Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy

(My mother doesn’t smoke, but practically all of the men and quite a few of the women who work for City Transport are chain-smokers.) A picture on the wall shows Comrade Tito, the Yugoslav President, inside a brand-new trolleybus. He wears the grey uniform of a marshal of the Yugoslav National Army, with more buttons on it than on the dashboard he is leaning against. Below Tito’s picture is a large street map of Belgrade, with a spider’s web of bus routes in blue, trolleybus routes in green and tram routes in red. My mother knows each of these by heart. At home, we sometimes play a game which consists of asking her questions about imaginary itineraries – what is the best route, for example, from Patrice Lumumba Street in Karaburma to the International Brigades Avenue in New Belgrade, on the other side of town – and she reels off line numbers, interchanges and frequencies. It is a game my mother loves.
    Her office houses two large desks with telephones and typewriters, a couple of heavy leather armchairs and a small table with a ficus plant and an overflowing ashtray. When a visitor comes, Mother telephones for small cups of bitter coffee from the canteen in the basement. Anyone important is announced by a security officer, a large woman called Stanka, who wears a black leather jacket and short boots which end justbelow her melon-like calves and look as though they were designed by NASA for Mars landings. Under her jacket, Stanka has a wide belt with a pistol in a fine leather holster. She is a gregarious woman. She often laughs loudly and her belly moves up and down. Her pockets are full of boiled sweets, which she hands out to my sister and me when we visit.
    My mother never forgets to ask Stanka about the health of her only child, Stanko, a little boy whose legs are thin and spindly, like cooked spaghetti. The security officer is the only single mother we know in the whole of Belgrade, and we feel sorry for her little son, as though he were an orphan, or worse. We cannot begin to imagine what his sad, fatherless life must be like. Stanka often repeats that Stanko is the only man in the entire world she would cook and wash for. ‘Men, they are all the same,’ she laughs, and puts her big hand over the pistol holster. ‘They all deserve to rot in hell.’ My mother doesn’t laugh. ‘Off to work, woman. Off to work,’ she says, and gives Stanka a pat on the back with her small hand, a large amethyst and gold ring glinting against the heavy leather jacket. Stanka seems almost a foot taller than my mother.
    There are three telephones on my mother’s desk. They ring all the time and she often speaks on two lines simultaneously. My mother’s secretary, a middle-aged white-haired man called Toma, without the index finger on his right hand (a hunting accident), comes in and out of the room carrying bits of paper for my mother to sign. (I can’t remember whether the absence of a digit affected Toma’s touch-typing speed.) Many of the supplicants assume that Toma is the boss – communism notwithstanding, Yugoslavia is still a patriarchal place – and start repeating their stories of misfortune when he enters. When Toma points out the error of their ways, they return to my mother with a syrupy flow of apologies.
    I sit in one of the armchairs with a glass of raspberry squash and listen, waiting for my mother to finish work. She keeps telling everyone about my exceptional school results and the supplicants smile at me ingratiatingly. I am embarrassed, proud and pleased at the same time. I tell everyone I want to be a poetess when I grow up.
    It is 8 March, International Women’s Day. Most of the visitors and quite a few employees bring in a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates. My mother’s desk is covered with cards, some of them with the picture of Klara Zetkin, the German communist leader, whose square jaw reminds me of Stanka. By the end of the