Chernobyl Strawberries (28 page)

In the midst of laughter, Kosta suddenly looked at me quite seriously. My heart sank. I was by this stage so thoroughly attuned to English ways of flirting, which are quite different from the Serbian ones, that I briefly thought I might have encouraged some kind of declaration with which he was about to embarrass me. ‘I keep trying to work out how you've changed. You sound the same, you've barely aged, you dress in
a very similar way, and yet somehow you seem so much more English to me even when you speak Serbian. It must be the expression on your face,' he said. ‘Back where we come from one doesn't smile so often, and one doesn't say everything is wonderful if it isn't.'

‘Wonderful,' I retorted, and smiled.

What Kosta said worried me a bit. Much as I loved the English ways, I certainly did not want to cease being a Serb, whatever that implied. I was not reaching some Copernican, nationalist turning point. I simply felt that being English and Serbian at the same time was the only way I could now be happy: inside and outside, within and without, belonging but free. I wanted to remember every word in Serbian and keep learning the new ones. I needed to read and write in both languages, and to think in both, every day, in order not to forget the nuances of difference between the words which apparently meant the same thing.

That is how the idea of working for the BBC World Service initially came about. There were few Serbs in London who had both the radio experience and the necessary work permits to be in a position to accept the sequence of short-term work contracts of which the corporation, with its freshly discovered Thatcherism, was particularly fond. The BBC kept the option of getting rid of me at the drop of a hat, and I had the advantage of feeling like an insider without really belonging. I stayed with the World Service, on and off, for some seven years: longer, in fact, than I've ever spent working anywhere else. It says something about my spirit of contrariness that I was most willing to commit myself to those who kept dangling the get-out clause in front of my eyes.

The Serbian language service expanded in direct
proportion to the spread of battlefields across the Balkans in the 1990s. The ‘blink and you'll miss it' war in Slovenia in 1991 was followed by longer and far bloodier conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia, while the troubles of Kosovo and Macedonia bubbled quietly but insistently in the background, waiting for their own turn to explode. Detailed maps of my vanishing Yugoslav homeland appeared daily in British newspapers. The BBC needed Serbian voices like mine more than ever before. The belief which apparently stood behind the expansion in Serbian programming – that ‘ordinary' people, misled by their nasty leaders, would mend their ways once given the right sort of information – seemed to me a touch too reliant on placing trust in the essential goodness of the human race, but what the hell. Someone had to keep tilting at the windmills, and I was as good as the next man.

Before I joined the BBC, I had a relatively vague notion of what its Yugoslav output was like. In so far as I had – while still resident in Belgrade – listened to its short-wave programmes on frequencies crackling with the static of the entire European mainland, it was in order to improve my English. Soon after I joined, the Serbo-Croat service split up, although the Serbs, the Croats, the Slovenes and the Macedonians remained loosely linked as a South Slavonic Service, a ghostly relic of the defunct state. Former Serbo-Croat broadcasters now went into either the Serbian or the Croatian room according to their accents. Thus a Serbian woman from Zagreb remained in the Croatian service, and a Macedonian speaking with a Belgrade accent continued his work in the Serbian section. There was no Bosnian programming and, as it happens, no Muslims were ever employed, so we divided our resident Bosnian Serbs and Croats between ourselves. No one complained. Under the caring eyes of our British bosses, we went forth and multiplied our programmes, as long as the wars
went on. As soon as a country achieved peace and stability, the cutbacks began. No one could deny the justice in that: truth is not cheap, after all. If you can pay for it yourself, you should damn well be prepared to do so.

I went on with the job of translating news bulletins on the war in the Balkans and features on British life from English into Serbian, to the delight of my father-in-law, pleased that his son's wife was now effectively the voice of freedom and empire in the Balkans, and my mother, who remained one of my most faithful listeners in faraway Belgrade. As far as she was concerned, I was back on track to media fame. Radio was good, TV would have been even better.

A cohort of Serbian aunts, great-aunts and cousins remained glued to each of my radio appearances, and knew – from the minutest tremors in my voice – whether I was tired, unhappy or had a cold. They analysed each broadcast with all the skills of highly trained officials at Cheltenham's GCHQ, while paying little or no attention to the contents of my bulletins, which became increasingly depressing as the war progressed inexorably towards their own front doors. Even my little nephew taped one of my programmes and played it occasionally on his toy cassette recorder, shouting ‘Auntie's on!' Before she wised up to his pranks, my mother tended to drop whatever else she was doing and run to the nearest radio. During my years at the Beeb, all the radios in our Belgrade home remained tuned to the World Service.

