A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Nineteen. The Red Plough

I think it was the baby alarm that finally did the trick. Father has agreed to a divorce. I am charged with finding a suitable solicitor-someone who is authoritative enough to stick up to Valentina’s army of legal-aid lawyers, someone who will fight my father’s corner, not just go through the motions and collect the fees.

“Not the youth I spoke to about the annulment. He was useless,” Mrs Divorce Expert says. “It must be a woman-she will be outraged by what has happened. Not the biggest firms, because they will pass the smaller cases on to a junior. Not the smallest firms, because they will have no expertise.”

I wander up and down the streets of Peterborough ’s legal district, looking at the names on the brass plates. What can you tell from a name? Not a lot. That’s how I find Ms Laura Carter.

The first time I meet her, I almost get up and walk straight out of the room. I am sure I have made a mistake. She seems far too young, far too nice. How am I going to be able to talk to her about bosom-fondling, about oralsex, about squishy squashy? But I am wrong-Ms Carter is a tigress: a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, pert-nosed English rose of a tigress. As I talk, I see her pert nose twitching with anger. By the time I have finished, she is furious.

“Your father is at risk. We must get her out of the house as soon as possible. We’ll apply for an injunction immediately, and we’ll file for divorce at the same time. The three cars are good. The note from Eric Pike is good. The episode in the hospital is excellent, because it is a public place, and there were plenty of witnesses. Yes, I think we can get something in place by the tribunal appeal in September.”

The first time I take my father to meet Ms Carter in her office, he wears the tattered suit he wore for his wedding and the same white shirt with the black-stitched buttons. He bows so low over her outstretched hand, in the old Russian way, that he almost topples over. She is charmed.

“Such a nice gentleman,” she murmurs to me in her English-rose voice. “Such a shame that someone would take advantage.”

He, however, has reservations. He tells Vera on the phone, “Looks like young girl. What does she know?”

“What do you know, Pappa?” Big Sis retorts. “If you knew anything, you wouldn’t be in this pickle.”

Ms Carter also throws light on the mystery of the small portable photocopier and the missing medical appointments.

“She may want to show that your father is ill-too ill to attend a tribunal. Or she may be getting evidence that he is of unsound mind-confused, doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“And the translated poems?”

“That will be to demonstrate that it is a bona-fide relationship.”

“The scheming vixen!”

“Oh, I expect her solicitor told her to do it.”

“Solicitors do that?”

Ms Carter nods. “And worse.”

It’s mid-July now, and the September tribunal hearing, having seemed an eternity away, suddenly seems very close. Ms Carter arranges for a private detective to serve the papers.

“We’ll have to make sure the divorce petition is served on her in person. Otherwise she can claim she never received it.”

Vera has volunteered to be there on the day, to make sure that Valentina receives it in person. Now there is to be some action, she doesn’t want to miss out. My father insists that she does not need to come, that he is after all an intelligent adult and can handle this himself; but he is overruled. The trap is set.

At the pre-ordained time, the detective, a tall dark louche-looking man with plenty of five-o’clock shadow, turns up at the house and hammers on the door.

“Oh, it must be the postman!” cries Vera, who has been up since six o’clock anticipating the excitement. “It could be a parcel for you, Valentina.”

Valentina rushes to the door. She is still wearing her frilly pinafore and her yellow rubber gloves from washing up the breakfast things.

The detective thrusts the envelope into her hands. Valentina looks confused.

“Divorce pepper? I no want divorce.”

“No,” says the detective, “the petitioner is Mr Nikolai Mayevskyj. He is divorcing you.”

She stands for a moment in stunned silence. Then she explodes in a ball of fury.

“Nikolai! Nikolai! What is this?” she screams at my father. “Nikolai, you crazy dog-eaten-brain graveyard-deadman!”

My father has locked himself in his room and turned the radio on full volume.

She swings round again to confront the private detective, but he is already slamming the door of his black BMW and driving away with a screech of tyres. She turns on Vera.

