2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (18 page)

We are sitting in here together this wet afternoon in May drinking tea, watching the rain stream down the windows and lash the lilac trees in the garden, while I try to work the conversation away from the development of jet propulsion in Ukraine in the 19305, and towards a discussion of divorce.

“I know you don’t like the idea, Pappa. But I think it’s the only way you will be free again.”

He stops and looks at me with a frown. “Why you are now talking about divorce, Nadia? That is Vera, who is such enthusiast for the divorce. Cigarettes and divorce. Pah!”

His jaw is set, his arthritic fingers knotted in his lap.

“Vera and I are both agreed about this, Pappa. We think Valentina will continue to abuse you, and we are worried about your safety.”

“Did you know, when Vera first discovered there was such thing as divorce, she immediately tried to convince Ludmilla to divorce me.”

“Really?” This is the first I have heard about this. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it. Children say all sorts of strange things.”

“She did mean it. Indeed she did. All her life she has tried to make divorce between Millochka and me. Now between Valentina and me. Now you too, Nadia.”

He fixes me with that stubborn look. I can see this conversation is going nowhere.

“But Pappa, you lived with Mother for sixty years. Surely you can see that Valentina is not the same as Mother.”

“Clearly this Valentina, she is of quite different generation. She knows nothing of history, even less about recent past. She is daughter of the Brezhnev era. In times of the Brezhnev, everyone’s idea was to bury all gone-by things and to become like in West. To build this economy, people must be buying something new all the time. New desires must be implanted as fast as old ideals must be buried. That is why she is always wanting to buy something modern. It is not her fault; it is the post-war mentality.”

“But Pappa, this is no excuse for her to mistreat you. She cannot abuse you like this.”

“One can forgive a beautiful woman many things.”

“O, Pappa! For goodness’ sake!”

His glasses have slipped down his nose, and sit at a crazy angle. His shirt is unbuttoned at the throat, showing the white hairs that sprout around his scar. He has a sour, unwashed smell. He isn’t exactly your Don Juan, but he has no idea.

“This Valentina, she is beautiful like Milla, and like Milla she has strong spirit, but also with an element of cruelty in her nature unknown to Ludmilla, which by the way is characteristic of the Russian type.”

“Pappa, how can you compare her with Mother? How can you even say her name in the same breath?”

It is his disloyalty that I cannot forgive.

“You made Mother’s life a misery, and now you abuse her memory. Vera’s right—Mother should have divorced you long ago.”

“Misery? Memory? Nadia, why you always want to make a drama out of something? Millochka died. That is sad, of course, but is now in the past. Now is time for new life, new love.”

“Pappa, it’s not me making the drama. It’s you. All my life, all Mother’s life, we had to live with your crazy ideas, your dramas. Do you remember how upset Mother was when you invited all the Ukrainians to come and live with us? Do you remember how you bought the new Norton, when Mother needed a washing machine? Do you remember when you left home and tried to catch the train back to Russia?”

“But that was not because of Millochka. That was because of you. You were then a crazy Trotskyist.”

“I wasn’t a Trotskyist. And even if I was, I was only fifteen. You were an adult—supposedly.”

It’s true, though, that it was because of me that he tried to leave home and catch the train back to Russia. He packed his brown cardboard suitcase—the very same one that had travelled with him when he left Ukraine—and stood on the platform at Witney railway station. I can just imagine him pacing up and down, muttering to himself and looking impatiently at his watch from time to time.

Mother had to go and plead with him.

“Nikolai! Kolya! Kolyusha! Come home now! Kolka, where are you going?”

“I’m waiting for the train to Russia!” Picture the dramatic gesture of his head, his blazing eyes. “Why not? It’s all the same. Now they are bringing in communism here, I don’t know why I ever left Russia. I don’t know why I risked everything. Now even my own daughter is helping to bring in communism here.”

Yes, it was all my fault. I went down to Greenham Common with my friend Cathy in 1962. (I went again in 1981, but that’s a different story.) We went to protest about the planned deployment of H-bombs at the nuclear base, and we got ourselves arrested. There we were in our drainpipes and headbands and groovy shades, sitting out on the newly laid approach road. I was reading Julius Caesar’s
De Bella Gallico
(GCE set text) while the police came and carried us away one by one. I may have been challenging the state through non-violent civil disobedience, but I was still my father’s daughter, and I did my Latin homework.

