Chernobyl Strawberries
God and Books: An Excerpt
by Vesna Goldsworthy
When a major misfortune overtakes us, people sometimes assume that – if it offers nothing else in return for the anguish – it might bring some kind of deeper spiritual insight. Suffering makes us better people – or so they say; it enables us to exhibit bravery; it makes us stronger; it brings us closer to God. We use such words of comfort because we have difficulty in accepting that suffering may come without any compensation and we create elaborate narratives of redemption around the pointlessness of pain. I can report nothing of this kind. I didn’t learn anything, other than just how much pain I can take. While my cancer was attacked by poison, sword and fire, like a medieval beast, I didn’t fear death. If one creates life, one doesn’t just abandon the scene when the going gets tough. In a very unexpected way, the desire to be healed turned out to be about motherhood.
I continued to set the alarm clock for seven just in case I overslept, but I never did. I worked, I looked after my son and I kept the house clean. I prepared food even when the thought of eating made my stomach turn. I went from room to room with a red plastic bowl, always ready to throw up cleanly. I left handfuls of hair on the carpet, like a moulting dog. My skull emerged white and smoother than an ostrich egg. My little boy caressed my bald crown and said, ‘Mummy, you look like a hatchling.’ I felt younger and more vulnerable than him.
When I should have been resting, I wasted time in bookshops as though there was no tomorrow, or, judging by the extraordinary quantities of books I kept buying, as if there was a superabundance of tomorrows. I wasn’t really reading anything. I sniffed the fresh smell of print and caressed unbroken spines. I indulged in macabre calculations. If I had a year to live, then, at four books a month, there was enough time to read forty-eight books; five years–240; fifty years–2,400. That finally offered some consolation: even without cancer, I could hardly expect to be alive fifty years from now, and yet 2,400 books seemed barely satisfactory. I already possessed 2,000 books I hadn’t read, and was acquiring more each day. I was also devoting my hours to writing, which seemed a waste of precious time. I resolved to write less and read more. Reader, you are witness to my resolution.
After the first operation, I was told that I had clean, wide margins, like the books I enjoy most. I was given the odds on surviving five years, and they seemed very good, even though I couldn’t really deal with odds. I am temperamentally inclined to believe that one in a thousand is somehow more likely to happen than nine out of ten.
God never spoke to me. It might be that my particular pain did not really stand out in the white noise emanating from the planet like steam from a boiling pot. I certainly wasn’t unwilling to get in touch. I lingered in the semi-darkness of churches just before evensong, listening out for the thin, silvery rattle of incense burners. I said prayers in English, Serbian and sometimes even Greek. (This last sounded most likely to get through, perhaps because I understood so little of it.) It felt a bit like praying for a favourable exam result when you’d already submitted the script: comforting but useless. It might simply be that I could never be sufficiently humble. Yellow-faced and radiation-sick, Baldilocks remained her obstinate self.
Nonetheless, only bookshops and churches gave me the feeling that anything might happen. I didn’t really believe in God as much as I believed in books, but I loved the sights and sounds of religion. The Byzantine chant of my ancestral Orthodoxy, curtains of incense and black-clad monks with beards untouched by razors, flocking like ravens on snow-covered forecourts; Anglican cathedrals in which stone seemed as light as ice cream; the sublime, darkened beauty of London’s Tractarian churches; the Baroque waxworks of ripe Catholicism – as far as I was concerned, they all provided a vision of humanity at its most endearingly hopeful. And London was the New Jerusalem: there was no religion in the world which didn’t have a meeting house in one of its suburban terraces. Being ill in the British capital at the beginning of the twenty-first century was a bit like being a leper in the Holy Land in AD 33: there was never a shortage of volunteers to wash one’s feet.
I went to synagogues and mosques. On balance, I preferred domes to arches: building a sphere, a woman’s breast, seemed as close as both God and humanity ever came to perfection. Looking at the webs of unfamiliar script, I realized that the vocabulary of my own, non-existent faith was so bound up in the story of Jesus that I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I said God and, pop, up came the long bearded face. Although I might have tried to undo such conditioning, it seemed hardly worth the effort. Since it was unlikely that I was ever going to believe, I might as well remain a Serbian Orthodox agnostic. Other religions appealed as stories, Christianity as a storybook with pictures.
If I believed anything, it was that – as the novelist Danilo Kis once said – reading many books could never be as dangerous as reading just one. My literary hoards offered a sense of peace that no single volume has ever been able to provide on its own, but I did begin to wonder what was behind my obsessive book buying. In my family history, building a library has always seemed a bad idea. Books vanished when your house was hit by a bomb or torched, and they were what had to be left behind when you moved abroad. In difficult times, a diamond ring could always be exchanged for a pot of goose fat in one of the villages surrounding Belgrade. All a book can do is burn.
I am a compulsive reader. Quality doesn’t really come into this. On crowded underground trains, when there is no room to open a book, I will read safety warnings and advertisements, breaking the lines in different places to create a poem. Put me into a bare hotel room and I’ll go through the phone directories imagining local lives, the way other people may flick through satellite TV channels. On those occasions when I said ‘yes’ to proposals I’d never intended to accept and was then duty-bound to oblige, it happened because I was reading while pretending to listen. If I travelled anywhere, the safe bet is that I carried more books than clothes, fearing that I might run out of things to read. Even then, I went straight to the airport bookshops to buy more.
Feverishly starting a new volume, reading to page sixty or thereabouts, and then moving on to the next one, so that I always had at least six or seven books on the go, has always been my particular vice. Books gathered by my pillow, in my desk drawers, in bags abandoned at the bottom of my wardrobe, like sweet wrappers in a child’s pocket. The space under my bed was known in my family as the Library of Congress. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d reach down there and pull out a book to continue to read from where I last left it, the place marked by a bus ticket from Tel Aviv to Acre dated 1988 or a letter I began writing seven years ago. My memories of places became inseparable from the books I first read while visiting them. Sometimes the connections made geographical sense – like discovering André Aciman’s Out of Egypt in Alexandria – sometimes not at all. I read Kis’s Early Sorrows while staying with a retired colonel in Peshawar, and the book still colours my recollections of the North-West Frontier Province with Central European melancholy.
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My fondest memories from abroad are those of standing in bookshops, inhaling the familiar smell of leather, paper and fresh print. On one of my earliest visits to England, I discovered paradise in the shadows of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a bookshop where books could be had for free if you plausibly impersonated a visitor from behind the Iron Curtain. I am not sure which democracy-loving, communist-hating organization funded the enterprise. The little shop was well stocked with the works of dissident East European authors and right-wing economic theory. The former enthralled for hours. Every book ever banned in the East seemed to be there, from the granddaddy of dissidents, my Montenegrin compatriot Milovan Djilas, to the Bulgarian Georgi Markov, who was murdered with a stab from a poisoned umbrella tip on London’s Waterloo Bridge. Elegant novels written by Czech rubbish collectors stood next to Albanian essayists, and imprisoned Romanian poets vied for shelf space with Lithuanian philosophers. When you chose your books, an elderly bookseller (or book-giver) produced a form which required your signature and address. For some unaccountable reason, I gave a Bulgarian name, feeling, perhaps, that the provenance was more suitable for a recipient of such literary gifts. It didn’t seem like the sort of place where anyone would ask you to produce your documents: that would be too much like home. By the time I settled in London, my paradise had gone.
Chernobyl Strawberries was published in the UK by Atlantic Books in 2005. This excerpt comes from Chapter 6, “God and Books,” pp. 158-166.
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