2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (8 page)

Whether they loved each other or not, they stayed together for sixty years.

“So, Pappa, what do you remember about Ludmilla? Tell me, what was she like when you first met?” (I am attempting some reminiscence therapy. I somehow hope that filling his mind with images of my mother will blot out the interloper.) “Was it love at first sight? Was she very beautiful?”

“Yes, indeed. Quite beautiful in every way. But of course not as beautiful as Valentina.”

There he sits with a small secret smile on his face, wisps of silver hair straggling on to his frayed collar, his spectacles repaired with brown parcel tape balanced on the end of his nose so that I can’t quite see his eyes, his hands swollen with arthritis cradling a mug of tea. I want to grab it from him and dash it in his face. But I realise that he has no idea, no idea at all, of the effect his words might have on me.

“Did you love her?” (I mean did he love her
more
.)

“Ah, love! What thing is love! No one can understand. On this point, science must concede to poetry.”

My father doesn’t invite us to the wedding, but he lets slip the date. “No need to visit now. Everything is OK. You can come after June first,” he says.

“We’ve got four weeks to stop her,” says my sister.

But I hesitate. I am touched by his joy, his new vitality. Also, I am mindful of Mike’s opinion.

“Maybe it’ll be OK. Maybe she’ll look after him, and make him happy in his last years. It’s better than going into a home.”

“For goodness’ sake, Nadia. You don’t think that kind of woman will be around when he’s old and dribbling and incontinent. She’ll take what she can, and be off.”

“But let’s face it, neither you nor I are going to look after him in his old age, are we?” (Best to get it out into the open, even though the bluntness of it smarts.)

“I did what I could for Mother. Towards Father I feel a sense of obligation: nothing more.”

“He isn’t so easy to love.” I’m not trying to sound accusing, but that’s the way she takes it.

“Love has got nothing to do with it. I’ll do my duty, Nadezhda. As I sincerely hope you will. Even if that means saving him from making an absolute idiot of himself.”

“It’s true I couldn’t look after him full-time, Vera. We’d argue all the time. It would drive me mad. But I want him to be all right—to be happy. If Valentina makes him happy…”

“It’s not about happiness, Nadezhda, it’s about money. Can’t you see? I suppose with your leftish ideas you would welcome anyone who wanted to come and rip off hard-working people.”

“Leftish doesn’t come into it. It’s about what’s best for him.” (Smug voice. See? I am not a fascist like my sister.)

“Of course it is. Of course it is. Did I ever suggest otherwise?”

My sister rings the Home Office again. They tell her she must put it in writing. She writes again, anonymously. She telephones the register office where their wedding will be recorded. The registrar gives her a sympathetic hearing.

“But you know, at the end of the day if he’s determined to go ahead with it, there’s absolutely nothing I can do,” the registrar says.

“But the divorce from her husband in Ukraine—it came through just like that at the last minute. And after they were divorced, she went back to stay with him.”

“I’ll check the paperwork, but if it’s all in order…”

“What about the translation? She had to have it translated at the last minute at an agency in London. They might have confused a decree absolute with a decree nisi.” My sister is an expert on divorce.

“Of course I’ll look at it closely. But I don’t read Ukrainian. I have to take it at its face value. He’s an adult.”

“He’s not behaving like one.”

“Ah, well.”

She sounded like a typical social worker bureaucrat, my sister tells me. She will do her best, but of course she must stay within the rales.

We have flights of imagination in which we turn up at the wedding, sneaking in half-way through the service, while the couple are at the altar.

“I will wear my black suit,” says Vera, “which I wore to Mother’s funeral. At the point when the priest says, “…
and if anyone knows of any jiist cause or lawful impediment
…?” we will shout out from the back…” (I’ve always wanted to do that.)

“But what would we say?” I ask my sister.

We are both stumped.

My father and Valentina were married on 1 June at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, for Valentina is a Catholic. My father is an atheist, but he humours her. (It’s natural for women to be irrational, he says.)

He has given her £500 for a wedding dress: cream polyester silk, tightly fitting around the waist and hips, with a plunging neckline trimmed in frilled lace, through which we catch a glimpse of those modestly nestled Botticellian breasts. (I have seen the wedding pictures.) I can just imagine how he fusses around to make sure the photographer he has hired gets the best angle. He wants to show her off, his trophy, to all those gossipy doubters who scorned her. She needs the photo for the immigration officials.

