2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (32 page)

“Look. Here,” he points, “they are already crossing from Felix-stowe to Hamburg. Next Hamburg to Berlin. Cross into Poland at Guben. Then Wroclav, Krakow, cross border at Przemysl. Ukraina. Home.”

He has gone very quiet.

I stare at the map. Criss-crossing the route he has traced with his finger, another route is marked in pencil. Hamburg to Kiel. Then from Kiel the line dips south into Bavaria. Then up again into Czechoslovakia. Brno. Ostrava. Across into Poland. Krakow. Przemysl. Ukraina.

“Pappa, what is this?”

“This is our journey. Ukraina to England.” He traces the line backwards. “Same journey, other direction.” His voice is laboured, croaky. “Look, here in south near Stuttgart is Zindelfingen. Ludmilla was working in Daimler-Benz assembly. Ludmilla and Vera stayed here nearly for one year. Nineteen forty-three.”

“What did they do there?”

“Milla’s job was to fit fuel pipe to aircraft engine. First-class engine but somewhat heavy in the air. Poor lift-drag ratio. Poor manoeuvrability, though some interesting new developments in wing design were just…”

“Yes yes,” I interrupt. “Never mind about the aircraft. Tell me what happened in the war.”

“What happened in war? People died—that is what happened.” He fixes me with that stubborn clenched-jaw look. “Those who were bravest perished first. Those who believed in something died for belief. Those who survived…” He starts to cough. “You know that more than twenty million Soviet citizens perished in this war.”

“I know.” And yet the number is so vast it is unknowable. In that measureless ocean of tears and blood, where are the landmarks, the familiar bearings? “But I don’t know the twenty million, Pappa. Tell me about you and Mother and Vera. What happened to you after that?”

His ringer moves along the pencilled line.

“Here, near Kiel, this is Drachensee. I was some time in this camp. Building boilers of ships. Ludmilla and Vera came near end of war.”

Drachensee: there it sits on the map, shameless, a black dot with red lines of roads leading from it, as though it were any other place.

“Vera said something about a correction block?”

“Aha, this was an unfortunate episode. Caused entirely by cigarettes. I have told you, I think, that I owe my life to cigarettes. Yes? But I have not told you also that I almost lost my life through cigarettes. Through Vera’s adventure with cigarettes. Lucky that war ended then. British came just in time—rescued us from Correction Block. Otherwise we surely would not have survived.”

“Why? What…? How long…?”

He coughs for a moment, avoiding my eyes.

“Lucky also that at liberation we were in British zone. Another piece of luck was Ludmilla’s birthplace, Novaya Aleksandria.”

“Why was that lucky?”

“Lucky because Galicia was formerly part of Poland, and Poles were allowed to stay in West. Under Churchill-Stalin agreement, Poles could stay in England, Ukrainians sent back. Most sent to Siberia—most perished. Lucky that Millochka still had birth certificate, showed she was born in former Poland. Lucky I had some German work papers. Said I came from Dashev. Germans changed Cyrillic to Roman script. Dashev Daszewo. Word sounds like same, but Daszewo is in Poland, Dashev is in Ukraina. Ha ha. Lucky immigration officer believed. So much luck in such a short time—enough to last a lifetime.”

In the dusky light of the forty-watt bulb, the lines and shadows of his wrinkled cheeks are as deep as scars. How old he looks. When I was young, I wanted my father to be a hero. I was ashamed of his graveyard desertion, his flight to Germany. I wanted my mother to be a romantic heroine. I wanted their story to be one of bravery and love. Now as an adult I see that they were not heroic. They survived, that’s all.

“You see, Nadezhda, to survive is to win.”

He winks, and the scar-wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes crease with merriment.

After Father has gone to bed, I telephone Vera. It is late, and she is tired, but I need to talk. I start with the easy stuff.

“The baby is beautiful. It’s a girl. They called her Margaritka after Mrs Thatcher.”

“But did you find out who the father is?”

“Dubov’s the father.”

“But he can’t be…”

“No, not the biological father. But he’s the father in every way that matters.”

“But didn’t you find out who the real father is?”

“Dubov is the real father.”

“Really, Nadia. You are hopeless.”

