A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

by Marina Lewycka

  Mother’s mother, Sonia Blazhko, was eighteen when she married Mitrofan Ocheretko in the gold-domed Cathedral of St Michael in Kiev. She wore a white dress and a veil, and a pretty gold locket hung around her neck. Her long brown hair was crowned with white flowers. Despite her slim build, she must have been visibly pregnant. Her oldest brother Pavel Blazhko, railway engineer, later friend of Lenin, gave her away, for her father was too frail to stand through the service. Her older sister Shura, recently qualified as a doctor, was maid of honour. Her two younger sisters, still at school, pelted her with rose petals, and burst into tears when she kissed the groom.

  The Ocheretko men strode into the church in their riding-boots, embroidered shirts and outlandish baggy trousers. The women wore wide swinging skirts and boots with little heels and coloured ribbons in their hair. They stood together in a fierce bunch at the back of the church and left abruptly at the end without tipping the priest.

  The Blazhkos looked down on the groom’s family, whom they thought uncouth, little more than brigands, who drank too much and never combed their hair. The Ocheretkos thought the Blazhkos were prissy urbanites and traitors to the land. Sonia and Mitrofan didn’t care what their parents thought. They had already consummated their love, and its fruit was on her way.

  “Of course it was pulled down in 1935.”

  “What was?”

  “St Michael of the Golden Domes.”

  “Who pulled it down?”

  “The communists of course.”

  Ha! So there is a subtext to this romantic story.

  “Pappa and Valentina are in love, Vera.”

  “How can you talk such nonsense, Nadia? Will you never grow up? Look, she’s after a passport and a work permit, and what little money he has left. That’s clear enough. And he’s just mesmerised by her boobs. He talks of nothing else.”

  “He talks about tractors a lot.”

  “Tractors and boobs. There you have it.”

  (Why does she hate him so much?)

  “And what about our mother and father-do you think they were in love when they married? Don’t you think that was, in its way, a marriage of convenience?”

  “That was different. It was a different time,” says Vera. “In times like that people did what they had to in order to survive. Poor Mother-after all she went through, to end up with Pappa. What a cruel fate!”

  In 1930, when my mother was eighteen, her father was arrested. It was still several years before the purges were to reach their terrible climax, but it happened in the classic way of the Terror-a knock on the door in the middle of the night, the children screaming, my grandmother Sonia Ocheretko in her nightdress, her loose hair streaming down her back, pleading with the officers.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry!” my grandfather called over his shoulder as they bundled him away with just the clothes he stood up in. “I’ll be back in the morning.” They never saw him again. He was taken to the military prison in Kiev, where he was charged with secretly training Ukrainian Nationalist combatants. Was it true? We will never know. He never stood trial.

  Every day for six months Ludmilla and her brother and sister would accompany their mother to the prison with a bundle of food. They handed it to the guard at the gate, hoping that at least some of it would get through to their father. One day the guard said: “There’s no need to come tomorrow. He won’t be needing your food any more.”

  They were lucky. In the later years of the purges, not only the criminal, but his family, friends, associates, anyone who could be suspected of complicity in his crime, would be sent away for correction. Ocheretko was executed, but his family was spared. Still, it was no longer safe for them to stay in Kiev. Ludmilla was expelled from her veterinary course at the university-she was now the daughter of an enemy of the people. Her brother and sister were removed from their school. They moved back to the khutor and tried to scratch a living.

  And that was not easy. Although the Poltava farmland is some of the most fertile in the whole of the Soviet Union, the peasants faced starvation. In the autumn of 1932 the army seized the entire harvest. Even the seed corn for next year’s planting was taken.

  Mother said that the purpose of the famine was to break the spirit of the people and force them to accept collectivisation.

  Stalin believed that the peasant mentality, which was narrow, covetous and superstitious, would be replaced by a noble, comradely, proletarian spirit. (“What wicked nonsense,” said Mother. “The only spirit was to preserve one’s own life. Eat. Eat. Tomorrow there may be nothing.”)

  The peasants ate their cows, chickens and goats, then their cats and dogs; then rats and mice; then there was nothing left to eat but grass. Between seven and ten million people died across Ukraine during the man-made famine of 1932-3.

  Sonia Ocheretko was a survivor. She made watery soup from grass and wild sorrel that they gathered from the fields. She dug for roots of horseradish, and tuberous artichokes, and found a few potatoes in the garden. When those ran out they trapped and ate the rats that lived in the thatch of their roof, then the thatch itself, and they chewed on harness leather to quell the hunger pangs. When they were too hungry to sleep, they used to sing:

  There is a tall hill, and beneath it a meadow,

  A green meadow, so abundant

  You would think you were in paradise.

