2007 - Two Caravans

by Marina Lewycka

  “Bye-bye, little flower,” Vulk said, with that chip-fat smile. “Ve meet again. Maybe ve mekka possibility?”

  “Maybe.”

  I knew it was the wrong thing to say, but by then I was just desperate to get away.

  The farmer shoved my bag into his Land Rover and then he shoved me in too, giving my behind a good feel with his hand as he did so, which was quite unnecessary. He only had to ask and I would have got in myself.

  “I’ll take you straight out to the field,” he said, as we rattled along narrow winding lanes. “You can start picking this afternoon.”

  After some five kilometres, the Land Rover swung in through the gate, and I felt a rush of relief as at last I planted my feet on firm ground. The first thing I noticed was the light—the dazzling salty light dancing on the sunny field, the ripening strawberries, the little rounded caravan perched up on the hill and the oblong boxy caravan down in the corner, the woods beyond, and the long curving horizon, and I smiled to myself. So this is England.

  The men’s caravan is a static model, a battered old fibreglass box parked at the bottom of the field by the gate, close to a new prefab building where the strawberries are crated and weighed each day. Stuck onto one corner of the prefab is the toilet and shower room—though the shower doesn’t work and the toilet is locked at night. Why is it locked? wonders Andriy. What is the problem with using the toilet at night?

  He has woken early with a full bladder and an unspecific feeling of dissatisfaction with himself, his caravan mates, and caravan life in general. Why is it, for example, that although the men’s caravan is bigger, it still feels more cramped than the women’s caravan? It has two rooms—one for sleeping and one for sitting—but Tomasz has the double bed in the sleeping room all to himself and three of them are sleeping in the sitting room. How has this happened? Andriy has one of the seat-beds and Vitaly has the other. Emanuel has made himself a hammock from an old sheet and blue bale-twine, skilfully twisted and knotted, and slung it across the sitting room from corner to corner—he is lying there breathing deeply with his eyes closed and a cherubic smile on his round brown face.

  Andriy recalls Emanuel’s look of astonishment and horror when the farmer suggested he should share the double bed with Tomasz.

  “Sir, we have a proverb in Chichewa. One nostril is too small for two fingers.”

  Afterwards, he took Andriy to one side and whispered, “In my country homosexualisation is forbidden.”

  “Is OK,” Andriy whispered back. “No homosex, only bad stink.”

  Yes, Tomasz’s trainers are another insult—their stink fills the caravan. It is worst at night when the trainers are off his feet and stowed beneath the bed. The fumes rise, noxious and clinging, and dissipate like bad dreams, seeping through the curtain that divides the sleeping from the sitting room, hovering below the ceiling like an evil spirit. Sometimes, in the night, Emanuel rolls silently out of his hammock and places the trainers outside on the step.

  Another thing—why are there no pictures on the walls in the men’s caravan? Vitaly keeps a picture of Jordan under his bed, which he says he will stick up when he finds something to stick it with. He also keeps a secret stash of canned lager and a pair of binoculars. Tomasz keeps a guitar and a pair of Yola’s knickers under his bed. Emanuel keeps a bag full of crumpled papers.

  But the worst thing is that because of the slope, and the way their caravan is positioned, you can only get a view of the women’s caravan from the window above Tomasz’s bed. Should he ask Tomasz to move over so he can take a look, and see whether that girl is still around? No. They’d only make stupid remarks.

  In the women’s caravan they have been up since dawn. Yola has learnt from experience that it is better to rise early if they don’t want the Dumpling knocking on the door and inviting himself in while they are getting dressed, hanging around watching them with those hungry-dog eyes—doesn’t he have anything better to do?

  Irina and the Chinese girls have to get up first and fold away the double bed before there is room for anyone to move. They cannot use the lavatory and washroom until the Dumpling arrives with the key to the prefab—what does he think they’re going to do? Unroll the toilet rolls at night?—but there is a handy gap in the hedge only a few metres away, though Yola cannot for the life of her understand why there always seem to be faces grinning at the window of the other caravan whenever any of the women takes a nip behind the hedge, don’t they have anything better to do down there?

