Marina Lewycka
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

© 2005

One. Two phone calls and a funeral

Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.

It all started with a phone call.

My father’s voice, quavery with excitement, crackles down the line. “Good news, Nadezhda. I’m getting married!”

I remember the rush of blood to my head. Please let it be a joke! Oh, he’s gone bonkers! Oh, you foolish old man! But I don’t say any of those things. “Oh, that’s nice, Pappa,” I say.

“Yes, yes. She is coming with her son from Ukraina. Ternopil in Ukraina.”

Ukraina: he sighs, breathing in the remembered scent of mown hay and cherry blossom. But I catch the distinct synthetic whiff of New Russia.

Her name is Valentina, he tells me. But she is more like Venus. “Botticelli’s Venus rising from waves. Golden hair. Charming eyes. Superior breasts. When you see her you will understand.”

The grown-up me is indulgent. How sweet-this last late flowering of love. The daughter me is outraged. The traitor! The randy old beast! And our mother barely two years dead. I am angry and curious. I can’t wait to see her-this woman who is usurping my mother.

“She sounds gorgeous. When can I meet her?”

“After marriage you can meet.”

“I think it might be better if we could meet her first, don’t you?”

“Why you want to meet? You not marrying her.” (He knows something’s not quite right, but he thinks he can get away with it.)

“But Pappa, have you really thought this through? It seems very sudden. I mean, she must be a lot younger than you.”

I modulate my voice carefully, to conceal any signs of disapproval, like a worldly-wise adult dealing with a love-struck adolescent.

“Thirty-six. She’s thirty-six and I’m eighty-four. So what?” (He pronounces it ‘vat’.)

There is a snap in his voice. He has anticipated this question.

“Well, it’s quite an age difference.”

“Nadezhda, I never thought you would be so bourgeois.” (He puts the emphasis on the last syllable-wah!)

“No, no.” He has me on the defensive. “It’s just that…there could be problems.”

There will be no problems, says Pappa. He has anticipated all problems. He has known her for three months. She has an uncle in Selby, and has come to visit him on a tourist visa. She wants to make a new life for herself and her son in the West, a good life, with good job, good money, nice car-absolutely no Lada no Skoda-good education for son-must be Oxford Cambridge, nothing less. She is an educated woman, by the way. Has a diploma in pharmacy. She will easily find well-paid work here, once she learns English. In the meantime, he is helping her with her English, and she is cleaning the house and looking after him. She sits on his lap and allows him to fondle her breasts. They are happy together.

Did I hear that right? She sits on my father’s lap and he fondles her superior Botticellian breasts?

“Oh, well…” I keep my voice steady, but rage burns in my heart, “…life’s just full of surprises. I hope it works out for you. But, look, Pappa,” (time to be blunt) “I can see why you want to marry her. But have you asked yourself why she wants to marry you?”

“Tak tak. Yes, yes, I know. Passport. Visa. Work permit. So vat?” Cross, croaky voice.

He has it all worked out. She will care for him as he grows older and frailer. He will put a roof over her head, share his tiny pension with her until she finds that well-paid job. Her son-who, by the way, is an extraordinarily gifted boy-genius-plays piano-will get an English education. They will discuss art, literature, philosophy together in the evenings. She is a cultured woman, not a chatterbox peasant woman. He has already elicited her views on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, by the way, and she agrees with him in all respects. She, like him, admires Constructivist art and abhors neo-classicism. They have much in common. A sound foundation for marriage.

“But, Pappa, don’t you think it might be better for her if she married someone nearer her own age? The authorities will realise it’s a marriage of convenience. They’re not stupid.”

“Hmm.”

“She could still be sent back.”

“Hmm.”

He hasn’t thought of this. It slows him down, but it doesn’t stop him in his tracks. You see, he explains, he is her last hope, her only chance to escape persecution, destitution, prostitution. Life in Ukraine is too hard for such a delicate spirit as hers. He has been reading the newspapers, and the news is grim. There is no bread, no toilet paper, no sugar, no sewerage, no probity in public life, and electricity only sporadically. How can he condemn a lovely woman to this? How can he walk by on the other side of the road? “You must understand, Nadezhda, only I can save her!”

