Chernobyl Strawberries (27 page)

In 1992, as the long agony of Yugoslavia's dissolution gathered pace, I became the night-shift queen of the BBC World Service. I was still playing at journalism, while my little sister became the news. She worked for the Belgrade offshoot of a British charity, on whose behalf she took risks on the fringes of Balkan battlefields where she struggled to reunite children found alone in shelters and orphanages with families exiled across the continent, from Lapland to Anatolia. Because of the war, children's homes were full of kids who didn't really know whether they still had parents or not. My sister is a mother of two, and her heart broke on a daily basis. She showed me a self-portrait made by one of her wards, a clumsy sketch by a seven-year-old depicting a boy kicking a football. The leg which pointed towards the ball was a short, thin line in pencil. ‘An unfinished drawing?' I asked. ‘A landmine,' replied my sister. ‘Thank you,' the caption read, in a shaky child's hand.

Just before four a.m., I glance out of my office window at the BBC towards the ink-coloured sky behind the pigeon mesh.
This is the most dangerous hour for night-shift workers: lorries swerve towards lampposts, hands slip under mechanized blades, hospital patients die, bleepers emit a long, steady whine. The worst I can do is fluff during the five o'clock news bulletin: give the wrong time, a wrong date, an incorrect temperature. In rare moments of panic, when no tape seems to be in its proper place and telephone connections with stringers in distant Balkan valleys remain obstinately dead, my brain short-circuits and I start apologizing to my listeners in English. Wires cross and spark, producing a millisecond of blank space in which I begin to say
sorry
instead of
izvinite
. I emit no more than a barely audible hiss, which startles the studio manager on the other side of the heavy glass panel, before I realize the mistake and will my tired mind to think in Serbian again. As soon as the steady, incomprehensible Slavonic flow resumes, the SM settles back into his chair. The TV above his head broadcasts silent explosions and train crashes in slow motion. I try not to look at the ticker at the bottom of the screen, for fear that I might start speaking English again.

Serbian – the language of the news bulletins I read every night from the basement of Bush House, the BBC World Service's Art Deco edifice in Aldwych – is my mother tongue, but English is now both more and much less than that. It is my default language, the code in which apologies are proffered. I have written millions of words, made love thousands of times, been ill, dreamed and prayed in English. I have cooked countless meals using herbs and spices whose names do not exist in any other language in my mind, while broadcasting in what itself must be becoming something quaintly archaic: the ‘RP' spoken by Belgrade's educated classes, the language which, in its own turn, both is and isn't my own tongue.

My ‘real' Serbian is intoned with long, open stresses which resonate in the voices of kids playing ball in the streets
of Belgrade's inner suburbs. It is peppered with corrupted English slang, with which my generation has replaced my granny's German
hoch
and my mother's French
comme il faut
: that ‘hepi' which does and does not mean ‘happy', the ‘fensi' which means pretentious rather than just ‘fancy', the ‘OK' which is and isn't yes. It is usually delivered in a sort of deadpan in which everything you say turns out to mean its exact opposite: the vocal equivalent of a Masonic handshake. Over the years in England, I have lost not only the words but also the gestures that go with it – the shrug of the shoulders for ‘What can one do?', the full-stop pout for emphasis, the wave-away for those who are beyond redemption. When I do make them, the movements feel as though they belong to someone else.

The Bulgarians shake their heads from side to side for yes, and nod for no: the head gestures' meaning is the exact opposite of that further west in Europe. I remember my Bulgarian summer of 1984 – the summer in which I met Simon – as the summer when I laughed as I said no while nodding vigorously, and said yes while shaking my head as if in disbelief. Although his Bulgarian was much better than mine, my future husband wisely stuck to his English gestures. This riddled the progress of our affair with potential for misinterpretation. Not that there was ever any misunderstanding, for in the things which mattered we barely needed to speak to each other. Words are, after all, only a small part of knowing the language.

My English vocabulary was fairly extensive when I settled in Britain in 1986. My parents had spent thousands on their daughters' English classes over the years, an investment which was ultimately to take us both away from them. What I had yet to learn was the English communication code: how to distinguish the compliments from put-downs and courtesies
from real invitations; how to know when I was free to laugh and when laughter would be in bad taste. Over the years, I've even learned how to punctuate my speech with those peculiarly English smiles which light the face for a brief moment and disappear as quickly as they've come. My mother tongue, meanwhile, remained firmly locked in its mid-eighties Serbo-Croat time capsule, a language which officially does not even exist any more.