“You she-cat-dog-vixen flesh-eating witch!”

“I’m sorry, Valentina,” says Big Sis, in a voice which she later describes to me as calm and rational, “but this is no more than you deserve. You cannot come to this country and deceive and cheat people, however stupid they are.”

“I no cheat! You cheat! I love you Pappa! I love!”

“Don’t be silly, Valentina. Now, go and see your solicitor.”

“Oh Vera, that’s wonderful! Did it all go so smoothly?”

If I feel a moment’s pity for the trapped bewildered Valentina, it is only fleeting.

“So far so good,” says Mrs Divorce Expert.

But Valentina’s solicitor has a trick up his sleeve that Ms Carter has not foreseen. The first court hearing, at which the injunction will be served to oust Valentina from the house, has been brought forward at Ms Carter’s request. Neither my sister nor I can be there, so we only have Laura’s account of what happened. She and my father arrive early at the court. The judge arrives. Valentina and Stanislav arrive. The judge opens the proceedings. Valentina stands up. “I no understand English. I must interpreter.” There is consternation in the court. Clerks rush around, hurried phone calls are made. But no Ukrainian-speaking interpreter can be found. The judge adjourns the hearing, and a new date is set. We have lost two weeks.

“Oh, bother!” says Ms Carter. “I should have thought of that.”

In early August, the same group reassembles, but this time with a middle-aged woman from the Ukrainian Club in Peterborough, who has agreed to act as an interpreter. My father will pick up the tab. She must know about the story of Valentina and my father-all the Ukrainians for miles around know about it-but she is po-faced, and reveals nothing. I have taken the day off to be there too, to give Laura and Pappa moral support. It is a blazing hot day, just over a year since they were married. Valentina is wearing a navy-blue pink-lined suit-maybe the same one she wore for the immigration panel. My father is wearing his wedding suit again and the white shirt stitched with black button thread.

Ms Carter describes the incidents with the wet tea-towel, the glass of water, and the hospital steps. Her voice is low and clear, dense with suppressed emotion, solemn at the awfulness of the things she describes. She seems almost apologetic, as with her head bowed and her eyes downcast, she produces her coup de grace: a report from the psychiatrist. Valentina protests vigorously and colourfully that my father has told a malicious pack of lies, that she loves her husband, and that she has nowhere else to live with her son.

“I am not bad woman. He has a paranoia!”

She tosses her hair from side to side and whips the air into a lather with her hands as she appeals to her audience. The interpreter translates it all into bland third-person English.

Now my father stands up and answers questions in a voice so faint and quavery the judge has to ask him to repeat himself several times. His English is correct and formal, engineer’s English, yet there is a clever touch of drama in the way he raises his shaking hand and points at Valentina: “I believe she wishes to murder me!” He looks small, wizened and bewildered in his crumpled suit and thick glasses; his frailty speaks volumes. The judge orders that Valentina and Stanislav must leave the house within a fortnight, taking all their possessions with them.

That evening, my father and I open a four-year-old bottle of my mother’s purple plum wine, to celebrate. The cork bursts out and hits the ceiling with a thwack, leaving a dent in the plaster. The wine tastes like cough-medicine and goes straight to the head. My father begins to tell me about his days at the Red Plough Factory in Kiev, which, apart from today, he declares, were the happiest days of his life. Within thirty minutes we are both fast asleep, my father in his armchair, I slumped across the dining-table. Some time very late during the night, I am woken by the sounds of Stanislav and Valentina letting themselves into the house and creeping upstairs, talking in quiet voices.

Although the psychiatrist pronounced my father all-clear, Valentina may have been closer to the truth than she realised, for only someone who has lived in a totalitarian state can appreciate the true character of paranoia. In 1937, when my father returned to Kiev from Luhansk, the whole country was bathed in a tniasma of paranoia.

