Chernobyl Strawberries (17 page)

That the event was kitsch, a peculiarly Yugoslav kind of kitsch – combining punk, poetry and sport, like a toaster with an in-built barometer and alarm clock – was perfectly clear to me even then. A proper Eastern Bloc country would have had a poet of a much greater stature than me and a bunch of opera singers of world repute, rather than a literature student wedged between a Croatian version of the Sex Pistols in black leather
and ageing Bosnian rockers. Down on the pitch, there was none of the muscle-and-tone blond coordination familiar from similar German events filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, only rows of kids who cheerfully moved about waving their brightly coloured ribbons, lucky to have been given a couple of weeks off school for rehearsals.

With the hindsight of twenty years, the whole event seems perhaps much more tightly controlled than it appeared to me then. My voice was not my own. There was no place for improvisation, not an inch of space for manoeuvre. As I was sitting on the special guest platform, surveying the crowds after my historic non-reading and then enjoying a big congratulatory hug from Zagreb's handsome response to Sid Vicious (his leather jacket rubbing noisily against my chiffon blouse), a familiar face appeared just behind me.

‘I just wanted to say hello,' whispered Zoran, a school friend whom I barely recognized. His long blond Jim Morrison locks were now trimmed into the shortest possible crop. ‘Hey, Zocky, how's tricks? Who are you with?' I chirped, high on the taste of my newly acquired stardom. ‘The police academy,' he answered. ‘I am a student there now. We are all around you tonight.'

5. Peter the Great, Peter the Earless and Other Romances

I AM A RELUCTANT
accountant of the heart. I've loved some men and others have loved me; and then there was a handful of times when loving and loving back kept the see-saw in balance, my feet in the air and my eyes on the sky. No life's story now seems complete without ledgers of affection, yet they create hierarchies which betray and deceive. Time lengthens some horizons and foreshortens others. There are memories which haunt and memories which sleep like babies in little white coffins. With passing years, a single kiss can acquire more meaning than months of naked skin.

Andrei stood up from an armchair in his unlit, freezing room. French windows flooded with moonlight looked down on to a narrow, icy lane. The headlamps from passing cars pierced thick curtains of snow like searchlights. Pools of amber light lapped on the high ceiling for a few moments and withdrew. The entire building vibrated with stifled sounds of music. Across the road, the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra was rehearsing by candlelight. The city was frozen in the middle of a blackout, without electricity and heating. Trams and trolleybuses stood abandoned in their tracks.

The Yeti woman walking through the snow drifts was me. I wore two vests, a checked flannel shirt, a heavy woollen jumper, two pairs of stockings, green moleskin dungarees and red snow boots, and – over all of that – a mink coat of syrup-coloured pelts, a birthday present from my parents, and a red fox-fur hat with earflaps drawn tightly under my chin. Around my shoulders, I wrapped my mother's silver stole. The dead head of an animal with ruby glass eyes hung on my chest, biting its own tail. It was eighteen below zero, but I was also playing the Arctic queen. Nothing and no one could make me unhappy in those days. I ran on my own power supply.

The doorbell did not work. I knocked while shaking the snow off my boots and my hat. I removed nothing when I stepped inside. My frozen breath hung in the air. A row of thin yellow candles threw flickering shadows on hundreds of book spines in glass cases. The room was full of ghosts. Andrei came towards me and I stretched my mittened hand out to greet him, but he took a further step which made the handshake impossible. His white hair glistened in semi-darkness. The temperature was so low that I could feel the icy crescent shapes of each of my twenty nails.

He took his glasses off and carefully put them down on his desk in a gesture which somehow managed to be dizzyingly intimate. I heard my heartbeat and the sound of gold wire coming to rest on the surface of wood. I kept my eyes open when he closed his and lowered his head towards me. Our kiss lasted barely ten seconds: this was the first time I really touched Andrei, even though we had spent hours poised over books in this very room. ‘Your lips taste of snow,' he said, still using the formal
you
.

Andrei's jacket smelled of mothballs, and his fine, smooth, old-man's skin of baby soap and talcum powder. This was not an erotic kiss. It was not the beginning of anything. He
took a step back and picked his glasses up. I was determined to pretend that nothing unusual had happened. I sat down in my chair, in which, over the three years which preceded this evening, I had learned everything that I will ever know about reading books; reading was – it turns out – my most enduring passion. In the whole of Belgrade, in the whole of the Balkans perhaps, there was no better interpreter of books than this small bespectacled man; and in the rest of the world it seemed to me that no more than a handful were his equals.

