My father has tried to keep my sister and me in the dark about his plans. When we ask him a direct question he changes the subject, but he isn’t a very good liar and is easily caught out. He forgets what he has told each of us, and he believes that we are still not on speaking terms. But we have started to share our information.
“Of course he sent her the eighteen hundred pounds in the end, Vera. He paid it into her bank account and she withdrew it all. And he was sending her regular payments all the time she was away.”
“Really! It’s too much!” Big Sister’s voice hits a note of high drama. “That must have been most of his pension.”
“And he sent money for the coach tickets for her and Stanislav from Lviv to Ramsgate. And then she told him she needed extra money for an Austrian transit visa.”
“Of course Mother was absolutely right,” says Vera. “He has no common sense.”
“He’ll have to stop when he runs out of money.”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s only just beginning.”
My father has not only rescued this beautiful destitute Ukrainian woman, but he is also in a position to foster the talents of her extraordinarily gifted son.
Stanislav, who is fourteen, has been to see an independent psychologist, who, for a modest fee, paid by my father, has tested his IQ, and written a certificate declaring him to be a genius. On the basis of this, the boy (also a very talented musician, by the way, plays piano) has been offered a place at a prestigious private school in Peterborough. (Of course he is much too intelligent for the local comprehensive, which is only fit for the sons and daughters of farm labourers.)
My sister, who paid good money to send her extraordinarily gifted daughters to a posh school, is outraged. I, who sent my own extraordinarily gifted daughter to the local comprehensive, am outraged too. Our rage bubbles merrily up and down the telephone lines. We have something in common at last.
And another thing. As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families. Vera and I do not want Valentina in our family.
“Let’s face it,” says Vera. “We don’t want someone so common” (I didn’t say it!) “to carry our name.”
“Oh, come on, Vera. Our family is not uncommon. We’re just an ordinary family, like everybody else.”
I have started to challenge Big Sis’s self-appointed guardianship of the family story. She doesn’t like it.
“We come from solid bourgeois people, Nadezhda. Not arrivistes.”
“But the Ocheretkos were-what? Wealthy peasants…”
“Farmers.”
“…turned horse-dealers.”
“Horse-breeders.”
“Cossacks, anyway. A bit wild, you might say.”
“Colourful.”
“And the Mayevskyjs were teachers.”
“Grandfather Mayevskyj was Minister of Education.”
“But only for six months. And of a country that didn’t really exist.”
“Of course Free Ukraine existed. Really, Nadia, why must you take such a downbeat view of everything? Do you think you are some kind of handmaid of history?”
“No, but…” (Of course this is exactly what I think.)
“When I was a little girl…” Her voice softens. I hear her fumbling for a cigarette. “When I was a little girl, Baba Sonia used to tell me the story of her wedding. Now that’s what a wedding should be like, not this pitiful charade that our father is being dragged through.”
“But just look at the dates, Vera. The bride was four months pregnant.”
“They were in love.”
What’s this? Is Big Sis a closet romantic?
Mother’s mother, Sonia Blazhko, was eighteen when she married Mitrofan Ocheretko in the gold-domed Cathedral of St Michael in Kiev. She wore a white dress and a veil, and a pretty gold locket hung around her neck. Her long brown hair was crowned with white flowers. Despite her slim build, she must have been visibly pregnant. Her oldest brother Pavel Blazhko, railway engineer, later friend of Lenin, gave her away, for her father was too frail to stand through the service. Her older sister Shura, recently qualified as a doctor, was maid of honour. Her two younger sisters, still at school, pelted her with rose petals, and burst into tears when she kissed the groom.
The Ocheretko men strode into the church in their riding-boots, embroidered shirts and outlandish baggy trousers. The women wore wide swinging skirts and boots with little heels and coloured ribbons in their hair. They stood together in a fierce bunch at the back of the church and left abruptly at the end without tipping the priest.
The Blazhkos looked down on the groom’s family, whom they thought uncouth, little more than brigands, who drank too much and never combed their hair. The Ocheretkos thought the Blazhkos were prissy urbanites and traitors to the land. Sonia and Mitrofan didn’t care what their parents thought. They had already consummated their love, and its fruit was on her way.
“Of course it was pulled down in 1935.”
“What was?”
“St Michael of the Golden Domes.”
“Who pulled it down?”
“The communists of course.”
Ha! So there is a subtext to this romantic story.
“Pappa and Valentina are in love, Vera.”
“How can you talk such nonsense, Nadia? Will you never grow up? Look, she’s after a passport and a work permit, and what little money he has left. That’s clear enough. And he’s just mesmerised by her boobs. He talks of nothing else.”
“He talks about tractors a lot.”
“Tractors and boobs. There you have it.”
(Why does she hate him so much?)
“And what about our mother and father-do you think they were in love when they married? Don’t you think that was, in its way, a marriage of convenience?”
“That was different. It was a different time,” says Vera. “In times like that people did what they had to in order to survive. Poor Mother-after all she went through, to end up with Pappa. What a cruel fate!”
In 1930, when my mother was eighteen, her father was arrested. It was still several years before the purges were to reach their terrible climax, but it happened in the classic way of the Terror-a knock on the door in the middle of the night, the children screaming, my grandmother Sonia Ocheretko in her nightdress, her loose hair streaming down her back, pleading with the officers.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry!” my grandfather called over his shoulder as they bundled him away with just the clothes he stood up in. “I’ll be back in the morning.” They never saw him again. He was taken to the military prison in Kiev, where he was charged with secretly training Ukrainian Nationalist combatants. Was it true? We will never know. He never stood trial.
Every day for six months Ludmilla and her brother and sister would accompany their mother to the prison with a bundle of food. They handed it to the guard at the gate, hoping that at least some of it would get through to their father. One day the guard said: “There’s no need to come tomorrow. He won’t be needing your food any more.”
They were lucky. In the later years of the purges, not only the criminal, but his family, friends, associates, anyone who could be suspected of complicity in his crime, would be sent away for correction. Ocheretko was executed, but his family was spared. Still, it was no longer safe for them to stay in Kiev. Ludmilla was expelled from her veterinary course at the university-she was now the daughter of an enemy of the people. Her brother and sister were removed from their school. They moved back to the khutor and tried to scratch a living.