A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Part 20

Valentina bends down and puts her face very close to my father's.

"You think you clever clever. Soon you will be dead, Mr Clever Engineer."

My father lets out a shriek, and what he later describes as a 'rear end discharge'.

"Already you look like corpse-soon you will be. You carca.s.s of dog. You walking skeleton."

She leans over him, pinioning him to the chair with one hand on each side of his head, while Mrs Zadchuk continues to photocopy the correspondence from Ms Carter. When she has finished, she bundles together the papers, unplugs the photocopier, and stows them all in a large Tesco carrier bag.

"Come, Valenka. We have all what we need. Leave this bad-stink corpse."

Valentina stops in the doorway and blows him a mock kiss.

"You living dead. You graveyard escapee."

Twenty-Three.

The graveyard escapee Maybe Valentina knew, or maybe it was an inspired guess, but my father is indeed a graveyard escapee.

It happened in the summer of 1941 when the German troops swept into Ukraine and the Red Army fled eastwards, burning bridges and fields behind them. My father was in Kiev with his regiment. He was a reluctant soldier. They had shoved a bayonet into his hands and told him he had to fight for the motherland, but he didn't want to fight-not for the motherland, not for the Soviet state, not for anybody. He wanted to sit at his desk with his slide rule and his sheets of blank paper and puzzle over the drag-lift equation. But there was no time for that-no time for anything except stab and run, shoot and run, dive for cover and run, and run and run. Eastwards, through the harvest-yellow wheat fields of Poltava, under a blazing blue sky, the army ran, to regroup finally at Stalingrad. Only the flag they followed wasn't yellow and blue: it was scarlet with yellow.

Maybe this was why, or maybe he had just had enough, but my father didn't go with them. He slipped away from his regiment and found a place to hide. In the old Jewish cemetery in a quiet leafy quarter of the city he lowered himself into a broken tomb, replacing the heavy stones behind him, and sheltered there, cheek to cheek with the dead. Sometimes, as he crouched in the dark, he could hear the voices of bereaved Jews wailing above his head. He stayed there in the cool, damp silence for almost a month, living on the food he had brought with him, and, when that ran out, on grubs, snails and frogs. He drank from the trickle of water that made a puddle in the earth when it rained, and contemplated his closeness to death, adjusting his eyes to the darkness.

Except that it was not completely dark there was a gap between the stones through which sunlight beamed at a certain time of day, and through which, when he pressed his eye to it, he could see the world outside. He could see the gravestones, half-overgrown with pink roses, and beyond that, a cherry tree, laden with ripening fruit. He became obsessed with the tree. All day he watched the cherries ripen while he hunted in the dark underground for grubs which he wrapped in a handful of leaves or gra.s.s to make them more palatable.

There came a day-an evening-when he could bear it no longer. As dusk fell, he crept out of his hiding-place and climbed the tree, and plucked fistfuls of cherries, cramming them into his mouth. More and more, so that the juice ran down his chin. He spat the stones in all directions, till his clothes were covered in smatterings of cherry juice, like blood. It seemed he could never get enough. And then he filled his pockets and his cap, and stole back to his underground den.

But someone had seen him. Someone reported him. At daybreak, soldiers came and dragged him out and arrested him as a spy. As they grabbed him and manhandled him into the truck, the acid ma.s.s of cherries in his belly combined with the terror of arrest caused him to soil himself shamefully.

They took him to an old mental hospital on the edge of the city which was their command headquarters, and locked him in a bare room with bars over the windows, to sit in his stench and await interrogation. My father was not a brave man, not the heroic type. He knew how brutally the Germans treated captive Ukrainians. What would you or I do in that situation? My father smashed a window with his fist, and with a shard of broken gla.s.s, he cut his throat.

The Germans did not give up on him so easily. They found a doctor, an aged Ukrainian psychiatrist who had stayed behind in the hospital to look after his patients. He had never st.i.tched together a wound since his days as a medical student. He repaired my father's throat with rough st.i.tches of b.u.t.ton thread, leaving a jagged scar that caused him to cough when he ate for ever after. But he saved my father's life. And he told the Germans that the larynx was irreparably damaged, that the man would never be able to speak under interrogation, and in any case, he was no spy but a poor lunatic-a former mental patient who had tried to harm himself before. So the Germans let him go.

He stayed in the hospital, under the care of the elderly psychiatrist, with whom he played chess and discussed philosophy and science. As the summer pa.s.sed, the Germans too moved on, pursuing the Red Army eastwards. When he thought it was safe, he slipped away, made his way back through the German lines, westwards, towards Dashev to join his family.

