by Rose Tremain
One morning, after a night of almost no sleep, Lev attempted to ask Midge Midgham for something—a soft blanket or quilt—to put between the sheet and the foam, but he knew that Midge was selectively deaf, so he wasn’t surprised when the man simply turned away from him and strode toward the waiting tractor.
Midge Midgham. The Chinese boys had nicknamed him “Big Berri.” Often, when the pickers assembled for the day and Midge shouted his orders as the rig began its slow forward creep, the Mings’ faces broke into smiles, and these smiles sometimes widened into unstoppable laughter. “Hor-hor-hor-hor! Hor-hor-hor-hor-hor-hor!” It amused Lev to watch them: Sonny and Jimmy Ming, bent over the furrows, weeping with mirth at the sight of Big Berri on his tractor with his stomach punched into an agonizing fold by the steering wheel and his thick neck twisting round to let his puffy eyes keep their vigil on the pickers’ pace.
“Wha’s the matter with them?” Midge sometimes innocently asked. The mongrel dog, Whiskey, might be snapping and yapping at their heels, but they didn’t heed him. Their laughter seemed a sweet intoxication from which nothing could part them.
“In China,” Vitas might offer, “people laugh quite more.”
Or his friend Jacek, a rosy-faced boy with blond hair, might add, “Don’ worry, Midge. No laugh at you. Maybe plan something. Plan Whiskey kidnap. In China, everybody eat dog!”
“Well,” said Midge, “tell them I’ll put their blusted eyes out if they lay a finger on my dog.”
And so the morning would roll on, Lev’s world shrinking to the gray-brown furrows, the green stems, snapping cleanly under the knife, wild weeds in the ditches, sun or rain on his back, diesel fumes from the tractor sullying the freshness of the air.
There was a kind of camaraderie in the line. Lev liked to hear his own language pass from voice to voice. It reminded him of beating the woods behind Auror for rabbits and pigeons when he was a boy. Sometimes, breathing in the diesel smoke, he caught a memory-whiff of the Baryn mill, half expected to look up and see his old friends standing at the edge of the wood: ghostly faces under hard hats.
Mainly, Lev himself was silent, listening to what Vitas and the others talked about: the girls they fancied at the co-op checkouts or in the Longmire Arms, the motorbikes they itched to buy and flaunt, the flavors of crisps they preferred, their discovery of Pot Noodle, the money they were saving, the rules of bar billiards . . .
One afternoon, as they ate their lunch in the corner of a field— floury baps filled with corned beef, pickles, processed cheese, washed down with Pepsi—he told them the old story of buying the Tchevi and pouring vodka on the windshield as they drove it home through the ice. And he saw that they were held by this, just as Lydia’s friends in Muswell Hill had been held. Everybody stared at him: Vitas and Jacek and the other young men from his country, Oskar, Pavel, and Karl. Only the Mings looked blank. When he spoke his language, Sonny and Jimmy Ming didn’t understand a single word.
“I’d like to drive an American car,” said Vitas.
“I’d like to meet Rudi,” said Jacek.
The others nodded, concurred. They’d like to meet Rudi and drive the car. And Lev thought, yes, Rudi was everything this story had made him out to be—and more. He was a force of nature. He was a lightning bolt. He was a fire that never went out.
Lev called him often. It felt to him as though Rudi was once again his only friend in the world. He knew that his money—money that he should have sent to Ina, money that should have repaid his debt to Lydia—was leaking away on mobile-phone debt, but his loneliness was so acute that he had to keep Rudi near him somehow, or go insane.
One evening, Rudi said to him, “Well, I’ve got troubles, too, Lev. The Tchevi’s playing me up again, fuck it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Get this. I’m going along Route 719, way out toward Piratyn, in the middle of nowhere, with this lard-faced granny, carrying two live hens in a coop, in the back. Thinking to myself, I hope she’s got money and isn’t going to try to pay me in fucking eggs. And then I see steam coming out of the hood. Steam! It’s billowing out in massive clouds. I feel like I’m in some old Communist horror movie, starring a tank engine.”
Lev couldn’t suppress a smile. “What did you do?” he said.
