Chernobyl Strawberries (24 page)

I gave a lecture on Danilo Kis's novel
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
in London in the late eighties. Together with quite a few of my compatriots, I was a teeny-weeny bit in love with Danilo, who was a tall, slim, Jewish-Hungarian-Montenegrin Byron. I remember seeing him walk along Belgrade's Knez Mihajlova Street through a thick curtain of snow, with snowflakes melting in his dark curls. A woman called out his name and he responded in a deep, smoky voice. I remained smitten for three weeks at least: I was barely fourteen and hadn't yet read any of his books.

As I explained Kis's post-national credentials, a Hungarian woman in the audience stood up to ask me whether I thought Danilo was in fact a Hungarian Jew or a Jewish Hungarian. ‘You and I know what the difference means,' she suggested conspiratorially. Danilo called himself ‘the last Yugoslav'
but I wasn't sure if that really meant anything to him. At that stage he was already dying in his Parisian exile, and a couple of years later I put a pebble on his grave. I often described myself as Yugoslav simply because I kept forgetting that the country did not exist any more. I felt utterly defeated.

When I gave up palaeography, I decided to try my hand at deconstruction. I read every volume on post-structuralism I could put my hands on in Belgrade – not that many, in those days – and started penning book reviews neither of my parents could make any sense of. Soon enough, I became editor of the student literary magazine
Znak
, ‘The Sign'. It was one of the most coveted positions a young literary thing could have. The budget was considerable and there was no pressure to sell, which, curiously, often produced better results than more financially minded publishing ventures. I began to describe myself as a fellow-traveller of the postmodernist school.

In the eighties, the debate between the ‘realists' and the ‘postmodernists' had suddenly become very public and very bitter. Mostly middle-aged and mostly men, the realists thought that an author should be engaged or, as they put it, ‘rise up to the challenges of their society'. In those days, this meant being a nationalist, or – as the realists would have it – ‘patriotic'. The postmodernists were mainly young and smart, and responded to the ‘challenges of the society' by writing fiction which had very little to do with anything, and was so sophisticated it hurt. I tried to publish as much of their work as possible in my two years at the helm of
Znak
. In fact, I was probably never as happy as when going to our printers in New Belgrade with my hands full of galley proofs of experimental prose. I took unnecessarily long routes and stopped to chat to everyone.

I had a little office at the university, which became the
meeting place of the smart set, or so I fancied. I spent my nights translating chunks of deconstructionist philosophy, smoking out of my bedroom window, nurturing my conceits and weighing my career options. Many of my postmodernist brethren were ending up in America. I imagined a professorship at Columbia (good location, good university), but Yale seemed to be the place where deconstruction was happening. I wasn't so sure about New Haven, but decided that – if the package Yale offered was good – I'd reluctantly have to move out to the sticks. The wielding of literary power – however small – was obviously corrupting.

For students of literature such as myself, who thought themselves men and women of letters, Belgrade was in many ways a sort of down-at-heel Elysium. It might be true that there are more literary events in London in any given week than in a whole year of book publishing in Serbia, but the illusion that you could do everything and get everywhere had tremendous compensations. From the protest meetings at the Writers' Union to the decadent, avant-garde happenings at the Students' Cultural Centre, our little duffel-coated coterie of literary critics in their early twenties seemed omnipresent. We asked questions and collected signatures, we booed and applauded across the town. We hung on the tails of famous literary visitors to the capital, in the illusion that we were – in the wider scheme of things – somehow part of the world into which people like Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg and John Updike casually dropped. I was star-struck by writers. I built up a collection of books with personal dedications from the great and the good of the writing world, many of whom weren't sure whether they were in Belgrade, Bucharest or Budapest.

I have a file of poems with rhymes for Vesna in a number of languages, written amid the bibulous aftermaths of the many readings I attended. Being, as my mother insisted, a good-looking girl, as well as the editor of Belgrade's most avant-garde literary journal (or so I kept telling anyone who cared to listen, and many did), I even received marriage proposals, one of which was delivered in Welsh, by a grey-haired poet kneeling in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Belgrade. I am not sure if it was the thought of being in Eastern Europe which brought out the romantic (or opportunistic) streak in visiting Western writers. I was still too naive to enquire whether a hand offered in marriage was a euphemism for anything else. That naivety was also perhaps what protected me from actually finding out.

On occasion, I acted as an interpreter from French for the Writers' Union. I soon realized that the thrill of being in the East, where books mattered more than life itself, was what many of our literary visitors found exciting about the idea of coming to Belgrade. They always wanted to know about banned authors and banned books, about poets imprisoned and tortured for their verse. I loved the idea of dangerous books myself, but it often seemed that most of Yugoslavia's banned authors were nationalists, and that didn't seem romantic at all.

It seemed, in a way, disappointing that we were not more like Russia used to be in the thirties, or earlier. One French poet enthused over my alleged ‘striking resemblance' to Tatiana from Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
. ‘TatiaNA,' he called across the lobby when I came to pick him up from his hotel for his morning meetings, sweetly emphasizing the last syllable. ‘TatiaNA', he sang in the official limousine all the way to the state dairy in Panchevo, at the other side of the Danube, a visit
to which was organized by some clever-clogs bureaucrat in the town hall. ‘Don't worry, TatiaNA,' he whispered as I struggled in my efforts to convey comparative data related to the milk production of Holstein-Friesians and Brown Swiss cows into French. ‘Just tell me sweet nothings, if you prefer. No one will ever know.'

When I came to live in London in 1986, it took me seven months to find a job. I might have got one sooner had I not – in a fit of newcomer's stubbornness – restricted myself to replying to the few job ads published in the
Times Literary Supplement
and the
London Review of Books
. Eventually, an Anglo-Czech science-fiction writer, who earned his living by working for a Cambridge publisher in an office high in one of the turrets of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, was sufficiently intrigued by my unconventional CV to want to interview me. Soon afterwards I became an editor, but I edited nothing. I spent most of my time drawing up production grids for a microfiche collection of books about plants and insects, a job for which the one essential qualification was an ability to count to forty-nine, the number of frames on the microfiche.

I spent my days in a bizarre mimicry of reading. I turned the pages of literally thousands of books, and plotted out the microfiche frames, which I then passed on to an English history graduate who was the ‘photography editor'. From this angle, British publishing seemed to be full of people whose job titles were far too grand for what they actually did, as if to compensate for salaries which would barely keep one afloat in Kishinev.

For the first time in my life, I worked with books which contained nothing I was remotely interested in. Not being
English, I was left pretty cold by botany and entomology. I was a town girl, uninterested in plant and insect life; in my native Serbian, I knew the names of hundreds of species, purely for poetic purposes, but when it came to recognizing any, I am afraid that identifying the most basic – a butterfly, an oak or a rose – was as far as my expertise went.

None the less, I was surrounded by some of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. Just being in a library made me happy: it was a world whose driving forces and divisions of labour were as familiar to me as a beehive is to a bee. Librarians pulled out catalogue drawers crammed tight with index cards; scientists waited for large volumes to be delivered to ornate, numbered desks. From my little cubbyhole, high under one of the neo-Gothic arches of the museum, I observed them going about their business and entertained myself by inventing elaborate stories of plant and insect gathering in Belize or the Caucasus. One day, I was a writer in exile, recently escaped from East Berlin or Kaliningrad with a 100,000-word masterpiece, another – a princess in her castle.