2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (11 page)

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I have slipped into the mongrel language, half-English half-Ukrainian, fluent and snappy.

“Ah-shamed! Ah-shamed!” she snorts. “You shame. No me shame. Why you no visit you mamma grave? Why you no crying, bringing flower? Why you making trouble here?”

The thought of my mother lying neglected in the cold ground while this usurper lords it in her kitchen drives me to a new pitch of fury.

“Don’t dare to talk about my mother. Don’t even say her name with your filthy-talking boil-in-the-baggage mouth!”

“You mother die. Now you father marry me. You no like. You make trouble. I understand. I no stupid.”

She speaks the mongrel language too. We snarl at each other like mongrels.

“Valentina, why are you driving around in two cars, when my father doesn’t have enough money to pay for the repairs on one car? Why are you talking on the telephone to Ukraina while he’s asking me for money to pay the bills? You tell me!”

“He give you money. Now you give him money,” the big red mouth taunts.

“Why should my father pay for your cars? For your telephone bills? You have work. You earn money. You should contribute something to the household.” I have worked myself up into a lather of righteous anger, and the words come pouring out, some English, some Ukrainian, mixed up any old how.

“You father buy me nothing!” She leans forward and shouts into my face so close that I can feel a fine shower of saliva on my skin. I can smell armpits and hair lacquer. “No car! No jewel! No clothes!” (She pronounces it in two syllables—cloth-es.) “No cosmetic! No undercloth-es!” She yanks up her t-shirt top to display those ferocious breasts bursting like twin warheads out of an underwired, ribbon-strapped, lycra-panelled, lace-trimmed green satin rocket-launcher of a bra.

“I buy all! I work! I buy!”

When it comes to bosoms, I have to admit defeat. I am lost for words. In the silence that fells, I hear my father’s voice in the next room, droning on. He is telling Mike the story about pencils in space. I have heard it many times before. So has Mike.

“In early days of space travel, one interesting problem emerged from experiments with weightlessness. Americans found that for writing notes and keeping records, normal ink pen would not work without gravity feed. Scientists undertook intensive research, finally developed high-technology pen to work in conditions of no gravity. In Russia, scientists faced with same problem found different solution. Instead of pen, they used pencil. That is how Russians put pencils into space.”

How can my father be so blind to what is happening to him?

I turn on Valentina.

“My father is an innocent man. Stupid but innocent. You spend all your money on tart underwear and tart make-up! Is it because my father’s not enough for you, ey? Is it because you’re after another man, or two or three or four, ey? I know what you are, and soon enough my father will know. Then we’ll see!”

Stanislav exclaims, “Wow! I didn’t know Nadezhda could speak such Ukrainian!”

Then the doorbell rings. Mike answers. It’s the Zadchuks. They’re standing on the doorstep with a bunch of flowers and a home-made cake.

“Come in! Come in!” says Mike. “You’re just in time for tea.”

They hover in the doorway. They have caught sight of Valentina’s thunderous face. (The breasts are re-covered.)

“Come in,” says Valentina with a pout. They are her friends, after all, and she may need them.

“Come in,” I say, “I’ll put the kettle on.” I need time to rally, to get my breath back.

Although it is October, the weather is mild and sunny. We will drink tea in the garden. Mike and Stanislav set out deck-chairs and an old wonky camping table under the plum tree.

“Good you come,” says Pappa to the Zadchuks, settling back into the creaking canvas. “Good cake. My Millochka used to make like this.”

Valentina takes this as a slight.

“In Tesco is better.”

Mrs Zadchuk is offended.

“I like baking cake better.”

Mr Zadchuk springs to her defence.

“Why you buying cake in Tesco, Valentina? Why you no baking? Woman should bake.”

Valentina is still in full eruption-mode from her encounter with me.

“I no time to baking. All day working for money. Buy cake. Buy clothes. Buy car. No-good meanie husband give no money.”

I am afraid the t-shirt will come up again, but she satisfies herself with a dramatic bosom-lunge in my father’s direction. Alarmed, he looks to Mike for help. Mike, not knowing enough Ukrainian to understand what is going on, fatally returns to the subject of cake, and ingratiates himself with Mrs Zadchuk by helping himself to another large slice.

“Mmm. Delicious.”

Mrs Zadchuk’s pink cheeks glow. She pats his thigh.

“You good eat. I like man good eat. Why you no eat more, Yuri?”

Mr Zadchuk takes this as a slight.

“Too much cake make fatty turn. You fatty, Margaritka. Little bit fatty.”

Mrs Zadchuk takes this as a slight.

