Chernobyl Strawberries (6 page)

As it happens, I have my own war stories too. Before I got my first university job, I had worked as a small-time journalist. That was in the nineties, during the ‘
war again
'. Balkan expertise could easily be sold and apparently I had a Balkan story to tell. In the early autumn of 1999, I visited the northern Serbian plains to look at the molten toadstools of oil rigs hit by NATO bombs – dropped not more than a few weeks beforehand by my adopted compatriots against my compatriots by birth. The smell of carcinogenic smoke and rotting animal flesh hung in the air. There was clearly a lesson to be learned there, but it wasn't about who had started the fight. The goodies and baddies were named in the nursery rhymes everybody sang; there was no point in adding my little foreign voice to the choir. In order to write I had to see. In order to see I had to go – over pontoons thrown across bombed bridges, driven by shadowy figures who had spent most of the decade charging foreigners the equivalent of my mother's annual salary for a ride around bomb craters and God knows what else. I learned how to deflect the ‘where are you from?' question in my mother
tongue. I lived a strange existence for a short while. I dined at the Hyatt Hotel with journalists in bulletproof vests getting drunk on expense accounts, with blonde rock-chicks and high-class prostitutes amid the sheen of marble lobbies where everything was for sale, while lodging in my parental home on the other side of town, where the windows were lit by the bright copper of autumnal trees and nothing could be bought. I could think of no questions to ask. I watched and wrote nothing.

I met a variety of politicians, opposition and government, in wood-panelled offices as big as football pitches, in opulent restaurants full of coke-heads and smuggled caviar, in lorry-driver bifes where they served tripe soup as hot as hell with cornbread and tiny chasers of homemade brandy, on park benches and in parked cars. I never sensed I was anywhere near the real story, whatever that might have been, and I hardly wanted to get there.

The Yugoslav Minister of Information, a tall and slightly rough-and-ready kind of guy, a former schoolteacher, invited me once to a white villa shaded by enormous chestnut trees in Dedinye, the Belgrade
quartier
where I lived between the ages of four and thirteen. We had a pointless conversation about the real nature of the conflict. In fact, I mainly translated the minister's rambling sentences to an important British journalist I was accompanying (the real reason behind a sudden flurry of invitations), while thinking about the cycle paths unknown to either of my interlocutors, who were both members of the male ‘car and driver' International. They ran just behind the villa's walls right up to the hill above the military hospital, from which you can see half of Serbia on a clear day: its rolling hills, the shining ribbons of rivers, the flood plains, the plum orchards, the roofs of little churches like seashells amid lilac bushes.

The minister kept glancing over our shoulders towards a gigantic TV screen which showed muted footage of a basketball match. The villa was so eerily empty of furniture, it could have been the set for the third act of
The Cherry Orchard
. Both the party and the auction might have been in full swing, but we could see nothing from where we were sitting. ‘God, Vezzna, what a colossal waste of time,' the journalist said as we caught a taxi back to the hotel, ‘what a bloody colossal waste of time.' His sense of time-wasting was clearly different from mine, but I liked his wrinkled, intelligent face, with its mixture of gravitas and self-importance, a combination I couldn't muster in a million years. It worked well in my native city. So did the neckties and the inability to speak Serbian, neither of which could I sport convincingly.

In fact, I allowed myself to be exploited for such meaningless little interpreting sessions because I enjoyed the inconspicuousness they granted me. I passed on words like tennis balls and examined hands, shoes, paintings, views from open windows, men being cagey with each other in a series of ornate salons while women brought in coffee cups on little silver trays. Some of the women shot curious sideways glances towards me, but most of the time I could walk through walls unnoticed. I was four months pregnant and knew none of this would last anyway. The entire city smelled of rubble and recent fires. We drove past the bombed-out hospital through the leafy streets towards the river, where we joined streams of traffic on the main road. The buses were so full that they tilted heavily on every bend. I saw the suffering faces of old men and women pressed against the windowpanes and thought of my mother and my father in their cold rooms, on these buses, in long hospital queues. I desperately wanted to escape the bombed city and at the same time longed to stay on for ever. The
war
again
was over and there was no excuse for hanging on as far as work was concerned. The stories were allegedly elsewhere. At the Writers' Club, the garden restaurant had already closed for the season, and Belgrade was gradually withdrawing into its smoky cellars and dives for the winter, the city willing itself to be invisible again.

