A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Twenty-Six. All will be corrected

“So who do you think is the father? Eric Pike or Bald Ed?”

I am in the top bunk, Vera is in the bottom bunk, in the room that was formerly Stanislav’s room, before that, the room where Anna, Alice and Alexandra stayed when they visited, before that the room that Vera and I shared as girls. It seems in a way amazing for us both to be here, yet in another way the most natural thing in the world. Except that Vera used to have the top bunk and I used to sleep down below.

Through the thin plasterboard wall we can hear the low murmur of male voices in the next room as Stanislav and Dubov catch up on eighteen months of separation. It is a gentle, companionable rumble, punctuated by loud bursts of laughter. From the room below comes the intermittent sound of Father’s long rasping snores. Mike is in the front room, uncomfortably curled up on the two-seater sofa. Fortunately he had quite a lot of plum wine before he went to bed.

“There’s someone else,” says Vera. “You’ve forgotten about that man she stayed with right at the beginning.”

“Bob Turner?” The idea had not crossed my mind, and yet now that Vera says it, I remember the fat brown envelope, the head leaning out of the window, the way Father crumpled. “That was more than two years ago. It couldn’t be him.”

“Couldn’t it?” says Vera sharply.

“You mean she kept on seeing him after they were married?”

“Would that be so surprising?”

“I suppose not.”

“One would have thought she could have done better. None of them seems very appealing. Really,” Vera muses, “she is quite attractive, in a sluttish way. Then again, it is one thing to sleep with that kind of woman, quite another to marry her.”

“But Dubov married her. And he seems a decent sort of guy. Dubov still loves her. And I think she really loves him-the way she came rushing over as soon as she knew he was here.”

“And yet she abandoned him for Pappa.”

“The lure of life in the West.”

“Now she thinks with this baby nonsense she can weasel her way back in with Pappa-he’s so obsessed with the idea of having a son.”

“But imagine, abandoning the love of your life for Pappa, and then finding out he isn’t even rich. All he has to offer is a British passport-and that paid for by Bob Turner. Don’t you feel even just a little bit sorry for her?”

Vera is silent for a moment.

“I can’t say I do. Not after the incident with the Dictaphone. Why, do you?”

“Sometimes I do.”

“But she pities us, too, Nadia. She thinks we’re stupid and ugly-and flat-chested.”

“The thing I can’t understand is what Dubov sees in her. He seems so…perspicacious. You’d think he could see through her.”

“It’s her boobs. All men are the same.” Vera sighs. “Did you see the way Bald Ed ran after her? Pitiful!”

“But did you see Bald Ed’s car? Did you see the way Pappa and Dubov were gazing at it?”

“And Mike.”

After Valentina left, Bald Ed rushed out into the garden calling “Val! Val!” in a pathetic whine, but she didn’t even look round. She slammed the door and drove off in the Lada leaving a cloud of acrid blue engine smoke swirling in the garden. Bald Ed waved his arms and ran down the road after her. Then he jumped into his car that was parked out on the road-it was an American ipsos-style Cadillac convertible, pale green, with fins, and lots of chrome-and chased her through the village. Father, Mike, Dubov and Eric Pike all stood at the window and stared as he drove away. Then they all got stuck into the beer I had brought back. After an hour or so, Eric Pike left, too. Then they got out the plum wine.

“Vera, you don’t think Pappa could be the father? Men of his age have been known to father children. He did talk about it himself at the beginning.”

“Don’t be silly, Nadia. Just look at him. Besides, he was the one who raised the issue of non-consummation. I think Bald Ed is the most likely candidate. Just imagine being related to a man called Bald Ed!”

“I expect he has another name. Anyway, if Pappa divorces her, we won’t be related.”

“If!”

“You think he could still change his mind?”

“I’m sure of it. Especially if he convinces himself the baby is a boy. Conceived by oral sex. Or through some kind of Platonic exchange of minds.”

“Surely he couldn’t be so stupid.”

“Of course he could,” says Vera. “Look at his track record so far.”

We chuckle smugly. I feel close to her and far at the same time, stacked up above her in the dark. When we were children we used to share jokes about our parents.

It must be at least three o’clock in the morning. The rumbles from next door have stopped. I am almost drifting off to sleep. The darkness is comfortable, enfolding. We are so close that we can hear each other’s breath, yet the shadows cloak our faces, as in a confessional, so no expression or judgement or shame is revealed. I know there may never be a chance like this again.

“Pappa said something happened to you in the camp at Drachensee. Something about cigarettes. Can you remember?”

“Of course I can remember.” I wait for her to continue, and after a while she says, “There are some things it’s better not to know, Nadia.”

“I know. But tell me anyway.”

The labour camp at Drachensee was a huge, ugly, chaotic and cruel place. Forced labourers from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, conscripted to boost the German war effort, communists and trade unionists sent from the Low Countries for re-education, Gypsies, homosexuals, criminals, Jews in transit to their deaths, inmates of lunatic asylums and captured resistance fighters, all lived cheek by jowl in low concrete lice-infested barracks. In such a place, the only order was terror. And the rule of terror was reinforced at every level; each community and subcommunity had its own hierarchy of terror.

So it was that among the children of the forced labourers, the head of the hierarchy was a skinny sly-faced youth called Kishka. He must have been some sixteen years old, but he was slight for his age, maybe from a childhood of hunger, and maybe also because he had a habit to support. Kishka was a forty-a-day smoker.

