2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Read Online Free PDF Page A

course she won’t make him happy. We can see what she’s after. Really, Nadezhda, why do you always take the side of the criminals…”
    “But Vera…”
    “You must meet her and warn her to back off.”
    I telephone my father.
    “Pappa, why don’t I come over and meet Valentina?”
    “No no. This is absolutely impossible.”
    “Why impossible?”
    He hesitates. He can’t think of excuses fast enough.
    “She doesn’t speak English.”
    “But I can speak Ukrainian.”
    “She is very shy.”
    “She doesn’t sound shy to me. We could discuss Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.” (Ha ha.)
    “She will be working.”
    “Well, I could meet her afterwards. After she finishes work.”
    “No, this is not the point. Nadezhda, it’s better we don’t talk about this. Goodbye.”
    He puts the phone down. He’s hiding something.
    A few days later I ring him again. I try a different tack:
    “Hi, Pappa. It’s me, Nadezhda.” (He knows it’s me, but I want to sound friendly.)
    “Aha. Yes. Yes.”
    “Pappa, Mike’s got a couple of days off this weekend. Why don’t we come over and see you.” My father adores my husband. He can talk to him about tractors and aeroplanes.
    “Hmm. Tak . That will be very nice. When will you come?”
    “On Sunday. We’ll come for lunch on Sunday, about one o’clock.”
    “OK. Good. I will tell Valentina.”
    We arrive well before one o’clock, hoping to catch her, but she has already gone out. The house looks neglected, dispirited. When my mother was here there were always fresh flowers, a clean tablecloth, the smell of good cooking. Now there are no flowers, but used cups, piles of papers, books, things that have not been put away. The table is bare dark brown formica, spread with newspaper on which some chunks of stale bread and apple peelings are waiting to be thrown away. There is an odour of stale grease.
    My father, however, is in great spirits. He has an intense, animated air. His hair, which is now quite silver and thin, has grown long and wispy at the back. His skin has colour and seems firmer, a bit freckled, as if he has been out in the garden. His eyes are bright. He offers us lunch—tinned fish, tinned tomatoes, brown bread, followed by Toshiba apples. This is his special recipe—apples gathered from the garden, peeled, chopped, packed into a pyrex dish and cooked in the microwave (a Toshiba) until they are sticky and solid. Proud of his invention, he offers us more and more and more, and some to take home with us.
    I worry—is it healthy to be eating so much out of tins? Is he getting a balanced diet? I check the contents of his fridge and larder. There is milk, cheese, cereal, bread, plenty of tins. No fresh fruit or vegetables, apart from Toshiba apples and some very speckled bananas. But he looks well. I start to make a shopping list.
    “You should eat more fresh fruit and vegetables, Pappa,” I say. He consents to cauliflower and carrots. He no longer eats frozen peas or beans—they make him cough.
    “Does Valentina cook for you?” I ask.
    “Sometimes she does.” He is evasive.
    I grab a J-cloth and start to tackle the grime. All the surfaces are covered in dust, and brown sticky patches where things have been spilt. There are books everywhere: history, biography, cosmology, some he has bought himself, some from the public library. On the table in the front room I find several sheets of paper covered with his fine, crabby, spiky handwriting, with many additions and crossings-out. I have to struggle to read hand-written Ukrainian, but I can tell from the way the lines are set out that it is poetry. My father published his first poem at the age of fourteen. It was a eulogy to a new hydro-electric power station that was built on the River Dnieper in 1927. When he was training to be an engineer in Kiev, he belonged to a secret circle of Ukrainian poets, which had been outlawed as part of the drive to impose Russian as the lingua franca of the Soviet Union. I am