Some people were strumming Spanish guitars, and everyone started to sing:

Don’t you hear the H-bombs thunder,

Sounding like the crack of doom?

While they tear the heavens asunder,

Fall-out makes the earth a tomb.

Yes, I could hear the H-bombs. I could see the fall-out glimmering in the air, I could feel the strange rain falling. I did believe I would never live to grow up if we didn’t get rid of those H-bombs. But still, I was hedging my bets and doing my GCEs.

All the other people there were older than Cathy and me. Some had long stringy hair and bare feet, and wore faded jeans and dark glasses. Others were nice Quakerly types with sensible shoes and cardigans. They carried on singing as the police picked them up by their arms and legs and put them into furniture vans (they seemed to have run out of Black Marias). Cathy and I didn’t sing—we didn’t want to look daft.

An impromptu courtroom had been set up in the local primary school. We sat on infant-sized chairs, and were called to the bench one by one. Each person made a speech about the wickedness of war, and was fined £3, with £2 court costs. When it was my turn, I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I was only fined £3. (A bargain!) I had lied about my age, because I didn’t want my parents to find out, but they found out anyway.

“Kolya,” pleaded my mother, “she’s not a communist, she’s just a silly girl. Come home now.”

My father said nothing, but stared at a fixed point down the railway line. The next train was in forty minutes, and that went to Eynsham and Oxford, not to Russia.

“Kolyusha, it’s a long way to Russia. Look, at least come home and have something to eat first. I’ve got a lovely beetroot soup. And
kotletki—
your favourite
kotletki
, with spinach and beans from the garden, and little potatoes. Just come and fill your belly, then you can go to Russia.”

So, still muttering his rage, he allowed himself to be led back along the muddy path between the brambles and nettles, to the pebble-dash semi where we lived. Grudgingly he bowed his head over the steaming soup bowl. Later, she coaxed him up to bed. So he didn’t leave home after all.

Instead, I left. I ran away to live at Cathy’s house. They lived in a long low Cotswold stone cottage at White Oak Green, full of books and cats and cobwebs. Cathy’s parents were left-wing intellectuals. They didn’t mind Cathy going on marches, in fact they encouraged her. They talked about grown-up things like whether Britain should join the EEC and who created God. But the house was cold, and the food tasted funny, and the cats jumped on you in the night. After a few days my mother came and coaxed me home, too.

Years later I can still remember the smell of hot sun on freshly laid tarmac at Greenham Common, and the musty smell of Cathy’s bedroom. Only the image of my father is unclear, as if something obscure but vital has been blotted out, and only the raging surface is left. Who is he, this man whom I have known and not known all my life?

“But this is all in past, Nadia. Why you have such bourgeois preoccupation with all personal history?”

“Because it’s important…it defines…it helps us understand…because we can learn…Oh, I don’t know.”

Lady Di and the Rolls-Royce

V
alentina and Stanislav have been given a cat. They call it Lady Di, after Diana Princess of Wales, whom they admire greatly. She came from Mrs Zadchuk’s neighbour, and she is more of a kitten than a cat—and not nearly as pretty as her namesake. She is black with random white splodges, pale pink-rimmed eyes and a wet pale pink nose.

Lady Di (they pronounce it Lye Dee Dee) sets to, shredding all the soft furnishings in the house. After a few weeks, it turns out that she is a boy-cat, not a girl-cat (my mother would never have made that mistake) and starts pissing everywhere. Now, to the smell of rotting apples, mouldering half-eaten boil-in-the-bag dinners, cheap perfume, and the odour of unventilated old-man’s room, is added the scent of tomcat’s piss. Not just piss, either. No one has taught Lady Di to use a litter tray, and no one clears up after him when, on wet days, he decides he is too royal to go in the garden.

My father, Valentina and Stanislav all adore Lady Di, who has a neat way of scampering up curtains, and can jump four feet in the air to catch a bit of paper dangled on a string. Only Vera and I don’t like him, and we don’t live there, so what does it matter what we think?

