Chernobyl Strawberries (3 page)

Where does an autobiography begin and where should it end? The idea that a life is ‘book-ended' by two events which one can never describe as one's personal experience – birth and death – is banal, but in narrative terms frustrating for a writer. These are, literally, the unaccountable moments. Unless one is being fanciful,
Tristram Shandy
-style, the birth-story is passed down, second-hand. The memoirist could never provide ‘the' ending either: the act of writing declares her alive even as the moment she chooses for any provisional closure colours the tone of the narrative.

I remember a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Orson Welles. On hearing a producer complain about the downbeat conclusion of a film he had just presented, Welles allegedly said: ‘If you are after a happy ending, simply cut fifteen minutes earlier.' Did I want a happy ending, I wondered,
and if so where do I leave myself: at the wedding or in the delivery ward, the traditional sites of happily-ever-after? If I choose a less upbeat option, which one of the many stations of the cross of a cancer patient should I opt for — the cliff-hanger moment of that first biopsy result (‘I am afraid it doesn't look good,' the doctor said), or the point when, after scans and repeated tests, I was told that the cancer hadn't spread (‘Things may not be so bad, after all.')?

I face a similar dilemma as I search for another provisional closure now. Where can one see the passing of a decade more clearly, what does it affect more? The book, or the person it depicts – the person the reader will soon get to know, yet who is also no longer there, who is both dead and alive, like that cat in Schrödinger's experiment, not only ten years older but changed by the book itself?

Therein lies the problem in writing about
Strawberries
. I am reporting from that future which so easily might not have happened yet which looks superficially more similar to the past than I think most readers would like to hear. I have been back at work for ten years, lecturing, marking, and sitting in meetings much more often than is good for my soul. But this book has also changed my writing life quite profoundly. Since it appeared, I have felt freer to write exactly what I want to write in any given moment because, somehow, I no longer felt I needed to prove anything to myself. I have published a book of poetry and I have written a novel which is about to be published, a story of Slavonic London borne out of my own deep love for this city, which I wouldn't have dared attempt without
Chernobyl Strawberries
.

My genre hopping sometimes frustrates the reviewers, because it makes it difficult to describe my work neatly (I commiserate), yet, if you take away the trappings of form, the themes which preoccupy me have remained remarkably
unchanged. It is meaningful, therefore, that this edition is being published by John Nicoll, who edited my first book,
Inventing Ruritania
, eighteen years ago.

I wish I could say – as people sometimes expect of cancer survivors and immigrants alike — that I am grateful for each and every new day on this green island. Ask me how I am today and chances are that I will respond with that very English ‘Mustn't grumble.' Which doesn't mean that I don't. Which doesn't mean that I am not grateful.

West London, August 2014

‘It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning, and not to try to go further back.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein,
On Certainty

1. The Beginnings, All of Them

I HAVE TASTED
Chernobyl strawberries. Every spring, winds from the Ukraine bring rain to the fruit nurseries in the hills south-west of Belgrade. In the city, the trees and cobblestones glisten. The scent of glowing berries – the colour of fresh wounds and as warm as live blood – spills through the streets around the market square. The fragrance lingers in the rusty tramcars winding their way around the old sugar factory and the promise of summer overpowers for a while the familiar smells of sweat, tobacco, machine oil and polished wood.

In 1986 – the year of Chernobyl and the spring before the summer of my move to England – their smell seemed headier than ever. I was twenty-four and in the kind of love that makes the oceans part. I was about to leave an entire world behind without a second thought in order to live that feeling to its end, wherever and whenever the end happened to be. There was no other option. I was, obviously, still a child: not because the move to the other end of the continent wasn't worth the effort (it was, it was!), but because I could, at that stage, think about love only in grand operatic terms. As far as affairs of the heart were concerned, when the
faites vos jeux
moment came I simply had to stake everything. Anything less and I might have lost my nerve.

The world I left behind, and which I am now revisiting from the distance of twenty years and well over a thousand
miles, was that of Yugoslavia in the throes of the big communist experiment. As a social order it seemed invincible, yet it lasted just half a lifespan. Yugoslavia no longer exists, not even as a name, but in a kind of Rorschach test I still see the land of the South Slavs on every map of Europe. It is a vision which dates me: the way in which my eye still arranges its constituent parts into a country on the salty palm of the Balkans, the way in which I still call myself Yugoslav, and my mother tongue Serbo-Croat, without thinking, as though the very act of leaving, paradoxically, makes it impossible to let go.

