Dream Land (2 page)

From the car Mehmed watched indulgently before starting up the engine again. “Yes, it’s good to be where we belong,” he called, “but we have much to do to claim it back.”

As if something in the air had made them slightly drunk, the rest of the journey they all talked like crazy.

“What do you mean, claim it back?”

“When will it be a town?”

“Is it the same as you remember, Ismail
Aga
?” Mehmed asked Grandpa.

“The hills don’t change. The soil. But where are the peach trees? And the villages…”

“How does it feel, children, the air of your homeland?”

“It feels like growing things. Different than in Samarkand,” Lutfi reflected. “You can tell it rains more.”

“Asim, what about the permission? Have we got it yet?”

“It doesn’t matter. We will.”

“But, Asim, the children. You promised me.”

Papa patted Mama’s knee. “I couldn’t do it any longer without you. I wanted to bring you home. I want you all to take part in this. You hear me, children?” He looked at Lutfi and Safi. “We lost this land of ours nearly fifty years ago. And now we’re claiming it back. I want you to see it and know it and claim it yourselves.”

“You bet,” Lutfi said flippantly. But it was the wrong answer for Papa’s fierce excitement and he added quickly, “I know. I do know. And I … I’ll do my best.”

“And you, Safinar?”

Safi looked away from those unknown, cold hills outside. She whispered, “Yes.”

Papa laughed and put his hands on each side of her head, tucking his fingers between her careful plaits. “That’s my girl. Oh, how I’ve missed my family! And now tell me about my other little girl. How tall is Lenara? How many teeth has she got?”

It was dark when they arrived at Bakhchisaray, so Safi could see little of the old capital of the Crimean Tatars where long ago Grandpa had gone to school. She looked out eagerly for the mosques and the khan’s palace, but all she saw was ordinary houses with warmly lit windows.

Mehmed turned off the road and they began a bumpy ascent up a dirt track. The same smell of smoke and cooking reached them, and the headlights picked out low humped shapes rather like haystacks.

“Army camp number two,” said Mehmed cheerfully, braking. He switched off the headlights and everything outside turned black, sprinkled with dots of dim yellow light.

“Another town in the making,” Papa said. “Out you get.”

“Is this where you’ve been living for the last six months, Papa?” No mosque, no palace. As Safi’s eyes got used to the darkness she could make out rows and rows of tents and shelters made of plastic sheeting draped over sticks and planks. The points of light came from paraffin lamps, and campfires glowed. A radio muttered away quietly to itself, and somewhere someone was singing an old Tatar song.

Papa took her hand, leading her down a line of shelters. “Most of the time I was camping outside the town hall, which was
much
more uncomfortable than here.”

“Why outside the town hall?”

“Because we were picketing, to demand that the authorities give us back our land by Mangup-Kalye, where your grandfather grew up. That land belongs to our family; it always has. You know that, don’t you, Safi?”

Of course Safi did. She’d known it for as long as she’d known anything. She was a Crimean Tatar, and her people had lived in Crimea for centuries, until the Second World War when the Soviet government had deported all the Crimean Tatars and let more Russians and Ukrainians settle in their place. Safi’s parents, Lutfi and she and Lenara had all been born and had grown up in Uzbekistan. But that didn’t change anything. Crimea was her home and now, since perestroika, she and all the other Tatars could finally return to it.

“But if it belongs to us, why do the authorities have to give it back?” she asked Papa.

“Exactly. And since they don’t want to, we’ve decided to take it for ourselves. Soon you’ll see the house we’re building there, in Grandpa’s village. But for the moment we’re going to stay here in Bakhchisaray. Do you like it?”

“It’s exciting.” Safi had felt sleepy in the car, but now the smoke and darkness and the twinkling lamps made her feel wide awake and fluttery with half-scared delight. Some of the shelters glowed from inside like great dim lanterns, and shadows slid enormously over the walls. People called out from the entrances, or stopped to shake Papa’s hand as they walked past, and they touched Safi’s head and patted her shoulders with quick warm touches, as if she were a kind of talisman.

“
Salaam aleikhum!
”

“It’s good to see children.”

“Another young one to join the fight.”

“To reclaim the homeland…”

“Welcome home!”

Safi ducked her head, not entirely liking the many hands muzzing the plaits Mama had tied for her all that way away in Samarkand, in another country now. She was glad when they reached their tents, piled high inside with quilts and blankets. They all squashed into one, for company, and Mehmed brought them green tea and bowls of hot rice
plov
.

Papa sat with his arms round Mama. “I see you haven’t been pining away for me, Elmira. Look at you; you’ve got fat.”

“It’s all the extra clothes!” Mama protested. “And a few lovely pieces of paper hidden you-know-where.”

Tucked inside her bra and tights Mama was carrying money, everything that was left from the sale of their house after they had bought the air tickets. Safi knew it wasn’t as much money as Mama had hoped; in the last months since the Soviet Union had collapsed, everything – even houses – had lost value.

“Oh well, in that case…” Papa murmured something into Mama’s ear, and she pushed him away with one of those sweetly indignant giggles Safi hadn’t heard since her father had left.

Grandpa took out his pipe and thumbed tobacco into the bowl. The paraffin lamp fizzed peacefully. Outside, the voice was still singing. Safi didn’t speak much Tatar – she spoke Russian like everyone else – but she knew the words to this song. For the last fifty years it had been forbidden because it spoke of their exile, but almost every Tatar child she knew had been taught the words secretly.

It was a sad song, but the man’s voice didn’t sound sad at all, because there was no one now to forbid him to sing it.

