A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Part 15

"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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s. 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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.

"Rolls-Royce kaput. Lada kaput. Soon Rover kaput. Only walking is not kaput. Ha ha."

"Soon you kaput," says Valentina. Then she catches my eye and gives a little laugh as if to say, only joking.

She drives off with Stanislav in the Rover, leaving behind a cloud of smoke and a smell of burning. While Mike and my father continue to pore over the Roller, I go inside and search the Yellow Pages.

"Hallo, is that Mr Eric Pike?"

"How can I help?" The voice is both oily and gritty, like burnt engine oil.

"I'm the daughter of Mr Mayevskyj. You sold him a car."

"Ah yes." Gritty chuckle. "Valentina's Roller. Came from the Glaswyne estate, you know."

"Mr Pike, how could you do a thing like that? You know the car doesn't even go."

"Well now, Miss er...Mrs er...You see Valentina said that her husband was a wizard engineer. Aeronautics. You see I happen to know a bit about planes." The oily gritty voice becomes confiding. "You see some of the world leaders in aeronautics in the 19305 were Ukrainian. Sikorsky-invented the helicopter. Lozinsky-worked on the MiG. Saw them in action myself in Korea, you know. Fine little fighters. So when Valentina told me about her husband, how he promised her he would get it going in no time...Believe me, I had my doubts, but she was very persuasive. You know what she's like."

"My father's looked at it, and he says he can't fix it. Perhaps you could just take it away and give him his money back."

"Five hundred quid is a very good price for a vintage Roller."

"Not if it doesn't go."

There is silence on the other end of the phone.

"Mr Pike, I know what's going on. I know about you and Valentina."

Silence again, then a soft click. Then the dialling tone.

Lady Di likes the Roller. There is a window on the rear pa.s.senger side that does not fully close, where he can squeeze in. He invites his friends round, too, and they party all night on the sumptuous leather seats, and then spray a bit of p.i.s.s around to mark that they were there. Lady Di's girlfriend is a shy skinny tabby, who, it soon becomes apparent, is pregnant, and who likes to curl up on the driver's seat, sinking her claws into the soft leather.

It is unseasonably wet in June. It rains and rains until the lawn is a sea of mud. The Roller sinks deeper and deeper; gra.s.s and weeds grow tall around it. Lady Di's girlfriend has her babies on the front seat of the Roller-there are four of them-blind, soft, mewing bits of fluff that suck at their skinny mother, pawing her belly in rhythm. Pappa, Valentina and Stanislav are enchanted with them, and try to bring them into the house, but the girlfriend moves them all back, carrying them one by one by the scruff of the neck.

Vera's visit to Pappa comes very shortly after the kittens are born. She drives up from Putney in her battered open-top Golf GT, a love-gift from Big d.i.c.k in the days when he still loved her (of course it wasn't battered then). She arrives in the middle of the afternoon, while Stanislav and Valentina are out, and Pappa is snoozing in his armchair with the radio on full blast. He wakes up to find her standing over him, and lets out an involuntary scream: "No! No!"

"Oh, for goodness' sake be quiet, Pappa. We've had quite enough melodrama this week already, thank you," Vera barks in her Big Sis voice. "Now!" She looks around, as though Valentina might be hiding in a corner. "Where is she?"

Father sits in the armchair gripping the armrests and saying nothing.

"Where is she, Pappa?"

He bites his lips together theatrically and stares straight ahead.

"Pappa, for goodness' sake, I've driven all the way up from Putney to try to get you out of this mess you've got yourself into, and you can't even bring yourself to talk to me."

"You tell me to be quiet, so I am quiet." He damps his lips together again.

Big Sis marches through every room in the house, slamming doors as she goes. She even looks in the outhouse and the greenhouse. Then she goes back into the room where my father is sitting. He hasn't moved. His lips are still pressed tight.

