Dream Land (4 page)

“Where is it? Where’s Adym-Chokrak? Where is our village?”

Safi sat down on the grass with a bump, she was so disappointed. Even after the shock of the camp in Bakhchisaray, she’d still thought the village would be exactly as Grandpa had described it. She knew it off by heart, although she’d never been there. The two-storey house where Uncle Murat and Aunt Halide lived, the
chaykhana
under the walnut tree, and the headman Ali Memetov’s place smothered in grapevines, where they made wine even though the Koran said they weren’t allowed to drink it. The fat-tailed sheep, the cobbled alleys that led to the fountain, the tobacco leaves laid out to dry in the sunshine.

All of it had gone. Every last scrap and stone.

Behind her, there was a splosh and an indignant quacking from the ducks; Lutfi had heaved a lump of mud into the soupy pond and was staring at the widening ripples. Papa squeezed Mama’s hand where they stood by the car. And Grandpa blinked at the empty echoing valley and said, “Well, we’ve got some rebuilding to do.”

Mehmed and Papa had already made a start. The yellow block building was half finished, not half ruined, and it was the house where Safi’s family was going to live.

It was small and square, built of blocks of crushed shell that looked crumbly as sugar, but when Safi touched them they were hard and sharp-edged. Most of the house so far was underground: a cellar for their container of belongings when it arrived from Uzbekistan. Over it, raw splintery planks had been laid to make a floor. The walls stood just a little taller than Safi. A single small window was finished but it had no glass, just thin boards. A sheet of plastic was stretched over the top of the walls. When Safi peered inside, it was darkly poky and smelt of damp cement; three forlorn iron bedsteads, a dusty stool, a jumble of tin cups and plates.

“This is our house?” There could only be three rooms in there. No bathroom, no bedrooms.

The mixture of rage and disappointment must have shown in her face, because Grandpa said in his slow deep voice, “When we arrived in the Hungry Steppe we lived in dugouts. In holes in the ground. That was all that was waiting for us, Safinar.”

“Yes, I
know!
You’ve told us a million times.” Safi was shocked. She clapped her hand over her mouth and looked round to see if anyone else had heard how disrespectful she had just been. She’d never talked to her grandfather in that tone before. She wasn’t sure she’d ever even
wanted
to. But something about the sight of the gloomy rubbishy half-built hovel made her stomach twist. She knew Grandpa had lived in a dugout. She knew the Tatars had been forced to build their own work camps in exile. She knew they’d had malaria and lice and only the clothes they stood up in. But she couldn’t care about that, when all she could think of was
her
house, the one they’d left behind to come here.

“And I’ve told you a thousand times about this village we had to leave in Crimea,” Grandpa said sternly. “It’s gone now, but it’s still in our blood, our bones.”

Safi turned away so that he wouldn’t see how angry she was. She had lived in a proper house in Samarkand, with six rooms and a veranda. The sun shone in warm squares through the clean curtains; the coffee pot and cups gleamed on the shelf. In her neat cosy bedroom the fringe on her lampshade danced as Lenara jumped up at it; at about five o’clock its shadow touched the door lintel like a reaching hand. And there was her friend Jemile climbing over the back fence and tapping on the window, coming to play.

Grandpa hadn’t left behind his best friend. He hadn’t left behind his little sister. It was all right for him to talk about blood and bones and building.

Safi left her family clustered about the little shack and wandered away up the valley. It was a soft grey afternoon, but the steep leafless woods blocked out much of the light. When she went on along the road, she could see up the slopes to where ridges of rock appeared – one, two, three, four – right at the top of Mangup-Kalye like the spines of a great dragon. She didn’t think she wanted to live in their shade. It was so utterly different from what Grandpa had told her. She didn’t see how it could all have disappeared so completely, the red and white houses and the tobacco field, the fountain and the grapevines. There was not a single thing here she could recognize. Nothing in Crimea was like Grandpa had said.

