Chernobyl Strawberries (33 page)

In those daily calls during the bombing season, it is my father who keeps the laughter alive. With my sister and her children gone, Mother is like a flame extinguished, yet Father suddenly makes the war seem nothing if not funny. He has seen it all before, he claims. His Second World War stories have a Mark Twain-like glow of childhood memory, and a whatever-happens-now-I've-seen-worse stoicism. We laugh for long minutes before one of us puts the receiver down. ‘Whatever could you have found so funny?' ask my husband and my mother in unison, at different ends of the transcontinental line. The fact that the telephone connections between my two warring countries remain open is a little miracle in itself.

Father had already seen two aerial attacks on Belgrade on Easter Day: the Germans bombed in 1941, when he was
eight, and the Allies in 1944. They went for many of the places NATO is targeting today. ‘Third time lucky,' Father says when the oil refinery in the river valley explodes, emitting a large, black, mushroom cloud. ‘Your mother will have to wash the curtains now.' On British television, where I watch them, the direct hits sound strangely muted, like the crack of a bicyclist's skull hitting the asphalt. ‘I may be an orphan at sixty-six but at least I no longer have my mother to worry about, only yours,' Father says.

I once thought of Father's generation of men as cowards simply because they allowed the communists to rule unchallenged for so many years. I admired the Czechs and the Hungarians, who climbed on to the Soviet tanks in those grainy black-and-white documentaries, and thought of them as much more courageous than the Serbs, the Croats and the rest of the Yugoslav lot. Now I wonder if I was right. I realize how much easier it is to climb on an enemy tank than to know exactly what to do with your own. My generation of spoilt, well-travelled, English-speaking socialist kids has hardly done much better.

‘Christ is risen, Daddy,' I shout from west London on a Sunday morning. ‘He is risen indeed,' Father shouts back from Serbia, against the wailing sound of air-raid sirens. There is no reason to interrupt the conversation. My parents stay away from air-raid shelters. The phone lines crackle but remain alive and I continue to call once a day, to ward off the evil eye. Then the war stops. The British Army advances into Prishtina, and it is an ending of sorts. ‘It's somebody else's worry now,' I tell my parents, but this is true only up to a point. I don't want to see British soldiers dying. I am British too.

My father was the only man in a household of strong women. He negotiated between two headstrong daughters, his wife and his mother with the skills of an experienced peace negotiator. Like the UN, he risked unpopularity all the time. Whenever there was a prohibition to be prescribed, my mother urged us to ‘ask your father', unwilling ever to say no herself. If she wanted to get her mother-in-law to comply with anything, she always sent Father to do the explaining: why, for example, it was unwise for Granny to take three times the recommended dose of Mother's blood pressure-lowering pills when her blood pressure was already extremely low (Granny loved taking tablets just as much as she hated going to the doctor and would swallow a handful of whatever happened to be around); or why it wasn't necessary to knit woollen stockings for the entire family and even less to undo perfectly nice jumpers in order to get the wool for the stockings. Granny didn't take kindly to lessons of this kind. She saw them as direct personal attacks, to which she responded with equally direct denunciations of Father, in which she referred to things that only a mother would know about her son. My father, an angel of patience where she was concerned, tended to react with a long, imperturbable, ‘Mama, please.'

Most of the time, however, Granny watched over Father's interests with the eyes of a hawk. The hierarchy of her affections was always abundantly clear. We were her family, but he was her body and soul. He was her only child, after all. Even when Father was in his fifties and Granny in her seventies, she urged us to ensure that we never let him leave the house without a scarf or a pair of gloves, as if she was trying to make up for his childhood years, when she dug the fields all day and sewed shirts for money all night, bent over the neck of her Singer machine in the rising waves of white cotton like a rider
in a desperate race against the tide. ‘You're abandoning Misha,' she said sadly while she watched me pack for England, as though I was leaving a child behind.

Halfway through the Second World War, in the middle of Zharkovo marketplace, where she was selling her agricultural produce, Granny hit a junior German officer on the head with a heavy key. Her German was poor but evidently good enough for an argument. She was promptly locked away, for all anyone knew to await execution. For hours, my good grandfather pleaded with the local mayor to intercede, and the mayor in turn pleaded with the German authorities. They finally let her go, quite possibly believing that she had to be mad because she refused to apologize. Her response to her release was pure, unmitigated anger. Her husband – my grandfather – should not have pleaded with anyone as far as she was concerned; and it was typical of his weakling nature that he had even contemplated such a thing.

Grandfather is often curiously absent from my family story. Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he seems to belong to a different historical era from the rest of us. He appears, in walk-in parts, in stories in which he usually tries to appease Granny's fiery temper. ‘A fool,' Granny repeats lovingly, decades after his death.

On 19 October 1944, a gang of Soviet soldiers barely out of their teens burst into Granny's kitchen in the southern suburbs of Belgrade, demanding to be fed. She went out into the backyard, caught a hapless chicken, beheaded it with an axe and plunged it, still half-covered in feathers, into a pot of boiling water. Minutes later, the Soviet boys devoured the bird, barely
warmed through, expressed appreciation and moved on towards the city, which echoed with exploding shells. In Granny's book the Soviets were the good guys, part of the Orthodox International. When my then eleven-year-old father sat down to his usual wartime meal of watery polenta, Granny slapped a spoonful of plum jam on his plate, to ‘celebrate the end of the Schwab'. (For her generation, all Germans and all Austrians were Swabian.) The following day, Belgrade was taken by the communists. Or freed. It depends on your point of view.

When I ask my father what he remembers of the Second World War, he tells me how he became a film buff by attending dozens of free screenings of Nazi movies in the local cinema. This is a deliberately sunny, father-like memory of war. ‘They were great films,' my father says. His passion for cinema, initiated though it may have been by Goebbels's propaganda, remains one of his most endearing traits. When I was a child, we saw literally hundreds of films together. He took me to the children's shows at the Yugoslav Army Club every Sunday morning, and we often saw one or two films in the city during the week: it was, supposedly, the best way to keep my sister and me away from under Mother's busy feet.

In summer, we went to the garden cinema of the Officers' Club in the Unknown Hero Street, just across the road from us, almost every evening. This was the most beautiful cinema in the world: heady with the smell of jasmine and tobacco and lit by thousands of stars. The performances were punctuated at ten-minute intervals by the sound of trolleybuses coming to a halt in the street just outside the wire fence hidden by lilac bushes. The first few rows of garden chairs were always filled with children. Every evening we went to bed with a deep
imprint of woven plastic on the backs of our thighs. No one paid much attention to the guidance ratings: we saw whatever film happened to be on.

When our parents were too tired to take us to the cinema, we joined the ranks of neighbourhood kids for a free viewing through the wire at the other side of the screen. Struggling to read the subtitles backwards boosted our language skills. The crunching of the gravel under the rows of chairs where the adults sat on the other side of the white canvas usually announced an imminent love scene. We giggled our way through long embraces until a parent came to shoo us off. There was never any nudity in the films we saw – at least not until some time in the mid-seventies – but the passion was there, all the time.