The priest was a young Irishman who, says my father, looked like a teenager with spots and sticking-up hair. What did he make of this oddly assorted couple as he blessed their union? Did he know that the bride was a divorcee? Did he feel just a twinge of unease? The Zadchuks, her only Ukrainian friends, are also Catholics from western Ukraine. All the other Ukrainians in the congregation, my mother’s friends invited to the wedding by my father, are Orthodox from the east. I suppose the youth and spottiness of the priest confirmed all their suspicions about Catholicism.

Her uncle from Selby is in the group picture, and Stanislav, and some friends she met at work They have that smug dressed-up look of people brazening out a sham. Bob Turner is not there.

After the wedding, people who some two years ago sat in our front room after my mother’s funeral, now come back to the house again to toast the happy couple in vodka, nibble Tesco-bought snacks and talk about…I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I can imagine the gossip, the scandal. Half his age. Look at her bosom—how she waves it under a man’s nose. Greasepaint on her face. The old man making a fool of himself. The shame of it.

Crap car

I
t’s three weeks after the wedding, and I still haven’t met my new stepmother.

“So when can we come and meet the lucky bride?” I ask my father.

“Not yet. Not yet.”

“But when?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not yet?”

“She isn’t here yet.”

“Not there? Where is she?”

“Never mind where is she. Not here.”

Stubborn old man. He won’t tell me anything. But I find out anyway. I trick him.

“What kind of a wife is that? Won’t even live with her husband?”

“Soon she will come. In three weeks. When Stanislav’s school finishes.”

“What difference does it make’ when school term finishes? If she loved you she would be here right now.”

“But his house is right next to the school. It is more convenient for Stanislav.”

“Hall Street? Where Bob Turner lives? So she’s still with Bob Turner?”

“Yes. No. But the relationship is quite Platonic now. She has assured me.” (He pronounces it with three syllables—a-shoo-red.)

Fool. Taken for a ride. No point in arguing with him now.

It’s mid-August, and hot, by the time we go to visit. The fields are humming with combine harvesters that crawl up and down like great cockroaches. Some fields have already been harvested, and the huge round hay bales, wrapped in black polythene, lie randomly among the stubble like broken bits of giant machines—nothing picturesque about these Cambridgeshire harvests. The mechanical hedge cutters have already been out, slashing back the dog roses and brambles that crowd the hedgerows. Soon it will be time for stubble-burning in the cornfields, and potato and pea fields will be sprayed with chemical defoliants.

My mother’s garden, however, is still a refuge for birds and insects. The trees are heavy with fruit—not ripe yet, give you tummy-ache—and wasps and flies are already gorging themselves on the windfalls, while greedy finches feast on gnats, blackbirds dig for grubs and fat buzzing bumble-bees thrust themselves into the open labia of foxgloves. Roses pink and red battle it out with bindweed in the flower-beds. The downstairs dining-room window that overlooks the garden is open and my father is sitting there with his glasses on and a book on his knees. There’s a tabledoth on the table instead of newspaper, and some plastic flowers in a vase.

“Hi, Pappa.” I lean forward and kiss his cheek. Stubbly. “Hi, Dyid,” says Anna. “Hi, Nikolai,” says Mike.

“Aha. Very nice you come. Nadia. Anushka. Michael.”

Hugs all round. He looks well.

“How are you getting on with your book, then, Dyid?” asks Anna. She adores her grandfather, and thinks he is a genius. And for her sake I gloss over his peculiarities, his distasteful sexual awakening, his lapses of personal hygiene.

“Good. Good. I am soon coming to most interesting part. Development of caterpillar track. Significant moment in history of mankind.”

“Shall I put the kettle on, Pappa?”

“So tell me about the caterpillars,” says Anna without irony.

“Aha! You see in prehistoric times, great stones were moved on wooden rollers made out of tree-trunks. Look.” On the table he lines up a row of sharp-pointed 2H pencils, and puts a book on top of them. “Some men are pushing the stone, but others—after the stone has passed over the roller—they must pick up the tree from the back of the stone and run round to put it in the front. In caterpillar track, this movement of rollers is done through chains and linkages.”

