“Could we have a bottle of wine?” asks Mike, but the restaurant is unlicensed.
We will have to make our own cheer.
We order. My father loves lamb bhuna. My daughter is a vegetarian. My husband likes dishes that are very hot. I like oven-baked dishes. Valentina and Stanislav have never eaten Indian food before. They are wary, condescending.
“I want only meat. Plenty meat,” says Valentina. She chooses a steak from the English selection. Stanislav chooses roast chicken. We wait. We listen to the pop music and the babble of the DJ. We watch the frost glint on the car roofs. The proprietor stands behind the bar and watches us discreetly. What is he waiting for?
Anna squeezes up beside Mike and starts to fold his napkin into an elaborate origami flower. She is a Daddy’s girl, as I once was. Watching them together makes me feel sad and happy at the same time.
“Well,” says Mike. “Christmas again. Isn’t it good to go out for a meal together? We should do it more often.”
“Great,” I say. He doesn’t know about the letter to the Home Office.
“Did you get any nice presents, Stanislav?” asks Anna, her voice bubbling with Christmas excitement. She doesn’t know, either.
Stanislav got socks, soap, a book about aeroplanes and some tapes. Last year he got a black jacket with a fur collar. Real fur. The year before he got skates from his father.
“Is better in Ukraina, Christmas,” says Valentina.
“Well why don’t you…” I try to stop myself, but Valentina knows what I am saying.
“Why for? For Stanislav. All is for Stanislav. Stanislav must have good opportunity. Is no opportunity in Ukraina,” she turns on me loudly. “Is only opportunity for gangster prostitute in Ukraina.”
Mike nods sympathetically. Anna goes quiet. Stanislav smiles his cute chip-toothed smile. Behind the bar the proprietor has gone very still. My father looks as if he is miles away, on a tractor somewhere.
“Was it better under communism?” I ask.
“Of course better. Was good life. You no understand what type of people is rule country now.”
Her syrup-coloured eyes have a heavy, glazed look. Today is her first day off work in two weeks. The black eyeliner has smudged and run into the wrinkles below her eyes. If I’m not careful, I will begin to feel sorry for her. Tart. Slut. Boil-in-the-bag cook. I think of Mother and harden my heart.
“My school was better,” says Stanislav. “More discipline. More homework. But now in Ukraina you have to pay the teachers if you want to pass the exams.”
“No different to your new school then,” I say drily. Mike kicks me under the table.
“No different to my school,” chirps Anna. “We’re always having to bribe our teachers with apples.”
Stanislav looks astonished.
“Apples?”
“Just a joke,” says Anna. “Don’t children in your country give their teachers apples?”
“Apples never,” says Stanislav. “Vodka, yes.”
“You in university teacher?” Valentina asks me.
“Yes.”
“I want for help Stanislav in OxfordCambridgeUniversity. You working CambridgeUniversity. So you help?”
“Yes, I work in Cambridge, but not at Cambridge University. I am at the Anglia Polytechnic University.”
“Angella University? What is this?”
My father leans across and whispers, “Polytechnic.”
Valentina raises both eyebrows and mutters something that I cannot understand.
Our meals arrive. The proprietor seems to hover for a long time around Valentina as he sets out the dishes before her. She manages to flash her syrupy eyes his way, but it is a half-hearted flirtation. It is late and we are all too hungry for courtesies. The lamb bhuna is stringy, and we have to cut it up into tiny pieces for my father. The vegetable curry has no vegetables in it apart from cabbage. Mike’s hot curry is too hot. Stanislav’s oven-cooked chicken is dry and tough. Valentina’s steak is like a slab of wood.
“Everything all right?” asks the proprietor.
“Lovely,” says Mike.
Afterwards, Mike drives my father and Anna and Stanislav home in the car and I walk home with Valentina. The pavements are icy, and we cling on to each other, first for balance, but after a while the clinging becomes companionable. Despite the dismal meal, some seasonal cheer has rubbed off on us. Peace on earth, goodwill to all men, sing the Christmas angels in the crispy sky. I realise there will not be another opportunity like this.
