A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

by Marina Lewycka

  “You are no different to Stalin’s police,” my father suddenly bursts out in a high quavery voice. “Whole system of state apparatus is only to defend powerful against weak.”

  “I’m sorry if you think that, Mr Mayevskyj,” the policeman says politely. “But we live in a free country and you are free to express your opinion.”

  Valentina swings herself down heavily from the stool.

  “I time go working now,” she says. “You clean up you Pappa shit.”

  The policeman, too, makes his goodbyes and leaves.

  My father sinks down in his chair, but I do not let him rest.

  “Pappa, please put on some trousers,” I say. There is something so horrifying about his corpse-like nakedness that I cannot bear to look at him. I cannot bear the look in his eyes-at once defeated and dogged. I cannot bear the stench coming from his room. I have no doubt that Valentina cannot bear it either, but I have hardened my heart: it was her choice.

  While my father is cleaning himself up, I search the house again. Somewhere there must be letters from her solicitor, information about her immigration appeal. Where does she keep her correspondence? We need to know what she is planning to do, how long she will be here. To my surprise, I find in the sitting-room, on the table amid the rotting apples, a small portable photocopier. I had overlooked it before, thinking it was some part of a computer, maybe belonging to Stanislav.

  “Pappa, what’s this?”

  “Oh, this is Valentina’s new toy. She uses it to copy letters.”

  “What letters?”

  “It is her latest craze, you know. Copying this, copying that.”

  “She copies your letters?”

  “Her letters. My letters. Probably she thinks it is very modern. All letters she copies.”

  “But why?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe she thinks to have photocopier is more prestigious than writing by hand.”

  “Prestigious? How stupid. That can’t be the reason.”

  “Do you know the theory of panopticon? English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Is design for the perfect prison. Jailer sees everything, from every angle, and yet himself remains invisible. So Valentina knows everything about me, and I know nothing about her.”

  “What are you talking about, Pappa? Where are all the letters and copies?”

  “Maybe in her room.”

  “No, I’ve looked. Not in Stanislav’s room either.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe in car. I see she takes everything to car.”

  Crap car is sitting on the driveway. But where are the keys?.

  “No need for keys,” says my father. “Lock is broken. She locked keys inside boot. I break lock with screwdriver.”

  I notice that the car also has no tax disc. Maybe she had second thoughts about driving off in it while the policeman was here. In the boot I find a cardboard box, bursting with papers, files and photocopies. This is what I have been looking for. I bring them into the sitting-room, and sit down to read.

  There is so much paper here that I am overwhelmed. I have gone from having no information at all, to suddenly having far too much. As far as I can tell, the letters are not ordered or sorted in any way, not by date or correspondent or content. I start to pull them out at random. Near the front of the box, a letter from the Immigration Service catches my eye. It is the letter setting out their reasons for refusing to grant her leave to remain after her appeal-there is no reference to my father’s statement under duress, but there is a paragraph explaining her rights to a further appeal to a tribunal. My heart sinks. So the last appeal was not the end of the road. How many more appeals and hearings will there be? I make a copy of the letter on the small portable photocopier, so that I can show it to Vera.

  Now here are some copies of my father’s poems and letters to her, including the letter setting out the details of his savings and pensions-both the original Ukrainian texts and the translations have been photocopied and stapled together. Why? For whom? Here is a letter to my father from the consultant psychiatrist at the Peterborough District Hospital, offering him an appointment. The appointment is for tomorrow. My father has not said anything about this. Did he receive the letter? She has copied the letter (why?) but she has not returned the original.

  There are some letters from Ukraine, presumably from her husband, but I can only read Ukrainian character by character, and I haven’t got time to read them now.

  There is more of my father’s correspondence-here is the letter from the trainee solicitor about the difficulty of obtaining an annulment. Here is a letter he has written to whom it may concern at the Home Office declaring his love for her, and insisting that the marriage is genuine. It is dated 10 April-shortly before the appeal panel in Nottingham. Was it also written under duress? Here is a letter from his GP, Doctor Figges, advising him that he needs to call in for a new prescription.

