A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Seven. Crap car

It’s three weeks after the wedding, and I still haven’t met my new stepmother.

“So when can we come and meet the lucky bride?” I ask my father.

“Not yet. Not yet.”

“But when?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not yet?”

“She isn’t here yet.”

“Not there? Where is she?”

“Never mind where is she. Not here.”

Stubborn old man. He won’t tell me anything. But I find out anyway. I trick him.

“What kind of a wife is that? Won’t even live with her husband?”

“Soon she will come. In three weeks. When Stanislav’s school finishes.”

“What difference does it make’ when school term finishes? If she loved you she would be here right now.”

“But his house is right next to the school. It is more convenient for Stanislav.”

“ Hall Street? Where Bob Turner lives? So she’s still with Bob Turner?”

“Yes. No. But the relationship is quite Platonic now. She has assured me.” (He pronounces it with three syllables-a-shoo-red.)

Fool. Taken for a ride. No point in arguing with him now.

It’s mid-August, and hot, by the time we go to visit. The fields are humming with combine harvesters that crawl up and down like great cockroaches. Some fields have already been harvested, and the huge round hay bales, wrapped in black polythene, lie randomly among the stubble like broken bits of giant machines-nothing picturesque about these Cambridgeshire harvests. The mechanical hedge cutters have already been out, slashing back the dog roses and brambles that crowd the hedgerows. Soon it will be time for stubble-burning in the cornfields, and potato and pea fields will be sprayed with chemical defoliants.

My mother’s garden, however, is still a refuge for birds and insects. The trees are heavy with fruit-not ripe yet, give you tummy-ache-and wasps and flies are already gorging themselves on the windfalls, while greedy finches feast on gnats, blackbirds dig for grubs and fat buzzing bumble-bees thrust themselves into the open labia of foxgloves. Roses pink and red battle it out with bindweed in the flower-beds. The downstairs dining-room window that overlooks the garden is open and my father is sitting there with his glasses on and a book on his knees. There’s a tabledoth on the table instead of newspaper, and some plastic flowers in a vase.

“Hi, Pappa.” I lean forward and kiss his cheek. Stubbly. “Hi, Dyid,” says Anna. “Hi, Nikolai,” says Mike.

“Aha. Very nice you come. Nadia. Anushka. Michael.”

Hugs all round. He looks well.

“How are you getting on with your book, then, Dyid?” asks Anna. She adores her grandfather, and thinks he is a genius. And for her sake I gloss over his peculiarities, his distasteful sexual awakening, his lapses of personal hygiene.

“Good. Good. I am soon coming to most interesting part. Development of caterpillar track. Significant moment in history of mankind.”

“Shall I put the kettle on, Pappa?”

“So tell me about the caterpillars,” says Anna without irony.

“Aha! You see in prehistoric times, great stones were moved on wooden rollers made out of tree-trunks. Look.” On the table he lines up a row of sharp-pointed 2H pencils, and puts a book on top of them. “Some men are pushing the stone, but others-after the stone has passed over the roller-they must pick up the tree from the back of the stone and run round to put it in the front. In caterpillar track, this movement of rollers is done through chains and linkages.”

Pappa, Anna and Mike take turns pushing the book over the pencils, and moving the pencils from the back to the front, faster and faster.

I go into the kitchen and prepare teacups on a tray, pour milk into a jug and hunt for biscuits. So where is she? Is she at home? Is she still hiding from us? Then I see her-a large blonde woman, sauntering down the garden towards us on high-heeled peep-toe mules. Her gait is lazy, contemptuous, as though she can barely be bothered to stir herself to greet us. A denim mini-skirt rides high above her knees; a pink sleeveless top stretches around voluptuous breasts that bob up and down as she walks. I stare. Such a wanton expanse of dimpled, creamy flesh. Plump bordering on fat. As she comes closer I see that her hair, which tumbles Bardot-style in a tousled pony-tail over bare shoulders, is bleached, showing an inch of brown at the roots. A broad, handsome face. High cheekbones. Flared nostrils. Eyes wide set, golden brown like syrup, and outlined in black Cleopatra lines that flick up at the corners. The mouth curls into a pout that is almost a sneer, drawn in pale peach-pink lipstick that extends beyond the line of the lips, as though to exaggerate their fullness.

