Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Our office was like a room in an eccentric museum. Pieces of Robert’s eclectic collection of artworks were literally everywhere: an Aboriginal feather cloak, a threadbare kilim, sculpture from India and psychedelic prints from the sixties, came together in a fascinating mess. In the early afternoon, Robert and I often drank wine from milky Roman glasses which, he would say, may or may not have been touched by Jesus. He would sometimes nod off and leave me to edit my ploughs and furlongs to the gentle sound of snoring. We were paid a pittance, but even so there was never enough money to keep us all going. In Moscow, we might have gone on for several decades, but here the writing was clearly on the wall. While it lasted, it was England as I liked it best.

  In the years of horror brought on by the interminable war in my homeland, I retreated to the world of reading lists, seminar discussions and essay deadlines, in which I always felt safe and at home, first as a student and then as a teacher. The former polytechnic, one of Britain’s newest generation of universities, of which I finally became part, may not have turned out to be quite the glamorous oasis of electrifying lectures in elegant wood-panelled halls I had envisaged while furtively smoking fragrant Herzegovina cigarettes out of the window of my Zharkovo bedroom, but there were always just enough students who cared about books to make me feel that I was in the right place after all. And once every two or three years, there was one whose passion was such that it carried me along. I understood, for the first time, that what I thought of as Andrei’s gift to me – those hours of apprenticeship which made me feel privileged to be his student – might just as easily have been my gift to him.

  There were many moments in which my sense of homecoming was less than poetic. One April day a couple of years ago, I escaped early from a meeting which was stumbling into its fourth hour and had only just reached item nine out of the seventeen points on the agenda. In the art of the long meeting, British university workers easily outdid anything I’d encountered in my socialist upbringing. The sessions were often longer than the communist plenaries, the acronyms just as plentiful, the put-downs just as complicatedly veiled in oblique metaphor, the passions just as high, even if the stakes were often infinitesimal. The Yugoslavs and the Warsaw Pacters were at least allowed drink and cigarettes in their meetings; my colleagues and I were slowly boring each other to death over weak tea and cheap sugary biscuits, in grey classrooms where one’s eye followed dark circles of chewing gum on the floor and the smell of crisps and trainers continued to linger even through the long summer vacation. In its functionality, its determined denial of beauty, the university was visually so East European that I often had to check myself when the phone rang in my office, for fear that I might answer it in Serbian.

  I walked through the quiet avenues of Kingston Hill feeling guilty about the hour I’d stolen. Large villas hid behind impenetrable crowns of trees. Every now and then a car came by and its driver threw a curious glance at me. We were miles away from public transport but no one was walking here, and quite a few streets had no pavements. I had to stay either in the middle of the road or walk along the wet verges, where my feet sank into the grass with a soft, squashy sound. It felt as though the water was rising from below. I couldn’t decide if it was raining or not, so I kept opening and closing my umbrella.

  I was trying to guess how my life would turn out, paradoxically, just at the moment when – unknown to me – the first mutant cells may have begun to attach themselves to my milk ducts. In theory, I had a job I’d always thought I wanted, and I was good at it. In practice, I no longer felt I could get everything I pointed a finger at, which had been my secret magic. I could not work out where and when I lost that feeling. There was the decade-long, draining war, which left the country I came from destitute and friendless. Then there was the more immediate poverty around me, not nearly as devastating, but sad none the less. The poverty of the publishing world managed to seem romantic, whereas the bleak poverty of the university often upset me, perhaps because there were so many young witnesses to it. It seemed unfair that they couldn’t have what I had had so long ago, and in a much poorer place.

  My own time was increasingly thrown against the advancing waves of bureaucracy. I often sat over spreadsheets at my dining-room table late into the night, working out percentages of this and that, just like my mother used to do. Even the abbreviations I used in my reports were eerily similar to the ones with which she headed the miles of ledgers she used to produce. There was no inherent reason why my life should be any easier than hers. None the less, I felt that I was betraying some kind of promise I’d given her by accepting the boredom so readily, as though both of us had somehow failed through that acceptance, for what kept her going was the illusion that her children’s lives would somehow turn out to be miraculously easy.

