Chernobyl Strawberries (14 page)

I am not at all sure where all that poetry came from. Ours was a reasonably bookish house, but not a particularly poetic one. We possessed hardly any books of poetry. In fact, before I started buying books, our library consisted of my father's mathematics collection, mainly in Russian, and a haphazard assortment of nineteenth-century novels in an equally random selection of languages. Our entire book collection fitted into a single bookcase with fragile glass doors, locked by an ornate key with a wine-coloured silk tassel. A row of porcelain figurines which stood in front of cloth-bound editions of overviews of higher mathematics,
Kursi vishei matematiki
, published in Moscow and Leningrad in the late forties, suggested correctly that the books were seldom moved from their places, although that would be misleading as far as our reading habits were concerned. We all read like souls possessed, even if we did not own many books.

Books were very expensive, and if a neighbour or an aunt bought a copy of a novel – it might have been anything from the Croatian translation of D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, published when I was four, to Sholokhov's
And Quiet Flows the Don
in its original Russian – we all read it, irrespective of age and pedagogical advice. I was barely out of primary school when I asked an elderly great-aunt about how exactly – quoting D. H. Lawrence – one was meant to ‘fuck a little flame into being'.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
was, in fact, my favourite novel before I discovered Saint-Exupéry's
Le Petit Prince
. That's how topsy-turvy my reading world was.

All of us knew a lot of poems by heart. Yugoslav
lycées
tended to make their students learn a couple every week. They adhered to strict learning programmes, which meant that the entire population of fourteen-year-olds up and down the country would be learning the same poem in the same week, and that my parents knew exactly what we were up to, because they learned exactly the same poem in exactly the same week when they were fourteen (except, of course, for those poets who have since disappeared from the face of the earth because they have said or done something not said or not done). We all agreed that the only poetry you truly possess and enjoy is that which you know by heart.

Both my parents retained an extensive selection of verse from the national Parnassus in their heads, even if they chose not to go around reciting it to their daughters, except on long car journeys when we ran out of songs to sing. My father had a preference for Sergei Esenin, and frequently recited an unbearably sad poem about a bitch whose puppies were thrown into a river to drown, which he knew in both Serbian and Russian.
Sobaka
– the Russian word for a dog – still sounds incredibly sad to me because of that poem. My mother's range was extensive,
but she was fonder of reciting prose, and particularly the final lines of
Père Goriot
by Balzac, where an elderly man – whose two daughters had married into the aristocracy and abandoned him – is buried at the expense of a poor student. After a while, we were all able to reel off the inscription on old Goriot's gravestone without prompting. I am not sure if my mother's fondness for that particular scene came from an unconscious desire to see her daughters marry aristocrats and abandon her, or from her regret that she had left her own parental home in eastern Serbia to marry my father, or – and this was most likely – from her pure love of pathos. Mother was the only person I knew who actually
listened
to the words of pop songs on the radio and cried: particularly when the songs were about leaving home, lost loves, nostalgia and regrets in general. This used to annoy my father, a rational soul, no end. At times, we had a moratorium on music with words in our house, until I found my mother crying to the sounds of Saint-Saëns's
Swan
. Then we realized it was pointless and let her be.

My Montenegrin grandmother used to recite one or two classics of children's poetry and a vast selection of epic ballads, with a strong preference for blood and gore in both. Beheadings, impalings, the pulling out of hearts and livers: that was the substance of Granny's poetry. I still remember a Turkish hero, Musa, slain by the Christian Prince Marko, who was so brave it turned out he had two hearts and a double ribcage. Granny's other favourite was poetry about women's suffering, but she was no suffragette. In one verse, a mother of a small baby is immured in the foundations of a fortress, her breasts still heavy with milk, which ran like white tears from the stone. In another, an elderly mother nurses the hand of her youngest son, dropped from the sky by a raven flying from a distant battlefield. My favourite Granny poem was the one about a woman who was wrongly accused of being unfaithful. To
punish her, her husband ties her to the tails of four horses and dismembers her. When he realizes that she was innocent, he repents and builds a monastery at each of the places where a part of her body first fell. The couple are reunited in heaven: a Montenegrin take on Lady Chatterley, I guess.

In the four years between my move to London and her death, Granny wrote to me only once. It was a short letter, pencilled in a deliberate hand clearly unused to writing. She reminded me to visit my parents regularly and urged me to behave in a way which would not dishonour my lineage: no laughing in public places, no loud conversation, modesty in dress and in everything else. Granny wrote as though she was worried that, away from my father and my tribe, I might be in danger of succumbing to some ungodly excess. In her world, Montenegrins who lived apart from their tribes were notoriously prone to prodigal or licentious behaviour. Her prompting came not because she lacked confidence in me, but because she clearly believed that this was what a letter from a grandmother to her granddaughter should be like. It wasn't the place for frivolities of any kind. Although written in continuous lines, her letter was – from the first word to the last – a string of rhythmic pentameters, the verse of Serbian epic poetry.