Over the past couple of years, my body has been caught in a hormonal storm which wreaked havoc with all my operating systems. As a forerunner to cancer, I developed a disease of the eye muscle resulting in double vision, binocular diplopia, where each eye sees a single picture but with both eyes open one always sees two, partly overlapping, images. It is a strangely appropriate condition which I found almost comfortingly close to my inner ways of seeing. For some eighteen months I could read only with one eye closed. Then the illness suddenly lifted. My eyes settled back into their sockets and started to coordinate again.

Immersed in theorizing about double vision, mainly in order to convince myself that I wasn't insane, I failed to notice the cancer (
my
cancer!) until the
tumourchich
became a proper, grown-up tumour, and was so large that it changed the shape of my breast. The healthy one lay flat on my chest like a milky pancake, the diseased one a beautiful glowing white mound straight out of a Renaissance painting, with a chocolate nipple which could have belonged to a fourteen-year-old. I now have a long duelling scar, like a smile, running diagonally across my right breast. On the scale of human misery, even within my own family, this barely registers at all. The doctors say it was simply bad luck – the illnesses could in no way have been connected. To me it seems that, for reasons which I can't bear
to think about just now, my body was simply giving up. But I am a lucky girl, all things considered.

Discussing one's breasts in public is highly improper, particularly in my part of the world. I certainly hope this book is never translated into Serbian. This is not the kind of writing I had in mind when I penned my Nobel acceptance speech in pidgin French, in emulation of the Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric, who wrote sprawling historical sagas set in Ottoman Bosnia. Not that I had read any of them at that stage. I was only eight or nine, but I already had a fancy that matching anything that Ivo did would make my parents really proud of me. I practised the speech in front of the double
armoire
mirror, under the reflected light of my father's green anglepoise and my mother's bedside lamp, shaded in frilly duchess satin. The same ambition, the same desire to please, the same vanity, amazingly, is still at work. Remember me. Remember ME!

In the spring of 1986, I made strawberry jam for the first time. I stirred the fruit carefully to avoid bruising. I dried rows of glistening jars in the oven. I filled them with sweet-smelling thick liquid. I wrote and dated the labels, adding short pensées on love and waiting to each, all in an effort to make time pass more quickly. Warm strawberry juice melting into the mountain of sugar made me think of the opening scenes of Snow White. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the sweetest of them all? The princess of the Balkan kitchen might have been foolish but was no sacrificial virgin. I did not bring a single jar of my Chernobyl jam to England. I left them all in Belgrade, glowing on the shelves in neat rows. Or did I? The strawberries may or may not have been radioactive.

2. The Name of the Mother

BACK IN THE EIGHTIES
, still a young bride, I called myself Vesna Bjelogrlic-Goldsworthy. On paper, the name seems longer than its nine syllables. The grand double-barrel was a compromise between patriotism, the knee-jerk feminism of a Belgrade princess and that romantic-submissive impulse which leads women like me – two-thirds Simone de Beauvoir, one-third Tammy Wynette – to promise to obey till death do us part. Spelling the name out, however, soon became a bore. My fellow Serbs, not even willing to contemplate Goldsworthy, preferred Goldsvorti, Golsforti, Golzuordi and even Golsvorti, by association with the novelist John Galsworthy, whose high literary status in Serbia is reflected in the fact that he has his own street in north Belgrade. Most of the time, I did not bother to correct anyone over there, just as I've never put to rights anyone over here who expressed surprise that ‘Vanessa' was a Serbian name. More appealing than Vesta or Vespa, Vanessa suited me well. It was my onomastic equivalent of an invisible cloak.

Bjelogrlic, pronounced Byelogerlitch, turned into an obstacle race for the native English speaker. It was indeed a fine Slav ‘itch', as Evelyn Waugh once said, and anyone called Ivlin Vo must have known a thing or two about itchy names. Byelogerlitch means ‘son of white throat', which, admittedly,
sounds somewhat Sioux-chieftainish in English but is quite OK, even a soupçon distinguished, in Serbian. On my wedding day in November 1986, the registrar in Hammersmith took a deep breath every time he approached it and, remarkably, succeeded not once. I felt sorry for the poor man. The bride, the groom and the two witnesses (our entire wedding party) took a collective gulp of air every time he reached the B. What a job!

Since then, a rare few have been brave enough to try. Blog-litch was as close as one normally got. I dropped it after a while. I felt I had nothing to prove by endlessly repeating the tedious sequence – b-for-beetroot, j-for-jam, e-for-ecdysis, l-for-Levant, o-for-oh dear – and the variants thereof. I had too many names to care about any one. Even Goldsworthy is more than one should normally need to burden people with. Occasionally, however – today, for example – I still feel a sudden impulse to teach the world and his aunt to pronounce Bjelogrlic properly.