  In the next village, there was a woman who had eaten her baby. She had gone mad, and wandered through the lanes crying, “But she died first. She was dead. What harm to eat? So plump! Why waste? I didn’t kill! No! No! No! She died first.”

  They were saved by the remoteness of their khutor- if anyone thought about them at all, they probably thought they were already dead. In 1933 they somehow obtained a travel permit and made the long journey to Luhansk, soon to be renamed Voroshilovgrad, where Sonia’s sister Shura lived.

  Shura was a doctor, six years older than Sonia. She had a dry sense of humour, dyed red hair, a taste for extravagant hats, a rattling laugh (she smoked hand-rolled cigarettes made with home-grown tobacco) and an elderly husband-a Party member and a friend of Marshal Voroshilov-who could pull strings. They lived in an old-fashioned wooden house on the edge of town, with carved eaves, blue-painted shutters, and sunflowers and tobacco plants in the garden. Shura had no children of her own, and fussed over Sonia’s. When Sonia found a teaching job and moved into a small flat in town with the two younger children, Ludmilla stayed with Aunty Shura. Aunty Shura’s husband found her a job in the locomotive factory in Luhansk, where she was to be trained as a crane operator. Ludmilla was reluctant. What did she want with cranes?

  “Do it, do it,” urged Aunty Shura. “You will become a proletarian.”

  At first, mastery of those mighty machines that swung and turned at her command was thrilling. Then it became routine. Then deadly boring. She dreamed once more of becoming a vet. Animals smelled of life, and were warm to the touch, more exciting to handle and subdue than a mere machine that could be operated with levers. (“What a poor thing is the crane or the tractor compared to a horse, Nadia!”) Veterinary surgeons at that time worked only with big animals-animals that had value-cows, bulls, horses. (“Just imagine, Nadia, these English people will spend one hundred pound to save the life of a cat or dog that can be pick up in street for nothing. Such foolish kind hearts!”)

  She wrote to the Institute in Kiev, and was sent a bundle of forms to fill in, asking her to detail her and her parents’ and her grandparents’ occupations-their position in the class structure. Only those from the working class were to study at university now. She sent the forms off with a heavy heart, and was not surprised to hear nothing. She was twenty-three, and it seemed as though her life had reached a dead end. Then a letter came from that strange boy she had been at school with.

  Weddings, like funerals, provide the perfect arena for family drama: there are the rituals, symbolic costumes, and every opportunity for snobbery in its many guises. According to Vera, my father’s family disapprove
d of the Ocheretkos. The girl, Ludmilla, was pretty enough, said Baba Nadia, but rather wild; and it was unfortunate, to say the least, that her father was an ‘enemy of the people’.

  Baba Sonia, for her part, found my father’s family pretentious and peculiar. The Mayevskyjs were part of the small Ukrainian intelligentsia. Grandfather Mayevskyj, Nikolai’s father, was a very tall man with flowing white hair and little half-glasses. In the brief flowering of Ukrainian independence in 1918 he was even Minister for Education for six months. After Stalin came to power and all ideas of Ukrainian autonomy were stamped out, he became the head teacher of the Ukrainian language school in Kiev, operating on voluntary subscription and under constant pressure from the authorities.

  It was at this school that my mother and father first met. They were in the same form. Nikolai was always the first boy to put his hand up, always top of the class. Ludmilla thought him an insufferable know-all.

  Nikolai Mayevskyj and Ludmilla Ocheretko were married in the register office in Luhansk in the autumn of 1936. They were twenty-four years old. There were no golden domes or bells or flowers. The ceremony was conducted by a plump female party official in a bottle-green suit and a not-very-clean white blouse. The bride was not pregnant and nobody cried, even though there was much more to cry about.

  Did they love each other?

  No, says Vera, she married him because she needed a way out.

  Yes, says my father, she was the loveliest woman I had met, and the most spirited. You should see her dark eyes when she was in a rage. On the skating rink she glided like a queen. To see her on horseback was a wonder.

  Whether they loved each other or not, they stayed together for sixty years.

  “So, Pappa, what do you remember about Ludmilla? Tell me, what was she like when you first met?” (I am attempting some reminiscence therapy. I somehow hope that filling his mind with images of my mother will blot out the interloper.) “Was it love at first sight? Was she very beautiful?”

  “Yes, indeed. Quite beautiful in every way. But of course not as beautiful as Valentina.”

  There he sits with a small secret smile on his face, wisps of silver hair straggling on to his frayed collar, his spectacles repaired with brown parcel tape balanced on the end of his nose so that I can’t quite see his eyes, his hands swollen with arthritis cradling a mug of tea. I want to grab it from him and dash it in his face. But I realise that he has no idea, no idea at all, of the effect his words might have on me.