It’s true. He has tried. He has done his best. Before he hit on the plan of marrying her himself, he searched all around for suitable husbands. He has already approached the Stepanenkos, an elderly Ukrainian couple who have a single son still living at home. He has approached Mr Greenway, a widower living in the village whose unmarried son visits him from time to time. (A sensible type, by the way. An engineer. Not a common type. Would be very good match for Valentina.) They have both refused: they are too narrow-minded. He told them so, in no uncertain terms. Now neither the Stepanenkos nor Mr Greenway will speak to him any more.

The Ukrainian community in Peterborough has disowned her. They, too, are narrow-minded. They are not impressed with her views on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. They are bound up in the past, Ukrainian nationalism, Banderivtsi. She is a modern, liberated woman. They put out vile rumours about her. They say she sold her mother’s goat and cow to buy grease to put on her face to attract Western men. They speak rubbish. Her mother had chickens and pigs-she never had a goat or a cow. This just goes to show how foolish these gossipy types can be.

He coughs and splutters on the other end of the telephone. He has fallen out with all his friends over this. If needs be he will disown his daughters. He will stand alone against the world-alone apart from the beautiful woman by his side. His words can barely keep up with the excitement of his Big Idea. “But Pappa…”

“And one thing more, Nadia. Don’t tell Vera.” Not much chance of that. I haven’t spoken to my sister for two years, since our row after Mother’s funeral.

“But Pappa…”

“Nadezhda, you have to understand that in some respects the man is governed by different impulses to the woman.”

“Pappa, please, spare me the biological determinism.”

Oh, what the hell? Let him learn the hard way.

Perhaps it started before the phone call. Perhaps it started two years ago, in this same room where he is sitting now, where my mother lay dying while he paced about the house in an ecstasy of grief.

The windows were open, and the breeze that fluttered through half-drawn linen curtains carried the scent of lavender from the front garden. There was birdsong, voices of people passing on the street, the neighbour’s daughter flirting with her boyfriend by the gate. Inside the pale, dean room, my mother gasped for breath hour after hour while her life slid away, and I fed her morphine from a spoon.

Here are the rubbery accoutrements of death-the nurse’s latex gloves, the waterproof sheet on the bed, spongy-soled slippers, a pack of glycerine suppositories gleaming like golden bullets, the commode with its functional cover and rubber-tipped legs, now full of a lumpy greenish liquid.

“Do you remember…?” I recite the stories of her and our childhood over and over again.

Her eyes flicker darkly. In a lucid moment, her hand in mine, she says, “Look after poor Kolya.”

He was with her when she died in the night. I remember the roar of his pain. “Me too! Me too! Take me too!” His voice thick, strangled; his limbs rigid, as though gripped by a convulsion.

In the morning, after they had taken her body away, he sat in the back room with a haunted look on his face. After a while he said, “Did you know, Nadezhda, that apart from the mathematical proof of Pythagoras there is also a geometric proof? Look how beautiful it is.”

On a sheet of paper, he drew lines and angles, connected with small symbols, and murmured over them as he unfolded the equation.

He’s completely off his trolley, I thought. Poor Kolya.

In the weeks before she died, Mother worried as she lay propped up on the pillows of a hospital bed. Linked with wires to a monitor that recorded the pitiful pulsing of her heart, she grumbled about the mixed ward with only the privacy of a cursorily drawn curtain, and the intrusive noises of the wheezing, coughing, snoring old men. She flinched under the impersonal, stubby fingers of the young male nurse who came to tape the wires above shrunken breasts, carelessly revealed under the hospital gown. She was nothing but a sick old woman. Who cared what she thought?

Quitting life is harder than you think, she said. There are so many things to be taken care of before you can depart in peace. Kolya-who would take care of him? Not her two daughters-clever girls, but so quarrelsome. What would happen to them? Would they find happiness? Would they be provided for by those charming but good-for-nothing men they had ended up with? And the three granddaughters-so pretty and no husbands yet. Still so much to sort out, and her strength was failing.

