Free Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy Page B

more he reasoned, the less reasonable I became. I had to join and that was that. My mother didn’t help. Not a member herself, even when her refusal to join the party was clearly detrimental to her career as a bureaucrat in public transport, she was none the less exceedingly proud whenever one of her daughters was chosen for something, whatever that something might be, and the comrades were no exception. They were still running the country after all. The careers she saw me in – Yugoslav ambassador to the UN, director-general of Belgrade TV, editor-in-chief of the Politika newspaper – all involved party membership. The fact that she did not wish me to join was clearly a bit awkward, but we never addressed that particular problem, just as we never spoke about the sheer logistics involved in chairing a session of the Security Council on the Hudson while making it home to Belgrade in time for dinner en famille , another thing that she would always expect of me. Such minor inconveniences would surely sort themselves out one way or another. As, indeed, they did.

    If anyone, Tom Courtenay may have been the main culprit. In all those long afternoons of the seventies which I spent sitting in matinée screenings at the National Museum of Cinematography, in the roomy basement of a building in Kosovo Street in Belgrade, emerging bleary-eyed into the blinding light of the Balkan summer, few films affected me as deeply as Dr Zhivago . Granted, part of me knew even then that it was fundamentally a piece of sentimental trash, but the Great Russian Soul, as sieved through the quintessentially English melancholic view of history, was absolutely irresistible. The English played the Russians with the sort of respect and care that was only ever matched by Americans playing the English – one empire nodding to another in recognition that we are all heading in the same direction.
    And Dr Zhivago was, for me, mainly about Strelnikov. Lara was an absolute blank, and the others were hardly worth bothering with. A wounded male in an armoured train cutting its way through Siberian snowdrifts (red flags a-flutter, gold-rimmed spectacles a-twinkling), embracing communism as a cure for a broken heart, Courtenay’s Strelnikov was clearly irresistible. Like some blond angel of destruction hurtling towards his death because of that evil, corrupt Komarovsky, he was the man every silly fool in Belgrade (even if, quite possibly, nowhere else) wept for. There was no need to read Pasternak if you had David Lean, with all those comrades bleeding on virgin snow under the assaults of cruel tsarist Cossack cavalry, all the rich fur and rows of trembling birch trees, boots falling on the frozen surface of snow like silver spoons on crème brûlée , and all that lingering, annoying, sentimental music!
    I knew even then that my communism was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy in which tall men and slim, bookish womenargued passionately, and painstakingly printed illegal leaflets on small presses hidden in back rooms whose doors were as taut as the membrane of a drum, always about to burst under the policeman’s heavy boot. There was no room in that fantasy for murderous stocky Josephs – Dzhugashvili the Georgian (a.k.a. Stalin) and Broz, the Slovene-Croat (a.k.a. Tito) – not even for the fatherly, dumpy Karl and Friedrich (Tweedledum and Tweedledee), let alone their ten (or was it eleven?) theses on Feuerbach we had to know by heart for our philosophy lessons. They were all clearly deviating from my party line. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point surely was to make it more beautiful.
    Of course, you may say, Strelnikov/Courtenay had it easy, cast as he was against not only that Orientalist devil Komarovsky (Rod Steiger could hardly erase the memory of evil Jud Fry from Oklahoma! with his bourgeois little beard) but also the equally dark-haired, doe-eyed and totally uncool Dr Zhivago/Omar