I see him dispassionately for a moment, and I am struck by how old he is, how bent and shuffling his gait. But his eyes are aflame. He rings the bell. There is no reply. He rings again. And again. And again. Longer and longer. After a long while, there is a grating sound of a sash window being opened. My father looks up eagerly. He is holding out the envelope. His hands are shaking. We all hold our breath, expecting to see a beautiful blonde with an enormous bust, but instead, a man pokes his head out of the window. He is maybe forty, with a fuzz of brown hair and a white shirt, open at the neck.
“Piss off, will you? Just piss off!”
My father is speechless. He extends the envelope with his trembling hands.
The brown-haired man ignores it.
“Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble already? First the letter from the solicitor, then pestering her at her work, now following her home. You’ve upset her. Now just piss off and leave her alone!” He slams the window shut.
My father seems to shrink and crumple on the spot where he stands. Mike puts an arm round his shoulder and leads him back to the car. When we get back to the house, he can barely speak.
Mike says, “I think you had a lucky escape there, Nikolai. Why don’t you put the money back in the bank tomorrow, and forget about her.”
My father nods dumbly.
“Do you think I am so very foolish?” he asks Mike.
“No, no,” says Mike. “Any man can lose his head over a beautiful woman.” He catches my eye and gives me a little apologetic smile.
My father perks up a bit. His masculinity is intact.
“Well, I will have nothing more to do with her. You are quite right.”
It’s getting late now. We say goodbye and prepare for the long drive back to Cambridge. As we are leaving the house, the phone rings, and we hear my father talking in Ukrainian. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but something in his tone makes me suspicious—a lingering, gentle note. I suppose I should stop, listen, intervene, but I’m tired, and I want to get home.
“Do you know how much money was in that envelope?” Mike asks.
We are driving through twilight, half-way home, and mulling over the events of the day.
“I saw there was quite a wad of notes. Maybe a hundred pounds, I’d say.”
“It’s just that I noticed the top note was a fifty. When you go to the bank to draw money out, they don’t usually give you fifties. They give you tens or twenties. Unless you’re taking a lot of money out.” He frowns with concentration into the bending road. “I think maybe we should find out.” He pulls to a halt abruptly outside a red telephone booth in a village. I see him fumbling for coins, dialling, talking, feeding the coin box, talking some more. Then he comes back to the car.
“Eighteen hundred pounds.”
“What?”
“In the envelope. Eighteen hundred pounds. Poor old man.”
“Poor old fool. It must be all his savings.”
“Apparently Valentina rang him and tried to get him to pay the money into her account.”
“She wasn’t interested in reading his poetry then?” (Ha ha.)
“He says he’ll put the money back in the bank tomorrow.”
We drive on. It is Sunday night, and there are few other cars on the road.
Dusk has fallen now, with strange streaks of light across the sky where the sun has gone down behind clouds. We have the windows down, and the scents of the country buffet our faces—hawthorn, cow parsley, silage.
It is about ten o’clock when we get home. Mike rings my father again. I listen on the extension.
“Just letting you know we got back safely, Nikolai. Are you sure you’ll be able to get to the bank tomorrow? I don’t like the thought of you having all that money in the house overnight. Can you put it somewhere safe?”
“Yes…no…” My father is agitated. “What if I give it to her after all?”
“Nikolai, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think you should put it in the bank, like you said you would.”
“But what if it’s too late? What if I given it her already?”
“When did you give it to her?”
“Tomorrow.” He is confused, and the wrong words come tumbling. “Tomorrow. Today. What it matters?”
“Hang on, Nikolai. Just-hang on.”
Mike puts on his coat and picks up the car keys. He looks terribly tired. In the early hours of next morning, he returns with the envelope, and stows the £1,800 safely in the drawer under his socks, until he can get to the bank tomorrow. I don’t know what happened to the poems.
Four
A rabbit and a chicken
I’m not sure at what point Valentina sweet-talked my father into handing over the money, but she got it in the end.