“Well, what could I do? I pulled over. Switched off. Granny leans back on the upholstery, like this is completely normal. Just closes her eyes. Hens fast asleep, too—or dead. So I get out, get the hood up. Everything’s boiling in there. I’m not kidding, Lev. I can hear bubbling going on, like Lora was cooking face flannels.
“Everything way too hot to touch. So I know we’re stuck. No option but to stay there and wait till it cools, then refresh the system. But we’re middle of Route 719, nothing in sight but rocks and scrub and one seared old oak tree. Freak temperature: 85 degrees Fahrenheit. And suddenly I’m thinking, It’s still eight or nine miles to Piratyn and I’ve got no water to top up the fucking cooling system!”
“Right. Well, you’re alive to tell the tale.”
“Yeah. But it got surreal. I’m waiting there, apologizing. I feel like such a loser. I feel worse than you’re feeling, comrade. Granny hauls her arse out of the car, twitches her patched-up old skirts, tells me she has to answer a call of nature. So, Bingo, I think to myself: Liquid! And I’m about to ask her, ‘Would you mind saving your body fluid for my poor sick car?’ but then I remember, no, fuck it, I’ve got no receptacle. Nothing to collect it in.”
Lev heard Rudi’s voice begin to break up into laughter as he went on: “So figure what I do, Lev. While Granny’s off into the scrub, I wrap a snot rag round my hand, get the cap off the cooler tank, and I lean over, nearly scalding my balls off, and I piss into the fucking tank. Jesus Christ!”
Lev joined the laughter. Felt it bubble up in him from wherever it had hidden itself. Rudi began coughing, then collected himself and said, “Well, we got there. Chicken shit all over my upholstery, and God knows what uric acid does to an engine, but we survived. Never been so glad to see that dump, Piratyn, in my whole life. Got some coolant into the system, courtesy of a bribe. I swear every last citizen of Piratyn’s a born-and-bred gray. Fucking garage people looked at the Tchevi like she was primed with a terrorist bomb. Cost me almost my whole fare. So bang goes another afternoon’s work and the engine still smells of piss and the cooling system’s leaking like hell and still not fixed and not going to get fixed unless I can cannibalize another motor for a new pump. I tell you, Lev, sometimes this country —”
He broke off. Lev heard the maimed cuckoo come shrieking out of its home in the wooden clock. “Oh well, I needn’t tell you,” sighed Rudi, “you know only too well. That’s why you’re picking asparagus in the mudflats of England.”
The afternoons felt long. On fine days they worked nine, ten hours. Worked till the light began to go, till the rooks began to shuffle in the high trees, till Lady Muck became almost invisible in her green sheath. Then they fell into the Land Rover, mute, aching, hungry, and were driven back to the caravans. Took turns at the hot shower, a big empty walk-in space, fixed up by Midge next to the chiller. Heated up the cheapest tinned stuff they could buy—ravioli, baked beans, mulligatawny soup—and spooned it in like starving children, bulked out with thick-cut bread. Slaked their sugar thirst with canned peaches, mandarin oranges, Mars bars. Wandered outside to smoke, if the night was fine, and stared at the stars, clear and bright, over the quiet land.
Around nine o’clock, Vitas and his friends would invariably set out on the quarter-mile walk to the pub, the Mings following in their wake, and Lev was alone.
He walked in the beautiful silence to where the white geese lay down in their field. Lev leaned on the gate, smoking, trying to empty his mind of everything but this: the May darkness, the moon’s borrowed light, the feeling of being alive. But often, like a movie suddenly beginning in his brain, scenes at GK Ashe would come pelting in: G.K. shouting at the waiters, the nurse from Niger banging down heavy skillets on the stee
l draining top, every sound bouncing and echoing off the hard surfaces. Then the noise lessened and there was Sophie . . . selecting a knife, pinboning a sea bass with deft cuts, making this look as easy as slitting open an envelope, as easy as sliding a scalpel across a vein . . .
He’d leave the gate, leave the geese, alert for foxes and night creatures. He’d start walking again, as if trying to escape, fleeing Sophie’s knife, but there was nowhere to go, except farther into the darkness, to where the poplars sighed like the sea. Sometimes, as he turned round and went slowly back to the caravan, Lev looked over at the lights in Midge’s farmhouse. To push Sophie from his mind, he began to wonder about Midge, “Big Berri,” lonely lord of his fruit and vegetable kingdom, too fat for his clothes, tender toward his dog, spending his life hiring strangers. Had he had a wife once? Had he ever danced a tango? Did anyone alive care about the answers to these questions?
