Chernobyl Strawberries (19 page)

One evening, Petar and I stopped in front of Belgrade's River Navy headquarters at the bottom of Prince Milosh Street. We kissed until every one of the buses home went by. ‘We can't go on like this, Petar,' I said, my voice breaking down after only seven words, although I had practised the speech all day. ‘I am leaving you.' I opened my satchel full of French textbooks and, by way of explanation, produced a letter, or rather a collection of moderately censored extracts copied from my diary. I had suspected all along that I wouldn't have the nerve for an exegesis of what exactly had led me to this fork in the road, yet I felt I owed it to Petar.

He stood and read my document for the best part of ten minutes, giving very little away, then hugged me wordlessly – in what already felt like a different kind of embrace – and I caught my bus home. It then took me nearly a year before I stopped wanting to dial his number and to take every one of those 2,000-odd words back.

I recalled this particular evening as I watched the buildings between which Petar and I had stood burn on
Channel Four News
in 1999. They were hit by precision bombs, together with almost all of the government headquarters but none of the many embassies on the street, in what seemed like the military equivalent of dentistry. My friend Ana, whose house stood just up the road from the Foreign Ministry, rang me in London the following morning – as I was leaving for a day of research at the British Library – to say that she had been woken up by rays of sunshine playing on her face. She was just thinking that she had left the blinds up when she realized that overnight a crack wide enough to let the light through had opened up in one of the walls.

The bombing had apparently sent her whole neighbourhood on the move downhill, towards the river. ‘You must write to every British newspaper about this,' Ana said, displaying an astonishing lack of understanding about the way
real
democracy works. Fissures of this kind only ever feature on local news. Given that her building insurance excluded acts of war, that the bank which had underwritten it was bankrupt anyway and that her salary at Belgrade University amounted to just under thirty pounds a month, paid in two instalments – well, one could understand the state of mind she was in.

Ana's call had interrupted a chain of reminiscences brought about by aerial destruction, a very Balkan
à la recherche
. The girl who abandoned Petar might or might not have been me. Like a premeditated murder, it was an act both planned and sudden. Until it happened, I never thought I'd be able to go through with it. This is not to say that I have ever, for a moment, regretted my departure; just that I have, in the intervening years, lost touch with that girl who could – like NATO
– destroy and create on a large scale while following an instinct no stronger than a distant whistle. I now wanted to know her again.

Petar and I were from different backgrounds. I never met either of his parents. In Petar's world, being introduced to your boyfriend's parents signified a stage in a relationship which we did not quite reach, the point of no return. He met both of mine. In my circles, meeting someone's parents was of relatively little consequence (even if they were inclined to weigh the pros and cons of even the most unlikely spousal ‘candidate'). Mother and Father simply happened to be
en route
to the record collection or the kitchen. Mother, in particular, always made sure that she was
en route
. If all else failed, she'd turn up, without knocking, just inside my room door, with a silver tray. She usually couldn't knock because of her burden of homemade biscuits and heavy Bohemian glasses filled with Coca-Cola.

Mother taught us early on that the simpler the offering the more ornate the presentation needed to be. Hence crystal for Coke, a drink she despised, whereas caviar was best eaten off the back of your own hand. Not that any of my boyfriends were ever offered caviar, on or off the hand. Our occasional supply of Caspian Beluga, which often came in tins bearing the stamp of the Romanian diplomatic stores, was set aside for New Year's Eve, halfway through our Christmas fast (Orthodox Christmas being on 7 January). Since we were allowed no meat or dairy food, we relied on caviar and champagne – even if only Russkoe Shampanskoe – and this seemed the best way of fasting that anyone has ever come up with. My sister and I were permitted small glasses of sweet champagne as far back as I can
remember. She got drunk on a thimbleful of Russkoe Shampanskoe when she was six, and sang her way into the New Year.