  There is a cold water tap and washing bowl at the side of the women’s caravan, and even a shower made from a bucket with holes in the bottom, fed from a black-painted oil drum stuck up in a tree. In the evening, after it has been in the sun all day, the water is pleasantly warm. That nice-looking boy Andriy, who is quite a gallant despite being Ukrainian, has erected a screen of birch poles and plastic sacks around it, disregarding the protests of Vitaly and Tomasz, who complained that he spoiled their innocent entertainment—really those two are worse than the children at nursery school, what they need is a good smacking—and now they can no longer see the shower, they spend all their time making comments about the items on the women’s washing line. Recently a pair of her knickers has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Yola cannot for the life of her understand how grown men can be such fools. Well, in fact, she can.

  It was Tomasz who stole the knickers, in a moment of drunken frivolity one night last week. They are of white cotton, generously cut, with a pretty mauve ribbon at the front. He has been looking out ever since for the right moment to return them discreetly without being caught—he wouldn’t want anyone to think he is the sort of man who steals women’s underwear from washing lines and keeps it under his bed.

  “I see Yola has washed her undies again today,” he says morosely in Polish, peering through Vitaly’s binoculars from the window above his bed. “I wonder what is the meaning of this.”

  The white knickers dangle in the air like a provocation. When Yola recruited him to her strawberry-picking team, there had been a twinkle about her that had seemed to suggest she was inviting him to…well, more than just to pick strawberries.

  “What do you mean, what is the meaning?” asks Vitaly in Russian, mimicking Tomasz’s Polish accent. “Most of what women do is completely meaningless.”

  Vitaly is vague about his origins and Tomasz has never pressed him, assuming he is some kind of illegal or gipsy. Despite himself, he is impressed by the way Vitaly can slip easily between Russian, Polish and Ukrainian. Even his English is quite good. But what use are all those languages, if you have no poetry in your soul?

  “In the poetry of women’s undergarments, there is always meaning. Like the blossoms that fall from a tree as the heat of summer approaches…Like clouds which melt away…”

  He can feel a song coming on.

  “Enough,” says Vitaly. “The Angliskis would call you a soiled old man.”

  “I am not old,” protests Tomasz.

  In fact he has just turned forty-five. On his birthday he looked in the mirror and found two more grey hairs on his head, which he at once pulled out. No wonder his hair is beginning to look thin. Soon, he will have to surrender to the greyness, to cut his hair short, put away his guitar, exchange his dreams for compromises, and start worrying about his pension. What has happened to his life? It is just slipping away, like sand through an hourglass, like a mountain washed to the sea.

  “Tell me, Vitaly, how has life turned you into a cynic at such a young age?”

  Vitaly shrugs. “Maybe I was not born to be a loser, like you, Tomek.”

  “Maybe there is still time enough for you.”

  How can he explain to this impatient young man what it has taken him forty-five years to learn—that loss is an essential part of the human condition? That even as we are moving on down that long lonesome road, destination unknown, there is always something we are leaving behind us. He has been trying all morning to compose a song about it.

  Put
ting down the binoculars, he reaches for his guitar, and begins to strum, tapping his feet in time to the rhythm.

  There once was a man, who roamed the world o’er.

  Was he seeking for riches, or glory, or power?

  Was he seeking for meaning, or truth or…

  This is where he gets stuck. What else is that wretched man seeking?

  Vitaly gives him a pitying look.

  “Obviously he is looking for someone to fuck.”

  He picks up the binoculars, turns the knob for focus and gives a soft whistle between his teeth.

  “Hey, black man,” he calls to Emanuel in English, “come and see. Look, it’s just like the little panties thatjordan is wearing in my poster. Or maybe…”—he adjusts the binoculars again—“…maybe it is one of those string nets they use to package salami.”

  Emanuel is sitting at the table, chewing a pencil for inspiration as he composes a letter.

  “Leave him, leave him,” says Tomasz. “Emanuel is not like you. He is…” He strums a couple of chords on his guitar as he searches for the right phrase. “In this box of fibreglass, he is searching for a gem.”

