‘You never finished your story, Inna, how your father’s leg was amputated, and Dovik went to Tbilisi to study medicine that came from sewerage. Improbable though that may seem to most normal people. And then?’
‘Aha! Soviet bacteriophage medicine was big success! Dovik got medal of gonner. Then in 1962 big creases. American President Jeff Kennedy put rocket inside Turkey for Netto expansionism. Soviet President Khrushchev try put rocket in Cuba.’
‘Not Netto, Inna. NATO.’
‘So what this Netto everybody talking about?’
‘It’s a cheap supermarket chain in the north of England.’
‘Supermarket?’ She looked mortified. ‘I was think it military club for putting rocket all around Russia. Supermarket! Oy bozhe moy!’
I knew of course about the Cuban missile crisis, but for me the big event of 1962 was my first birthday, some months earlier on May 6th. According to Howard there had been a cake with one candle, which he blew out for me, while Mum and Dad got tipsy and went off to try for another baby, evidently without success. Howard told me that in October 1962 Mum had organised an embarrassing candlelit peace vigil in the cherry grove, which he had been forced to attend, and Dad had made two grand from selling foil-lined anti-radiation suits that had fallen off the back of a lorry somewhere near Huddersfield.
I remember some years later watching a TV documentary about the Cuban missile crisis with grainy footage of rocket-laden warships motionless on a grey ocean as the two world powers squared up to each other. Inna told me that in October 1962 all across the Soviet Union, people travelled home to be with their families in what they believed might be their last days on earth. Her parents were by then living in Crimea where her father had a desk job with the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Dovik too came home from Georgia to his adopted family. Time and distance had transformed him from an annoying older brother into a mysterious and handsome stranger. Together they watched the confrontation of warships on the communal television in the basement of the building – the same images I had seen. She described how they held their breath as the heroic Soviet submariners of the B-59 that protected their warships, running low on air deep below the Caribbean and harried by enemy destroyers, had to choose between rising to the surface in sight of their pursuers, or firing off their nuclear torpedoes and risking igniting nuclear Armageddon which, Inna said, would finish all life on earth.
Biting her lip, she confessed that she did not want to die a virgin. Dovik gallantly offered to put that right for her.
‘Ha ha! Virgin!’ She clapped her hands.
I don’t know whether Dovik ever realised or whether she eventually confessed.
Shortly afterwards they moved to Tbilisi and got married. Dovik continued his bacteriophage research, which according to Inna was a Soviet version of antibiotics made from viruses that thrive in effluent and infect and destroy bacteria. Inna, as a nurse at the same hospital, had administered this yukky remedy to local unfortunates.
‘Mm. Shakespeare said something along the lines that one pain is cured by another.’ It was from Romeo and Juliet. ‘Take thou some new infection to thy eye and the rank poison of the old will die.’
‘Aha! Very clever man! He was Soviet citizen?’
‘It seems unlikely, Inna, but it’s an intriguing thought.’ Could anyone really be as stupid as that, or was she having me on?
Inna and Dovik lived in a two-roomed flat on the ground floor of a low-rise ‘Khrushchyovka’.
‘Council house like this, but made from good Soviet concrete.’
Despite her outspoken distaste for public housing, the young couple were happy in their new flat which, although small, was a home of their own at a time when many families were still living crammed into a couple of rooms with parents and in-laws. They made it nice with flowers, pictures and traditional embroidery, and here they had their two children. ‘Two boys grown up now. Both doctor. One live Peterburg, one live Hamburg. Everybody normal.’
According to Inna, the Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev was a popular leader, spirited and jovial, who denounced Stalin and enjoyed a glass of Ukrainian shampanskoye best-in-world. It seemed as though the Soviet Union was at last crawling out of its grim past of famine, war and repression into a progressive and dynamic world power stretching all the way from Czechoslovakia to Kamchatka. Khrushchev’s diplomacy even saved the world from nuclear destruction while letting Mister President Jeff Kennedy take the credit.
‘No, Inna, it was the other way around. John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation and Khrushchev had to back down. Everybody knows that.’
‘Aha! Same like Dovik know I virgin!’ she chuckled.
I began to feel a bit sorry for this Dovik, who seemed like a decent sort of guy who had obviously drawn a few short straws in life, Inna being one of them.
