Chernobyl Strawberries (2 page)

I tried self-consciously to imagine a sunny picture of Belgrade, my native town. It felt a bit like preparing to write a poem – there was vague sense of buzz, an advancing mood rather than a story. Although I thought of these early jottings as a letter to my son, they were not as formal as that. Anything that began with “Dear Son” or “Dear Alexander” would have made me howl with self-pity. I had no plan. I saw houses tightly packed on the hills rising above the two wide ribbons of Belgrade's rivers, the Ottoman fortress at the confluence, the domes of its churches, a mountain with a needle of a TV tower to the south, and then the plains which stretched to the north of the Danube for hundreds of miles. I saw Belgrade not in the way I remembered it as a young woman, but as I now commonly beheld it from a plane coming in to land, making a loop above the city after a two-and-a-half-hour flight from London.

Unexpectedly, as my mind's eye moved in for the close-up, I remembered a bend of a street I hadn't been on in years. It was the slope of a hill close to my grammar school. There was a market above it and, below, a causeway leading to an island in the river. Nothing important ever happened to me on that street, yet here I was, an empty tram rattling somewhere to the right, the smell of strawberries and the calls of stall-holders somewhere behind me, a canvas filling with detail in the vivid and incontestable logic of a lucid dream. The strawberries set the sequence of images off. The blood, the tongue, the heart, the body: everything the fruit reminded me of in that particular moment is still there on the first page, as if to define the implicit agenda for the rest of the book.

Although I was writing in English, the language pulling me onwards had an odd affinity to Serbian. It could have been
simply the suppleness of an adoptive mother tongue, a feeling finally achieved after decades of practice, but it seemed like a new sound, as though I had attained a kind of fusion. Once upon a time, in Yugoslavia, I used to write creatively in the language then called Serbo-Croat. (I use the term ‘creative'
faute de mieux
, to describe poems, essays and short stories, while disliking the implication that academic writing lacks creativity.) Like someone jumping on a bicycle, or diving into a lake for the first time in many years, and finding that the body knows exactly what to do, I plunged into this new mode of writing in English to find that young self was still there, as though she had been waiting for this moment all along.

You can hear the voice of the young woman on almost every page. It was the sound I wanted to recreate: she was optimistic, ambitious, invulnerable, and in some ways insufferable. I needed a dose of her youthful courage, but behind the brave face I now saw insecurities as well — an eagerness to please, certain conformity, a sense of being stifled, a desire to escape. She dreams about the wider world, and writes poems about exile long before her actual departure. The broader backdrop is the country of her birth, a land which I gradually came to view as being caught in the same hubris of youthful pride. It became a mirror of that particular self. Too good to last. Too good to be true.

That twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old voice is the dominant tone of this composition. The other sound, the voice of the forty-two-year-old ‘
almost English
' woman, shadows it, chronicles, translates, and explains the odd detail. She sometimes subtly mocks and teases the young one, but she envies her too. The counterpoint of these two selves is not dissimilar to a fugue. The musical term suits not only the desired polyphony of the text but also the book's themes, because
fuga
means both ‘to flee' and ‘to chase'. The flight from the present
and the quest for meaning in the past — because the future may no longer be there — provide the recurrent
Leitmotifs
.

When you set out to write your life story, where do you start? What is the first thing you remember? I don't mean the earliest memory, but the first detail that comes to mind when you face a blank sheet or an empty screen. Try it as an unrehearsed experiment, and the result is likely to be a surprise. It may seem counterintuitive to talk about surprises in writing about one's past, but they were the most remarkable part of the project. They continued after the publication; the most exciting one, perhaps, being the warmth of its reception.

I have, almost, become used to the double-take which happens when someone you have never met addresses you like a long-lost friend. The memoir seems to engender a familiarity which, unexpectedly, works in two directions. It is there not just in the way in which its readers ask after my parents or my friends, but in the way they talk to me about their own, as though I am, already, part of their inner circle.

What kind of work is a memoir expected to do? What sort of need does it fulfil, for its author and its readers, who, in ever greater numbers, seem to find in the genre something that may be missing from fiction? Many readers asked if I found writing the book healing. I resist the term because it detracts from literary ambition (would one ask a novelist if his fiction felt therapeutic?), yet it is not an unfair question.

My ‘memory project' – to depict a life as seen from within — is not necessarily synonymous with an ‘intimate story', although it is that as well. It skips between the personal and the public. It does not attempt to offer an inventory of my achievements or failures, as a biography might. Instead, it offers my account of ‘what it was like' and ‘how it felt' — to be a child and
then a young woman in the Balkans during the Cold War; to emigrate; to enter an English family; to have a child; to watch your country fall apart in a sequence of wars; to face a life-threatening illness; to survive. But this last is hindsight.

While writing
Chernobyl Strawberries
, I realised that memory was, to an extent, a capricious guide. There were months I could account for, almost hour by hour, even decades later, while whole years had faded into a blur. I once talked dreamily of wanting to visit a French cathedral town when a friend reminded me that we had been there together in the summer of 1980. By the time we get into our forties (and now fifties, in my case), many of us are bound to lose a town or two. Do we choose the ones we keep?

The memories which stood out most sharply were far from always being predictable, the moments of happiness or trauma. On the contrary, I sometimes felt like a detective charged with the task of making sense, teasing out the ways in which the seemingly random recollections which floated to the surface, pushing others aside, added up to a particular idea of the self. Why write about David Lean's
Dr Zhivago
, for example, and not about Andrei Tarkovsky's
Ivan's Childhood
which had influenced me just as deeply? Why describe a youthful affair of the heart which happened in Paris but not one which took place in Dubrovnik? Why was I including some friends and not mentioning others who were just as close, if not closer?

