Chernobyl Strawberries (11 page)

‘Just sign on the dotted line, please,' said a small man wearing an orthopaedic shoe and a smile even shier than mine, as he stood up from the enormous desk which occupied a good half of his office. Everything in the room, including him, seemed to be mushroom-coloured and slightly mouldy, as though salvaged from a shipwreck. He shook my hand, I proffered a five-pound note and off went the form, in a pre-paid brown envelope, to the India Building in Liverpool, its name a solitary, faint echo of the kind of reading material which fired my childhood fantasy of Britain. I wasn't sure if Messrs Henty, Haggard, Kipling and Buchan would have entirely approved of a foreign woman, a ‘sleeping dictionary', signing any document in her own hand, but at least I now knew that I could dead-pan as well as any of their heroes. (I still can't hear the words ‘Her Majesty' without at the same time hearing a line of metallic bugles blowing heaven wards. Luckily enough, in my circles at least, one doesn't hear them that often.)

My previous oath was given at a ceremony which took place in the dying days of February 1980, only a few months before my baccalaureate exams. These were called, appropriately, the
Matura
examination in Serbian, even if our maturity was not high on the list of aptitudes to be tested. The year ahead was full of initiation rites: my first heartbreak, my first holiday alone (in fact, with my sister, who, being a couple of years younger, enjoyed every hard-won freedom a couple of years ahead of me), my first autumn at university. This particular evening was to be the first of those firsts. With a small group of nervous fellow
maturants
gathered in the senior common room of my Belgrade
lycée
, each clutching a red carnation and
a brand-new red membership card bearing a small black hammer and sickle, I swore allegiance to the Communist Party, which I was about to join. Not many of my former compatriots in that swathe of land between the nostril of the Adriatic Sea and the lush hips of the Balkan peninsula would now own up to having done the same (even if we all know who you are, my friends!).

In fact, the proper name of the organization I was joining was the League of Communists of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but there was no poetry in that. The
jeunesse dorée
of Belgrade called it the ‘Ka-Pe-Yot'. Its pre-war acronym sounded vaguely romantic, revolutionary and illegal, redolent of the heavy coats with astrakhan collars, thick silk stockings and night-pot hats of the twenties and thirties, and prisons in which you sat around a big table with the comrades, translating radical German philosophy and declaring that you recognized no court but the court of your own revolutionary party. If you missed the Spanish Civil War this was the next best thing.

Funnily enough, I don't remember the words of the oath, although I can pretty well guess what they may have been. I remember that I made no note of the event in my otherwise impeccably detailed diary for that year (the last year for which I kept a diary – sadly, just as the details were becoming more interesting, I seem to have run out of enthusiasm for recording them). It might be that I was aware even then of the need to airbrush the event, subconsciously mindful of its impending absurdity. I take it as read that the oath was not entirely in keeping with the one I subsequently pledged to Her Majesty (Ta-rraaa!), but the Almighty, probably even QE2 herself, will surely understand. Her subjects seem to me an increasingly fickle lot. Why I joined the Ka-Pe-Yot, and in 1980 of all times, is another matter altogether. Its head, Comrade Joseph Broz
Tito, was already in a hospital in Slovenia, waiting for a leg amputation in readiness for all those grisly jokes about knuckle stews that were to fill the many days of his grotesque obsequies in May 1980, and even I could hear the water sloshing on the lower decks.

My father, my national defence teacher, and Tom Courtenay have a lot to answer for. My father was a reluctant communist himself (membership was part and parcel of his job description) and a strong advocate of a wait and see' policy in all things, but in matters political more than anything else. Where I come from, it is the option of the wise, yet I would ‘wait and see' for no man. ‘Wait and see' was my father's way of saying you might well regret this later. The more he reasoned, the less reasonable I became. I had to join and that was that. My mother didn't help. Not a member herself, even when her refusal to join the party was clearly detrimental to her career as a bureaucrat in public transport, she was none the less exceedingly proud whenever one of her daughters was chosen for something, whatever that something might be, and the comrades were no exception. They were still running the country after all. The careers she saw me in – Yugoslav ambassador to the UN, director-general of Belgrade TV, editor-in-chief of the
Politika
newspaper – all involved party membership. The fact that she did not wish me to join was clearly a bit awkward, but we never addressed that particular problem, just as we never spoke about the sheer logistics involved in chairing a session of the Security Council on the Hudson while making it home to Belgrade in time for dinner
en famille
, another thing that she would always expect of me. Such minor inconveniences would surely sort themselves out one way or another. As, indeed, they did.

