2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (7 page)

My father’s voice drones up and down like a contented harvest bumble-bee. The room is warm and full of harvest smells. Outside the window, a purplish twilight is settling over the fields. A tractor is moving slowly up and down, already turning the burned-off stubble into the ground.

Wedding pictures

D
espite Vera’s and my efforts, Valentina and her son Stanislav came back to England on 1 March. They entered at Ramsgate, on six-month tourist visas. No one at the British Embassy in Kiev objected to their visa; no one at Ramsgate gave their passports more than a cursory examination. Once back in Peterborough, they moved in with Bob Turner. Valentina took a job at a hotel near the cathedral, and immediately went ahead with plans for the marriage to my father. This much I managed to piece together from hours of telephone conversations.

My father has tried to keep my sister and me in the dark about his plans. When we ask him a direct question he changes the subject, but he isn’t a very good liar and is easily caught out. He forgets what he has told each of us, and he believes that we are still not on speaking terms. But we have started to share our information.

“Of course he sent her the eighteen hundred pounds in the end, Vera. He paid it into her bank account and she withdrew it all. And he was sending her regular payments all the time she was away.”

“Really! It’s too much!” Big Sister’s voice hits a note of high drama. “That must have been most of his pension.”

“And he sent money for the coach tickets for her and Stanislav from Lviv to Ramsgate. And then she told him she needed extra money for an Austrian transit visa.”

“Of course Mother was absolutely right,” says Vera. “He has no common sense.”

“He’ll have to stop when he runs out of money.”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s only just beginning.”

My father has not only rescued this beautiful destitute Ukrainian woman, but he is also in a position to foster the talents of her extraordinarily gifted son.

Stanislav, who is fourteen, has been to see an independent psychologist, who, for a modest fee, paid by my father, has tested his IQ, and written a certificate declaring him to be a genius. On the basis of this, the boy (also a very talented musician, by the way, plays piano) has been offered a place at a prestigious private school in Peterborough. (Of course he is much too intelligent for the local comprehensive, which is only fit for the sons and daughters of farm labourers.)

My sister, who paid good money to send her extraordinarily gifted daughters to a posh school, is outraged. I, who sent my own extraordinarily gifted daughter to the local comprehensive, am outraged too. Our rage bubbles merrily up and down the telephone lines. We have something in common at last.

And another thing. As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families. Vera and I do not want Valentina in our family.

“Let’s face it,” says Vera. “We don’t want someone so
common
” (I didn’t say it!) “to carry our name.”

“Oh, come on, Vera. Our family is not uncommon. We’re just an ordinary family, like everybody else.”

I have started to challenge Big Sis’s self-appointed guardianship of the family story. She doesn’t like it.

“We come from solid bourgeois people, Nadezhda. Not
arrivistes
.”

“But the Ocheretkos were—what? Wealthy peasants…”

“Farmers.”

“…turned horse-dealers.”

“
Horse-breeders
.”

“Cossacks, anyway. A bit wild, you might say.”

“Colourful.”

“And the Mayevskyjs were teachers.”

“Grandfather Mayevskyj was Minister of Education.”

“But only for six months. And of a country that didn’t really exist.”

“Of course Free Ukraine existed. Really, Nadia, why must you take such a
downbeat
view of everything? Do you think you are some kind of handmaid of history?”

“No, but…” (Of course this is exactly what I think.)

“When I was a little girl…” Her voice softens. I hear her fumbling for a cigarette. “When I was a little girl, Baba Sonia used to tell me the story of her wedding. Now
that’s
what a wedding should be like, not this pitiful charade that our father is being dragged through.”

“But just look at the dates, Vera. The bride was four months pregnant.”

“They were in love.”

What’s this? Is Big Sis a closet romantic?

Mother’s mother, Sonia Blazhko, was eighteen when she married Mitrofan Ocheretko in the gold-domed Cathedral of St Michael in Kiev. She wore a white dress and a veil, and a pretty gold locket hung around her neck. Her long brown hair was crowned with white flowers. Despite her slim build, she must have been visibly pregnant. Her oldest brother Pavel Blazhko, railway engineer, later friend of Lenin, gave her away, for her father was too frail to stand through the service. Her older sister Shura, recently qualified as a doctor, was maid of honour. Her two younger sisters, still at school, pelted her with rose petals, and burst into tears when she kissed the groom.

