Chernobyl Strawberries (7 page)

The first Bjelogrlic was really, or
allegedly really
, a son of a ‘white throat'. That belongs to the matriarchal story of my patriarchs. Early in the nineteenth century, escaping from a forgotten Montenegrin blood feud, my ancestral mother crossed the border into Ottoman Herzegovina with two young sons, unwilling to reveal her name to anyone. She settled in Lipnik, a mountain village no more than a stone's throw from her ancestral lands, but with a tribal frontier between her and whatever dispute threatened her sons' lives. The young widow's Montenegrin dress revealed more of her neck than those of her Herzegovinian Orthodox sisters, whose costume was barely different from the head-to-toe coverings of Muslim women.
The colour of choice for clothing was black: ideal for both mourning and camouflage. It wasn't a world in which beauty brought anything but trouble.

Lipnik lay in the lands ruled by Smail-Aga Chengich, a feudal lord notorious for bloodthirstiness and the subject of a nineteenth-century Croatian epic in which my ancestors, now prime specimens of the Christian
rayah
, the subjects of the glorious Turkish empire, were soon to feature with outstretched hands, begging, ‘Bread, master, bread,' before joining in the heroic uprising in which Smail-Aga (pronounced, sweetly, Smile-Aga) ended up brutally murdered, which was probably no more and barely less than he deserved.

The account of Smail-Aga's beheading, coincidentally at the hands of my Montenegrin granny's fellow tribesmen, remained one of her favourite bedtime stories. Over the years, like some Christian Orthodox Scheherazade, Granny had developed two highly picaresque versions of the same plot. One was a big battlefield scene in which a turbaned head flew with a swing of a Montenegrin sword, like a cricket ball hit by a bat. The other was an altogether more luscious but less probable version in which Smail is lured away from his troops by dancing Montenegrin maidens with promises of music and sweetmeats. The ending is the same.

The ‘Turk's' head was taken to the Montenegrin court at Cetinje as a present to the Prince-Bishop and mounted on a contraption which made it bow to the ruler every time the door opened. If his subjects were anything like Granny, the Prince, who was a poet and a monk, would hardly have dared to complain about their gift.

‘Mama,' pleaded Mother, ‘this is not a story for children. They will never be able to get to sleep.' Her attempts to shield
her daughters from such distinctly non-bourgeois versions of Balkan history were never an undivided success.

My mother's family (my mother is the tallest child)

Many years later, Mother was again terribly upset when she overheard Granny telling my English husband how to preserve a human head. Their discussion, in which I acted as interpreter, focused on the relative advantages of pickling versus salting, a fresh take on recording Granny's favourite recipe. Needless to say, Granny had no experience of headhunting, but she sensed what my husband, a recent English graduate in Balkan history, wanted to hear, and she also thought that a hint of menace might keep her exotic grandson-in-law on his toes.

She delivered her opinions with a girly twinkle in her eye, and a wide, beheading movement of her wrinkled hand,
while bragging about the fact that her ferocious tribe had achieved the ultimate accolade of being called ‘whore's bastards' by their Turkish enemies. For a woman who had settled in a graceful and elegant former Austro-Hungarian town when she was barely in her teens, she seemed to me to have kept an astonishingly vivid link with the nineteenth-century Ottoman Balkans, as though nothing that had happened in the whole of the twentieth century could quite measure up to the triumphal defeat of the sultan in which her own grandfather had played a small part.

In preparation for the day when my hair starts to fall out from chemotherapy, I line up sepia photographs of my Herzegovinian great-grandmothers, the wives of the sons of the White Throat, and copy the ways they tied their scarves. I suddenly realize that behind the tortoiseshell frames of my spectacles, behind the reddish curls carefully layered by my Thai hairdresser, behind the smile, which none of them ever shows, I carry
their
face. The mirror and the photographs reflect each other in silent recognition and I take my place in a row of unsmiling mothers with strong chins, large brown eyes, high cheekbones and tall foreheads. The eyes have it all, however. Having known real sorrow, I finally seem to have learned to read them. Ours is not a smiling culture. My grandmother maintained to her dying day that it was unseemly for a woman to laugh in public and covered her mouth with her right hand whenever she did so, even with us at home. Hers was the most winning laughter anyone has heard.

I am not quite sure what happened to the White Throat and whether she existed at all. I dropped the beautiful, unpronounceable
name, which was her bequest, soon after I got my first job in England. Unlike my ancestral matriarch and so many others in the part of the world I come from, I have never been a refugee. I am not an exile. Not quite an expatriate either: that term seems to be reserved for those coming from lands which are more fortunate than mine. A migrant, perhaps? That sounds too Mexican. An émigrée? Too Russian.

All these descriptions contain existential drama, cultural baggage which is highly inappropriate for someone who walked down the greenest lawn in Belgrade to the embassy of her adoptive country and, after a long but very polite interview with the consul, acquired a letter addressed to the ‘Under-Secretary of State' – I had no idea who or what that was at the time – asking him (or her, or it) to grant me the right of abode in the kingdom of the lion and the unicorn. Everything about Britain seemed touched with angel dust at the time. I could sit through the most boring documentary about the miners' strike or a royal wedding in order to catch background glimpses of my new home. I loved the embassy building, I loved the old-fashioned picture of the Queen on her throne hanging in the vestibule, I loved pouring little clouds of milk into my cups of Russian tea.
Un nuage du lait
: that's what Britain was for me.

The letter from the British embassy, printed on heavy white paper adorned with an impressive watermark, was to be produced at the airport on arrival. I left with an invitation from the consul to drop in for a cup of tea when visiting my native city again: I must have left a fine impression. That's how it was back in the eighties. Or that, maybe, is how it was for me. I was used to taking my good luck for granted, so I never knew.

Only at Heathrow, briefly, did my story touch those of others. The immigration officer decided that I needed to have my chest X-rayed and I was whisked off from Terminal 2 to a clinic in Terminal 3 in a minibus driven by a chatty woman in
a grey and navy uniform. There were other people waiting to be seen – a worried Indian woman in a sari, an African family, a man in a strange green suit reading an Armenian book – but I was out before I could take a good look at any of them, my X-ray filed somewhere in the airport building, where, for all I know, it may still be. Only minutes later, I was on the Piccadilly Line – the Ellis Island of London's huddled masses – with a copy of the
London Review of Books
.

One and one eventually became three. I am now a mother of a little boy. I earn my living teaching at an underfunded university in a prosperous London suburb. Daughter of a self-managed workers' paradise, I excel at my job. I criticize and self-criticize, I censor and self-censor, I compose self-assessment sheets about self-managed time, I sit on teaching and research committees, I attend meetings and take notes, I know that literature has hidden and insidious meanings. I have even written a book about those. My communist upbringing, my upbringing in communism – to be able to live with myself without believing in anything I say, to be able to accept things without asking too many questions – has certainly stood me in good stead throughout my working life. A virtue is a virtue wherever you are, East or West. A transferable skill.