He stayed in the hospital, under the care of the elderly psychiatrist, with whom he played chess and discussed philosophy and science. As the summer passed, the Germans too moved on, pursuing the Red Army eastwards. When he thought it was safe, he slipped away, made his way back through the German lines, westwards, towards Dashev to join his family.
But Mother and Vera had already gone. Two weeks before my father returned, the Germans had taken over the village, put all the able-bodied young adults on to trains, and transported them to Germany to work in munitions factories. Ostarbeiter, they were called: workers from the East. They had wanted to leave Vera behind—she was only five—but Mother had kicked up such a fuss that she came too. Father stayed in Dashev for long enough to recover his strength, then he talked his way on to a train and followed them to the West.
“No, no,” says Vera. “It didn’t happen like that. They were plums, not cherries. And it was the NKVD that caught him, not the Germans. The Germans came afterwards. And when he came back to Dashev, we were still there. I remember him coming back, with this terrible scar on his throat. Baba Nadia looked after him. He couldn’t eat anything except soup.”
“But he told me himself…”
“No, he went west first, got on a transport to Germany. When he told them he was an engineer they gave him a job. Then he sent for Mother and me.”
That is the story of how my family left Ukraine—two different stories, my mother’s and my father’s.
“He was an economic migrant, then, not an asylum seeker?”
“Nadia, please. Why are you raising these questions now? We should be concentrating our energies on the divorce—not on this endless carping about the past. There is nothing to say. Nothing to be learned. What’s over is over.”
There is a catch in her voice, as though I have touched a nerve. Can I have hurt her?
“I’m sorry, Vera.” (I am sorry.)
It dawns on me: Big Sis is no more than a carapace. My real sister is somebody different, somebody I am only just beginning to know.
“Now.” Her voice steadies. She takes control. “You say Valentina has copied all his papers. There can be only one reason for this—she wants to use them for her divorce hearing. You must let Laura Carter know at once.”
“I will.”
Ms Carter is incandescent when I tell her about the photocopying of the papers.
“Some of these solicitors are hardly better than their crooked clients. If these papers are shown in court, we shall protest. Did you get anywhere with that private detective?”
Justin delivers on his promise. A week or so later he telephones to say that he has tracked down Valentina: she and Stanislav are living in two rooms above the Imperial Hotel. She works behind the bar, and Stanislav washes pots. (I had guessed as much.) She is also claiming social security benefit, and housing benefit on a rented terraced house in Norwell Street, which she is subletting to a Ghanaian trainee audiologist who had somehow wandered into the Imperial Hotel for a drink. Does she have a lover? Justin is not sure. He has spotted a dark blue Volvo estate parked nearby once or twice, but not overnight. Eric Pike is a long-standing regular at the Imperial Hotel. There is no evidence that will stand up in court.
I thank Justin profusely and put a cheque in the post.
I telephone Vera, but her line is busy, and while I am waiting, I decide to make a call to Chris Tideswell at the Spalding Police Station. I tell her about the withdrawal of the appeal at the tribunal, and I tell her that Valentina is now living at the Imperial Hotel with her son, where they are both illegally employed.
“Hm,” says Chris Tideswell in her chirpy young-girl voice. “Yer a right detective. Yer should join the force. I’ll see what I can do.”
Vera is delighted with Justin’s findings.
“You see, it confirms what I always believed. She is a criminal. Not satisfied with ripping off Pappa, she is also ripping off our country.” (Our country?) “And what about this Ghanaian? Probably he is also some kind of asylum seeker.”
“Justin said he’s a trainee audiologist at the hospital.”
“Well, he could still be an asylum seeker, couldn’t he?”
“All we know is that he’s renting the house from her. Probably she’s ripping him off too.”
There are ten years between Vera and me—ten years that gave me the Beatles, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the student uprising of 1968, and the birth of feminism, which taught me to see all women as sisters—all women except my sister, that is.
“And maybe he is subletting rooms in the house to other asylum seekers.” (She won’t let it go.) “You see when you enter this shady world of criminality, you discover that there are layers upon layers of deceit, and you have to be both clever and persistent to find out the truth.”
“Vera, he’s a trainee audiologist. He works with deaf people.”
“That doesn’t mean anything, Nadia.”
Once, not so long ago, Big Sis’s attitudes would send me into a rage of righteousness, but now I see them in their historical context, and I smile to myself in a superior way.
“When we first came here, Vera, people could have said the same things about us—that we were ripping off the country, gorging ourselves on free orange juice, growing fat on NHS cod-liver oil. But they didn’t. Everyone was kind to us.”
“But that was different. We were different.” (We were white, of course, for one thing, I could say, but I hold my tongue.) “We worked hard and kept our heads down. We learned the language and integrated. We never claimed benefits. We never broke the law.”
“/broke the law. I smoked dope. I was arrested at Greenham Common. Pappa got so upset that he tried to catch the train back to Russia.”
“But that’s exactly my point, Nadia. You and your lem’sh friends—you never really appreciated what England had to offer—stability, order, the rule of law. If you and your kind prevailed, this country would be just like Russia—bread queues everywhere, and people getting their hands chopped off.”
