Yes, this new Ukrainian girl has some positive features: nice looking, nice smile, nice dimples, nice figure, nicely rounded, plenty to get hold of, not too thin like those stylish city girls who starve themselves into Western-type matchsticks. But she’s only another Ukrainian girl—plenty of those where you came from. And besides, she’s a bit snobbish. She thinks she’s better than you. She thinks she’s a high-culture type with a superior mentality, and you’re a low-culture type. (And so what if you are? Is that something to be ashamed of?) You can tell by the way she talks, being so stingy with her words, as if it’s money she’s counting out. And the ridiculous plait, like that crow Julia Timoshenko, fake-traditional Ukrainian. Tied with an orange ribbon. She thinks she’s better than you because she’s from Kiev and you’re from Donbas. She thinks she’s better than you, because your dad’s a miner—a dead miner, at that.
Poor Dad. Not the life for a dog let alone a man. Underground. Down below the mushrooms. Down with the legions of ghost miners, all huddled up in the dark, singing their eerie dead-men’s songs. No, he can’t go down there anymore, even if it’s the only way he knows how to live, how to put bread on the table. He’ll have to find another way. What would his father have wanted him to do? It’s hard enough living up to your parents’ expectations when you know what they expect. But all Andriy’s father ever said to him was, “Be a man.” What is that supposed to mean?
When the pit prop gave way and the roof fell in, Andriy was on one side of the cave-in and his father was on the other. He was on the living side; his father was on the side of the dead. He heard the roar, and he ran toward the light. He ran and ran. He is still running.
I AM DOG I RUN I RUN FROM BAD MAN CAGE I HEAR DOGS BARK ANGRY DOGS GROWL ANGRY DOGS BARK THEY WILL FIGHT THEY WILL KILL I SMELL DOG RAGE MAN SWEAT MAN OPENS CAGE MAN PULLS COLLAR MEN SIT SMOKE TALK DOGS BARK LIGHT TOO BRIGHT BIG ANGRY DOG SNARLS SHOWS TEETH HAIRS BRISTLE ON HIS BACK HE WILL KILL I AM NOT FIGHTING DOG I AM RUNNING DOG I JUMP I RUN I RUN TWO DAYS I EAT NO MEAT HUNGER PAINS IN BELLY MAKE ME MAD I FEEL HUNGER I FEEL FEAR I RUN I RUN I AM DOG
The women’s trailer was small, but so cozy. I fell in love with it straightaway. I put my bag down and introduced myself.
“Irina. From Kiev.”
Okay, there was some unpleasantness upon my arrival. Yola, the Polish supervisor, who is a coarse and uneducated person with an elevated view of her own importance, said some harsh words about Ukrainians for which she has yet to apologize. Okay, I was a bit dismayed at the overcrowded conditions, and I may have been a little tactless. But then the Chinese girls very kindly told me I could share their bed. I wished I hadn’t finished the poppy-seed cake, for a small gift can go a long way in these circumstances, but I still had a bottle of home-made cherry vodka for emergencies, and what was this if not an emergency? Soon we were all firm friends.
We ate our dinner sitting out on the hillside all together, drinking the rest of the vodka and watching the sun set. I was pleased to discover there’s another Ukrainian here—a nice though rather primitive miner from Donetsk. We chatted in Ukrainian over dinner. Poles and Ukrainians can understand each other’s language too, though it’s not the same. But of course I have come to England mainly to improve my English before I start my university course, so I hope I will soon meet more English people.
English was my favorite subject at school, and I had pictured myself walking through a panorama of cultivated conversations, like a painted landscape dotted with intriguing homonyms and mysterious subjunctives: would you were wooed in the wood. Miss Tyldesley was my favorite teacher. She even made English grammar seem sexy, and when she recited Byron she would close her eyes and breathe in deeply through her nose, trembling in a sort of virginal ecstasy, as though she could smell his pheromones wafting off the page. Please, control yourself, Miss Tyldesley! As you can imagine, I couldn’t wait to come to England. Now, I thought, my life will really begin.
