They took him to an old mental hospital on the edge of the city which was their command headquarters, and locked him in a bare room with bars over the windows, to sit in his stench and await interrogation. My father was not a brave man, not the heroic type. He knew how brutally the Germans treated captive Ukrainians. What would you or I do in that situation? My father smashed a window with his fist, and with a shard of broken glass, he cut his throat.
The Germans did not give up on him so easily. They found a doctor, an aged Ukrainian psychiatrist who had stayed behind in the hospital to look after his patients. He had never stitched together a wound since his days as a medical student. He repaired my father’s throat with rough stitches of button thread, leaving a jagged scar that caused him to cough when he ate for ever after. But he saved my father’s life. And he told the Germans that the larynx was irreparably damaged, that the man would never be able to speak under interrogation, and in any case, he was no spy but a poor lunatic-a former mental patient who had tried to harm himself before. So the Germans let him go.
He stayed in the hospital, under the care of the elderly psychiatrist, with whom he played chess and discussed philosophy and science. As the summer passed, the Germans too moved on, pursuing the Red Army eastwards. When he thought it was safe, he slipped away, made his way back through the German lines, westwards, towards Dashev to join his family.
But Mother and Vera had already gone. Two weeks before my father returned, the Germans had taken over the village, put all the able-bodied young adults on to trains, and transported them to Germany to work in munitions factories. Ostarbeiter, they were called: workers from the East. They had wanted to leave Vera behind-she was only five-but Mother had kicked up such a fuss that she came too. Father stayed in Dashev for long enough to recover his strength, then he talked his way on to a train and followed them to the West.
“No, no,” says Vera. “It didn’t happen like that. They were plums, not cherries. And it was the NKVD that caught him, not the Germans. The Germans came afterwards. And when he came back to Dashev, we were still there. I remember him coming back, with this terrible scar on his throat. Baba Nadia looked after him. He couldn’t eat anything except soup.”
“But he told me himself…”
“No, he went west first, got on a transport to Germany. When he told them he was an engineer they gave him a job. Then he sent for Mother and me.”
That is the story of how my family left Ukraine -two different stories, my mother’s and my father’s.
“He was an economic migrant, then, not an asylum seeker?”
“Nadia, please. Why are you raising these questions now? We should be concentrating our energies on the divorce-not on this endless carping about the past. There is nothing to say. Nothing to be learned. What’s over is over.”
There is a catch in her voice, as though I have touched a nerve. Can I have hurt her?
“I’m sorry, Vera.” (I am sorry.)
It dawns on me: Big Sis is no more than a carapace. My real sister is somebody different, somebody I am only just beginning to know.
“Now.” Her voice steadies. She takes control. “You say Valentina has copied all his papers. There can be only one reason for this-she wants to use them for her divorce hearing. You must let Laura Carter know at once.”
“I will.”
Ms Carter is incandescent when I tell her about the photocopying of the papers.
“Some of these solicitors are hardly better than their crooked clients. If these papers are shown in court, we shall protest. Did you get anywhere with that private detective?”
Justin delivers on his promise. A week or so later he telephones to say that he has tracked down Valentina: she and Stanislav are living in two rooms above the Imperial Hotel. She works behind the bar, and Stanislav washes pots. (I had guessed as much.) She is also claiming social security benefit, and housing benefit on a rented terraced house in Norwell Street, which she is subletting to a Ghanaian trainee audiologist who had somehow wandered into the Imperial Hotel for a drink. Does she have a lover? Justin is not sure. He has spotted a dark blue Volvo estate parked nearby once or twice, but not overnight. Eric Pike is a long-standing regular at the Imperial Hotel. There is no evidence that will stand up in court.
I thank Justin profusely and put a cheque in the post.
I telephone Vera, but her line is busy, and while I am waiting, I decide to make a call to Chris Tideswell at the Spalding Police Station. I tell her about the withdrawal of the appeal at the tribunal, and I tell her that Valentina is now living at the Imperial Hotel with her son, where they are both illegally employed.
“Hm,” says Chris Tideswell in her chirpy young-girl voice. “Yer a right detective. Yer should join the force. I’ll see what I can do.”
Vera is delighted with Justin’s findings.
“You see, it confirms what I always believed. She is a criminal. Not satisfied with ripping off Pappa, she is also ripping off our country.” (Our country?) “And what about this Ghanaian? Probably he is also some kind of asylum seeker.”
“Justin said he’s a trainee audiologist at the hospital.”
“Well, he could still be an asylum seeker, couldn’t he?”
“All we know is that he’s renting the house from her. Probably she’s ripping him off too.”
There are ten years between Vera and me-ten years that gave me the Beatles, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the student uprising of 1968, and the birth of feminism, which taught me to see all women as sisters-all women except my sister, that is.
“And maybe he is subletting rooms in the house to other asylum seekers.” (She won’t let it go.) “You see when you enter this shady world of criminality, you discover that there are layers upon layers of deceit, and you have to be both clever and persistent to find out the truth.”
“Vera, he’s a trainee audiologist. He works with deaf people.”
“That doesn’t mean anything, Nadia.”
Once, not so long ago, Big Sis’s attitudes would send me into a rage of righteousness, but now I see them in their historical context, and I smile to myself in a superior way.
“When we first came here, Vera, people could have said the same things about us-that we were ripping off the country, gorging ourselves on free orange juice, growing fat on NHS cod-liver oil. But they didn’t. Everyone was kind to us.”
“But that was different. We were different.” (We were white, of course, for one thing, I could say, but I hold my tongue.) “We worked hard and kept our heads down. We learned the language and integrated. We never claimed benefits. We never broke the law.”
“/broke the law. I smoked dope. I was arrested at Greenham Common. Pappa got so upset that he tried to catch the train back to Russia.”
“But that’s exactly my point, Nadia. You and your lem’sh friends-you never really appreciated what England had to offer-stability, order, the rule of law. If you and your kind prevailed, this country would be just like Russia -bread queues everywhere, and people getting their hands chopped off.”
“That’s Afghanistan. Chopping hands off is the rule of law.”
Both of us have raised our voices. This is turning into an old-style argument.
“Whatever. You see my point,” she says dismissively.
“What I appreciated about growing up in England was the tolerance, liberalism, everyday kindness.” (I drive home my point by wagging my finger in the air, even though she can’t see me.) “The way the English always stick up for the underdog.”
“You are confusing the underdog with the scrounger, Nadia. We were poor, but we were never scroungers. The English people believe in fairness. Fair play. Like cricket.” (What does she know about cricket?) “They play by the rules. They have a natural sense of discipline and order.”