Chernobyl Strawberries (35 page)

I see a 23-year-old girl with wavy, dark hair, reading a chunky volume in the tall grass by the basketball courts on the Gypsy Island on the Sava river in Belgrade. From time to time, she
stands up, stretches her arms and throws a ball or two with the boys. Her suntanned body is simultaneously muscular and plump. Her breasts are so firm that they barely move when she takes a jump upwards and then stands back, smiling, to follow the curve of the ball through the hoop. She wipes her brow with the back of her hand. ‘Veki!' a young man calls the girl's name from one of the forlorn tables at a small waterside café. ‘Drop that book and come over here. I've been watching you, kid. You've been reading the same page all day.' His blond hair is gathered in a ponytail. In the distance, Belgrade shimmers under a blanket of smog. The sky is still, cloudless. A swallow takes a long dive towards the water.

Through convalescence, I revisit the year before I met Simon again and again because it represented the last moment when everything could just as easily have turned out differently. I had won a scholarship for postgraduate study in France; I had an offer of a job at an American university (a lectureship in Serbo-Croat, small-time stuff, but the location on the edge of the Pacific appealed to my romantic instincts); I had a marriage proposal from Tomislav. The fact that I had considered all three options, but chosen none, appeals to my sense of destiny. Rather than confirm the idea of free will, as it should, the memory of myself standing at a crossroads paradoxically strengthens my conviction that everything is written for us in advance.

I see myself, just turned twenty-three, struggling to reach an ultimately irrelevant decision. I don't know what adventures now await me in this hospital bed in the cancer ward high above the roofs of west London. I don't even know whether the rain will ever stop. This is perhaps why I enjoy the certainty that
the 23-year-old would be all right; that she would be happy beyond words, from the moment when she first embraced the young Englishman on an echoing corridor of the Karl Marx Institute in Sofia and for the two subsequent decades at least. Could anyone really ask for more?

I relive the long summer of 1984, allowing myself to be seduced, letting go, over and over again. Whatever happens now, I repeat to myself, the two of us have already proved to be more enduring than the world.

Then I begin to wonder whether the shadow has been there all along, like a scene painted by De Chirico. The Belgrade girl does not know it yet, but she will outlive the country she is leaving. The body she travels in so boldly will be cut and patched, and soon she will be able to seduce only in a different, much more haunting way. She will enchant the connoisseurs of suffering. ‘How fetching is your garland of thorns!' her future lovers will have to say. ‘How attractive that homemade look!' She can no more escape the world she is coming from – her flawed East European self – than I can slip through the rain and out of the London hospital room.

Halfway through 1916, my grandfather sits somewhere in the darkness of south-eastern Poland by the swollen waters of a river whose name he doesn't know. At dawn, the clinking of Cossack swords, no louder than the sound of a spoon falling against the side of a china cup, announces that thousands are on the move. Grandfather shivers in his grey Habsburg tunic, listening out for the Russians, enemy-brothers.

I am scarred by the evaporation of the communist empire just as much as Grandpa was by the fall of the Habsburgs. He was twenty-four when the dual monarchy collapsed, I was twenty-eight when the crowds first danced on the wall in Berlin. He went over to the Russians, I went over to the English, in both cases before the outcome of the war was clear. I had grown up under the hammer-and-sickle banner, which, like the image of Christ, I can't quite get out of my bloodstream. My eyes were trained to look towards the beautiful Utopia, that first dawn of the Marxist not-yet. For that training, I love and despise and pity my educators.

I am often haunted by memories of the vanished socialist world. Uninvited fragments which float before my eyes manage to be vivid and melancholy at the same time. They have the strange quality of outtakes from a home movie which never seems to play at the correct speed. I see the trains emptying of picnickers at the border station of Villa Opicina, just to the east of Trieste, then filling again with grey people lugging the gaudy chattels of despair, freshly purchased in Italy, eastwards into Yugoslavia – the trinkets which we took home as symbols of a better life in better places. And further east, where not even the ornate plastic reached, hundreds of young women a bit less lucky but otherwise just like myself dutifully attended classes in schools named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote essays to mark the comrades' birth- and death-days, and learned to shoot, play music and speak foreign languages perfectly, with little hope of using them.

I once sat on a park bench in a small Ukrainian town just across the border from Hungary – a drab railway junction
called Chop – watching a couple dance under a loudspeaker which, for reasons best known to the Soviet authorities, broadcast music into the forlorn, fly-blown summer afternoon. She was wearing a light red summer dress, a pair of snow-white socks and heavy, black boots with incongruous little heels. He had a pistachio-green suit with a tiny medal on the wide lapel. My father and mother came back from their walk with a glass of soda and pear syrup from one of the street dispensers. The couple were getting closer to each other, slowing down. I took a sip of soda when the music suddenly changed to an army march.

My generation and I thought that we could somehow avoid the pain. The promise was there in our education: a brighter tomorrow without a cloud, an expensive new dawn for which hundreds and thousands had laid down their lives in the Second World War. We had it all rammed into us: the gratitude for the carefree mornings paid for in advance by the comrades; plenitude in exchange for obedience. So long as we were thankful and toed the line, nothing could possibly go wrong.

When Comrade Tito died, he gave us back the keys to our castle. ‘You can roam freely everywhere, but on no account open the door of this little room, whatever noises you hear coming from inside. See, this is the key and this is the lock, but you must never ever open the door. Do you understand, never ever?' said Comrade Tito, and left, hopping, on his one remaining leg.