A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Read online

Beloved wife of Nikolai

  Mother of Vera and Nadezhda

  Grandmother of Alice, Alexandra and Anna

  The stonemason had trouble getting all the words on. There is a flowering cherry tree and beneath it a wooden bench facing the neat square of grass half-turned to recent graves, and a hawthorn hedge dividing it from a wheat field which rolls on into other wheat fields, potato fields, oilseed rape fields, on and on to the horizon. My mother came from the steppes, and she felt at ease with these open horizons. The Ukrainian flag is two oblongs of colour, blue over yellow-yellow for the cornfields, blue for the sky. This vast, flat, featureless fenland landscape reminded her of home. Only the sky is seldom as blue.

  I miss my mother, but I am beginning to come to terms with my grief. I have a husband and a daughter and a life elsewhere.

  My father prowls around the house where they lived together. It is a small, ugly, modern house, pebble-dashed with a concrete slab garage at the side. Around the house on three sides is the garden, where my mother grew roses, lavender, lilacs, columbines, poppies, pansies, clematis (Jackmanii and Ville de Lyon), snapdragons, potentilla, wallflowers, catmint, forget-me-nots, peonies, aubretia, montbretia, campanula, rock roses, rosemary, irises, lilies and a purple trailing wisteria, pinched as a cutting from a botanical garden.

  There are two apple trees, two pear trees, three plum trees, a cherry and a quince, whose yellow fragrant fruits have won prizes at the village show for the last twenty years. At the back, beyond the flower garden and the lawn, are three vegetable patches where my mother grew potatoes, onions, runner beans, broad beans, peas, sweet corn, marrows, carrots, garlic, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, cabbages and Brussels sprouts. In between the vegetables, dill and parsley grow wild, self-seeded. To one side, a soft-fruit patch of raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, red and black currants and a cherry tree is enclosed in netting on frames that my father has made to keep off the fat, greedy birds. But some of the strawberries and raspberries have escaped the net, and run off to propagate in the flower borders.

  There is a greenhouse where a purple grape-vine luxuriates above fruitful beds of tomatoes and capsicums. Behind the greenhouse are a water butt, two potting sheds, a compost heap and a dung pile that is the envy of the village. It is rich, crumbly, well-rotted cow-manure, a gift from another Ukrainian gardener. “Black chocolate,” my mother called it. “Come on, my little darlings,” she would whisper to the marrows, “have some black chocolate.” They gobbled it up, and grew and grew.

  Each time my father goes out into the garden he sees my mother’s shape, bent down among the marrows, reaching to tie the runner beans, a blur through the glass of the greenhouse. Sometimes her voice calls him from room to room of the empty house. And each time he remembers she is not there after all, the wound bursts open again.

  The second phone call came a few days after the first.

  “Tell me, Nadezhda, do you think it would be possible for a man of eighty-four to father a child?”

  See how he always gets straight to the point? No small talk. No ‘How are you? How are Mike and Anna?’ No chit-chat about the weather. Nothing frivolous will hold him up when he isin the grip of a Big Idea.

  “Well, I’m not sure…”

  Why is he asking me? How would I know? I don’t want to know. I don’t want this kick of emotion that drags me back to the bogey-nose days, to the time when my Daddy was still my hero and I was still vulnerable to his disapproval.

  “And if it is, Nadezhda,” he rattles on before I can marshal my defences, “what do you think are the chances it would be mentally defective?”

  “Well now, Pappa,” (pause for breath, keep the voice cheery and sensible) “it is quite well established that the older a woman is, the greater her chance of having a baby with Down’s Syndrome. It’s a kind of learning disability-it used to be called mongolism.”

  “Hmm.” (He doesn’t like the sound of that.) “Hmm. But maybe it’s a chance we should take. You see, I am thinking that if she is mother to the British citizen, as well as wife of British citizen, they surely would not be able to deport her…”

  “Pappa, I don’t think you should rush into…”

  “Because British justice is best in world. It is both a historical destiny and burden, which one might say…”

  He always speaks to me in English, eccentrically accented and articled, but functional. Engineer’s English. My mother spoke to me in Ukrainian, with its infinite gradations of tender diminutives. Mother tongue.