The Ocheretko men strode into the church in their riding-boots, embroidered shirts and outlandish baggy trousers. The women wore wide swinging skirts and boots with little heels and coloured ribbons in their hair. They stood together in a fierce bunch at the back of the church and left abruptly at the end without tipping the priest.

The Blazhkos looked down on the groom’s family, whom they thought uncouth, little more than brigands, who drank too much and never combed their hair. The Ocheretkos thought the Blazhkos were prissy urbanites and traitors to the land. Sonia and Mitrofan didn’t care what their parents thought. They had already consummated their love, and its fruit was on her way.

“Of course it was pulled down in 1935.”

“What was?”

“St Michael of the Golden Domes.”

“Who pulled it down?”

“The communists of course.”

Ha! So there is a subtext to this romantic story.

“Pappa and Valentina are in love, Vera.”

“How can you talk such nonsense, Nadia? Will you never grow up? Look, she’s after a passport and a work permit, and what little money he has left. That’s clear enough. And he’s just mesmerised by her boobs. He talks of nothing else.”

“He talks about tractors a lot.”

“Tractors and boobs. There you have it.”

(Why does she hate him so much?)

“And what about our mother and father—do you think they were in love when they married? Don’t you think that was, in its way, a marriage of convenience?”

“That was different. It was a different time,” says Vera. “In times like that people did what they had to in order to survive. Poor Mother—after all she went through, to end up with Pappa. What a cruel fate!”

In 1930, when my mother was eighteen, her father was arrested. It was still several years before the purges were to reach their terrible climax, but it happened in the classic way of the Terror—a knock on the door in the middle of the night, the children screaming, my grandmother Sonia Ocheretko in her nightdress, her loose hair streaming down her back, pleading with the officers.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry!” my grandfather called over his shoulder as they bundled him away with just the clothes he stood up in. “I’ll be back in the morning.” They never saw him again. He was taken to the military prison in Kiev, where he was charged with secretly training Ukrainian Nationalist combatants. Was it true? We will never know. He never stood trial.

Every day for six months Ludmilla and her brother and sister would accompany their mother to the prison with a bundle of food. They handed it to the guard at the gate, hoping that at least some of it would get through to their father. One day the guard said: “There’s no need to come tomorrow. He won’t be needing your food any more.”

They were lucky. In the later years of the purges, not only the criminal, but his family, friends, associates, anyone who could be suspected of complicity in his crime, would be sent away for correction. Ocheretko was executed, but his family was spared. Still, it was no longer safe for them to stay in Kiev. Ludmilla was expelled from her veterinary course at the university—she was now the daughter of an enemy of the people. Her brother and sister were removed from their school. They moved back to the
khutor
and tried to scratch a living.

And that was not easy. Although the Poltava farmland is some of the most fertile in the whole of the Soviet Union, the peasants faced starvation. In the autumn of 1932 the army seized the entire harvest. Even the seed corn for next year’s planting was taken.

Mother said that the purpose of the famine was to break the spirit of the people and force them to accept collectivisation.

Stalin believed that the peasant mentality, which was narrow, covetous and superstitious, would be replaced by a noble, comradely, proletarian spirit. (“What wicked nonsense,” said Mother. “The only spirit was to preserve one’s own life. Eat. Eat. Tomorrow there may be nothing.”)

The peasants ate their cows, chickens and goats, then their cats and dogs; then rats and mice; then there was nothing left to eat but grass. Between seven and ten million people died across Ukraine during the man-made famine of 1932-3.

Sonia Ocheretko was a survivor. She made watery soup from grass and wild sorrel that they gathered from the fields. She dug for roots of horseradish, and tuberous artichokes, and found a few potatoes in the garden. When those ran out they trapped and ate the rats that lived in the thatch of their roof, then the thatch itself, and they chewed on harness leather to quell the hunger pangs. When they were too hungry to sleep, they used to sing:

There is a tall hill, and beneath it a meadow,

A green meadow, so abundant

You would think you were in paradise.