After dinner I went back to the trailer and unpacked my bag. On a patch of wall below the head-level locker I put up my picture of Mother and Papa standing together in front of the fireplace at home. Mother is wearing pink lipstick and a ghastly pink scarf tied in what she thinks is a stylish bow; Papa is wearing his ridiculous orange tie. Okay, so they wear terrible clothes, but they can’t help it, and I still love them. Papa’s arm is around Mother’s shoulder, and they’re smiling in a stiff uncertain way, like people whose hearts aren’t in it, who are just posing for the camera. I looked at it while I drifted off to sleep, and a few pathetic tears came into my eyes. Mother and Papa waiting for me at home—what’s so sad about that?
The next morning, when I woke up, the trailer was flooded with sunlight and everything seemed different. The gloomy thoughts and fears of yesterday had fled like ghosts into the night. When I went out to the tap to wash, the water splashing on the stones caught the sunbeams and broke them into hundreds of brilliant rainbows that danced through my fingers, cold and tingly. In the copse behind me, a thrush was singing.
As I bent toward the tap, the orange ribbon slipped off my plait, swirling in the water. For a moment I remembered the orange balloons and banners in the square, the tents and music, and my parents, so excited, gabbing like teenagers about freedom and other such stuff. And I did feel a stab of sadness. Then I picked up the wet ribbon, shook it out, and hung it over the washing line. As I looked down over the valley, my heart started to dance again. I took a deep breath. This air—so sweet, so English. This was the air I’d dreamed of breathing; loaded with history, yet as light as…well, as light as something very light. How had I lived for nineteen years without breathing this air? And all the cultured, brave, warm-hearted people that I’d read about in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens—okay, I admit, mostly in translation—I was ready to meet them.
In fact I was particularly looking forward to meeting a gentleman in a bowler hat like Mr. Brown in my Let’s Talk English book, who looks supremely dashing and romantic with his tight suit and rolled-up umbrella, and especially with the intriguing bulge in his trousers’ zipper area, which was drawn very realistically in black ink by a previous owner of that textbook. Who wouldn’t want to talk English with him?! Lord Byron looks romantic too, despite that bizarre turban.
English men are supposed to be incredibly romantic. There’s a famous folk legend about a man who braves death and climbs in through his lady’s bedroom window just to bring her a box of chocolates. Unfortunately, the only Englishman I have met so far is farmer Leapish, who doesn’t seem to fit into this category. I hope he is not typical.
Please don’t think I’m one of those awful Ukrainian girls who come to England only to ensnare a husband. I’m not. But if love should happen to come my way, okay, my heart is open and ready.
The kettle starts to whistle. Andriy pours the water onto the teabag, adds two spoonfuls of sugar, and, cradling the hot cup in his hands, wanders down to the gate, where he sometimes stands when he has an idle moment, observing the passing cars and looking out for his Angliska rosa. Leaning on his elbows, he drinks slowly, enjoying the heat in his throat, the cool breeze blowing up The Downs, and the noisy chatter of birds doing their early-morning stuff. The sun has come up over the hill and although it isn’t yet eight o’clock, he can already feel its warmth on his skin. The light is as sharp as crystal, marking out the landscape with hard crisp shadows.
He likes to come down here, to look out at this England, which, despite being just beyond the gate, still seems tantalizingly out of reach. Where are you, Let’s Talk English Mrs. Brown, with your tiny waist and tailored polka-dotted blouse? Where are you, Vagvaga Riskegipd, with your bubble gum and ferocious kisses? Since he came to England two weeks ago he hasn’t met a single Angliska rosa. He has seen them drive past, so he knows they exist. Sometimes he waves, and once one of them even waved back. And yes, she was blond, and yes, she was driving a red Ferrari convertible. She was gone in the twinkling of an eye, before he could even vault over the gate to see the rear spoiler d
isappear around the bend in the lane. But for sure she lives somewhere nearby, so it is only a matter of time before she reappears. Okay, so his last girlfriend Lida Zakanovka went off with a soccer player. Good luck to her. There are better women waiting for him over here in England.
He blows on the hot tea to cool it down and thinks about his last visit to England. How long ago was that? It was about eighteen years, so he must have been seven years old. He was accompanying his father on a fraternal delegation to visit the mine workers’ union in the city of Sheffield, which is twinned with his home town, Donetsk. Learn, boy, his father had said. Learn about the beauty of international solidarity. Though it didn’t do him much good when he needed it. Poor Dad.
