Marina Lewycka - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Now that Mother has died, Big Sis has become the guardian of the family archive, the spinner of stories, the custodian of the narrative that defines who we are. This role, above all others, is the one I envy and resent. It is time, I think, to find out the whole story, and to tell it in my own way.

What do I know about my mother? Ludmilla (Milla, Millochka) Mitrofanova was born in 1912 in Novaya Aleksandria, a small garrison town in what is now Poland, but was then on the western flank of the Russian Empire. Her father, Mitrofan Ocheretko, was a cavalry officer, a war hero, and an outlaw. Her mother Sonia was nineteen years old when Ludmilla was born, a trainee schoolteacher, a survivor.

The Ocheretkos were not gentry but wealthy peasants from the Poltava region of Ukraine, who lived on the edge of a khutor (settlement) and farmed some thirty hectares on the eastern bank of the Sula River. They were hard-working, hard-drinking Cossacks who had somehow amassed enough wealth to pay the necessary bribe to win a lucrative contract to supply horses to the Tsar’s army. This in rum allowed them to save up enough to pay the considerably greater sum needed to secure for their eldest son, Mitrofan, a place in the military academy.

Mitrofan Ocheretko seems to have been a brilliant soldier: fearless and prudent, he loved life but respected death. Unlike officers drawn from the nobility, who hardly considered the peasants to be human, Ocheretko was mindful of the troops and careful with their lives, only taking risks when there was something to be gained. From the mud and slaughter of the Great War, he emerged covered in glory. His great moment came in 1916, on the Eastern Front, when he took a bullet in his thigh at Lake Naroch crawling through a bog to rescue the Tsar’s cousin, who had become trapped as the spring thaw turned the shores of the lake into miles of churned-up mud. Ocheretko dragged the young aristocrat to safety and carried him in his arms through a hail of artillery fire.

For his bravery he was awarded the St George’s Cross. The Tsar himself pinned it to his chest, and the Tsarina patted little Ludmilla on the head. Two years later, the Tsar and Tsarina were dead, and Ocheretko was an outlaw on the run.

After the revolution of 1917, Ocheretko joined neither the Russian White Army nor the Soviet Red Army. Instead, he took Sonia and the three children-my mother Ludmilla now had a younger sister and brother-back to Poltava and left them there in a tumbledown wooden cottage on the khutor while he went off to fight with the rebel Ukrainian National Republican Army. It was a moment to be seized: now while Russia was tearing herself apart, this might be the occasion for Ukraine to slip free of the imperial yoke.

Ludmilla hardly saw her father during those years. Sometimes he would arrive in the middle of the night, exhausted and hungry, and be gone again by the morning. “Don’t tell anyone Pappa was here,” her mother would whisper to the children.

The Civil War was waged through a succession of bloody massacres and reprisals so gruesome that it seemed as if the human soul itself had died. No town, not even the smallest village, no household was left untouched. The history books tell of ingenious new ways of inflicting painful lingering death. The gift of imagination, perverted by blood-lust, invented tortures undreamt of before, and former neighbours became enemies for whom mere shooting was too merciful. But my parents never talked to me about these horrors: I was their precious peacetime baby.

When Mother described her early childhood it was always as an idyll-long summers when the sun was hot and they ran barefoot in the fields and skinny-dipped in the Sula River, or took their cow off to the distant pastures and stayed outdoors from dawn to dusk. No shoes, no pants, no one to tell them what to do. And grass tall enough to hide in, such a merry green, sprinkled with red and yellow flowers. And the sky blue-blue, and cornfields like a sheet of gold stretching as far as eye could see. Sometimes, in the distance, they could hear shooting, and see curls of smoke rising from a burning house.

My father has positioned himself in front of the map of Ukraine, and is delivering an intense two-hour lecture to his captive one-man (Mike) audience about the history, politics, culture, economics, agriculture and aviation industry of Ukraine. His student is settled comfortably in the armchair facing the map, but his eyes are focused on a spot beyond the lecturer’s head. His cheeks are very pink. In his hand he cradles a glass of Mother’s home-made plum wine.

“It is often forgotten that the Civil War was more than a simple matter of whites against reds. No fewer than four foreign armies were in battle for control over Ukraina: Red Army of Soviets, White Russian Imperial Army, Polish army mounting opportunistic invasion, and German army propping up puppet regime of Skoropadski.”

I am in the kitchen cutting up vegetables for soup, listening with half an ear.

“The Ukrainians were led by former Cossack atmans, or grouped under the anarchist banner of Makhno. Their aim, at once both simple and impossible, was to free Ukraina of all occupying forces.”

The secret of my mother’s fabulous soup was plenty of salt (they both suffered from high blood pressure), a big knob of butter (they didn’t worry about cholesterol), and vegetables, garlic and herbs fresh from the garden. I cannot make soup like this.

“Nadezhda’s grandfather, Mitrofan Ocheretko, joined a band under the leadership of Atman Tiutiunik, to whom he became second-in-command. They were fighting in a loose alliance with the ‘Ukrainian Directoire’ of Simon Petlura. Ocheretko, by the way, was a very remarkable type with sweeping moustaches and eyes black like coal. I have seen his picture, though of course I have never met him.”

Into the soup, when it was simmering, she dolloped teaspoons of ‘ halushki ’- a paste of raw egg and semolina, beaten together with salt and herbs-which fluffed up into dumplings that crumbled on your tongue.

“At end of the Civil War this Ocheretko fled to Turkey. Now Sonia’s brother Pavel-he by the way was a very remarkable type, railway engineer who built first rail line from Kiev to Odessa -he was friend of Lenin. Because of this, some letters were written and Mitrofan Ocheretko was rehabilitated under amnesty, and obtained a job teaching sword-fencing in the military academy in Kiev. And it was here in Kiev that Ludmilla and I first met.”

His voice has gone all croaky.

“Come on, Pappa, Mike, lunch is ready!”

The time between Valentina’s return to Ukraine and her re-entry into England was a time of great personal growth and intellectual activity for my father. He started pouring out poems again, which he left lying around the house on scraps of paper, all written in the same crabbed Cyrillic hand. I deciphered the word ‘love’ once or twice, but I couldn’t bring myself to read them.

Every week he wrote to Valentina in Ukraine and in between letters he telephoned and talked, sometimes to her, sometimes to her intelligent-type husband. I know the phone calls were long because I saw the phone bill.

However, with my sister and me he was very cagey. He didn’t want us telling him what to do. He had already made his mind up.

Vera went to visit him in September. She described her visit;

“The house is filthy. He eats off newspaper. He eats nothing but apples. I tried to persuade him to go into a sheltered housing scheme, but he says you dissuaded him. I can’t imagine what you think you can gain from this, Nadezhda. I suppose you’re worried that if he sells the house you won’t be able to inherit your share. Really! Your obsession is going too far. The house is much too big for him now. I tried to get a home help, but he refuses. As for this other sordid business-I tried to find out what’s going on with this tart, but he won’t talk about it at all. He just changes the subject. I don’t know what the matter with him is. He was behaving most oddly. We really should see the doctor about having him certified, don’t you agree? He seems to be living in a world of his own.”