My familial audience was disappointed when I volunteered for an endless sequence of night shifts. I was hardly making the right career move by electing to read lullabies to Balkan insomniacs. Staying up all night wasn't good for my health, they pleaded, refusing to believe that I enjoyed the night
duty, when I could be alone for some twelve hours. All the radio toys my sister and I had once dreamed of were now mine and mine alone: countless spools of brown, yellow and red-and-white tape, sharp razors to cut out unwanted speech from my recordings, computers humming with echoes of the troubled world outside, and cool, empty, sound-insulated studios behind whose padded doors I spoke and sang to myself to stay awake.

I wasn't avoiding my co-workers. They were a merry, largely lovable bunch of people who brought the best of my homeland right to the heart of London. None the less, when no one told me what to do, I did the work much faster. I walked through the cavernous corridors of Bush House, past busy-looking people carrying bundles of tape-recordings, and along rows of dark rooms into which delivery men threw copies of morning newspapers with a muffled thud, setting off a sequence of automatically controlled lights.

From time to time, I went into the basement library to read poetry for a quarter of an hour. The rhymes echoed in my sleepy mind as it braced itself for the horrors of Balkan battlefields in the first dawn programmes. Every word and every image seemed strange. I read Auden's ‘Night Mail' and thought not about the thousands asleep everywhere around me on this island, but about armoured columns preparing to move in on Bosnian villages while orders were being passed down the line, like invisible parcels of death, ready for delivery.

Between twelve thirty and three a.m., I took a nap in the dormitory, located in another of the basement warrens of Bush House. The beds were separated from each other by curtains, like a hospital ward. You could always hear the night murmurs of broadcasters asleep. Simple grey blankets reminded me of army billets. At three o'clock precisely, a uniformed security guard came to wake me up by shining a small torch in my face, careful not to disturb the sleepers next to me. I hovered
between wakefulness and sleep as I waited for my wake-up light, while sighs, snores and the soft rustle of bedding washed around me like waves.

At the same time, throughout the country which I still called my homeland innocent people huddled in the dark, afraid of the morning. At the BBC, I always seemed much closer to their pain than anywhere else in London, so close in fact that I felt it all the time. The radio waves which carried my voice channelled the suffering both outwards and inwards. I was my own most faithful listener, a hostage to the stories of death about which I could do nothing but transmit.

When I felt I could no longer fight sleep, I often stepped into the night streets of London. Freshly washed and empty, they belonged to me. So long as I looked as though I knew where I was going, no one ever bothered me. In fact – before I was temporarily confused by cancer – I always knew where I was going, so I never had any problems. I walked briskly around Bush House, which stood on night guard, flanked by the High Commissions of India and Australia like a forgotten soldier of the Commonwealth. Its white corporate flag, bearing the motto ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation', fluttered in the night wind, whipping the metal-tube mast, which echoed emptily.

On Kingsway, homeless people slept in cardboard boxes in office doorways, often in pairs, foot to foot or side by side. ‘Hello, love,' called a male Irish voice from a flower-patterned sleeping bag on a neatly arranged mat of newspapers. ‘Can't sleep. Can you?' ‘I can't either,' I responded. In the quiet of the night, my voice sounded much more foreign for some reason. ‘Where are you from?' the man continued. ‘Russia,' I said, suddenly taken aback by the realization that I pretended to be
Russian in order not to have to talk about the war in Yugoslavia. I obviously thought that, given half a chance, even a homeless person might ask, ‘What the hell is going on down there?' ‘Comrade Russki,' laughed the man instead, pulling his sleeping bag over his shoulders, ‘Russia is finished, isn't it?' ‘Finished? Maybe,' I replied and walked back towards the river, invisible but implicit behind the dark edifices and the sloping streets with their abrupt endings. I was right about his political bent after all.

I stared towards St Mary le Strand on its concrete island in the middle of a deserted street, like a plastic toy boat on the bottom of an empty bath. Traffic lights flickered at its flanks. Even at three a.m., the building of King's College, a block of unforgiving grey concrete, cast a gloomy shadow across the road. Its offices lined successive floors like human-sized pigeonholes. I suddenly wanted to escape back to a place like that, simply to feel safe among books again. For some irrational reason, I thought that nothing bad could happen to me if I could just read and write, and talk about books. I wondered how many years it might take me to cross the road, but I sensed that the crossing had already begun. It was a strange move to be planning. Most people I knew seemed to want to come this way, towards the beckoning lights of the media, and expressed surprise when I mentioned my plans to teach. In Britain, teaching at any level – university included – is a relatively poorly paid job. In London, where lecturers' salaries barely cover the rent, it tends to be seen as a species of monasticism. For me, it represented a retreat to safety.

Much though I loved radio, the Yugoslav wars finally made me hate the news. I no longer wanted to know what was going on in the place from which I came. Ten years previously, I would buy a whole newspaper simply to read a five-line agency report from Belgrade. Now that entire pages were devoted to it,
I quickly turned over to Court & Social, Gardening, Motoring – anything. So long as the article did not contain the words Balkan, or war, or dead, it was fine.