He doesn’t remember much about Sheffield, but three things stand out in his memory from that visit. First, he recalls, there was a banquet, and a sticky pink dessert, of which he ate so much that he was later horribly, messily, pinkily sick in the back of a car.
Second, he remembers that the renowned visionary ruler of the city, who had welcomed them warmly with a long-long speech about solidarity and the dignity of labor (the speech had so impressed his father that he repeated it many times over), who had sat next to them at the banquet and kindly pressed more and more of that treacherous pink dessert on him, and in the back of whose car he had later been sick—this man was blind. The man’s astonishing blindness, the fearsome all-excluding wall bricked up behind his visionary eyes, had fascinated Andriy. He had closed his eyes tight and tried to imagine what it would be like to live behind that wall of blindness; he went around bumping into things, until his father slapped him and told him to behave himself.
The other thing he remembers is his first kiss. The girl—she must have been a daughter of one of the delegates—was older and bolder than him, a long-legged girl with white blond hair and a sprinkle of freckles on her nose. She smelled of soap and bubble gum. While the fraternal speeches droned on and on in the hall, the two of them had played a wild game of chase along the echoing corridors of the vast civic building, racing up and down stairs, dodging in doorways, shrieking with excitement. She had pounced on him at last and wrestled him down on the stone stairs, pinning him to the ground, pressing her strong body on top of him. They were both out of breath, panting and laughing. Suddenly she had swooped down on him with her lips and kissed him—a wet, insistent kiss, her tongue pushing against his mouth. It was a kiss of subjugation. He’d been too young and too astonished to do anything but surrender. Then she’d given him a bit of paper with her name scrawled on it, the “i”s dotted with little hearts. Vagvaga Riskegipd. An incredibly sexy name. And a telephone number. He still has it, tucked into the back of his wallet like a talisman. At school, when the other boys chose to study Russian language or German, he chose English.
He tries to conjure up her face. Fair hair. Freckles. The smell of bubble gum is vivid in his memory. An incredibly sexy smell. Does she still remember him? What does she look like now? She would be in her early thirties. What would she do if he suddenly appeared on her doorstep?
They say Angliski women are incredibly sexy. According to Vitaly, who knows these things, Angliski women are as cold as ice to touch, but once they start to melt—once the passion heats them and they melt inside—it’s just like a river bursting its banks. There’s no stopping these Vagvaga women; these Mrs. Brown women. A man has to keep a cool head or he could drown in the torrent of their passion. But getting them to the melting point—there’s a real skill in that, says Vitaly. The Angliska woman is attracted to dashing men of action, men who are bold enough to make hazardous journeys and climb in through bedroom windows bearing boxes of chocolates, et cetera. This type of behavior melts the Angliska woman’s icy heart. Will strawberries be okay as a substitute for chocolates? For all other acts in this drama he’s prepared. He’s ready for anything. He feels the lifeblood pulsing through his body, and he wants to live—to live more sweetly, more intensely.
“Be a man,” his father had said.
One of the annoying things about my mother is the way she always classifies people according to their level of culture. It’s as if she carries a perfectly defined hierarchy of culture in her head.
“It doesn’t cost anything to be cultured, Irina,” she says, “which is just as well, because if it did, teachers would be among the least cultured people in Ukraine.”
The worst thing is, I seem to have picked up her habit, even though I know you shouldn’t judge people by appearances. But sometimes you can’t help it. Take us strawberry pickers, for example.
Although they are Chinese, the Chinese girls are definitely cultured types. One is a student of medicine and one is a student of accounting. I can’t remember which is which, but medicine is more cultured than accounting. The Chinese Chinese girl has her hair cut short like a boy’s, and she’s quite pretty, but her legs are too thin. The Malaysian Chinese girl is also pretty, but she has a perm, which looks stupid on that type of hair. Maybe it’s the other way around. They are friendly toward me, but they talk and giggle together all the time, which is annoying when you don’t know what they’re giggling about. Their English is terrible.
Next come Tomasz, Marta, and Emanuel. Tomasz is some kind of boring government bureaucrat, though he has taken a leave of absence from his job because he says he can earn more money picking strawberries—stupid, isn’t it? He claims to be a poet, which of course is extremely cultured, though there is little evidence of this, unless you count those dreary songs he sings whenever Yola is around. And, besides, he is quite ancient—he must be in his forties—and he has a pathetic little beard and hair almost down to his shoulders like a hippy. Koshmar! And there’s a dire smell about him.