  “Pappa, just stop and think for a minute. Is this really what you want?”

  “Hmm. What I want?” (he pronounces it ‘vat I vant’). “Of course to father such a child would be not straightforward. Technically it may be possible…”

  The thought of my father having sex with this woman makes my stomach turn.

  “…Snag is, hydraulic lift no longer fully functioning. But maybe with Valentina…”

  He is lingering over this procreation scenario too much for my taste. Looking at it from different angles. Trying it for size, as it were. “…what do you think?”

  “Pappa, I don’t know what to think.”

  I just want him to shut up.

  “Yes, with Valentina it may be possibility…”

  His voice goes dreamy. He is thinking of how he will father this child-a boy, it will be. He will teach him how to prove Pythagoras from first principles and how to appreciate Constructivist art. He will discuss tractors with him. It is my father’s great regret that both his children were daughters. Inferior intellectually, yet not flirtatious and feminine, as women should be, but strident, self-willed, disrespectful creatures. What a misfortune for a man. He has never tried to conceal his disappointment.

  “I think, Pappa, that before you rush into anything, you should get some legal advice. It may not turn out the way you think. Would you like me to talk to a solicitor?”

  “Tak tak.” (Yes yes.) “Better you talk to a solicitor in Cambridge. They have all types of foreign there. They must know something about immigration.”

  He has a taxonomic approach to people. He has no concept of racism.

  “OK, Pappa. I’ll try to find a solicitor who specialises in immigration. Don’t do anything till I get back to you.”

  The solicitor is a young man from an inner city practice who knows his stuff. He writes:

  If your father was to marry, then he would need to make an application to the Home Office for his wife to stay. For this to be granted, she would have to show the following:

  That the main purpose of the marriage was not to secure her entry or stay in the UK.

  That they have met.

  That they intend to live permanently together as husband and wife.

  That they can support and accommodate themselves without claiming Public Funds.

  The main problem is that the Home Office (or an Embassy if she applies after leaving die United Kingdom) is likely to believe mat, because of die age difference, and because die marriage took place shortly before she had to leave die UK, die main purpose of die marriage is simply for immigration.

  I forward the letter to my father.

  The solicitor also tells me that the chances of success would be measurably improved should the marriage last for five years, or should there be a child of the marriage. I do not tell my father this.

  Two. Mother’s little legacy

  My mother had a pantry under the stairs stocked from floor to ceiling with tins of fish, meat, tomatoes, fruit, vegetables and puddings, packets of sugar (granulated, caster, icing and Demerara), flour (plain, self-raising and wholemeal), rice (pudding and long-grain), pasta (macaroni, twirls and vermicelli), lentils, buckwheat, split peas, oatmeal, bottles of oil (vegetable, sunflower and olive), pickles (tomato, cucumber, beetroot), boxes of cereals (mainly Shredded Wheat), packets of biscuits (mainly chocolate digestives) and slabs of chocolate. On the floor, in bottles and demi-johns, were gallons of a thick, mauve liquor made from plums, brown sugar
and cloves, a glass of which was guaranteed to render even the most hardened alcoholic (and there were plenty of those in the Ukrainian community) comatose for up to three hours.

  Upstairs under the beds in sliding boxes were kept preserves (mainly plum) and jars of home-made jam (plum, strawberry, raspberry, blackcurrant and quince in all combinations). In the potting-sheds and garage, cardboard fruit-boxes were stacked with the latest crop of apples, Bramleys, Beauty of Bath and Grieves, all separately wrapped in newspaper, exuding their fruity perfume. By next spring, their skins would be waxy, and the fruit inside shrivelled, but they were still good for Apfelstrudel and Blini. (The windfalls and damaged fruit had been picked out, cut up, and stewed as they fell.) Nets of carrots and potatoes, still preserved in their coat of clayey soil, bundles of onions and garlic, hung in the cool dark of the outhouse.