When I became a teacher of literature, I sometimes took his books out of the university library in Bloomsbury, where they languished, uncherished and unborrowed, in their modest Serbian covers. It was a mystery that the library had them at all. As I prepared my lectures, I remembered Andrei's voice. He'd bend over a book and, jabbing a word with his finger, exclaim: ‘Here, Vesna, here is what we were looking for.' I knew that he was attracted to me and I also sensed that our reading sessions gave him a thrill of self-denial. What I was not ready to admit, not even to myself, was that I enjoyed playing with him in the safety of his self-control. I'd lean too far forward or hold his gaze a second too long, fine-tuning my skills of seduction, as cruel and as ignorant of hurt as a young animal can be. Reading with Andrei was always both dangerous and thrilling, like holding a key to the fairy-tale chamber which might unleash the hurricane. Kissing him felt safe and a bit sad, but it was a taste I had to learn about too. The virtuous make the poorest of readers.

I had crossed the dark city to get to his study and would have to cross it again to return home. The journey was my parting gift. We both knew that I was never going to visit him again. Not because of that kiss: it was one of the gentlest I have ever received. I was the upstart demigod in a Greek story, standing in the door frame with the fire I had stolen. In my
dreams, I had tried being both Andrei's wife and his lover, and neither seemed possible at all, but as his student, God, yes, as his student, I was beyond compare.

I've always had a certain chameleon quality, which came from never really knowing who I was. If I fell in love, I'd tackle the man as a study project and begin emulating everything he did. I'd catch up with his favourite films and favourite books – however stupid – and start watching, and indeed sometimes even playing, his favourite sports. I'd adopt his taste in music and food, his way of dressing and his accent. I can still remember the look of horror on my parents' face one summer, when – because of a blond air-traffic controller from Dubrovnik – I suddenly began to elongate my vowels in the way they do on the Adriatic coast. For a long while, it seemed that only by becoming someone else could I truly be myself. Wise men found this unnerving, simpler ones admired our uncanny similarities.

Until I started growing that wild piece of flesh in my breast – my
tumourchich –
I was always happy to turn into a lizard or a leaf, as the situation required. Then, at forty-one, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I suddenly felt too tired for such games. I no longer really cared whether anybody liked me or not. Then I discovered I was no longer able to change colour at all. I stretched my white body on my big green leaf, a bald, wounded caterpillar. I was free.

In the early eighties, Petar was one of the top students of economics at Belgrade University and a prominent member of the Socialist Youth League. He was two years older than me, thin and tall, with curly black hair and a melancholy, narrow
face which could have been painted by El Greco. There was an intensity about him which was difficult to pin down. I called him Pierre, after Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy's
War and Peace
, which means – very approximately – Peter the Earless. This name suited him very well. Bezukhov was a loser, and I sensed the same instinct for losing a game in Petar, even though, superficially, one might have said just the opposite. He was a political star in the making and I was a flighty kid, dreaming of literary fame. Underneath, however, he was as vulnerable as a reed and I had a steel armature.

Belgrade University, 1930s

I first met Petar at a local poetry competition. I remember being struck, as if by a flash of recognition, by a long, clever face in the audience. I've only ever felt that sort of thing – hinges closing, a complicated piece of jigsaw falling into its proper place – two or three times in my forty-odd years, and each time it happened, I was sure I was never going to feel anything like it again. We took the tram back into town. Halfway down the Boulevard of the Revolution, the longest
street in Belgrade, Petar put his hand on my shoulder. It was as simple as that.

He called me Françoise, which was only in part meant to reflect my incorrigible pomposity. I took myself very seriously indeed. In fact, the name was much more the product of circumstance. Most of our evenings began at the gate of my French school on top of Prince Milosh Street, from where we walked slowly downhill towards the ugly spaghetti junction which separated central Belgrade from its southern suburbs.

Speaking French for a couple of hours, in a converted bourgeois apartment in a mansion block overlooking one of Belgrade's busiest intersections, always made me unaccountably happy. My chameleon nature simply shone when it came to learning foreign languages, which I seemed to master without effort, as if by osmosis. Before I was twenty-five, I had studied Latin, Greek, Old Church Slavonic, English, French, Russian, Bulgarian, Italian and Japanese, with varying degrees of determination and success, but I loved speaking French more than any other language. After each class, I practically glided down the grand marble staircase to meet ‘Pierre'. The only foreign language he spoke was Russian. This fitted the roles I saw us in – the princess and the commissar – very well indeed.