2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (17 page)

And maybe she is genuinely repentant, says my father, for after the policemen have gone she does not turn on him in a fury, but takes his hand and places it on her breast, stroking it with her fingers, chiding him gently for mistrusting her and allowing this shadow to fall between them. She does not even abuse him for taking her box of papers and hiding it under his bed. (Of course she found them—of course my father did not manage to return them to the boot of the car.) Or maybe someone (Mrs Zadchuk?) has explained to her the meaning of the last sentence of the solicitor’s letter.

I have sent Mrs Divorce Expert a copy of the solicitor’s letter, and she has sent Mrs Flog–‘em–and–send–‘em–home a newspaper cutting. It tells the story of a man from the Congo who has lived in the UK for fifteen years, who is now to be deported because he entered the country illegally all those years ago, even though he has established a life for himself, built up a business, become a figure in the local community. The local church has mounted a campaign on his behalf.

“I think the tide is turning,” says Vera. “People are waking up at last.”

I have come to quite the opposite conclusion—people are falling asleep over this issue, not waking up. The remote voices in Lunar House are asleep. The blue-chip voices in far-flung consulates are asleep. The trio on the immigration panel in Nottingham are asleep—they are just going through the motions like sleepwalkers. Nothing will happen.

“Vera, all this stuff about deportation, and these high-profile cases with campaigns and letters to newspapers—it’s just to create an illusion of activity. In reality, in most cases—nothing happens. Nothing at all. It’s just a charade.”

“Of course that is what I would expect you to say, Nadezhda. Your sympathies have always been quite clear.”

“It’s not a matter of sympathies, Vera. Listen to what I’m saying. Our mistake has been to think that they would remove her. But they won’t.
We
have to remove her.”

Wearing the stilettos of Mrs Flog–‘em–and–send–‘em–home has altered the way I walk. I used to be liberal about immigration—I suppose I just thought it was all right for people to live where they wanted. But now I imagine hordes of Valentinas barging their way through customs, at Ramsgate, at Felixstowe, at Dover, at Newhaven—pouring off the boats, purposeful, single-minded, mad.

“But you always take her side.”

“Not any more.”

“I suppose it’s because you’re a social worker, you can’t help it.”

“I’m not a social worker, Vera.”

“Not a social worker?” There is silence. The phone crackles. “Well what are you?”

“I’m a lecturer.”

“So—a lecturer! What do you lecture about?”

“Sociology.”

“Well that’s it—that’s what I mean.”

“Sociology’s not the same thing as social work.”

“No? Well what is it?”

“It’s about society—different forces and groups in society and why they behave as they do.”

There is a pause. She clears her throat.

“But that’s fascinating!”

“Well, yes.
I
think so.”

Another pause. I can hear Vera lighting a cigarette on the other end of the line.

“So why is Valentina behaving as she is?”

“Because she’s desperate.”

“Ah, yes. Desperate.” She draws a deep breath, sucking in smoke.

“Remember when we were desperate, Vera?”

The hostel. The refugee centre. The single bed we shared. The terraced house with the toilet in the back yard and the squares of torn newspaper.

“But how desperate must one be to become a criminal? Or to prostitute oneself?”

“Women have always gone to extremes for their children. I would do the same for Anna. I’m sure I would. Wouldn’t you do the same for Alice or Lexy? Wouldn’t Mother have done the same for us, Vera? If we were desperate? If there was no other way?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Nadia.”

I lie in bed in the small hours thinking about the man from the Congo. I imagine the knock on the door in the night, the heart jumping against the rib-cage, the predator and prey looking into each other’s eyes. Gotcha! I imagine the friends and neighbours gathered on the pavement, the Zadchuks waving hankies which they press to their eyes. I imagine the cup of coffee, still warm, left on the table in the haste of departure, which goes cold, then gathers a skin of mould and then finally dries into a brown crust.

Mike does not like Mrs Flog–‘em–and–send–‘em–home. She is not the woman he married.

“Deportation’s a cruel nasty way of dealing with people. It’s not the solution to anything.”