The shape of Yugoslavia marks the outline of my childhood like a fat silkworm or a ripe white mulberry on the eastern edge of the Adriatic, but I am not given to homesickness or nostalgia. I am English now; I wouldn't begin to know how to return to Serbia, which is not the place I left anyway, nor even to Belgrade, the only city in that corner of the world to which I have a link that still breathes. In that city, I enjoyed a prosperous childhood and adolescence in a sequence of more or less comfortable homes which became increasingly opulent as my parents' careers advanced and then poorer again as the country began to slide towards its final bloodbath. I rarely think of those homes and those streets nowadays. Nothing reminds me of them. Sometimes, none the less, the memory returns, uninvited.

Mine is in no way an exceptional story. I was an ordinary bright girl in an ordinary middle-class world with its own rules and regulations, communist comrades notwithstanding. I obeyed when I was supposed to obey and rebelled at all the right moments. On the surface, it would appear that there is little that is remarkable about my life story. It would be difficult to turn it into either
Speak
,
Memory
or
The Gulag Archipelago
. I was
no Russian dissident: I have never seen the inside of a prison cell, never been tortured for any beliefs. I didn't escape to the West under a train or through barbed-wire fences. Much though I would have liked to, I've never had to memorize any poetry, mine or anybody else's, in order to preserve it for future generations. The closest I ever came to a conflict with the communist power machine is a heated argument with Yugoslav customs officers over some LPs I was bringing back from Paris in 1980, shortly after my nineteenth birthday. Two uniformed ruffians threatened to make me get off a train in the middle of a Slovene forest for trying to smuggle Western goods into the country. It was an empty threat, the acting out of the rituals of an authoritarian state, a show of power and supplication aimed at putting a spoilt metropolitan brat in her proper place. You don't stop trains for Georges Brassens, not in Yugoslavia.

How could something that seemed so solid perish so easily? I am almost disappointed that the comrades didn't put up a better fight towards the end. I know they were tired, but they owed that much to all those among us who had demonized them so wholeheartedly. How could they just pack up and retire to write memoirs full of dates and self-justifications? How could they metamorphose so easily into a bunch of cuddly grandpas with bad dental work? Even those who tortured and imprisoned, and pinned electrodes to grown men's balls, now wear checked slippers and send grandchildren to Western universities. Their erstwhile victims, meanwhile, appear ever so slightly mad and certainly much less nice, much less affable, less well adjusted, as though they were, in some way, asking for it all along. Could it really be that I grew up in a world behind the looking glass, which had no more substance than the painted backdrop on a theatrical stage?

In the year of my birth, 1961, my extended family of six lived in two earth-floored rooms – mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, great-grandmother and the baby (me) – without an indoor lavatory and with a water tap by the garden gate. The poverty was both that of the country and ours alone. We kept being punished by circumstance, but also by a certain unwillingness to adapt, until we learned to adapt all too well, on autopilot, and to live without believing. Only then did the rewards begin to accrue. By the time I was twelve, we owned an enormous house, approximately four rooms and a bathroom per person (there were five of us by now: add another child and subtract the grandfather and the great-grandmother). We must have learned a lesson or two.

The New House stood, white and unmistakable, on the brow of a Belgrade hill, as a monument to my parents' drive and willingness to do without, surrounded by pine saplings which promised a mature garden for the grandchildren. It took five years to build and it was best loved in construction. I played hide-and-seek in the trenches dug out for the foundations and, when the walls went up, signed my name furtively in wet, salmon-pink plaster.

In the eighties, Yugoslavia – and most of us in it – went into economic decline. We could no longer afford to heat such a vast place and, even if we could, there was no oil to be bought anywhere in town and, because of power shortages, electricity on alternate days only. Our erstwhile buddies from the International Monetary Fund were beginning to tighten the screws on the comrades and they then turned on us, inventing more and more complicated ways of saving money to repay the foreign debt. Cars whose number plates ended in even numbers were not allowed to move on even dates, odd numbers on odd dates; Belgrade was divided into zones which had no electricity according to a complex rota announced every
morning on local radio; sanitary towels were sold in particular chemist shops on particular days of the week, according to a schedule published in the daily newspaper; shops no longer gave out carrier bags, so you had to carry one in your pocket just in case you bought something; doctors' surgeries ran out of latex gloves, so you had to bring a pair if you wanted to be examined. Nothing major, nothing dreadful, nothing worth mentioning ever really happened, just a series of petty obstacles to remind us all that Yugoslavia was no longer the golden child of the West, no more the cutest of the Eastern babies. There were new kids to be cared for, grown lean and hungry on the Soviet diet, opening their pink little-baby mouths towards the teat, cooing just as sweetly.