  I had believed that I could somehow dedicate my life to the beauty of the written word, but it sometimes seemed that books were no longer enough and this was really confusing. I was not made for asceticism. I hated austerity. Perhaps for the first time since I arrived in England, I began to feel claustrophobic. I was about to enter the tropic of Cancer, that twilight world from which one longs to return to ledgers and spreadsheets at midnight, indeed to anything at all which could be called simply life.

  In the forties, in a room in the coach house which stood in the Japanese garden of Warren House, the Kingston Hill residence of Lady Paget, the Serbian novelist Milos Tsernianski wrote the second volume of Migrations, a haunting story of exile and loss, one of the greatest Slavonic books. The Tsernianskis could not afford to pay rent, and repaid their benefactress in kind. Milos, a former Yugoslav diplomat, used his calligraphic skills to address her party invitations and his wife, Vida, baked biscuits for Lady Paget’s guests. It is terribly unfair, but I keep thinking of the couple as pets, a pair of Pekinese perhaps. I imagine Lady Paget turning towards one of her friends and saying, against the clinking of porcelain cups, ‘I keep a Serbian novelist here, you know, my dear.’ To his credit, Tsernianski was never a particularly grateful guest: indeed, the veiled references to his hostess in his novels are invariably ironical and bitter. He was a pet piranha rather than a pet Pekinese, biting the hand which fed him. I briefly saw myself in my own coach house at the bottom of Kingston Hill, baking biscuits and writing party invitations, although I no longer had the kind of conceit which would make me feel Tsernianski’s equal without having done anything to prove it. On the other hand, I had one enormous advantage over him. I was free to come and go as I pleased. I needed to feel that freedom in my bones again if I was to survive.

  In the early thirties, my Herzegovinian grandfather was visiting Subotica, a town close to the Yugoslav border with Hungary, when he met his future Montenegrin bride. Subotica was the birthplace of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, a confection of Habsburg neo-Baroque and Jugendstil where poplars and spires still provide the highest points on the cityscape. It is built on land so flat that it tricks the eye into seeing the earth’s surface bend and slope off towards the horizon. After the Great War, hundreds of Montenegrins were settled on the farmland around Subotica, in order to firm up the new border of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. They continued to yearn for the mountains well into the third generation.

  Because of an administrative error, my grandmother’s identity card lists Subotica as her birthplace, even though she was born 300 miles further south, in what used to be the kingdom of Montenegro. An educated, well-to-do girl from a good tribe, of which she remained fiercely proud, my grandmother might have married a Sirdar or a courtier. She had raven-black hair and deep-set eyes like sloes. The Great War left her with an invalid father, shipwrecked in the northern plains. She worked in a rope factory to support her younger siblings through school. Surrounded by Hungarian, German and Romanian workers, she picked up words from their languages and for the rest of her life spoke ‘Granny’, a unique Montenegrin-Central European dialect in which Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian layers of vocabulary blended into a singular concoction. N
o one else in the world spoke this language; her parents were too old to change their speech, her siblings too young to remember the inflections of the old country. Granny’s voice was coarse with asthma – a memento from the years she spent inhaling hemp dust on the factory floor.

  I sometimes ring my little sister in her important big office in Toronto and leave a message in ‘Granny’ on her voicemail. I adopt an asthmatic wheeze and let flow a torrent in which complaints and endearments alternate in a linguistic macédoine, until I run out of breath and start laughing. My grandmother’s rages were biblical, her outpourings of love unmatched. Her way of speaking always seems several sizes too big for me. The telephone line which connects me to my sister’s answering machine in the depths of the Canadian winter conveys a code which is more perfect than any my father in his career as a codebreaker ever deciphered. The language of my dead grandmother brings to life all our lost homelands, yet no book has ever been written in it. This is the language I lost when I chose to write books in English, a choice I affirmed when English turned out to be my son’s mother tongue. When I capture the code in the language of my son, I’ll burn the books and set myself free.