Some months before I decided to join the World Service, I took Kosta, an old Belgrade friend who now lived in Illinois, out to lunch in a Soho restaurant. Having just come from a brief visit to Belgrade, he was full of home-grown gossip. It seemed as though everyone we knew was having affairs, divorcing and making futile bids for freedom from the middle-aged duties we were all slowly beginning to accumulate. Kosta and I laughed our way through two bottles of wine before we got to where we always get in the end, the stories which still, just about, keep us anchored in a vanished world. Deliberately avoiding any talk of the war, we were like bright orange buoys with chains almost eaten away by the salt, bobbing happily on the surface of things.

In our university days, for example, you were allowed to smoke while sitting exams, and many future literary critics anxiously availed themselves of the opportunity to calm their frayed nerves, while invigilators smoked to pass the time. The exam hall sometimes resembled a smokers' waiting room in a provincial railway station. There were no ashtrays, however, and I once set fire to one I improvised out of a page from the exam script, while musing on the finer points of a comparison between
Anna Karenina
and
Middlemarch
. I was aiming to impress my comparative literature professor by skiing off-piste.
Middlemarch
was definitely not on the syllabus. In Yugoslavia, George Eliot was mainly known for
The Mill on the Floss
, and was languishing in the twilight world of young-adult fiction. Insinuating that she was equal to an obvious great such as Leo T. was a risky strategy, but I was a Dorothea still madly in love with Casaubon. I simply had to give it a go, I thought, as I drew in a mouthful of smoke. ‘Colleague Bjelogrlic,' shouted the professor from the minstrels' gallery in the university's Hall of Heroes, which gave him a perfect view of a sea of students fidgeting over their papers, ‘extinguish that fire at once, I say!'

Many of our professors addressed us with ‘Colleague'. Others used ‘Comrade', or ‘Miss', according to whether they were communists or bourgeois recidivists. Forms of address provided an easy way of knowing individual political allegiances. It was useful to be able to distinguish Comrade Professors from Mr or Mrs Professors in order to know whether to cite Lukacs or T. S. Eliot. Although one could often tell the two groups apart simply by the clothes, it was not always safe to make hasty assumptions. Suits, ties and moccasins mostly belonged to comrades; tweed jackets, turtle necks and shoelaces to Mr and Mrs, but safari suits could go both ways, and were surprisingly popular in the early eighties.

The evening after the exam, Kosta made one of the strangest passes anyone has ever made at me. We were sitting in his father's library and drinking his father's wine when he took my left hand and started kissing the inside of my index finger, while repeating, ‘Why not, why ever not?' in a strange, strangulated stage whisper. I wasn't sure whether he was trying to convince me, or was asking me to spell out the reasons why not, of which there were a million, but I thought his approach to courting quite original.

I stood up to leave and knocked against one of the heavy crystal lozenges of a large antique chandelier. I was some inches taller than Kosta (which might have been one of those million reasons why not). A rivulet of blood made its way from my forehead down my cheek and towards my lips. I ran into the lobby, still laughing and squealing with pain at the same time. Old Totitza, Kosta's family's ancient Slovak maid, rushed towards me, my coat at the ready in her hands, all the while repeating in a trembling, eighty-year-old voice, ‘Are they OK, are they OK?' It took me a while to realize that she meant me, rather than her employers.

In pre-war Belgrade homes (pre-Second World War, that is), servants used to address their masters in the third-person plural. It didn't occur to me that my friend's father, a director of a big socialist cooperative and a member of the Communist Party since he was sixteen, encouraged such old-fashioned bourgeois etiquette in his house. When she finished wiping my brow with a linen tea towel, I gave Totitza a partisan salute. The scratch was barely visible. I was neither angry with Kosta nor particularly flattered. His countless amorous conquests depended on vast amounts of indiscriminate gunfire. His servant's anxious enquiries, however, were something to remind Kosta of now, particularly since she was long dead and he held the passport of a truly egalitarian state.