Tart. Bitch. Cheap slut. This woman who has taken the place of my mother. I stretch my hand out and bare my teeth in a smile.

“Hallo, Valentina. How nice to meet you at last.”

Her hand in mine is cold, limp, no grip. The long fingernails are varnished in peach-pink pearlised nail-polish to match the lips. I see myself through her eyes-small, skinny, dark, no bust. Not a real woman. She smiles at Mike, a slow, wicked smile.

“You like vodka?”

“I’ve made a pot of tea,” I say.

My father’s eyes are fixed on her as she moves about the room.

When I was sixteen my father forbade me to wear make-up. He made me go upstairs and wash it offbefore I could go out.

“Nadia, if all women were to wear paint on their faces, just think, there could be no more natural selection. The inevitable result would be the uglification of the species. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

Such an intellectual. Why couldn’t he be like normal fathers, and just say he didn’t like it? Now look at him drooling over this painted Russian tart. Or maybe he is now so short-sighted he can’t see that she is wearing make-up. He probably thinks she was born with pale peach pearlised lips and black Cleopatra flick-ups at the corners of her eyes.

Now another figure appears in the doorway, a boy in his teens. A bit on the plump side, childish freckled face, chipped front tooth, curly brown hair, round glasses.

“You must be Stanislav,” I gush.

“Yes I am.” Charming chipped-tooth smile.

“Lovely to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you. Let’s all have some tea.”

Anna looks him up and down, but her face gives nothing away. He is younger than she is, and therefore of no interest.

We sit awkwardly around the table. Stanislav is the only one who appears to be relaxed. He tells us about his school, his favourite teacher, his least favourite teacher, his favourite football team, his favourite pop group, his waterproof sports watch which he lost at Lake Balaton, his new Nike trainers, his favourite food, which is pasta, his concern that the other kids will tease him if he gets fat, the party he went to on Saturday, his friend Gary’s new puppy. His voice is confident, pleasantly inflected, his accent delightful. He is perfectly at ease. No one else says anything. The heavy weight of all the unsaid things bears down on us like storm clouds. Outside, a few drops of rain fall and we hear thunder in the distance. My father closes the window. Stanislav carries on talking.

After tea I take the cups to the sink to wash up bjut Valentina gestures me away. She pulls on rubber gloves over her plump peach-pearl-tipped fingers, puts on a frilly apron, and whips up a lather in the bowl.

“I do,” she says. “You go.”

“We go to cemetery,” says my father.

“I’ll come with you,” says Stanislav.

“No Stanislav, please, stay and help your mother.”

He will be telling us about his favourite graveyards next.

When we get back from the cemetery, we have another cup of tea, and then it’s dinner time. Valentina will cook for us, my father says; she is a good cook. We sit around the table and wait. Stanislav tells us about a game of football in which he scored twice. Mike, Anna and I smile politely. My father beams with pride. Meanwhile Valentina puts on her frilly apron and busies herself in the kitchen. She reheats six ready-cooked chilled meals, roast meat slices in gravy with peas and potatoes, and places them on the table with a flourish.

We eat in silence. You can hear the scraping of the knives on the plates as we tackle the stringy reheated meat. Even Stanislav shuts up for a few minutes. When he gets to the peas, my father starts to cough. The skins catch in his throat. I pour him water.

“Delicious,” says Mike, looking round for assent. We all murmur in agreement.

Valentina beams triumphantly.

“I make modern cooking, not peasant cooking.”

After dinner there is raspberry-ripple ice-cream from the freezer.

“My favourite,” says Stanislav with a little giggle.

He tells us his order of preference for ice-cream flavours.

My father has been rummaging in a drawer, and now comes up with a sheaf of papers. It is the latest chapter of his book, which I have helped him to translate. He wants to read it to Mike, and to Valentina and Stanislav.

“You will learn something about the history of our beloved motherland.”

But Stanislav suddenly remembers that he has some homework to catch up on, Anna has walked into the village to buy some milk, and Valentina is detained on the telephone in the next room, so it is just Mike and I who sit with him in the wide-windowed sitting-room.