But Mother and Vera had already gone. Two weeks before my father returned, the Germans had taken over the village, put all the able-bodied young adults on to trains, and transported them to Germany to work in munitions factories. Ostarbeiter Ostarbeiter, they were called: workers from the East. They had wanted to leave Vera behind-she was only five-but Mother had kicked up such a fuss that she came too. Father stayed in Dashev for long enough to recover his strength, then he talked his way on to a train and followed them to the West.

"No, no," says Vera. "It didn't happen like that. They were plums, not cherries. And it was the NKVD that caught him, not the Germans. The Germans came afterwards. And when he came back to Dashev, we were still there. I remember him coming back, with this terrible scar on his throat. Baba Nadia looked after him. He couldn't eat anything except soup."

"But he told me himself..."

"No, he went west first, got on a transport to Germany. When he told them he was an engineer they gave him a job. Then he sent for Mother and me."

That is the story of how my family left Ukraine-two different stories, my mother's and my father's.

"He was an economic migrant, then, not an asylum seeker?"

"Nadia, please. Why are you raising these questions now? We should be concentrating our energies on the divorce-not on this endless carping about the past. There is nothing to say. Nothing to be learned. What's over is over."

There is a catch in her voice, as though I have touched a nerve. Can I have hurt her?

"I'm sorry, Vera." (I am am sorry.) sorry.) It dawns on me: Big Sis is no more than a carapace. My real sister is somebody different, somebody I am only just beginning to know.

"Now." Her voice steadies. She takes control. "You say Valentina has copied all his papers. There can be only one reason for this-she wants to use them for her divorce hearing. You must let Laura Carter know at once."

"I will."

Ms Carter is incandescent when I tell her about the photocopying of the papers.

"Some of these solicitors are hardly better than their crooked clients. If these papers are shown in court, we shall protest. Did you get anywhere with that private detective?"

Justin delivers on his promise. A week or so later he telephones to say that he has tracked down Valentina: she and Stanislav are living in two rooms above the Imperial Hotel. She works behind the bar, and Stanislav washes pots. (I had guessed as much.) She is also claiming social security benefit, and housing benefit on a rented terraced house in Norwell Street, which she is subletting to a Ghanaian trainee audiologist who had somehow wandered into the Imperial Hotel for a drink. Does she have a lover? Justin is not sure. He has spotted a dark blue Volvo estate parked nearby once or twice, but not overnight. Eric Pike is a long-standing regular at the Imperial Hotel. There is no evidence that will stand up in court.

I thank Justin profusely and put a cheque in the post.

I telephone Vera, but her line is busy, and while I am waiting, I decide to make a call to Chris Tideswell at the Spalding Police Station. I tell her about the withdrawal of the appeal at the tribunal, and I tell her that Valentina is now living at the Imperial Hotel with her son, where they are both illegally employed.

"Hm," says Chris Tideswell in her chirpy young-girl voice. "Yer a right detective. Yer should join the force. I'll see what I can do."

Vera is delighted with Justin's findings.

"You see, it confirms what I always believed. She is a criminal. Not satisfied with ripping off Pappa, she is also ripping off our country." (Our country?) "And what about this Ghanaian? Probably he is also some kind of asylum seeker."

"Justin said he's a trainee audiologist at the hospital."

"Well, he could still be an asylum seeker, couldn't he?"

"All we know is that he's renting the house from her. Probably she's ripping him off too."

There are ten years between Vera and me-ten years that gave me the Beatles, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the student uprising of 1968, and the birth of feminism, which taught me to see all women as sisters-all women except my sister, that is.

"And maybe he is subletting rooms in the house to other asylum seekers." (She won't let it go.) "You see when you enter this shady world of criminality, you discover that there are layers upon layers of deceit, and you have to be both clever and persistent to find out the truth."

"Vera, he's a trainee audiologist. He works with deaf people."

"That doesn't mean anything, Nadia."

Once, not so long ago, Big Sis's att.i.tudes would send me into a rage of righteousness, but now I see them in their historical context, and I smile to myself in a superior way.

"When we first came here, Vera, people could have said the same things about us-that we were ripping off the country, gorging ourselves on free orange juice, growing fat on NHS cod-liver oil. But they didn't. Everyone was kind to us."

"But that was different. We We were different." (We were white, of course, for one thing, I could say, but I hold my tongue.) "We worked hard and kept our heads down. We learned the language and integrated. We never claimed benefits. We never broke the law." were different." (We were white, of course, for one thing, I could say, but I hold my tongue.) "We worked hard and kept our heads down. We learned the language and integrated. We never claimed benefits. We never broke the law."

