Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Halfway through the Second World War, in the middle of Zharkovo marketplace, where she was selling her agricultural produce, Granny hit a junior German officer on the head with a heavy key. Her German was poor but evidently good enough for an argument. She was promptly locked away, for all anyone knew to await execution. For hours, my good grandfather pleaded with the local mayor to intercede, and the mayor in turn pleaded with the German authorities. They finally let her go, quite possibly believing that she had to be mad because she refused to apologize. Her response to her release was pure, unmitigated anger. Her husband – my grandfather – should not have pleaded with anyone as far as she was concerned; and it was typical of his weakling nature that he had even contemplated such a thing.

  Grandfather is often curiously absent from my family story. Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he seems to belong to a different historical era from the rest of us. He appears, in walk-in parts, in stories in which he usually tries to appease Granny’s fiery temper. ‘A fool,’ Granny repeats lovingly, decades after his death.

  On 19 October 1944, a gang of Soviet soldiers barely out of their teens burst into Granny’s kitchen in the southern suburbs of Belgrade, demanding to be fed. She went out into the backyard, caught a hapless chicken, beheaded it with an axe and plunged it, still half-covered in feathers, into a pot of boiling water. Minutes later, the Soviet boys devoured the bird, barely warmed through, expressed appreciation and moved on towards the city, which echoed with exploding shells. In Granny’s book the Soviets were the good guys, part of the Orthodox International. When my then eleven-year-old father sat down to his usual wartime meal of watery polenta, Granny slapped a spoonful of plum jam on his plate, to ‘celebrate the end of the Schwab’. (For her generation, all Germans and all Austrians were Swabian.) The following day, Belgrade was taken by the communists. Or freed. It depends on your point of view.

  When I ask my father what he remembers of the Second World War, he tells me how he became a film buff by attending dozens of free screenings of Nazi movies in the local cinema. This is a deliberately sunny, father-like memory of war. ‘They were great films,’ my father says. His passion for cinema, initiated though it may have been by Goebbels’s propaganda, remains one of his most endearing traits. When I was a child, we saw literally hundreds of films together. He took me to the children’s shows at the Yugoslav Army Club every Sunday morning, and we often saw one or two films in the city during the week: it was, supposedly, the best way to keep my sister and me away from under Mother’s busy feet.

  In summer, we went to the garden cinema of the Officers’ Club in the Unknown Hero Street, just across the road from us, almost every evening. This was the most beautiful cinema in the world: heady with the smell of jasmine and tobacco and lit by thousands of stars. The performances were punctuated at ten-minute intervals by the sound of trolleybuses coming to a halt in the street just outside the wire fence hidden by lilac bushes. The first few rows of garden chairs were always filled with children. Every evening we went to bed with a deep imprint of woven plastic on the backs of our thighs. No one paid much attention to the guidance ratings: we saw whatever film happened to be on.

  When our parents were too tired to take us to the cinema, we joined the ranks of neighbourhood kids for a free viewing through the wire at the other side of the screen. Struggling to read the subtitles backwards boosted our language skills. The crunching of the gravel under the rows of chairs where the adults sat on the other side of the white canvas usually announced an imminent love scene. We giggled our way through long embraces until a parent came to shoo us off. There was never any nudity in the films we saw – at least not until some time in the mid-seventies – but the passion was there, all the time.

  In their choice of films, my parents remained true to their gender stereotypes. Mother loved old-style romantic weepies, while Father preferred films policiers, Westerns and war epics, Yugoslav, Russian and American alike. With him, we chased the Redskins across the prairies one evening and raced to plant the hammer-and-sickle banner on the Reichstag the next. With her, it was always the long farewells, the promises of undying love, the deathbed scenes. When they took us to see a film together, they tended to compromise by choosing Italian comedies and French costume dramas. Joint cinema outings were more sophisticated by default. In fact, the movies connected my parents’ generation to ours with a shared pool of celluloid references. None of my four grandparents had ever set foot in the cinema.

  Father often quoted his favourite hard-boiled detectives, and my sister and I answered back faster than the wisecracking fifties dames. Mother could never decide which film star to compare her beautiful daughters to. While my slim sister was likened to the sweet child stars like Shirley Temple or gamine actresses like Audrey Hepburn, the plumper me seemed destined for similes with old-time divas and sultry neo-realist Italian beauties. ‘Isn’t she just like Ava Gardner in The Snows of Kilimanjaro?’ Mother asked an aunt of mine when I was barely twelve. ‘I’d say Mogambo,’ suggested the aunt for reasons known only to her. ‘How about Ita Rina?’ my sister threw the name of one of Serbia’s silent-movie stars into the game. They paused for a moment. No one was certain about Ita Rina’s precise looks, but everyone knew the name, which has featured in every crossword puzzle as ‘famous Serbian actress (7)’ for as long as anyone can remember.