I know what she means, but after I saw the way Dubov wielded that baby-bottle, I lost interest in the biological paternity. Instead I tell her about the pink lacy baby clothes, the elasticated loop-under-heel slacks, the last boil-in-bag supper. I describe the way they hoisted the non-electric cooker on to the roof-rack, and how everybody cheered. I reveal the secret of the seventeenth patent.

“Really!” she exclaims from time to time as I talk, and I keep wondering whether I will dare to ask her about the Correction Block.

“I can’t get over how lovely the baby is. I thought I would hate her.” (I had imagined that when I looked into the cot, I would know who the father was—that her corrupt progeniture would shine in her face.) “I thought she would be like a miniature version of Valentina, a thugette in nappies. But she’s just herself.”

“Babies change everything, Nadia.” There is a scuffling sound on the other end of the phone, and a slow intake of breath. Vera is lighting a cigarette. “I remember when you were born.”

I don’t know what to say, so I wait for her to follow up the remark with some reminiscences, but there is a long sigh as she exhales, then silence.

“Vera, tell me…”

“There’s nothing to tell. You were a beautiful baby. Let’s go to bed now. It’s late.”

She doesn’t tell me, but I have already worked it out.

Once, there was a War Baby and a Peacetime Baby. War Baby was born on the eve of the greatest conflict the world has known, into a country already ravaged by famine and choked in the mad grip of a paranoid dictator. She cried a lot, because her mother had little milk to give her. Her father did not know what to say to her, and didn’t say much. After a while he left. Then her mother left too. She was brought up by an elderly aunt who doted on her, and whom she grew to love. But when the war broke out, the industrial town where her aunt lived was too dangerous, so her mother came to fetch her, and took her to a village to stay with her father’s parents, where she would be safe. She never saw her aunt again.

War Baby’s paternal grandparents were an eccentric elderly couple, with strict ideas of how children should be raised.

They also had care of their daughter’s child, a chubby rollick-some little girl called Nadezhda, a couple of years older than her cousin, whose parents lived in Moscow. She had been named after her grandmother, and was the apple of her eye. War Baby was a thin, spiritless child, quiet as a mouse. She stood for hours at the gate, waiting for her mother to come back.

War Baby’s mother divided her time between War Baby and War Baby’s father, who lived in a big city to the south, and seldom came to visit, for he was engaged in Important Work. Her mother’s visits often ended in a row with Baba Nadia, and when her mother had gone, her grandmother would tell War Baby terrifying stories about witches and trolls that gobbled up naughty children.

War Baby was never naughty; in fact she hardly said anything at all. Nevertheless, from time to time she would manage to spill some milk or to drop an egg, and then she would be punished. The punishments were not cruel, but they were unusual. She would be made to stand for an hour in the corner, holding the shell of the broken egg, or holding a handwritten sign that said “Today I spilled some milk.” Cousin Nadia would pull faces at her. War Baby said nothing. She stood silently in the corner holding her icons of breakage. She stood in the corner and watched.

The worst thing of all was to be sent into the hen-house to collect eggs, for they were guarded by a fearsome cockerel with blazing eyes and a fiery crown. When he stretched up and flapped his wings and crowed, he was almost as tall as War Baby. He would dart forward and peck at her legs. No wonder she so often dropped the eggs.

One day, the winds of war blew War Baby’s mother back to the village: sheome back and she didn’t leave. At night, War Baby and her mother snuggled up in bed together and her mother told her stories about Great-Grandpa Ocheretko and his amazing black horse called Thunder, about Baba Sonia’s wedding in the Cathedral of the Golden Domes, and about brave children who slew witches and demons.

Mother and Baba Nadia still argued, but they didn’t argue as much as before, for Mother went out to work every day in the local
kolkhoz
, where her veterinary skills were very much in demand, even though she had only completed three years of training. Sometimes she was given money, but more often the farnvmanager paid her in eggs, wheat, or vegetables. Once she stitched up the belly of a pig that had been gored by a cow, using black button thread, for surgical suture was nowhere to be found. The sow lived, and when it produced eleven piglets, Mother was given one to bring home.