  In a brown envelope I find some copies of the wedding pictures-Valentina smiling to camera, bent low towards my father so that her fabulous cleavage is revealed, and my father wide-eyed, grinning like a dog with two tails. In the same envelope are a copy of the marriage certificate and an information sheet from the Home Office regarding naturalisation.

  Now here at last is the letter I have been looking for-it is a letter from Valentina’s solicitor, dated only a week ago, agreeing to act for her in relation to her Immigration Tribunal, hearing in London on 9 September and advising her to apply for legal aid. September! My father will never be able to hold out so long. The letter ends with a caution:

  You are advised that you should avoid at all costs giving your husband grounds for divorce, as this could seriously jeopardise your case…

  I am so deeply engrossed that I almost miss the sound of the back door opening. Someone is in the kitchen, I realise. Quickly, I bundle together all the letters and papers, shove them back into the box and look for somewhere to put them. In the corner of the room is the big chest freezer where my mother kept all her vegetables and herbs, and where Valentina now keeps her boil-in-the-bag dinners. I stick them in there. The door opens.

  “Oh, you here still,” says Valentina.

  “I’m just doing a bit of tidying up.” My voice is placatory (no point in upsetting her-I will be gone soon, and then she will be left with my father) but she takes this as a slight.

  “I too much working. No time house working.”

  “Quite.” I lean casually on the freezer.

  “You father-he no give me money.”

  “But he gives you half his pension.”

  “Pension no good. What can buy with pension?”

  I don’t want to argue with her. I just want her to go, so I can get on with looking through the papers. But then I realise she may have come back for her boil-in-the-bag lunch.

  “Would you like me to make lunch for you, Valentina? You can go upstairs and have a rest, while I get the lunch ready.” She is surprised and mollified, but declines my offer. “I no time eating. Only sandwich” (she pronounces it san-yeedge). “I come get car. After finish working I go Peterborough with Margaritka shopping.”

  She bangs the door and drives off in the car, and I am left with a box of frozen documents.

  I make a copy of the solicitor’s letter, but then I see that there are only two sheets of copier paper left, so I stop. I slip one of the wedding photos into my handbag, as well as the copies I have made. Then I put the rest of the papers back into the box.

  As I am doing so, another paper catches my eye. It is a letter from the Institute of Feminine Beauty in Budapest, typed on thick cream paper, with a gold-embossed border, to a Mrs Valentina Dubova at Hall Street, Peterborough. It thanks her, in English, for her esteemed custom and acknowledges the payment of three thousand US dollars in respect of breast enhancement surgery. It is signed with a flourish by a Doktor Pavel Nagy. From the date, I work out that it must have taken place a few months before their marriage, during her trip to Ukraine. My mind goes back to the fat brown envelope. Three thousa
nd US dollars is a little over £1,800. So my father must have known what it was for. Must have known, and must have been eager to pay it.

  “Pappa,” I call him, softly, so as not to reveal the extent of my rage. “Pappa, what is this?”

  “Mmm. Yes.” He looks at the letter and nods. There is nothing he can say.

  “You are crazy. Lucky you have an appointment with the psychiatrist tomorrow.”

  I stow the box of frozen letters under my father’s bed, with strict instructions that he must replace them in the boot of her car at the earliest opportunity, without her seeing. I suppose I should stay and do it myself, but it is already early evening, and I just want to get away, to get home to kind, sane Mike and my orderly house. I cook him macaroni cheese-maggot-white, tasteless, but he can eat it without his false teeth. We eat in silence. There is nothing left to say. When he has finished, I say goodbye. As I turn from the lane into the main road, a car careers wildly round the bend in the other direction. One headlamp is broken. In the front are two grinning figures: Valentina and Margaritka returning from their shopping trip.