I know I have to report this to Vera but something makes me hold back. Every time I phone my father or my sister, it is like crossing a bridge from the world where I am an adult with responsibilities and a measure of power, to the cryptic world of childhood where I am at the mercy of other people’s purposes which I can neither control nor understand. Big Sister is the absolute monarch in that twilit world. She rules without demur or pity.
“My God, what an idiot he is!” she exclaims when I tell her about Valentina and the envelope of money. “We’ve got to stop him.” Big Sister is always certain.
“But, Vera, I think he’s really serious about it—about her. And if she makes him happy…”
“Really, Nadezhda, you are so gullible. We read about these people in the papers every day. Immigrants, asylum seekers, economic migrants. Call them what you will. It is always the most determined and ruthless people who make it over here, and then when they find it isn’t so easy to get a good job, they will turn to crime. Can’t you see what will happen if she comes and stays? We’ve simply got to stop her coming back from Ukraine.”
“But he’s so determined. I’m not sure we can stop it…” I’m transfixed between two certainties—his and hers. This is how it’s been all my life.
My sister telephones the Home Office. They tell her to put it in writing. If my father finds out he will not forgive her, as he has never forgiven her for anything before, so she writes anonymously:
She came here on a tourist visa. This is her second tourist visa. She has been working illegally. Her son is enrolled in an English school. Three weeks before her visa was due to expire she came up with the idea of marriage. Her intention is to marry Mr Mayevskyj in order to obtain a visa and work permit.
Then she telephones the British Embassy in Kiev. A bored-sounding young man with a blue-chip accent tells her that Valentina’s visa has been granted already. There was nothing in her application to indicate that she should be refused. But what about…? Vera lists the points she made in her letter. The young man gives the telephonic equivalent of a shrug.
“So you see I’m relying on you, Nadezhda,” Big Sis says.
I raise the subject a couple of weeks later, while we are sitting having lunch at my father’s house, Mike, my father and I. Tinned ham, boiled potatoes, boiled carrots. His daily diet. He has prepared it for us with pride.
“Have you heard from Valentina, Pappa?” (Voice chatty, conversational.)
“Yes, she has written. She is very well.”
“Where is she staying? Has she gone back to her husband?”
“Yes. She is staying there now. He is very educated type, by the way. Polytechnic director.”
“And what are her plans? Is she coming back to England?” Bright keeping-a-distance voice.
“Hmm. Maybe. I don’t know.”
He does know, but he won’t say.
“So who was the man with brown hair, the man in the window, who was so rude to you?”
“Aha. This is Bob Turner. A very decent type, by the way. A civil engineer.”
My father explains that Bob Turner is a friend of Valentina’s uncle in Selby. He has a house in Selby where he lives with his wife, and the house in Peterborough, which
was his mother’s, where he had installed Valentina and Stanislav.
“And what do you think is his relationship with Valentina?” It seems obvious to me, but I am trying to lead him through a sort of Platonic dialogue to see the truth.
“Aha, yes. It was a relationship. There was even some possibility that he would marry her, but his wife will not give him divorce. Of course this relationship is finished now.”
“Of course it’s not finished, Pappa. Can’t you see that you’re being taken for a ride?” I can hear my voice getting shrill. But he isn’t listening. A faraway look has come into his eyes. He has turned into an eighty-four-year-old teenager, tuned in to his private music.
“He paid for my naturalisation, by the way,” he murmurs, “so when I marry her, I will be British subject.”
When he marries her.
“But Pappa, ask yourself—why? Why did Bob Turner pay for you to be naturalised?”
“Why?” A little self-satisfied smile. “Why not?”
My Platonic dialogue hasn’t got me very far so I try another approach. I invoke the spirit of Big Sister.
“Pappa, have you talked to Vera about this business with Bob Turner? I think she would be very upset.”
“Why should I talk to her? It is absolutely none of her business.” His eyes refocus. His jaw twitches. He’s scared.
