Chernobyl Strawberries

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  I told myself I wasn’t frightened, but I kept waking up at three a.m. drenched in sweat, staring death in the face. I thought about Alexander’s future, and tried to be falsely generous towards Simon, thinking that he would remarry and forget, but I clearly wanted neither. I wanted to know for certain that he would spend the rest of his days sobbing at my grave and that no one would ever be able to replace me.

  A week later it became much worse. One of the scans showed that the cancer had spread to my bones. We needed a repeat before we could be sure, but meanwhile the hospital vocabulary had changed, just in case. We talked about palliative care, maintenance, a positive attitude. No one mentioned treatment any longer. The grim reaper seemed to be sharpening his scythe. I kept being either cheerfully sarcastic or angry. I suspected that my positive attitude was somehow meant to make things easier for everyone else, and I rebelled in small, childish ways. One day, I was barely able to function at the thought of my own end, while the next I had become so accustomed to it that I was able to stop off and buy myself a sandwich at a riverside bar as I walked home from the hospital along the Thames. The river’s tides were strangely comforting. ‘The world will just go on without me,’ I thought as I munched tuna on wholemeal bread and drank carrot juice, and contemplated the uselessness of my healthy eating habits. I had, self-evidently, not a single original thought about death.

  Two weeks on and I gave up on the idea that I’d ever sleep past three a.m. again. Instead, I got up, put on my dressing gown and tried, pathetically, to get on with my academic writing. I was halfway through a book on travel when the world as I knew it ended. I had never noticed it before, but the newspapers were full of heroic examples of people who had climbed Everest in metastasis. Hitting the keyboard with my two index fingers seemed comparatively easy.

  It wasn’t going anywhere. I’d get up from my desk and walk to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, porcelain pale and poisoned. I stood on the tiles, feeling that I was like one of those shiny apples which you bite into, only to spit out brown, rotten flesh. I couldn’t decide whether that was the legacy of my East European youth – all those factory chimneys belching black sulphurous smoke, all those coal fires – or of my Western European life – the plastic gloss on everything, invisible, equally poisoned. I needed to pin the blame somewhere. I needed to feel really angry. I couldn’t.

  One morning at four a.m., I gave up on my travel book and started writing a ‘life-without-Vesna’ manual for Simon. This was meant to be a practical little booklet, no tears, no deathbed speeches. He and I had – in the many years of living together – developed a system of duty-sharing, running the home in the fashion of German U-boat crews. No talk, no detectable traces. I did my work and he did his; what one knew the other need not worry about. I now set out to write down my portion of the U-boat duty rota. I listed my bank accounts and the bills I settled each month, my pitiful pension schemes and my savings funds: life’s administrative debris. Then I wrote down how to set the video recorder and the washing machine, and how to programme each of a surprising number of timers around the house. The more pointless the instructions seemed, the happier I felt writing them out.

  My own choices seemed to funnel rapidly. I enjoyed the feeling of being in control, perhaps because control was the last thing I really had. Even the ‘life manual’ was getting out of hand. If it became longer than 3,000 words it would be as good as useless, the teacher in me worried. Then I realized that the reason I enjoyed writing it was the passwords to the past which I kept burying in the text. I was floating messages in a bottle which would mean nothing to anybody else except the two of us.

  My son, on the other hand, was too young to have such shared memories. Only two at the time of my diagnosis, he would, in all likelihood, have difficulty remembering me in a couple of years’ time. My photographs would erase my living face. The world I came from would seem as exotic and distant to him as accounts of nineteenth-century explorations of the source of the Nile. I was aware that although, since their late-Victorian heyday, his English ancestors kept moving into smaller and smaller dwellings, much of their history was still around. It was all there for Alexander to touch and see: the paintings, commissions signed by Victoria and George, letters of love and business, and pieces of uniform and dress.

  His Serbian blood was, by comparison, like an underground river. The drifts of Balkan life meant that we kept little in writing, and sold or lost most that was of value from the past. We started afresh at regular intervals and owned barely anything that was older than us. I distilled everything further when I came to England: down to four suitcases, of which two were filled with books. I was so uninterested in material possessions that joining a family where everything was already in place was a blessing. The thought of decorating and furnishing a house – the kind of thing my mother loved – bored me. I was happy simply to move in. Now I wanted to write myself into the picture in a way which surprised me. I was trying to capture my voice for Alexander so that he could hear it if and when he wanted to. His Serbian was poor and that was my fault, for I had always spoken English to him. Now my English – such as it was – would have to serve a sacred duty. I put the ‘life manual’ to one side and began to write my life for Alexander.

  A week later, the second scan showed that the cancer was still in situ and hadn’t spread. Everyone was talking about treatment again. It would be removed, counter-poisoned with the finest pharmaceuticals, you will sail through. Fear not, girl. Overwhelmingly – 76 per cent, according to statistics – the chances are that you will still be around five years from now. You are so strong, it is probably more than 76 anyway. I no longer really cared. I was, of course, glad to hear the good news, but my happiness had, in the meantime, ceased to depend on scan results. The illness had articulated the odds which everyone faced sooner or later. ‘Why me?’ somehow translated into ‘Why not?’ For whatever reason, I simply didn’t fear death any more.

