Chernobyl Strawberries (40 page)

What I was trying to write was not a book about cancer. I often joked that I hardly wished myself to be remembered as ‘the English patient' and I still don't. I wanted it to be a book about London and Belgrade, about the Serbian and English families to which I belong. While my body was cut and reconstructed, I was recreating a life story which seemed to me both very ordinary and unique. I found the uniqueness not so much where one most expects it – in the fulfilment of particular ambitions – but in the thirst with which I continued to take on the new. Such discoveries are perhaps the unexpected but beautiful fruit of writing things down in this way.

Still uncertain about what exactly to call my memoir, I played with different titles which connected my two divided worlds. I tried to join up the Danube and the Thames, Britain and Yugoslavia, the North West and the South East of Europe, but none of the options I came up with seemed to capture the sum of the book's parts. Chernobyl Strawberries had been there in the first sentence all along, and it offered a useful metaphor for the bittersweet Eastern European world I came from. The pollution of Chernobyl was not that different from the invisible ideological pollution amid which I grew up. At the same time, I knew that the world of my childhood had its allure too. I remembered the vulnerable, uncherished splendours
behind the grey facades, and I felt a strange sort of obligation towards that memory.

By choosing to write in English, I was recreating that world in a new medium. The act of implicit translation – the carrying through of experience from one language into another – was something of which I was deeply aware, even when no-one else seems to have found the fact that I was writing this book in English particularly unusual. Were an Englishwoman to arrive in Belgrade with Serbian, picked up at twice-weekly lessons back at school, as her third language, and to find herself a few years later teaching nineteenth-century Serbian literature to Serbian students at a Serbian university, and were she to write a memoir in Serbian which is then translated back into English by someone else...well, such a reverse scenario is almost too improbable to contemplate. However, my British compatriots are so used to appropriations of their language to take much notice of acts of derring-do (or foolishness) like mine; in fact, they sometimes seem to expect nothing less.

The manuscript found its English publisher when it was barely half-written and, soon afterwards, German and Serbian publishers too. Although my first book was also originally written in English and translated into four different languages, it was an academic study and the exchanges with translators were never this amusing. ‘What kind of shoe precisely is this brogue your father-in-law wore in Belgrade twenty years ago?', my German translator asked from some Greek island where she was working on my book. I scanned a picture and e-mailed it back to Greece.

In her turn, my Serbian translator sent electronic mail from the Illinois university where she was working on her PhD, and I forwarded it from London to the publishing house in
Belgrade. Seeing the little literary world I created in English transported back into my native tongue was in many ways an unsettling experience. I realised that I was originally able to write the book only by locking myself into English with the pretence that my parents and my friends would not read it. The book was a work of love, in every sense. I wasn't so much worried about its contents as strangely shy.

I also learned a lot about my own linguistic mannerisms in the process. If the translator chose a word I wouldn't have used — sometimes simply because she was twenty years younger and my mother tongue had changed in my absence – what I heard as a false note bothered me even when it was superficially more elegant. On one or two occasions, without even realising it, she translated the words from Serbian songs I had woven into the English narrative back to me, in an amusing version of Chinese whispers. Eventually, I relaxed. I stopped looking over her shoulder and let her get on with her work. Many years ago I translated a novel by Bruce Chatwin into Serbian, and I reminded myself that – had Bruce been able to interfere in my choice of Serbian synonyms – the work would have lost much of its charm. In fact, I never wanted to translate this book myself, partly because I was too busy enjoying myself in the afterglow of its English publication to rush back to my study, partly because I feared that I might end up writing a different book, wanting to explain and describe very different things. In Serbian, my memoir could become a book about England just as much as my English book is about Serbia.

Finally the translation was ready and I flew to Belgrade to open the Book Fair. The opening day is one of the high points of the season, and – as this was the fiftieth anniversary of the Fair's existence – it felt even more festive than usual. The opening ceremony was broadcast in direct transmission on the main TV channel and picked up in every news bulletin that
evening. The Serbia I was returning to is a different country from the Yugoslavia I left twenty years ago. This event was truly live.