“Better fatty than skinny. Look Nadezhda. She starving Bangladesh-lady.”

I take this as a slight. Righteously, I draw in my stomach. “Thin is good. Thin is healthy. Thin people live longer.”

All of them turn on me with howls of derisive laughter.

“Thin is hunger! Thin is famine! Everybody thin drop over dead! Ha ha!”

“I like fatty,” says my father. He places a placatory wizened hand on Valentina’s breast and gives it a little squeeze. Blood rushes to my head. I jump up and accidentally catch the leg of the table, sending the teapot and the remains of the cake sliding on to the ground.

The tea party has not been a success.

After the Zadchuks have gone, there is still the washing-up to be done, and some dirty linen to be washed. Valentina pulls on rubber gloves over pearlised-pink-tipped fingers. I shove her aside.

“I’ll do it,” I say. “I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. You’re obviously too fine for this, Valentina. Too fine for my father, don’t you think? Not too fine to spend his money, though. Eh?”

She lets out a shriek. “Vixen! Crow! You get out my kitchen! Out my house!”

“Not your house! My mother’s house!” I shriek back.

My father comes running into the kitchen.

“Nadezhda, why you poking your nose in here? Not your business!”

“Pappa, you crazy man. First you say Valentina spends all your money. Lend me a hundred pounds. Lend me five hundred pounds. Then you say I shouldn’t poke my nose in. Make your mind up.”

“I say lend money. I no say poke nose in.” His jaw is clenched. His fists are clenched. He is beginning to shake. I remember when this look used to strike terror in me, but I am taller than he is now.

“Pappa, why should I give money for you to spend on this grasping deceitful painted…” Bitch, bitch, bitch! I think. But my feminist mouth won’t say it.

“Go out! Go out and never come back! You are not my daughter Nadezhda!” He fixes me with pale demented eyes.

“Fine,” I say. “Fine by me. Who wants you for a Dad anyway? You cuddle up with your fat-bosom wife and leave me out of it.”

I grab my things and rush out to the car. After a few moments, Mike follows.

As we leave the outskirts of Peterborough and head out for the open country, Mike ventures, in a jocular sort of way, “What a crazy bunch you are.”

“Shut up!” I shriek. “Just shut up and keep your nose out of it!” Then I feel ashamed. I have surrendered to the madness. We drive home in silence. Mike searches the radio waves for soothing music.

Christmas gifts

V
ery late one evening, not long after our visit, Stanislav phones my sister. He found her number in Father’s phone book.

“Please. You must do something…these terrible rows…shouting all the time…” he sobs down the telephone.

Vera does something. She telephones the Home Office. They tell her to put it in writing. She telephones me in a fury.

“This time we’re both going to do it, and we’re both going to sign it. I’m not having him playing us off one against the other. I’m not having you keeping in his good books by doing nothing, while I do all the work and then end up getting cut out of his will.”

“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll phone him first. See if I can find out what’s going on. I don’t want to do something we’re both going to regret.” I feel guilty that I haven’t been vigilant enough on his behalf.

I phone my father. I hear the phone crackle, then his breathless panting as he picks it up.

“Hallo? Ah, Nadezhda. Good you phoned.”

“What’s up, Pappa?”

“Well, not so good with Valentina. Some problems. She is now acting as if she rather dislikes me…telling me I am inferior being…insect to be squashed…imbecile to be locked away…dead corpse to be put in ground…other things like this.” He mumbles incoherently and coughs a lot. His voice is croaky, as if dragging the words out is causing him pain.

“Oh, Pappa.”I don’t know what to say, but he hears reproof in my voice.

“Of course it is not entirely her fault. She has been placed under severe pressure by delays from Home Office. And besides this her work is very hard, in day working at nursing-home, in evening working at hotel. She gets tired, and when tired is easily angry.”

I am filled with rage—rage against her and rage against him.

“But Pappa, anybody could see this was going to happen. Anybody but you.”

“Don’t tell Vera, will you? She will say…”

“Pappa, Vera knows. Stanislav telephoned her.”

“Stanislav telephoned to Vera?”

“He was crying down the telephone.”

“Too bad. Too bad. Well, whatever happens…at least until her Appeal we will stay together…after that they will go and I will be left in peace.”

But my sister and I will take no chances. I draft a letter to the Home Office Immigration Department at Lunar House, Croydon, setting out the story of Valentina’s marriage to our father and her relationship with Bob Turner. I don’t care about being a good liberal any more. I want this woman taken away. I describe the living arrangements—separate beds—and the fact that the marriage has not been consummated, because I believe the Establishment will take the view that penetrative sex is what marriage is all about. I am pleased with the primness of the letter.