  With his dark eyes, his glossy black hair and his trim moustache, Father had the good looks of an earlier, black-and-white era. Our neighbours – his erstwhile school friends – often told us that he was quite a heart-breaker in those mythical days before we were born. I was never quite sure what that meant. In the early seventies, when he was barely forty, Father’s hair went white almost overnight and he shaved off the moustache. He suddenly looked incredibly Slav, like a young member of the Politburo or a colonel in the Red Army.

  We took most of our holidays in Yugoslavia, in the Yugoslav National Army’s own resorts and hotels in the mountains or by the sea. Closing the house for a trip to the Adriatic was one of our summer rituals. Unlike Mother, who always dreamed of journeys to an odd assortment of places which mapped out her own adolescent dreams (Paris, Geneva, Madeira, Nice), Father only ever left home with a heavy heart. He travelled abroad most reluctantly. Occasional trips to Italy and Greece were hard-won concessions to his daughters.

  My parents on the Adriatic coast in 1959

  Father not only had to ask for permission from his employer before going abroad but had to write detailed reports on his movements and contacts. The army was understandably a bit worried that its code-breakers might break an unexpected code or two. His patient trails with his daughters through Roman department stores probably made a less than riveting read for some weary officer back home.

  In fact, Father hardly ever spoke to anyone, while my sister and I chattered eagerly in English, French and Italian, and Mother smiled benevolently towards us. He was perhaps different only on a long train journey across the Soviet Union which we undertook one summer, where everyone addressed him in Russian without a second thought, and he responded in a fluent, almost accentless stream. He had a special talent for conversations in which he revealed nothing in the most charming way possible. ‘When will Yugoslavia finally send a man into space?’ asked a drunken Russian train conductor one night. ‘Will it be with us or the Americans?’ ‘The more important question just now is which planet to go for,’ Father replied.

  ‘What will happen when I marry Simon?’ I asked Father in the autumn of 1984. ‘Could you lose your job?’

  I was genuinely worried. I had been free to come and go as I pleased, more or less my entire life, and I’d made friends in both the East and the West, but I knew so little of the world he disappeared into every day.

  ‘You do what you have to do,’ Father answered. I was not sure that he really knew how his bosses would respond, but he kept his job. He was due to retire in two or three years’ time, but by then it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The Yugoslav
army had greater things to worry about than an English son-in-law.

  Then the new century begins and Alexander is born. On a sunny day in early March 2000, Simon takes him from hospital in a big, bright blue-and-orange pram. I am driven home, less than a mile away, all milk and blood. On a west London street, I look out of the car towards the brand-new father and his brand-new boy under the rainbow-coloured parasol. Nothing can go wrong now. Nothing.

  9. England, My England

  Early one morning, I am wheeled into the operating theatre with a green paper bracelet bearing my name, date of birth and gender (a succinct biography) on each of my wrists. ‘In case they become separated,’ I tell the anaesthetist. His smile is the last thing I see for some ten hours. When I open my eyes again, it’s already evening. I am all there: one aching, motionless piece of flesh. This is my second major operation in less than a year. I am familiar with the ways in which the body which has been cut, opened and sewn up begins to heal itself. Hours translate into a handful of days, each one as long as eternity. Time stretches and compresses itself in patterns drawn by pain.

  In my morphine-fuelled hospital dreams it rains all night, steadily, incessantly, just as it is supposed to rain in England. My body is a map of cuts and drains, held together by a fine cross-stitch of transparent thread. Drips, cannulas and tubes emerge through my skin as though the internal and the external have swapped places. I am an edifice of modern architecture. Inside, I float on the sound of rain. Outside, I heave in a web of plastic vessels full of my own bodily fluids. It hurts when I breathe, so I breathe gingerly, lightly, pretending not to, as though I am trying to deceive the pain.

  A complicated graph at the end of my bed marks the lines for pressure and pulse, for temperature, for the quantities of piss and pus, and red and white blood cell counts. Every now and then someone comes to administer an injection and I am asked to give my name and my date of birth. I am not sure whether this is to check that I still know who I am, or that I am still me and not an impostor, as though anyone would want to swap places with me. A nurse comes to take a sample of my blood and can’t quite decide where to insert another needle. So many of my arteries have needles sticking out of them already. I tell her that villagers in Serbia believe that injections and vaccinations given in the course of a lifetime prevent the deceased from turning into a vampire. I am safe from that threat at least. I try not to joke too often because it hurts when I laugh.

  My husband and my son bring flowers and fresh fruit every day, leaving splashes of colour behind them in my grey hospital enclosure. When I can’t sleep, I listen to the sound of non-existent rain pelting the windowpanes and try to remember the way my body looked when it was intact. It was only days ago but the memory is already fading. I am no longer sure what once lay in the place of the furrows of fresh scars trimmed with beads of bright red dew. In the black-and-white ultrasound photographs of my breasts, the most intimate pictures I’ve ever allowed anyone to take, the cancer cells are the bright, coloured spots. They cluster like purple grapes against the darkness of the healthy tissue. They are the only image of myself which I find impossible to forget.

