Chernobyl Strawberries (10 page)

In preparation for her wedding day, my maternal grandmother had embroidered countless pillow covers and hand-cloths with elaborate initials copied from some pattern book, but she had never learned to read or write. Although she was the eldest daughter of a wealthy family, she grew up in a patriarchal world in which education, even in its most basic form, was seldom deemed necessary for girls. In her turn, however, this illiterate woman became immeasurably proud of her own daughter's schooling. It was possible that she had kept Mother's French notebook as a treasured memento of some kind, although she would not have been able to read her own daughter's words; just as my own mother – in spite of all her education – will not be able to read this book.

You chose freedom, says my future father-in-law, who had obviously read too many novels by Solzhenitsyn. It appeals to him, the idea of this particular choice, even if it is not the one I made. Later on, when Yugoslavia descends into its bloody death throes, it begins to look like that. I've chosen freedom from the war, freedom to define myself along any lines I choose, freedom to like the British Army officers, with their posh accents, well-cut uniforms and thoughtful faces, who now make a career of running the Balkans on our behalf, even when I can hear detonations as background noise during my daily telephone calls to my parents and can guess who is playing with the buttons. God knows, my compatriots have done their share and I am certainly not judging anyone.

Ten years into my marriage and queues of my fellow Serbs and Montenegrins stretch in front of every embassy you can think of. My own walk across the lawn of the British
embassy in General Zhdanov Street and the consul's invitation begin to seem unreal. None the less, I am still, at heart, one of the spoilt generation, brought up on the dream of Nabokov, Kundera, Brodsky, Milosz, Kis, the Great East European Novelists and Poets (why do I remember only men just now?), writing the Great East European Novels and Poems. We were an endangered and protected species, the pre-1989ers, equipped through the best education communism could offer and the unstinting love of our East European mothers to believe that the world owed us a living, arrogant from birth. Had the consul not invited me to tea, I might not have come here at all.

In June 1986, my husband-to-be brought me over to his large family home in Sussex to plan the beginning of our life together. We were both recent graduates and decided to cross Europe, from Belgrade to the Sussex coast, in the cheapest possible way, by taking a couple of bus journeys. The first long leg was to be on one of the twice-weekly buses which took South Slav guest workers and their families to Paris. Our rucksacks were lodged between buckets of pickles and white cheese, and carefully wrapped sides of prosciutto, the food of homesickness. Large bundles and string-tied suitcases offered evidence of the travellers' paradox: the poorer you are, the more you need to take with you.

My mother, my father and my sister drove us to the bus station in our white Skoda. It was a strange beginning to a voyage, a weird mixture of holiday and funeral. No one knew what to say. But go I must, and I went. We hugged for what seemed like hours, saying nothing, and I climbed on the bus in the full blast of some mournful southern tune. My parents and my sister stood outside and waved, silent, like creatures in an aquarium. My mother was the smallest of the three. I suddenly
became aware that she was wearing one of my dresses, a frumpy floral print which only a few days beforehand I had thrown out as definitely unsuited to my new life in England. As the bus pulled away, she suddenly started running towards it, for no more than five or six yards, and stopped, frozen, just looking towards me.

In the long night through which I gave birth on the top floor of Queen Charlotte's Hospital, high above the terraces of west London, with epidurals coursing coldly through my spine, I switched from English to Serbian in the low moans I emitted between contractions. My Kenyan midwife, Esther, urged me on. ‘Brave thing. Brave thing,' she kept repeating. ‘It's almost over. It's almost done.' My son's crown was already emerging into the world. I shouted ‘Mama,' as, I gather, sailors do when drowning in the open seas. She came to me, silent, wearing that dress.

3. My Oaths of Allegiance

ONE OF MY FAVOURITE
uncles, Zhivoyin, was once a guards officer in the king's army and an important player in the coup of 27 March 1941, which brought down the Yugoslav regency and put an end to its attempts to appease Hitler. After a long internment in a German POW camp, my uncle returned to Belgrade and became some kind of big shot in the Yugoslav sports administration.

With his tailored suits, highly polished Oxford brogues and fine ankles in long black stockings, he stood out among the communist comrades in their strange costumes, vaguely related to some distant notion of a Western suit, and stranger shoes, cut like leatherette bricks. He resembled a bird of paradise in a poultry coop. Even his hand gestures, suggestive of great distinction, looked as though they might merit five years' imprisonment followed by thorough re-education.

In his memoirs, Uncle Zhivoyin described the daily routines of a guards officer with a remarkable lack of pomposity. We loved the moments leading to grand parades – from the tips for high-gloss boot and brass-button polishing to the ways of applying a thin layer of face powder. My macho Serb compatriots were outdone by their Romanian neighbours, who favoured a barely discernible layer of lipstick on officers' lips.

I'd never known anyone quite like my uncle Zhivoyin until I met my future father-in-law. The bearing, knowledge of shoe shine and brass, even some of the hand gestures: it was all there in this Old Etonian and Indian cavalry officer, but with a kind of dishevelled, devil-may-care dash which revealed the peculiarly British, old-fashioned and upper-class horror of anything that might be described as sissy, prissy or any other issy adjective.

I was sure that, in so far as any two people in our wider families would get on, my father-in-law and Uncle Zhivoyin would get on famously. My father-in-law, however, was having none of that. In the midst of some vigorous pruning in his Sussex garden, he declared that he couldn't possibly understand a man who pledged his officer's honour to the king and then worked for the communists. Not quite knowing how to respond, I suddenly grasped the sheer luxury of being a British male in the twentieth century. Every conceivable counter-argument notwithstanding – and I know there are many – the picnic rug on the moral high ground still came in khaki and red, the colours of his beloved regiment. My father-in-law stood on the high ground, wielding a pair of secateurs, chopping, felling and dead-heading, without a care in the world.

I swore allegiance three times, even without counting my marriage vows, and I know a thing or two about both swearing and allegiances. The most recent ceremony took place back in 1991. About to become a British citizen, I walked up to the office of a local solicitor in Chiswick, in a room above an electrical supplier's shop. A dark silhouette with fingers poised over a keyboard was clearly visible through the frosted door panel on which the partners' names were etched in copperplate Gothic. The scene was reminiscent of the opening shots of a
forties detective mystery, except for the sound, which was that of click-clicking rather than tap-tapping, and the no-smoking signs.

My Yugoslav passport: first visits to England

This was an important day for me and I was unusually diffident. My knock on the door was barely audible. I needed a commissioner for oaths to witness my signature on a document in which I ‘swore by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second Her Heirs and Successors according to law'. (That's it, then. No republicanism in this house.) In fact, I could have ‘solemnly and sincerely affirmed' instead – the atheist option – but I preferred the poetry of the wording which invoked the Almighty. I had never made any pledges involving God before, and solemn affirmations were a bit socialist for my taste. This was not to be a trade union Labour Day picnic. Sadly, given the
Miltonian frame of mind, I didn't even have to read the words out loud.