum believed I was Russian because I once helped him translate a Russian index card. There was also an occasion when some botanists invited me to meet a ‘compatriot of mine’, a visiting professor from Budapest, and didn’t seem at all puzzled when we started conversing in French. I didn’t help matters by always explaining my nationality in the most complicated way possible. My museum security pass gave ‘Belgravia’ as my place of birth.

  Two years into my first job, I barely knew anyone in the publishing firm for which I worked. I met the proprietor, a charming baronet, once, for about five minutes. Cyril, my Czech interviewer, left more or less the moment I proved I could be relied on to count to forty-nine. He warned me that the job would leave me bored out of my wits. This would have been daunting for some people, but I loved the prospect of boredom. Growing up in Eastern Europe was a powerful vaccine. I had gone through eighteen years of socialist education, learning when to say yes and when to keep quiet, in preparation for a job in which I’d be underpaid and under-employed. Where I come from, such jobs – usually in very nice places – were often described as ‘ideal for women’.

  I continued to meet Cyril from time to time, mainly in pubs around South Kensington, where we would talk about East European science fiction and world music, his pet subjects. He was now indexing place-names for an expensive edition of the Domesday Book which was being prepared by another small publisher. He explained to me that the Domesday Book was a glorified eleventh-century tax return rather than, as I thought, a book of apocalyptic prophecy. Cyril remembered that I knew some Latin and could read scripta continua and offered me a job in an office in a former dairy behind Kensington Square. I rang Cambridge and told my boss that I had been ‘head-hunted’: a fine display of Thatcherite vocabulary, which was then just beginning to filter through to the gentle world of independent publishing.

  Cyril and I – a Czech and a Serb – now spent hours over huge maps of English counties, plotting the exact locations of saltpans, forests and demesnes in the eleventh century and finding them on large Ordnance Survey maps. England still seemed like an enormous jigsaw puzzle to me. While I got to know individual counties down to the smallest hamlet, I often had no idea where they stood in relation to each other. I loved the weird poetry of English place-names. I’d repeat strange little mantras – ‘Chester-le-Street, Ashby de la Launde, Ashby de la Zouch, Weston-super-Mare’ – as though I was bringing the country of my marriage into being.

  As the ‘place-name editor’, I often dealt with calls from prospective buyers, who invariably wanted to ensure that their house or their village was mentioned in the Domesday Book before they parted with their money. On hearing a foreign female, many asked to speak to ‘my boss’, so I usually transferred the calls to our marketing director, Lady Henrietta. There was no point in alienating customers by trying to prove something. Slim and elegant, with a singsong plummy voice, Lady Henrietta seemed to me a born saleswoman. I could sometimes hear her saying to one of the people to whom I’d spoken that I was ‘frighteningly clever’, which always pleased me. There were many more English people in London in those days, and foreigners tended to fall into one of two categories: they were either fiendishly clever, spoke ten languages fluently and knew everything, or they had to be taught how to hold a fork and run water from a tap. I was glad to find myself in the first category.

  Eventually, I progressed beyond place-names, to some proper copy-editing. The Domesday Book was an endless variation on the ‘Ethelred the Lecher o
wns two pigs and a copse in Lower Turnpike’ theme, so there was not much to be brainy about. I now sat at a desk in the corner of a large office which belonged to Robert, the editorial director, art historian, son of an earl and one of the most terrific raconteurs I’ve come across. I could listen for hours to his stories, few of which had anything to do with the Domesday Book. In the sixties, the publisher I worked for had produced brave, adventurous books illustrated by some of the most avant-garde artists of the day, instead of the good-looking volumes in green and gold – the publishing equivalent of National Trust soap bars – which we were now putting out. I had a feeling, one which I often had in England, that I had arrived somewhere just after the party was over, and that the best thing to do was have one last drink and hear how it all went. No one was better suited to that than Robert.