  When my parents bought a freezer, in 1979, the peas, beans, asparagus and soft fruits soon piled up in plastic ice-cream tubs, each one labelled, dated and rotated. Even dill and parsley were rolled in little plastic bundles and stored away for use, so that there was no longer any season of the year when there was scarcity.

  When I teased her about these supplies, enough to feed an army, she would wag her finger at me and say, “It’s in case your Tony Benn ever comes to power.”

  My mother had known ideology, and she had known hunger. When she was twenty-one, Stalin had discovered he could use famine as a political weapon against the Ukrainian kulaks. She knew-and this knowledge never left her throughout her fifty years of life in England, and then seeped from her into the hearts of her children-she knew for certain that behind the piled-high shelves and abundantly stocked counters of Tesco and the Co-op, hunger still prowls with his skeletal frame and gaping eyes, waiting to grab you the moment you are off your guard. Waiting to grab you and shove you on a train, or on to a cart, or into that crowd of running fleeing people, and send you off on another journey where the destination is always death.

  The only way to outwit hunger is to save and accumulate, so that there is always something tucked away, a little something to buy him off with. My mother acquired an extraordinary passion and skill of thrift. She would walk half a mile down the High Street to save a penny off a bag of sugar. She never bought what she could make herself. My sister and I suffered humiliation in home-made dresses stitched up from market remnants. We were forced to endure traditional recipes and home-baking when we craved junk food and white sliced bread. What she couldn’t make had to be bought second-hand. Shoes, coats, household things-someone else had always had them first, had chosen them, used them, then discarded them. If you had to get it new, it had to be the cheapest money could buy, preferably reduced or a bargain. Fruit that was on the turn, tins that were dented, patterns that were out of date, last year’s style. It didn’t matter-we weren’t proud, we weren’t some foolish types who waste money for the sake of appearances, Mother said, when every cultured person knows that what really matters is what’s inside.

  My father lived in a different world. He went to work every day as a draughtsman, in a tractor factory in Doncaster. He earned his wage, bought the things the other men at work bought-new clothes (what’s wrong with that shirt? I could have mended it), a camera (who needs camera?), a record player and vinyl discs (such extravagance!), books (and so many good books in public library), DIY tools (for making crazy things in house), furniture (could get same cheaper in the Co-op), a new motor-bike (drives like a madman). Every week, he gave my mother a fixed, not ungenerous amount for housekeeping, and spent the rest.

  So it was that after fifty years of saving, preserving, baking, and making, my mother had accumulated a small nest-egg of several thousand pounds from the money my father gave her every week. This was her poke in the eye to hunger, her comfy safe feeling in the night, her gift of safety to her children in case hunger ever came for us. But what should have been a gift became a curse, for, to our shame, my sister and I squabbled about how her little legacy should be divided.

  After our stand-off at the funeral, my sister and I bombarded each other with hate-filled letters and teemed venom down telephone wires. Once it started, there was no stopping it.

  She phoned me late one evening, when Anna was in bed, and Mike was out. She wanted me to countersign to release some money for one of her daughters who was buying a flat. I let the phone ring nine times before I picked it up, because I knew it was her. Leave it! Leave it! said a sensible voice in my head. But in the end I picked it up, and all the hurtful things we had never said before came tumbling out. And once they were said, they couldn’t be unsaid.

  “You bullied and tricked her into signing that codicil, Vera. You stole her locket.” (Is this really me, saying such horrible things to my sister?) “Mother loved us both equally. She wanted us to share what she left behind.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.” Her voice snaps like ice. “She could only give the locket to one of us. She gave it to me. Because I was there when she needed me. I was always there when she needed me. And you-the favoured one, the little darling-you let her down in the end.” (Ouch! How can she say this to me, her baby sister?) “As I knew you would.”

  We both subscribe to the best-defence-is-attack school of diplomacy.

