Chernobyl Strawberries (21 page)

Our sex lives were controlled by the fear of pregnancy and the even greater fear of abortion, the trusty stand-by of socialist birth control. Harrowing stories of abortions gone wrong, of overworked, unsympathetic doctors and of young women's futures devastated by the wrong turn of a curettage knife were the stuff of everyday gossip. In my grandmother's day, there were two other options for a pregnant girl (three, if you counted suicide): a shotgun wedding or a cupful of caustic soda thrown in the face of the careless man. There were still a few shotgun weddings around in the late seventies, but caustic soda was not easily come by.

I knew a number of young couples forced to ‘do the right thing' by bringing up a crying baby in their parents' flat,
without any hope of ever affording their own place. Belgrade was a town of almost two million people and yet it somehow seemed that everyone knew everything about everyone else. Every taxi to hospital was observed and enquired about, every heartbreak carefully dissected and filed away for future reference.

It was strange, or perhaps not so strange, that such a neighbourly, tightly controlled society, which seemed to me one of the safest places in Europe, could erupt into an explosion of violence, of rapes and slaughter fuelled by rivers of drink and drugs. Even stranger that the old neighbourliness could continue to exist side by side with horrors such as refrigerated vans full of corpses dumped into the Danube; camps in which people were herded like animals; and columns of refugees stretching for miles heading for Belgrade, sometimes on tractors driven by seven-year-old boys with bricks tied to their feet because they couldn't reach the accelerator. Was it that our seemingly praiseworthy emphasis on the family reinforced our tribal identities and undercut our allegiance to wider society, so that we knew only how to defend our own? Strangest of all is that, once this nightmarish version of Mardi Gras was over, so many of the old prohibitions simply slotted back into place.

Tomislav was an unexceptional student of civil engineering and a gifted photographer who had been one of my circle of friends since I was a teenager. Apart from coming from an almost identical family background, we had relatively little in common, but I wouldn't let that spoil the beautiful picture. I seemed to have loved the idea of Tomislav much more than I ever loved Tomislav himself. We went on a skiing holiday in
Montenegro with a group of friends, about a year after I left Petar. One evening, while he and I were trying to defrost the water pipes in his family chalet by lighting a small fire in the garage, the basic chemistry of our day-to-day communication changed. Tomislav became my boyfriend with a capital B. As any viewer of romantic comedies will know, when something like this happens in the first fifteen minutes of a film, everyone sits waiting for a dark brooding stranger to take the bride away.

Tomislav was the God of Slalom: six foot four, with blond hair falling over his shoulders, eyes as blue as bluebells, and a sort of permanent tan that came from dividing his year between hours of skiing on the mountain slopes and hours of basketball on the riverside courts in Belgrade. I took him along to poetry readings. Among my fellow poets, he stood out in his white jeans and white shirt, like Michelangelo's
David
. I even introduced him to Andrei at one of these evenings, but started dragging him away before they could begin a conversation. Without being condescending, Andrei still found a way of making any man younger than forty-five look like a child, which was worrying, given that I was barely twenty-one. He also had a way of making me feel like a cat with a live bird in its jaws, about to drop the catch at his feet. To my relief, Tomislav seemed to confuse him. He clutched his drink, looked up towards the mane of blond hair and asked me about my plans for the summer holidays.

It was unsurprising, perhaps, that I liked the idea of two handsome, good-looking kids from the same side of the tracks making it together in the big world, writing books and building bridges. Neighbourhood grannies smiled at us benevolently. Even my mother got over Tomislav's habit of turning up on our doorstep in a pair of cropped shorts and a tattered shirt,
carrying different bits of sports equipment or a camera around his neck. He was a nice boy from a nice family.

In the two summers we spent together, Tomislav and I would pack our rucksacks and get on to the railways of Europe, spending long, lazy days in Paris, Heidelberg or Lisbon, sometimes crossing the continent in a long seventy-two-hour sweep, or inching our way from Genoa to Barcelona for days on end, stopping to swim and eat watermelons on the white beaches of the Mediterranean. Very often, we'd simply slip into sleeping bags on the beach and watch the stars light up. We met friends from Belgrade in the most unexpected places – a Portuguese bar or a Swiss station café – and exchanged notes about youth hostels and train routes. At the end of the season, we rented a room in the walled town in Dubrovnik in which to see the summer out, floating between the azure waters and the skies of the Adriatic, without a care in the world.

At some point between those two summers, I began to feel trapped by the pretty tapestry I was weaving. This feeling was starting to seem oddly familiar. I could not pinpoint anything grave, but I was dissatisfied with a myriad of small things. For example, Tomislav would take my photograph all the time, in a way which began to irritate me. I look at those photographs now and I see myself happy and at peace – eating my banana splits, swimming, rock climbing, sleeping, whatever – even though I know that this wasn't true. I was restless, eager not to make this my life, wishing to try other things and other people. I'd convinced myself that I was the mistress of seduction, but was increasingly bothered by the fact that I did not seem to know how to be seduced myself. And, more than anything else, I began to want to be seduced. ‘You think too much,' said my younger sister wisely. I dreamed of losing my head.

It was strange and quite unexpected, for many different reasons, that I finally shared my life with an Englishman and by sharing it became, almost, English. Almost – in this context – is a word I am happy with, for I love the sense of being ‘foreign but not quite'. I love the opportunity of reinventing myself every morning. I even love writing in a foreign language, although – after twenty years in this country – I still can't quite control my English. Like a fast new car, it takes wide swings around unfamiliar corners and leaves me vulnerable but exhilarated.

None the less, for whatever reason, I have fewer inhibitions in English – perhaps because for me it doesn't yet carry subcutaneous layers of pain. In fact, I sense – however irrational this may seem – that the I who speaks English is a very subtly different person from the I who speaks Serbian and the I who speaks French. That, perhaps, has something to do with the old chameleon tricks or the nature of the language itself. At any rate, the English speaker is a bit more blunt and a bit more direct than the other two. She is and isn't myself. She takes risks and admits to loss.

In theory, I didn't much like the idea of Britain sight unseen. All those years of Francofolly and the fact that my knowledge of these islands was based mainly on fiction had combined to make it seem a vaguely forbidding place. Beyond the white cliffs of Dover sat a rainy plateau populated, in my adolescent imagination, by depressing creatures from Hardy, Dickens, Gissing and Orwell. This is the kind of reading that my socialist educators deemed useful in exposing the reality of late capitalism. In practice, I felt at home here from the very first day.

That is not to say that I don't feel homesick for Belgrade, for its cosy domesticity and its fragments of hard-to-find beauty. During the years of the Yugoslav wars, I often saw my native city on the news. As I watched its familiar shapes recorded through the infrared camera lens – the bomber-pilot's-eye view – I often ached with longing to be there. The outlines of the hills, rising from the murky confluence of the Sava and the Danube, were as well known to me as the curves of my own body. It might not be an accident that the two were wounded and disfigured so soon after each other.