A stone slipped under her foot, and the grating noise was so loud she stopped in fright. Without noticing, she must have turned a corner. Her family and the house and pond were out of sight. The dirt road led on in front of her, and the high silent slopes of wood and rock towered on either side, shutting her in. In the furthest outcrop of rock there was a window of light, like an eye looking down the valley, watching her.

Safi was so scared she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. The eye pinned her. There was an eye in the rock.

“Safi!” Her mother’s voice, a little anxious, wonderfully normal, floated up the valley. “Safinar! Where are you?”

“Hey, Safi!” Lutfi’s voice was nearer, and a moment later he came round the bend in the track. “What are you doing, all on your own? Looking for Grandpa’s house? I think we’ve found it, but there’s nothing to see. Just a few old fruit trees.” Lutfi sounded fed up. “I hope we don’t really come and live here; it’s dismal. Mehmed says there are still caves at the top of the mountain, and ruins and stuff. Sounds like there’s more left up there than down here. What’s the betting we end up living in a cave…”

Just before they turned the bend in the track, Safi dared to look back. The eye in the outcrop of rock had disappeared.

That night in the camp at Bakhchisaray, Mama and Papa argued. Safi lay in the tent she shared with Lutfi and Grandpa and listened to their heated undertones while Grandpa snored gently.

“But the land isn’t ours,” Mama said. “It’s illegal; we’ll be squatters with no rights and the authorities can come and turn us off it whenever they like.”

“It was our fathers’ land before the Soviets evicted them illegally. We’ve got the right of history.”

“Since when have governments taken any notice of history?” Mama asked. “Yes, there’s no Soviet Union any more, but Crimea’s part of Ukraine now, and there’s no Ukrainian law that says we can have the land.”

“Then we’ll make them write a law.”

Mama changed tack. “How will we live in Adym-Chokrak? It’s the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing left. I want to work, Asim. I want Safi and Lutfi to go to school. Lutfi’ll be thinking about college soon, and jobs. I don’t want to risk everything on this dream of your father’s.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” Papa said sharply.

“I mean no disrespect. I wanted to come home to Crimea too, you know that. But here in Bakhchisaray at least we’ll have friends and neighbours, our people, our culture. We’ll have support; we can make a life. Out there, under that terrible mountain, that Mangup-Kalye…”

“I’ve been talking to Mehmed. He thinks that ‘terrible mountain’ is our opportunity. The ruins on Mangup are famous; there’s a whole ancient city up at the top. There’ll be tourists in the summer and we can start a business: guides, a campsite, a cafe. And it’s not far from Bakhchisaray, so the children will be able to go to school.”

“And me? What about my job?”

There was a silence.

“You shouldn’t be thinking of your job now. There are more important things. We aren’t in the godless Soviet Union any more; here we’re going to be a proper Muslim Tatar family, live like our fathers did. That’s why we came back.”

Another silence, which went on this time.

“Safi, are you awake?” Lutfi hissed. She could just see him sitting up in the darkness by the entrance to the tent.

“Yes.”

“Come over here.”

Safi wondered if he’d been listening to their parents too. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard them argue. She shuffled out from under her quilt and over to his side, careful not to disturb their grandfather.

Lutfi had opened the entrance and was looking out. Down at the bottom of the hill, between the outlines of the shelters, campfires glowed and black figures passed to and fro, sticks in their hands.

“They’re looking out for the locals, in case they attack us,” Lutfi whispered. “I heard Papa and Mehmed talking about it. They hate us here. They want us to go back to Uzbekistan.”

“All because of a war fifty years ago.” Safi shivered miserably. “I wish they would like us.”

“I don’t. It’s not just because of the war. It’s because they’re occupying our land and they know they’ve got no right to it, and they don’t want to give it back. That’s what everyone says, here in the camp.” Lutfi’s eyes gleamed a little in the firelight and he shifted with unfamiliar impatience.