It seeped everywhere, into the most intimate crevices of people’s lives: it soured the relations between friends and colleagues, between teachers and students, between parents and children, husbands and wives. Enemies were everywhere. If you didn’t like the way someone had sold you a piglet, or looked at your girlfriend, or asked for money you owed, or given you a low mark in an exam, a quick word to the NKVD would sort them out. If you fancied someone’s wife, a word to the NKVD, a stint in Siberia, would leave the coast clear for you. However brilliant, gifted, or patriotic you might be, you were still a threat to somebody. If you were too clever you were sure to be a potential defector or saboteur; if you were too stupid, you were bound to say the wrong thing sooner or later. No one could escape the paranoia, from the lowliest to the greatest; indeed the most powerful man in the land, Stalin himself, was the most paranoid of all. The paranoia leached out from under the locked doors of the Kremlin, paralysing all human life.

In 1937 the arrest of the renowned aircraft designer Tupolev, on suspicion of sabotage, shocked the world of aviation. He was imprisoned not in the gulag but in his own institute in Moscow, along with his entire design team, and forced to continue his work under conditions of slavery. They slept in dormitories under armed guard, but were fed the finest meat and plenty of fish, for it was believed that the brain needed good nourishment in order to perform. For an hour or so each day, the engineers were allowed out into a caged enclosure on the roof of the institute for recreation. From here they could sometimes watch the aeroplanes they had designed wheeling in the sky high above them.

“And not only Tupolev,” says my father, “but Kerber, Lyulka, Astrov, Bartini, Lozinsky, even the genius Korolev, father of space flight.” Suddenly aviation was a dangerous endeavour.

“And such imbecile types now in control! When the engineers proposed to build a small two-stroke emergency gasoline engine in place of bulky four-stroke engine, to run the aeroplane’s electrical system if generators should fail, they were forbidden, on grounds that switching from four-stroke to two-stroke in one step would be too risky. They were ordered to build three-stroke engine! Three-stroke engine! Ha ha ha!”

Maybe it was the arrest of Tupolev, or maybe it was the poisonous effect of the paranoia, but it was now that my father began to switch his allegiance from the soaring firmament of aviation to the humble earth-bound world of tractors. So he found his way to the Red Plough Factory in Kiev.

The Red Plough was a paranoia-free zone. Nestled in a curve of the Dnieper River, away from the main political centres, it got on with its humble work of producing agricultural implements, construction machinery, boilers and vats. Nothing had military implications. Nothing was secret or state-of-the-art. Thus it became a haven for scientists, engineers, artists, poets and people who just wanted to breathe free air. My father’s first design project was a concrete mixer. It was a beauty. (He whirls his hands around to demonstrate its motion.) Then there was a twin-furrow plough. (He slides his hands up and down, palms outward.) On summer evenings after work, they would strip off and swim in the wide sandy-bottomed river that looped around the factory precinct. (He demonstrates vigorous breast-stroke. The plum wine has really gone to his head.) And they always ate well, for as a sideline they repaired bicycles, motors, pumps, carts, whatever anyone brought to the back door, and took payment in bread and sausages.

My father worked at the Red Plough from 1937 until the outbreak of war in 1939, while my mother attended the Veterinary Institute on the outskirts of Kiev. They lived in a two-roomed apartment on the ground floor of an ‘art nouveau’ stuccoed house on Dorogozhitska Street, which they shared with Anna and Viktor, a couple of friends they knew from university. At the bottom of their road was Melnikov Street, a wide boulevard which leads down past the old Jewish cemetery into the steep wooded ravine of Babi Yar.

I awake late next morning with a splitting headache and a stiff neck My father is already up, fiddling about with the radio. He is in excellent spirits, and immediately wants to continue where he left off about the fate of Tupolev, but I shut him up and put the kettle on. There is something foreboding about the stillness in the house. Stanislav and Valentina are out, and the Rover has disappeared from the front drive. As I walk through the house clutching a cup of tea, I notice that some of the dutter in Valentina’s room seems to have been cleared away, some pots and pans are missing from the kitchen, and the small portable photocopier has gone.