“The wind has tossed them to the rocks and mountains

This imperfect world has become a grave for the Tatars…”

Images from the long, long day began to flick through Safi’s head. The sea spread out like a dull blue carpet far below the aeroplane, turning jade green around the crinkly Crimean coastline. She’d never seen the sea before. But she couldn’t hold it; the waves were flowing backwards, turning into the sway and jerk of the bus they’d taken to the airport; and then she was back before that in Samarkand, in their empty, strangely echoing house. The boxes and bags were piled up in the doorway and the rooms where she’d lived all her life looked huge, emptied of all their furniture and pictures and people: nothing to fill them now but dusty sunlight. As she turned to go into her bedroom for one last time, the floor suddenly gave way and she was falling.

She jumped violently. For a second she was nowhere, and then she was wide awake again and she was somewhere. She was in a tent in Crimea, and her home in Samarkand was far, far away. It would always be far away now, because this strange new place Crimea was home.

“
Khartbaba
, will you tell me a story?” She was addressing Grandpa, but when her voice came out plaintive as a little girl’s she looked slightly apprehensively at her father. She had turned twelve while he had been away; perhaps he would think she was too old now for bedtime stories.

Papa only smiled and nodded, nuzzling Mama’s hair. Even Lutfi, who was quite grown up at fifteen, propped himself up on one elbow expectantly.

Grandpa’s pipe smoke twirled out of the tent doorway. There was a rising moon over the camp now, turning the cloud edges to silver. “All right then…”

Safi wondered if he knew that she wanted a story to fill the cold space inside her and make her feel homey as his stories always did, because he’d been telling them to her for as long as she could remember. She smiled at him, a smile that felt a bit wobbly. Of course he knew. Grandpa knew everything.

“I
know what it’s like to arrive at a camp full of homeless people in a strange place, because that’s what happened to me during the war,” Grandpa said. “To all of the Crimean Tatars, when the Soviets forced us into exile in 1944. The trains took us to many places in Central Asia and Siberia. Mine went to Uzbekistan, to the Hungry Steppe.”

Lutfi chased the last few rice grains around his bowl of
plov
. “It was called that because nothing grew there, right?”

“Nothing but thorns. The boggy ground was mixed with coarse white salt that blew away in the wind, so there was always a taste of it on your lips and a feel of grit in your eyes. It was a kind of cruel joke because the constant flavour of salt was like the ghost of food, but there was nothing to eat. All we got was sweetcorn: cornbread, corn porridge, even just dry kernels to chew. Sometimes not even that. It was the hungriest place in the world.

“The Soviet soldiers who came to take us away told us we were accused of collaborating with the Germans, and this was our punishment. But they would not say where we were going, and they gave us just fifteen minutes to get ready. So I had three shirts on my back, two pairs of trousers and my good boots, and in my pack I had a couple of books, a few roubles, and wrapped in my scarf and waistcoat our family coffee pot and coffee grinder.”

“That’s all?” Safi thought about all her nice things in Samarkand, boxed up ready to come to Crimea.

“That’s all. The roubles had already gone by the time we arrived at the Hungry Steppe, and my boots soon followed, exchanged for bread. You see, I’d rather go barefoot than sell our coffee pot and grinder, even though I thought I’d probably never set eyes on a coffee bean again. But in the end the pot and the grinder had to go; I sold them to a brutal pig of a soldier who was a tea drinker, like all Russians, but he wasn’t very bright and he liked the shiny brass.

“After that, even if I’d had something left to sell, no one would buy because there was no food at all. Even the guards were on reduced rations. There was a village a few kilometres away where we were sure there would be food. But we couldn’t take one step outside the camp without permission. If we did we would be beaten and locked up – if they didn’t simply shoot us first.”

Safi tried to imagine Grandpa as a boy, just a year or two older than Lutfi, starving in the Uzbek steppe. Uzbekistan was where she had been born, and she’d loved living there. But when Grandpa had arrived nearly fifty years ago it had been an alien, hostile place of cold and deprivation.

“But at least being shot is quicker than dying of hunger,” Grandpa went on, and Lutfi laughed and said, “That’s what I’d think too.”

“So I decided to try and get to this village to beg or steal some food. I slipped out in the dark, cleared the camp fence and set off without being seen. But I had forgotten one thing.”

“What?”

Grandpa looked out again at the sky, but now the clouds hid any brightness. “The moon. It was huge and round and white, shining on the white acres of salt. Ah, never have I seen such a moon since! I saw moon mirages. The salt stood up in fabulous dead palaces; it lay in shimmering lakes. And there was I, like a mouse on a lamplit tabletop, with nowhere to hide.

“And then I heard footsteps and humming, and from the camp came the stupid young soldier, the one who had taken our coffee pot and grinder in return for a miserable spoonful of corn porridge. He was strolling over the salt steppe and, Allah bless us, he had the pot and grinder in his hands and was admiring how they shone in the moonlight. I told you he was a bit touched. You could almost have felt sorry for him, had he not treated us so badly…

“I didn’t dare move. I stood there, frozen, as he polished the coffee grinder on his sleeve and began to turn the handle.

“And the air filled with the most delicious smell of coffee. I couldn’t believe it. I suppose it was the coffee dust still left in there after years of grinding, which all the long journey and the dirt and the salt had not managed to dislodge. But it felt like a dream. It was as if my poor senses, deranged by hunger and the moon, had conjured up this aroma like a mirage to torture me. And before I could help it I let out a deep groan.”

Grandpa groaned, so deeply that Safi jumped.

“At once the soldier dropped the grinder, grabbed his pistol and shouted, ‘Stop! You aren’t allowed to leave the camp! Who are you? Speak!’

“But I couldn’t. It was the wonderful smell of coffee, which took me straight home to my father’s house. All I could do was make another deep and horrible groan.