Mother wrote her will out in hospital, while my sister Vera and I both stood over her, because neither of us trusted the other. She wrote it out in her quavering longhand, and two of the nurses witnessed it. She was weak now, who for so many years had been strong. She was old and sick, but her legacy, her life savings, throbbed full of life in the Co-op bank.

One thing she was definite about-it shouldn’t go to Pappa.

“Poor Nikolai, he’s got no sense. He’s too full of crazy schemes. Better you two will have half and half.”

She talked in her own DIY language-Ukrainian sprinkled with words like handheldblendera, suspenderbeltu, green-fingerdski.

When it was dear that there was nothing more they could do in hospital, they discharged her to die at home in her own time. My sister spent most of the last month up there. I visited at weekends. It was some time during that last month, when I wasn’t there, that my sister wrote out the codicil dividing the money equally among the three granddaughters, my Anna, and her Alice and Alexandra, instead of between my sister and myself. My mother signed it, and two neighbours witnessed it.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Mother before she died, “everything will be all right. We’ll be sad, and we’ll miss you, but we’ll be all right.”

But we weren’t all right.

They buried her in the churchyard in the village, in a new plot that bordered on to open country. Her grave was the last in a row of new neat graves.

The three granddaughters, Alice, Alexandra and Anna, tall and blonde, threw roses into the grave, then handfuls of earth. Nikolai, bent with arthritis, grey-skinned, vacant-eyed, dung to my husband’s arm in tearless grief. The daughters, Vera and Nadezhda, Faith and Hope, my sister and I, prepared to do battle over our mother’s will.

When the funeral guests come back to the house, to pick at cold refreshments and get tipsy on Ukrainian samohonka, my sister and I confront each other in the kitchen. She is wearing a black knitted silk two-piece from some discreet little second-hand dress agency in Kensington. There are small gold buckles on her shoes and she carries a Gucci handbag with a little gold clasp, and a fine gold chain hangs around her neck. I am wearing an assortment of black garments I found in Oxfam. Vera looks me up and down critically.

“Yes, the peasant look. I see.”

I am forty-seven years old and a university lecturer, but my sister’s voice reduces me instantly to a bogey-nosed four-year-old.

“Nothing wrong with peasants. Mother was a peasant,” four-year-old retorts.

“Quite,” says Big Sister. She lights a cigarette. The smoke curls upwards in elegant spirals.

She bends forward to replace the lighter in her Gucci bag, and I see that on the gold chain round her neck hangs a little locket, tucked away inside the lapels of her suit. It looks old-fashioned and quaint against Vera’s stylish outfit, as though it doesn’t belong. I stare. Tears are in my eyes.

“You’re wearing Mother’s locket.”

It is Mother’s only treasure from Ukraine, small enough to hide in the hem of a dress. It was a gift from her father to her mother on their wedding day. Inside the locket, their two photographs smile fadedly at each other.

Vera returns my gaze.

“She gave it to me.” (I cannot believe this. Mother knew I loved the locket, coveted it more than anything. Vera must have stolen it. There is no other explanation.) “Now, what exactly do you want to say about the will?”

“I just want things to be fair,” I whine. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nadezhda, it’s enough that you get your clothes from Oxfam. Must you get your ideas there also?”

“You took the locket. You pressured her into signing the codicil. Split the money equally among the three granddaughters, instead of between the two daughters. That way, you and yours get twice as much. Greedy.”

“Really, Nadezhda. I’m shocked that you could think this way.” Big Sister’s groomed eyebrows quiver.

“Not nearly as shocked as I was when I found out,” Bogey-nose bleats.

“You weren’t there, were you, my little sister? You were off doing your wonderful thing. Saving the world. Pursuing your career. Leaving all the responsibility to me. As you always do.”

“You tormented her last days with stories of your divorce, of your husband’s cruelty. You chain-smoked at her bedside while she lay dying.”

Big Sister flicks the ash from her cigarette and sighs theatrically.

“You see, the trouble with your generation, Nadezhda, is that you’ve just skated over the surface of life. Peace. Love. Workers’ Control. It’s all idealistic nonsense. You can afford the luxury of irresponsibility, because you’ve never seen the dark underside of life.”

