Dream Land (14 page)

She was supposed to be exploring with Lutfi, but as soon as they were out of sight of the house he had stomped off somewhere without a word. Safi had been glad that he had not given her away about school, but since she had accused him about it, his self-righteous fury with her was almost worse. Sometimes she thought she hardly recognized her careless, good-natured brother in the angry person he’d become.

Go back
, whispered the ghosts. If she’d been with Jemile or looking after Lenara, she might have enjoyed the spookiness of this path. They’d have made up stories about monsters and bandits and the hero Alim to scare themselves. On her own, it was just awful. But she’d set off to get to the top of Mangup-Kalye, and she couldn’t turn back now.

The path got narrower and muddier, and because she was hurrying she slipped and fell. She lay looking at the mud on her clothes, almost crying. Why had she started this? She must be a long way away by now, and no one knew where she was. If only Lutfi had come with her. If only she’d never left her family behind.

Down below, Mama and Papa would be arriving at Bakhchisaray around now. Mama would be hurrying to the post office to call Uzbekistan and talk to Lenara. Papa would be meeting up with his friends and carefully working out the cost of supplies and building materials. The house at Mangup was turning out to be more expensive than anyone had expected, and because of changes in the government, prices were soaring. Papa and Mehmed had constantly gloomy faces now. There was nothing to eat but the cheapest pasta and bread, and the building work had almost stopped.

Safi realized why the path was muddy: ahead of her was a spring bubbling up and overflowing a deep stone basin. She got to her feet and plunged her hands, then her hot face into the water. It was startlingly cold and a shiver went right through her, starting from the top of her head and running out of the tips of her toes. After it had gone she suddenly noticed the silence settling around her. The water chuckled tinily, dwarfed by the utter stillness of the woods. Not even the birds sang.

She hurried on, legs aching, and her panting breath was the only sound in the world. The climb seemed endless. The path got narrower and narrower, the trees closing her in and filtering the daylight to a green darkness. She couldn’t remember where she was going or why. She wished she’d never come.

And then quite suddenly she emerged into another world.

The trees gave way and there was space: huge, airy, bright. The top of the plateau was covered with a fine carpet of silver-green grass, scattered with starry white flowers as thickly as a fall of hail. A fresh breeze sighed over it with a gentle, tireless, lonely sound.

Safi filled her lungs with it. At the edge of the plateau the wooded slopes plunged down dark and steep, but she stood above them looking out into air. Such distances! Such a falling away of valley after valley after valley, abrupt hills and ridges receding in ever softer shades of blue. A lake gleamed amidst thick gauzy forest like a mirror, and right in the furthest distance, where the palest blue of the mountains turned into the pale grey of the sky, a line glittered.

She had come up between the first and second knuckles of Mangup-Kalye, and now something took her hand and led her onto the back of the fist into a strange, high green country, dotted with ruins and pocked with caves. The white flowers bounced up again from under her shoes. There were tiny irises, and funny blue flowers like bunches of grapes on fine stalks, and some kind of herb that smelt sweet and fresh and heady. She met a cow, thoughtfully pulling up the grass with its huge rough tongue. The caves were hollowed out of the edges of the plateau, connected to each other by worn staircases cut into the rock. Some had windows, and doors opening onto a sheer drop of a hundred metres down to the woods below. Once they had been houses and churches, wine cellars and mosques and kenessas, but no one had lived in this city for hundreds of years. They had left it full only of wind and light. She found one cave with precise round hollows and troughs cut into the floor, and another that had a square pool of water. She clambered and burrowed and scrambled among them happily, but still something led her on and further on, until she found the best cave of all.

She easily might have missed it, because the entrance was from one of the smaller caves, through a hole tucked away in a corner of the floor. No one very fat or tall would have been able to fit through it. But when Safi dropped down into the cave below she caught her breath in delight.