Lady Di has become a surrogate child to them. They sit together holding hands and marvelling over his brilliance and beauty. It is surely only a matter of time before he is taught to prove Pythagoras from first principles.

“He won’t even consider a divorce, Vera. They sit there holding hands cooing over that nasty little cat.”

“Really, it’s too much! I told you we should have had him certified,” says Big Sis.

“That’s what Valentina thinks.”

“Well she’s quite right, wicked though she is. She’s obviously got him eating out of her hands again, until she gets her passport. Men are so stupid.”

“Vera, what’s all this about you wanting Mother to divorce him?”

“What do you mean?”

“He says you tried to persuade Mother to divorce him.”

“Did I? I can’t remember. What a pity I didn’t succeed.”

“Anyway, the upshot is, it’s put him right off the idea of divorce.”

“I can see I’m going to have to come and talk to him myself.”

However, something soon happens which makes him change his mind. Early one morning, he telephones and starts ranting some nonsense about a big roller. I am in a hurry to get to work so I urge him to ring later. But he finally gets the words out:

“It’s the roller sitting in the front garden, on the lawn.”

“Pappa, what do you mean? What roller?”

“Roller! Rolls-Royce!”

Valentina has achieved the apogee of her dreams of life in the West—she is the owner of a Rolls-Royce. It is a 4-litre sedan, sold to her by Eric Pike for the knock-down price of £500 (paid by my father). She now has a Lada in the garage, a Rover on the drive, and a Roller on the lawn. None of the cars is licensed or insured. She has still not passed her driving test.

“Who is this Eric Pike, Pappa?” I remember the note I found tucked up in the knicker drawer with the half-eaten ham sandwich.

“Actually, this is a most interesting type. Once he was pilot in RAF. Jet propulsion fighter pilot. Now he is used car dealer. He has superb moustaches.”

“And is he very friendly with Valentina?”

“No no. I think not. They have nothing in common. She has no interest whatsoever in motors, except as vehicle for self-display. Actually is quite nice car. Came from estate of Lady Glaswyne. I believe was used for many years as farm vehicle, transporting hay, sheep, fertiliser bags, anything you like. Almost like tractor. Now is in need of some repairing.”

Mike bursts out laughing when he sees the Roller. It flops crookedly on the grass in front of the sitting-room window like a swan with a broken wing. It looks as if the suspension is gone. Brown fluid seeps from its underbelly, poisoning the grass. The paintwork which was once white is now a patchwork of touch-up paint, filler, and rust. He and my father walk round and round it, patting it and poking it here and there, shaking their heads.

“She wants me to repair her,” says my father with a helpless little shrug, as if he is the fairytale prince set an impossible task as a test of love by the beautiful princess.

“I think it’s past repair,” says Mike. “Anyway, where would you get the parts?”

“True, she is needing some parts, and even then it is by no means any certainty that she will run,” says my father. “Such is a pity. Car like this should run for ever, but she has dearly suffered from some abuses in her past. Nevertheless, what beauty…”

Just at that moment, Valentina emerges from the house. Although it is June, and the weather is warm, she is wearing a huge pinch-waisted wide-shouldered fur coat, which she wraps around herself with her hands in the pockets, movie-star style. She has grown so fat that the coat hardly meets in the middle. Around her neck twinkle some sparkly beads which in a poor light could be mistaken for diamonds. Stanislav, in a short-sleeved shirt, walks behind her carrying her bag.

She stops when she sees the three of us standing in the garden looking at her Roller.

“Is nice car, yes?” She addresses all of us, but looks to Mike for a reply.

“Yes, a very nice car,” says Mike, “but possibly more of a museum piece or a collector’s item than an on-road vehicle.”

“Hallo, Valentina,” I smile ingratiatingly. “You’re looking very elegant. Are you going out?”

“Verk.” One word. She doesn’t even turn her head towards me.

“What do you think, Stanislav? Do you like the car?”

“Oh yes. It’s better than a Zill.” Flash of chipped tooth. “Valentina always gets what she wants in the end.”

“Car is kaput,” says my father.

“You mend car,” she snaps. Then remembering she is supposed to be nice to him, she bends forward and pats his cheek. “Mr Engineer.”

Mr Engineer draws himself up to his full crooked height.