Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  I am, although no one but me knows it yet, exactly one week pregnant. My father-in-law collapsed suddenly, of internal bleeding, on the night of 28 June 1999. That evening, in a sudden flash of intuition, I had announced to my husband that I wasn’t going to see in my thirty-eighth birthday childless. After thirteen years of marriage – and with only two days to go before the birthday in question – my husband knew better than to contradict, although he has always had little time for intuition of this kind. This is one of those moments in which the difference between the two worlds we come from shows most clearly. In his, destiny is something you are supposed to take into your own hands. In mine, it falls like a block of concrete from the open sky.

  My father-in-law during his farming days

  Is it surprising that we then try to second-guess moments of triumph and disaster by staring into the dregs of coffee at the bottom of a cup we have drunk, or at haphazardly thrown handfuls of beans, or the shoulder blades of slaughtered animals? We deal in revelations and epiphanies in order to mask powerlessness: intimations of the future do not fully translate between my Eastern and my Western world. I am never sure whether to believe them either, but visions are the stock in trade of my Montenegrin family. One of the clans I hail from – the Prorokovic, literally the sons of prophets – throws up seers in every generation. I suspect by now that I am not one of the elect, but I often get it right none the less.

  My son, Alexander, waiting to be born

  I wake up in the middle of the night feeling an unfamiliar electric buzz in the pit of my stomach. ‘This is it,’ I say to myself. ‘A child.’ Then the phones begin to ring, bringing the news of my father-in-law’s death. In the days which follow, amid the rush of funeral arrangements, I forget about the strange, glorious moment of my son’s conception, but I feel different all the time. In the cemetery chapel I know for certain that I am no longer one but two. No bigger than a tadpole by the time I turn thirty-eight, the child waits for the century to come to an end.

  After the funeral service, we walk towards the cluster of Goldsworthy graves under the crowns of mature chestnut trees. One or two monuments cover empty lots, preserving the memory of men and women whose bodies lie in places like Calcutta and the Indian Ocean. The lettering has faded and we have to guess what the Victorian palimpsest adds up to. The most recent grave, built on the eve of the First World War, contains three generations of fathers, sons and their wives. For some reason, the family I married into seems always to have had four or five boys to each girl. Even in the cemetery, the world I am inscribing myself into seems overwhelmingly masculine and spartan to the core. I sit on the edge of a salmon-coloured marble square and read the rows of old-fashioned names around me: Walter, Roger, Everard, Frederick, Charlotte, Sophia, Mary Emma. I try to insert Vesna into the sequence. In 1999, this still seems an amusing thought. An eternity, uninterrupted, stretches ahead of me.

  In the adjacent plot, three gleaming new black gravestones occupy what must once have been a cemetery path. Their gold Cyrillic lettering tells of Serbs exiled in London after the Second World War. One proclaims loyalty to the deposed king; one pays a tribute to Mum and Dad; the third simply marks the beginning and the end, a village in Bosnia and a suburb on the road to Heathrow Airport. I take a black scarf out of my pocket, cover my hair and say a short Orthodox prayer for the dead. Finally, the tears arrive.

  For some years now, I have bidden farewell to my parents at the boarding gates of different airports, thinking, in no longer than the briefest of moments, that this hug, this kiss, this goodbye, might well be the last. I observe my father slowing down, or suddenly notice that my mother’s eyes are the eyes of an old woman, and wonder, guiltily, whether he or she will be the first to go. Although they live in a land where people grow older sooner, and die younger, so long as they are together I remain a child, and I am not sure I know how to be anything else. It is a measure of my sheltered, protected life that it never even occurs to me that the order of departure might be any different from the order of arrival.

  When I am told I have cancer, it takes three days before I can make the telephone call to let Mother and Father know. I wonder whether they really need to be told. I don’t know what to expect. They belong to the generation which hid this illness like a guilty secret, through mortal fear, taboo and superstition. I find out that cousins and neighbours had died from it only once I join the club myself, but I also get to hear stories of miraculous survival. I hug a ninety-year-old woman, an old family friend, feeling, for the first time, a breast that is not there. ‘And it hasn’t been for over forty years,’ she suddenly confides, timid but unyieldingly triumphant, like a girl.