"/broke the law. I smoked dope. I was arrested at Greenham Common. Pappa got so upset that he tried to catch the train back to Russia."

"But that's exactly my point, Nadia. You and your lem'sh friends-you never really appreciated what England had to offer-stability, order, the rule of law. If you and your kind prevailed, this country would be just like Russia-bread queues everywhere, and people getting their hands chopped off."

"That's Afghanistan. Chopping hands off is the rule of law."

Both of us have raised our voices. This is turning into an old-style argument.

"Whatever. You see my point," she says dismissively.

"What I appreciated about growing up in England was the tolerance, liberalism, everyday kindness." (I drive home my point by wagging my finger in the air, even though she can't see me.) "The way the English always stick up for the underdog."

"You are confusing the underdog with the scrounger, Nadia. We were poor, but we were never scroungers. The English people believe in fairness. Fair play. Like cricket." (What does she she know about cricket?) "They play by the rules. They have a natural sense of discipline and order." know about cricket?) "They play by the rules. They have a natural sense of discipline and order."

"No no. They're quite anarchic. They like to see the little man stick two fingers up to the world. They like to see the big shot get his come-uppance."

"On the contrary, they have a perfectly preserved cla.s.s system, in which everyone knows where they belong."

See how we grew up in the same house but lived in different countries?

"They make fun of their rulers."

"But they like strong rulers."

If Vera mentions Mrs Thatcher, I shall put the phone down. There is a short pause, in which we both consider our options. I try an appeal to our shared past.

"Remember the woman on the bus, Vera? The woman in the fur coat?"

"What woman? What bus? What are you talking about?"

Of course she remembers. She hasn't forgotten the smell of diesel, the swish of the windscreen wipers, the unsteady sway of the bus as it churned newly fallen snow into slush; coloured lights outside the windows; Christmas Eve 1952. Vera and I, m.u.f.fled against the cold, snuggling up against Mother on the back seat. And a kind woman in a fur coat who leaned across the aisle and pressed sixpence into Mother's hand: "For the kiddies at Christmas."

"The woman who gave Mother sixpence."

Mother, our mother, did not dash the coin in her face; she mumbled, "Thank you, lady," and slipped it into her pocket. The shame of it!

"Oh, that. I think she was a bit drunk. You mentioned it once before. I don't know why you go on about it."

"It was that moment-more than anything that happened to me afterwards-that turned me into a lifelong socialist."

There is silence on the other end of the telephone and for a moment I think she has hung up on me. Then: "Maybe it was what turned me into the woman in the fur coat."

Twenty-Four.

Mystery man Vera and I decide that together we will confront Valentina outside the Imperial Hotel.

"It is the only thing to do. Otherwise she will keep on evading us," says Vera.

"But she might just turn and run away when she sees us."

"Then we will follow her. We will track her down to her lair."

"But what if she has Stanislav with her? Or Eric Pike?"

"Don't be such a baby, Nadia. If necessary we will call for the police."

"Wouldn't it be better to leave it to the police in the first place? I spoke to this young woman officer in Spalding who seemed really sympathetic."

"Do you still believe that the law will oust her? Nadia, if we don't do this, n.o.body will."

"OK." Although I make objections, I am excited by the idea. "Maybe we should arrange for five-o'clock-shadow Justin to be there. Just as back-up."

But before we can arrange a suitable date, my father calls in a state of great agitation. A mystery man has been seen hanging around the house.

"Mystery man. Since yesterday. Peeping in at all windows. Then disappears."

"But Pappa, who is it? You should call the police."

I am alarmed. It seems obvious that someone is casing the house for a break-in.

"No no! No police! Definitely no police!"

My father's experience of the police has not been positive.

"Call a neighbour, then, Pappa. And confront him together. Find out who he is. It's most likely a burglar, looking to see what you have worth stealing."

"Does not look like burglar. Middle-aged. Short. Wears brown suit."

I am intrigued.

"We'll come on Sat.u.r.day. Lock your doors and windows until then."

We arrive at about three o'clock on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It is mid-October. The sun is already low in the sky, and a fenland mist shrouds the countryside in a damp haze, lingering around the low-lying fields and marshes, stealing like a wraith out of drainage culverts and watercourses. The leaves have started to turn. The garden is thick with windfalls, apples, pears and plums, over which a cloud of small flies hovers.

My father is asleep in his armchair by the window, his head thrown back, mouth open, a silver thread of saliva running from his lip to his collar. Lady Di's girlfriend is curled up on his lap, her striped belly quietly rising and falling. A miasma of somnolence hangs over the house and garden, as if a fairytale witch has cast a spell, and the sleeper is waiting to be awakened with a kiss.