“How are things going?” I ask.
“Good. Everything good.”
“But what about the arguments? You seem to have a lot of arguments.” I keep my voice neutral, friendly.
“Who telling you?”
“Valentina, it’s obvious to anybody.” I don’t want to betray Stanislav, and I don’t want to land my father in it.
“You father is no easy man,” she says.
“I know.” I know that I couldn’t put up with my father day in day out as she does. I begin to regret my letter to the Home Office.
“All time he making trouble for me.”
“But Valentina, you worked in an old people’s home. You know old people can be difficult.”
What did she expect? A refined elderly gentleman who would shower gifts on her, and pass away quietly one night? Not my tough cantankerous stubborn old father.
“You father more difficult. Trouble with cough cough cough. Trouble with nerves. Trouble with bath. Trouble with pi-pi.” As she turns towards me, the moonlight catches her handsome Slavic profile, the high cheekbones, the curved mouth. “And all time, you know, kiss kiss, touching here, here here…” Her gloved hands caress her breasts, thighs, knees through the thick coat. (My father does that?) I feel like gagging, but I keep my voice steady.
“Be kind to him. That’s all.”
“I kind,” she says. “As my own father. You no worry.”
She slips on the ice and grips my arm tighter. I feel her warm sensuous bulk rest briefly against me and smell the strong sugary perfume, my Christmas gift, which she has sprayed on to her neck and throat. This woman who has taken the place of my mother.
Ten
Squishy squashy
My father is excited. The inspector from the Immigration Service has come to call. Soon Valentina’s immigration status will be confirmed and their love will be sealed for ever. Without the fear of deportation hanging over them, the cloud of misunderstanding will lift and it will once more be as when they were first in love. Maybe even better. Maybe they will start a new family. Poor Valentina has been so anxious and this has sometimes made her irritable, but soon their troubles will be at an end.
The inspector is a middle-aged woman with flat lace-up shoes and parted hair. She carries a brown briefcase, and refuses my father’s offer of tea. He shows her around.
“This is my room. This is Valentina’s room. This is Stanis-lav’s room. You see, plenty room for everybody.”
The inspector makes notes of where everyone lives.
“And this is my table. You see, I prefer to eat by myself. Stanislav and Valentina eat in the kitchen. I cook for myself-look, Toshiba apples. Cooked by Toshiba microwave. Full of vitamins. You like to try?”
The inspector refuses politely, and makes more notes.
“And will I be able to meet Mrs Mayevska? When does she come back from work?”
“She is always coining at different time. Sometimes early, sometimes late. Better you telephone first.”
The inspector makes another note, then she puts her notebook away in her brown briefcase and shakes my father’s hand. He watches her small turquoise Fiat disappear around a bend in the road, and telephones me with the news.
A fortnight later Valentina gets a letter from the Home Office. Her application for leave to stay in Britain has been refused. The inspector has found no evidence of a genuine marriage. She flies into a rage at my father.
“You foolish idiot man. You giving all w
rong answer. Why you no show her you love-letter poem? Why you no show her wedding picture?”
“Why should I show her a poem? She did not ask to see poem, she asked to see bedroom.”
“Hah! She see you no good man to go into woman bedroom.”
“You no good woman shut husband out of bedroom.”
“What you want in bedroom, eh? Thphoo! You squishy squashy. You flippy floppy. Squishy squashy flippy floppy!” she taunts. She puts her face close to his, and her voice gets louder and louder. “Squishy squashy! Flippy floppy!”
“Stop! Stop!” my father cries. “Go! Go! Go away! Go back to Ukraina!”
“Squishy squashy flippy floppy!”
He pushes her away. She pushes him back. She is bigger than he is. He stumbles, and bangs his arm against the corner of the dresser. A livid bruise rises.
“Look what you done!”