In 1964, when Inna was pregnant with her first son, Khrushchev was ousted and replaced by Brezhnev.
‘Oy! Such primitive man!’ She threw up her hands. ‘Primitive eyebrow! Primitive politic! Like black bear cover wit medals. Also Ukrainian! What we can do?’
They resolved to emigrate, but had to wait until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 before their dream could become a reality. As the country went into meltdown, Western advisers poured in and shady people grabbed publicly owned assets in a wild spree of shoot-from-the-hip privatisation. Dovik was approached by the gangster-cum-businessman Kukuruza, who was sniffing around for ways of making money out of creaking Soviet research institutions with business potential. Bacteriophage medicine, with its low-cost effluent ingredients and unlimited upside, seemed an ideal prospect. Dovik demurred. He was not ready to hand over his baby to the mobsters, and he had other escape plans. He was already in touch with scientists at the Wellcome Institute in London who were also studying bacteriophages. He wrote a friendly letter from Tbilisi and was offered a research fellowship.
‘So we come in London. Very nice place. Everybody happy. Then one day this gangster Kukuruza come back for Dovik, but now he big olihark.’
Dovik’s refusal to sell his secrets cost him his life. A plate of poisoned slatki in a Soho restaurant did for him – or so Inna said.
‘Oy-oy-oy! Olihark got him dead. Now I all alonely. Time for going home!’
As Inna spoke, she crammed an obscure pink garment brutally into an already full bag. ‘Ah! Ukraina! You cannot imagine, Bertie, how beautiful this country. Yellow-blue, same like our flag. Yellow fields filled wit corn. Sky blue, no cloud. River like glass. Willow tree on bank. Little white house wit cherry trees in garden. Mmm-m-m.’ She was wailing again, hopelessly struggling with the zip of her bag. ‘England is good country but too wet. Too dark. Too much brissel sprout.’
Personally I am fond of Brussels sprouts, but I can see that they are an acquired taste. ‘Brussels sprouts are part of your five-a-day, Inna. Here, let me do that for you.’
I took the bag from her and found the only way I could close the zip was to remove the pink garment, which turned out to be a rubberised roll-on corset. She grabbed the bag from me, undid the zip, and shoved it in again. Then the zip broke. Tears welled up in her eyes. I put my arm around her. I was suddenly feeling quite emotional too.
‘I can see why you want to go to Ukraine, Inna. But I think you’re taking a bit of a gamble with this Lookerchunky guy. I mean how much do you know about him?’
‘I know love. That is enough.’ Tears fluttered on her eyelashes.
‘But love is a bit … you know … unreliable. Wouldn’t it be better if you went to live near your sons?’
‘Oy, I been visit in Hamburg. Nice place but everybody speaking German. Wrong type kobasa.’
‘What about St Petersburg? That’s closer to home for you.’
‘Also nice place, but too much gangster, winter worse than London, son too busy. No, better I go in Crimea wit Lev. Nice climate, nice people, plenty seaside, plenty nice food nice wine.’
‘But Inna, Crimea is in Russia now, not in Ukraine.’
‘No, no, Bertie. Before was Russia, now Ukraina. Mister Khrushchev give it over. I been there.’
‘Now Russia has taken it back. Haven’t you been following the news? The people voted overwhelmingly. Though of course we must assume the vote was rigged.’
‘Oy! Why nobody tell me?’ She clasped her hands in dismay. ‘Where I will go?’
‘But you don’t need to leave, Inna. In fact it would be nice if you stayed. Aren’t you happy here?’ Maybe I had been too harsh with her over the coffee and Flossie’s care. From now on I would treat her like a queen.
‘Everything changing round here, Mister Bertie. Blackie gone away. Mrs Crazy gone away. Romania gone away. Today they cut down cherry tree, same like in play of Chekhov.’
The Cherry Orchard, that’s what I’d been trying to remember! I’d even played Gaev in 1981, in Camberwell. Something about looking from the window and seeing Mother walking through the cherry orchard wearing a white dress. I felt a lump in my throat. She would never walk there again.
‘And yesterday I hear man in wheelchair got dead.’
‘What?’ This was unexpected and shocking. ‘You mean Len?’ Maybe she was confused.