Then Lev would sit at the table, on his bed in its folded state, reading Hamlet under the single bulb hanging from a black wire draped across the ceiling of the caravan. External electric sockets on the wall of the chiller fed the three vans, wires bunched up with brown tape and pushed in through tilting windows. When the wind blew, the light above the table swung back and forth, throwing shadows everywhere, like spirit rags.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d . . . ?
Lev’s eyes were bent low over the page. It was so difficult, he heard himself cursing Lydia for expecting too much of him. But he had nothing else to read here, so he labored on, and for some reason, whenever the ghost appeared, he felt his understanding make a forward surge.
I am thy father’s spirit . . .
He read till his eyes were closing, then put the sheets on his scratchy bed and lay down. He was usually asleep by the time the Mings returned from the pub, but he’d wake to hear them laughing, see their light come on through the curtain that separated their sleeping area from the rest of the van. Sometimes Jimmy (or Sonny) would stumble out again, still convulsed with giggles . . . hor-hor-hor-hor-hor-hor . . . and see Lev sitting up, watching him.
“Sorry, Rev. Forgot piss.”
More unstoppable laughter from the one left behind. Hor-hor-hor-hor-hor-hor! Then a moment’s silent repentance, a dark head appearing through the curtain. “Sorry, Rev. We waken you?”
“It’s okay.”
“We drinking rotsa beer!”
“You have fun?”
“What you say, Rev?”
“You enjoy the pub?”
“Yah, yah. Good shit. Sonny win bar birriads. Night, Rev.”
He’d drift back to sleep, but wake again, hear them talking, then sighing, moaning, and whimpering in their sleep. It seemed to him that their rest was fitful and short, yet in the mornings they always greeted him brightly: “Morning, Rev. How you today?”
If it was raining, they’d appear with their yellow oilskins zipped up to their chins and their sou’westers already pulled on over their thick black hair. In the Land Rover, they sat tight up against each other. They reminded Lev of two obedient brothers at his school, near in age, who went everywhere together and couldn’t bear to be separated. Rudi had nicknamed them “the KGB.” He told Lev they had a family secret too terrible to let out, had to spy on each other night and day, in case one of them talked. To Vitas and the others, the Mings seldom spoke. Only, sometimes, to laugh about Big Berri. Or when it was their turn to work in the chiller, to rub their gloved hands and say, “Big cold, this chirrer! Cold like China winter.”
It was an old stable block with a sagging roof, refrigerated to 8° Celsius. The pickers took turns to do a two-hour evening shift in there, washing, weighing, and bagging up the asparagus, reboxing it for delivery to local shops and supermarkets. They wore oilskins, and rubber gloves and boots, like the trawler crews. They worked in pairs, under dim rods of industrial lighting, using conversation to try to keep them warm.
Working in the chiller with Vitas, who was trying to grow a fussy little triangle of beard under his lower lip, Lev asked, “You going to stay with Midge all summer?”
“Yeh,” said Vitas. “Do the tomato poly-tunnels next. Then the beans and the soft fruit. Go home in August with a suitcase full of cash. Start my engineering course in Jor in September.”
“You want to be an engineer, Vitas?”
Vitas had chosen to work with a woolen scarf wrapped round and round his head, like a bandage. “I want to be something,” he said.
Lev was silent. He stared at the writing on the asparagus bags: Produce of Longmire Farm, Suffolk. “Only the Best!” Thought, Yes, this was what, in the end, drew you on over the years, in spite of tragedy and loss, the idea that you could make some kind of mark, that through the slowly accumulating weeks and months you would somehow become the kind of person you might stop to admire. Only the Best.
“What are you going to do?” asked Vitas.
Lev went on with his work. He thought about all the recipes he’d painstakingly learned at GK Ashe and written out on pieces of paper and stashed in his bag when he left Belisha Road. “I don’t know,” he said to Vitas. “I still haven’t figured it out.”
Midge Midgham invited Lev to his house one May evening, said he’d found a bottle of vodka at the back of his drinks cupboard, assumed Lev liked vodka.
