A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Part 13

"Quite." I lean casually on the freezer.

"You father-he no give me money."

"But he gives you half his pension."

"Pension no good. What can buy with pension?"

I don't want to argue with her. I just want her to go, so I can get on with looking through the papers. But then I realise she may have come back for her boil-in-the-bag lunch.

"Would you like me to make lunch for you, Valentina? You can go upstairs and have a rest, while I get the lunch ready." She is surprised and mollified, but declines my offer. "I no time eating. Only sandwich" (she p.r.o.nounces it san-yeedge). "I come get car. After finish working I go Peterborough with Margaritka shopping."

She bangs the door and drives off in the car, and I am left with a box of frozen doc.u.ments.

I make a copy of the solicitor's letter, but then I see that there are only two sheets of copier paper left, so I stop. I slip one of the wedding photos into my handbag, as well as the copies I have made. Then I put the rest of the papers back into the box.

As I am doing so, another paper catches my eye. It is a letter from the Inst.i.tute of Feminine Beauty in Budapest, typed on thick cream paper, with a gold-embossed border, to a Mrs Valentina Dubova at Hall Street, Peterborough. It thanks her, in English, for her esteemed custom and acknowledges the payment of three thousand US dollars in respect of breast enhancement surgery. It is signed with a flourish by a Doktor Pavel Nagy. From the date, I work out that it must have taken place a few months before their marriage, during her trip to Ukraine. My mind goes back to the fat brown envelope. Three thousand US dollars is a little over 1,800. So my father must have known what it was for. Must have known, and must have been eager to pay it.

"Pappa," I call him, softly, so as not to reveal the extent of my rage. "Pappa, what is this?"

"Mmm. Yes." He looks at the letter and nods. There is nothing he can say.

"You are are crazy. Lucky you have an appointment with the psychiatrist tomorrow." crazy. Lucky you have an appointment with the psychiatrist tomorrow."

I stow the box of frozen letters under my father's bed, with strict instructions that he must replace them in the boot of her car at the earliest opportunity, without her seeing. I suppose I should stay and do it myself, but it is already early evening, and I just want to get away, to get home to kind, sane Mike and my orderly house. I cook him macaroni cheese-maggot-white, tasteless, but he can eat it without his false teeth. We eat in silence. There is nothing left to say. When he has finished, I say goodbye. As I turn from the lane into the main road, a car careers wildly round the bend in the other direction. One headlamp is broken. In the front are two grinning figures: Valentina and Margaritka returning from their shopping trip.

Fifteen.

In the psychiatrist's chair My father's visit to the psychiatrist is a triumph. The consultation lasts a whole hour, and the consultant hardly gets a word in edgeways. He is a most cultured and intelligent type, my father says. An Indian, by the way. He is fascinated by my father's theory of the relations.h.i.+p between mechanical engineering as applied to tractors and the psychological engineering advocated by Stalin, as applied to the human soul. He is sympathetic to Schopenhauer's observation of the connection between madness and genius, but reluctant to be drawn into a debate about whether Nietzsche's supposed madness was an effect of syphilis, though he admits under pressure that there is some merit in my father's case that Nietzsche's genius was merely misunderstood by less intelligent types. He asks my father whether he believes that he is being persecuted. "No, no!" my father exclaims. "Only by her!" He points at the door behind which Valentina is lurking. (The doctor wanted to discover whether I am suffering from a paranoia, my father said, but of course I did not fall for this trick.) Valentina is miffed at being excluded from the consultation, since she believes it was she who first brought my father's madness to the attention of the authorities. She is even more miffed when my father emerges with a beam of triumph on his face.

"Very intelligent doctor. He says I not crazy. You crazy!" She barges into the psychiatrist's office and starts to berate him in a variety of languages. The doctor calls the hospital porters and she is asked to leave. She flounces out throwing offensive remarks about Indians over her shoulder.

"OK, Pappa, so the visit to the psychiatrist was a success. But what happened to your head? Where did you get that cut?"

"Ah, this too is Valentina's doing. After she failed to have me certified as insane, she attempted to murder me."

He describes another ugly scene as they emerge from the porticoed entrance of the hospital, still shouting at each other. She pushes him, and he loses his footing and falls down the stone steps, banging his head. It starts to bleed.

