Chernobyl Strawberries (25 page)

I had a chatelaine of keys which took me through underground corridors full of stuffed animals, bizarre specimens in formaldehyde and all kinds of other exhibits that were no longer appropriate for show, to cellars and then up to turrets full of books. I occasionally spoke to an entomologist with an interest in Russian coleoptera, who told me that many of his colleagues in the museum believed I was Russian because I once helped him translate a Russian index card. There was also an occasion when some botanists invited me to meet a ‘compatriot of mine', a visiting professor from Budapest, and didn't seem at all puzzled when we started conversing in French. I didn't help matters by always explaining my nationality in the most complicated way possible. My museum security pass gave ‘Belgravia' as my place of birth.

Two years into my first job, I barely knew anyone in the publishing firm for which I worked. I met the proprietor, a charming baronet, once, for about five minutes. Cyril, my Czech interviewer, left more or less the moment I proved I could be relied on to count to forty-nine. He warned me that the job would leave me bored out of my wits. This would have been daunting for some people, but I loved the prospect of boredom. Growing up in Eastern Europe was a powerful vaccine. I had gone through eighteen years of socialist education, learning when to say yes and when to keep quiet, in preparation for a job in which I'd be underpaid and under-employed. Where I come from, such jobs – usually in very nice places – were often described as ‘ideal for women'.

I continued to meet Cyril from time to time, mainly in pubs around South Kensington, where we would talk about East European science fiction and world music, his pet subjects. He was now indexing place-names for an expensive edition of the Domesday Book which was being prepared by another small publisher. He explained to me that the Domesday Book was a glorified eleventh-century tax return rather than, as I thought, a book of apocalyptic prophecy. Cyril remembered that I knew some Latin and could read
scripta continua
and offered me a job in an office in a former dairy behind Kensington Square. I rang Cambridge and told my boss that I had been ‘head-hunted': a fine display of Thatcherite vocabulary, which was then just beginning to filter through to the gentle world of independent publishing.

Cyril and I – a Czech and a Serb – now spent hours over huge maps of English counties, plotting the exact locations of saltpans, forests and demesnes in the eleventh century and finding them on large Ordnance Survey maps. England still
seemed like an enormous jigsaw puzzle to me. While I got to know individual counties down to the smallest hamlet, I often had no idea where they stood in relation to each other. I loved the weird poetry of English place-names. I'd repeat strange little mantras – ‘Chester-le-Street, Ashby de la Launde, Ashby de la Zouch, Weston-super-Mare' – as though I was bringing the country of my marriage into being.

As the ‘place-name editor', I often dealt with calls from prospective buyers, who invariably wanted to ensure that their house or their village was mentioned in the Domesday Book before they parted with their money. On hearing a foreign female, many asked to speak to ‘my boss', so I usually transferred the calls to our marketing director, Lady Henrietta. There was no point in alienating customers by trying to prove something. Slim and elegant, with a singsong plummy voice, Lady Henrietta seemed to me a born saleswoman. I could sometimes hear her saying to one of the people to whom I'd spoken that I was ‘frighteningly clever', which always pleased me. There were many more English people in London in those days, and foreigners tended to fall into one of two categories: they were either fiendishly clever, spoke ten languages fluently and knew everything, or they had to be taught how to hold a fork and run water from a tap. I was glad to find myself in the first category.

Eventually, I progressed beyond place-names, to some proper copy-editing. The Domesday Book was an endless variation on the ‘Ethelred the Lecher owns two pigs and a copse in Lower Turnpike' theme, so there was not much to be brainy about. I now sat at a desk in the corner of a large office which belonged to Robert, the editorial director, art historian, son of an earl and one of the most terrific raconteurs I've come across. I could listen for hours to his stories, few of which had anything to do with the Domesday Book. In the sixties, the publisher I
worked for had produced brave, adventurous books illustrated by some of the most avant-garde artists of the day, instead of the good-looking volumes in green and gold – the publishing equivalent of National Trust soap bars – which we were now putting out. I had a feeling, one which I often had in England, that I had arrived somewhere just after the party was over, and that the best thing to do was have one last drink and hear how it all went. No one was better suited to that than Robert.

