Chernobyl Strawberries (34 page)

In their choice of films, my parents remained true to their gender stereotypes. Mother loved old-style romantic weepies, while Father preferred
films policiers
, Westerns and war epics, Yugoslav, Russian and American alike. With him, we chased the Redskins across the prairies one evening and raced to plant the hammer-and-sickle banner on the Reichstag the next. With her, it was always the long farewells, the promises of undying love, the deathbed scenes. When they took us to see a film together, they tended to compromise by choosing Italian comedies and French costume dramas. Joint cinema outings were more sophisticated by default. In fact, the movies connected my parents' generation to ours with a shared pool of celluloid references. None of my four grandparents had ever set foot in the cinema.

Father often quoted his favourite hard-boiled detectives, and my sister and I answered back faster than the wisecracking fifties dames. Mother could never decide which film star to
compare her beautiful daughters to. While my slim sister was likened to the sweet child stars like Shirley Temple or
gamine
actresses like Audrey Hepburn, the plumper me seemed destined for similes with old-time divas and sultry neo-realist Italian beauties. ‘Isn't she just like Ava Gardner in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
?' Mother asked an aunt of mine when I was barely twelve. ‘I'd say
Mogambo
,' suggested the aunt for reasons known only to her. ‘How about Ita Rina?' my sister threw the name of one of Serbia's silent-movie stars into the game. They paused for a moment. No one was certain about Ita Rina's precise looks, but everyone knew the name, which has featured in every crossword puzzle as ‘famous Serbian actress (7)' for as long as anyone can remember.

With his dark eyes, his glossy black hair and his trim moustache, Father had the good looks of an earlier, black-and-white era. Our neighbours – his erstwhile school friends – often told us that he was quite a heart-breaker in those mythical days before we were born. I was never quite sure what that meant. In the early seventies, when he was barely forty, Father's hair went white almost overnight and he shaved off the moustache. He suddenly looked incredibly Slav, like a young member of the Politburo or a colonel in the Red Army.

We took most of our holidays in Yugoslavia, in the Yugoslav National Army's own resorts and hotels in the mountains or by the sea. Closing the house for a trip to the Adriatic was one of our summer rituals. Unlike Mother, who always dreamed of journeys to an odd assortment of places which mapped out her own adolescent dreams (Paris, Geneva, Madeira, Nice), Father only ever left home with a heavy heart. He travelled abroad
most reluctantly. Occasional trips to Italy and Greece were hard-won concessions to his daughters.

My parents on the Adriatic coast in 1959

Father not only had to ask for permission from his employer before going abroad but had to write detailed reports on his movements and contacts. The army was understandably a bit worried that its code-breakers might break an unexpected code or two. His patient trails with his daughters through Roman department stores probably made a less than riveting read for some weary officer back home.

In fact, Father hardly ever spoke to anyone, while my sister and I chattered eagerly in English, French and Italian, and Mother smiled benevolently towards us. He was perhaps different only on a long train journey across the Soviet Union which we undertook one summer, where everyone addressed him in Russian without a second thought, and he responded in a fluent, almost accentless stream. He had a special talent for conversations in which he revealed nothing in the most
charming way possible. ‘When will Yugoslavia finally send a man into space?' asked a drunken Russian train conductor one night. ‘Will it be with us or the Americans?' ‘The more important question just now is which planet to go for,' Father replied.

‘What will happen when I marry Simon?' I asked Father in the autumn of 1984. ‘Could you lose your job?'

I was genuinely worried. I had been free to come and go as I pleased, more or less my entire life, and I'd made friends in both the East and the West, but I knew so little of the world he disappeared into every day.

‘You do what you have to do,' Father answered. I was not sure that he really knew how his bosses would respond, but he kept his job. He was due to retire in two or three years' time, but by then it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The Yugoslav army had greater things to worry about than an English son-in-law.

Then the new century begins and Alexander is born. On a sunny day in early March 2000, Simon takes him from hospital in a big, bright blue-and-orange pram. I am driven home, less than a mile away, all milk and blood. On a west London street, I look out of the car towards the brand-new father and his brand-new boy under the rainbow-coloured parasol. Nothing can go wrong now. Nothing.

9. England, My England

Early one morning, I am wheeled into the operating theatre with a green paper bracelet bearing my name, date of birth and gender (a succinct biography) on each of my wrists. ‘In case they become separated,' I tell the anaesthetist. His smile is the last thing I see for some ten hours. When I open my eyes again, it's already evening. I am all there: one aching, motionless piece of flesh. This is my second major operation in less than a year. I am familiar with the ways in which the body which has been cut, opened and sewn up begins to heal itself. Hours translate into a handful of days, each one as long as eternity. Time stretches and compresses itself in patterns drawn by pain.

In my morphine-fuelled hospital dreams it rains all night, steadily, incessantly, just as it is supposed to rain in England. My body is a map of cuts and drains, held together by a fine cross-stitch of transparent thread. Drips, cannulas and tubes emerge through my skin as though the internal and the external have swapped places. I am an edifice of modern architecture. Inside, I float on the sound of rain. Outside, I heave in a web of plastic vessels full of my own bodily fluids. It hurts when I breathe, so I breathe gingerly, lightly, pretending not to, as though I am trying to deceive the pain.

A complicated graph at the end of my bed marks the lines for pressure and pulse, for temperature, for the quantities
of piss and pus, and red and white blood cell counts. Every now and then someone comes to administer an injection and I am asked to give my name and my date of birth. I am not sure whether this is to check that I still know who I am, or that I am still me and not an impostor, as though anyone would want to swap places with me. A nurse comes to take a sample of my blood and can't quite decide where to insert another needle. So many of my arteries have needles sticking out of them already. I tell her that villagers in Serbia believe that injections and vaccinations given in the course of a lifetime prevent the deceased from turning into a vampire. I am safe from that threat at least. I try not to joke too often because it hurts when I laugh.

My husband and my son bring flowers and fresh fruit every day, leaving splashes of colour behind them in my grey hospital enclosure. When I can't sleep, I listen to the sound of non-existent rain pelting the windowpanes and try to remember the way my body looked when it was intact. It was only days ago but the memory is already fading. I am no longer sure what once lay in the place of the furrows of fresh scars trimmed with beads of bright red dew. In the black-and-white ultrasound photographs of my breasts, the most intimate pictures I've ever allowed anyone to take, the cancer cells are the bright, coloured spots. They cluster like purple grapes against the darkness of the healthy tissue. They are the only image of myself which I find impossible to forget.