Much later, I realized that poetry writing had, in fact, something in common with lactation. Prompted by some mental/hormonal/ godly arrangement, the poetry comes as if from nowhere and, if not written down, engorges a swollen chest to the point of unbearable pain. Eventually, the urgency begins to ease and the writing takes place just intermittently. It is at this point only that it can be abandoned. Then it dries up
completely. The organs which create verse – the heart, the brain, the fingers, the stomach – retain a memory of how it was once done, but are no longer able to produce poetry. In fact, like lactation, poetry is something that my adopted culture – let's call it British – is not entirely sure about. While poetry writing is nothing to be ashamed of, it's certainly better done in the privacy of one's own home.

Au contraire
, the Yugoslavia of my adolescence was still stuck in that nineteenth-century frame of mind from which emerged Byron, Shelley and Tennyson, the bards, the lechers and the poets laureate, great men to be adored and admired, rather than shy nursing mothers. In terms of poetic role models, I was slightly better off than a British child of my age would have been. There were poets everywhere and they were celebrated. Communists wrote poetry, and so did workers and peasants, and it was par for the course as far as members of the honest intelligentsia were concerned. Many of our greatest national figures were poets. They were commemorated in macho monuments, wielding swords and sitting on horses, streets were named after them: what's there to be shy about?

The Yugoslav poets of that era could be divided into two broad groups: the state-sponsored bunch and the outcasts. The first lot wore suits (and, if male, ties) and held responsible jobs in the media, publishing and arts administration. Their books tended to appear with ‘big' publishers in leather- and cloth-bound volumes with gold-embossed lettering, and got adulatory reviews. The outcasts wore rarely washed bohemian clothes, had badly cut hair and were frequently in dire need of a good dentist. They tended to read more broadly and had the obvious advantage of no nine-to-five (or, as it was locally, seven-to-three) jobs to insert a modicum of discipline into their days. They were published by small presses, if at all, in slim volumes of thirty to forty poems at most. These volumes were frequently
illustrated by the author (naturally, the suits had no time for such frivolities). They were hardly ever reviewed. In fact, a review was generally a bad thing, a sign that someone was out to get you, normally under the orders of a hostile suit somewhere higher up. These reviews themselves required a finely honed set of interpreting skills if one was to divine whether the author was on the way to jail or not. Some of the outcast bohemians had excellent connections among Belgrade's pickpockets from shared stints in local prisons. If you had a drink with a boho in a local pub you never knew who was going to come up to say hello.

There was some element of crossover between the two groups – a member of the boho tribe would temporarily sober up and get a haircut and a good job with a publisher for a few months or years. Given abundant state subsidy, these jobs required no financial
savoir-faire
, and the absence of managerial qualities was not a problem. The nicely heated new offices would normally become a kind of drop-in centre for a particular coterie of bohos, whose books were suddenly all over the publishing lists for the coming year, and the whisky purchased for the meetings with sales-rep teams was drunk in no time. Things never lasted, however, for any boho worth his salt would usually make a boo-boo of a political kind, normally by publishing a book of verse which could be interpreted
differently
. This resulted in the pulping of volumes and so-called ‘informative' conversations with poetry-loving cops down at the central police station.

The suits also occasionally missed a trick, which was all too easy to do, particularly with allegorical poetry, and would join the bohos for a few months or years in driverless wilderness. You could always tell a former suit in a group of bohos: their skin was too healthy, they got drunk too easily and they had regular, stable families consisting of one wife and one or
two children. Even if quite a few bohos depended financially on wives with full-time employment, their marriages were usually shorter than one-book publishing deals. Both groups were equally lecherous and both groups were largely male. The suits were more used to getting women on a silver plate and the bohos to singing for their supper, but there was no difference in their basic assumption that writing poetry required more sex and seduction than tram driving.

Although there were very few women poets in those days, there was no shortage of female verse groupies who didn't write poetry themselves. They tended to come from the ranks of the literary proletariat: they were librarians, proofreaders, literature students and suchlike, temporarily bent on becoming famous as muses. Women poets as such were not unknown and, indeed, I can confirm that they were encouraged; but the overall atmosphere, not unlike a boozy men's club, was not too favourable for a writing female.

Those women who gained recognition through loss-leading literary magazines tended themselves to divide into bohos and suits, but the number of the latter was so tiny as to be practically non-existent. Most women poets kept ordinary day jobs, and had to wrestle with the sexual advances of men poets until such time as they were ready to become sexless mother figures revered as national monuments. In order to keep their jobs, even if of a bohemian persuasion, they allowed themselves only minor signs of eccentricity (a tilted hat, a floor-skimming skirt, a chain-smoking habit), and – unlike their male colleagues – never waited for decay to develop to the point where they had to have their front teeth extracted.

All in all, I was too fond of creature comforts (good-looking, tall and well-dressed young men included) ever seriously to consider a poetic career. However, I was not to know that when the verse started pouring out. The schools I attended
needed and encouraged young poets – for inclusion in school magazines and yearbooks, participation in school poetry festivals, and all manner of other festive events. There were too many birthdays of famous people, anniversaries of battles and revolutions, name-days and openings of institutions. All needed a celebratory line or two, preferably in rhyme.