“I know. I know. But…”

Next morning I telephone the number at the top of the letter Valentina got from the Immigration Advisory Service. They give me a number at East Midlands Airport. Amazingly, I get through to the woman with the brown briefcase and blue Fiat who visited the house after their marriage. She is surprised to hear from me, but she remembers my father straightaway.

“I had a gut feeling something wasn’t right,” she says. “Your Dad seemed so, well…”

“I know.”

She sounds nice—much nicer than my father’s description of her.

“It wasn’t just the bedrooms—it was the fact that they didn’t seem to do
anything
together.”

“But what will happen now? How will it end?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

I learn that the deportation, if there is to be one, will be carried out not by the Immigration Service but by the local police, instructed by the Home Office. Every region has police officers who are located within local police stations but who specialise in immigration matters.

“It’s been interesting talking to you,” she says. “We visit people, and we file these reports, and then they disappear into thin air. We don’t often find out what happens.”

“Well, nothing’s happened yet.”

I phone the central police station in Peterborough, and ask to speak to the specialist immigration officer. They refer me on to Spalding. The officer whose name they have given me is not on duty. I phone again next day. I was expecting a man, but Chris Tideswell turns out to be a woman. She is matter-of-fact, when I tell her my father’s story.

“Yer poor Dad. Yer get some right villains.” Her voice sounds young and chirpy, with a broad fenland accent. She doesn’t sound old enough to have carried out many deportations.

“Listen,” I say, “when all this is over, I’m going to write a book about it, and you can be the heroic young officer who finally brings her to justice.”

She laughs. “I’ll do my best, but don’t hold yer breath.” There is nothing she can do until after the tribunal. Then there may be leave to appeal on compassionate grounds. Only after that will there be a warrant to deport, maybe.

“Phone me a week or so after the hearing.”

“You can have a starring role in the film. Played by Julia Roberts.”

“Yer sound as if yer a bit desperate.”

Will Valentina be able to keep up this regime of little-pigeon cooing and bosom-stroking until September? Somehow I doubt it. Will my father, thin as a stick, frail as a shadow, be able to survive on his diet of tinned ham, boiled carrots, Toshiba apples and the occasional beating? Seems unlikely.

I telephone my sister.

“We can’t wait until September. We’ve got ‘to get her out.”

“Yes. We’ve tolerated this for far too long. Really, I blame…” She stops. I can almost hear the screech of verbal brakes being slammed on.

“We need to work together on this, Vera.” My voice is placatory. We are getting on so well. “We’ll just have to persuade Pappa to reconsider his objections to divorce.”

“No, something more immediate. We must apply for an ousting order to get her out of the house at once. The divorce can come later.”

“But will he go along with it? Now they’re back on bosom-fondling terms, he is quite unpredictable.”

“He’s mad. Quite mad. In spite of what the psychiatrist said.”

This is not the first time my father has been given the all-dear by a psychiatrist. It happened at least once before, some thirty years ago, when I was in what he described as my Trotskyist phase. I found out about it by chance. My parents were out, and I was rooting through their bedroom—the same room with the heavy oak furniture and discordantly patterned curtains that Valentina has now converted into her boudoir. I can’t remember what I was looking for, but I found two things that shocked me.

The first, lying on the floor under one of the beds, was a crumpled rubber sac full of whitish sticky fluid. I stared at it in horror. This most intimate outpouring. This shameless evidence that my parents had performed the sex act on more than the two occasions on which Vera and I had been conceived. My father’s semen!

The second was a report from a psychiatrist at the Infirmary dated 1961. It was among some papers hidden in a drawer in the dressing-table. The report noted that my father had asked to see a psychiatrist because he believed he was suffering from a pathological hatred of his daughter (me, not Vera!). So obsessive and all-consuming was this hatred that he feared it was a sign of mental illness. The psychiatrist had talked to my father at length, and had concluded that in view of my father’s experience of communism it was not at all surprising, natural in fact, that he should hate his daughter for her communist views.

I read it with growing astonishment, and then with rage, both at my father and at this anonymous psychiatrist, who had taken the easy option, who hadn’t heard my father’s call for help. Stupid—both of them. My mother, whose family had suffered unspeakable wrongs, who had far more reason to hate me for being a communist, had somehow never stopped loving me even through my wildest years, even though the things I said must have hurt her to the quick.