‘Yes, no-leg man wit poison-mushroom hat. Deeyabet must eat to make sugar in blood, and he need electric for keeping insulin in refigorator.’
A finger of guilt poked my ribs. I’d promised to try and help, but I’d forgotten. I’d been selfishly preoccupied with my own survival, and at the back of my mind I’d assumed ‘They’ would look after him – someone like Mrs Penny from the Council, or the Job Centre, or the NHS would be keeping an eye on him. But nobody was. While I’d been waiting for Godot, time had run out for Len.
I bowed my head, remembering his relentless optimism and his occasional bullshit. ‘Poor Len. Didn’t anybody help him?’
‘I give him injection but insulin kaput.’
Alas, poor Len. A black cloudbank loomed on my mind’s horizon. Legless Len, Mrs Crazy, the cherry grove, even Inna Alfandari – now that Mother was gone, those were the last living links that connected a secure past to an uncertain future. It wasn’t just the bricks and concrete that made this place home, it was the web of human spirit, that funny old-fashioned word embroidered by Gobby Gladys: FELLOWSHIP.
‘Coo-coo-coo,’ Flossie cooed from the balcony. She fluffed out her feathers and hopped up and down on her perch, turning towards the one-legged pigeon as it flapped away in the direction of the next-door balcony. Oh yes, I’d forgotten Flossie – she was still here.
‘What’s up wit devil-bird?’ asked Inna. ‘She turning into pigeon?’
‘I think she’s fallen in love.’
Berthold: Benefit Fraud
With what was left of my first-night Lucky stipend, I booked a cab for Inna to Hampstead, where it turned out she still had her old flat, which she had been subletting to friends of friends. I felt quite peeved that she hadn’t told me before, but relieved that she had somewhere to go.
These friends of friends were now visiting family in Zaporizhia, and until they came back Inna would be able to stay there with Lookerchunky aka Lev. When they returned, their rent would be paid into Inna’s bank account and would augment her tiny widow’s pension back in Ukraine. The more I learned of this set-up the less I liked it, but she had it all worked out, and as she gabbled her explanation her eyes slid from side to side in a shifty way that made me suspect that I hadn’t yet got to the bottom of it.
‘Bye bye, Bertie.’ She stood on tiptoes and gave me a peck on the cheek, then she was gone in a high-speed hobble, leaving only the trace of her distinctive spicy smell with a hint of L’Heure Bleue lingering in the hallway.
Watching through the window as she tottered across the decimated cherry grove with her bags to where the cab was waiting, a lump rose in my throat. I would miss her potty conversation and dreadful singing. I would miss the globalki, kosabki and slutki.
Then I heard: Ding dong. Ding dong!
‘Who the f—?’
A man and a woman were standing at the door, seedy nondescript types with flat lace-up shoes, briefcases and blank unsmiling faces like the Undead. I moved to close the door, but the man was resting one brown shoe on the threshold.
‘We’re looking for Mrs Inna Alfandari,’ he said. His voice was flat, brown and slightly nasal.
‘She’s not here,’ I said. Who the hell were they? Mormons? Jehovah’s Witnesses?
‘Can you tell us where she is?’ asked the woman. Her voice was also flat, brown and slightly nasal. She did not smile.
I hesitated. If they were police, they would have shown their ID. ‘Can you tell me who you are?’
‘Does Mrs Alfandari live here?’ he pursued.
‘Look, I’ve no idea who you are. Why should I tell you anything?’
The woman flicked back the lapel of her jacket to show an ID tag dangling on her low-rise bosom. It had a bronze company logo on top – i4F – and her name: Miss Anthea Crossbow, Fraud Investigator. Blimey.
‘Can we come in?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong p-p-person.’
‘We’ve been watching these premises,’ said the man. ‘We have reason to suspect she’s been living here.’
‘There’s no-b-body of that name living here. There’s just me and my m-mother. Lily Lukashenko.’
They exchanged quick glances.
‘There must have b-b-been some mix-up.’
‘We’re investigating benefit fraud.’ The man handed me a business card, with the same i4F logo and the name Mr Alec Prang. Senior Fraud Investigator. ‘We believe Mrs Alfandari has wrongly been claiming Housing Benefit for a flat she no longer occupies.’
‘Oh, how a-p-p-palling!’