Pappa, Anna and Mike take turns pushing the book over the pencils, and moving the pencils from the back to the front, faster and faster.

I go into the kitchen and prepare teacups on a tray, pour milk into a jug and hunt for biscuits. So where is she? Is she at home? Is she still hiding from us? Then I see her—a large blonde woman, sauntering down the garden towards us on high-heeled peep-toe mules. Her gait is lazy, contemptuous, as though she can barely be bothered to stir herself to greet us. A denim mini-skirt rides high above her knees; a pink sleeveless top stretches around voluptuous breasts that bob up and down as she walks. I stare. Such a wanton expanse of dimpled, creamy flesh. Plump bordering on fat. As she comes closer I see that her hair, which tumbles Bardot-style in a tousled pony-tail over bare shoulders, is bleached, showing an inch of brown at the roots. A broad, handsome face. High cheekbones. Flared nostrils. Eyes wide set, golden brown like syrup, and outlined in black Cleopatra lines that flick up at the corners. The mouth curls into a pout that is almost a sneer, drawn in pale peach-pink lipstick that extends beyond the line of the lips, as though to exaggerate their fullness.

Tart. Bitch. Cheap slut. This woman who has taken the place of my mother. I stretch my hand out and bare my teeth in a smile.

“Hallo, Valentina. How nice to meet you at last.”

Her hand in mine is cold, limp, no grip. The long fingernails are varnished in peach-pink pearlised nail-polish to match the lips. I see myself through her eyes—small, skinny, dark, no bust. Not a real woman. She smiles at Mike, a slow, wicked smile.

“You like vodka?”

“I’ve made a pot of tea,” I say.

My father’s eyes are fixed on her as she moves about the room.

When I was sixteen my father forbade me to wear make-up. He made me go upstairs and wash it offbefore I could go out.

“Nadia, if all women were to wear paint on their faces, just think, there could be no more natural selection. The inevitable result would be the uglification of the species. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

Such an intellectual. Why couldn’t he be like normal fathers, and just say he didn’t like it? Now look at him drooling over this painted Russian tart. Or maybe he is now so short-sighted he can’t see that she is wearing make-up. He probably thinks she was born with pale peach pearlised lips and black Cleopatra flick-ups at the corners of her eyes.

Now another figure appears in the doorway, a boy in his teens. A bit on the plump side, childish freckled face, chipped front tooth, curly brown hair, round glasses.

“You must be Stanislav,” I gush.

“Yes I am.” Charming chipped-tooth smile.

“Lovely to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you. Let’s all have some tea.”

Anna looks him up and down, but her face gives nothing away. He is younger than she is, and therefore of no interest.

We sit awkwardly around the table. Stanislav is the only one who appears to be relaxed. He tells us about his school, his favourite teacher, his least favourite teacher, his favourite football team, his favourite pop group, his waterproof sports watch which he lost at Lake Balaton, his new Nike trainers, his favourite food, which is pasta, his concern that the other kids will tease him if he gets fat, the party he went to on Saturday, his friend Gary’s new puppy. His voice is confident, pleasantly inflected, his accent delightful. He is perfectly at ease. No one else says anything. The heavy weight of all the unsaid things bears down on us like storm clouds. Outside, a few drops of rain fall and we hear thunder in the distance. My father closes the window. Stanislav carries on talking.

After tea I take the cups to the sink to wash up bjut Valentina gestures me away. She pulls on rubber gloves over her plump peach-pearl-tipped fingers, puts on a frilly apron, and whips up a lather in the bowl.

“I do,” she says. “You go.”

“We go to cemetery,” says my father.

“I’ll come with you,” says Stanislav.

“No Stanislav, please, stay and help your mother.”

He will be telling us about his favourite graveyards next.

When we get back from the cemetery, we have another cup of tea, and then it’s dinner time. Valentina will cook for us, my father says; she is a good cook. We sit around the table and wait. Stanislav tells us about a game of football in which he scored twice. Mike, Anna and I smile politely. My father beams with pride. Meanwhile Valentina puts on her frilly apron and busies herself in the kitchen. She reheats six ready-cooked chilled meals, roast meat slices in gravy with peas and potatoes, and places them on the table with a flourish.