Marta is educated, and she even speaks a bit of French, but that Roman Catholic–type education is full of rules and mysteries and lacks practical content—like Western Ukrainians. Anyway, Mother says that Catholic is less cultured than Orthodox. Marta is nice and friendly, but she has a big nose. Probably that is why she’s still unmarried at the age of thirty.
Emanuel is adorable, but he is not quite eighteen and also a Catholic, though he appears to be an intelligent type, and he wears a horrible green anorak even when it’s not raining. Of course he is black, but this does not make him any less cultured, because as any cultured person knows, black people are just as cultured as anybody else. He often sings as he picks strawberries in the field, and he has a beautiful voice, but he only sings religious songs. It would be nice if he sang something more amusing.
Vitaly is mysterious. He never gives you a straight answer. Sometimes he disappears; no one knows where he goes. He is clearly intelligent because he speaks good English and several other languages, but his manner is rather coarse and he wears a gold chain with a silver penknife dangling around his neck. His eyes are dark and twinkly with cute curly eyelashes, and his hair is black and curly. In fact he is not bad looking in a flashy curly sort of way. I would give him seven out of ten. Though he is not my type. Maybe he is a Gypsy.
Near the bottom is Ciocia Yola (strictly speaking she is only Marta’s aunt, but we all call her Ciocia). She is a vulgar person with a gap between her front teeth and obviously dyed hair. (My mother’s hair is dyed too, but it’s not so obvious.) She claims she was once a nursery school teacher, which is not a proper teacher at all, and she also claims to be the supervisor and puts on airs which are unwarranted and extremely irritating. She likes to sound off about her opinions, which are generally not worth listening to.
Right at the bottom is Andriy, the miner’s son from Donbas. Unfortunately miners are generally primitive types who find it difficult to be cultured, however hard they try. When he works in the field, I can smell his sweat. He takes his shirt off when it gets too hot and shows off his muscles. Okay, they may even ripple a bit. But he is definitely not my type.
As for me, I’m nineteen, and everything else about me is still-to-be. Fluent-English-speaker-to-be. I hope. Romantically-in-love-to-be. Are you ready,
Mr. Brown? World-famous-writer to-be, like my Papa. I have already started to think about the book I will write when I get back home. But you have to have something interesting to write about, don’t you? More interesting than a bunch of strawberry pickers living in two trailers.
Yola’s eyes narrow as she watches the Ukrainian girl wander along the strawberry rows as if she had all the time in the world to fill those boxes. Out in the strawberry field it’s the hierarchy of the check-in that matters. Several times a day, the farmer counts the trays of boxes, checks them in, stacks them on pallets in the prefab, and notes down who has earned what. The women generally earn less. The men earn more. The supervisor of course earns the most.
Yola is both the gang mistress and the supervisor. As a former teacher, she is a person of natural authority and a woman of action. It is her belief that maintaining a pleasant sexual harmony within the picking team is the key to success, and for this reason she encourages the men to take their shirts off in the sun.
She doesn’t want any griping or unpleasant comments behind her back, especially from those Ukrainians, now that there are two of them. Not that she has anything against Ukrainians, but it is her belief that the high point of Ukrainian civilization was its brief occupation by Poland, though the civilizing effects were clearly quite short-lived and superficial. To be fair, this Ukrainian boy Andriy is quite a gentleman as well as a good picker, but he is inclined to moodiness, and he thinks too much. Thinking is not good for a man. He is quite nice looking, though of course he is much too young for her, and she isn’t the type of a woman to seduce a boy half her age, though she knows some who would in Zdroj, which she will tell you about later.
Yes, if only there were more good pickers like that. Nobody understands the problems she faces, for her pay depends not just on her own efforts but on the performance of the good-for-nothing team she supervises in the field. She tells them—but will they listen?—to pick strawberries just right. Too white and farmer will reject. Too ripe and shops complain. And you have to handle correctly, and drop gently—don’t throw—into boxes. She tells them, and they just carry on exactly the same as before. Really, she is getting too old for this game.
Strawberry Fields Page 3