  “Did you love her?” (I mean did he love her more.)

  “Ah, love! What thing is love! No one can understand. On this point, science must concede to poetry.”

  My father doesn’t invite us to the wedding, but he lets slip the date. “No need to visit now. Everything is OK. You can come after June first,” he says.

  “We’ve got four weeks to stop her,” says my sister.

  But I hesitate. I am touched by his joy, his new vitality. Also, I am mindful of Mike’s opinion.

  “Maybe it’ll be OK. Maybe she’ll look after him, and make him happy in his last years. It’s better than going into a home.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Nadia. You don’t think that kind of woman will be around when he’s old and dribbling and incontinent. She’ll take what she can, and be off.”

  “But let’s face it, neither you nor I are going to look after him in his old age, are we?” (Best to get it out into the open, even though the bluntness of it smarts.)

  “I did what I could for Mother. Towards Father I feel a sense of obligation: nothing more.”

  “He isn’t so easy to love.” I’m not trying to sound accusing, but that’s the way she takes it.

  “Love has got nothing to do with it. I’ll do my duty, Nadezhda. As I sincerely hope you will. Even if that means saving him from making an absolute idiot of himself.”

  “It’s true I couldn’t look after him full-time, Vera. We’d argue all the time. It would drive me mad. But I want him to be all right-to be happy. If Valentina makes him happy…”

  “It’s not about happiness, Nadezhda, it’s about money. Can’t you see? I suppose with your leftish ideas you would welcome anyone who wanted to come and rip off hard-working people.”

  “Leftish doesn’t come into it. It’s about what’s best for him.” (Smug voice. See? I am not a fascist like my sister.)

  “Of course it is. Of course it is. Did I ever suggest otherwise?”

  My sister rings the Home Office again. They tell her she must put it in writing. She writes again, anonymously. She telephones the register office where their wedding will be recorded. The registrar gives her a sympathetic hearing.

  “But you know, at the end of the day if he’s determined to go ahead with it, there’s absolutely nothing I can do,” the registrar says.

  “But the divorce from her husband in Ukraine -it came through just like that at the last minute. And after they were divorced, she went back to stay with him.”

  “I’ll check the paperwork, but if it’s all in order…”

  “What about the translation? She had to have it translated at the last minute at an agency in London. They might have confused a decree absolute with a decree nisi.” My sister is an expert on divorce.

  “Of course I’ll look at it closely. But I don’t read Ukrainian. I have to take it at its face value. He’s an adult.”

  “He’s not behaving like one.”

  “Ah, well.”

  She sounded like a typical social worker bureaucrat, my sister tells me. She will do her best, but of course she must stay within the rales.

  We have flights of imagination in which we turn up at the wedding, sneaking in half-way through the service, while the couple are at the altar.

  “I will wear my black suit,” says Vera, “which I wore to Mother’s funeral. At the point when the priest says, “…and if anyone knows of any jiist cause or lawful impediment…?” we will shout out from the back…” (I’ve always wanted to do that.)

  “But what would we say?” I ask my sister.

  We are both stumped.

  My father and Valentina were married on 1 June at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, for Valentina is a Catholic. My father is an atheist, but he humours her. (It’s natural for women to be irrational, he says.)

  He has given her £500 for a wedding dress: cream polyester silk, tightly fitting around the waist and hips, with a plunging neckline trimmed in frilled lace, through which we catch a glimpse of those modestly nestled Botticellian breasts. (I have seen the wedding pictures.) I can just imagine how he fusses around to make sure the photographer he has hired gets the best angle. He wants to show her off, his trophy, to all those gossipy doubters who scorned her. She needs the photo for the immigration officials.

  The priest was a young Irishman who, says my father, looked like a teenager with spots and sticking-up hair. What did he make of this oddly assorted couple as he blessed their union? Did he know that the bride was a divorcee? Did he feel just a twinge of unease? The Zadchuks, her only Ukrainian friends, are also Catholics from western Ukraine. All the other Ukrainians in the congregation, my mother’s friends invited to the wedding by my father, are Orthodox from the east. I suppose the youth and spottiness of the priest confirmed all their suspicions about Catholicism.

  Her uncle from Selby is in the group picture, and Stanislav, and some friends she met at work They have that smug dressed-up look of people brazening out a sham. Bob Turner is not there.

  After the wedding, people who some two years ago sat in our front room after my mother’s funeral, now come back to the house again to toast the happy couple in vodka, nibble Tesco-bought snacks and talk about…I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I can imagine the gossip, the scandal. Half his age. Look at her bosom-how she waves it under a man’s nose. Greasepaint on her face. The old man making a fool of himself. The shame of it.

  Seven. Crap car

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

  “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.