"Come," says Valentina, "You foolish falling-on-ground man. Get in car quick quick quick we go home."

A small crowd has gathered around them.

"No, go away, murderer!" my father cries, flailing his arms about. "I will riot go home with you!" His gla.s.ses have fallen off and one of the lenses is smashed.

A nurse steps out of the crowd, and looks at my father's head wound. It is not deep, but it bleeds copiously. She takes him by the arm.

"Might be just as well to pop into Casualty and have it looked at."

Valentina grabs his other arm.

"No, no! He my husband. He OK. He coming home in car."

There is a tug of war between the two women, my father in the middle, all the time protesting 'Murderer! Murderer!' The crowd of onlookers has swelled. The nurse calls the hospital security guards and my father is taken to Accident & Emergency, where his wound is dressed, Valentina still stubbornly clinging to his arm. She will not let him go.

But my father refuses to leave A & E with Valentina. "She wants to murder me!" he calls out to anyone who comes within earshot. In the end, a social worker is called, and my father, his head dramatically bandaged, is admitted to a residential hostel for the night. Next day, he is escorted home in a police car.

Valentina is waiting for him when he arrives, all smiles and bosom.

"Come, holubchik holubchik, my little pigeon. My darling." She pats his cheek. "We will not argue any more."

The policemen are charmed. They accept her offer of tea, and sit around in the kitchen far longer than is necessary, discussing the vulnerability and foolishness of old people, and how important it is that they be properly looked after. The policemen advance instances of elderly people who have been duped by doorstep criminals and knocked over in the street by muggers. Not all old people are so lucky as to have a loving wife to care for them. Valentina expresses horror at these wanton instances of brutality.

And maybe she is genuinely repentant, says my father, for after the policemen have gone she does not turn on him in a fury, but takes his hand and places it on her breast, stroking it with her fingers, chiding him gently for mistrusting her and allowing this shadow to fall between them. She does not even abuse him for taking her box of papers and hiding it under his bed. (Of course she found them-of course my father did not manage to return them to the boot of the car.) Or maybe someone (Mrs Zadchuk?) has explained to her the meaning of the last sentence of the solicitor's letter.

I have sent Mrs Divorce Expert a copy of the solicitor's letter, and she has sent Mrs Flog'emandsend'emhome a newspaper cutting. It tells the story of a man from the Congo who has lived in the UK for fifteen years, who is now to be deported because he entered the country illegally all those years ago, even though he has established a life for himself, built up a business, become a figure in the local community. The local church has mounted a campaign on his behalf.

"I think the tide is turning," says Vera. "People are waking up at last."

I have come to quite the opposite conclusion-people are falling asleep over this issue, not waking up. The remote voices in Lunar House are asleep. The blue-chip voices in far-flung consulates are asleep. The trio on the immigration panel in Nottingham are asleep-they are just going through the motions like sleepwalkers. Nothing will happen.

"Vera, all this stuff about deportation, and these high-profile cases with campaigns and letters to newspapers-it's just to create an illusion of activity. In reality, in most cases-nothing happens. Nothing at all. It's just a charade."

"Of course that is what I would expect you to say, Nadezhda. Your sympathies have always been quite clear."

"It's not a matter of sympathies, Vera. Listen to what I'm saying. Our mistake has been to think that they would remove her. But they won't. We We have to remove her." have to remove her."

Wearing the stilettos of Mrs Flog'emandsend'emhome has altered the way I walk. I used to be liberal about immigration-I suppose I just thought it was all right for people to live where they wanted. But now I imagine hordes of Valentinas barging their way through customs, at Ramsgate, at Felixstowe, at Dover, at Newhaven-pouring off the boats, purposeful, single-minded, mad.

"But you always take her side."

"Not any more."

"I suppose it's because you're a social worker, you can't help it."

"I'm not a social worker, Vera."

"Not a social worker?" There is silence. The phone crackles. "Well what are you?"

"I'm a lecturer."

"So-a lecturer! What do you lecture about?"

"Sociology."

"Well that's it-that's what I mean."

"Sociology's not the same thing as social work."

"No? Well what is it?"