Why does my sister’s upper-class drawl infuriate me so much? Because I know it’s fake. I know about the single bed we shared and the toilet across the yard and the squares of torn newspaper to wipe your bum. She can’t fool me. But I have my ways of needling her, too.

“Oh, it’s the dark underside that’s bothering you? Why don’t you go and get some counselling?” I suggest slyly in my best professional let’s-be-sensible voice, my look-how-grown-up-I-am voice, the voice I use with Pappa.

“Please don’t talk to me in that social-worker voice, Nadezhda.”

“Get some psychotherapy. Get to grips with that dark underside, flush it out into the open, before it eats you away.” (I know this will infuriate her.)

“Counselling. Therapy. Let’s all talk about our problems. Let’s all hug each other and feel better. Let’s help the underprivileged. Let’s give all our money to the starving babies.”

She bites fiercely into a canape. An olive hurtles to the floor.

“Vera, you’re going through bereavement and divorce. No wonder you’re feeling under stress. You need some help.”

“It’s all self-delusion. Underneath, people are hard and mean and out for themselves. You can’t imagine how I despise social workers.”

“I can imagine. And Vera, I’m not a social worker.”

My father is in a rage, too. He blames the doctors, my sister, the Zadchuks, the man who cut the long grass behind the house, for causing her death. Sometimes he blames himself. He slopes around muttering, if this hadn’t happened, if that hadn’t happened, my Millochka would still be alive. Our little exile family, long held together by our mother’s love and beetroot soup, has started to fall apart.

Alone in the empty house, my father lives out of tins and eats off folded newspapers, as if by punishing himself he will bring her back. He will not come and stay with us.

Sometimes I go and visit. I like to sit in the churchyard where my mother is buried. The tombstone reads:

Ludmilla Mayevska

Born in 1912 in the Ukraine

Beloved wife of Nikolai

Mother of Vera and Nadezhda

Grandmother of Alice, Alexandra and Anna

The stonemason had trouble getting all the words on. There is a flowering cherry tree and beneath it a wooden bench facing the neat square of grass half-turned to recent graves, and a hawthorn hedge dividing it from a wheat field which rolls on into other wheat fields, potato fields, oilseed rape fields, on and on to the horizon. My mother came from the steppes, and she felt at ease with these open horizons. The Ukrainian flag is two oblongs of colour, blue over yellow-yellow for the cornfields, blue for the sky. This vast, flat, featureless fenland landscape reminded her of home. Only the sky is seldom as blue.

I miss my mother, but I am beginning to come to terms with my grief. I have a husband and a daughter and a life elsewhere.

My father prowls around the house where they lived together. It is a small, ugly, modern house, pebble-dashed with a concrete slab garage at the side. Around the house on three sides is the garden, where my mother grew roses, lavender, lilacs, columbines, poppies, pansies, clematis (Jackmanii and Ville de Lyon), snapdragons, potentilla, wallflowers, catmint, forget-me-nots, peonies, aubretia, montbretia, campanula, rock roses, rosemary, irises, lilies and a purple trailing wisteria, pinched as a cutting from a botanical garden.

There are two apple trees, two pear trees, three plum trees, a cherry and a quince, whose yellow fragrant fruits have won prizes at the village show for the last twenty years. At the back, beyond the flower garden and the lawn, are three vegetable patches where my mother grew potatoes, onions, runner beans, broad beans, peas, sweet corn, marrows, carrots, garlic, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, cabbages and Brussels sprouts. In between the vegetables, dill and parsley grow wild, self-seeded. To one side, a soft-fruit patch of raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, red and black currants and a cherry tree is enclosed in netting on frames that my father has made to keep off the fat, greedy birds. But some of the strawberries and raspberries have escaped the net, and run off to propagate in the flower borders.

There is a greenhouse where a purple grape-vine luxuriates above fruitful beds of tomatoes and capsicums. Behind the greenhouse are a water butt, two potting sheds, a compost heap and a dung pile that is the envy of the village. It is rich, crumbly, well-rotted cow-manure, a gift from another Ukrainian gardener. “Black chocolate,” my mother called it. “Come on, my little darlings,” she would whisper to the marrows, “have some black chocolate.” They gobbled it up, and grew and grew.

