When Comrade Tito died, he gave us back the keys to our castle. ‘You can roam freely everywhere, but on no account open the door of this little room, whatever noises you hear coming from inside. See, this is the key and this is the lock, but you must never ever open the door. Do you understand, never ever?’ said Comrade Tito, and left, hopping, on his one remaining leg.
For a long time, my English voice sounded quite unlike my Serbian one, in a way which irritated me. The more insecure I felt, the more emptily correct my language became. The shards of memory, of everything that there was before I came to London, were embedded so firmly into Serbian that they wouldn’t translate without pain.
Then illness and fear made the memories erupt. For better or worse, English had to do. Where I was once happy in not belonging, I now wanted to be all in one place just as much as I needed to be all in one piece. I longed for shelter and protection. I no longer wanted any prizes, other than my son’s continuing knowledge of me. Once that is accomplished, I can drink wine and listen to music and watch the wind dance in the crowns of trees. Or die; whichever it happens to be.
I brought Simon to Belgrade to meet my parents in the spring of 1985. Roughly at the same time, my friend Olya – a poet who wrote sophisticated verse which secretly made me feel quite jealous – was having an affair with a young German student from Freiburg. They translated large chunks of Georg Trakl’s poetry into Serbian and spent long, passionate weekends in various cathedral towns in Alsace. The budding generation of Belgrade princesses was obviously becoming very cosmopolitan just then. ‘At least Vesna is seeing an Englishman,’ Olya’s mother commented. The hierarchy of nationalities, arranged according to a vague order of desirability, as seen through the lenses of our cosy, still-enclosed world, soon became practically the only topic I was allowed to discuss as I moved from one Belgrade coffee party to another. Simon smiled beatifically and ate elaborate petits fours under the watchful eyes of dozens of versions of his future mother-in-law, to the manner born.
Our discussions often resembled those old jokes about ‘an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Serb’ in which the Serbs generally came off best. They were ours, and ‘ours’ in this context – for better or worse – does not really translate into English. There was an implicit consensus that marrying a fellow Serb would have been better for me, more ‘natural’, as though I was marrying outside the species. This was somewhat mitigated by the fact that Simon was so obviously a well-educated young man with the kind of family background that no one could complain much about, try as they might. And they did try. Who was good enough for their girl, after all? To rubber-stamp her choice would be bad manners.
If the Serbs tended to come off best in the story of ‘an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Serb’, I am afraid that the Frenchmen generally won the second place. For an average Serbian lady of middle-class persuasion (communist or not), the French were clearly the ‘if you must marry a foreigner’ bride-grooms of choice. While other nationalities attracted a host of different prejudices, the French, and the Parisians in particular, had a kind of Teflon image to which nothing bad ever seemed to stick. That brand of non-empirical Francophilia was ubiquitous in the Balkans. Everything that was wrong with Yugoslavia was reliably just right in France. The French were handsome, courteous, elegant, admirers of fine art and fine foods, passionate lovers best epitomized by characters in novels such as La Dame aux Camélias.
In short, they somehow managed to preserve the kind of image which might have been designed by a joint committee of the French Tourist Board and the French Ministry of Culture at the height of the Belle Epoque. Even during the bombing of Serbia in 1999, many of my female relations managed to hate the Americans, the English and the Germans (especially the Germans!), but found it in their hearts to excuse the French. ‘They didn’t really want this! The Americans made them do it,’ said one of them. She was horribly upset at the fact that the monument to Franco-Serbian friendship in the Kalemegdan Park was draped in a black cloth intended to cover the engraved verse urging the Serbian nation to ‘love France as she has loved us’, not even beginning to see that just then this might have sounded ironic.
I once became involved in what the French so appropriately call une amitié amoureuse over a few weeks in Paris. I was nineteen. At thirty-one, Henri seemed to me thrillingly ancient. He was actually born in the forties (in October 1949, to be absolutely precise), and was a student of literature at the Sorbonne in May 1968: a walking piece of French history as far as I was concerned. He was a teacher at a Parisian lycée, an aspiring theatre director, a communist and a lover of poetry. We met in a bookshop on Rue Monsieur Le Prince one dark afternoon, and continued our conversation through a long, rainy evening in a nearby café.
