A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Part 14

"He's mad. Quite mad. In spite of what the psychiatrist said."

This is not the first time my father has been given the all-dear by a psychiatrist. It happened at least once before, some thirty years ago, when I was in what he described as my Trotskyist phase. I found out about it by chance. My parents were out, and I was rooting through their bedroom-the same room with the heavy oak furniture and discordantly patterned curtains that Valentina has now converted into her boudoir. I can't remember what I was looking for, but I found two things that shocked me.

The first, lying on the floor under one of the beds, was a crumpled rubber sac full of whitish sticky fluid. I stared at it in horror. This most intimate outpouring. This shameless evidence that my parents had performed the s.e.x act on more than the two occasions on which Vera and I had been conceived. My father's s.e.m.e.n!

The second was a report from a psychiatrist at the Infirmary dated 1961. It was among some papers hidden in a drawer in the dressing-table. The report noted that my father had asked to see a psychiatrist because he believed he was suffering from a pathological hatred of his daughter (me, not Vera!). So obsessive and all-consuming was this hatred that he feared it was a sign of mental illness. The psychiatrist had talked to my father at length, and had concluded that in view of my father's experience of communism it was not at all surprising, natural in fact, that he should hate his daughter for her communist views.

I read it with growing astonishment, and then with rage, both at my father and at this anonymous psychiatrist, who had taken the easy option, who hadn't heard my father's call for help. Stupid-both of them. My mother, whose family had suffered unspeakable wrongs, who had far more reason to hate me for being a communist, had somehow never stopped loving me even through my wildest years, even though the things I said must have hurt her to the quick.

I put the papers back in the drawer. I wrapped the used condom in some newspaper and put it in the bin, as though I could somehow protect my mother from its shameful contents.

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! Beyond the Caucasus we stood up for our rights, stood up for our rights. Hey! There the Magyars were advancing, were advancing. 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 cla.s.sical 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 gla.s.ses have slipped down his nose, and sit at a crazy angle. His shirt is unb.u.t.toned 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 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. (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, Don't you hear the H-bombs thunder, Sounding like the crack of doom? Sounding like the crack of doom? While they tear the heavens asunder, While they tear the heavens asunder, Fall-out makes the earth a tomb. 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 gla.s.ses. 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- kotletki- your favourite your favourite kotletki 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 G.o.d. 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."

Seventeen.

Lady Di and the Rolls-Royce Valentina and Stanislav have been given a cat. They call it Lady Di, after Diana Princess of Wales, whom they admire greatly. She came from Mrs Zadchuk's neighbour, and she is more of a kitten than a cat-and not nearly as pretty as her namesake. She is black with random white splodges, pale pink-rimmed eyes and a wet pale pink nose.

Lady Di (they p.r.o.nounce it Lye Dee Dee) sets to, shredding all the soft furnishings in the house. After a few weeks, it turns out that she is a boy-cat, not a girl-cat (my mother would never have made that mistake) and starts p.i.s.sing everywhere. Now, to the smell of rotting apples, mouldering half-eaten boil-in-the-bag dinners, cheap perfume, and the odour of unventilated old-man's room, is added the scent of tomcat's p.i.s.s. Not just p.i.s.s, either. No one has taught Lady Di to use a litter tray, and no one clears up after him when, on wet days, he decides he is too royal to go in the garden.

My father, Valentina and Stanislav all adore Lady Di, who has a neat way of scampering up curtains, and can jump four feet in the air to catch a bit of paper dangled on a string. Only Vera and I don't like him, and we don't live there, so what does it matter what we think?

Lady Di has become a surrogate child to them. They sit together holding hands and marvelling over his brilliance and beauty. It is surely only a matter of time before he is taught to prove Pythagoras from first principles.

"He won't even consider a divorce, Vera. They sit there holding hands cooing over that nasty little cat."

"Really, it's too much! I told you we should have had him certified," says Big Sis.

"That's what Valentina thinks."

"Well she's quite right, wicked though she is. She's obviously got him eating out of her hands again, until she gets her pa.s.sport. Men are so stupid."

"Vera, what's all this about you wanting Mother to divorce him?"

"What do you mean?"

"He says you tried to persuade Mother to divorce him."

"Did I? I can't remember. What a pity I didn't succeed."

"Anyway, the upshot is, it's put him right off the idea of divorce."

"I can see I'm going to have to come and talk to him myself."

However, something soon happens which makes him change his mind. Early one morning, he telephones and starts ranting some nonsense about a big roller. I am in a hurry to get to work so I urge him to ring later. But he finally gets the words out: "It's the roller sitting in the front garden, on the lawn."

"Pappa, what do you mean? What roller?"

"Roller! Rolls-Royce!"

Valentina has achieved the apogee of her dreams of life in the West-she is the owner of a Rolls-Royce. It is a 4-litre sedan, sold to her by Eric Pike for the knock-down price of 500 (paid by my father). She now has a Lada in the garage, a Rover on the drive, and a Roller on the lawn. None of the cars is licensed or insured. She has still not pa.s.sed her driving test.

"Who is this Eric Pike, Pappa?" I remember the note I found tucked up in the knicker drawer with the half-eaten ham sandwich.

"Actually, this is a most interesting type. Once he was pilot in RAF. Jet propulsion fighter pilot. Now he is used car dealer. He has superb moustaches."