Each time my father goes out into the garden he sees my mother’s shape, bent down among the marrows, reaching to tie the runner beans, a blur through the glass of the greenhouse. Sometimes her voice calls him from room to room of the empty house. And each time he remembers she is not there after all, the wound bursts open again.

The second phone call came a few days after the first.

“Tell me, Nadezhda, do you think it would be possible for a man of eighty-four to father a child?”

See how he always gets straight to the point? No small talk. No ‘How are you? How are Mike and Anna?’ No chit-chat about the weather. Nothing frivolous will hold him up when he isin the grip of a Big Idea.

“Well, I’m not sure…”

Why is he asking me? How would I know? I don’t want to know. I don’t want this kick of emotion that drags me back to the bogey-nose days, to the time when my Daddy was still my hero and I was still vulnerable to his disapproval.

“And if it is, Nadezhda,” he rattles on before I can marshal my defences, “what do you think are the chances it would be mentally defective?”

“Well now, Pappa,” (pause for breath, keep the voice cheery and sensible) “it is quite well established that the older a woman is, the greater her chance of having a baby with Down’s Syndrome. It’s a kind of learning disability-it used to be called mongolism.”

“Hmm.” (He doesn’t like the sound of that.) “Hmm. But maybe it’s a chance we should take. You see, I am thinking that if she is mother to the British citizen, as well as wife of British citizen, they surely would not be able to deport her…”

“Pappa, I don’t think you should rush into…”

“Because British justice is best in world. It is both a historical destiny and burden, which one might say…”

He always speaks to me in English, eccentrically accented and articled, but functional. Engineer’s English. My mother spoke to me in Ukrainian, with its infinite gradations of tender diminutives. Mother tongue.

“Pappa, just stop and think for a minute. Is this really what you want?”

“Hmm. What I want?” (he pronounces it ‘vat I vant’). “Of course to father such a child would be not straightforward. Technically it may be possible…”

The thought of my father having sex with this woman makes my stomach turn.

“…Snag is, hydraulic lift no longer fully functioning. But maybe with Valentina…”

He is lingering over this procreation scenario too much for my taste. Looking at it from different angles. Trying it for size, as it were. “…what do you think?”

“Pappa, I don’t know what to think.”

I just want him to shut up.

“Yes, with Valentina it may be possibility…”

His voice goes dreamy. He is thinking of how he will father this child-a boy, it will be. He will teach him how to prove Pythagoras from first principles and how to appreciate Constructivist art. He will discuss tractors with him. It is my father’s great regret that both his children were daughters. Inferior intellectually, yet not flirtatious and feminine, as women should be, but strident, self-willed, disrespectful creatures. What a misfortune for a man. He has never tried to conceal his disappointment.

“I think, Pappa, that before you rush into anything, you should get some legal advice. It may not turn out the way you think. Would you like me to talk to a solicitor?”

“Tak tak.” (Yes yes.) “Better you talk to a solicitor in Cambridge. They have all types of foreign there. They must know something about immigration.”

He has a taxonomic approach to people. He has no concept of racism.

“OK, Pappa. I’ll try to find a solicitor who specialises in immigration. Don’t do anything till I get back to you.”

The solicitor is a young man from an inner city practice who knows his stuff. He writes:

If your father was to marry, then he would need to make an application to the Home Office for his wife to stay. For this to be granted, she would have to show the following:

That the main purpose of the marriage was not to secure her entry or stay in the UK.

That they have met.

That they intend to live permanently together as husband and wife.

That they can support and accommodate themselves without claiming Public Funds.

The main problem is that the Home Office (or an Embassy if she applies after leaving die United Kingdom) is likely to believe mat, because of die age difference, and because die marriage took place shortly before she had to leave die UK, die main purpose of die marriage is simply for immigration.

I forward the letter to my father.

The solicitor also tells me that the chances of success would be measurably improved should the marriage last for five years, or should there be a child of the marriage. I do not tell my father this.