  “Another loser,” snorts Vitaly.

  Dear sister,

  Thank you for the money you sent for with its help I have now journeyed from Zomba to Lilongwe and so on via Nairobi into England. I hope these words will receive you for when I came to the address you gave in London a different name was written at the door and nobody knew of your wherebeing. So being needful of money I came into the way of strawberry-picking and I am staying in a caravan with three mzungus here in Kent. I am striving with all my might to improve my English but this English tongue is like a coilsome and slippery serpent and I am always trying to remember the lessons of Sister Benedicta and her harsh staff of chastisement. So I write hopefully that you will come there and find these letters and unleash your corrections upon them dear sister. And so I will inform you regulally of my adventures within this rainstruck land.

  From your beloving brother Emanuel!

  The women’s caravan is already in sunshine, but the sun hasn’t yet reached the bottom of the field, where Andriy is standing at the kitchen end of the men’s caravan, trying to light the gas to make some tea. The coarse banter from the sleeping room irritates him, and he doesn’t want the other three to notice the agitation that has come over him since yesterday. He lights another match. It flares and burns his fingers before the gas will catch. Devil’s bum! That girl, that new Ukrainian girl—when their eyes met, did she smile at him in a particular way?

  He replays the scene like a movie in his head. It is this time yesterday. Farmer Leapish arrives as usual in his Land Rover with the breakfast food, the trays of empty punnets for the strawberries and the key to the prefab. Then someone steps out of the passenger door of the Land Rover, a pretty girl with a long plait of dark hair down her back, and brown eyes full of sparkle. And that smile. She steps into the field, looking around this way and that. He is there standing by the gate, and she turns his way and smiles. But is it for him, that smile? That’s what he wants to know.

  He made a point of sitting next to her at dinner.

  “Hi. Ukrainka?”

  “Of course.”

  “Me too.”

  “I can see.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Irina.”

  He waited for her to ask—“And yours?”—but she didn’t.

  “Andriy.”

  He waited for her to say something, but she didn’t.

  “From Kiev?” he continued.

  “Of course.”

  “Donetsk.”

  “Ah, Donetsk. Coalminers.”

  Did he detect a hint of condescension in her voice?

  “You been to Donetsk?”

  “Never.”

  “I came to Kiev.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “In December. When demonstrations were going on.”

  “You came for demonstrations?” A definite condescending lilt.

  “I came to demonstrate against demonstrations.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “Maybe I saw you then. You were there?”

  “Of course. In Maidan Square.”

  “In demonstration?”

  “Of course. It was our Orange Freedom Revolution.”

  “I was with the other side. White and blue.”

  “The losing side.”

  She smiled again. A flash of white teeth, that’s all there was to it. He tries to picture the face, but he can’t get it into focus. No, there was more to it than teeth; there was a crinkling round the nose and eyes, a little lift of the eyebrows and two infuriating dimples winking below the cheeks. Those dimples—he can’t get them out of his mind. Was it just a smile, or did it mean something?

  And if it means something, does it mean I’ve got a good possibility here? A good possibility of a man-woman possibility? Should I take things further? Or should I just play cool? A girl like that—she’s too used to men running after her. Wait for her to show the first card. But what if she’s shy—what if she needs bit of help with that first card? Sometimes a man must act to bring about a possibility.

  But then again, isn’t this wrong time and place, Andriy Palenko, to be involving yourself with another Ukrainian girl? What about the blond-haired Angliska rosa you came all this way to England for, the pretty blue-eyed girl who is waiting for you, though she doesn’t know it yet herself, packed with high-spec features: skin like smetana, pink-tipped Angliski breasts, golden underarm hair like duckling down, etc. And a rich Pappa, who at first may not be too happy about his daughter’s choice, because he wants her to marry a banker in a bowler hat like Mr Brown—what father would not?—but when he gets to know you will soften his heart and welcome you into his luxurious en-suite-bathroom house. For sure, he will find a little nice job for his Ukrainian son-in-law. Maybe even a nice car…Mercedes. Porsche. Ferrari. Etc.