  Sisters on the grass

  7. Homesickness, War and Radio

  ONE OF THE GAMES my sister and I liked to play when we were children was called ‘television’. We’d put two chairs side by side at the dining-room table, sit upright and smile beatifically towards imaginary cameras as we shuffled the blank sheets of paper from which we ‘read’ our news bulletins. We had our noms de plume, or, rather, noms de microphone. ‘Respected viewers, good evening,’ my sister would begin, with the standard opening of Belgrade TV news. ‘Comrade Tito visited a factory today. Over to you, Natasha.’ ‘Thank you, Clementine,’ I’d say, carefully enunciating every syllable.

  My lips were the colour of violets. Before a broadcast we ‘went into make-up’: early on, we played each other’s make-up girls, but then, because of different approaches to aesthetics, each started doing her own. Father had a stash of marker crayons in the garage, red on one side and blue on the other, of an old-fashioned kind which needed a lick in order to write. The crayons made convincing make-up tools: blue for the eyelids, red for the cheeks, a layer of red followed by a layer of blue for the lips, and, only occasionally, a fragrant cloud of Mother’s face powder to finish. My sister was fond of fake moles. I hated the way she sometimes read the news looking like a shrunken version of Madame de Pompadour, but I was in no position to choose my co-anchors at that stage. My sister was the only show in town. While she went on as cheerfully as ever, my growing hostility became apparent in my broadcasts, which I increasingly delivered through clenched teeth.

  In those days, news readers on Belgrade television were not really journalists. They tended to be elegant men and women with sonorous, educated voices, selected as much for their political suitability as for their poise and reading skills. News bulletins were static affairs which followed a strict running order. No matter what was going on in the world, Comrade Tito’s activities came first. Foreign news could be as bleak as you liked, but home offerings were generally cheerful and positive. Sports achievements followed news of production quotas met and surpassed and the export successes of Yugoslav industry. Contented tourists from around the world visited our coast, and Yugoslav cars raced along the roads of foreign capitals.

  It was easy to produce convincing imitations of such daily litanies of success, but they made our broadcasting game repetitive. My sister and I desperately needed excitement and disasters. We occasionally tried to interview our grandmother for the programme, sensing some potential in her story, but she kept rejecting our bids. She never believed anything anyone said in the news bulletins, not even the weather reports, and was indifferent towards the idea of media stardom. Furthermore, she tended to enquire about the nationality of any person who appeared on television, and – if it was a Montenegrin – say something along the lines of, ‘I knew it. You do not get much more handsome or cleverer than that.’ It was only because of her that we noticed that Montenegro, not much more populous than a small British county, produced a disproportionate number of talking heads. This might have had something to do with its beautiful but barren landscape: there was little point in trying to make a go of it at home.

  Granny loved agricultural programmes, boxing and Montenegrin folk-dancing – which was itself a convincing imitation of fighting. That was about it as far as television was concerned. She would stay up late watching international boxing championships and always chose her favourites according to their religion. So long as the Orthodox boys won, she was happy; unfortunately, in the world of boxing, that did not happen very often. Mother was exasperated. How could such a seemingly sweet old thing be so fond of savage entertainment and yet cheerfully talk her way through the New Year’s Day concert from Vienna which was Mother’s favourite TV programme? As far as Mother was concerned, Granny’s Montenegrin blood was to blame for all her unladylike excesses.

  On those rare occasions when our house filled with those Montenegrin cousins with whom my grandmother was still on speaking terms, and the noise of their arguments became unbearable, Mother would beckon me to the kitchen to help arrange the trays of meze. Closing the door behind her, she sighed in resignation. She could never accept the fact that arguing was just the way they communicated. They knew how to keep quiet when they wanted. It was not uncommon to find close relatives living under the same roof who hadn’t said a word to each other for ten years because of some tiff the origins of which were long forgotten.