“Now you go crying to daughter! Help, help, Nadia Verochka! Wife beating me! Hah hah! Husband should beat wife!”
Maybe he would beat her if he could, but he cannot. For the first time, he realises how helpless he is. His heart fills with despair. Next day, when she is at work, he telephones me and tells me what happened. His words come stumbling, limping out, as though just speaking it aloud hurts. I express concern, but I feel smug. Wasn’t I was right about the official view of penetration?
“You see, this matter of erectile dysfunction, Nadia. Sometimes it happens to the male.”
“It doesn’t matter, Pappa. She shouldn’t mock you like that.” Stupid man, I think. What did he expect?
“Don’t tell Vera.”
“Pappa, we may need Vera’s help.”
I had thought this story was going to be a knockabout farce, but now I see it is developing into a knockabout tragedy. He hasn’t told me before because she listens when he talks on the telephone. And because he doesn’t want Vera to know.
I resist the temptation to say ‘I told you so, stupid man’. But I telephone Vera, and she says it for me.
“But really I blame you, Nadezhda,” she adds. “You stopped him going into sheltered housing. None of this would have happened if he had gone into sheltered housing.”
“Nobody could have predicted it…”
“Nadia, I predicted it.” Her voice rings with Big Sis triumph.
“OK, so you’re so clever. How are we going to get him out of it?” I pull a mocking face that she can’t see on the phone.
“There are two possibilities,” says Vera. “Divorce or deportation. The first is expensive and uncertain. The second is also uncertain but at least Pappa doesn’t have to pay for it.”
“Can’t we go for both?”
“How you’ve changed, Nadia. What’s happened to all your feminist ideas?”
“Don’t be so spiteful, Vera. We should be allies, but you just can’t bring yourself to be civil to me, can you? I can understand why Pappa never tells you anything.”
“Yes, well he’s another idiot. Mother and I were the practical people in the family.”
See how she claims Mother’s legacy? It’s not just the cupboard full of tins and jars, nor the gold locket, nor even the money in the savings account she’s after: no, it’s the inheritance of character, of nature, that we fight over.
“We never were a very practical family.”
“What is the word you social workers use? A dysfunctional family. Maybe we should apply for a grant from the council.”
Despite getting off to a shaky start, we manage to agree a division of labour. Vera, as the family expert on divorce, will contact solicitors, while I will find out the law relating to immigration and deportation. It feels uncomfortable at first to step out of my soft-soled liberal shoes into the stilettos of Mrs Flog–‘em–and–send–‘em–home of Tunbridge Wells, but after a while the new shoes mould to my feet. I discover that Valentina has the right to appeal, and then if she is refused she has the right to appeal again to a tribunal. And she is also entitled to legal aid. She is obviously going to be here for some time.
“Maybe we should write to the Daily Mail.” I am expanding into my role.
“Good idea,” says Vera.
On the divorce front, my sister has a cunning plan. A contested divorce is going to be complex and expensive, she has discovered, so she hits on the idea of annulment—the no-consummation-therefore-no-marriage angle so popular with European royalty in the sixteenth century.
“You see the marriage never really existed so there is no need for a divorce,” she explains to the wet-behind-the-ears trainee solicitor in the Peterborough practice. He has not come across this before, but he promises to look it up. He mumbles and stammers as he tries to get the details of the non-consummation from my sister over the phone.
“Good heavens,” she says, “just how much detail do you need?”
But although it worked for European royalty, it isn’t going to work for Pappa—it is only if one party complains about the other party’s inability or refusal to consummate the marriage that non-consummation becomes a ground for annulment or divorce, the trainee solicitor writes in a clumsily worded letter.
“Well, I never knew that,” says Vera, who thought she knew everything about divorce.
Valentina laughs out loud when Pappa suggests a divorce. “First I get passport visa, then you get divorce.”
Pappa, too, has gone off the idea of divorce. He is afraid that they will question him about squishy squashy. He is afraid the whole world will find out about flippy floppy.