I put the papers back in the drawer. I wrapped the used condom in some newspaper and put it in the bin, as though I could somehow protect my mother from its shameful contents.

My mother wears a hat

A
unty Shura delivered my mother’s first baby. Vera was born in Luhansk (Voroshilovgrad) in March 1937. She was a miserable baby whose high-pitched gasping cries, as though she was about to stop breathing at any moment, drove Nikolai to distraction. Aunty Shura doted on Ludmilla, but she did not like Nikolai, and neither did her Communist-Party-member-friend-of-Marshal-Voroshilov husband. Life at Aunty Shura’s became tense. Tempers flared, doors were slammed, voices were raised, and the wooden house reverberated like a sound box. After a few weeks, Ludmilla, Nikolai and baby Vera decamped to live with Ludmilla’s mother (now she was a grandmother they called her Baba Sonia) in her new three-roomed concrete-built apartment on the other side of the city.

It was a tight squeeze in the apartment. Nikolai, Ludmilla and the baby occupied one room; in another room lived Baba Sonia; the third room was rented out to two students. The younger brother and sister were away at college, but when they came back, they shared with their mother. There was no hot water—sometimes no cold water, either—and although the famine had eased, food was still scarce. The new baby grizzled and whined constantly. She sucked fiercely at the breast, but Ludmilla, sick and anaemic, had little milk to give her.

Baba Sonia would take the whining baby on to her knee, bounce her up and down, and sing:

Beyond the Caucasus we stood up for our rights, stood up for our rights. Hey!

There the Magyars were advancing, were advancing. Hey!

Aunty Shura said: “Take an apple, push iron nails into it, leave it overnight, then take the nails out and eat it—that way you get both vitamin C and iron.”

Nikolai could not find a suitable job in Luhansk and mooched around the flat writing poems and getting under everyone’s feet. The constant crying of the baby got on his nerves, and he got on Ludmilla’s nerves. In the winter of 1937 he returned to Kiev.

That same year, Ludmilla was finally offered a place at the veterinary college in Kiev. Maybe the crane-operating job had done the trick, and turned her into a proletarian after all. But now it seemed like a cruel joke. With a new baby and her husband at work, it would be impossible.

“Go! Go!” said Aunty Shura. “I’ll look after Verochka.” Ludmilla had to choose: husband and veterinary college, or baby daughter. Aunty Shura bought her a new coat and a train ticket, and gave her an extravagant hat with silk flowers and a veil. Ludmilla kissed her mother and her aunt goodbye at the station. Little Verochka clung to her sobbing. They had to hold her back while Ludmilla boarded the train.

“So when did you see her again?”

“It was nearly two years,” says Vera. “She stayed in Kiev right up until the start of the war. Then she came to get me. Kharkiv was too dangerous. We went to Dashev, to stay with Baba Nadia. It would be safer in the village.”

“You must have been glad to see her.”

“I didn’t recognise her.”

One day a thin dishevelled-looking woman arrived on the doorstep, and grabbed Vera in her arms. The child started to scream and kick.

“Don’t you recognise your mother, Verochka?” said Aunty Shura.

“She’s not my mother!” cried Vera. “My mother wears a hat.”

We still have a picture of Mother in the hat, with the veil pulled back and a girlish smile on her face. My father must have taken it shortly after she arrived in Kiev. I found it in a bundle of old photographs and letters in that same drawer where I once found the letter from the psychiatrist. The letter has long since been lost, but the photographs are in an old shoe box in the sitting-room, along with the fragrant rotting apples, the freezer full of boil-in-the-bag dinners, the small portable photocopier and the civilised person’s Hoover, which being of a foreign make for which no dust bags are available in this country, now sits abandoned in the corner with its cover open and debris spilling from its civilised insides.

This room is still disputed territory. When Valentina is at home, she sits in here with the television on at full blast, and an electric bar fire (my father has fixed the radiator so that it doesn’t come on, in order to protect his apples). My father does not understand television; most of the content is completely meaningless to him. He sits in his bedroom and listens to classical music on the radio, or reads. But when she is out at work, he likes to sit in here with his apples and his photographs and the view over the ploughed fields.