  Fifteen. In the psychiatrist’s chair

  My father’s visit to the psychiatrist is a triumph. The consultation lasts a whole hour, and the consultant hardly gets a word in edgeways. He is a most cultured and intelligent type, my father says. An Indian, by the way. He is fascinated by my father’s theory of the relationship between mechanical engineering as applied to tractors and the psychological engineering advocated by Stalin, as applied to the human soul. He is sympathetic to Schopenhauer’s observation of the connection between madness and genius, but reluctant to be drawn into a debate about whether Nietzsche’s supposed madness was an effect of syphilis, though he admits under pressure that there is some merit in my father’s case that Nietzsche’s genius was merely misunderstood by less intelligent types. He asks my father whether he believes that he is being persecuted. “No, no!” my father exclaims. “Only by her!” He points at the door behind which Valentina is lurking. (The doctor wanted to discover whether I am suffering from a paranoia, my father said, but of course I did not fall for this trick.)

  Valentina is miffed at being excluded from the consultation, since she believes it was she who first brought my father’s madness to the attention of the authorities. She is even more miffed when my father emerges with a beam of triumph on his face.

  “Very intelligent doctor. He says I not crazy. You crazy!” She barges into the psychiatrist’s office and starts to berate him in a variety of languages. The doctor calls the hospital porters and she is asked to leave. She flounces out throwing offensive remarks about Indians over her shoulder.

  “OK, Pappa, so the visit to the psychiatrist was a success. But what happened to your head? Where did you get that cut?”

  “Ah, this too is Valentina’s doing. After she failed to have me certified as insane, she attempted to murder me.”

  He describes another ugly scene as they emerge from the porticoed entrance of the hospital, still shouting at each other. She pushes him, and he loses his footing and falls down the stone steps, banging his head. It starts to bleed.

  “Come,” says Valentina, “You foolish falling-on-ground man. Get in car quick quick quick we go home.”

  A small crowd has gathered around them.

  “No, go away, murderer!” my father cries, flailing his arms about. “I will riot go home with you!” His glasses have fallen off and one of the lenses is smashed.

  A nurse steps out of the crowd, and looks at my father’s head wound. It is not deep, but it bleeds copiously. She takes him by the arm.

  “Might be just as well to pop into Casualty and have it looked at.”

  Valentina grabs his other arm.

  “No, no! He my husband. He OK. He coming home in car.”

  There is a tug of war between the two women, my father in the middle, all the time protesting ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ The crowd of onlookers has swelled. The nurse calls the hospital security guards and my father is taken to Accident & Emergency, where his wound is dressed, Valentina still stubbornly clinging to his arm. She will not let him go.

  But my father refuses to leave A & E with Valentina. “She wants to murder me!” he calls out to anyone who comes within earshot. In the end, a social worker is called, and my father, his head dramatically bandaged, is admitted to a residential hostel for the night. Next day, he is escorted home in a police car.

  Valentina is waiting for him when he arrives, all smiles and bosom.

  “Come, holubchik, my little pigeon. My darling.” She pats his cheek. “We will not argue any more.”

  The policemen are charmed. They accept her offer of tea, and sit around in the kitchen far longer than is necessary, discussing the vulnerability and foolishness of old people, and how important it is that they be properly looked after. The policemen advance instances of elderly people who have been duped by doorstep criminals and knocked over in the street by muggers. Not all old people are so lucky as to have a loving wife to care for them. Valentina expresses horror at these wanton instances of brutality.

  And maybe she is genuinely repentant, says my father, for after the policemen have gone she does not turn on him in a fury, but takes his hand and places it on her breast, stroking it with her fingers, chiding him gently for mistrusting her and allowing this shadow to fall between them. She does not even abuse him for taking her box of papers and hiding it under his bed. (Of course she found them-of course my father did not manage to return them to the boot of the car.) Or maybe someone (Mrs Zadchuk?) has explained to her the meaning of the last sentence of the solicitor’s letter.