So that’s what she’d been up to – the old scamp! Not poison but fraud. When you think of it, we were two of a kind and maybe that’s what drew us together. Did they know that she had also been renting out the same flat, pocketing both the rent and the Housing Benefit? No wonder she could afford to be generous with the vodka. Should I tell them? No. A plague upon it when thieves cannot be true one to another!
‘B-but there must b-be a mistake, Mr P-p-prang? She definitely doesn’t live here.’
‘Maybe we’d better recheck the Hampstead address,’ murmured Miss Crossbow to Mr Prang.
‘That would seem like a good idea.’ I smiled to myself. By the time they got there, Inna would have arrived in her taxi to confound their suspicions.
‘Would you please contact us if you discover any information about the whereabouts of this individual?’ Mr Prang bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile, and I assented with equal insincerity.
‘Thank you for your time, Mr … er?’ Miss Crossbow was fishing for my name.
‘It’s been a pleasure.’ I closed the door.
I heard the clunk of the lift and waited by the window for them to emerge in the grove, but they did not appear. Where could they have got to? Panic struck me as I reflected on their visit. Were they keeping me under surveillance too? While investigating Inna, had they twigged my own irregular situation and my mother’s demise? I stepped out on to the rear walkway just in time to see an unmarked white van with two figures hunched in the front seats, pulling away at speed from behind the bins. Presumably they had been staking out the back of the flats. Still, I smiled to myself, if they went back to Hampstead now, they would be just in time to realise their mistake.
Though I was miffed that Inna had pulled the wool over my eyes, I felt a sneaking admiration for her too. She had fooled everybody – even me, even Mother, who would never have guessed her friend’s duplicity and might have been horrified. On the other hand, Mother was generally tolerant of human weakness, especially when accompanied with a glass of booze.
Inna had left Mother’s room in quite a mess so, putting on the radio to drown out the silence in the flat, I busied myself with clearing up the debris. Here was the pink corset, which I put in a carrier bag for Inna t
o collect, and some tattered black stockings which I binned, along with crumpled packaging, an empty bottle of black hair dye, a hairbrush matted with long black hair, a still-unopened pack of Players No. 6, which Mother must have hidden somewhere, several plastic cups containing what seemed to be green phlegm, and a stack of women’s magazines in Cyrillic script featuring plump blonde dark-eyed models and recipes that looked suspiciously like variants on kobaski, golabki and slatki.
Once tidy, the room was more than bare – it had a desolate look. From the box under the boiler I replaced Mother’s photos, covering the faded squares in the wallpaper: dashing Ted Madeley, dreamy Berthold Lubetkin, Granny Gladys with her flowerpot hat and Grandad Bob with his dog-head walking stick, and the photo of me with Howard and the twins on Hampstead Heath. They settled back on to their old hooks with a comfortable sigh. I stepped back to survey my handiwork. Even the bottle of L’Heure Bleue was on the dressing table, though it was now empty.
Out on the balcony, Flossie was flirting with her scrawny new boyfriend. Frankly, I felt she could have done better for herself – an intelligent exotic bird like that – but apparently that’s often the way with mature females. I put on the kettle – there was an almost-full jar of Lidl own-brand in the cupboard – and regretted the generous impulse that had led me to offer Inna my remaining fiver for a taxi fare rather than saving it up for Luigi. I was in a fretful mood, my ankles were itching, the cloudbank of depression hovered on the edge of my consciousness, and for a man who has just shagged a very nice woman, I felt irritable and on edge.
Then, as the afternoon wore on, I realised what was bothering me. The phone. It was silent. Eustachia hadn’t rung.
I stared at it malevolently. Why didn’t she phone? It was her turn, for godssake. I had phoned her last time. If it became a habit, she would start to take me for granted, to give me the runaround. As Jimmy the Dog used to say, ‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen.’ But surely, a woman couldn’t do that? I mean, objectively speaking, Eustachia was nice, but nothing special. Like Flossie, I could probably do better, if I put my mind to it. Now that Mother had given me the green light. Now that I’d landed a rather recherché stage role, surely my sexual capital would be boosted. Maybe Violet would come back. Maybe Bronwyn wasn’t a lesbian. My mind was hopping around like a one-legged pigeon.
The Lubetkin Legacy Page 27