Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy Page B

same time every evening. Between five and seven, thekitchen is a noisy, steamy cauldron of activity; this is the best time to hide away in one’s room pretending to be doing urgent homework, while in fact writing poetry or simply staring out of the window, daydreaming.
    My father also returns around four with a briefcase and a newspaper, and often with warm loaves of bread under his arm. He and my mother sometimes catch up with each other on the short walk from the bus stop. She travels home by public transport and he in special army buses which pick him up from the same street corner every morning and drop him off every afternoon, like khaki school buses for grey-haired boys. The schoolboy impression is reinforced by the fact that Father often carries his gym bag in his briefcase. He regularly puts in an hour’s swimming or a game of five-a-side football at the end of his working day.
    Between four and five he usually has his siesta. He summons my sister or myself to tell him about our day at school. Our stories, he claims, lull him more easily to sleep. At five, he wakes up and promptly disappears downstairs, to the manly equivalent of the kitchen cauldron – things which involve neat kits of screwdrivers, pots of paint and polish, the car with its bonnet open, like the shoe-house of the fairy tale.
    Early on, I begin to think that I should have been born a boy. I can’t break an egg without making a mess of it, while I am usually exceedingly quick at grasping the interior mechanisms of every domestic appliance and the precise order of the bulbs behind the TV screen. A sole man in a household of four women, my father welcomes my interest, though the guilt associated with joining him rather than my mother in the kitchen most frequently keeps me in my room, writing.

    The army bus is full of handsome, jovial men in fine uniforms. When it stops on the corner, its doors often release a stream of laughter, through which my father walks towards us. It is quite unlike the long snake of the city bus, full to bursting with angry people holding tight twenty or thirty to each pole. My mother parts the crowd with sweet apologies, like Moses crossing the Red Sea.

    My younger sister and I
    From ten minutes to four onwards, my sister and I keep watch for their return, looking up and down the road like spectators at a tennis match. When we notice the small silhouettes of Mother and Grandmother at the opposite ends of the street,we run to help carry their loads: a mattock and bags of vegetables for Grandmother, who comes from the bottom of the hill; carrier bags for Mother, who comes from the bus station at the top. If my father is the first to emerge, we simply jump on him, clinging like limpets to each arm, and let him carry us into the house. This ritual is repeated until some point just before my twelfth birthday, when my mother takes me aside and tells me that such unladylike actions no longer befit me. After that, only my sister jumps, hanging off my father’s right arm like a baby monkey, for two more years. I walk beside them.
    The women in my family are tiny – my mother five foot two, my grandmother barely five foot. Returning from work, they sometimes round the corner at the same time: Mother click-clacking in her high heels, Grandmother slowly dragging her lame foot in the thick woollen socks and flat rubber shoes she wears in the field. Both women take enormous pride in their appearance: the younger in looking as elegant as possible in her tailored suits, the older in appearing as impoverished as possible in her widow’s black, with a black pinafore apron and a black scarf. When she takes her scarf off, Grandmother’s face is divided into spheres of dark and pale skin, like a diagram of the crescent moon.
    If a neighbour stops to greet her, usually saying something along the lines of ‘Why are you working so hard at your age? Why don’t you take a rest and let the children look after