Read 2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Online
Authors: Marina Lewycka
“She gave it to me.” (I cannot believe this. Mother knew I loved the locket, coveted it more than anything. Vera must have stolen it. There is no other explanation.) “Now, what exactly do you want to say about the will?”
“I just want things to be fair,” I whine. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nadezhda, it’s enough that you get your clothes from Oxfam. Must you get your ideas there also?”
“You took the locket. You pressured her into signing the codicil. Split the money equally among the three granddaughters, instead of between the two daughters. That way, you and yours get twice as much. Greedy.”
“Really, Nadezhda. I’m shocked that you could think this way.” Big Sister’s groomed eyebrows quiver.
“Not nearly as shocked as I was when I found out,” Bogey-nose bleats.
“You weren’t there, were you, my little sister? You were off doing your wonderful thing. Saving the world. Pursuing your career. Leaving all the responsibility to me. As you always do.”
“You tormented her last days with stories of your divorce, of your husband’s cruelty. You chain-smoked at her bedside while she lay dying.”
Big Sister flicks the ash from her cigarette and sighs theatrically.
“You see, the trouble with your generation, Nadezhda, is that you’ve just skated over the surface of life. Peace. Love. Workers’ Control. It’s all idealistic nonsense. You can afford the luxury of irresponsibility, because you’ve never seen the dark underside of life.”
Why does my sister’s upper-class drawl infuriate me so much? Because I know it’s fake. I know about the single bed we shared and the toilet across the yard and the squares of torn newspaper to wipe your bum. She can’t fool me. But I have my ways of needling her, too.
“Oh, it’s the dark underside that’s bothering you? Why don’t you go and get some counselling?” I suggest slyly in my best professional let’s-be-sensible voice, my look-how-grown-up-I-am voice, the voice I use with Pappa.
“Please don’t talk to me in that social-worker voice, Nadezhda.”
“Get some psychotherapy. Get to grips with that dark underside, flush it out into the open, before it eats you away.” (I know this will infuriate her.)
“Counselling. Therapy. Let’s all talk about our problems. Let’s all hug each other and feel better. Let’s help the underprivileged. Let’s give all our money to the starving babies.”
She bites fiercely into a canape. An olive hurtles to the floor.
“Vera, you’re going through bereavement and divorce. No wonder you’re feeling under stress. You need some help.”
“It’s all self-delusion. Underneath, people are hard and mean and out for themselves. You can’t imagine how I despise social workers.”
“I can imagine. And Vera, I’m not a social worker.”
My father is in a rage, too. He blames the doctors, my sister, the Zadchuks, the man who cut the long grass behind the house, for causing her death. Sometimes he blames himself. He slopes around muttering, if this hadn’t happened, if that hadn’t happened, my Millochka would still be alive. Our little exile family, long held together by our mother’s love and beetroot soup, has started to fall apart.
Alone in the empty house, my father lives out of tins and eats off folded newspapers, as if by punishing himself he will bring her back. He will not come and stay with us.
Sometimes I go and visit. I like to sit in the churchyard where my mother is buried. The tombstone reads:
Ludmilla Mayevska
Born in 1912 in the Ukraine
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:
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.
Mother’s little legacy
M
y 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.