Although he was small, Kishka had around him a coterie of bigger kids who would do his bidding; among these were his sidekick, a brute called Vanenko, two big, not-very-bright Moldavian lads, and a mad-eyed dangerous girl called Lena who always seemed to have plenty of cigarettes-it was said she slept with the guards. To keep Kishka and his gang in cigarettes, the other children were ‘taxed’-that is to say, they had to steal cigarettes from their parents and hand them over to Kishka, who would distribute them among his gang. Those who didn’t got their punishment.

Of all the children in the camp, only the shy mousy little Vera never paid her cigarette tax. How could this be allowed? Vera protested that her parents didn’t smoke, that they traded their cigarettes for food and other things.

“Then you must steal them from someone else,” said Kishka.

Vanenko and the Moldavian lads smiled. Lena winked.

Vera was distraught. Where would she find cigarettes? She sneaked into the barracks when no one was there, and rummaged through the pitiful belongings stowed under the beds. But someone caught her and sent her packing with a thick ear. Numb with despair as she waited for her beating, she stood in a comer of the yard, looking for a place where she could hide, though of course she knew that wherever she hid they would find her. Then she noticed a jacket hanging on a nail by the door. It was the jacket of one of the guards-and the guard himself was over by the perimeter fence, looking out the other way, smoking a cigarette. Quick as a cat, she slid her hand in the pocket, and found the nearly full packet of cigarettes. She hid it inside the sleeve of her dress.

Later, when Kishka came looking for her, she handed over the cigarettes. He was delighted. Army cigarettes had a much higher tobacco content than the rubbish doled out to the labourers.

If Vera had taken only one or two cigarettes, perhaps the whole story would have been different. But the guard, of course, noticed that the packet was missing. He stalked through the yard with his cat-whip, picking on the kids one at a time. Lack of a smoke was making him irritable. Who had seen the thief? Someone must know. If they didn’t own up, the whole block would be punished. Parents too. No one would be spared. He muttered about the existence of a correction block, from which few emerged alive. The children had heard the rumours too, and they were terrified.

It was Kishka himself who fingered Vera.

“Please sir,” he grovelled, cringing as the guard pinched his ear, “it was her-that skinny one over there-she nicked them and gave them out to all the kids.”

He pointed out little Vera, who was sitting silently near the door of one of the huts.

“You, was it?”

The guard grabbed little Vera by the collar of her dress. She didn’t have the presence of mind to deny it. She started to cry. He hauled her inside to the guardroom, and locked the door.

Mother went in search of Vera as soon as she got back from the factory and found she was missing. Someone told her where to look.

“Your daughter is a thieving little rat,” said the guard. “She must be taught a lesson.”

“No,” Mother implored in her broken German, “she didn’t know what she was doing. The big ones put her up to it. What does she want with cigarettes? Can’t you see what a stupid little thing she is?”

“Stupid, yes, but I need my cigarettes,” said the guard. He was a big man, slow in his speech, younger than Mother. “You’ll have to give me yours.”

“I’m sorry, I have none. I traded them. You see, I don’t smoke. Next week, when we are paid, you can have them all.”

“What use is next week? Next week you will have another story.” The guard started to flick his whip around their legs. His face and ears had gone bright red. “You Ukrainians are ungrateful swine. We save you from the communists. We bring you to our country, we feed you, we give you work. And all you can think of is to thieve from us. Well, you have to be taught a lesson, don’t you? We have a correction block for vermin like you. You have heard about F Block? You have heard how nicely we look after you there? Soon you will know.”

Everyone had heard rumours about the Correction Block, a row of forty-eight cramped windowless concrete cells half buried underground, like upright coffins, which stood on its own at one side of the Labour Re-education Camp. In winter, cold and rain added to the torment; in summer, dehydration. Some had seen people dragged out crazed and skeletal after ten or twenty or thirty days. Longer than that, it was said, no one was dragged out alive.

“No,” pleaded Mother. “Have pity!”

She seized Vera and pulled her into her skirt. They cowered against the wall. The guard drew closer, closer, pushing his face up to theirs. His chin gleamed with thin downy blond stubble. He must have been in his early twenties.

“You seem such a nice young man,” Mother begged, choking on the unfamiliar German words. Tears were in her eyes. “Please, show us some pity, young man.”

“Yes, we will show pity. We will not separate you from your child.” They could feel the spray from his crooked-tooth mouth as he gabbled, excited by his power. “You will go with her, vermin mother.”

“Why must you do this? Don’t you have a sister? Don’t you have a mother?”

“Why are you talking about my mother? My mother is a good German woman.” He paused for a moment, blinked, but the momentum of his excitement was too strong, or his imagination failed him.

“We will teach you to raise children not to steal. You will be re-educated. And your vermin husband, if you have one. You all will be corrected.”

The darkness breathes all around us. Then I hear a muffled mousy sniffy sort of sound from the bunk below. I lie quite still trying to fathom what it is, for it is a sound I have never heard before, a sound I have refused to hear, a sound I never imagined was possible. It is the sound of Big Sis crying.

One day I will ask Vera about the Correction Block, but now is not the time. Or maybe my sister is right: maybe there are some things that are better not known, for the knowledge of them can never be un-known. Mother and Father never told me about the Correction Block, and I grew up with no knowledge of the darkness that lurks at the bottom of the human soul.

How did they live the rest of their lives with that terrible secret locked away in their hearts? How did they grow vegetables, and mend motor-bikes, and send us to school and worry about our exam results?

But they did.