  “Mother loved me. She was terrified of you, Vera. Yes, we were all terrified of you-your sarcasm, your temper. You bossed me around for years. But you can’t boss me any more.” Saying it should make me feel grown up, but it doesn’t. It makes me feel four years old again.

  “You just disappeared off the scene, as you’ve done all your life, Nadezhda. Playing at politics, playing your pathetic little games, being so clever and putting the world to rights, while other people get on with the real hard work. You just sat back and left it all to me.”

  “You just barged in and took over.”

  “Someone had to take charge, and it obviously wasn’t going to be you. You didn’t have time for Mother. Oh no, you were too busy with your fabulous career.”

  (Bif! She has hit a sore point. I am consumed with guilt that I didn’t drop everything and rush to Mother’s bedside. Now she has me on the defensive, but I go straight back in for attack.)

  “Oh, listen to you, who never did a day’s work in your life! Lived off hubby’s money,” (Baf! I aim a low punch.) “I’ve always had to work for my living. I have responsibilities, commitments. Mother understood. She knew about hard work.”

  “That was proper work-not this namby-pamby molly-coddly waste-of-time do-gooding nonsense. It would have been more useful to grow vegetables.”

  “You don’t understand work, do you, Vera? You always had Big Dick with his expense account, his share options, his annual bonuses, his clever little deals and ways of avoiding tax. Then when it all went wrong, you tried to fleece him for every penny he had. Mother always said she could understand why he divorced you. You were so nasty to him.” (Ha! I scored there.) “Your own mother said that, Vera!”

  “She didn’t know what I had to put up with.”

  “She knew what he had to put up with.”

  The telephone spits and crackles with our rage.

  “The trouble with you, Nadezhda, is that your head is so full of nonsense that you don’t know the real world.”

  “I’m forty-seven, for God’s sake, Vera. I know the world. I just see it in a different way.”

  “Forty-seven doesn’t make any difference. You’re still a baby. You always will be. You’ve always taken everything for granted.”

  “I gave back, too. I worked. I tried to make things better for people. More than you ever did,” the whining four-year-old pipes up again.

  “Oh, my goodness! Tried to make things better for people! How noble you are!”

  “Well look at you, Vera-you just went out to feather your own nest, and sod everybody else.”

  “I had to learn to fight for myself. For myself and my girls. It’s easy to be superior when you don’t know what hardship is. When you’re in a trap, you
have to fight your way out.”

  (Oh, please! She’s still going on about all that old wartime stuff! Why can’t she let it go?)

  “What trap? What hardship? That was fifty years ago! And just look at yourself now! All bitter and twisted like a snake with jaundice.” (Now I put on the social-worker voice.) “You need to learn to let go of the past.”

  “Don’t give me this new age hippy nonsense. Let’s just talk about the practicalities.”

  “I’d rather give the money to Oxfam, Vera, than let you win by extortion.”

  “Oxfam. How pathetic!”

  So Mother’s little legacy stayed in the bank, and after that my sister and I didn’t talk to each other for two years, until a common enemy brought us together.

  Three. A fat brown, envelope

  “So did you get the letter from the solicitor, Pappa?”

  “Hmm. Yes. Yes.”

  He’s obviously not feeling chatty.

  “So what did you think?”

  “Aha, well…” He coughs. His voice sounds strained. He doesn’t like talking on the telephone. “Well, I have shown it to Valentina.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “What she says? Well…” More coughing. “She says it is impossible that the law will separate a man from his wife.”

  “But didn’t you read the solicitor’s letter?”

  “Yes. No. But still, this is what she says. This is what she believes.”

  “But what she believes is wrong, Pappa. Wrong.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And what about you? What do you say?” I struggle to control my tone.

  “Well, what can I say?” There is a little helpless shrug in his voice, as though he has surrendered to forces beyond his control.

  “Well, you could say you don’t think it’s such a good idea to get married after all. Couldn’t you?”

  My stomach contracts with dread. I realise he really is going to go ahead with this marriage, and that I am going to have to live with it.