Chernobyl Strawberries (36 page)

For a long time, my English voice sounded quite unlike my Serbian one, in a way which irritated me. The more insecure I
felt, the more emptily correct my language became. The shards of memory, of everything that there was before I came to London, were embedded so firmly into Serbian that they wouldn't translate without pain.

Then illness and fear made the memories erupt. For better or worse, English had to do. Where I was once happy in not belonging, I now wanted to be all in one place just as much as I needed to be all in one piece. I longed for shelter and protection. I no longer wanted any prizes, other than my son's continuing knowledge of me. Once that is accomplished, I can drink wine and listen to music and watch the wind dance in the crowns of trees. Or die; whichever it happens to be.

I brought Simon to Belgrade to meet my parents in the spring of 1985. Roughly at the same time, my friend Olya – a poet who wrote sophisticated verse which secretly made me feel quite jealous – was having an affair with a young German student from Freiburg. They translated large chunks of Georg Trakl's poetry into Serbian and spent long, passionate weekends in various cathedral towns in Alsace. The budding generation of Belgrade princesses was obviously becoming very cosmopolitan just then. ‘At least Vesna is seeing an Englishman,' Olya's mother commented. The hierarchy of nationalities, arranged according to a vague order of desirability, as seen through the lenses of our cosy, still-enclosed world, soon became practically the only topic I was allowed to discuss as I moved from one Belgrade coffee party to another. Simon smiled beatifically and ate elaborate
petits fours
under the watchful eyes of dozens of versions of his future mother-in-law, to the manner born.

Our discussions often resembled those old jokes about ‘an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Serb' in which the Serbs
generally came off best. They were ours, and ‘ours' in this context – for better or worse – does not really translate into English. There was an implicit consensus that marrying a fellow Serb would have been better for me, more ‘natural', as though I was marrying outside the species. This was somewhat mitigated by the fact that Simon was so obviously a well-educated young man with the kind of family background that no one could complain much about, try as they might. And they did try. Who was good enough for their girl, after all? To rubber-stamp her choice would be bad manners.

If the Serbs tended to come off best in the story of ‘an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Serb', I am afraid that the Frenchmen generally won the second place. For an average Serbian lady of middle-class persuasion (communist or not), the French were clearly the ‘if you must marry a foreigner' bride-grooms of choice. While other nationalities attracted a host of different prejudices, the French, and the Parisians in particular, had a kind of Teflon image to which nothing bad ever seemed to stick. That brand of non-empirical Francophilia was ubiquitous in the Balkans. Everything that was wrong with Yugoslavia was reliably just right in France. The French were handsome, courteous, elegant, admirers of fine art and fine foods, passionate lovers best epitomized by characters in novels such as
La Dame aux Camélias
.

In short, they somehow managed to preserve the kind of image which might have been designed by a joint committee of the French Tourist Board and the French Ministry of Culture at the height of the Belle Epoque. Even during the bombing of Serbia in 1999, many of my female relations managed to hate the Americans, the English and the Germans (especially the Germans!), but found it in their hearts to excuse
the French. ‘They didn't really want this! The Americans made them do it,' said one of them. She was horribly upset at the fact that the monument to Franco-Serbian friendship in the Kalemegdan Park was draped in a black cloth intended to cover the engraved verse urging the Serbian nation to ‘love France as she has loved us', not even beginning to see that just then this might have sounded ironic.

I once became involved in what the French so appropriately call
une amitié amoureuse
over a few weeks in Paris. I was nineteen. At thirty-one, Henri seemed to me thrillingly ancient. He was actually born in the forties (in October 1949, to be absolutely precise), and was a student of literature at the Sorbonne in May 1968: a walking piece of French history as far as I was concerned. He was a teacher at a Parisian
lycée
, an aspiring theatre director, a communist and a lover of poetry. We met in a bookshop on Rue Monsieur Le Prince one dark afternoon, and continued our conversation through a long, rainy evening in a nearby café.

Henri lived on one of the quieter streets of the seventh arrondissement, in a maid's room connected via a balcony door to the much grander flat in which his mother and father, both in their seventies, sat at a table of polished mahogany, endlessly bent over crossword puzzles from
Le Figaro
. They were watched by ancestral portraits of dour-looking civil servants of the Republic, a collection of upright men who could easily have played the deceived husbands in any one of the big nineteenth-century French novels of adultery.

