Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy Page A

afternoon, the hyacinths almost overpower the smell of smoke. I am here to help Mother carry the presents into the car: it is one of my annual treats. For days and even weeks after 8 March we visit relations and friends, distributing the boxes of chocolates and potted hyacinths Mother got.
    My father waits in our white Skoda outside. During the drive home, as always at the end of the working day, my mother runs through events from the office in detail, but Father switches off after a minute or two. You can tell when he is not listening any more from the automatic intervals between his yeses, but she carries on regardless. It is the telling rather than his responses that seems to matter to her. My sister and I know all of the many dramatis personae of Mother’s office life by name, ethnic origin and family situation. We know their illnesses, their children’s misadventures at school, the location of their summer houses and allotments, details of their spouses’ jobs. My father never talks about his work. If you ask him what he does at the office, he normally says that he sharpens pencils or some such lark.

    My parents, before me

    Mother leaves home at five-ten every morning in order to be at work at six-thirty. The ticket kiosks throughout Belgrade open at seven o’clock and she has a whole series of telephone calls to make beforehand. At seven, she telephones home to wake up my sister and me for school. She tells us what she’s put out for breakfast on the kitchen table and which clothes she’s hung on the towel rail, and sometimes asks, ‘What’s new?’ absent-mindedly, as though anything much could have happened in the two hours of sleep we’ve had since she left. At other times she says, ‘ Molim ’ – ‘Yes please’ – as though we’d rung her. When we play office, my sister and I emulate this particular tone on imaginary air telephones. In fact, we often play office, and my mother brings empty form books, paper clips and pieces of used indigo paper so that we can issue forms in triplicate. We even have our special office names for the game. My sister – who is normallymy secretary – calls herself Clementine. I chide her about sloppy form-filling, and she bangs her imaginary carriage return in noisy protest.
    Most people in our street go to work an hour later than my mother. Often, when I leave for school, I see her small footprints like rows of hurried exclamation marks in untouched snow. I know that she was the first person in the entire street to leave her warm house in the morning, to take her seat on an empty bus whose wheels churn the icy slush in semi-darkness. At eleven, I am already taller than her, with longer, wider feet. I feel strangely protective towards Mother’s traces: their edges soften and blur as the day progresses.

    My favourite time of day is the early afternoon, when we are back from school and my parents are not yet home. My sister and I riffle through the mail, telephone friends, cut pictures out of magazines and play music very, very loudly. We are latchkey children of sorts. My paternal grandmother lives on the floor below (our New House is three storeys high), but she is at work on her land most days between late February and late October. She tends to return at dusk with bags of fresh vegetables. We still own half a dozen acres of land in the Makish valley, most of it under maize, and my grandmother keeps an acre or so for tomatoes, peas, beans, lettuce and radishes. My sister and I love the smallest of new potatoes, which are barely bigger than pearls. Granny’s vegetable patch is reached through a narrow path in fields of corn, with long dark sabres of leaves which make the wind sound like a distant waterfall.
    My mother comes back from work at four o’clock, with bags of ingredients for supper, breakfast and the next day’s lunch. She prepares the evening meal and the next day’s lunch at the