Earlier this year Mrs Dubova obtained a second 6 months visa and arrived via Ramsgate in March. She once more moved into Mr Turner’s house. She and my father were married at the Immaculate Conception in Peterborough in June.

After the wedding Mrs Dubova did not move in with our father, but carried on living at Hall Street in Mr Turner’s house. When the school term ended, Mrs Dubova (now Mayevska) and Stanislav moved into our father’s house. However, she did not share a room with our father, and the marriage has never been consummated.

At first things seemed to be working out all right. We believed that although Mrs Dubova (now Mrs Mayevska) might not love our father in a romantic sense, she would at least be kind and caring to a frail elderly man in his last years. However, after only a few months, things have begun to go very wrong.

As I write I feel a terrible sense of guilt, and also a sweet secret feeling of release. The Judas kiss in the garden, the bliss of malice without accountability. My father must never know. Mike and Anna must never know. Valentina will suspect, but will never know for sure.

I ask the secret correspondent at the Home Office to protect our anonymity. I sign the letter and post it to my sister. She signs it and posts it to the Home Office. There is no reply. My sister rings a couple of weeks later and is told the letter has been filed.

Next time I phone my father to ask how things are, he is evasive.

“Everything OK,” is all he will say. “Nothing out of normal.”

“No more arguments?”

“Nothing out of normal. Husband wife. Quarrelling is normal. Not too bad.” Then he starts to talk about aviation. “You see, in love as in aviation, all is a matter of the balance. Uplift is greater in a long thin wing, but at cost of greater weight. So in same way, argument and occasional bad temper is a cost of the love. In design of aircraft wing, the secret of success is to achieve correct ratio between lift and drag. Is same with Valentina.”

“You mean she has plenty of uplift but she’s a bit of a drag.” (Ha ha.)

There is a long silence on the other end of the phone as he tries to puzzle out what I have said.

“Pappa,” I say, “that’s enough about aviation. Can’t you see I’m worried about you?”

“I’m all right. But my arthritis is coming back. This wet weather.”

“Would you like me and Mike to come up and see you?”

“No, not now. Later, maybe. After a while.”

My sister gets even shorter shrift.

“He won’t answer any of my questions. He just rambles on about this and that, on and on. I really think his mind’s going,” she says. “We should see the doctor to get him certified insane. Then we could say he was of unsound mind when he entered into the marriage.”

“He’s always been like that. He’s no worse now than he was. You know he’s always been a bit mad.”

“Of course that’s true. Quite mad. But somehow I feel this is worse. Does he talk to you about Valentina?”

“Not really. He says they have their arguments, but nothing out of the normal. Remember the arguments he used to have with Mother? Either things have settled down, and they’re getting on OK, or he doesn’t want us to know how bad it is. He’s worried that you’ll laugh at him, Vera.”

“Well of course I’ll laugh at him. What does he expect? But still, he’s our father. We can’t let this frightful woman do this to him.”

“He says everything’s all right. But he doesn’t sound all right.”

“Maybe she listens to him when he talks on the phone. Just a thought.”

Christmas gives us the excuse we need for a visit.

“It’s Christmas, Pappa. Families always get together at Christmas.”

“I’ll see what Valentina says.”

“No, just tell her we’re coming.”

“All right then. But no presents. No presents for me, and I get none for you.”

This ‘no presents’ idea comes from his mother, Baba Nadia. I was named after her. She was a village schoolteacher, a stern and pious woman, with straight black hair that didn’t go grey until she was seventy (a sure sign of Mongolian ancestry, said my mother), and a great follower of Tolstoy and his cranky ideas that captivated the Russian intelligentsia of the time: the spiritual nobility of the peasantry, the beauty of self-denial, and other such nonsense (said my mother, who had suffered her mother-in-law’s pronouncements on marriage, child-rearing, and the best way to make dumplings). And yet. And yet when I was a child my father had made me such wonderful gifts. There were model aeroplanes made from balsa wood and powered with rubber bands—and all the street turned out to watch them fly. There was a garage with an inspection pit made from wood and riveted aluminium, with a lift operated by a rubber-band that raised the dinky-cars on to the roof, and a curved ramp so that you could roll them down again. One Christmas there was a farmyard, a ‘
khutor
’ like the one that was home in Ukraine—a sheet of green-painted hardboard surrounded by a painted wall, with a hinged gate that opened, a farmhouse with windows and a door that opened and a little byre with a sloping roof for the die-cast cows and pigs. I remember these gifts with wonder. It is so long since I remembered the things I once loved about my father.