If anyone, Tom Courtenay may have been the main culprit. In all those long afternoons of the seventies which I spent sitting in matinée screenings at the National Museum of Cinematography, in the roomy basement of a building in Kosovo Street in Belgrade, emerging bleary-eyed into the blinding light of the Balkan summer, few films affected me as deeply as
Dr Zhivago
. Granted, part of me knew even then that it was fundamentally a piece of sentimental trash, but the Great Russian Soul, as sieved through the quintessentially English melancholic view of history, was absolutely irresistible. The English played the Russians with the sort of respect and care that was only ever matched by Americans playing the English – one empire nodding to another in recognition that we are all heading in the same direction.

And
Dr Zhivago
was, for me, mainly about Strelnikov. Lara was an absolute blank, and the others were hardly worth bothering with. A wounded male in an armoured train cutting its way through Siberian snowdrifts (red flags a-flutter, gold-rimmed spectacles a-twinkling), embracing communism as a cure for a broken heart, Courtenay's Strelnikov was clearly irresistible. Like some blond angel of destruction hurtling towards his death because of that evil, corrupt Komarovsky, he was the man every silly fool in Belgrade (even if, quite possibly, nowhere else) wept for. There was no need to read Pasternak if you had David Lean, with all those comrades bleeding on virgin snow under the assaults of cruel tsarist Cossack cavalry, all the rich fur and rows of trembling birch trees, boots falling on the frozen surface of snow like silver spoons on
crème brûlée
, and all that lingering, annoying, sentimental music!

I knew even then that my communism was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy in which tall men and slim, bookish women
argued passionately, and painstakingly printed illegal leaflets on small presses hidden in back rooms whose doors were as taut as the membrane of a drum, always about to burst under the policeman's heavy boot. There was no room in that fantasy for murderous stocky Josephs – Dzhugashvili the Georgian (a.k.a. Stalin) and Broz, the Slovene-Croat (a.k.a. Tito) – not even for the fatherly, dumpy Karl and Friedrich (Tweedledum and Tweedledee), let alone their ten (or was it eleven?) theses on Feuerbach we had to know by heart for our philosophy lessons. They were all clearly deviating from my party line. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point surely was to make it more beautiful.

Of course, you may say, Strelnikov/Courtenay had it easy, cast as he was against not only that Orientalist devil Komarovsky (Rod Steiger could hardly erase the memory of evil Jud Fry from
Oklahoma!
with his bourgeois little beard) but also the equally dark-haired, doe-eyed and totally uncool Dr Zhivago/Omar Sharif, who, his jauntily tilted fur hat notwithstanding, looked about as Russian as John Travolta. Wasn't that part of the plan? The West was clearly in love with its enemy, and I understood that love story perfectly well. It was underpinned by the same longing for simplicity, sharing and self-denial which now makes my British compatriots buy Shaker kitchens and wear Birkenstock sandals. Declutter, comrades, for heaven's sake!

My national defence teacher, Brka, the Moustache, a graduate in Marxist philosophy from a provincial university, was a handsome young man brimming with energy and wit. He obviously had the annual task of enlisting a select crop of eighteen-year-olds. Who could have been a more fitting candidate than the school egghead who simply had to excel in every subject,
including his own? I can still tell you how to measure the distance between the sight of the gun and the moving target, according to the visibility of particular body features. I still know the butt of my M-48 from the muzzle. In fact, the year before I joined the party I practised with an airgun for a week in our back garden in order to achieve the best results in the school's annual shooting competition. Clouds of sparrows flew off our cherry trees with every shot, our dog leapt and barked, straight-backed and alert like an arrow by my right knee, in what was clearly some Jungian doggy memory of hunting (the only meat he ever saw came from the butcher's block or a tin). Blossom drifted aimlessly in the air. But for the din we were creating, we could have been in a Japanese postcard. Once I knew which eye to close when aligning the sights, I was away.

While congratulating me on my marksmanship on the bus returning from the shooting range, Brka added that he expected no less of me. During his national service in Bileca, in Herzegovina, he was once inspected on a parade by a kosher five-star Yugoslav National Army general by the name of Bjelogrlic. He was clearly under the impression that the man was my paternal uncle. He still remembered the general's grey hair, cut incredibly short and combed
en brosse
, the voice of calm authority with which he delivered a patriotic speech, and the missing index finger on his right hand. I have to admit that few things are potentially as manly as a finger blown off in the heat of battle. There are exceptions, such as my mother's secretary, Toma, but the loss of his digit is not quite the same thing.