Henri lived on one of the quieter streets of the seventh arrondissement, in a maid’s room connected via a balcony door to the much grander flat in which his mother and father, both in their seventies, sat at a table of polished mahogany, endlessly bent over crossword puzzles from Le Figaro. They were watched by ancestral portraits of dour-looking civil servants of the Republic, a collection of upright men who could easily have played the deceived husbands in any one of the big nineteenth-century French novels of adultery.
Henri’s mother offered a cold, bony hand with a couple of extraordinarily large rings. ‘Enchanted to meet a little friend of my son’s,’ she said politely. Both she and her husband seemed to be a good ten inches shorter and infinitely thinner than I was, which – given my pretty average height and weight – was probably incorrect, but it went some way towards explaining why Henri was barely taller than me and so thin that he seemed to cross his legs in at least three places when he sat down. I was the Slav Gulliver in a French Lilliput, a Russian woman lieutenant entering Berlin, flagpole in one hand, grenade in the other, a tight rubashka over big, bouncy bosoms. ‘Belgrade, did you say?’ Henri’s mother looked up towards me. ‘Our cleaning lady is from —’ and she named a village some 150 miles south of Belgrade.
The same story repeated itself again and again over the ensuing days. Every time I met a friend or relation of Henri’s, I’d hear about a lovely nurse, a manicurist, a car mechanic or a little woman in the bakery to whom I was connected by virtue of nationality. My exotic value in Paris was precisely nil. That, I hasten to add, was probably not the reason why my relationship with Henri remained une amitié rather than turning into une affaire. He was very generous and impeccably polite, and even attractive in a sort of dishevelled, just-awakened, boyish way. None the less, I realized that I would never be able to love a man who could not carry me under one arm while holding a machine-gun or lassoing a steer with the other. So much for feminism and the love of poetry and philosophy. I put it down to survival instincts bred deep into my genes during long centuries of near slavery in the Ottoman Empire.
Henri clearly enjoyed playing Professeur Higgins to my Slav Eliza Doolittle. In a matter of weeks, my elisions became near perfect. I wasn’t a dustman’s daughter but, none the less, there were so many things I hadn’t tried at that stage: cheeses, wines, savoury water-ices, French poetry beyond Aragon, avant-garde theatre, galleries without tourists. French men as well, but Henri and I never really progressed beyond flirtatious conversational hints, which themselves improved my French vocabulary. I might have been too young or, now I sometimes suspect, remembering nothing more specific than a gesture, there might have been another man somewhere in the equation, a French Colonel Pickering, hidden from view. In all probability, things would not have turned out very differently if that were so. I only register it to say that, according to the received wisdom of Belgrade’s Francophile ladies, the Frenchmen were never inclined that way, no sirree! English gentlemen, however, as products of their famously all-male educational system were . . . au contraire.
If every Parisian I met seemed to have had dealings of one kind or another with at least two Serbs, the London I finally settled in was refreshingly free of such connections. My father-in-law dimly remembered a
member of the Serbian royal family from his Eton days, and quickly latched on to the martial glories of Montenegro; my grandmother-in-law, remembering two world wars, simply thought of Serbs as very brave; and my mother-in-law knew a Slovene daffodil farmer in Cornwall. Most of the people I met knew where Yugoslavia was and many had travelled through it for one reason or another, so there was no need for long explanations when I said where I was from. At the same time, and until the waves of refugees reached British shores in the 1990s, most tended to have no acquaintances among my compatriots, and, for better or worse, few illusions or prejudices other than those Occidentals then commonly harboured towards East Europeans.
