They broke into a careful run. The younger brother sneaked up and shoved a handful of snow down the back of his trousers. Nikolai tried to get away, but the pavement was treacherous. He fell on his face. The two boys pinned him down and straddled him shoving handfuls of snow into his face, down his neck, down his trousers. They started to pull his trousers down. The bigger brother grabbed his skates and began to tug. Nikolai, terrified, screamed and flailed about in the snow.
Just at that moment, three figures appeared at the top of the street. From where he was lying, face down in the snow, he made out a tall girl holding two smaller children by the hand. “Help me! Help me!” cried Nikolai.
The three hesitated when they saw the fracas. Should they run away or should they intervene? Then the small boy dashed forward.
“Geroff him!” he yelled, hurling himself at the legs of the smaller of the two brothers. The tall girl pitched in, and started to pull the bigger boy’s hair. “You geroff, you fat bully! Leave him alone!”
He shrugged off her assault and seized her wrists with both hands, allowing Nikolai to wriggle free.
“Is he yer boyfriend, then? D’yer fancy him?”
“Geroff or I’ll call my Dad, and he’ll slice your fingers off with his sabre and stuff ‘em up your nose.” Her eyes blazed.
The small girl rubbed handfuls of snow into their ears.
“Stuff’em up your nose! Stuff’em up your nose!” she shrilled.
The brothers squirmed and thrashed about, grinning and grabbing at the girls. There was nothing they liked more than a good fight, and they didn’t feel the cold. The sky above them was blue as a robin’s egg and the sun sparkled on the snow. Then adults appeared on the scene. There was shouting and sticks were waved. The Sovinkos pulled their caps over their ears and darted away, fast and agile as snow hares, before anyone could catch them.
“Are you all right?” asked the tall girl. It was his classmate Ludmilla Ocheretko, with her younger sister and brother. They had their skates slung round their necks too. (Of course the Sovinkos were too poor to have skates of their own.)
In winter, the sports stadium in Kiev was sprayed with water which froze instantly into an outdoor ice rink, and all the young people in Kiev got their skates on. They whizzed about, showed off, fell, pushed, glided and tumbled into each other’s arms. It didn’t matter what was happening in Moscow or on the many bloody fronts of the Civil War: people still met, skated a couple of laps together, and fell in love. So Nikolai and Ludmilla grasped each other’s mittened hands and spun around and around on their skates-the sky and the clouds and the golden domes spun with them-faster and faster, laughing like kids (they were still only kids) till they fell in a dizzy heap on the ice.
Fourteen. A small portable photocopier
Next time I visit my father it is mid-week, mid-morning, and I come without Mike. It is a mild luminous spring day, with tulips bursting out in front gardens and new growth greening the tips of trees. In Mother’s garden, the peonies are already out, thrusting up their crimson fists through the rampant weeds in the flower-beds.
As I pull up outside the house, I notice a police panda car parked there. I walk into the kitchen to find Valentina and the village policeman sharing a joke over a cup of coffee. After the freshness of the spring air, it is unbearably hot indoors, with the gas boiler belting away and all the windows closed. The two look up at me resentfully, as though I have disturbed a private tryst. Valentina, wearing a lycra denim mini-skirt and a fluffy baby-pink jumper with a white satin heart for the pocket, is perched on a high stool, with her legs crossed and her peep-toe mules casually dangling on her bare toes. (Slut!) The policeman lounges on a chair against the wall with his legs spread. (Slob!) They fall silent as I come in. When I introduce myself, the policeman pulls himself up and shakes my hand. It is the village constable, the same man I spoke to on the telephone about the wet tea-towel incident.
“Just dropped by to check on your Dad,” he says.
“Where is he?” I ask.
Valentina gestures towards the makeshift door which Mike put up, separating the kitchen from the dining-room, which is now his bedroom. My father has locked himself into his room, and is refusing to come out.
“Pappa,” I coax, “It’s me, Nadia. You can unlock the door now. It’s OK. I’m here.”
After a long while, there is a rattling of the bolt being pulled, and my father peeps round the door. I am shocked by what I see. He is terribly thin-emaciated-and his eyes have sunk back into their sockets so that his head looks almost like a death’s head. His white hair is long and straggles down his nape. He is wearing no clothes below the waist. I take in the terrible shrunken nakedness of his shanks and knees, livid white.
Just at that moment, I catch the policeman and Valentina exchanging glances. Valentina’s glance says: See what I mean? The policeman’s glance says: Blimey!
“Pappa,” I whisper, “where are your trousers? Please put on your trousers.”
He indicates a pile of clothes on the floor, and he doesn’t need to say anything else, for I can already smell what has happened.
“He shit himself,” says Valentina.
The policeman tries to conceal an involuntary smirk.
“What happened, Pappa?”
“She…” He points at Valentina. “She…”
Valentina raises her eyebrows, re-crosses her legs, and says nothing.
“What did she do? Pappa, tell me what happened.”
“She throw water at me.”
“He was shout at me,” pouts Valentina. “Shout bad thing. Bad language speaking. I say shut up. He no shut up. I throw water. Is only water. Water no hurt.”
The policeman turns towards me.
“Seems like it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,” he says. “Usually the case in domestics. Can’t take sides.”
“Surely you can see what’s going on?” I say.
“As far as I’m aware, no crime has been committed.”
“But isn’t your job to protect the vulnerable? Just look-use your eyes. If you can’t see anything else, you can see that there’s a difference in size and strength. They’re not exactly evenly matched, are they?” I notice once more how much weight Valentina has put on, but despite this, or maybe because of it, there is a kind of magnetism about her.
“You can’t arrest someone because of their size.” The policeman can hardly take his eyes off her. “Of course I’ll continue to keep an eye, if your dad would like me to.” He looks from Valentina to me to my father.
“You are no different to Stalin’s police,” my father suddenly bursts out in a high quavery voice. “Whole system of state apparatus is only to defend powerful against weak.”
“I’m sorry if you think that, Mr Mayevskyj,” the policeman says politely. “But we live in a free country and you are free to express your opinion.”
Valentina swings herself down heavily from the stool.
“I time go working now,” she says. “You clean up you Pappa shit.”
The policeman, too, makes his goodbyes and leaves.
My father sinks down in his chair, but I do not let him rest.
“Pappa, please put on some trousers,” I say. There is something so horrifying about his corpse-like nakedness that I cannot bear to look at him. I cannot bear the look in his eyes-at once defeated and dogged. I cannot bear the stench coming from his room. I have no doubt that Valentina cannot bear it either, but I have hardened my heart: it was her choice.
While my father is cleaning himself up, I search the house again. Somewhere there must be letters from her solicitor, information about her immigration appeal. Where does she keep her correspondence? We need to know what she is planning to do, how long she will be here. To my surprise, I find in the sitting-room, on the table amid the rotting apples, a small portable photocopier. I had overlooked it before, thinking it was some part of a computer, maybe belonging to Stanislav.