“I just want Lenara to come and for us to be a family again,” Safi said dolefully. Suddenly, big girl that she was, she felt as if she was going to cry. Mama and Papa, even Lutfi now, felt distant and different, talking about strange things, and she missed her little sister.

“Oh, silly old Safi.” But Lutfi was still the same person really. He put his arm round her, hugging her tightly, and a faraway, mournful tone crept into his voice so she knew he was thinking about his girlfriend back in Samarkand. “Everything’ll be all right. And if it isn’t, maybe we’ll go home again.”

T
hree days later, they moved into the house by Mangup-Kalye. By then, Safi was glad to get away from the muddy crowded camp and the gang of local children. And yet, almost immediately, she missed them. Mangup-Kalye was so quiet. The silence lay in wait like a relentlessly watchful beast, and in the pause between hammer strokes, the moments when conversation died, it pounced. In her head Safi knew exactly what it looked like. Its great spined back was the ridges of rock high on Mangup-Kalye, and its eye was a window of emptiness in the furthest outcrop, staring down the valley at them.

Safi was scared of Mangup-Kalye. She knew it was stupid. She wasn’t a baby; she was twelve, old enough to know that there was nothing frightening about a heap of old rocks and trees. But knowing it made no difference. During the day she kept as close as she could to her family, and at night she lay frozen under her quilt in the half-built house, listening to the silence and longing to make a movement, any movement, to break it, but too terrified even to twitch a finger. She woke clenched and aching every morning to the ringing birdsong that only made the silence behind even bigger.

Papa and Mehmed, with Mehmed’s brother, Ibrahim, and their cousin, Refat, had petitioned the authorities in Bakhchisaray for months to give them back the land where Grandpa’s village had stood. Now these men were helping Papa build the first house at Mangup, and when it was finished, they would work together to build the rest so that their families could come home too. The places where the houses would stand were already carefully staked out along the track up the valley, and the men joked that they had held a picket for the right to several metres of string and four stakes in the ground.

But they hadn’t even been granted the right to string and stakes, and so they had simply moved their tents to the valley and started to build. They kept the silence away with jokes and Tatar songs, and political talk that made Safi and Lutfi yawn. They sent Safi this way for wood, that way for stones, the other for cups of black sweet tea. They were tired and dirty and happy from days of digging and hefting blocks and banging in nails, seeing the little house rise under their hands.

“Of course, it would help if we had proper tools and good flat ground to start with,” Mehmed said cheerfully. His hair and moustache were powdered with yellowish dust from the building blocks, and he kept sneezing. He squinted along the line of the wall, trying to judge if it was level. Back in Uzbekistan Mehmed had been a teacher, while Refat had worked for the post office. “Oh well. If the walls aren’t totally straight, it’ll just look more creative. Atishoo!”

“Sneeze any harder and you’ll blow them down,” Refat said. “And I’d never hear the last of it from Mother. ‘Forty-eight years in exile, married for fifty, and what have I got to show for it? A son who won’t get married and can’t even build a house properly!’ Remember when she celebrated her golden wedding anniversary? She spent the whole day complaining that she wasn’t in her house in Crimea. ‘Just a tiny scrap of roof in the homeland would be enough for your little old mother,’ she says. ‘Just a corner where I can live, not bothering anyone, quiet as a mouse.’”

Everyone laughed. They were all familiar with the irascible letters Refat’s mother wrote to him from Uzbekistan. Safi imagined her to be as huge as Refat but, unlike her son, with a temper to match.

“Hey, Ibrahim.” Mehmed nudged his brother. “Why didn’t you bring a book about building back to Crimea with you?”

“Mmm.” Thin, dreamy Ibrahim didn’t take his nose out of the book he was reading. He was studying history and Arabic, and while everyone else, even Mama and Safi, pitched in as much as they could to help, Ibrahim kept getting distracted by anything printed. In the evenings he practised Arabic lettering on the paper cement sacks, and pinned the scraps on the half-built walls so that Safi and Mama and Grandpa had prayers from the Koran over their heads when they went to bed.