  When I finally do tell them, I cannot quite work out whether my parents are fantastically brave or in denial about what I’m going through. Their telephone calls are upbeat and full of a kind of Blitz spirit which opens no cracks for the possibility of defeat. ‘How are you today, my son?’ my mother asks cheerfully after each dose of chemotherapy I receive. In Serbian, calling a daughter ‘my son’, ‘my brave son’ – using the masculine as a generic name for a child – is not that unusual. With my bald, smooth head and my fresh operation scars, I look more like a son than ever before. If only she could see me. Apropos of nothing much, my shy, reticent father tells me that having me for a daughter is the best thing that has ever happened to him.

  Gradually I begin to understand something about courage and denial. I decide to join the Blitz brigade myself. I won’t hide my wounds – I am too proud for that – but I shall be the brightest glow-worm in the radiotherapy department. I shall fight it wherever. I shall never surrender. You sing or wail if you like, I’ll just keep mum.

  My twenties and my thirties were spent in a state of extended adolescence. The motto of those two decades could have been ‘There’s still plenty of time’. I held a sequence of fine, untroubling jobs. I never felt I was working hard, perhaps because, unlike my parents and even more unlike my grandparents, I had the luxury of never having to do anything I didn’t like for very long. Looking back from where I am now, everything seems fantastically, unbearably easy.

  Perhaps because of that ease, I deliberately sought difficulty. I travelled the world in a way which often confused my mother and father. Staying in fine hotels in places like Vienna or Paris was one thing, but seeking austere lodgings in the shadows of the Atlas, Ararat or K-2, as I began to do, was more difficult to understand. The luxury of deliberate hardship was not something my parents could begin to grasp. There lies a real generation gap. They could not understand my need to take risks simply in order to have a story to tell. This is the measure of my Western hubris, perhaps.

  In the first days of 1990, Simon and I interrupted a Christmas visit to Belgrade in order to witness the revolution in Romania while the body of Ceausescu, Romania’s freshly executed communist dictator, was still warm. Father drove us to the Danube Station to catch an empty train east. Our old Skoda coughed through the snowdrifts like a tubercular patient, and, in the back, Mother begged me not to stray too far from the hotel. In a freezing Bucharest room, lit by the moonlight refracted in the icicles hanging from the roof of the hotel, we listened to the echoing sounds of street demonstrations and ate sandwiches that Mother had furtively squeezed into our rucksacks before departure.

  I was grateful for her foresight: there was barely any food in the Romanian capital, and even that which was available was inedible. The soft white buns with delicate slices of salami, cheese and sweet roast pepper, carefully layered to create a chequerboard effect, were both extravagant and so perfectly telling of the ways in which Mother inscribed her love into our lives. It both infuriated and moved beyond words. After all, this was the woman who, before she went to work at five ten in the morning, found the energy to create elaborate swirls in mayonnaise on the ham and cheese tartines she left on the table ready for her daughters’ breakfast two hours later, simply because she thought that the swirls might encourage my sister to eat.

 
; We returned from Bucharest with photographs of rows of wax candles still burning on the sites of recent sniper killings, of tanks encircling the TV station, flags with the communist star cut out, smouldering ruins. The people in the streets of Bucharest celebrated the end of tyranny, intoxicatingly free for a moment. Back in Belgrade, the death spasms of communism, which thousands celebrated with unmitigated joy, made my parents worry about what would follow. Change was something to be feared. They had lived their entire lives in a world in which every regime seemed bound to be worse than the previous one. In Serbia, that seemed to sum up the entire twentieth century.

  For years, my mother and my aunts kept asking me about the children who weren’t arriving. Why would one marry, if not to have a child? From their point of view, I was already alarmingly old for first-time motherhood at twenty-seven, let alone ten years later. In the meantime, at two- or three-yearly intervals, Simon and I had a conversation about parenthood which usually ended with, ‘There’s still plenty of time.’ I wanted to complete my doctorate, I wanted to write a book, I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted all manner of things, some more selfish than others. I wanted a child too, but there was still plenty of time for that.

