Chernobyl Strawberries (39 page)

‘Come on, hit me if you like,' I said. Death stared at me for a long moment. I stared back.

The false starts, the dislocations, the fractures, the stitches, the leitmotifs of arrival and departure: I am at peace with everything that I once took as a sign of my weakness. The thirst for new experiences managed to keep me dreaming of adventures even when I thought I was dying. ‘Had I only stayed there, I would have been this or that by now,' I used to say when I was
unhappy with the hand of cards I held, knowing full well that I never really wanted to stay
there
, whatever that meant at any given moment. When I was pinned down by pain and plastic tubes on a hospital bed, while it rained so hard that I didn't wish to leave anyway, I turned back, perhaps for the first time, and stared into the picture I drew by my restlessness.

In its fragmented way, my life makes perfect sense. There is nothing extraordinary about it, but, as I try to write it down, I can feel it burning. I hear the flicker of its flames as distinctly as I once heard the sound of Alexander's heart in my womb; as clearly as I heard the sound of blood pulsating in the transplanted artery in the transplanted flesh which now represents a large portion of my breast; the sound of fresh beginnings. My body, strangely, now seems all the more beautiful to me for the way it is mapped by scars, like a cracked but unbroken vessel. I sleep well past three in the morning again, but I take nothing for granted any more.

Afterword

NONE OF THE PEOPLE
or places I refer to in this memoir is invented, although a few of the personal names are, mainly in those cases where I was in no position to check whether someone would mind being included in my life story, or where I was and was told that they wanted their identity disguised. I have also taken the liberty of combining one or two minor personalities, in a way which I hope simplifies things but which is of no consequence to the story of my life, such as it is. I don't wish to hurt anyone.

For most of my readers, the pages of this book will contain names of people and places which may appear difficult and alien. I decided to follow the example of those old Balkan travel books I love by transcribing names into English wherever practical, rather than always using the diacritics from the Serbo-Croatian version of the Latin alphabet, as is now common practice. This is not an ideal solution, but it is the one which appealed to me the most. It may upset the purists, but, as I suggested somewhere in this book, proper names – including my own – are not something I argue about with anyone.

The most interesting insights I have had while writing this memoir relate to the ways in which individual memory works. It connects people and places and things which may superficially seem unconnected, and imposes its own patterns
across time. To have written a linear narrative of my life – from birth to the present – would have been to force my story to acquire a shape which it doesn't have in the way I remember it, and to jettison those very patterns and leitmotifs which seem to me the most interesting. I would have to leave the end blank for another hand to write that death scene which I will never be able to describe. I refer to the many possible beginnings in the opening chapter, but I am aware of the ways in which the ending changes the meaning of the entire story. A memoir can only be written from a slowly shifting vantage point in the flow of the experience it describes. Its meaning is at best makeshift.

Regardless of whether its author realizes it or not, an autobiography is a doubly edited life. Memory edits the first run, the writer edits the second, as she imposes provisional boundaries on her recollection. In this book I wrote about my and my family's past as I remember it. I chose not to revisit my adolescent diaries, which are both patchy and stored in a house at the other end of the continent, nor my adult appointment diaries, which could remind me of too many insignificant things. I didn't want to research anything. I did little to compare notes even with those who are closest to me. This is not a faithful reconstruction of the past; it is an imprint of individual memory. If there are factual errors, and I am sure there are, it is because I remember things wrongly. That seems interesting too.

London, 27 July 2004

Acknowledgements

MY AGENT
, Faith Evans, my editor, Clara Farmer, and others at Atlantic Books, and my childhood friend Zana Kovincic, who spared time from her duties in the Peruvian diplomatic service, have all helped in different ways to make this book more beautiful. John Nicoll's advice was, as always, very valuable.

My sister, Vera Dodic, used a hard-earned break from her busy Toronto office to sift patiently through countless shoe-boxes of family photographs under the watchful and sometimes tearful eyes of my parents in Belgrade. As so many times before, she had the difficult task of explaining what exactly I was up to. I am sorry I could not be there to help.