"Really, Nadia," she tells me, "I could quite understand why Valentina threw a cup of water at him. I felt like doing just the same. I suppose he was trying to demonstrate how clever he was." I say nothing. My lips are clamped tight. I am trying not to laugh. "Of course it was easy to get him talking again. I just asked him about Korolev and the s.p.a.ce programme."

"And what happened in the end? Did you meet Valentina?"

"But I thought she was quite wonderful. So...dynamic."

Apparently, Big Sis and Valentina got on like a house on fire. Valentina admired Vera's style and panache. Vera admired Valentina's up-front s.e.xuality and her ruthlessness. They both agreed that Father is pathetic, crazy and contemptible.

"But the peach pearlised nail-polish? The high-heeled peep-toe mules? The Roller on the lawn?"

"Ah yes. Of course she is a tart. And a criminal. But still, I had to admire her."

My heart sinks. I have been so looking forward to this confrontation: the Zadchuk matrimonial canon v. Mrs Divorce Expert; the green satin rocket-launcher v. the Gucci handbag. I realise how much I have been depending on Big Sis to take on Valentina. Now I recognise that in some ways they are two of a kind.

"Poor Pappa. I know he's a bit eccentric, but I wouldn't call him contemptible."

"Look at all the trouble he has caused everybody-us, the authorities, even Valentina. In the end, she will realise that she would have been better latching on to somebody else. It would have been better if he could just have said no right from the beginning. He thinks he really is a suitable match for a tarty thirty-six-year-old. If that isn't contemptible, tell me what is."

"But she led him on. She flattered him. She made him feel young and s.e.xy."

"He let himself be flattered, because in his heart he believes that he is rather superior. He thinks he's so clever he can outwit the system. It's not the first time he's done something like this."

"What do you mean?"

"There are a lot of things you don't know, Nadia. Did you know, he almost had Baba Sonia sent off to Siberia?"

"I remember a story Pappa told me-it was all about the Ukrainian pioneers of aircraft design. And I remember Mother's story about how Baba Sonia got her front teeth knocked out."

After he graduated from the Aeronautical Inst.i.tute at Kiev in 1936, my father wanted to go to the University of Kharkiv, where Lozinsky and others were pioneering developments in jet propulsion. But instead he was sent east to Perm, in the foothills of the Urals, to teach in a Soviet air force training college. He hated Perm: full of drunken soldiers; no intellectual or cultural life; thousands of miles away from home; thousands of miles from Ludmilla, who was now pregnant with their first child. How to get himself sent home? Nikolai had a cunning plan. He would fail the security check. On one of the reams of forms which had to be filled in, he told the authorities that he was married to an enemy of the people. And just to put himself in an even worse light, he invented an older brother for Ludmilla, a counter-revolutionary terrorist living in Finland, dedicated to the overthrow of the Soviet state.

The authorities could hardly believe their luck. Naturally they wanted to know more about this counter-revolutionary brother. They arrested Baba Sonia and subjected her to several days of intensive interrogation and beatings. Where was this older son? Why was he not mentioned on any of her paperwork? What else did she have to hide? Was she, like her late husband, a traitorous enemy of the people?

Sonia Ocheretko had been lucky to escape in 1930, when her husband was taken away and shot. But those were just the first ripples of the purges. By 1937, the waves of arrests were mounting. Now shooting was too good for the enemies of the people-they were to be sent away to camps in Siberia for corrective re-education through labour.

Aunty Shura came to the rescue. She told the examiner how, as a young trainee doctor, she had travelled to Novaya Alek-sandria in 1912 to deliver her sister's first baby, my mother Ludmilla. She signed a sworn statement that Sonia Ocheretko had been a primigravida. It helped that Shura's husband was a friend of Voros.h.i.+lov.

But Sonia the survivor never recovered from her six days of interrogation. Her forehead was scarred above the eye and her front teeth were knocked out. Her movements which had been quick and lithe became lumbering and painful, and she blinked nervously all the time. Her spirit was broken.

