Free 2005 - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka Page A

for him.” (Smug voice. See? I am not a fascist like my sister.)
    “Of course it is. Of course it is. Did I ever suggest otherwise?”
     
    My sister rings the Home Office again. They tell her she must put it in writing. She writes again, anonymously. She telephones the register office where their wedding will be recorded. The registrar gives her a sympathetic hearing.
    “But you know, at the end of the day if he’s determined to go ahead with it, there’s absolutely nothing I can do,” the registrar says.
    “But the divorce from her husband in Ukraine—it came through just like that at the last minute. And after they were divorced, she went back to stay with him.”
    “I’ll check the paperwork, but if it’s all in order…”
    “What about the translation? She had to have it translated at the last minute at an agency in London. They might have confused a decree absolute with a decree nisi.” My sister is an expert on divorce.
    “Of course I’ll look at it closely. But I don’t read Ukrainian. I have to take it at its face value. He’s an adult.”
    “He’s not behaving like one.”
    “Ah, well.”
    She sounded like a typical social worker bureaucrat, my sister tells me. She will do her best, but of course she must stay within the rales.
    We have flights of imagination in which we turn up at the wedding, sneaking in half-way through the service, while the couple are at the altar.
    “I will wear my black suit,” says Vera, “which I wore to Mother’s funeral. At the point when the priest says, “… and if anyone knows of any jiist cause or lawful impediment …?” we will shout out from the back…” (I’ve always wanted to do that.)
    “But what would we say?” I ask my sister.
    We are both stumped.
     
    My father and Valentina were married on 1 June at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, for Valentina is a Catholic. My father is an atheist, but he humours her. (It’s natural for women to be irrational, he says.)
    He has given her £500 for a wedding dress: cream polyester silk, tightly fitting around the waist and hips, with a plunging neckline trimmed in frilled lace, through which we catch a glimpse of those modestly nestled Botticellian breasts. (I have seen the wedding pictures.) I can just imagine how he fusses around to make sure the photographer he has hired gets the best angle. He wants to show her off, his trophy, to all those gossipy doubters who scorned her. She needs the photo for the immigration officials.
    The priest was a young Irishman who, says my father, looked like a teenager with spots and sticking-up hair. What did he make of this oddly assorted couple as he blessed their union? Did he know that the bride was a divorcee? Did he feel just a twinge of unease? The Zadchuks, her only Ukrainian friends, are also Catholics from western Ukraine. All the other Ukrainians in the congregation, my mother’s friends invited to the wedding by my father, are Orthodox from the east. I suppose the youth and spottiness of the priest confirmed all their suspicions about Catholicism.
    Her uncle from Selby is in the group picture, and Stanislav, and some friends she met at work They have that smug dressed-up look of people brazening out a sham. Bob Turner is not there.
    After the wedding, people who some two years ago sat in our front room after my mother’s funeral, now come back to the house again to toast the happy couple in vodka, nibble Tesco-bought snacks and talk about…I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I can imagine the gossip, the scandal. Half his age. Look at her bosom—how she waves it under a man’s nose. Greasepaint on her face. The old man making a fool of himself. The shame of it.

Seven
    Crap car
    I t’s three weeks after the wedding, and I still haven’t met my new stepmother.
    “So when can we come and meet the lucky bride?” I ask my father.
    “Not yet. Not yet.”
    “But when?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Why not yet?”
    “She isn’t here yet.”
    “Not