I now sometimes think about the things I left out, not because I ever had anything to hide, but because even the longest memoir could not contain the full story of a life, although readers understandably grow suspicious the moment a memoirist mentions any lacunae. I have become increasingly aware of the editorial – or curatorial – effort which is built into any memoir writing. In my case, it was not so much part of
conscious ‘image making' as a by-product of composition – creating the thematic clusters into which I organised my memories once I realised that I could not fully adhere to chronology. The chronological approach, when I initially attempted it, seemed designed to compel me to account for the uneventful, the boredom which covered long stretches of my life – particularly my working life – like fine dust.

While I grappled with such conundrums, I also had to make the many unplanned decisions which accompany the process of offering one's life story to the public. My personal narrative began to feel like something that was just as much – if not more — about others as about me. I did not speak to anyone about what I was doing until the project was almost complete, but I understood early on that my friends and family, my neighbours, the university where I worked, the radio station and the publishing house where I had worked before, all had their continued existence and concerns about privacy and publicity. No strand of the story was entirely ‘mine'. However lovingly written, the book might test others' wish to remain private or to have a choice over the way they present themselves. My sister, for example, was holding a public position. Would she mind seeing episodes from her childhood in print? And how would my mother face her Serbian neighbours knowing that her clashes with her own mother-in-law, my wildly outspoken Montenegrin grandmother, would be known about by anyone who cared enough to buy my book? The same concerns applied at the British end. Would the university which employs me mind the world knowing that its concrete tower blocks look to me like the world I once knew behind the Iron Curtain? Would the BBC, for which I once worked, object to my comic takes on night-shift journalism? I had been too unimportant to have had access to earth-shattering revelations,
but even the galley-slaves witness things which the corporate communications departments would rather not see publicly discussed. There is no private sphere on the printed page.

Even the most loving autobiography involves betrayals and they do not necessarily end with the moment of publication. An obvious implication of writing a story with real-life characters is that their privacy remains an ongoing concern. Dorothea and Ladislaw do not have a life beyond the last page of
Middlemarch
. George Eliot was not expected to account for their activities. My ‘characters' do and I am. In public readings and in interviews, readers and journalists regularly ask ‘What happened to X after you left?', ‘How did Y react?', ‘Does Z still live in town N?', as though the door to a life, once opened, must remain continually so, ever wider ajar. The desire to protect privacy (my own but also my family's and that of others who feature in my book) remains in continuous tension with the commercial desire to create publicity (my own, my university's, my various publishers internationally). Publicity always and only exists as the ‘next question'. I don't believe that Czeslaw Milosz was necessarily right when he said that ‘when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished'. The boundaries are more easily set on the page than in an interview or a Q&A session, but I tread carefully and try not to hurt either those who happen to be part of my story or my readers.

All memoir writing is both the representation of a life and an interpretation of it. Like a photographic album, it replaces memory – fluid and shifting — with a collection of snapshots. The original assemblage may have been a random process, the scenes may have been unimportant, yet their status changes the moment they are selected: they become, metonymically, ‘the life'. The Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that each memory consists not only of itself but of all subsequent recollections of it. The memoir freezes the memory
and cuts it off from future accretions. Fixed and unchangeable, it eventually becomes a strange artefact in the life of its own creator – the sourcebook. One views it with the same mixture of distance and recognition one feels when an old photograph drops out of an envelope, or one hears a forgotten recording of one's own voice. The forty-two-year-old woman who wrote this book ten years ago now seems almost as young and as remote as the twenty-three-year-old one. I wish I could go back, if only to promise that those long, livid scars would fade.

A decade on, as discussions of the book have progressed from reviews to scholarly articles, student essays, and finally to a small handful of MA and PhD dissertations, I still find it hard to think about it as anything other than a miracle. I am used by now to talking about the memoir in what you could describe as rational terms. I have examined its structure and discussed its themes with my own students, often slipping into third person, as though the book had been written by somebody else. I have even provided a three-hundred-word account of the ‘research' which went into its making – also in the third person — when such a document was required for one of those productivity audits to which British academics are regularly subjected.

All such work notwithstanding, aspects of its publication continue to seem just as unreal, or even surreal, as the process of writing. The memory of myself, bald and drooling (one of the weirder effects of chemotherapy) yet laughing over the keyboard, seems nowhere near as strange as catching the sound of my own voice reading an episode from my Montenegrin grandmother's life on someone's car radio as I waited at traffic lights to cross a London street, or that supremely Freudian moment when, stepping out of the airport shuttle at Stockholm railway station, I beheld an enlarged version of a familiar black-and-white photograph of my parents in the window of an English-language bookshop, and – just below it
– my own two-year-old face staring at me from a small pile of paperbacks. Or an evening in a Viennese theatre when I sat on stage facing an audience of several hundred people and watched a famous Austrian actor perform the part of Vesna in German, in a semi-staged reading. I could see why someone might have chosen her, for we had superficial physical similarities, but she was a superior variant of me, a beautiful, willowy woman who wouldn't be out of place in a pre-Raphaelite painting. I felt both proud and embarrassingly self-conscious as I tried not to shift in my plush seat. Her expressive language was almost unintelligible to me, but I recognised every proper noun: names of family members, teachers, school friends and boyfriends bubbling up every now and then on to the surface of the elegant German flow. These are the moments – as though dreamed up by Buñuel — which seem designed to make you feel alternately self-possessed and bored with yourself.