It was almost perfectly round, with a ceiling domed like an egg and a single pillar holding it up. Curling around one side was a broad stone seat, and above it a series of arched alcoves cut into the wall. Another part of the wall was open in a window, with a ledge to stop you from falling. Outside the window lay Crimea, all its soft colours shading away into the sky.

It was the most complete small room. Its smooth silvery stone was wind-scoured and spotlessly clean, and the roundness made it cosy. The little niches in the wall were just the right shape for keeping a few things in. The stone seat was gently scooped out as if generations of people had sat there making it comfortable before leaving it for Safi.

Sitting back on the seat, Safi realized she felt completely happy. She felt at home. She wasn’t even thinking how much she’d like to show this to Jemile or Lenara. No one else had been up here: not Mama, not Papa, not Lutfi, and Grandpa never even talked about it. This was
her
place.

How could she ever have been scared of Mangup-Kalye, when this was at the top? She knew that this was where she’d come always.

“It’s my house,” she said to herself. And then, softly, out loud, “Safi’s house.”

“S
afinar!” Grandpa called again, but he didn’t really think she would hear. She’d gone ahead up the path long ago without seeing him, and he couldn’t run to catch up, not any more. His breath caught and wheezed painfully in a chest worn out with years of labour, years of grief. I’m too old, Grandpa thought. And what did I want to say to her anyway? She’ll look her questions at me that I no longer know how to answer.

Grandpa sat down on a rock to rest. The trouble with being old is that children think you know everything, he thought. They look up with trusting faces; my Safi looks up, drinking in my stories, expecting me to have all the answers because I’m beyond puzzlement, beyond doubt, beyond fear. And then these children grow up a little more, and now they think – Lutfi thinks – that I know nothing worth knowing because I’m beyond love, beyond joy, beyond pain. Sometimes they’re right; mostly they’re wrong. But it’s a wrongness we can do nothing about; it’s just the way life is. There’s a rock bigger than Mangup-Kalye between the old man I am and the children they are.

Grandpa folded his arms over his aching chest to keep it warm. The birds sang. The new leaves smelt fresh and sweet. His head in its round sheepskin cap nodded gently onto his chest.

I was on their side of the rock once, on the path that leads to the top of Mangup-Kalye, just about bursting with joy and love and fear. When I was a boy, I could run up that path in fifteen minutes. A bomb might fall on our heads any second, a plane tumble and crash; there were partisans hiding in the forest like Alim’s bandits; and my Safinar was waiting for me. Eh, life was worth living!

I’m on the path up Mangup-Kalye now, but I’m on the other side of the rock. I don’t know how long it would take me to climb to the plateau; just the thought makes my old legs shake. But more than my legs, it’s my heart that’s trembling. So much in Crimea has changed. So much has gone for ever. I’m scared to go up this path, in case, in case—

“
Khartbaba
?
”

Grandpa jerked awake. Safi was standing in front of him, watching him anxiously.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m a silly old man,” Grandpa said. “When I was a boy running up this path, old Gulnara
Tata
would look round from the Karaim gravestones, her hands full of moss and ivy, and call out to me, ‘What’s the hurry, silly boy? Don’t you know, nothing changes on Mangup-Kalye? Run any faster and you’ll catch up with your own future!’ Those words always sent a shiver down my spine, I didn’t know why.”

Safi considered. “What a funny thing to say.” She hoped Grandpa wouldn’t ask her where she’d been, but at the same time she was curious. This was perhaps the first time he’d mentioned Mangup-Kalye in his stories about when he was a boy. “Why did you used to run up the path?”

Grandpa stood up stiffly. “I’m cold. And we should be getting back to the house.”

Safi hesitated. The house was where her family was, and going back meant returning to the arguments. She wanted to hold on to the clean uncomplicated happiness of the caves a little longer, and hear a story about them that was as clean and simple. “Won’t you tell me first? Please?”