Our office was like a room in an eccentric museum. Pieces of Robert's eclectic collection of artworks were literally everywhere: an Aboriginal feather cloak, a threadbare kilim, sculpture from India and psychedelic prints from the sixties, came together in a fascinating mess. In the early afternoon, Robert and I often drank wine from milky Roman glasses which, he would say, may or may not have been touched by Jesus. He would sometimes nod off and leave me to edit my ploughs and furlongs to the gentle sound of snoring. We were paid a pittance, but even so there was never enough money to keep us all going. In Moscow, we might have gone on for several decades, but here the writing was clearly on the wall. While it lasted, it was England as I liked it best.

In the years of horror brought on by the interminable war in my homeland, I retreated to the world of reading lists, seminar discussions and essay deadlines, in which I always felt safe and at home, first as a student and then as a teacher. The former polytechnic, one of Britain's newest generation of universities, of which I finally became part, may not have turned out to be quite the glamorous oasis of electrifying lectures in elegant wood-panelled halls I had envisaged while furtively smoking fragrant Herzegovina cigarettes out of the window of my Zharkovo bedroom, but there were always just enough students
who cared about books to make me feel that I was in the right place after all. And once every two or three years, there was one whose passion was such that it carried me along. I understood, for the first time, that what I thought of as Andrei's gift to me – those hours of apprenticeship which made me feel privileged to be his student – might just as easily have been my gift to him.

There were many moments in which my sense of homecoming was less than poetic. One April day a couple of years ago, I escaped early from a meeting which was stumbling into its fourth hour and had only just reached item nine out of the seventeen points on the agenda. In the art of the long meeting, British university workers easily outdid anything I'd encountered in my socialist upbringing. The sessions were often longer than the communist plenaries, the acronyms just as plentiful, the put-downs just as complicatedly veiled in oblique metaphor, the passions just as high, even if the stakes were often infinitesimal. The Yugoslavs and the Warsaw Pacters were at least allowed drink and cigarettes in their meetings; my colleagues and I were slowly boring each other to death over weak tea and cheap sugary biscuits, in grey classrooms where one's eye followed dark circles of chewing gum on the floor and the smell of crisps and trainers continued to linger even through the long summer vacation. In its functionality, its determined denial of beauty, the university was visually so East European that I often had to check myself when the phone rang in my office, for fear that I might answer it in Serbian.

I walked through the quiet avenues of Kingston Hill feeling guilty about the hour I'd stolen. Large villas hid behind impenetrable crowns of trees. Every now and then a car came by and its driver threw a curious glance at me. We were miles away from public transport but no one was walking here, and quite
a few streets had no pavements. I had to stay either in the middle of the road or walk along the wet verges, where my feet sank into the grass with a soft, squashy sound. It felt as though the water was rising from below. I couldn't decide if it was raining or not, so I kept opening and closing my umbrella.

I was trying to guess how my life would turn out, paradoxically, just at the moment when – unknown to me – the first mutant cells may have begun to attach themselves to my milk ducts. In theory, I had a job I'd always thought I wanted, and I was good at it. In practice, I no longer felt I could get everything I pointed a finger at, which had been my secret magic. I could not work out where and when I lost that feeling. There was the decade-long, draining war, which left the country I came from destitute and friendless. Then there was the more immediate poverty around me, not nearly as devastating, but sad none the less. The poverty of the publishing world managed to seem romantic, whereas the bleak poverty of the university often upset me, perhaps because there were so many young witnesses to it. It seemed unfair that they couldn't have what I had had so long ago, and in a much poorer place.

My own time was increasingly thrown against the advancing waves of bureaucracy. I often sat over spreadsheets at my dining-room table late into the night, working out percentages of this and that, just like my mother used to do. Even the abbreviations I used in my reports were eerily similar to the ones with which she headed the miles of ledgers she used to produce. There was no inherent reason why my life should be any easier than hers. None the less, I felt that I was betraying some kind of promise I'd given her by accepting the boredom so readily, as though both of us had somehow failed through that acceptance, for what kept her going was the illusion that her children's lives would somehow turn out to be miraculously easy.

I had believed that I could somehow dedicate my life to the beauty of the written word, but it sometimes seemed that books were no longer enough and this was really confusing. I was not made for asceticism. I hated austerity. Perhaps for the first time since I arrived in England, I began to feel claustrophobic. I was about to enter the tropic of Cancer, that twilight world from which one longs to return to ledgers and spreadsheets at midnight, indeed to anything at all which could be called simply life.