  I have sent Mrs Divorce Expert a copy of the solicitor’s letter, and she has sent Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home a newspaper cutting. It tells the story of a man from the Congo who has lived in the UK for fifteen years, who is now to be deported because he entered the country illegally all those years ago, even though he has established a life for himself, built up a business, become a figure in the local community. The local church has mounted a campaign on his behalf.

  “I think the tide is turning,” says Vera. “People are waking up at last.”

  I have come to quite the opposite conclusion-people are falling asleep over this issue, not waking up. The remote voices in Lunar House are asleep. The blue-chip voices in far-flung consulates are asleep. The trio on the immigration panel in Nottingham are asleep-they are just going through the motions like sleepwalkers. Nothing will happen.

  “Vera, all this stuff about deportation, and these high-profile cases with campaigns and letters to newspapers-it’s just to create an illusion of activity. In reality, in most cases-nothing happens. Nothing at all. It’s just a charade.”

  “Of course that is what I would expect you to say, Nadezhda. Your sympathies have always been quite clear.”

  “It’s not a matter of sympathies, Vera. Listen to what I’m saying. Our mistake has been to think that they would remove her. But they won’t. We have to remove her.”

  Wearing the stilettos of Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home has altered the way I walk. I used to be liberal about immigration-I suppose I just thought it was all right for people to live where they wanted. But now I imagine hordes of Valentinas barging their way through customs, at Ramsgate, at Felixstowe, at Dover, at Newhaven-pouring off the boats, purposeful, single-minded, mad.

  “But you always take her side.”

  “Not any more.”

  “I suppose it’s because you’re a social worker, you can’t help it.”

  “I’m not a social worker, Vera.”

  “Not a social worker?” There is silence. The phone crackles. “Well what are you?”

  “I’m a lecturer.”

  “So-a lecturer! What do you lecture about?”

  “Sociology.”

  “Well that’s it-that’s what I mean.”

  “Sociology’s not the same thing as social work.”

  “No? Well what is it?”

&nb
sp; “It’s about society-different forces and groups in society and why they behave as they do.”

  There is a pause. She clears her throat.

  “But that’s fascinating!”

  “Well, yes. I think so.”

  Another pause. I can hear Vera lighting a cigarette on the other end of the line.

  “So why is Valentina behaving as she is?”

  “Because she’s desperate.”

  “Ah, yes. Desperate.” She draws a deep breath, sucking in smoke.

  “Remember when we were desperate, Vera?”

  The hostel. The refugee centre. The single bed we shared. The terraced house with the toilet in the back yard and the squares of torn newspaper.

  “But how desperate must one be to become a criminal? Or to prostitute oneself?”

  “Women have always gone to extremes for their children. I would do the same for Anna. I’m sure I would. Wouldn’t you do the same for Alice or Lexy? Wouldn’t Mother have done the same for us, Vera? If we were desperate? If there was no other way?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Nadia.”

  I lie in bed in the small hours thinking about the man from the Congo. I imagine the knock on the door in the night, the heart jumping against the rib-cage, the predator and prey looking into each other’s eyes. Gotcha! I imagine the friends and neighbours gathered on the pavement, the Zadchuks waving hankies which they press to their eyes. I imagine the cup of coffee, still warm, left on the table in the haste of departure, which goes cold, then gathers a skin of mould and then finally dries into a brown crust.

  Mike does not like Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home. She is not the woman he married.

  “Deportation’s a cruel nasty way of dealing with people. It’s not the solution to anything.”

  “I know. I know. But…”

  Next morning I telephone the number at the top of the letter Valentina got from the Immigration Advisory Service. They give me a number at East Midlands Airport. Amazingly, I get through to the woman with the brown briefcase and blue Fiat who visited the house after their marriage. She is surprised to hear from me, but she remembers my father straightaway.