A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Twelve. A half-eaten ham sandwich

“How do you suppose Mrs Z knew about the annulment plan?” Vera asks. Mrs Divorce Expert and Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home are putting their heads together again.

“Valentina must have seen the letter from the solicitor.”

“She’s going through his mail.”

“Looks like it.”

“I must say, with her devious criminal bent, I’m not in the least surprised.”

“It’s a game two can play.”

Next time we visit, I abandon Mike to field the tractor monologues in the apple-filled sitting-room, while I disappear upstairs to rummage through Valentina’s room. She has taken over the room which used to be my parents’ bedroom. It is a sombre, ugly room with heavy 19505 oak furniture, the wardrobe still full of my mother’s clothes, twin beds with yellow candlewick covers, mauve, yellow and black curtains in a startling modernist design of my father’s choosing, and a square of blue carpet in the middle of the brown lino. To me this room, this inner sanctum of my parents’ relationship, has always been a place of mystery and trepidation. So I am startled to find that Valentina has transformed it into a Hollywood-style boudoir, with pink nylon fur-fabric cushions, quilted and frilled holders for tissue paper, cosmetics and cotton wool, pictures of wide-eyed children on the walls, cuddly toys on the bed, and bottles of perfume, lotions and creams on the dressing-table. It seems they have all come from mail-order catalogues, several of which lie open on the floor.

But the most remarkable thing about the room is the mess. There is a chaos of papers, clothes, shoes, dirty cups, nail varnish, pots of cosmetics, crusts of toast, hairbrushes, beauty appliances, toothbrushes, stockings, packets of biscuits, jewellery, photographs, sweet wrappers, knick-knacks, used plates, underwear, apple cores, sticking plasters, catalogues, wrappings, sticky sweets, all jumbled together on the dressing-table, the chair, the spare bed, and overflowing on to the floor. And cotton wool, everywhere blobs of cotton wool covered with red lipstick, black eye make-up, orange face make-up, pink nail varnish, strewn on the bed, on the floor, trodden into the blue carpet, jumbled up with the clothes and food.

There is a strange odour, a mixture of sickly-sweet scent and industrial chemical, and something else-something organic and bacterial.

Where to start? I realise I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for. I reckon I have an hour before Valentina gets back from work, and Stanislav gets home from his Saturday job.

I start with the bed. There are some photos, a few official-looking papers, an application for a provisional driver’s licence, a?45 from her job at the nursing-home (I notice that the surname is spelt differently on both documents), an application form for a job at McDonald’s. The photographs are interesting-they show Valentina in a glamorous off-the-shoulder evening gown, elaborately coiffed, standing beside a dark stocky middle-aged man who is a couple of inches shorter than she. Sometimes he has his arm around her shoulder; sometimes they hold hands; sometimes they smile at the camera. Who is the man? I study the picture closely, but it does not look like Bob Turner. I pick one of the photos and slip it into my pocket.

Under the bed, in a Tesco’s carrier bag, I make my next discovery: it is a bundle of letters and poems in my father’s crabbed hand. Interspersed with the letters and poems, someone has supplied an English translation. My darling…beloved…beautiful goddess Venus…breasts like ripe peaches (for goodness’sake!)…hair like the golden wheat fields of Ukraina…all my love and devotion…yours until death and beyond. The handwriting of the translations looks like a child’s, with large rounded letters, and the i’s dotted with little circles. Stanislav? Why would he do this? Who is the intended reader of these translations? One of the letters, I notice, has numbers as well as words. Curious, I pull it out. My father has set out his income, giving details of all his pensions and all his savings accounts. The spidery numbers crawl up and down the pages. It is a modest amount, but enough to live comfortably, and all will be yours, my beloved, he has written at the bottom. All this has been neatly transcribed in the childish hand.

I read it through again, my irritation rising. My sister is right-he is a fool. I should not blame Valentina for taking his money-he has more or less thrust it upon her.

Now I turn my attention to the drawers. Here the same chaos prevails. I sift through the jumble of underwear, outerwear, sticky sweet wrappers, bottles of lotions, cheap perfume.

In one drawer, I find a note. “See you on Saturday. All my love, Eric.” Beside it, buried in a pair of knickers, is a half-eaten ham sandwich, its crusts grey and curled back, the pink dark-dry sliver of ham poking out obscenely.

At that moment, I hear the sound of a car pulling up. Quickly, I sneak out of Valentina’s room and into Stanislav’s. This used to be my room, and I still keep some things in the wardrobe, so I have an excuse to be there. Stanislav is tidier than Valentina. It does not take me long to realise that he is a fan of Kylie Minogue and of Boyzone. This ‘musical genius’ has a roomful of tapes of Boyzone! On the table under the window are some school books, and a writing pad. He is writing a letter in Ukrainian. Dear Daddy…

Then I realise there are two new voices-it is not Mike and my father, it is Valentina and Stanislav talking to each other in the kitchen. I close Stanislav’s door behind me quietly and tiptoe downstairs. Valentina and Stanislav are in the kitchen poking at some boil-in-the-bag delicacies bubbling away on the cooker. Under the grill, two shrivelled sausages are starting to smoke.

“Hallo Valentina. Hallo Stanislav.” (I’m not sure of the etiquette here: how are you supposed to talk to someone who is beating up your father, and whose room you have been rifling through? I opt for the English way: polite conversation.) “Had a hard day at work?”

“I always working hard. Too much hard,” Valentina replies grumpily. I notice how fat she has grown. Her stomach has swelled like a balloon, and her cheeks have stretched and bulged. Stanislav, on the other hand, seems to have grown thinner. My father is lurking in the doorway, emboldened by Mike’s presence.

“Sausages burning, Valentina,” he says.

“You no eating, you shut up mouth.” She flicks a wet tea-towel in his direction.

Then she throws the boil-in-bags on to a plate and slits them with a knife, spewing out their indeterminate contents, slaps the sausages down beside them, splatters some ketchup on top, and stomps back up to her bedroom. Stanislav follows mutely.

The pen is mightier than the tea-towel, and Father writes his own revenge.

Never was the technology of peace, in the form of the tractor, transformed into a weapon of war, more ferociously than with the creation of the Valentine tank. This tank was developed by the British, but produced in Canada, where many Ukrainian engineers were skilled in the production of tractors. The Valentine tank was so named because it was first born into the world on the day of St Valentine in 1938. But there was nothing lovely about it. Clumsy and heavy with an old-fashioned gearbox, it was nevertheless deadly, indeed a true killing machine.

“Ugh!” exclaims Vera, when I tell her about the ham sandwich. “But of course, what else would one expect from such a slut?”

I cannot describe the smell. I tell her about the cotton wool.

“How simply ghastly! In Mother’s bedroom! But didn’t you find anything else? Was there nothing from the solicitor about her immigration status, or any advice about divorce?”

“I couldn’t find anything. Maybe she’s keeping it at work. There’s no trace in the house.”

“She must have hidden it. Of course it is only what one would expect from a highly developed criminal mind like hers.”

“But listen to this, Vera. I had a look in Stanislav’s room, and guess what I found.”

“I haven’t a clue. Drugs? Counterfeit money?”

“Don’t be silly. No, I found a letter. He’s writing to his Dad in Ternopil, saying he’s really unhappy over here. He wants to go home.”