“That’s Afghanistan. Chopping hands off is the rule of law.”
Both of us have raised our voices. This is turning into an old-style argument.
“Whatever. You see my point,” she says dismissively.
“What I appreciated about growing up in England was the tolerance, liberalism, everyday kindness.” (I drive home my point by wagging my finger in the air, even though she can’t see me.) “The way the English always stick up for the underdog.”
“You are confusing the underdog with the scrounger, Nadia. We were poor, but we were never scroungers. The English people believe in fairness. Fair play. Like cricket.” (What does she know about cricket?) “They play by the rules. They have a natural sense of discipline and order.”
“No no. They’re quite anarchic. They like to see the little man stick two fingers up to the world. They like to see the big shot get his come-uppance.”
“On the contrary, they have a perfectly preserved class system, in which everyone knows where they belong.”
See how we grew up in the same house but lived in different countries?
“They make fun of their rulers.”
“But they like strong rulers.”
If Vera mentions Mrs Thatcher, I shall put the phone down. There is a short pause, in which we both consider our options. I try an appeal to our shared past.
“Remember the woman on the bus, Vera? The woman in the fur coat?”
“What woman? What bus? What are you talking about?”
Of course she remembers. She hasn’t forgotten the smell of diesel, the swish of the windscreen wipers, the unsteady sway of the bus as it churned newly fallen snow into slush; coloured lights outside the windows; Christmas Eve 1952. Vera and I, muffled against the cold, snuggling up against Mother on the back seat. And a kind woman in a fur coat who leaned across the aisle and pressed sixpence into Mother’s hand: “For the kiddies at Christmas.”
“The woman who gave Mother s
ixpence.”
Mother, our mother, did not dash the coin in her face; she mumbled, “Thank you, lady,” and slipped it into her pocket. The shame of it!
“Oh, that. I think she was a bit drunk. You mentioned it once before. I don’t know why you go on about it.”
“It was that moment—more than anything that happened to me afterwards—that turned me into a lifelong socialist.”
There is silence on the other end of the telephone and for a moment I think she has hung up on me. Then: “Maybe it was what turned me into the woman in the fur coat.”
Twenty-Four
Mystery man
Vera and I decide that together we will confront Valentina outside the Imperial Hotel.
“It is the only thing to do. Otherwise she will keep on evading us,” says Vera.
“But she might just turn and run away when she sees us.”
“Then we will follow her. We will track her down to her lair.”
“But what if she has Stanislav with her? Or Eric Pike?”
“Don’t be such a baby, Nadia. If necessary we will call for the police.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to leave it to the police in the first place? I spoke to this young woman officer in Spalding who seemed really sympathetic.”
“Do you still believe that the law will oust her? Nadia, if we don’t do this, nobody will.”
“OK.” Although I make objections, I am excited by the idea. “Maybe we should arrange for five-o’clock-shadow Justin to be there. Just as back-up.”
But before we can arrange a suitable date, my father calls in a state of great agitation. A mystery man has been seen hanging around the house.
“Mystery man. Since yesterday. Peeping in at all windows. Then disappears.”
“But Pappa, who is it? You should call the police.”
I am alarmed. It seems obvious that someone is casing the house for a break-in.
“No no! No police! Definitely no police!”
My father’s experience of the police has not been positive.
“Call a neighbour, then, Pappa. And confront him together. Find out who he is. It’s most likely a burglar, looking to see what you have worth stealing.”
“Does not look like burglar. Middle-aged. Short. Wears brown suit.”
I am intrigued.
“We’ll come on Saturday. Lock your doors and windows until then.”
We arrive at about three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. It is mid-October. The sun is already low in the sky, and a fenland mist shrouds the countryside in a damp haze, lingering around the low-lying fields and marshes, stealing like a wraith out of drainage culverts and watercourses. The leaves have started to turn. The garden is thick with windfalls, apples, pears and plums, over which a cloud of small flies hovers.
My father is asleep in his armchair by the window, his head thrown back, mouth open, a silver thread of saliva running from his lip to his collar. Lady Di’s girlfriend is curled up on his lap, her striped belly quietly rising and falling. A miasma of somnolence hangs over the house and garden, as if a fairytale witch has cast a spell, and the sleeper is waiting to be awakened with a kiss.
“Hallo, Pappa.” I kiss his scrawny stubbly cheek. He wakes with a start, and the cat jumps on to the floor, purring in greeting, rubbing herself against our legs.
“Hallo, Nadia, Michael! Good you can come!” He stretches out his arms in welcome.
How thin he has become! I had hoped that after Valentina left things would suddenly change; he would start to put on weight, and clean up the house, and everything would get back to normal. But nothing has changed, except that a bulky Valentina-shaped emptiness now sits in his heart. “How are you, Pappa? Where’s this mystery man?”
“Mystery man has disappeared. Not seen since yesterday.” I must confess to a pang of disappointment—my curiosity had been aroused. But I put the kettle on, and while it is boiling I wander outside and start to gather up the windfalls. I am concerned that my father has not pursued his annual ritual of gathering, storing, peeling and Toshiba-ing. Self-neglect is a sign of depression.
