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Mail-Order Bride
The British ethnic comedy takes a zany twist in Marina Lewycka's novel about an elderly Ukrainian immigrant who turns to the old country for a wife half his age.
By Michele A. Berdy
Published: June 10, 2005
Marina Lewycka's "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" begins with a bombshell, or, rather, a "fluffy pink grenade." Nikolai Mayevskyj, an 84-year-old widower and postwar Ukrainian immigrant to England, tells his middle-aged daughter Nadezhda that he is marrying 36-year-old Valentina, from Ukraine. His description is not reassuring: "Botticelli's Venus rising from waves. Golden hair. Charming eyes. Superior breasts." Protestations that she is highly cultured, with a brilliant son who needs an "OxfordCambridge" education, or that she will get a well-paying job and look after him in his old age, do not convince Nadezhda or her older sister, Vera, that Valentina is anything but a predatory, gold-digging hussy.
The two sisters have not spoken since their mother died two years earlier and they quarreled over her small inheritance. They are puzzlingly different: Vera is the brittle, autocratic "family Lenin" decked out in gold and Gucci, while Nadezhda, 10 years younger and the novel's narrator, is a left-leaning professor of sociology dressed -- as Vera acidly notes -- by Oxfam. They agree on nothing but their love for their late mother, Ludmilla, their exasperation with Nikolai and their campaign to thwart Valentina.
A vicious battle -- half-comic, half-tragic -- ensues. Valentina is every daughter's nightmare, a sly and slovenly tart. She serves ready-made dinners, presides over an untidy and foul-smelling house and fleeces Nikolai for all he's worth. She runs up a £700 phone bill to Ukraine. She demands household appliances, clothes and "a good car." When the old Rover they buy fails to run, she hurls fractured English invective at Nikolai: "You no good man. You plenty-money meanie. Promise money. Money sit in bank. Promise car. Crap car."
The sisters, conferring constantly on the phone, launch a counterattack: They call the Home Office and the local police station. Valentina hires a lawyer and curses Nikolai. The sisters write anonymous denunciations to the immigration service. Valentina escalates to physical abuse. Cowering before his wife, Nikolai nevertheless speaks up in her defense. "She is not a bad person. She has some incorrect ideas. Not her fault," he says. And Nikolai may be at least partially right. While Valentina fights the sisters doggedly and with ingenuity, she juggles exhausting menial jobs to bankroll her shopping expeditions herself.
The women's near-farcical struggle over Nikolai's soul and pension is interspersed throughout the novel with two digressions that give it weight and depth: Nikolai's "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," which he reads to Nadezhda and her husband when they visit, and the sisters' phone conversations about their family history. Nikolai's tractor treatise -- an erudite, if quirky, history of Soviet and Western agriculture, economics and philosophy -- provides the historical and social context for his family's drama, rooting it in the tragedies of Ukrainian history, the conflict between East and West and the benefits and drawbacks of capitalism and socialism.
The sisters' nightly phone conversations, which began as strategy sessions for ousting Valentina, move, at Nadezhda's prompting, to explorations of the family's past. Nadezhda, who was born in England after World War II, sees her family's history as a simple tale of love and triumph over adversity. Vera thinks differently. Born in Ukraine before the war, she was shuttled between grandmothers and occupied villages before being taken with her mother to a German labor camp. Nadezhda is sure her parents loved each other. "No," Vera says, "she married him because she needed a way out." Nadezhda believes her father came to England seeking asylum; no, Vera insists, he was an economic migrant. "He went west first. ... When he told them he was an engineer, they gave him a job. Then he sent for Mother and me." Nadezhda continues to ask questions, but Vera won't reply. "Why are you raising these questions now? ... There is nothing to say. Nothing to be learned. What's over is over."
But, of course, what's over is not over. The sisters may share parents, but they lack a common past. Through their conversations, Nadezhda begins to get a fuller sense of her older sister's childhood, which is horrific in Vera's reluctant, understated telling. And through their family stories and Nikolai's monumental book, it becomes clear that the leitmotifs of Ukrainian history continue to play out in new variations.
Penguin Press Born to Ukrainian parents at the end of World War II, Lewycka has published extensively on care for the elderly. |  | |
If the famine and terror of the post-Revolutionary years drove their mother to a marriage of convenience, the lawless rule of criminals and bureaucrats in the 1990s drove women like Valentina to do the same. Their styles may be different -- Ludmilla's homemade plum wine versus Valentina's boil-in-the-bag dinners, Ludmilla's dashing hat and Valentina's pink stiletto mules -- but ultimately both women are sturdy, practical Ukrainian tanks, plowing over everyone and everything to protect and provide for their families.
This is Lewycka's debut novel, and her hand is still a bit uncertain. Some of her characterizations are vivid and complex -- informed, it would seem, by her career as a specialist in elder care. But other turns of plot, such as Nadezhda's sudden sympathy for Valentina, are not fully motivated. Tone and style waver; funny sometimes descends into cute. And the story of Valentina and Nikolai is a reed that is a bit too slender to hold up the profound themes the novel explores, from the emigre experience to Ukrainian history to the humbling but unexpected joys of growing up, at 47 or 84. When Nadezhda says midway through the novel, "I had thought this story was going to be a knockabout farce, but now I see it is developing into a knockabout tragedy," the reader may be surprised to discover the deceptiveness of Lewycka's light touch. What seems at first to be a comedic romp with cookie-cutter characters -- foolish old man, predatory younger woman, overprotective daughters -- turns out to be a darker, more nuanced tale.
If tone and style are not perfectly balanced, by the end Lewycka works a bit of magic all the same. The novel's fictional reality transcends the genres of tragedy and farce, and both the reader and narrator discover that Valentina is not the predatory tramp of contemporary stereotype, Nikolai is not the doddering fool his daughters take him for, and Vera and Nadezhda can forgive what had seemed unforgivable. It takes the fluffy pink grenade of Valentina to bring them together with belated understanding and acceptance.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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June 27 - July 3, 2008 