Back in Belgrade, however, my forthcoming marriage and the distinct chance that I might soon be giving birth to little English people (with everything that implied) brought to the surface a veritable hotchpotch of ideas of Englishness, most of them mildly or not so mildly negative. Most Serbs I knew used the word English to mean British, so there was no let-off for the Welsh or the Scots either. Thus, for example:
The English were perfidious and treacherous. Winston Churchill supported the royalist resistance in 1941 only to dump the entire Serbian nation unceremoniously into the hands of the commies without a second thought. This reflected the fact that the English had never been our true friends but had always simply used us in whatever was the great power deal of the day.
The English were, on the whole, ugly. For every British-born Cary Grant and every Vivien Leigh there were literally hundreds who looked downright weird. Belgrade television, with its endless repeats of programmes such as The Benny Hill Show, Are You Being Served? and Hi-de-hi, did not help. Neither did the fact that members of the royal family were somehow thought of as ‘typically English’.
The English were either arrogant, cold aristocrats or boorish, beer-drinking football hooligans. The latter ‘needed a war, badly, to get the violence out of their system’, according to my practical grandmother.
England had, quite possibly, the worst climate in the world. The entire history of England could be viewed as a series of attempts to escape the weather. The English climate was likely to make me suicidal sooner or later. A neighbour turned up with a copy of Wuthering Heights, in which she had highlighted some pertinent descriptions of rain for my delectation.
English sex was an oxymoron. We were too polite to discuss this, but there were hints that English couples were supposed to sleep in separate bedrooms after the birth of their children. In Montenegro, there was a story – perhaps an urban or, rather, a very rural myth, I am not sure – that the mother-in-law sometimes slept (in the most innocent sense) with her future daughter-in-law to check whether her feet were warm and thus ensure that she would make a worthwhile bedfellow for the son during the long winter nights. As an English bride, my blood circulation was obviously irrelevant. I should need to keep no one warm but myself.
Simon’s paternal grandmother
England had perhaps the strangest cuisine in the world. They were reputed to have developed a special jam for every kind of meat, and they smothered their lamb with mint and vinegar. (This made Granny laugh, for Montenegrins are connoisseurs of fine lamb.) The English did not know what to do with vegetables, other than roots, as could be expected of northerners. ‘And God only knows what their patisserie is like,’ worried one aunt, while everyone tried hard to remember an English kind of cake.
‘Reform Torte,’ said a neighbour, referring to a fine confection of praline and walnut sponge, but no one was convinced that it was English. We imagined medieval bricks of dough which had to be soaked in milky tea. When Simon sat down to eat, Granny kept wondering whether any of the jars of jam from the larder – plum, rosehip, greengage, strawberry, melon – should be brought out to accompany his main course.
Simon’s paternal grandfather: I’Angleterre profonde
In fact, anything Simon did, any time, anywhere, was examined as an example of ‘what the English do’. He was not so much himself as a photo-fit for different aspects of Englishness. On a Danube pleasure cruise, two people came up to me to enquire about my travelling companion. ‘I knew from his shoes that he was English the moment I saw him,’ remarked a plump Yugoslav diplomat. ‘Is it true that they are very cold?’ asked a woman in a tight silk dress with a corsage of peonies, smiling broadly towards Simon in a vain attempt to obscure the line her enquiry was taking. He smiled back and muttered something about ‘the lady’s very fine pencil moustache’. I was, for perhaps the millionth time in my life, engaged in creative interpreting. Others patted his shoulder more benevolently, repeating, ‘Srpski zet!’ (‘Serbian son-in-law’) as though he were somehow marrying the whole nation. In a sense, he was. ‘Da, da,’ Simon replied in an impressive show of Serbo-Croat fluency.
These were not the only worries about the fate which awaited me in England. Even if it all worked out perfectly, marriage-wise, what was I going to do there? Women in my family have been working since time began and staying at home was not an option anyone considered seriously. I was endlessly told the same story of the novelist Milos Tsernianski – the temporary tenant of Lady Paget’s coach house in Kingston. In his London exile, Tsernianski could only find work as a book-keeper in a shoeshop in Bond Street. Fears of failure, or perhaps of the inability to transplant success, so often seemed to scar the Yugoslav perspectives of the outside world. My conviction that everything would work out was seen as evidence of nothing but my youth and inexperience. No one said it, but the question was implicit in every example of greatness unrecognized which was thrown in my direction: What hope was there for me?
