Chernobyl Strawberries (32 page)

My twenties and my thirties were spent in a state of extended adolescence. The motto of those two decades could have been ‘There's still plenty of time'. I held a sequence of fine, untroubling jobs. I never felt I was working hard, perhaps because, unlike my parents and even more unlike my grandparents, I had the luxury of never having to do anything I didn't like for very long. Looking back from where I am now, everything seems fantastically, unbearably easy.

Perhaps because of that ease, I deliberately sought difficulty. I travelled the world in a way which often confused my mother and father. Staying in fine hotels in places like Vienna or Paris was one thing, but seeking austere lodgings in the shadows of the Atlas, Ararat or K-2, as I began to do, was more difficult to understand. The luxury of deliberate hardship was not something my parents could begin to grasp. There lies a real generation gap. They could not understand my need to take risks simply in order to have a story to tell. This is the measure of my Western hubris, perhaps.

In the first days of 1990, Simon and I interrupted a Christmas visit to Belgrade in order to witness the revolution in Romania while the body of Ceausescu, Romania's freshly executed communist dictator, was still warm. Father drove us to the Danube Station to catch an empty train east. Our old Skoda coughed through the snowdrifts like a tubercular patient, and, in the back, Mother begged me not to stray too far from the
hotel. In a freezing Bucharest room, lit by the moonlight refracted in the icicles hanging from the roof of the hotel, we listened to the echoing sounds of street demonstrations and ate sandwiches that Mother had furtively squeezed into our rucksacks before departure.

I was grateful for her foresight: there was barely any food in the Romanian capital, and even that which was available was inedible. The soft white buns with delicate slices of salami, cheese and sweet roast pepper, carefully layered to create a chequerboard effect, were both extravagant and so perfectly telling of the ways in which Mother inscribed her love into our lives. It both infuriated and moved beyond words. After all, this was the woman who, before she went to work at five ten in the morning, found the energy to create elaborate swirls in mayonnaise on the ham and cheese
tartines
she left on the table ready for her daughters' breakfast two hours later, simply because she thought that the swirls might encourage my sister to eat.

We returned from Bucharest with photographs of rows of wax candles still burning on the sites of recent sniper killings, of tanks encircling the TV station, flags with the communist star cut out, smouldering ruins. The people in the streets of Bucharest celebrated the end of tyranny, intoxicatingly free for a moment. Back in Belgrade, the death spasms of communism, which thousands celebrated with unmitigated joy, made my parents worry about what would follow. Change was something to be feared. They had lived their entire lives in a world in which every regime seemed bound to be worse than the previous one. In Serbia, that seemed to sum up the entire twentieth century.

For years, my mother and my aunts kept asking me about the children who weren't arriving. Why would one marry, if not to
have a child? From their point of view, I was already alarmingly old for first-time motherhood at twenty-seven, let alone ten years later. In the meantime, at two- or three-yearly intervals, Simon and I had a conversation about parenthood which usually ended with, ‘There's still plenty of time.' I wanted to complete my doctorate, I wanted to write a book, I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted all manner of things, some more selfish than others. I wanted a child too, but there was still plenty of time for that.

The Yugoslav war went on for almost eight years. Even when we tried not to mention it, it was there like a body buried in our back garden. We talked about
that, out there
, we tried to guess what was
really
happening, we argued over who or what was to blame: insiders, outsiders, those who stayed behind, those who – like me – left the country, religious fanatics or godless communists, us or them. Yugoslavia was simultaneously the only solution and the worst of all possible worlds. I couldn't decide whether I loved or hated it. I had hauntingly beautiful memories of that country, yet it appears that it was also, and for so many people, an ugly, doomed place.

My first birthday

I often returned home from work just in time to watch the landscapes of my childhood burn on the early-evening television news. Every now and then I saw familiar faces. A high-school friend flitted briefly across the screen in a flak jacket, running across a square in Prishtina. I had no idea what he was doing there. A theatre director pointed to the burning edifice of Sarajevo Town Hall and I recognized the bandy-legged boy who took me out skating years ago. The spokeswoman for the Bosnian Ministry of Defence was, I realized, the young Muslim journalist whom I met in a restaurant on the Adriatic coast one sweltering August evening. We exchanged confidences over steaming bowls of mussels and glasses of cold beer, as one does only with complete strangers. Our great secrets – the reasons for the early breakdown of her marriage in a small town in eastern Bosnia, the intricacies of the complicated love-life I delighted in when I was twenty-two – seem now to belong to someone else, yet I can still recall them word for word. I felt that she was a kindred spirit, a sister-soul.

‘Don't you remember Radovan?' my father asks one day. My Montenegrin clan is connected by marriage to the Karadzic
clan, and Radovan, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, used to turn up at family weddings and funerals before he became wanted by the armies of the world for a list of war crimes as long as my arm. I don't really remember Radovan, but he reminds me how painfully I remain tied to the war even at over a thousand miles' distance, through webs of family and friendship which seem to stretch as far back as I can remember.

I want to get closer to the conflict in order to understand it, then I think that my distance and my confusion are the only possible means of understanding. I have brief Martha Gellhorn moments when I go off to the Balkans in search of truth. I pay to be driven around by unshaven thugs who peruse the glossy product catalogue of Heckler & Koch while I walk forlornly on the edges of bomb craters hoping to see God knows what. I have Virginia Woolf moments when I escape to Sussex to collect large polished pebbles on the beach, just in case. Then I look up to the sky and wonder why I wasn't born in Denmark. ‘Bad luck, girl,' comes the reply out of nowhere. ‘Deal with it.' This is as close as I ever get to any kind of epiphany. And I do. I deal with it.

Then it – the body in the garden – starts moving closer. One evening, returning home from the theatre, I meet a neighbour's sixteen-year-old boy in the street and he says, ‘Did you hear the news? We've started bombing Serbia tonight.' His father is Serbian and his mother English: that
we
obscures a thousand contradictions. I rush into the house and dial my mother and father's number with a desperate sense of urgency although there is nothing to say, just as I would – for as long as NATO bombers flew over Belgrade – continue to ring them every day simply to say hello. It is the only thing I can do. It is a ritual like
not stepping on the cracks in paving stones, pure superstition, a compulsion. If I don't get through, they will die.

A week into the bombing, my sister wonders whether to take her family away from Belgrade and back to Toronto, where she had lived in the early nineties. ‘Go. Just go. As far west and as far north as you can bear to go,' I urge her. Even in London I feel too close. She leaves the bombed city, and there are agonizing hours while she and her children travel by bus – along exposed highways and across bridges which might or might not be of interest to NATO's pilots – north to Hungary. Although the skies above Serbia are the busiest in Europe, the kind of plane she needs no longer flies there. She calls to say that they've made it across the border – no one hit, no one taken off the bus – and then they fly over me in London and across the Atlantic. For the rest of the spring, I call both Belgrade and Toronto, at different ends of the day.