In the next village, there was a woman who had eaten her baby. She had gone mad, and wandered through the lanes crying, “But she died first. She was dead. What harm to eat? So plump! Why waste? I didn’t kill! No! No! No! She died first.”

They were saved by the remoteness of their
khutor—
if anyone thought about them at all, they probably thought they were already dead. In 1933 they somehow obtained a travel permit and made the long journey to Luhansk, soon to be renamed Voroshilovgrad, where Sonia’s sister Shura lived.

Shura was a doctor, six years older than Sonia. She had a dry sense of humour, dyed red hair, a taste for extravagant hats, a rattling laugh (she smoked hand-rolled cigarettes made with home-grown tobacco) and an elderly husband—a Party member and a friend of Marshal Voroshilov—who could pull strings. They lived in an old-fashioned wooden house on the edge of town, with carved eaves, blue-painted shutters, and sunflowers and tobacco plants in the garden. Shura had no children of her own, and fussed over Sonia’s. When Sonia found a teaching job and moved into a small flat in town with the two younger children, Ludmilla stayed with Aunty Shura. Aunty Shura’s husband found her a job in the locomotive factory in Luhansk, where she was to be trained as a crane operator. Ludmilla was reluctant. What did she want with cranes?

“Do it, do it,” urged Aunty Shura. “You will become a proletarian.”

At first, mastery of those mighty machines that swung and turned at her command was thrilling. Then it became routine. Then deadly boring. She dreamed once more of becoming a vet. Animals smelled of life, and were warm to the touch, more exciting to handle and subdue than a mere machine that could be operated with levers. (“What a poor thing is the crane or the tractor compared to a horse, Nadia!”) Veterinary surgeons at that time worked only with big animals—animals that had value—cows, bulls, horses. (“Just imagine, Nadia, these English people will spend one hundred pound to save the life of a cat or dog that can be pick up in street for nothing. Such foolish kind hearts!”)

She wrote to the Institute in Kiev, and was sent a bundle of forms to fill in, asking her to detail her and her parents’ and her grandparents’ occupations—their position in the class structure. Only those from the working class were to study at university now. She sent the forms off with a heavy heart, and was not surprised to hear nothing. She was twenty-three, and it seemed as though her life had reached a dead end. Then a letter came from that strange boy she had been at school with.

Weddings, like funerals, provide the perfect arena for family drama: there are the rituals, symbolic costumes, and every opportunity for snobbery in its many guises. According to Vera, my father’s family disapproved of the Ocheretkos. The girl, Ludmilla, was pretty enough, said Baba Nadia, but rather wild; and it was unfortunate, to say the least, that her father was an ‘enemy of the people’.

Baba Sonia, for her part, found my father’s family pretentious and peculiar. The Mayevskyjs were part of the small Ukrainian intelligentsia. Grandfather Mayevskyj, Nikolai’s father, was a very tall man with flowing white hair and little half-glasses. In the brief flowering of Ukrainian independence in 1918 he was even Minister for Education for six months. After Stalin came to power and all ideas of Ukrainian autonomy were stamped out, he became the head teacher of the Ukrainian language school in Kiev, operating on voluntary subscription and under constant pressure from the authorities.

It was at this school that my mother and father first met. They were in the same form. Nikolai was always the first boy to put his hand up, always top of the class. Ludmilla thought him an insufferable know-all.

Nikolai Mayevskyj and Ludmilla Ocheretko were married in the register office in Luhansk in the autumn of 1936. They were twenty-four years old. There were no golden domes or bells or flowers. The ceremony was conducted by a plump female party official in a bottle-green suit and a not-very-clean white blouse. The bride was not pregnant and nobody cried, even though there was much more to cry about.

Did they love each other?

No, says Vera, she married him because she needed a way out.

Yes, says my father, she was the loveliest woman I had met, and the most spirited. You should see her dark eyes when she was in a rage. On the skating rink she glided like a queen. To see her on horseback was a wonder.