In the history of Ukraina, the tractor has played a contradictory role. In former times, Ukraina was a country of peasant farmers. For such a country to develop the full potential of her agriculture, mechanisation is absolutely essential. But the method by which such mechanisation was introduced was truly terrible.

His voice has become heavy, dragging along all the unwritten and unspoken words that are compressed into the words he is reading.

After the Revolution of 1917, Russia started to become an industrial country with a growing urban proletariat. This proletariat was to be recruited from the rural peasants. But if the peasants were to leave the countryside, how would the urban population be fed?

Stalin’s answer to this dilemma was to decree that the countryside must be industrialised too. So in place of peasant smallholdings, all land was collectivised into great farms, organised on the factory principle. The name for this was Kolkhoz, meaning collective husbandry. Nowhere was the principle of Kolkhoz applied more rigorously than in Ukraina. Where the peasant farmers used horses or oxen to plough, the kolkhoz was ploughed by the iron horse, as the first tractors were called. Crudely built, unreliable, with slatted iron wheels and no tyres, these early tractors could still do the work of twenty men.

The coming of the tractor was also of symbolic importance, for it made possible the ploughing up of boundary lands which separated the individual peasant strips, creating one large kolkhoz. Thus it heralded the end of the whole class of kulaks, those peasants who owned their own land, and were seen by Stalin as the enemy of the revolution. The iron horse destroyed the traditional pattern of village life, but the tractor industry in Ukraina flourished. However, the kolkhozy were not as efficient, and this is largely due to resistance from the peasants, who either refused to take part in the kolkhoz, or continued to cultivate their own plots on the side.

The retribution of Stalin was ruthless. Hunger was the tool he used. In› 1932 the entire harvest of Ukraina was seized and transported to Moscow and Leningrad to feed the proletariat in the factories-how else was the revolution to be sustained? Butter and grain from Ukraina were on sale in Paris and Berlin, and well-meaning people in the West marvelled at this miracle of Soviet productivity. But in Ukrainian villages the people starved.

This is the great unrecorded tragedy of our history, which only now is coming to light…

He stops, and gathers together his papers quietly. His glasses are perched low on his nose, the lenses so thick I can hardly see his eyes, but I fancy I catch a glint of tears. In the silence that follows, I can hear Valentina still chatting on the phone next door, and a faint beat of music corning from Stanislav’s room. In the distance, the clock on the village church strikes seven.

“Well done, Nikolai,” Mike applauds. “Stalin had a lot to answer for.”

“Well done, Pappa.” My applause is more grudging than Mike’s. All this Ukrainian nationalism bothers me-it seems outdated and irrelevant. Peasants in the fields, folk-songs at harvest, the motherland: what has all this got to do with me? I am a post-modern woman. I know about structuralism. I have a husband who cooks polenta. So why do I feel this unexpected emotional tug?

The back door clicks. Anna has come back. Valentina finishes her telephone conversation, and slips in to join in the applause, tapping her pearl-tipped fingertips delicately together. She smiles with satisfaction, as though she is personally responsible for this literary masterpiece, and kisses him on the nose. “Holubchik!” Little pigeon. My father glows.

Then it’s time for us to go home. We all shake hands and put on an unconvincing display of cheek-pecking. The visit is deemed a success.

“So what was she like?” my sister asks, over the phone.

I describe the mini-skirt, the hair, the make-up. My tone is neutral, disciplined.

“Oh my God! I knew it!” Vera cries.

(And how I am enjoying my bitch-fest! What has happened to me? I used to be a feminist. Now I seem to be turning into Mrs Daily Mail.)

I tell her about the washing-up gloves, the pink-pearl-tipped fingers.

“Yes, Yes. I see everything.” Her voice wobbles with rage.

Our mother’s hands were brown and rough from gardening and cooking. “I can see what kind of woman she is. He has married a tart!” (I didn’t say it!)

“But Vera, you can’t judge someone by how they dress.” (Ha! Look how rational and grown up I am!) “Anyway, that style of dress doesn’t mean the same in Ukraine -it signifies a rejection of the peasant past, that’s all.”

“Nadia, how can you be so naive?”

