Free The Lubetkin Legacy by Marina Lewycka Page A

idea: before I could let Inna loose in the neighbourhood I must teach her to play the part of my mother. This would be a challenge. I poured us both some coffee. She drank hers black with four heaped spoons of sugar.
    ‘Inna, sit down. There’s something we have to discuss.’
    ‘You want to make sex wit me, Mister Bertie?’ Her eyes twinkled behind her cat’s-eye glasses.
    I wondered for a moment whether she was having me on. ‘No, I want you to play the part of my mother. When you go out. When you meet people. Remember we discussed it in the hospital?’
    ‘Aha! You want I mekkit golabki kobaski slatki? I mekkit delicious wit yushka.’
    ‘Yes, that too. But the main thing is, you have to say you’re my mother. You have to say your name is Mrs Lily Lukashenko, and your date of birth is the first of March, 1932. Can you remember all that?’
    ‘First of March, 1932!’ squawked Flossie. ‘Shut up Flinna!’
    ‘Inna!’ said Inna.
    ‘Shut up, Inna!’
    ‘But my birthday is the twentieth of April.’
    ‘Shut up, Inna!’
    ‘I know, but you have to pretend, remember?’
    ‘Oy! Pretend remember not my birthday?’
    ‘Shut up, Inna!’
    ‘Shut up, Flossie! Yes, that’s it. Don’t worry, Flossie will remind you.’
    ‘Who is Flossie?’
    ‘Flossie the parrot.’
    ‘No, parrot name Mister Indunky Smeet. Your mother has told me.’
    ‘Listen. Listen carefully. The parrot is Flossie and you are Mrs Lily Lukashenko.’
    ‘Oy! Why for such ridiculous name? Alfandari is better.’
    ‘I know, but it’s my mother’s name.’
    Inna sighed deeply. ‘If you say so.’
    Inna went out that afternoon to Hampstead, saying she needed to retrieve some of her belongings and to pick up her mail. I gave her a key, and pointed out the bus stop, but five minutes later she was back, saying, ‘I forgot papers.’ She tucked a large brown envelope into her handbag. Why does she need papers to go back to her old flat? I wondered. But it wasn’t until later that I became suspicious of her comings and goings.
    Around five o’clock, I spotted her walking back through the cherry grove with a couple of carrier bags. I could see from my window that her bearing already seemed sprightlier, more optimistic, as if buoyed up by my small act of kindness that nature’s fragile vessel doth sustain in life’s uncertain voyage. The thought made me feel rather pleased with myself. She paused to rest near the playground, where the boy who had nearly been hit by the van was idling on the swings, toying with his phone. I wondered who he was. Suddenly Mrs Crazy appeared, heading towards the community garden. She and Inna greeted each other, then to my alarm they began to chat, leaning together as if exchanging confidences. This could be dangerous. If Inna tried to pass herself off as Lily Lukashenko, Mrs Crazy would smell a rat. She knew Mother well, and I had told her she had twisted her ankle.
    A few minutes later Inna’s key turned in the lock.
    ‘Hello, Mister Bertie. Look! I got cabbage for mekkit dish from my country, best in world.’
    That evening, we dined on mashed potatoes with yuksha, a type of gravy, and globokli. These turned out to be boiled cabbage leaves stuffed with a mixture of minced meat and rice. Inna had picked up the ingredients in the market at Hoxton and spent an hour in the kitchen preparing them. It would be an exaggeration to say they were delicious, but they were
more edible than the fluorescent styrofoam chunks from Shazaad that had become my staple diet. This arrangement was working out just as I’d hoped.
    ‘Lovely, Inna,’ I said. ‘You’re an excellent cook.’ Which was perhaps a slight overstatement, but I thought she’d be pleased.
    Instead she burst into tears and buried her face in her apron. ‘Oy! Oy! My good husband, he was saying same exactly thing!’
    I laid a hand on her wrist. ‘Hush. I’m sure he is in heaven looking down on you.’
    Sometimes a white lie can mend matters, but this one