They sat in Midge’s living room, drinking out of shot glasses, munching stale Ritz biscuits, with the dog, Whiskey, asleep on a frayed hearth rug and one window open on a warm but windy night.
Big Berri. His room was full of dust. You could smell it in the upholstery, see its gray bloom on the mantelpiece, on the pewter plates tilting there, on the tops of the huge old loudspeakers, positioned like sentries either side of the fireplace.
“You like music, Midge?” asked Lev.
Midge shifted in his armchair, stared at the speakers, appeared at a momentary loss. “My wife, Donna, she liked pop music,” he said. “R.E.M. The Strokes. Keane. Beyoncé Knowles. She used to jive around in here. Swish her hair about, like Tina Turner. Had a body on her, even at the age of forty-seven. Me, I hated that blusted music. I like quiet. Or else Barbra Streisand. But watching Donna used to get me worked up. Crikey. I’d put up with her music just to see her move.”
“Yes?”
“Yep. She’d been married before. Now she’s married again—to her hairdresser. Me, I was just a whatsername, an interlude. But she tried to get the farm off me. And tha’ riled me, I can tell yew. I’ve put my life into this farm and what did she ever put in? Used to pick fruit, that was all. Feed the geese sometimes . . .”
Lev shook his head in sympathy. The vodka was as stale as the biscuits, but still comforting.
“Know what lawyers cost in this country? Tha’ nearly broke me, but I fought Donna all the way on the farm—and I won. But if I hadn’t, I den’t know what I’d’ve done. I’m telling yew I den’t. I might have killed the girl. Because is tha’ right that she could walk into my life for three or four years and try to take half of everything I had, everything I’d built up? I’m asking yew if tha’s right.”
Midge downed his vodka, got up to break out more ice and to refill the two glasses.
An image of Procurator Rivas, smug behind his huge desk, suddenly appeared in Lev’s mind. “No,” he said. “Not right, Midge.”
“Tha’s what I’m saying. Wouldn’t happen in your country, would it?”
“Well,” said Lev, “in Communist era, people owned nothing in my country. Now maybe small flat or house—if they’re lucky—or, like my mother, a few goats and chickens, one small shed, so . . .”
“Yep. Commies were little devils, eh? Got everybody in a blusted straitjacket. Glad we din’t have ’em here. But what happened to yew, bor? I ben asking myself . . . Why’s a man of your age picking vegetables with young kids? Your wife steal your farm?”
“No,” said Lev. “My wife died.”
He saw Midge’s huge hand falter as he broke ou
t the ice from the rubber tray. He looked up at Lev, smoothing back from his shiny forehead some wisps of gray hair. “Tha’s rotten,” he said. “Couldn’t have been that old, could she?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Oh, crikey, tha’s tough. Wish I hadn’t asked now. Here . . .” He handed Lev his refilled glass. Went to his dusty stack of CDs and selected one. “Like to hear some Barbra Streisand?”
“Sure.”
Midge put the CD on, and the swoony orchestral sound floated out across Longmire Farm, joined with the sighing of the trees. Whiskey stirred on the rug and shook himself and, when Midge sat down again, climbed onto his lap. Midge stroked the dog’s head. “He’s my only companion now,” he said. “Can’t even get people to help me on the land anymore—only immigrant labor. The English used to love the land. Specially Suffolk people. Den’t know where that love went. Had three men working for me on this place once. Now, it’s just me and the pickers and the dog.”
“People,
People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world . . .”
Barbra sang on. Lev relaxed into his chair.
“I know the vans aren’t up to scratch,” said Midge, after a while. “It’s why I den’t charge rent for them. I’d’ve got them fixed up this year, but my cash flow’s poor. Had to whack down a lump sum in ’04 to get Donna off my back. And, crikey, tha’ left me rocky.”
“The van’s okay,” said Lev. “Only . . .”
“Windows den’t close properly. I know tha’. Get water in when it rains?”
“No,” said Lev. “Only my bed, Midge. I tried to tell you before. Scratches my skin. Maybe you can find something soft to put under my sheet.”
Midge stared at Lev in alarm, as though he’d asked him for a loan or a percentage of his takings on Lady Muck.