The manuscript found its English publisher when it was barely half-written and, soon afterwards, German and Serbian publishers too. Although my first book was also originally written in English and translated into four different languages, it was an academic study and the exchanges with translators were never this amusing. ‘What kind of shoe precisely is this brogue your father-in-law wore in Belgrade twenty years ago?’, my German translator asked from some Greek island where she was working on my book. I scanned a picture and e-mailed it back to Greece.
In her turn, my Serbian translator sent electronic mail from the Illinois university where she was working on her PhD, and I forwarded it from London to the publishing house in Belgrade. Seeing the little literary world I created in English transported back into my native tongue was in many ways an unsettling experience. I realised that I was originally able to write the book only by locking myself into English with the pretence that my parents and my friends would not read it. The book was a work of love, in every sense. I wasn’t so much worried about its contents as strangely shy.
I also learned a lot about my own linguistic mannerisms in the process. If the translator chose a word I wouldn’t have used — sometimes simply because she was twenty years younger and my mother tongue had changed in my absence – what I heard as a false note bothered me even when it was superficially more elegant. On one or two occasions, without even realising it, she translated the words from Serbian songs I had woven into the English narrative back to me, in an amusing version of Chinese whispers. Eventually, I relaxed. I stopped looking over her shoulder and let her get on with her work. Many years ago I translated a novel by Bruce Chatwin into Serbian, and I reminded myself that – had Bruce been able to interfere in my choice of Serbian synonyms – the work would have lost much of its charm. In fact, I never wanted to translate this book myself, partly because I was too busy enjoying myself in the afterglow of its English publication to rush back to my study, partly because I feared that I might end up writing a different book, wanting to explain and describe very different things. In Serbian, my memoir could become a book about England just as much as my English book is about Serbia.
Finally the translation was ready and I flew to Belgrade to open the Book Fair. The opening day is one of the high points of the season, and – as this was the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair’s existence – it felt even more festive than usual. The opening ceremony was broadcast in direct transmission on the main TV channel and picked up in every news bulletin that evening. The Serbia I was returning to is a different country from the Yugoslavia I left twenty years ago. This event was truly live.
I had prepared two versions of a short speech, in Serbian and in English, uncertain which was more appropriate for the occasion. Every year, one country is chosen as the guest of honour and its writers are invited to special events such as this. I was flying back to Belgrade as a British writer, and – the organisers advised – it was more appropriate to deliver my speech in English, as a courtesy to the many English guests. When the reflector lights went up, I saw my parents’ heads – now, unmistakably, brightly white – in the audience. I started reading the speech I knew they wouldn’t understand. At least, this time, they had heard what their daughter was going to say in advance.
If the writing kept me going while I was in hospital, the production of the book and the aftermath of its publication helped when I was uncertain about how to step back into my day-to-day life. As I searched through my small collection of family photographs and trinkets for suitable illustrations, as I responded to editorial queries (easy, once I decided that the only point of reference required was myself), I was also – by being able to call this work – delaying the return to my ‘civilian life’.
In fact, although it took me a while to recognise this, I faced the challenges war veterans must face after an armistice. The things I’ve learned at the hospital front-line made my old duties seem mundane, but they had, and still have, to be attended to. The lectures I prepare, the hundreds of student essays I mark every semester, the hours of travel to and from work on crowded trains and buses, the household tasks, the to-do lists which never seem to get any shorter, the bills and letters which always shout ‘urgent!’ at you: I now face them all again just as I had to face illness the year before. Nonetheless, while everything else may be flowing back into place like the water closing over a sunken vessel, life after Strawberries is perceptibly different, and that difference makes the quotidian much easier to take on.
Even before it came out, I had decided to throw myself into everything good that this book may bring, to live it and enjoy it to the full, just in case I never managed to complete another one. Such is the superstitious wisdom of the battle-scarred. The extent and the sheer joy of it all took me by surprise. I dreamed of one or two good reviews in my favourite little literary magazines, but not of serialization in The Times and on the BBC, nor of the press cuttings which started to arrive almost every day from different corners of Europe. I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. Having been through so much that I wanted to forget I was now given an abundance of memories to treasure.
As I write this, less than eight months after its publication, the memoir has been on bestseller lists in four different countries, a rare thing for a life story of someone as unknown as me. Amazingly, it has had over three hundred reviews. The number of words others have written about this book is already much greater than the number of words I wrote inside it. Could one feel anything but flattered? I gradually lost the sense of myself as an academic interloper and began to feel at home in the writing business. At literary festivals, I met authors whose work I have read and taught for many years and, while I resisted the urge to cross-examine them on my students’ behalf, I watched carefully and learned. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, I now count a number of those readers who have written to me or attended one of my events among my friends. In that, I see a reassuring balance of effort and outcome which is in itself a rare gift from fate.