"It's about society-different forces and groups in society and why they behave as they do."

There is a pause. She clears her throat.

"But that's fascinating!"

"Well, yes. I I think so." think so."

Another pause. I can hear Vera lighting a cigarette on the other end of the line.

"So why is Valentina behaving as she is?"

"Because she's desperate."

"Ah, yes. Desperate." She draws a deep breath, sucking in smoke.

"Remember when we were desperate, Vera?"

The hostel. The refugee centre. The single bed we shared. The terraced house with the toilet in the back yard and the squares of torn newspaper.

"But how desperate must one be to become a criminal? Or to prost.i.tute oneself?"

"Women have always gone to extremes for their children. I would do the same for Anna. I'm sure I would. Wouldn't you do the same for Alice or Lexy? Wouldn't Mother have done the same for us, Vera? If we were desperate? If there was no other way?"

"You don't know what you're talking about, Nadia."

I lie in bed in the small hours thinking about the man from the Congo. I imagine the knock on the door in the night, the heart jumping against the rib-cage, the predator and prey looking into each other's eyes. Gotcha! I imagine the friends and neighbours gathered on the pavement, the Zadchuks waving hankies which they press to their eyes. I imagine the cup of coffee, still warm, left on the table in the haste of departure, which goes cold, then gathers a skin of mould and then finally dries into a brown crust.

Mike does not like Mrs Flog'emandsend'emhome. She is not the woman he married.

"Deportation's a cruel nasty way of dealing with people. It's not the solution to anything."

"I know. I know. But..."

Next morning I telephone the number at the top of the letter Valentina got from the Immigration Advisory Service. They give me a number at East Midlands Airport. Amazingly, I get through to the woman with the brown briefcase and blue Fiat who visited the house after their marriage. She is surprised to hear from me, but she remembers my father straightaway.

"I had a gut feeling something wasn't right," she says. "Your Dad seemed so, well..."

"I know."

She sounds nice-much nicer than my father's description of her.

"It wasn't just the bedrooms-it was the fact that they didn't seem to do anything anything together." together."

"But what will happen now? How will it end?"

"That I can't tell you."

I learn that the deportation, if there is to be one, will be carried out not by the Immigration Service but by the local police, instructed by the Home Office. Every region has police officers who are located within local police stations but who specialise in immigration matters.

"It's been interesting talking to you," she says. "We visit people, and we file these reports, and then they disappear into thin air. We don't often find out what happens."

"Well, nothing's happened yet."

I phone the central police station in Peterborough, and ask to speak to the specialist immigration officer. They refer me on to Spalding. The officer whose name they have given me is not on duty. I phone again next day. I was expecting a man, but Chris Tideswell turns out to be a woman. She is matter-of-fact, when I tell her my father's story.

"Yer poor Dad. Yer get some right villains." Her voice sounds young and chirpy, with a broad fenland accent. She doesn't sound old enough to have carried out many deportations.

"Listen," I say, "when all this is over, I'm going to write a book about it, and you can be the heroic young officer who finally brings her to justice."

She laughs. "I'll do my best, but don't hold yer breath." There is nothing she can do until after the tribunal. Then there may be leave to appeal on compa.s.sionate grounds. Only after that will there be a warrant to deport, maybe.

"Phone me a week or so after the hearing."

"You can have a starring role in the film. Played by Julia Roberts."

"Yer sound as if yer a bit desperate."

Will Valentina be able to keep up this regime of little-pigeon cooing and bosom-stroking until September? Somehow I doubt it. Will my father, thin as a stick, frail as a shadow, be able to survive on his diet of tinned ham, boiled carrots, Tos.h.i.+ba apples and the occasional beating? Seems unlikely.

I telephone my sister.

"We can't wait until September. We've got 'to get her out."

"Yes. We've tolerated this for far too long. Really, I blame..." She stops. I can almost hear the screech of verbal brakes being slammed on.

"We need to work together on this, Vera." My voice is placatory. We are getting on so well. "We'll just have to persuade Pappa to reconsider his objections to divorce."

"No, something more immediate. We must apply for an ousting order to get her out of the house at once. The divorce can come later."

"But will he go along with it? Now they're back on bosom-fondling terms, he is quite unpredictable."