  I see a 23-year-old girl with wavy, dark hair, reading a chunky volume in the tall grass by the basketball courts on the Gypsy Island on the Sava river in Belgrade. From time to time, she stands up, stretches her arms and throws a ball or two with the boys. Her suntanned body is simultaneously muscular and plump. Her breasts are so firm that they barely move when she takes a jump upwards and then stands back, smiling, to follow the curve of the ball through the hoop. She wipes her brow with the back of her hand. ‘Veki!’ a young man calls the girl’s name from one of the forlorn tables at a small waterside café. ‘Drop that book and come over here. I’ve been watching you, kid. You’ve been reading the same page all day.’ His blond hair is gathered in a ponytail. In the distance, Belgrade shimmers under a blanket of smog. The sky is still, cloudless. A swallow takes a long dive towards the water.

  Through convalescence, I revisit the year before I met Simon again and again because it represented the last moment when everything could just as easily have turned out differently. I had won a scholarship for postgraduate study in France; I had an offer of a job at an American university (a lectureship in Serbo-Croat, small-time stuff, but the location on the edge of the Pacific appealed to my romantic instincts); I had a marriage proposal from Tomislav. The fact that I had considered all three options, but chosen none, appeals to my sense of destiny. Rather than confirm the idea of free will, as it should, the memory of myself standing at a crossroads paradoxically strengthens my conviction that everything is written for us in advance.

  I see myself, just turned twenty-three, struggling to reach an ultimately irrelevant decision. I don’t know what adventures now await me in this hospital bed in the cancer ward high above the roofs of west London. I don’t even know whether the rain will ever stop. This is perhaps why I enjoy the certainty that the 23-year-old would be all right; that she would be happy beyond words, from the moment when she first embraced the young Englishman on an echoing corridor of the Karl Marx Institute in Sofia and for the two subsequent decades at least. Could anyone really ask for more?

  I relive the long summer of 1984, allowing myself to be seduced, letting go, over and over again. Whatever happens now, I repeat to myself, the two of us have already proved to be more enduring than the world.

  Then I begin to wonder whether the shadow has been there all along, like a scene painted by De Chirico. The Belgrade girl does not know it yet, but she will outlive the country she is leaving. The body she travels in so boldly will be cut and patched, and soon she will be able to seduce only in a different, much more haunting way. She will enchant the connoisseurs of suffering. ‘How fetching is your garland of thorns!’ her future lovers will have to say. ‘How attractive that homemade look!’ She can no more escape the world she is coming from – her flawed East European self – than I can slip through the rain and out of the London hospital room.

  Halfway through 1916, my grandfather sits somewhere in the darkness of south-eastern Poland by the swollen waters of a river whose name he doesn’t know. At dawn, the clinking of Cossack swords, no louder than the sound of a spoon falling against the side of a china cup, announces that thousands are on the move. Grandfather shivers in his grey Habsburg tunic, listening out for the Russians, enemy-brothers.

  I am scarred by the evaporation of the communist empire just as much as Grandpa was by the fall of the Habsburgs. He was twenty-four when the dual monarchy collapsed, I was twenty-eight when the crowds first danced on the wall in Berlin. He went over to the Russians, I went over to the English, in both cases before the outcome of the war was clear. I had grown up under the hammer-and-sickle banner, which, like the image of Christ, I can’t quite get out of my bloodstream. My eyes were trained to look towards the beautiful Utopia, that first dawn of the Marxist not-yet. For that training, I love and despise and pity my educators.

  I am often haunted by memories of the vanished socialist world. Uninvited fragments which float before my eyes manage to be vivid and melancholy at the same time. They have the strange quality of outtakes from a home movie which never seems to play at the correct speed. I see the trains emptying of picnickers at the border station of Villa Opicina, just to the east of Trieste, then filling again with grey people lugging the gaudy chattels of despair, freshly purchased in Italy, eastwards into Yugoslavia – the trinkets which we took home as symbols of a better life in better places. And further east, where not even the ornate plastic reached, hundreds of young women a bit less lucky but otherwise just like myself dutifully attended classes in schools named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote essays to mark the comrades’ birth- and death-days, and learned to shoot, play music and speak foreign languages perfectly, with little hope of using them.

  I once sat on a park bench in a small Ukrainian town just across the border from Hungary – a drab railway junction called Chop – watching a coupl
e dance under a loudspeaker which, for reasons best known to the Soviet authorities, broadcast music into the forlorn, fly-blown summer afternoon. She was wearing a light red summer dress, a pair of snow-white socks and heavy, black boots with incongruous little heels. He had a pistachio-green suit with a tiny medal on the wide lapel. My father and mother came back from their walk with a glass of soda and pear syrup from one of the street dispensers. The couple were getting closer to each other, slowing down. I took a sip of soda when the music suddenly changed to an army march.

  My generation and I thought that we could somehow avoid the pain. The promise was there in our education: a brighter tomorrow without a cloud, an expensive new dawn for which hundreds and thousands had laid down their lives in the Second World War. We had it all rammed into us: the gratitude for the carefree mornings paid for in advance by the comrades; plenitude in exchange for obedience. So long as we were thankful and toed the line, nothing could possibly go wrong.