We often mistakenly assume that laughter and beauty are mutually exclusive; while I was writing Chernobyl Strawberries, I kept saying that the book I wanted to produce was the kind I fall in love with myself, one that is not afraid to be funny and poetic at the same time. I thought that my readers would turn out to be very similar to me, and I was not mistaken. In fact, the sheer wealth of encounters this book has brought – in person or through the letters and e-mails I received – represented its most unexpected consequence. I told the story of my life and I received other stories in return. Many offered personal histories of displacement. The world is full of refugees and children of refugees, and, just like me, many of my readers were people whose notions of home can only ever be multiple and whose accent, like mine, means that they might be asked ‘how long are you staying for?’ even when it has been more than half a lifetime.
Migration was far from being the dominant theme of the letters I received. My readers wrote of illnesses and miracle cures, of falling in love, of career changes and precious late children, of youthful poetry lived for then abandoned, or simply of their favourite books. What I think of as my most courageous steps – moving from one end of the continent to the other at the call of youthful love, learning to live in another language, or facing death and finding that I am not afraid of it – are acts of ordinary courage after all.
I sometimes wonder whether I would have received the same numbers and the same kinds of letters had I instead written a novel or a collection of essays. These forms have often been employed to tell a story which is essentially autobiographical. Although I could see distinct advantages in those genres in which everything ends exactly the way one wants when I began to write this book they seemed an option for those who had the luxury of time. The fact that I am now working on a novel – very, very slowly – is a reflection both of a renewed sense that I might have enough time for luxuries after all, and of the sheer enjoyment of creating fiction. And, although nothing is certain, I am glad that C
hernobyl Strawberries may yet turn out to be a step on a writing path rather than its conclusion. I often joke that I enjoy my ‘posthumous life’ more than the one I lived before. The fact that a memoir has come to represent a beginning rather than a summing up, appeals to my sense of a life in which so many things have been topsy-turvy.
The challenge I set myself was to write a story which was not linear yet which nonetheless managed to make the reader want to know what happened later, to read on with a sense of curiosity and, if possible, even urgency. Obviously, as is implicit in the memoir as a genre, the heroine does not die – not just yet – but does she live happily ever after? Yes, yes, dear reader, she lives a happy ‘after’. About ‘ever’, let’s wait and see.
London, December 2005
My eleven favourite books
LAST SPRING, I was asked to list my favourite books for a literary festival. I found the idea frustrating and kept wanting to change the line-up even when the orders for a special display were dispatched. As soon as I listed my choices, I realised that I had offered eleven rather than the customary ten titles, but couldn’t bear to delete one simply for the sake of decimal conventions. I have to admit that I love nothing so much as spying around other people’s shelves to check which books are well thumbed and which are still suspiciously pristine. I never feel fully at ease in houses in which the books are hidden or absent. ‘Tell me what you read, and I’ll tell you who you are’ is something I really believe in.
Dates shown indicate the year of first publication.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
When I was a student in Belgrade, in our (often very pretentious) bookish circles the question ‘Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?’ was the literary equivalent of ‘The Beatles or the Stones?’. We tended to choose Dostoevsky (and the Stones). At twenty, he somehow seemed more profound, more earth-shattering than Tolstoy. When I returned to Anna Karenina in my late thirties, I was bewitched by the complexities of marriage, adultery and parenthood the novel portrayed. Funnily, I found that living in England has ‘anglicized’ my imagination. I kept visualizing Vronsky – the guards officer who abandons the army for a lover and a spot of painting – in brightly coloured corduroy trousers and suede chukka boots, like some Chelsea lizard.
Milos Tsernianski, Migrations (1978)
This is quite possibly the greatest Serbian novel, written in 1929. The story of two Isakovich brothers who escape Ottoman Serbia for Austria-Hungary in the eighteenth century, one to become an officer in the Austrian army, the other a wealthy merchant, may sound distant and obscure, but the way Tsernianski writes about love, sex, war, nationhood, and exile grips one by the throat and does not let go. This tale of migration and longing for the safety of Russia and the North – is told in prose so beautiful that I still catch myself reciting the sections of it I have learned at school with a mixture of melancholy and awe.
Robert Dessaix, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004)
In his life and in his writings, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Turgenev was a connoisseur of unusual passions. For forty years he remained devoted to the French opera singer Pauline Viardot. He accompanied her and her husband around Europe, often living next door to them or even in the same house, while his relationship with Pauline remained more or less chaste. I say ‘more or less’ because the archaeology of human relationships is an impossible science. We often don’t know much about the passions of the people apparently closest to us; is it then possible to be certain about Viardot and Turgenev after more than a century had elapsed, when even the very substance of love might have changed? What I understand by ‘I love you’ might be very different from what Turgenev might have meant. Dessaix’s exploration of this unusual affair defies generic boundaries. It is a detective story, a travelogue, a personal memoir, a piece of intellectual history and a fascinating examination of whatever love means.