“Vera’s worried about you. We both promised Mother we would look after you.”
“She will look after me only to put me in my grave.”
He starts to cough violently. Particles of boiled carrot fly around the room and land on the walls. I fetch him a glass of water.
In the shadowy kingdom of childhood, where my sister was queen, my father was the exiled Pretender. A long time ago, they went to war against each other. It was so long ago that I don’t know what they first clashed about, and they have probably forgotten too. My father made a tactical retreat into the domain of his garage, his constructions of aluminium, rubber and wood, his coughing and his Big Ideas. From time to time he would surge forth in angry blazing forays directed towards my sister and, after she had left home, towards me.
“Pappa, what is all this bad-mouthing of Vera? Why do you two always argue? Why do you…?”
I hesitate to use the word ‘hate’. It is too strong, too irrevocable. My father starts to cough again.
“You know this Vera…She is terrible in temper. You should see the way she was pestering Ludmilla—you must give all to the granddaughters, you must make a codicil. All the time, even as she was dying. She is too much interested in money. And now she wants me to make my will like that, divided in three for the grandchildren. But I have said No. What you think?”
“I think you should leave it half and half,” I say. I’m not going to be drawn into his game.
Ha! So Big Sister is still scheming for the inheritance—though there is only the house and his Pensioners Bond left to divide. I don’t know whether to believe him. I don’t know what to believe. I have a sense of something terrible that has happened in the past, which no one will tell me about because even though I am in my forties I am still the baby: too young to understand. I believe what he says about how she obtained the codicil. But now he is playing a different game, trying to enlist me on his side against my sister.
“What you think if I make in my will to leave everything to you and Michael when I shall die?” he says, suddenly lucid. “I still think you should leave it half and half.”
“If you say so.” He sighs peevishly. I’m refusing to play.
I am secretly pleased to be the favoured one, but I am cautious. He is too unpredictable. Once, long ago, I was Daddy’s girl, trainee trail-rider apprentice engineer. I try to remember the things I once loved about him.
There was a time when my father used to sit me on the back of his motor-bike—“Take care, Kolyusha!” Mother would cry—and we would roar about the long, straight fenland lanes. The first bike he had was a 2500: Francis Barnett he rebuilt from scrap, each piece cleaned and restored by hand. Then a shiny black 3500: Vincent; then a 5000: Norton. I used to recite the names like a mantra. I remember how I would rush to the window when I heard the deep throb of the engine at the top of the road, and then he would come in, all wind-blown, with his goggles and his old Russian leather flying helmet, and say, “Who wants to come for a ride?”
“Me! Me! Take me!”
But that was before he discovered I had no aptitude for engineering.
After lunch my father snoozes, and I find the secateurs and go out into the garden to cut some roses for my mother’s grave. There has been rain, and the earth smells of roots and growth—a wild, disorderly growth. The red rose which rambles up the fence between us and the neighbours is strangled in bindweed, and nettles are sprouting up in patches where once the dill and parsley self-seeded. The lavender bushes my mother planted by the path have grown tall, sparse and leggy. Brown, rattling seed-heads of poppies and columbines jostle with willowherb in the flowerbeds, greedy for the black chocolate she fed them. Ah, she would sigh, there’s always work to do in a garden. Always something growing and something to be cut down. A soul can’t sit down for a moment.
The graveyard, too, is a place where life and death go side by side. A tortoiseshell cat has marked out his territory here, and patrols the hedge that separates the cemetery from the cornfields. A pair of fat thrushes are tugging at worms in the earth of a newly turned grave. Five more graves have appeared after hers; five more people have died in the village since she died. I read their tombstones. Dearly beloved…Mum…Sadly departed this life…Resting with Jesus…In eternity…A mole has been busy at work alongside the gravediggers, turning up mounds of earth here and there. There is a molehill above my mother’s grave. I like to think of the sleek black mole snuggled up with her down below in the dark. At her funeral, the vicar said she was in heaven, but she knew she was going down here into the ground, to be eaten by worms. (Never harm a worm, Nadezhda, it is the gardener’s friend.)
