Chernobyl Strawberries (29 page)

Back in my office, a shoal of computer screens fringed with yellow Post-it notes shimmered in the dark like phosphorescent fish. From time to time, shadows of mice scuttled along the skirting boards, dodging traps, in search of biscuit crumbs. The office lights were set to switch off automatically when the sensors detected no movement. Bent over the keyboard, I regularly found myself engulfed in darkness. I kept forgetting to stand up and wave my arms about in order to turn the lights on and make the mice disappear.

No one visibly controlled my broadcasts, although everything I did was logged and recorded. ‘Our victorious army entered the town yesterday,' said a colleague from the Croatian service, forgetting in his patriotic fervour that he was the voice of the BBC and not of some Zagreb outfit. Some days later, he had to explain himself to someone higher up the food chain. At Bush House we weren't really supposed to use ‘our' for anything, British, Serbian, Croatian or anybody else's.

At the Serbian end of the enterprise I was less likely to make the same mistake. My Croatian colleague was only a few years younger than me, but the small difference in age had meant that he was educated in the dog days of Yugoslav socialism, when no one needed to pretend to worship the old gods of Titoism. Paradoxically, that seemed only to increase his desire to do obeisance to the new idols of nationalism. When we were growing up, my school friends and I had to write poems and essays about ‘our army' – the one my father worked for – at what were practically monthly intervals: 20 October, Belgrade Liberation Day; 29 November, Republic
Day; 22 December, Army Day. Our calendars were forever stuck in the early forties. We were never allowed to forget who – supposedly – liberated us from the occupying enemy and then held our Russian, American and British allies at bay. If the long years of commissioned rhymes achieved anything, they ensured that I never called any army mine in a hurry.

My news bulletins at the BBC were exemplary. Outwardly, I kept my distance and knew how to be even-handed. In my feelings about the war, however, I tended to overcompensate both in my distress that Serb suffering did not seem to register anywhere and in my shame that the Serbs could cause so much pain to others. Both suggested that my relationship with my own Serbianness was perhaps more raw than I admitted even to myself. It was part of a knotted circle of love and guilt which I preferred not to pick at very much. If I could have closed my eyes and kept Serbia beautiful, I would have done that, but before I knew it it was far too late.

In an echo of the world of Balkan politics, the BBC had given the Serbs and the Croats adjoining rooms, with no connecting doors but with a large window in the dividing wall, so that we could always see what the others were up to, although both sides feigned lack of interest as they went about their daily work. The Croatian section overlooked the street; the Serbian faced a large pillar through pigeon mesh. The Serbs therefore needed more light, which they could only get if they had a window in the Croatian wall. Was the management trying to send some kind of message?

One night in early August 1995, one of my colleagues from the Croatian service, who bore a very grand Montenegrin name, came into the Serbian office to tell me to hold the top news story for the morning bulletin. His sources reported that
something big was about to happen in the Serb-held enclave of Knin. By five a.m., that ‘something' became operation ‘Storm'; columns of the Croatian army advanced towards Knin, while inside it thousands of Serbs prepared to flee. After I read the news, I locked myself in a cubicle in the women's lavatory. Tears ran down my face, leaving big wet blotches on my white shirt. I cried for the bewildered refugees in their endless columns moving east, and then I cried that I didn't cry in the same way when others suffered. I realized that I could still tell ‘my side' simply by how much it hurt.

I had the answer to Kosta's question. I had become English in every possible way, but the fault lines along which the pain reached me were still Serbian, whatever that may imply. This is not to say that I forgave my fellow Serbs for any of the awful things they had done in the Balkan wars, or that I forgave myself for anything I could have done to help but didn't, simply that the me I had created, that fashionable, travelling, global, postmodern subject of my own little life story, had a chink in her armour after all. The truth, the real story, and all the other journalistic fictions and pretensions seemed irrelevant by comparison.

I joined the
BBC
in order to keep my mother tongue alive, and I now knew more words for dying than the Inuit know for snow. I had to admit, although that wasn't news, that I wasn't really made to be a news hound. I took things to heart. I kept looking at them from both sides, until nothing seemed clear any more. By owning up to my own weakness, I conceded the feeling of moral superiority to anyone who felt able to throw any certainty at me. I had none, except perhaps for the knowledge that, if an army was created, it would go to war sooner or later. I was about to disappoint my mother again. I kept escaping to the British Library to work on a book about the Balkan past with much more enthusiasm than I ever had
for the Balkan present. Whatever I now needed to learn must certainly be there.

Some months before my nineteenth birthday, I was invited to read a poem on Studio B, then Belgrade's most fashionable radio station. I was no stranger to poetry readings but I was not prepared for the magic of radio. When she heard the music fade under her voice, the shy exhibitionist in me – a creature of contradictions – knew she had found a home, a place to be invisible and show off at the same time. I stayed on to present a programme aimed at secondary school students, called
An Extra Hour
, through my last school year and the summer before going to university. Studio B could barely be heard beyond the boundary marked by the orbital road around Belgrade, but this was still my entire world anyway.

My fellow presenter, a nursing student called Ljuba, was a tall, lanky youth whose voice was as clear as crystal. He and I read the news from Belgrade schools, interviewed young athletes and maths champions, and, in between, played modish tunes. I was part of the most stylish crowd in the world, I was regularly being asked out by some of the most fantastic-looking young men around, and I was just eighteen. Even my parents extended the curfew from eleven to eleven thirty when I argued that I needed the extra half-hour in order to review the latest theatrical openings and still get home by public transport: what more could a girl ask for? I didn't know where the top of the world was, but it couldn't have been far away.

For our editor, once a star radio presenter, this might have been a career cul-de-sac. For Ljuba and me, it was heaven on earth, a world straight out of the communist Utopia, in which you worked purely because you loved work – ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs' –
except that we were not paid a penny.
The Extra Hour
was in many ways a typical creation of the socialist media. Its main purpose was to train new generations of radio presenters. I never knew whether I had an audience of two or two million: there was no pressure of that kind. The programme existed simply because someone once thought it was a good idea. I was truly a spoilt child of communism in so far as I was brought up never to worry about where the money was coming from. It was simply there when you needed it. Then it ran out.

My mother and father hoped that my career on Studio B might lead to all sorts of things, although finally it led to nothing very much, other than a brief moment of radio fame inside the Belgrade orbital. In fact, my parents have always had an overriding concern with exactly where things might lead. Their very different family backgrounds were similar in their poverty, and in the restrictions socialism placed on their early freedom of choice. In their view, any action I took was inseparable from its potential, distant consequences. Any boy with whom I went out to dance was analysed as a prospective husband, any two-day job as a career for life. My momentary whims and my thirst for new experiences – the way I abandoned men and places and projects, expecting that the next one would be waiting for me just around the corner; the way I said I needed to ‘try everything'; even the way I spoke my mind – were alien to their instinct to hold on to what you already had. ‘Don't run from the first one,' my mother kept saying, and yet I always did, particularly when there was no good reason for it.

While youthful experiences of hunger and dispossession made my parents long for stability and permanence, the days of my own early life clicked and clacked into each other steadily and predictably, like rows of worry beads. You could always see
the next bead on the string, bright and shiny and almost identical to the one you'd just held with your fingertips. Once I tasted war, illness and unhappiness, I too changed my prayers from
give
to
please don't take away
. There were things, all too many things, I found out, which I wouldn't really want to try, not even once.