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989)
In their judgements on Chernobyl Strawberries, readers and reviewers often drew my attention to works which they considered in some way similar. Some comparisons were flattering (Robertson Davies, for example), others puzzling (Tom Sharpe). Eva Hoffman’s name cropped up from time to time even while I was still writing the book. ‘She is similar to you,’ a friend told me, ‘and your histories are similar. You must read it.’ Eva left Poland for Canada when she was twelve, went on to study at top American universities and produce a range of highly respected books: similarities are relative. I hate to admit this, but Eva’s book had, for quite some time, languished on my reading pile enthusiastically purchased but as yet unopened, where she was in the company of some of the best writers of our time. I always buy at least three times as many titles as I can possibly read; a greed doubtless rooted in the reading hunger of my East European childhood. One of the first things I did after I submitted the manuscript of Chernobyl Strawberries to the publisher – now safe from what Harold Bloom calls ‘the anxiety of influence’ – was to read Lost in Translation. I enjoyed it so much that I instantly added it to my university course lists. Because this normally means that I have to reread the book again and again, such inclusion is more than a mere compliment.
Graham Swift, The Light of Day (2003)
I had noticed The Light of Day in the bookshops when it came out and read some good reviews, but decided that it was probably not my sort of book. The story of a private detective who follows an unfaithful husband around a relatively small patch of south-west London, and develops a strange bond with his client, the jealous wife, seemed too understated for my taste. Now I wonder if my background (let’s call it Continental) simply conditioned me to be attracted to books laced with more obvious literary fireworks? I heard Graham Swift read from The Light of Day last June. Something about the way he performed the text, in an amazing double-act of the writer and his character, alerted me to the possibility that there was nothing simple and very little that is parochial about this story. Anyway, I have now read it and changed my mind. It is absolutely my kind of story.
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942)
This is my favourite travel book. It is half a million words long and deals with a country that doesn’t exist any more. I realise that many people might take a look at it and say: ‘Well, it is about Yugoslavia, and it is broadly sympathetic towards the Serbs, so Vesna would say that, wouldn’t she?’ I plead ‘not guilty’. It is true, the fact that it was about Yugoslavia initially led me to it, but what West loved most about Yugoslavia are its southern and western parts, rather than the north-eastern area I came from. The historian A. J. P. Taylor called it a work of genius, and the American travel writer Robert Kaplan said it was the greatest travel book of the twentieth century. Rebecca West discovered Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second World War because – in the growing certainty of the apocalypse which was facing Europe – she wanted to write a book about a small country and its relationship with the great empires. Finland was an early, rejected choice. Written against the sound of bombs raining over London, this book is as much a memoir of one of the last century’s most remarkable British women as it is an account of Yugoslavia.
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907)
While I was undergoing treatment for cancer, Father and Son offered unexpected solace. First published anonymously in 1907, this book tells the story of Edmund Gosse’s strange and solitary Victorian childhood. His parents were deeply religious members of the Plymouth Brethren. Gosse’s mother, Emily, who died of breast cancer when Edmund was eight, authored a number of religious pamphlets. The account of Emily’s cancer treatment in mid-nineteenth century London made my own treatment in early twenty-first century London seem luxurious, notwithstanding the spartan hospital wards and shared bathrooms, and all the problems familiar to any fellow user of our National Health Service. What Emily had, however, and I could not have, is an unwavering belief in God. I can certainly see the advantage of belief in such extreme situations, if not otherwise. I read her story as to
ld by her son with enormous curiosity. It is a very unusual and very courageous book.
John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916)
‘There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark’: the story of Greenmantle, which sweeps through London and Constantinople, via places such as Baghdad, Berlin and Belgrade, is my favourite adventure novel. I like Buchan’s central character, Richard Hannay, the South African mining engineer and war hero, but his Sandy Arbuthnot is my favourite officer-and-gentleman: ‘Tallish, with a lean, high-boned face and a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl’s . . . He rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before . . . He’s blood-brother to every kind of Albanian bandit. He used to take a hand in Turkish politics, and got a huge reputation . . .’ Greenmantle is deadpan, a bit camp, full of imperial swagger, superbly plotted and absolutely irresistible.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2)
I hate to admit this, but although I might prefer a comparison to a broad range of femmes fatales of East European fiction, if anyone asked me to which literary character I think myself most similar, I would have to say that it was George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke. When I was younger I shared her idealism and her bookishness and I even had one or two crushes on highly unsuitable elderly Casaubons at the time when I still believed that it was possible to write the Key to All Mythologies. At twenty I used to think book-writing much more important, and even more sexy, than running a bank or a country.
C. D. Wright, Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (2002)
I discovered C. D. Wright’s work while I was writing Chernobyl Strawberries. I felt a renewed thirst for poetry. I enjoyed those ten or twenty minute journeys elsewhere that the best poems offer and I didn’t feel like engaging with stories or novels, perhaps because my own story preoccupied me so much at that time. A close friend recommended C. D. Wright, an Arkansas poet. Her poems are like words on fire, direct, often erotic, told in an unmistakably Southern voice. I’ve revisited this book so often that I now half-remember most of it. Strangely enough, the descriptions of Arkansas made me think of my own childhood. I remembered cycling furiously along narrow paths cut through maize fields, gripping the handlebars with fingers sticky and purple from picking wild mulberries. My sister and I spent sweltering evenings on our balcony, gossiping in the shelter of mosquito nets. We watched moths as big as eggs dive unsuccessfully towards the tiny holes. They flew towards the light, hitting the fine wire again and again. We were poor in almost everything else but rich in time.
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