Grandpa looked into Safi’s trusting face gazing up at him. He sat down with a sigh, drawing her to lean against his knee. “From the top of Mangup-Kalye we could see the whole war in Crimea. The Germans had an army base up there, as they knew you could see so much. But they never saw as much as we did, because they were invaders; it was not their land.”

Grandpa took his pipe out of his pocket, looked at it, and then put it back again. “From the top of Mangup we could see the bloom of red and black where the anti-tank missiles landed, and then minutes afterwards the boom of the explosion would reach our ears. We could see the racing sheets of orange that was the forest burning. Best of all, we could watch the aeroplanes. They zoomed below us along the valleys, the Soviet planes with red stars on their wing tips, the fascists with black crosses. Down in the village, we knew our mothers and grandmothers were hiding with cushions over their heads, muttering prayers from the Koran. From up here we could look down on the heads of the pilots and gunners; if we were fast enough, we thought we could lean out and spit and they would look up, shaking their fists and swearing … but we were never quick enough.”

“It sounds fun,” Safi said. She’d never imagined before that war might be fun.

“Yes. The only pity was that by 1944 we had no one left to cheer for. The Soviets had already gone and left us once to the German occupiers. Now the Germans were on the retreat; and anyway, we no longer believed their promises. All we cheered now was the brightest explosion as another plane, red-starred or black-crossed, went down in flames.

“One morning a Soviet plane was shot down … about here. Yes, it must have been where we’re sitting right now.” Grandpa looked around, as if searching for a sign of that long-ago crash, but there was nothing but the spring leaves gently fingering the air. “We saw the pilot’s parachute pop open to hang like a fat mushroom. And then his plane blew up, and the blast tore his parachute in half and tossed him all the way down into Ali Memetov’s grapevines.

“The Germans picked him out of the vines, and brought him to our house. He had two broken legs and a mouthful of smashed teeth. They brought a small sack of semolina too, and I was more interested in that, because we hadn’t had enough food for months. But the semolina was for the pilot. The Germans told us to look after him; they said that if anything happened to him, we’d be in trouble.”

“Why did they bring him to you?” Safi asked.

“They knew he wouldn’t die in my mother’s care. When one of the Germans billeted in our house was shot by the partisans, she nursed him back to health. The Germans didn’t know it, but she had looked after a wounded Red Army soldier cut off in the retreat in 1941, and sick partisans from the forest. Like us watching the air fights from Mangup, my mother didn’t care whether it was red stars or black crosses. I didn’t care because, Soviet or fascist, they were as bad as each other. But my mother believed they were as good as each other; they were people who were suffering and who needed kindness.”

“You mean my great-grandmother,” said Safi. “Who married Seit Ahmet when he thought he was too old.” She remembered that when Grandpa had told them Seit Ahmet’s story, he had promised another one about kindness. Perhaps this was it. “Go on.”

“My mother fed that Soviet pilot semolina gruel through a straw, and the Germans measured how much the sack went down and how much the pilot recovered, as if they had an exact formula for correlating the two. I never found out why he was so important to them. He wasn’t much older than me. After a few days he stopped dying and sat up bright-eyed and miserable and jumping at every noise. I thought he was listening for the partisans, but I don’t know whether he hoped they would rescue him or knew they would shoot him.

“When the sack was empty, the Germans came and took him away in an army lorry as if he were a sack himself, as though all that semolina had just been transferred from one container to another. My mother cried when they took him away.”

Grandpa leant forward. “But I didn’t care. This was not our war. The Germans made us promises so they could use us against the Soviets, and when the Soviets came back they used those promises to get rid of us for good. I understood that even then. There was no one to stand for the Crimean Tatars except ourselves. When the Red Army took back Crimea, they came to our village and asked who had handed over that pilot to the Germans. They didn’t ask who had saved his life by feeding him gruel, by caring for him. We Tatars stood together and shrugged our shoulders. We did not know. We did not remember. No one in the village pointed a finger at my mother, and because of it Ali Memetov and my Uncle Murat were shot in front of us. The week after, they came and took us all away.”