My mother understood about life and death. Once she brought a dead rabbit home from market, and skinned and gutted it on the kitchen table. She took out its red, bloody insides, pushed a straw into the windpipe, and blew into the lungs. Wide-eyed, I watched how the lungs went up and down.
“See, Nadezhda, this is how we breathe. We breathe and we live.”
Another time she brought home a live chicken. She took it into the back garden, gripped it between her knees as it struggled to get free and wrung its neck with a quick, light movement. The chicken twitched and went still.
“See, Nadezhda, this is how we die.”
Both the rabbit and the chicken were pot-roasted with garlic, shallots and herbs from the garden, and then when the meat was all eaten up, the bones were used for soup. Nothing was wasted.
I sit on the bench under the wild cherry tree in the cemetery and sort through my memories, but the harder I try to remember, the more I get confused about which are memories and which are stories. When I was little, my mother used to tell me family stories—but only the ones that had a happy ending. My sister also told me stories: her stories were strongly formulaic, with goodies (Mother, Cossacks) and baddies (Father, communists). Vera’s stories always had a beginning, a middle, an end, and a moral. Sometimes my father told me stories, too, but his stories were complicated in structure, ambiguous in meaning arid unsatisfactory in outcome, with lengthy digressions and packed with obscure facts. I preferred my mother’s and my sister’s tales.
I too have a story to tell. Once upon a time we were a family, my mother and father, my sister and I—not a happy family nor an unhappy one, but just a family that pootled along while children grew up and parents grew old. I remember a time when my sister and I loved each other, and my father and I loved each other. Maybe there was even a time when my father and my sister loved each other—that I can’t remember. We all loved Mother, and she loved all of us. I was the little girl with plaited hair gripping a stripy cat, whose photo stands on th
e mantelpiece. We spoke a different language from our neighbours and ate different food, and worked hard and kept out of everybody’s way, and we were always good so the secret police wouldn’t come for us in the night.
Sometimes, as a small child, I used to sit in the dark at the top of the stairs in my pyjamas, listening, straining to overhear my parents talking in the room below. What were they talking about? I could catch only phrases, fragments, but I caught the urgency in their voices. Or I would come into a room and notice the way their voices suddenly changed, their faces lighted into temporary smiles.
Were they talking about that other time, that other country? Were they talking about what happened in between their childhood time and mine—something so fearful that I must never know about it?
My sister is ten years older than me, and had one foot in the adult world. She knew things I didn’t know, things that were whispered but never spoken about. She knew grown-up secrets so terrible that just the knowledge of them had scarred her heart.
Now that Mother has died, Big Sis has become the guardian of the family archive, the spinner of stories, the custodian of the narrative that defines who we are. This role, above all others, is the one I envy and resent. It is time, I think, to find out the whole story, and to tell it in my own way.
Five
A short history of tractors in Ukrainian
What do I know about my mother? Ludmilla (Milla, Millochka) Mitrofanova was born in 1912 in Novaya Aleksandria, a small garrison town in what is now Poland, but was then on the western flank of the Russian Empire. Her father, Mitrofan Ocheretko, was a cavalry officer, a war hero, and an outlaw. Her mother Sonia was nineteen years old when Ludmilla was born, a trainee schoolteacher, a survivor.
The Ocheretkos were not gentry but wealthy peasants from the Poltava region of Ukraine, who lived on the edge of a khutor (settlement) and farmed some thirty hectares on the eastern bank of the Sula River. They were hard-working, hard-drinking Cossacks who had somehow amassed enough wealth to pay the necessary bribe to win a lucrative contract to supply horses to the Tsar’s army. This in rum allowed them to save up enough to pay the considerably greater sum needed to secure for their eldest son, Mitrofan, a place in the military academy.
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