Then soldiers came to the village—German soldiers, then Russian soldiers, then German soldiers again. The village watch-mender and his family were taken away one afternoon in a tall windowless van, and were never seen again. Their oldest daughter, a pretty quiet girl aged fourteen or so, had managed to run away when the soldiers came, and Baba Nadia took her in and hid her in the hen-house (the fearsome cockerel had long since been stewed and his spurred feet turned into the most delicious chicken soup). For although Baba Nadia was a strict woman, she knew what was right and what was wrong, and taking people away in the tall windowless van was wrong. Then one night, someone set fire to the hen-house. No one knows who it was. The watch-mender’s daughter and the two remaining chickens perished in the blaze.

Eventually, the winds of war blew War Baby’s father home, too. Very early one morning, while it was still dark, an emaciated man with a terrible suppurating wound on his throat arrived at the door. Baba Nadia let out a scream, and prayed for mercy. Grandfather Mayevskyj went into the village and bribed someone to let him have some medicines that were supposed to be for the soldiers. Mother boiled rags and cleaned the wound. She stayed at his bedside day and night, and sent War Baby out to play with cousin Nadia. From time to time, War Baby crept into his room and was allowed to sit on the bed. He squeezed her hand, but he didn’t say anything. After a few weeks, he was well enough to get up and wander about the house. Then just as mysteriously as he had arrived, he disappeared.

Soon after, it was time for War Baby and her mother to leave too. German soldiers came into the village and took all the healthy people of working age, and put them on a train. They took War Baby’s mother. They would have left War Baby behind, but Mother screamed so much, they let her come too. It was a goods wagon with no seats: everyone sat crammed together on bales of straw, or on the floor. The train journey lasted for nine days, with only sour bread to eat, and very little water, and just a bucket in the corner of the wagon for the toilet. But there was an air of excitement.

“We are going to a camp,” said War Baby’s mother, “where we will be safe. We will work, and we will get good food to eat. And maybe Father will be there.”

To War Baby’s dismay, the camp was not a circle of tents and tethered horses, as her mother had described the Cossack encampments, but a maze of concrete buildings and high barbed-wire fences. Still, War Baby and her mother had a bed to share and food to eat. Every day, Mother and the other women were taken in a truck to a factory where they assembled aeroplane engines for twelve hours. War Baby was left behind in the camp with the children, who were all much older, and a guard who spoke a language she didn’t understand. She spent hours looking through the wire fence watching for the truck that would bring her mother home. At night, her mother was too tired to tell her stories. Pressed up dose in the dark, War Baby listened to her breathing, until they both fell asleep. Sometimes, in the night, she was woken by the sound of her mother crying, but in the morning her mother got up and washed her face and went to work as if nothing had happened.

Then one day, the winds of war blew Mother and War Baby to another camp, and Father was there. It was like the first camp but bigger and more frightening, for there were many other people there apart from the Ukrainians, and the guards carried whips. Something terrible happened in that camp that it would be better to forget—better not to know that it had happened at all.

Then suddenly, it was no longer wartime, it was peacetime. The family boarded a huge ship and sailed away across the sea to another country where the people talked in a funny language, and though they were still in a camp, there was more to eat, and everybody was kind to them. And as if to celebrate the coming of peace to the world, another baby was born into the family. Her parents called her Nadezhda, after those Nadezhdas they had left behind, for the name means ‘hope’.

Peacetime Baby was born in a country that had just been victorious in war. Although times were hard, the mood of the country was hopeful. Those able to work would work for the benefit of all; those in need would be provided for; and children would be given milk, orange juice and cod-liver oil, so they would grow strong.

Peacetime Baby lapped up all three fluids greedily and grew up stubborn and rebellious.

War Baby grew up into Big Sis.

T
he Sunny Bank sheltered housing complex lies in a quiet cul-de-sac on the southern outskirts of Cambridge. It is a low-rise modern purpose-built development of forty-six flats and bungalows set in a large well-maintained garden, with lawns, mature trees, rose beds, and even a resident owl. There is a communal lounge where residents can watch television (Father grimaces), attend coffee mornings (“But I prefer apple juice!”) and take part in other activities from ballroom dancing (“Ah, but you should see how Millochka could dance!”) to yoga (“Aha!”). It is owned by a charitable trust, and let out at nonprofit rents to those lucky enough to make it to the top of the waiting-list. The warden, Beverley, a middle-aged widow with a bouffant of bleached hair, a throaty laugh, and an enormous bosom, seems in many ways like an older and more benign version of Valentina. Maybe this is why Sunny Bank is Father’s first choice of sheltered housing.