  ‘Come on, hit me if you like,’ I said. Death stared at me for a long moment. I stared back.

  The false starts, the dislocations, the fractures, the stitches, the leitmotifs of arrival and departure: I am at peace with everything that I once took as a sign of my weakness. The thirst for new experiences managed to keep me dreaming of adventures even when I thought I was dying. ‘Had I only stayed there, I would have been this or that by now,’ I used to say when I was unhappy with the hand of cards I held, knowing full well that I never really wanted to stay there, whatever that meant at any given moment. When I was pinned down by pain and plastic tubes on a hospital bed, while it rained so hard that I didn’t wish to leave anyway, I turned back, perhaps for the first time, and stared into the picture I drew by my restlessness.

  In its fragmented way, my life makes perfect sense. There is nothing extraordinary about it, but, as I try to write it down, I can feel it burning. I hear the flicker of its flames as distinctly as I once heard the sound of Alexander’s heart in my womb; as clearly as I heard the sound of blood pulsating in the transplanted artery in the transplanted flesh which now represents a large portion of my breast; the sound of fresh beginnings. My body, strangely, now seems all the more beautiful to me for the way it is mapped by scars, like a cracked but unbroken vessel. I sleep well past three in the morning again, but I take nothing for granted any more.

  Afterword

  NONE OF THE PEOPLE or places I refer to in this memoir is invented, although a few of the personal names are, mainly in those cases where I was in no position to check whether someone would mind being included in my life story, or where I was and was told that they wanted their identity disguised. I have also taken the liberty of combining one or two minor personalities, in a way which I hope simplifies things but which is of no consequence to the story of my life, such as it is. I don’t wish to hurt anyone.

  For most of my readers, the pages of this book will contain names of people and places which may appear difficult and alien. I decided to follow the example of those
old Balkan travel books I love by transcribing names into English wherever practical, rather than always using the diacritics from the Serbo-Croatian version of the Latin alphabet, as is now common practice. This is not an ideal solution, but it is the one which appealed to me the most. It may upset the purists, but, as I suggested somewhere in this book, proper names – including my own – are not something I argue about with anyone.

  The most interesting insights I have had while writing this memoir relate to the ways in which individual memory works. It connects people and places and things which may superficially seem unconnected, and imposes its own patterns across time. To have written a linear narrative of my life – from birth to the present – would have been to force my story to acquire a shape which it doesn’t have in the way I remember it, and to jettison those very patterns and leitmotifs which seem to me the most interesting. I would have to leave the end blank for another hand to write that death scene which I will never be able to describe. I refer to the many possible beginnings in the opening chapter, but I am aware of the ways in which the ending changes the meaning of the entire story. A memoir can only be written from a slowly shifting vantage point in the flow of the experience it describes. Its meaning is at best makeshift.

  Regardless of whether its author realizes it or not, an autobiography is a doubly edited life. Memory edits the first run, the writer edits the second, as she imposes provisional boundaries on her recollection. In this book I wrote about my and my family’s past as I remember it. I chose not to revisit my adolescent diaries, which are both patchy and stored in a house at the other end of the continent, nor my adult appointment diaries, which could remind me of too many insignificant things. I didn’t want to research anything. I did little to compare notes even with those who are closest to me. This is not a faithful reconstruction of the past; it is an imprint of individual memory. If there are factual errors, and I am sure there are, it is because I remember things wrongly. That seems interesting too.

  London, 27 July 2004

  Acknowledgements

  MY AGENT, Faith Evans, my editor, Clara Farmer, and others at Atlantic Books, and my childhood friend Zana Kovincic, who spared time from her duties in the Peruvian diplomatic service, have all helped in different ways to make this book more beautiful. John Nicoll’s advice was, as always, very valuable.

  My sister, Vera Dodic, used a hard-earned break from her busy Toronto office to sift patiently through countless shoe-boxes of family photographs under the watchful and sometimes tearful eyes of my parents in Belgrade. As so many times before, she had the difficult task of explaining what exactly I was up to. I am sorry I could not be there to help.

  In addition to the members of my family who took most of the photographs in this book, and in particular my uncle-in-law Douglas Goldsworthy, I must thank Dejan Corovic, who took the photograph on the front cover many more years ago than I care to remember.

  My husband, Simon, was always there to help and – although he is a reserved and private man – understood why I needed to tell this story. My son, Alexander, kindly lent me what he maintains to be his computer to enable me to write it. My love and my profound gratitude to them – and to my parents, Milos and Nada Bjelogrlic – is, I hope, apparent in this memoir.

  My thanks go to the many doctors and nurses who, in an unusually literal sense, made this book possible: my family doctor, Dr Venkatesham; and, at Charing Cross Hospital, Professor Charles Coombes, Dr David Vigushin, Dr Charles Lowdell and Dr Simon Wood; Vanessa Cross, Ann Alexander and all the other nurses who were there when I needed them most, to laugh at my jokes, admire my wigs and turbans, and make sure that the needles didn’t hurt.