Mike settles himself in the other comfqrtable chair in listening mode.
“So, Nikolai, how’s the book coming along? Have you got any more of that excellent plum wine?” (He’s been showing too much interest in that plum wine for my liking. Doesn’t he realise it is dangerous stuff?)
“Aha!” exclaims my father, handing Mike a glass. “Now is coming a very interesting time in the history of tractors. As Lenin said of the capitalist time, the whole world is unified into one market, with concentrations of capital increasing markedly. Now in relation to engineering of tractors, my thoughts on this are as follows…”
I never found out what his thoughts were, because by this point, Mike has surrendered to the plum wine, and I have ranged out of earshot. I am paying tribute to Mother’s garden. It makes me sad to see the havoc four years of neglect have wreaked; yet it is the havoc of superabundance. In such a rich soil, everything that takes root thrives: weeds proliferate, creepers run amok, the grass is grown so tall it is almost like a meadow, fallen fruit rots, yielding curious spotted fungi; flies, gnats, wasps, worms and slugs feast on the fruit, birds feast on the worms and flies.
Underneath the washing-line, half hidden in the long grass, a piece of shiny cloth catches my eye. I bend down closer to look. It is the green satin bra, the colour now almost faded out. A startled earwig scurries out of one of the enormous cups. On impulse I pick it up and try to read the size on the label. But that too has faded away, washed out by soap powder, sun and rain. Holding this tattered relic in my hands gives me a strange sense of loss. Sic transit gloria mundi.
I don’t know what makes me look up from my contemplation, but at that moment my eye catches a movement, a fleeting figure perhaps, at the side of the house. Then it is gone; maybe it was just a brownish shadow, or maybe a glimpse of someone in brown. The mystery man!
“Mike! Pappa! Come quick!”
I run into the front garden which is still dominated by the two rusting cars. At first it seems there is no one there. Then I see someone standing very still in the shadow of the lilac tree. He is quite short and squat, with curly brown hair. He is wearing a brown suit. There is something strangely familiar about him.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
He doesn’t say anything, nor move towards me. His stillness is uncanny. Yet he is not frightening. His face is open, attentive. I come a couple of steps closer.
“What do you want? Why do you keep coming here?”
Still he says nothing. Then I remember where I have seen him before: he is the man in the photographs I found in Valentina’s room—the man with his arm around her strapless shoulders. He is a little older than the man in the photos, but it is definitely him.
“Please, say something. Tell me who you are.”
Silence. Then Mike and Pappa appear at the front door. Mike is rubbing his eyes sleepily. Now the man steps forward, and stretching out his hand says one word.
“Dubov.”
“Ah! Dubov!” My father rushes forward, seizes both his hands, and lets flow a stream of rapturous welcome in Ukrainian. “Highly esteemed Director of Polytechnic in Ternopil! Renowned leading Ukrainian scholar! You are most welcome in my modest house.”
Yes, it is Valentina’s intelligent-type husband. As soon as I realise this, I recognise also the resemblance to Stanislav: the brown curls, short build, and now, as he steps out of the shadows, the dimpled smile.
“Mayevskyj! Acclaimed engineer of first order! I have been honoured to read your fascinating thesis on tractor history which you sent to me,” he says in Ukrainian, pumping my father’s hands up and down. Now I understand why he did not respond to my questions. He does not speak English. My father introduces us.
“Mikhail Lewis, my son-in-law. Distinguished trade unionist and computer expert. My daughter Nadezhda. She is a social worker.” (Pappa! How could you!)
Ov
er tea and a packet of past-sell-by-date biscuits I have found in the larder, we gradually discover the reason for the mystery man’s visit. It is simple enough: he has come to find his wife and son, and to take them home to Ukraina. He has grown increasingly concerned about the letters he has been receiving from England. Stanislav is not happy at his school, where he says the other boys are lazy, obsessed with sex, they boast endlessly of their material possessions, and the academic standard is low. Valentina is also unhappy. She has described her new husband as a violent and paranoid man, from whom she is seeking a divorce. Though now that he has met the respected gentleman-engineer (with whom he has already enjoyed a stimulating correspondence on the subject of tractors) he is inclined to believe that she may have exaggerated a little, as she has sometimes been known to do in the past.
“One may forgive a beautiful woman a little exaggeration,” he says. “The important thing is that all is forgiven, and now it is time for her to come home.”
He has come over to England on an exchange programme with Leicester University to extend his knowledge of superconductivity, and he has been allowed to take some weeks’ leave in addition. His mission is to find his wife (although he granted her a divorce, he has never for one moment ceased to consider her as such) and woo her, and win back her heart. “She loved me once—surely she can love me again.” On his free days, he has caught the train from Leicester and lain in wait outside the house, hoping to catch her by surprise. He has scoured the town, and enlisted the help of the President of the Ukrainian Club, but as the days have gone by and she has not appeared, he fears he may have lost her for ever. But now—now he has met the eminent Mayevskyj and his charming daughter and distinguished son-in-law—now maybe they will help him in his endeavours.
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