Petar's father was a cabinet-maker whose trade was killed off by the fashion for furniture from Slovenia, which first began to grip middle-class Yugoslav households in the late sixties. Most of the well-to-do families up and down the country owned one of about four different designs: Louis Quinze (at its most surreal when applied to wall-to-wall chipboard wardrobes known locally as
regali
), Bauhaus, rustic and ‘contemporary'. The furniture was normally bought with extremely low-interest loans. Yugoslav yuppies were flush with money from the funds with which the West supported Comrade Tito in his hair-dressing follies, to the annoyance of the entire Eastern Bloc. His crown was growing redder by the day.

One tended to feel instantly at home in a flat one had never visited before. Give or take a painting or an upright piano in the corner, everyone's dwelling was more or less the same. The marketing campaigns of the Slovene furniture industry, with happy couples opening the doors of richly carved bureaux to reveal brand-new colour television sets, also Slovene, and toasting each other with a glass of Slovene Riesling, left old-style cabinet-makers like Petar's father with few commissions. Slovenia was our California, the land we all wanted to live in, and the Slovenes lived on that dream.

Our own family furniture was a socialist take on Louis Quinze, my mother's choice. I've also seen it on TV in the study of the head of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and, a decade later, in the living room of an alleged war criminal which was being ransacked by the UN police in what seemed like a futile attempt to find someone hiding under a
small commode. The head of the academy had a large library; the war criminal's wife must have had a taste for crochet, for there were anti-macassars everywhere, but the rooms were otherwise more or less identical to ours. I felt that, through furniture, I had a special path to understanding the world I came from. Whereas in the West the inexhaustible variety of interior design often manages to obscure surprising degrees of conformity, the enforced conformity of the society I grew up in concealed a bunch of eccentrics and sometimes downright madness. While the wives were crocheting, madmen were busily planning Armageddon.

Petar's mother was a Serb from Croatia, some years older than his father, a Croat concentration camp survivor, and a housewife. This last, a very rare thing, provoked in me a mixture of jealousy and pity. Socialist children tended to prefer parentless homes which were unsupervised until late in the afternoon, but envied the freshly prepared lunches and other comforts a
mother-at-home
implied. To my generation of kids, raised by women bus drivers and nuclear physicists, a
mother-at-home
tended to signify either extreme privilege or dire poverty.

In most respects, what someone might see as the class differences between Petar and me mattered little in our classless society; I was hardly the Duchess of Devonshire myself. Even money – or the absence of it – did not seem to matter very much. You didn't study comparative literature in the hope of making your first million before you were thirty. We barely needed any money at all.

We loved to sit in workmen's
kafane
, smoky boozers in which a drink cost only a few pence and no one we knew ever turned up. These places were staffed by surly waitresses in
peeptoe canvas boots,
borosane
, designed to prevent varicose veins and quite possibly the ugliest footwear on earth. They were mandatory for workers in state-owned shops and hostelries. One of the waitresses would eventually come up to us, clutching an enormous leather wallet and dodging hands, stretched out from surrounding tables, which were bent on pinching her bottom. She'd say something along the lines of ‘What's for you two lovebirds?' in a voice coarse from cigarette smoke. While the state worried about varicose veins, these women were inhaling the equivalent of three packets of cigarettes a day.

Petar and I were usually in the middle of a conversation about world politics. I said I had no interest in politics but I loved arguing with him and would often adopt a position which I thought might infuriate him, siding with some crazed bunch of nationalists in Spain or Sri Lanka who had just blown a few people up, simply in order to get him going. Arguing with Petar in the middle of a smoky
kafana
always managed to seem incredibly glamorous to me. He always gave each argument his best shot and would never give up until I conceded the point. Between the two of us, it was always 1917 all over again, the early snows of November danced in the air and Russia was ready to pull out of the war: the end of the world as I knew it. Except that I was about to escape to Paris and Petar was to ride the bullet train until the ice-pick got him. That's how it seemed anyway.