A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Sixteen. My mother wears a hat

Aunty Shura delivered my mother’s first baby. Vera was born in Luhansk (Voroshilovgrad) in March 1937. She was a miserable baby whose high-pitched gasping cries, as though she was about to stop breathing at any moment, drove Nikolai to distraction. Aunty Shura doted on Ludmilla, but she did not like Nikolai, and neither did her Communist-Party-member-friend-of-Marshal-Voroshilov husband. Life at Aunty Shura’s became tense. Tempers flared, doors were slammed, voices were raised, and the wooden house reverberated like a sound box. After a few weeks, Ludmilla, Nikolai and baby Vera decamped to live with Ludmilla’s mother (now she was a grandmother they called her Baba Sonia) in her new three-roomed concrete-built apartment on the other side of the city.

It was a tight squeeze in the apartment. Nikolai, Ludmilla and the baby occupied one room; in another room lived Baba Sonia; the third room was rented out to two students. The younger brother and sister were away at college, but when they came back, they shared with their mother. There was no hot water-sometimes no cold water, either-and although the famine had eased, food was still scarce. The new baby grizzled and whined constantly. She sucked fiercely at the breast, but Ludmilla, sick and anaemic, had little milk to give her.

Baba Sonia would take the whining baby on to her knee, bounce her up and down, and sing:

Beyond the Caucasus we stood up for our rights, stood up for our rights. Hey!

There the Magyars were advancing, were advancing. Hey!

Aunty Shura said: “Take an apple, push iron nails into it, leave it overnight, then take the nails out and eat it-that way you get both vitamin C and iron.”

Nikolai could not find a suitable job in Luhansk and mooched around the flat writing poems and getting under everyone’s feet. The constant crying of the baby got on his nerves, and he got on Ludmilla’s nerves. In the winter of 1937 he returned to Kiev.

That same year, Ludmilla was finally offered a place at the veterinary college in Kiev. Maybe the crane-operating job had done the trick, and turned her into a proletarian after all. But now it seemed like a cruel joke. With a new baby and her husband at work, it would be impossible.

“Go! Go!” said Aunty Shura. “I’ll look after Verochka.” Ludmilla had to choose: husband and veterinary college, or baby daughter. Aunty Shura bought her a new coat and a train ticket, and gave her an extravagant hat with silk flowers and a veil. Ludmilla kissed her mother and her aunt goodbye at the station. Little Verochka clung to her sobbing. They had to hold her back while Ludmilla boarded the train.

“So when did you see her again?”

“It was nearly two years,” says Vera. “She stayed in Kiev right up until the start of the war. Then she came to get me. Kharkiv was too dangerous. We went to Dashev, to stay with Baba Nadia. It would be safer in the village.”

“You must have been glad to see her.”

“I didn’t recognise her.”

One day a thin dishevelled-looking woman arrived on the doorstep, and grabbed Vera in her arms. The child started to scream and kick.

“Don’t you recognise your mother, Verochka?” said Aunty Shura.

“She’s not my mother!” cried Vera. “My mother wears a hat.”

We still have a picture of Mother in the hat, with the veil pulled back and a girlish smile on her face. My father must have taken it shortly after she arrived in Kiev. I found it in a bundle of old photographs and letters in that same drawer where I once found the letter from the psychiatrist. The letter has long since been lost, but the photographs are in an old shoe box in the sitting-room, along with the fragrant rotting apples, the freezer full of boil-in-the-bag dinners, the small portable photocopier and the civilised person’s Hoover, which being of a foreign make for which no dust bags are available in this country, now sits abandoned in the corner with its cover open and debris spilling from its civilised insides.

This room is still disputed territory. When Valentina is at home, she sits in here with the television on at full blast, and an electric bar fire (my father has fixed the radiator so that it doesn’t come on, in order to protect his apples). My father does not understand television; most of the content is completely meaningless to him. He sits in his bedroom and listens to classical music on the radio, or reads. But when she is out at work, he likes to sit in here with his apples and his photographs and the view over the ploughed fields.

We are sitting in here together this wet afternoon in May drinking tea, watching the rain stream down the windows and lash the lilac trees in the garden, while I try to work the conversation away from the development of jet propulsion in Ukraine in the 19305, and towards a discussion of divorce.

“I know you don’t like the idea, Pappa. But I think it’s the only way you will be free again.”

He stops and looks at me with a frown. “Why you are now talking about divorce, Nadia? That is Vera, who is such enthusiast for the divorce. Cigarettes and divorce. Pah!”

His jaw is set, his arthritic fingers knotted in his lap.

“Vera and I are both agreed about this, Pappa. We think Valentina will continue to abuse you, and we are worried about your safety.”

“Did you know, when Vera first discovered there was such thing as divorce, she immediately tried to convince Ludmilla to divorce me.”

“Really?” This is the first I have heard about this. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it. Children say all sorts of strange things.”

“She did mean it. Indeed she did. All her life she has tried to make divorce between Millochka and me. Now between Valentina and me. Now you too, Nadia.”

He fixes me with that stubborn look. I can see this conversation is going nowhere.

“But Pappa, you lived with Mother for sixty years. Surely you can see that Valentina is not the same as Mother.”

“Clearly this Valentina, she is of quite different generation. She knows nothing of history, even less about recent past. She is daughter of the Brezhnev era. In times of the Brezhnev, everyone’s idea was to bury all gone-by things and to become like in West. To build this economy, people must be buying something new all the time. New desires must be implanted as fast as old ideals must be buried. That is why she is always wanting to buy something modern. It is not her fault; it is the post-war mentality.”