During my hospital stay, my mother-in-law rang the ward every day. Her care was both attentive and completely different from my mother’s, perhaps because I didn’t feel any need to shield her from bad news. She sent cards and letters and parcels of bright, airy clothes which were intended to cheer me up: African kaftans, Pakistani shalwar kamiz and dozens of big scarves for turbans (cotton, because silk slides off a bald head), Tuareg necklaces and bracelets, large silver earrings, detective stories, memoirs, pictures of rolling English hills, brochures of country houses to rent when I was well again. She didn’t, even for a moment, allow for the possibility that I wouldn’t be.
A history graduate from Westfield College in London, my mother-in-law blazed the trail as a trendy left-wing Goldsworthy bride in the sixties. She campaigned against my cancer just as she had campaigned while the Yugoslav war was raging. She wrote letters to MPs, to the Prime Minister, to God, for all I knew, explaining the ins and outs of the Balkan crisis to anyone who cared to listen. I am not sure if our different ways of battling against suffering – for I see no great difference in the degree of courage – say something about our different origins. I harden and travel inwards, where the pain can’t reach me; she engages with every weapon at her disposal. She believes that she, alone, can make a difference in a way in which I never could.
When the biopsy needle went into my right breast, I knew the truth. Like a diver emerging from the dark waters with heavy metal lungs, the needle drew out its haul of poisoned cells. The surgeon, a woman of my age with straight glossy hair and bright dark eyes, followed her training in delivering bad news. No lies, no promises, no false dawns, but no fear either: ‘Yes, I am afraid it doesn’t look good.’ I was the first to utter the c-word. I asked, ‘Why me?’ as I suppose everyone does. Suddenly, every other destiny seemed preferable. She had no answer. Indeed, it could have been her. A year later, we were friends.
A nurse wearing civilian clothes (the special corps of cancer troops) took me aside to a hospital room which was obviously meant to be more like home, furnished with a comfortable sofa, a vase of flowers and two boxes of tissues at the ready, a world away from the hard plastic chairs and linoleum in the corridor outside. It felt as unreal as an undertaker’s office or a morning-TV studio. I sat on the sofa and took a tissue, and then froze. I couldn’t quite decide whether to be brave or start sobbing on the nurse’s shoulder. She h
ad seen us all before: the jokers, the stiff-upper-lippers, the tragedians. I only had this one take. ‘I am sorry, Michelle. I don’t seem to have any questions. I should really be going home now.’ I stood up, walked towards the door, then turned back. ‘How am I going to tell my parents?’ I asked, as though I had broken the most important promise I’d ever given them.
I knew how I was going to tell or not tell Simon. He was waiting for the phone to ring: a wordless call would suffice. That morning, I asked him not to come with me to the hospital, just as I asked him to stay away from the maternity ward almost three years before to the day, when our son was born. This was not always an easy thing to do in a world which assumed that his duty was to be by my side, but he didn’t mind. He understood that I was made of different mettle. I faced both my demons and my gods alone.
I walked out of the hospital slowly. The sounds of the city were muffled and distant. The day seemed to have been created for bad news. I stared at the familiar bends of the river. I could walk like this for ever, but I was scared of returning home on my own. Finally I called Simon to ask him to meet me. His tall, familiar figure emerged from the mist of a dying February afternoon. ‘A widower,’ I thought, almost as though I was checking the word out for size. We tried intermittently to say something, but it was difficult to know where to start. I kept apologizing. I felt that I had betrayed him too in some way, worse than ever before.
With my baby sister
I kept thinking that I was being punished for having it all so easy in the past. This was ridiculous, given that I believed in neither karmic destiny nor hubris, but how is a dialectical materialist supposed to face terminal illness? My luck simply had to run out at some stage, I figured, and wished it had run out differently. I tried to be realistic. Even if it all ended tomorrow, no one except my mother could really say that I died young at forty-one.
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