“Better think of something else, Nadia,” he says.
Despite the stress he is under, he has managed to finish another chapter of his history, but it has taken on a sombre tone. When Mike and I visit at the beginning of February, he takes us into the sitting-room, still full of last year’s apples and as chilly as a cold store, and reads aloud to us.
The early makers of the tractor dreamed that swords would be turned into ploughshares, but now the spirit of the century grows dark, and we find that, instead, ploughshares are to be turned into swords.
The Kharkiv Locomotive Factory, which once produced 1,000 tractors a week to feed the demands of the New Economic Plan, was relocated to Chelyabinsk beyond the Urals and converted to produce tanks by decree of K. J. Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence.
The chief designer was Mikhail Koshkin, who was educated at the Leningrad Institute and worked at the Kirov Plant until 1937. He was a moderate, cultured type, whose genius was used, one might say abused, by Stalin to create the Soviet Union’s military supremacy. Koshkin’s first tank, the Aso, ran on the original caterpillar tracks, with a 45-mm gun and armour that would withstand a hit by a shell. This was renamed the T32 when the gun size was increased to 76.2 mm and the armour was also made thicker. The T32 saw action in the Spanish Civil War, where the thinness of the armour plating made it vulnerable, though its manoeuvrability was much admired. Out of this was bom the legendary T34, which many credit with having turned the tide of the war. It had even thicker armour, and to compensate for the additional weight, was the first locomotive to be fitted with a cast aluminium engine.
His voice is weaker, more quavery, and he has to keep stopping for breath.
In the ferocious weather of February 1940, the first T34 was driven to Moscow to be paraded before the Soviet leadership. It made a huge impression, not least because of the way it rolled so smoothly over the rutted, cobbled, snow-bound streets of the capital. However, poor Koshkin did not live to see his creation in production. On this trip, being exposed for many hours to the abominable weather, he contracted pneumonia, and died some months later.
The design was completed by his pupil and colleague Aleksandr ‘ Morozov, a dashing and handsome young engineer. Under his guidance, the first T34 tanks rolled off the assembly line in August 1940, as they were soon to roll off in their hundreds and thousands. In honour of this, the town of Chelyabinsk, formerly most noted for production of tractors, was renamed Tankograd.
Outside
the window, the sun sinks into the frosted furrows which have not thawed all day. The wind that nips the branches has blown in from the flatlands of the East Anglia coast, and beyond that from the steppes, and beyond the steppes from the Urals.
My father is warmly wrapped against the cold with fingerless gloves and a woollen hat and three pairs of socks. He leans forward in his chair, reading through his thick glasses. Behind him on the mantelpiece sits a portrait of my mother. She is looking over his shoulder, out towards the fields and the horizon. Why did she marry him, this musing brown-eyed young woman with coiled, plaited hair and a mysterious smile? Was he a dashing and handsome young engineer? Did he seduce her with talk of automatic transmission and gifts of engine oil?
“Why did she marry him?” I ask Vera.
Mrs Divorce Expert and Mrs Flog–‘em–and–send–‘em–home have been swapping notes on the phone, and the tone between us has become quite cordial. We moved from talking about our father’s marriage to Valentina to our parents’ marriage, and now I see the door to the past has opened a crack, and I want to push.
“It was after the submarine commander was killed at Sebas-topol. I suppose she was frightened of being on her own. It was a frightening time.”
“What submarine commander?”
“From the Black Sea Fleet. Whom she was engaged to.”
“Mother was engaged to a submarine commander?”
“Didn’t you know? He was the love of her life.”
“Not Pappa?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Bogey-nose whines, “no one ever told me anything about it.”
“Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
With a snap, Big Sis closes the door to the past and turns the key.
Eleven
Under duress
A date has been set for Valentina to appeal against the Immigration Service decision. Suddenly my father realises he is not so powerless after all. The appeal is to be held in Nottingham in April.
“I’m not going,” says Pappa.
“Yes you go,” says Valentina.
2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Page 10