“Not at all, Vera. I had a Ukrainian sociology professor visiting last year and she looked exactly like that. And she was upset that most of my friends wore no make-up and went around in jeans or tracksuit bottoms, when she yearned for designer clothes. She said it was a betrayal of womanliness.”

“Well, yes.”

My sister would rather be dead than be seen in jeans (apart from designer jeans of course) or tracksuit bottoms. Then again, she would rather be dead than be seen in high-heeled peep-toe mules and a denim mini-skirt.

I tell her about the pre-cooked chilled meal. We are on common ground here. “The sad thing is, he probably doesn’t notice the difference,” she murmurs. “Poor Mother.”

The first crisis of their marriage comes shortly after our visit. Valentina is demanding a new car-not just any old car, either. Must be good car. Must be Mercedes or Jaguar at least. BMW is OK. No Ford please. The car will be used to drive Stanislav to his posh school, where other children are driven in Saabs and Range Rovers. My father has seen a second-hand Ford Fiesta in good condition, which he can afford. Valentina will not tolerate a Ford Fiesta. She will not even tolerate a Ford Escort. There is a blazing row.

“Tell me what you think, Nadezhda.” He phones me in an agitated state.

“I think the Ford Fiesta sounds just right.” (I drive a Ford Escort.)

“But she will not tolerate it.”

“Well, do what you like.” He will anyway.

My father has a bit of money in the bank. It is his Pensioners Bond, which matures in three years’ time, but what the hell, the lady wants a new car and he wants to be generous. They settle on an old Rover, large enough to satisfy Valentina’s aspirations, old enough for my father to afford. He cashes in his Pensioners Bond and gives most of it to Valentina for the car. He gives the £200 that is left to my daughter Anna, who has just passed her ‘A’ levels with flying colours, to help her on her way to university. I feel bad about this, but not too bad. I tell myself that if he didn’t give it to Anna for university, he would only give it to Valentina for a Mercedes.

“It is to make up the difference from the codicil,” he says, “this money will not be for Vera’s daughters, only for Anna.”

I am uneasy, because I know Big Sister will hit the roof. But I want revenge for the codicil.

“That’s great, Pappa. She’ll need it when she goes to university.”

Now he is spent up-he has no money left.

Anna is thrilled when I tell her about her grandfather’s gift.

“Oh! He’s so cute. I wonder if he gave some to Alice and Lexy when they went to uni?”

“I expect so.”

Valentina is delighted with the Rover. It is sleek, shiny, metallic green in colour, with a 3-litre engine, leather seats that smell of expensive cigars, a walnut dashboard and 186,000 miles on the clock. They ride around town and park up beside the Saabs and the Range Rovers outside Stanislav’s school. Valentina holds an international driver’s licence issued in Ternopil, which is valid for a year. She has never taken a driving test, says my father, but she paid for the licence in pork cutlets from her mother’s smallholding. They go to visit the Zadchuks and her friend Charlotte, and the uncle in Selby. Then the car breaks down. The dutch is shot. My father telephones.

“Nadezhda, please will you lend me a hundred pounds for repairs. Until I get my pension.”

“Pappa,” I say, “you should have bought the Ford Fiesta.”

I send him a cheque.

Then he phones my sister. She phones me.

“What’s going on with this car?”

“I don’t know.”

“He wanted to borrow a hundred pounds to mend the brakes. I said to him, can’t Valentina pay for it out of her earnings? She’s earning enough.”

“So what did he say?”

“He won’t hear of it. He’s afraid to ask her. He says she needs to send money back to Ukraine for her sick mother. Can you imagine.” Her voice is crisp with irritation. “Each time I criticise her he just springs to her defence.”

“Maybe he still loves her.” (I am still a romantic.)

“Yes, I suppose he does. I suppose he does.” She sighs a worldly sigh. “Men are so stupid.”

“Mrs Zadchuk told her it was the husband’s duty to pay for the wife’s car.”

“Duty? How lovely! How quaint! He told you that?”

“He asked me what I thought. Apparently being a feminist makes me an authority on the rights of wives.” I’m not sure what my sister thinks of feminism.

“Our mother never liked the Zadchuks, did she?” Vera muses.

“I think it’s his pride. He can’t ask a woman for money. He thinks the man should be the provider.”