"Of course Aunty Shura threw him out after that. They had nowhere else to go, so they went back to live with Baba Sonia in her flat. Really, it was unforgivable."

"But Baba Sonia forgave him."

"She forgave him for Mother's sake. But Mother never forgave him."

"She must have forgiven him in the end. She stayed with him for sixty years."

"She stayed with him for our sake. For you and me, Nadia. Poor Mother."

I wonder-is this true? Or is Vera projecting her own drama into the past?

"But Vera, does that mean you're going to sit back and let Valentina abuse our father? Rip him off? Maybe even murder him?"

"No of course not. Really, Nadezhda, I can't understand how you could want me to sit back and do nothing in such a situation. We have to defend him, for Mother's sake. Useless though he is, he is still our family. We can't let her win."

(So Big Sis is still on board!) "Vera, why does Father always go on about you smoking? He's got a thing about cigarettes."

"Cigarettes? He talked to you about cigarettes?"

"He says you're obsessed with divorce and cigarettes."

"What else did he say?"

"Nothing else. Why?"

"Forget it. It doesn't matter."

"Obviously it does does matter." matter."

"Nadia, why do you always go scrabbling around in the past?" Her voice is tense, brittle. "The past is filthy. It's like a sewer. You shouldn't play there. Leave it alone. Forget it."

Eighteen The baby alarm Valentina has received a wedding invitation from her sister in Selby. She has shown it to my father, waving it under his nose with a few nasty gibes. The accompanying letter describes the husband-to-be as a doctor, forty-nine years old, married (no longer married, of course) with two children of school age (both in private school) and a good house with good garden and double garage. The no-t.i.ts wife is making plenty trouble but husband is too much in love, no problem.

In double garage is Jaguar and second car Renault. Jaguar is good, says Valentina, but not as good as Rolls-Royce. Renault is little better than Lada. Nevertheless, her sister's letter has fired up in Valentina a new dissatisfaction with her plenty-money-meanie no-good husband and the second-rate life-style he has condemned her to.

As my father burbles on down the phone, stopping from time to time for a violent fit of coughing, I cannot help glancing across at Mike, who is sitting there with his feet up and a gla.s.s of beer in his hand, watching the Channel Four News. He looks so decent, so nice, greying a bit, with the slight beginnings of a paunch, but handsome still, so loved, so-husbandly. But...an anxious thought brushes my mind.

The baby alarm What is it with men? What is it with men?

And now, with another fit of coughing, my father comes to the nub of his telephone call. Valentina requires more money, and he must liquidate some a.s.sets. But what a.s.sets does he have? Only the house. Ah! At the back of the house is a large area of land which is good for nothing. This he could sell. (He is talking about Mother's garden!) He has had a discussion with a neighbour, and the neighbour is willing to take it off his hands for a sum of three thousand pounds.

My heart is pounding now, my eyes so misted with rage that I can hardly see, yet I must control my voice.

"Don't rush into anything, Pappa. There's no hurry. Maybe this sister's husband-to-be will turn out to be a meanie as well. After all he must provide for his wife and his private-school children. Maybe the wife will get the Jaguar, and the sister will have the Renault. Maybe Valentina will realise how lucky she is. Just wait and see."

"Hmm."

As for selling Mother's garden-my jaw is clenched tight so that I can barely get the words out through my teeth-these things are often more complicated than they seem. The deeds would have to be redrawn. Probably most of the money would be swallowed up in solicitors' fees. And the offer from the neighbour-well that is quite a paltry amount. If he had planning permission to build another house there, why the plot of land would fetch ten times as much. Just imagine how pleased Valentina would be. (And planning permission takes ages and ages.) Would he like me to ask a solicitor? Would he like me to contact the council about planning permission? Should I talk to Vera?

"Hmm. Solicitor yes. Council yes. Vera no."

"But probably Vera will find out. Imagine how upset upset" (he knows I mean furious) "she will be."

Vera did find out. I told her. She was both upset and furious.