  Yes, this new Ukrainian girl has some positive features: nice looking, nice smile, nice dimples, nice figure, nicely rounded, plenty to get hold of, not too thin, like those stylish city girls who starve themselves into Western-type matchsticks. But she’s only another Ukrainian girl—plenty of those where you came from. And besides, she’s a bit snobbish. She thinks she’s better than you. She thinks she’s a high-culture type with a superior mentality, and you’re a low-culture type. (And so what if you are? Is that something to be ashamed of?) You can tell by the way she talks, being so stingy with her words, as if it’s money she’s counting out. And the ridiculous plait, like that crow Julia Timoshenko, fake-traditional-Ukrainian. Tied with an orange ribbon. She thinks she’s better than you because she’s from Kiev and you’re from Donbas. She thinks she’s better than you because your dad’s a miner—a dead miner, at that.

  Poor Dad. Not the life for a dog let alone a man. Underground. Down below the mushrooms. Down with the legions of ghost-miners, all huddled up in the dark, singing their eerie dead-men’s songs. No, he can’t go down there any more, even if it’s the only way he knows how to live, how to put bread on the table. He’ll have to find another way. What would his father have wanted him to do? It’s hard enough living up to your parents’ expectations when you know what they expect. But all Andriy’s father ever said to him was, “Be a man.” What is that supposed to mean?

  When the pit-prop gave way and the roof fell in, Andriy was on one side of the fall and his father was on the other. He was on the living side; his father was on the side of the dead. He heard the roar, and he ran towards the light. He ran and ran. He is still running.

  I AM DOG I RUN I RUN FROM BAD MAN CAGE I HEAR DOGS BARK ANGRY DOGS GROWL> ANGRY DOGS BARK THEY WILL FIGHT THEY WILL KILL I SMELL DOG-SWEAT MAN-RAGE MAN OPENS CAGE MAN PULLS COLLAR MEN SIT SMOKE TALK DOGS BARK LIGHT TOO BRIGHT BIG ANGRY DOG SNARLS SHOWS TEETH HAIRS BRISTLE ON HIS BACK HE WILL KILL I AM NOT FIGHTING DOG I AM RUNNING DOG I JUMP I RUN I RUN TWO DAYS I EAT NO MEAT HUNGER PAINS IN BELLY MAKE ME MAD I FEEL HUNG
ER I FEEL FEAR I RUN I RUN I AM DOG

  The women’s caravan was small, but so cosy. I fell in love with it straightaway. I put my bag down and introduced myself.

  “Irina. From Kiev.”

  OK, there was some unpleasantness upon my arrival. Yola, the Polish supervisor, who is a coarse and uneducated person with an elevated view of her own importance, said some harsh words about Ukrainians for which she has yet to apologise. OK, I was a bit dismayed at the overcrowded conditions, and I may have been a bit tactless. But then the Chinese girls very kindly told me I could share their bed. I wished I hadn’t finished the poppy-seed cake, for a small gift can go a long way in these circumstances, but I still had a bottle of home-made cherry vodka for emergencies, and what was this if not an emergency? Soon, we were all firm friends.

  We ate our dinner sitting out on the hillside all together, drinking the rest of the vodka and watching the sun set. I was pleased to discover there’s another Ukrainian here—a nice though rather primitive miner from Donetsk. We chatted in Ukrainian over dinner. Poles and Ukrainians can understand each other’s language, too, though it’s not the same. But of course I have come to England mainly to improve my English before I start my university course, so I hope I will soon meet more English people.

  English was my favourite subject at school, and I had pictured myself walking through a panorama of cultivated conversations, like a painted landscape dotted with intriguing homonyms and mysterious subjunctives: would you were wooed in the wood. Miss Tyldesley was my favourite teacher. She even made English grammar seem sexy, and when she recited Byron she would close her eyes and breathe in deeply through her nose, trembling in a sort of virginal ecstasy, as though she could smell his pheromones wafting off the page. Please, control yourself, Miss Tyldesley! As you can imagine, I couldn’t wait to come to England. Now, I thought, my life will really begin.