Henri's mother offered a cold, bony hand with a couple of extraordinarily large rings. ‘Enchanted to meet a little friend of my son's,' she said politely. Both she and her husband seemed to be a good ten inches shorter and infinitely thinner
than I was, which – given my pretty average height and weight – was probably incorrect, but it went some way towards explaining why Henri was barely taller than me and so thin that he seemed to cross his legs in at least three places when he sat down. I was the Slav Gulliver in a French Lilliput, a Russian woman lieutenant entering Berlin, flagpole in one hand, grenade in the other, a tight
rubashka
over big, bouncy bosoms. ‘Belgrade, did you say?' Henri's mother looked up towards me. ‘Our cleaning lady is from —' and she named a village some 150 miles south of Belgrade.

The same story repeated itself again and again over the ensuing days. Every time I met a friend or relation of Henri's, I'd hear about a lovely nurse, a manicurist, a car mechanic or a little woman in the bakery to whom I was connected by virtue of nationality. My exotic value in Paris was precisely nil. That, I hasten to add, was probably not the reason why my relationship with Henri remained
une amitié
rather than turning into
une affaire
. He was very generous and impeccably polite, and even attractive in a sort of dishevelled, just-awakened, boyish way. None the less, I realized that I would never be able to love a man who could not carry me under one arm while holding a machine-gun or lassoing a steer with the other. So much for feminism and the love of poetry and philosophy. I put it down to survival instincts bred deep into my genes during long centuries of near slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

Henri clearly enjoyed playing Professeur Higgins to my Slav Eliza Doolittle. In a matter of weeks, my elisions became near perfect. I wasn't a dustman's daughter but, none the less, there were so many things I hadn't tried at that stage: cheeses, wines, savoury water-ices, French poetry beyond Aragon, avant-garde theatre, galleries without tourists. French men as well, but Henri and I never really progressed beyond flirtatious conversational hints, which themselves improved my French
vocabulary. I might have been too young or, now I sometimes suspect, remembering nothing more specific than a gesture, there might have been another man somewhere in the equation, a French Colonel Pickering, hidden from view. In all probability, things would not have turned out very differently if that were so. I only register it to say that, according to the received wisdom of Belgrade's Francophile ladies, the Frenchmen were never inclined that way, no sirree! English gentlemen, however, as products of their famously all-male educational system were . . .
au contraire
.

If every Parisian I met seemed to have had dealings of one kind or another with at least two Serbs, the London I finally settled in was refreshingly free of such connections. My father-in-law dimly remembered a member of the Serbian royal family from his Eton days, and quickly latched on to the martial glories of Montenegro; my grandmother-in-law, remembering two world wars, simply thought of Serbs as very brave; and my mother-in-law knew a Slovene daffodil farmer in Cornwall. Most of the people I met knew where Yugoslavia was and many had travelled through it for one reason or another, so there was no need for long explanations when I said where I was from. At the same time, and until the waves of refugees reached British shores in the 1990s, most tended to have no acquaintances among my compatriots, and, for better or worse, few illusions or prejudices other than those Occidentals then commonly harboured towards East Europeans.

Back in Belgrade, however, my forthcoming marriage and the distinct chance that I might soon be giving birth to little English people (with everything that implied) brought to the surface a veritable hotchpotch of ideas of Englishness, most of them mildly or not so mildly negative. Most Serbs I knew
used the word English to mean British, so there was no let-off for the Welsh or the Scots either. Thus, for example:

The English were perfidious and treacherous. Winston Churchill supported the royalist resistance in 1941 only to dump the entire Serbian nation unceremoniously into the hands of the commies without a second thought. This reflected the fact that the English had never been our true friends but had always simply used us in whatever was the great power deal of the day.

The English were, on the whole, ugly. For every British-born Cary Grant and every Vivien Leigh there were literally hundreds who looked downright weird. Belgrade television, with its endless repeats of programmes such as
The Benny Hill Show, Are You Being Served?
and
Hi-de-hi
, did not help. Neither did the fact that members of the royal family were somehow thought of as ‘typically English'.