  The Yugoslav war went on for almost eight years. Even when we tried not to mention it, it was there like a body buried in our back garden. We talked about that, out there, we tried to guess what was really happening, we argued over who or what was to blame: insiders, outsiders, those who stayed behind, those who – like me – left the country, religious fanatics or godless communists, us or them. Yugoslavia was simultaneously the only solution and the worst of all possible worlds. I couldn’t decide whether I loved or hated it. I had hauntingly beautiful memories of that country, yet it appears that it was also, and for so many people, an ugly, doomed place.

  My first birthday

  I often returned home from work just in time to watch the landscapes of my childhood burn on the early-evening television news. Every now and then I saw familiar faces. A high-school friend flitted briefly across the screen in a flak jacket, running across a square in Prishtina. I had no idea what he was doing there. A theatre director pointed to the burning edifice of Sarajevo Town Hall and I recognized the bandy-legged boy who took me out skating years ago. The spokeswoman for the Bosnian Ministry of Defence was, I realized, the young Muslim journalist whom I met in a restaurant on the Adriatic coast one sweltering August evening. We exchanged confidences over steaming bowls of mussels and glasses of cold beer, as one does only with complete strangers. Our great secrets – the reasons for the early breakdown of her marriage in a small town in eastern Bosnia, the intricacies of the complicated love-life I delighted in when I was twenty-two – seem now to belong to someone else, yet I can still recall them word for word. I felt that she was a kindred spirit, a sister-soul.

  ‘Don’t you remember Radovan?’ my father asks one day. My Montenegrin clan is connected by marriage to the Karadzic clan, and Radovan, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, used to turn up at family weddings and funerals before he became wanted by the armies of the world for a list of war crimes as long as my arm. I don’t really remember Radovan, but he reminds me how painfully I remain tied to the war even at over a thousand miles’ distance, through webs of family and friendship which seem to stretch as far back as I can remember.

  I want to get closer to the conflict in order to understand it, then I think that my distance and my confusion are the only possible means of understanding. I have brief Martha Gellhorn moments when I go off to the Balkans in search of truth. I pay to be driven around by unshaven thugs who peruse the glossy product catalogue of Heckler & Koch while I walk forlornly on the edges of bomb craters hoping to see God knows what. I have Virginia Woolf moments when I escape to Sussex to collect large polished pebbles on the beach, just in case. Then I look up to the sky and wonder why I wasn’t born in Denmark. ‘Bad luck, girl,’ comes the reply out of nowhere. ‘Deal with it.’ This is as close as I ever get to any kind of epiphany. And I do. I deal with it.

  Then it – the body in the garden – starts moving closer. One evening, returning home from the theatre, I meet a neighbour’s sixteen-year-old boy in the street and he says, ‘Did you hear the news? We’ve started bombing Serbia tonight.’ His father is Serbian and his mother English: that we obscures a thousand contradictions. I rush into the house and dial my mother and father’s number with a desperate sense of urgency although there is nothing to say, just as I would – for as long as NATO bombers flew over Belgrade – continue to ring them every day simply to say hello. It is the only thing I can do. It is a ritual like not stepping on the cracks in paving stones, pure superstition, a compulsion. If I don’t get through, they will die.

  A week into the bombing, my sister wonders whether to take her family away from Belgrade and back to Toronto, where she had lived in the early nineties. ‘Go. Just go. As far west and as far north as you can bear to go,’ I urge her. Even in London I feel too close. She leaves the bombed city, and there are agonizing hours while she and her children travel by bus – along exposed highways and across bridges which might or might not be of interest to NATO’s pilots – north to Hungary. Although the skies above Serbia are the busiest in Europe, the kind of plane she needs no longer flies there. She calls to say that they’ve made it across the border – no one hit, no one taken off the bus – and then they fly over me in London and across the Atlantic. For the rest of the spring, I call both Belgrade and Toronto, at different ends of the day.