“But Pappa, this is no excuse for her to mistreat you. She cannot abuse you like this.”

“One can forgive a beautiful woman many things.”

“O, Pappa! For goodness’ sake!”

His glasses have slipped down his nose, and sit at a crazy angle. His shirt is unbuttoned at the throat, showing the white hairs that sprout around his scar. He has a sour, unwashed smell. He isn’t exactly your Don Juan, but he has no idea.

“This Valentina, she is beautiful like Milla, and like Milla she has strong spirit, but also with an element of cruelty in her nature unknown to Ludmilla, which by the way is characteristic of the Russian type.”

“Pappa, how can you compare her with Mother? How can you even say her name in the same breath?”

It is his disloyalty that I cannot forgive.

“You made Mother’s life a misery, and now you abuse her memory. Vera’s right-Mother should have divorced you long ago.”

“Misery? Memory? Nadia, why you always want to make a drama out of something? Millochka died. That is sad, of course, but is now in the past. Now is time for new life, new love.”

“Pappa, it’s not me making the drama. It’s you. All my life, all Mother’s life, we had to live with your crazy ideas, your dramas. Do you remember how upset Mother was when you invited all the Ukrainians to come and live with us? Do you remember how you bought the new Norton, when Mother needed a washing machine? Do you remember when you left home and tried to catch the train back to Russia?”

“But that was not because of Millochka. That was because of you. You were then a crazy Trotskyist.”

“I wasn’t a Trotskyist. And even if I was, I was only fifteen. You were an adult-supposedly.”

It’s true, though, that it was because of me that he tried to leave home and catch the train back to Russia. He packed his brown cardboard suitcase-the very same one that had travelled with him when he left Ukraine -and stood on the platform at Witney railway station. I can just imagine him pacing up and down, muttering to himself and looking impatiently at his watch from time to time.

Mother had to go and plead with him.

“Nikolai! Kolya! Kolyusha! Come home now! Kolka, where are you going?”

“I’m waiting for the train to Russia!” Picture the dramatic gesture of his head, his blazing eyes. “Why not? It’s all the same. Now they are bringing in communism here, I don’t know why I ever left Russia. I don’t know why I risked everything. Now even my own daughter is helping to bring in communism here.”

Yes, it was all my fault. I went down to Greenham Common with my friend Cathy in 1962. (I went again in 1981, but that’s a different story.) We went to protest about the planned deployment of H-bombs at the nuclear base, and we got ourselves arrested. There we were in our drainpipes and headbands and groovy shades, sitting out on the newly laid approach road. I was reading Julius Caesar’s De Bella Gallico (GCE set text) while the police came and carried us away one by one. I may have been challenging the state through non-violent civil disobedience, but I was still my father’s daughter, and I did my Latin homework.

Some people were strumming Spanish guitars, and everyone started to sing:

Don’t you hear the H-bombs thunder,

Sounding like the crack of doom?

While they tear the heavens asunder,

Fall-out makes the earth a tomb.

Yes, I could hear the H-bombs. I could see the fall-out glimmering in the air, I could feel the strange rain falling. I did believe I would never live to grow up if we didn’t get rid of those H-bombs. But still, I was hedging my bets and doing my GCEs.

All the other people there were older than Cathy and me. Some had long stringy hair and bare feet, and wore faded jeans and dark glasses. Others were nice Quakerly types with sensible shoes and cardigans. They carried on singing as the police picked them up by their arms and legs and put them into furniture vans (they seemed to have run out of Black Marias). Cathy and I didn’t sing-we didn’t want to look daft.

An impromptu courtroom had been set up in the local primary school. We sat on infant-sized chairs, and were called to the bench one by one. Each person made a speech about the wickedness of war, and was fined £3, with £2 court costs. When it was my turn, I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I was only fined £3. (A bargain!) I had lied about my age, because I didn’t want my parents to find out, but they found out anyway.

“Kolya,” pleaded my mother, “she’s not a communist, she’s just a silly girl. Come home now.”

My father said nothing, but stared at a fixed point down the railway line. The next train was in forty minutes, and that went to Eynsham and Oxford, not to Russia.

“Kolyusha, it’s a long way to Russia. Look, at least come home and have something to eat first. I’ve got a lovely beetroot soup. And kotletki- your favourite kotletki, with spinach and beans from the garden, and little potatoes. Just come and fill your belly, then you can go to Russia.”

So, still muttering his rage, he allowed himself to be led back along the muddy path between the brambles and nettles, to the pebble-dash semi where we lived. Grudgingly he bowed his head over the steaming soup bowl. Later, she coaxed him up to bed. So he didn’t leave home after all.

Instead, I left. I ran away to live at Cathy’s house. They lived in a long low Cotswold stone cottage at White Oak Green, full of books and cats and cobwebs. Cathy’s parents were left-wing intellectuals. They didn’t mind Cathy going on marches, in fact they encouraged her. They talked about grown-up things like whether Britain should join the EEC and who created God. But the house was cold, and the food tasted funny, and the cats jumped on you in the night. After a few days my mother came and coaxed me home, too.

Years later I can still remember the smell of hot sun on freshly laid tarmac at Greenham Common, and the musty smell of Cathy’s bedroom. Only the image of my father is unclear, as if something obscure but vital has been blotted out, and only the raging surface is left. Who is he, this man whom I have known and not known all my life?

“But this is all in past, Nadia. Why you have such bourgeois preoccupation with all personal history?”

“Because it’s important…it defines…it helps us understand…because we can learn…Oh, I don’t know.”