  Mother was particularly incensed by Granny’s way of dividing people into friend or foe according to their faith, or, rather, according to her perception of it. If one were to believe Granny, the whole of Asia and Africa was ‘Turkish’ and most of the rest of the world Catholic, and we were never quite sure which was worse. The Jews, whom she called Chivuti, were great, both because they continued to stand up to the ‘Turks’ and because communist Yugoslavia was hostile to Israel (and anything maligned by that bunch was ipso facto fantastic), but one couldn’t quite escape the feeling that that was because she had never really met any Jews, Israeli or otherwise. One thing was certain: we Orthodox folk had to stick together! Not that, in her case, that ever stood in the way of expressing prejudice about Romanians, Bulgarians, Greeks or, in particular, her fellow Serbs. While the Serbs from the highlands were generally OK, those from the lowlands were a bunch of thieves to a man.

  My father’s mother

  How all this annoyed Mother! She was too polite to argue, but she would turn towards Granny and say, ‘Mother, how can you?’ in a steady, even tone, using the polite form of you. In the thirty years they lived together, my mother preserved the formal vi – the Serbian second-person plural – in addressing her mother-in-law, whereas Granny was on familiar, ti terms with everyone, including God, with whom she argued incessantly and loudly as though he were a fellow Montenegrin. ‘Why wouldn’t you do this for me, God?’ she prayed, sounding the word God as though it were a Christian name. ‘Have I ever thrown a stone at you?’

  My sister or I would raise a small, clenched fist – the imaginary microphone – towards Mother’s lips, sensing a statement fit for our news bulletins. ‘You should never, ever judge people by their faith,’ Mother would say, making sure that Granny was within earshot, with examples of wonderful friends who were either Catholic or Muslim at the ready. The older woman shrugged her shoulders and waited for the knockout.

  In 1992, as the long agony of Yugoslavia’s dissolution gathered pace, I became the night-shift queen of the BBC World Service. I was still playing at journalism, while my little sister became the news. She worked for the Belgrade offshoot of a British charity, on whose behalf she took risks on the fringes of Balkan battlefields where she struggled to reunite children found alone in shelters and orphanages with families exiled across the continent, from Lapland to Anatolia. Because of the war, children’s homes were full of kids who didn’t
really know whether they still had parents or not. My sister is a mother of two, and her heart broke on a daily basis. She showed me a self-portrait made by one of her wards, a clumsy sketch by a seven-year-old depicting a boy kicking a football. The leg which pointed towards the ball was a short, thin line in pencil. ‘An unfinished drawing?’ I asked. ‘A landmine,’ replied my sister. ‘Thank you,’ the caption read, in a shaky child’s hand.

  Just before four a.m., I glance out of my office window at the BBC towards the ink-coloured sky behind the pigeon mesh. This is the most dangerous hour for night-shift workers: lorries swerve towards lampposts, hands slip under mechanized blades, hospital patients die, bleepers emit a long, steady whine. The worst I can do is fluff during the five o’clock news bulletin: give the wrong time, a wrong date, an incorrect temperature. In rare moments of panic, when no tape seems to be in its proper place and telephone connections with stringers in distant Balkan valleys remain obstinately dead, my brain short-circuits and I start apologizing to my listeners in English. Wires cross and spark, producing a millisecond of blank space in which I begin to say sorry instead of izvinite. I emit no more than a barely audible hiss, which startles the studio manager on the other side of the heavy glass panel, before I realize the mistake and will my tired mind to think in Serbian again. As soon as the steady, incomprehensible Slavonic flow resumes, the SM settles back into his chair. The TV above his head broadcasts silent explosions and train crashes in slow motion. I try not to look at the ticker at the bottom of the screen, for fear that I might start speaking English again.