  In those daily calls during the bombing season, it is my father who keeps the laughter alive. With my sister and her children gone, Mother is like a flame extinguished, yet Father suddenly makes the war seem nothing if not funny. He has seen it all before, he claims. His Second World War stories have a Mark Twain-like glow of childhood memory, and a whatever-happens-now-I’ve-seen-worse stoicism. We laugh for long minutes before one of us puts the receiver down. ‘Whatever could you have found so funny?’ ask my husband and my mother in unison, at different ends of the transcontinental line. The fact that the telephone connections between my two warring countries remain open is a little miracle in itself.

  Father had already seen two aerial attacks on Belgrade on Easter Day: the Germans bombed in 1941, when he was eight, and the Allies in 1944. They went for many of the places NATO is targeting today. ‘Third time lucky,’ Father says when the oil refinery in the river valley explodes, emitting a large, black, mushroom cloud. ‘Your mother will have to wash the curtains now.’ On British television, where I watch them, the direct hits sound strangely muted, like the crack of a bicyclist’s skull hitting the asphalt. ‘I may be an orphan at sixty-six but at least I no longer have my mother to worry about, only yours,’ Father says.

  I once thought of Father’s generation of men as cowards simply because they allowed the communists to rule unchallenged for so many years. I admired the Czechs and the Hungarians, who climbed on to the Soviet tanks in those grainy black-and-white documentaries, and thought of them as much more courageous than the Serbs, the Croats and the rest of the Yugoslav lot. Now I wonder if I was right. I realize how much easier it is to climb on an enemy tank than to know exactly what to do with your own. My generation of spoilt, well-travelled, English-speaking socialist kids has hardly done much better.

  ‘Christ is risen, Daddy,’ I shout from west London on a Sunday morning. ‘He is risen indeed,’ Father shouts back from Serbia, against the wailing sound of air-raid sirens. There is no reason to interrupt the conversation. My parents stay away from air-raid shelters. The phone lines crackle but remain alive and I continue to call once a day, to ward off the evil eye. Then the war stops. The British Army advances into Prishtina, and it is an ending of sorts. ‘It’s somebody else’s worry now,’ I tell my parents, but this is true only up to a point. I don’t want to see British soldiers dying. I am British too.

  My father was the only man in a household of strong women. He negotiated between two headstrong daughters, his w
ife and his mother with the skills of an experienced peace negotiator. Like the UN, he risked unpopularity all the time. Whenever there was a prohibition to be prescribed, my mother urged us to ‘ask your father’, unwilling ever to say no herself. If she wanted to get her mother-in-law to comply with anything, she always sent Father to do the explaining: why, for example, it was unwise for Granny to take three times the recommended dose of Mother’s blood pressure-lowering pills when her blood pressure was already extremely low (Granny loved taking tablets just as much as she hated going to the doctor and would swallow a handful of whatever happened to be around); or why it wasn’t necessary to knit woollen stockings for the entire family and even less to undo perfectly nice jumpers in order to get the wool for the stockings. Granny didn’t take kindly to lessons of this kind. She saw them as direct personal attacks, to which she responded with equally direct denunciations of Father, in which she referred to things that only a mother would know about her son. My father, an angel of patience where she was concerned, tended to react with a long, imperturbable, ‘Mama, please.’

  Most of the time, however, Granny watched over Father’s interests with the eyes of a hawk. The hierarchy of her affections was always abundantly clear. We were her family, but he was her body and soul. He was her only child, after all. Even when Father was in his fifties and Granny in her seventies, she urged us to ensure that we never let him leave the house without a scarf or a pair of gloves, as if she was trying to make up for his childhood years, when she dug the fields all day and sewed shirts for money all night, bent over the neck of her Singer machine in the rising waves of white cotton like a rider in a desperate race against the tide. ‘You’re abandoning Misha,’ she said sadly while she watched me pack for England, as though I was leaving a child behind.