“Pappa, we may need Vera’s help.”
I had thought this story was going to be a knockabout farce, but now I see it is developing into a knockabout tragedy. He hasn’t told me before because she listens when he talks on the telephone. And because he doesn’t want Vera to know.
I resist the temptation to say ‘I told you so, stupid man’. But I telephone Vera, and she says it for me.
“But really I blame you, Nadezhda,” she adds. “You stopped him going into sheltered housing. None of this would have happened if he had gone into sheltered housing.”
“Nobody could have predicted it…”
“Nadia, I predicted it.” Her voice rings with Big Sis triumph.
“OK, so you’re so clever. How are we going to get him out of it?” I pull a mocking face that she can’t see on the phone.
“There are two possibilities,” says Vera. “Divorce or deportation. The first is expensive and uncertain. The second is also uncertain but at least Pappa doesn’t have to pay for it.”
“Can’t we go for both?”
“How you’ve changed, Nadia. What’s happened to all your feminist ideas?”
“Don’t be so spiteful, Vera. We should be allies, but you just can’t bring yourself to be civil to me, can you? I can understand why Pappa never tells you anything.”
“Yes, well he’s another idiot. Mother and I were the practical people in the family.”
See how she claims Mother’s legacy? It’s not just the cupboard full of tins and jars, nor the gold locket, nor even the money in the savings account she’s after: no, it’s the inheritance of character, of nature, that we fight over.
“We never were a very practical family.”
“What is the word you social workers use? A dysfunctional family. Maybe we should apply for a grant from the council.”
Despite getting off to a shaky start, we manage to agree a division of labour. Vera, as the family expert on divorce, will contact solicitors, while I will find out the law relating to immigration and deportation. It feels uncomfortable at first to step out of my soft-soled liberal shoes into the stilettos of Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home of Tunbridge Wells, but after a while the new shoes mould to my feet. I discover that Valentina has the right to appeal, and then if she is refused she has the right to appeal again to a tribunal. And she is also entitled to legal aid. She is obviously going to be here for some time.
“Maybe we should write to the Daily Mail.” I am expanding into my role.
“Good idea,” says Vera.
On the divorce front, my sister has a cunning plan. A contested divorce is going to be complex and expensive, she has discovered, so she hits on the idea of annulment-the no-consummation-therefore-no-marriage angle so popular with European royalty in the sixteenth century.
“You see the marriage never really existed so there is no need for a divorce,” she explains to the wet-behind-the-ears trainee solicitor in the Peterborough practice. He has not come across this before, but he promises to look it up. He mumbles and stammers as he tries to get the details of the non-consummation from my sister over the phone.
“Good heavens,” she says, “just how much detail do you need?”
But although it worked for European royalty, it isn’t going to work for Pappa-it is only if one party complains about the other party’s inability or refusal to consummate the marriage that non-consummation becomes a ground for annulment or divorce, the trainee solicitor writes in a clumsily worded letter.
“Well, I never knew that,” says Vera, who thought she knew everything about divorce.
Valentina laughs out loud when Pappa suggests a divorce. “First I get passport visa, then you get divorce.”
Pappa, too, has gone off the idea of divorce. He is afraid that they will question him about squishy squashy. He is afraid the whole world will find out about flippy floppy.
“Better think of something else, Nadia,” he says.
Despite the stress he is under, he has managed to finish another chapter of his history, but it has taken on a sombre tone. When Mike and I visit at the beginning of February, he takes us into the sitting-room, still full of last year’s apples and as chilly as a cold store, and reads aloud to us.
The early makers of the tractor dreamed that swords would be turned into ploughshares, but now the spirit of the century grows dark, and we find that, instead, ploughshares are to be turned into swords.
The Kharkiv Locomotive Factory, which once produced 1,000 tractors a week to feed the demands of the New Economic Plan, was relocated to Chelyabinsk beyond the Urals and converted to produce tanks by decree of K. J. Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defence.
The chief designer was Mikhail Koshkin, who was educated at the Leningrad Institute and worked at the Kirov Plant until 1937. He was a moderate, cultured type, whose genius was used, one might say abused, by Stalin to create the Soviet Union ’s military supremacy. Koshkin’s first tank, the Aso, ran on the original caterpillar tracks, with a 45-mm gun and armour that would withstand a hit by a shell. This was renamed the T32 when the gun size was increased to 76.2 mm and the armour was also made thicker. The T32 saw action in the Spanish Civil War, where the thinness of the armour plating made it vulnerable, though its manoeuvrability was much admired. Out of this was bom the legendary T34, which many credit with having turned the tide of the war. It had even thicker armour, and to compensate for the additional weight, was the first locomotive to be fitted with a cast aluminium engine.
His voice is weaker, more quavery, and he has to keep stopping for breath.
In the ferocious weather of February 1940, the first T34 was driven to Moscow to be paraded before the Soviet leadership. It made a huge impression, not least because of the way it rolled so smoothly over the rutted, cobbled, snow-bound streets of the capital.
However, poor Koshkin did not live to see his creation in production. On this trip, being exposed for many hours to the abominable weather, he contracted pneumonia, and died some months later.
The design was completed by his pupil and colleague Aleksandr ‘ Morozov, a dashing and handsome young engineer. Under his guidance, the first T34 tanks rolled off the assembly line in August 1940, as they were soon to roll off in their hundreds and thousands. In honour of this, the town of Chelyabinsk, formerly most noted for production of tractors, was renamed Tankograd.
Outside the window, the sun sinks into the frosted furrows which have not thawed all day. The wind that nips the branches has blown in from the flatlands of the East Anglia coast, and beyond that from the steppes, and beyond the steppes from the Urals.
My father is warmly wrapped against the cold with fingerless gloves and a woollen hat and three pairs of socks. He leans forward in his chair, reading through his thick glasses. Behind him on the mantelpiece sits a portrait of my mother. She is looking over his shoulder, out towards the fields and the horizon. Why did she marry him, this musing brown-eyed young woman with coiled, plaited hair and a mysterious smile? Was he a dashing and handsome young engineer? Did he seduce her with talk of automatic transmission and gifts of engine oil?
“Why did she marry him?” I ask Vera.
Mrs Divorce Expert and Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home have been swapping notes on the phone, and the tone between us has become quite cordial. We moved from talking about our father’s marriage to Valentina to our parents’ marriage, and now I see the door to the past has opened a crack, and I want to push.
“It was after the submarine commander was killed at Sebas-topol. I suppose she was frightened of being on her own. It was a frightening time.”