“He’s just asked you and me, Nadezhda.”

“But we’re not proper women, are we?”

Mike rings him up. They have a long conversation about the merits and drawbacks of hydraulic braking systems. They are on the phone for fifty minutes. Mike is silent most of the time, but occasionally he says, “Mmm. Mmm.”

A month later there is another crisis. Valentina’s sister is arriving from Ukraine. She is coming to see for herself the good life in the West that Valentina has described in her letters-the elegant modern house, the fabulous car, the wealthy widower husband. She must be met at Heathrow by car. My father says the Rover will not make it to London and back. Oil is leaking from the engine and fluid from the brakes. The engine smokes. One of the seats has collapsed. Rust has bubbled up through the dealer’s patch and polish. Stanislav sums up the problem.

“Auto ne prestijeskiy.” He says it with that little sweet smile that is half-way to a sneer.

Valentina turns on my father.

“You no good man. You plenty-money meanie. Promise money. Money sit in bank Promise car. Crap car.”

“You demand prestigious car. Prestijeskiy auto. Looks prestigious; doesn’t go. Ha ha.”

“Crap car. Crap husband. Thphoo!” she spits.

“Where you learning this new ‘crap’ word?” demands my father. He isn’t used to being bossed about. He’s used to getting his own way, to being wheedled and coaxed.

“You engineer. Why you no mending car? Crap engineer.”

My father has dismantled and reassembled engines in the garage for as long as I can remember. But he can’t get down under the car any more: his arthritis won’t let him.

“Tell your sister she is coming by train,” my father answers back. “Train. Plane. All modern transport is better. Crap car. Of course is crap car. You wanted. Now you have.”

And there is another problem. Crap cooker. The cooker in the kitchen, which has been there since my mother’s time, is getting old. Only two of the three rings will work, and the oven timer is gone, though the oven itself still works. On this cooker, heavenly delights of culinary art have been prepared for more than thirty years, but this will not impress Valentina’s sister. The cooker is electric, and everyone but a fool knows that electricity is not as prestigious as gas. Did not Lenin himself admit that communism was socialism plus electricity?

My father agrees to buy a new cooker. He likes spending money, but he has no money left. The cooker will have to be bought on hire purchase. He has seen a special offer at the Co-op. Valentina puts Nikolai into crap car and drives him into town to buy prestigious cooker. Must be gas. Must be brown. Alas, the brown cooker is not included in the special offer. It costs twice as much.

“Look, Valenka, is exactly same cooker. Same knobs. Same gas. Same everything.”

“In former Soviet Union all cookers are white. Crap cookers.”

“But everything in kitchen is white-washing machine white, fridge white, freezer white, cupboards white-tell me what point is to having a brown cooker?”

“You plenty-money meanie. You want give me crap cooker.”

“My wife is cooking on her thirty years. Better than you cooking.”

“You wife peasant Baba. Peasant Baba, peasant cooking. For civilised person, cooker must be gas, must be brown.” She says this slowly and with emphasis, as if repeating a basic lesson to a nincompoop.

My father signs the hire purchase agreement for a civilised person’s cooker. He has never borrowed money before in his life, and the illicit thrill makes him giddy with excitement. When Mother was alive, money was saved in a toffee tin hidden under a loose floorboard beneath the lino, and only when enough money was saved was anything purchased. Always in cash. Always at the Co-op. The Co-op stamps were stuck in a book, and this was kept under the floorboard too. In later years, when Mother discovered you could get interest if you put money in the building society, the building society deposits still started off as cash under the floorboard.

Another problem: the house is dirty. Crap Hoover. The vintage Hoover Junior is not picking up properly. Valentina has seen an advertisement for a civilised person’s Hoover. Blue. Cylinder. See, no pushing about. Just suck, suck, suck. My father signs another hire purchase agreement.

My father told me this, so naturally he told me his side of the story. Maybe there is another version of events that is more favourable to Valentina. If so, I don’t want to hear it. I imagine my father, bent and frail, shaking with impotent rage, and my heart fills up with righteous anger.

“Look, Pappa, you must stand up to her. Just tell her she can’t have everything she wants.”

“Hmm,” he says. “Tak.” He says yes, but his voice lacks conviction. He likes to grumble to a sympathetic audience, but he won’t do anything about it.