In addition to the members of my family who took most of the photographs in this book, and in particular my uncle-in-law Douglas Goldsworthy, I must thank Dejan Corovic, who took the photograph on the front cover many more years ago than I care to remember.

My husband, Simon, was always there to help and – although he is a reserved and private man – understood why I needed to tell this story. My son, Alexander, kindly lent me what he maintains to be his computer to enable me to write it. My love and my profound gratitude to them – and to my
parents, Milos and Nada Bjelogrlic – is, I hope, apparent in this memoir.

My thanks go to the many doctors and nurses who, in an unusually literal sense, made this book possible: my family doctor, Dr Venkatesham; and, at Charing Cross Hospital, Professor Charles Coombes, Dr David Vigushin, Dr Charles Lowdell and Dr Simon Wood; Vanessa Cross, Ann Alexander and all the other nurses who were there when I needed them most, to laugh at my jokes, admire my wigs and turbans, and make sure that the needles didn't hurt.

My fondest thanks are reserved for my surgeon, Jacqueline Lewis. Her dedication, warmth and friendship made me happy to be alive even when it seemed terribly hard work. I still can't think of many things which are as wonderful as waking up from the anaesthetic after seven hours of surgery to see Jackie's smiling face.

Life After
Strawberries

(Epilogue to the paperback edition)

CHERNOBYL STRAWBERRIES
grew out of poisoned soil, yet, from its beginnings, this book has been nothing but a happy project for me. In the seventeen months of its writing – between February 2003 and July 2004, while I was undergoing treatment for cancer – its creation felt just as healing as the offerings of conventional medicine. It proved to be the most effective of painkillers, for it managed not only to make me forget the pain, but also to make time pass more quickly, which is rather more than the usual pills can do.

We see things not as they are, but as we are, says one of the holy books, I forget which. I wouldn't wish those months in the Tropic of Cancer on my worst enemy, but I wouldn't give them back either. I hated the pain so much that it took a while to see that cancer gave me certain things too, including the luxurious gift of this book. I wouldn't have written it but for the possibility that time might be running out.

I penned chunks of it on my walks around the hospital ward, scribbling on scraps of paper and in small notebooks tucked into the same canvas bag which concealed drainage bottles, my blood and words together. No one batted an eyelid at my literary antics. In the big West London teaching hospital
where I was treated, the nurses had seen it all before. Two of the people on my ward were recovering from gender realignment surgery. Late at night I could hear them through the rows of curtains separating our beds, whispering to each other in countertenor. Even that didn't seem strange. Some patients were losing their breasts, others gaining new ones; some were happy to be starting different lives, others simply to be alive.

I brooded over images of my childhood and adolescence in Belgrade in the cold twilight of radiotherapy rooms. My past seemed suspended in the sun-encased memory but was clearly visible, like an insect in amber. At home, writing always demanded the luxury of a clear desk and a clear day, and I felt lucky when I stole one of those in a month. I wrote painstakingly and slowly. Sometimes I complained by e-mail to a friend who lives on a ranch in Oregon, when we were both awake in front of our computer screens at different ends of the night and in different time zones, a world away from London in every sense. She has authored many books and I hoped to hear from her the secret of writing against the noise and through the distractions. There was none. ‘Did you know that Nabokov used to lock himself in the bathroom, manuscript in his lap, while Vera and Dimitri played in their tiny Parisian flat?' she responded. Although I enjoyed writing, I hadn't felt that kind of overriding drive since I was a poetry-writing adolescent. Perhaps I was simply not meant to be a writer, I had decided. It didn't matter too much, but it didn't sound quite right.

On the ward, and for the first time since the poetic toil of my adolescence, I felt the same urge to cover blank sheets of paper with words, an urge strong enough to shut everything else away. I wrote while the moans of other patients, the hissing of TV sets and the smells of illness washed around me. Like
Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, I could hurtle into the future but only with my eyes fixed firmly on the past. Far from the libraries and books and all the crutches I had tended to use in my writing before, I felt free to play with the shadows my life was throwing against the hospital wall. A book grew slowly in the crevasses between history and story. It was a wild, hybrid fruit of that deeper knowledge of myself for which I had no choice but to surrender a pound of flesh.