I had prepared two versions of a short speech, in Serbian and in English, uncertain which was more appropriate for the occasion. Every year, one country is chosen as the guest of honour and its writers are invited to special events such as this. I was flying back to Belgrade as a British writer, and – the organisers advised – it was more appropriate to deliver my speech in English, as a courtesy to the many English guests. When the reflector lights went up, I saw my parents' heads – now, unmistakably, brightly white – in the audience. I started reading the speech I knew they wouldn't understand. At least, this time, they had heard what their daughter was going to say in advance.

If the writing kept me going while I was in hospital, the production of the book and the aftermath of its publication helped when I was uncertain about how to step back into my day-to-day life. As I searched through my small collection of family photographs and trinkets for suitable illustrations, as I responded to editorial queries (easy, once I decided that the only point of reference required was myself), I was also – by being able to call this work – delaying the return to my ‘civilian life'.

In fact, although it took me a while to recognise this, I faced the challenges war veterans must face after an armistice. The things I've learned at the hospital front-line made my old duties seem mundane, but they had, and still have, to be attended to. The lectures I prepare, the hundreds of student essays I mark every semester, the hours of travel to and from work on crowded trains and buses, the household tasks, the
to-do lists which never seem to get any shorter, the bills and letters which always shout ‘urgent!' at you: I now face them all again just as I had to face illness the year before. Nonetheless, while everything else may be flowing back into place like the water closing over a sunken vessel, life after
Strawberries
is perceptibly different, and that difference makes the quotidian much easier to take on.

Even before it came out, I had decided to throw myself into everything good that this book may bring, to live it and enjoy it to the full, just in case I never managed to complete another one. Such is the superstitious wisdom of the battle-scarred. The extent and the sheer joy of it all took me by surprise. I dreamed of one or two good reviews in my favourite little literary magazines, but not of serialization in
The Times
and on the BBC, nor of the press cuttings which started to arrive almost every day from different corners of Europe. I can't pretend I didn't enjoy it. Having been through so much that I wanted to forget I was now given an abundance of memories to treasure.

As I write this, less than eight months after its publication, the memoir has been on bestseller lists in four different countries, a rare thing for a life story of someone as unknown as me. Amazingly, it has had over three hundred reviews. The number of words others have written about this book is already much greater than the number of words I wrote inside it. Could one feel anything but flattered? I gradually lost the sense of myself as an academic interloper and began to feel at home in the writing business. At literary festivals, I met authors whose work I have read and taught for many years and, while I resisted the urge to cross-examine them on my students' behalf, I watched carefully and learned. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, I now count a number of those readers who have
written to me or attended one of my events among my friends. In that, I see a reassuring balance of effort and outcome which is in itself a rare gift from fate.

We often mistakenly assume that laughter and beauty are mutually exclusive; while I was writing Chernobyl Strawberries, I kept saying that the book I wanted to produce was the kind I fall in love with myself, one that is not afraid to be funny and poetic at the same time. I thought that my readers would turn out to be very similar to me, and I was not mistaken. In fact, the sheer wealth of encounters this book has brought – in person or through the letters and e-mails I received – represented its most unexpected consequence. I told the story of my life and I received other stories in return. Many offered personal histories of displacement. The world is full of refugees and children of refugees, and, just like me, many of my readers were people whose notions of home can only ever be multiple and whose accent, like mine, means that they might be asked ‘how long are you staying for?' even when it has been more than half a lifetime.

Migration was far from being the dominant theme of the letters I received. My readers wrote of illnesses and miracle cures, of falling in love, of career changes and precious late children, of youthful poetry lived for then abandoned, or simply of their favourite books. What I think of as my most courageous steps – moving from one end of the continent to the other at the call of youthful love, learning to live in another language, or facing death and finding that I am not afraid of it – are acts of ordinary courage after all.