  My fondest thanks are reserved for my surgeon, Jacqueline Lewis. Her dedication, warmth and friendship made me happy to be alive even when it seemed terribly hard work. I still can’t think of many things which are as wonderful as waking up from the anaesthetic after seven hours of surgery to see Jackie’s smiling face.

  Life After Strawberries

  (Epilogue to the paperback edition)

  CHERNOBYL STRAWBERRIES grew out of poisoned soil, yet, from its beginnings, this book has been nothing but a happy project for me. In the seventeen months of its writing – between February 2003 and July 2004, while I was undergoing treatment for cancer – its creation felt just as healing as the offerings of conventional medicine. It proved to be the most effective of painkillers, for it managed not only to make me forget the pain, but also to make time pass more quickly, which is rather more than the usual pills can do.

  We see things not as they are, but as we are, says one of the holy books, I forget which. I wouldn’t wish those months in the Tropic of Cancer on my worst enemy, but I wouldn’t give them back either. I hated the pain so much that it took a while to see that cancer gave me certain things too, including the luxurious gift of this book. I wouldn’t have written it but for the possibility that time might be running out.

  I penned chunks of it on my walks around the hospital ward, scribbling on scraps of paper and in small notebooks tucked into the same canvas bag which concealed drainage bottles, my blood and words together. No one batted an eyelid at my literary antics. In the big West London teaching hospital where I was treated, the nurses had seen it all before. Two of the people on my ward were recovering from gender realignment surgery. Late at night I could hear them through the rows of curtains separating our beds, whispering to each other in countertenor. Even that didn’t seem strange. Some patients were losing their breasts, others gaining new ones; some were happy to be starting different lives, others simply to be alive.

  I brooded over images of my childhood and adolescence in Belgrade in the cold twilight of radiotherapy rooms. My past seemed suspended in the sun-encased memory but was clearly visible, like an insect in amber. At home, writing always demanded the luxury of a clear desk and a clear day, and I felt lucky when I stole one of those in a month. I wrote painstakingly and slowly. Sometimes I complained by e-mail to a friend who lives on a ranch in Oregon, when we were both awake in front of our computer screens at different ends of the night and in different time zones, a world away from London in every sense. She has authored many books and I hoped to hear from her the secret of writing against the noise and through the distractions. There was none. ‘Did you know that Nabokov used to lock himself in the bathroom, manuscript in his lap, while Vera and Dimitri played in their tiny Parisian flat?’ she responded. Although I enjoyed writing, I hadn’t felt that kind of overriding drive since I was a poetry-writing adolescent. Perhaps I was simply not meant to be a writer, I had decided. It didn’t matter too much, but it didn’t sound quite right.

  On the ward, and for the first time since the poetic toil of my adolescence, I felt the same urge to cover blank sheets of paper with words, an urge strong enough to shut everything else away. I wrote while the moans of other patients, the hissing of TV sets and the smells of illness washed around me. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, I could hurtle into the future but only with my eyes fixed firmly on the past. Far from the libraries and books and all the crutches I had tended to use in my writing before, I felt free to play with the shadows my life was throwing against the hospital wall. A book grew slowly in the crevasses between history and story. It was a wild, hybrid fruit of that deeper knowledge of myself for which I had no choice but to surrender a pound of flesh.

  What I was trying to write was not a book about cancer. I often joked that I hardly wished myself to be remembered as ‘the English patient’ and I still don’t. I wanted it to be a book about London and Belgrade, about the Serbian and English families to which I belong. While my body was cut and reconstructed, I was recreating a life story which seemed to me both very ordinary and unique. I found the uniqueness not so much where one most expects it – in the fulfilment of particular ambitions – but in the thirst with which I continued to take on the new. Such discoveries are perhaps the unexpected but beautiful fruit of writing things down in this way.


  Still uncertain about what exactly to call my memoir, I played with different titles which connected my two divided worlds. I tried to join up the Danube and the Thames, Britain and Yugoslavia, the North West and the South East of Europe, but none of the options I came up with seemed to capture the sum of the book’s parts. Chernobyl Strawberries had been there in the first sentence all along, and it offered a useful metaphor for the bittersweet Eastern European world I came from. The pollution of Chernobyl was not that different from the invisible ideological pollution amid which I grew up. At the same time, I knew that the world of my childhood had its allure too. I remembered the vulnerable, uncherished splendours behind the grey facades, and I felt a strange sort of obligation towards that memory.

  By choosing to write in English, I was recreating that world in a new medium. The act of implicit translation – the carrying through of experience from one language into another – was something of which I was deeply aware, even when no-one else seems to have found the fact that I was writing this book in English particularly unusual. Were an Englishwoman to arrive in Belgrade with Serbian, picked up at twice-weekly lessons back at school, as her third language, and to find herself a few years later teaching nineteenth-century Serbian literature to Serbian students at a Serbian university, and were she to write a memoir in Serbian which is then translated back into English by someone else...well, such a reverse scenario is almost too improbable to contemplate. However, my British compatriots are so used to appropriations of their language to take much notice of acts of derring-do (or foolishness) like mine; in fact, they sometimes seem to expect nothing less.