“She has unrealistic expectations, Pappa.”

“But for this she cannot be blamed. She believes all Western propaganda.”

“Well she’ll just have to learn, won’t she?” Acid in my voice.

“But still, better you not talk to Vera about this.”

“Of course not.” (I can’t wait!)

“You see, Nadezhda, she is not a bad person. She has some incorrect ideas. Not her fault.”

“We’ll see.”

“Nadezhda…”

“What?”

“You are not talking about this with Vera.”

“Why not?”

“She will laugh. She will say I have told you so.”

“I’m sure she won’t.” (I know she will.)

“You know this Vera, what a type she is.”

Despite myself, I feel myself getting sucked into the drama, and back into my childhood. It has a hold of me. Just like civilised person’s Hoover. Suck, suck, suck. And I am dragged up into the dustbag of the past, full of clotted greying memories, where everything is formless, indistinct, lumpy with obscure gobs of matter shrouded in ancient dust-dust everywhere, drowning me, burying me alive, filling my lungs and my eyes until I cannot see, cannot breathe, can barely cry out, “Pappa! Why are you always so angry with Vera? What did she do?”

“Ah, that Vera. She was always autocrat, even when baby. Clinging to Ludmilla with fists of steel. Grip tight. Suck, suck, suck. Such a temper. Crying. Screaming.”

“Pappa, she was only a baby. She couldn’t help it.”

“Hmm.”

My heart cries out, “You should love us. You’re supposed to love us, no matter how bad we are! That’s what normal parents do!” But I can’t say it aloud. And anyway, he can’t help it, can he? Growing up with Baba Nadia with her thin soups and strict punishments.

“None of us can help how we are,” I say.

“Hmm. Of course this question of psychological” (he pronounces both consonants: p, s) “determinism is very interesting to discuss. Leibniz, for example, who by the way was a founder of the modern mathematics, believed that all was determined in the moment of creation.”

“Pappa…”

“Tak tak. And smoking all the time. Smoking even by Milla’s death-bed. What a powerful tyrant is a cigarette.” He realises my patience is running thin. “Did I ever tell you, Nadia, that I almost died from cigarettes?”

Is this a crude changing-the-subject ploy? Or has he become completely unhinged?

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

Neither of my parents smoked. Not only that, but they had kicked up such a dreadful fuss when I started smoking at the age of fifteen that I never got completely hooked, and gave up a few years later, having made my point.

“Ha! It was because I did not smoke that cigarettes saved my life, and for the same reason, they almost cost me my life.” He shifts his voice into an easy narrative gear. He is in control now, driving his tractor across the crumbling furrows of the past. “You see, in that German labour camp where we found ourselves at ending of war, cigarettes were a currency followed by everybody. When we worked we got paid: so much bread, so much fat, so many cigarettes. So any person who did not smoke his cigarettes could exchange them for food, clothing, even luxuries such as soap or blankets. Because of cigarettes, we always had enough to eat, were always warm. That was how we survived through war.” He fixes his eyes on a spot behind my head. “Vera, unfortunately, is now of course a smoker. Has she told you about her first encounter with cigarettes?”

“No, she didn’t tell me anything. What do you mean?” My mind had wandered during his ramble. Now I realise I should have been paying attention. “What happened with Vera and the cigarettes?”

There is a long silence.

“Can’t remember.” He looks sideways out of the window and starts to cough. “Did I tell you, Nadia, about the boilers of these ships, how gigantic they were?”

“Never mind about the boilers, Pappa. Please finish what you were saying about the cigarettes. What happened?”

“Can’t remember. No point to remember. Too much in the past…”

Of course he can remember, but he won’t say.

Valentina’s sister arrives. She is met at Heathrow by a man from the village, who has been paid fifty pounds by my father to drive down to London in his Ford Fiesta and bring her back. She is not blonde, like Valentina, but dark and elaborately coiffed with a bunch of little ringlets on her nape. She wears a real fur coat and patent leather shoes, and her mouth is a small pouting scarlet bow. She casts a cool, twinkly eye over the house, the cooker, the Hoover, the husband, and announces that she will stay with her uncle in Selby.