Dream Land (5 page)

Safi thought the lettering was lovely, but she would have preferred a roof to keep out the rain. In Uzbekistan rain had been rare and welcome; when it fell people stood in their doorways holding their hands out and laughing. Here Safi had come to dread the dull tappety-tap of the first drops falling on the plastic sheeting above their heads. “Mama!” she would shriek, and her mother would come running with bowls and buckets and more sheeting that they seemed to be endlessly and hopelessly rearranging to try to keep the beds dry. Safi had never paid such attention to the sky before. She got to know all the variations of rain cloud: grey and lilac and indigo massing behind the spines of Mangup-Kalye. She developed a permanent crick in her neck from gazing upwards so much.

“Hey, Safi, look at him.”

“At who?” Safi turned back to Lutfi. She was supposed to be mixing cement with her brother and Ibrahim, but Ibrahim had got engrossed in his book and stopped stirring entirely.

“Ibrahim
Aga
,” Safi said loudly.

“Mmm.” Ibrahim, sitting on an upturned bucket, made a couple of blind stabs at the cement with the stick and then subsided again. One foot dangled temptingly close to the soggy grey mass.

“Superstar scholar Ibrahim, in the Crimean Tatar Star Alley,” Lutfi whispered, scraping up the wet cement so that it settled round the bucket rim and touched Ibrahim’s shoe. “How long do you think it’ll take to dry?”

Safi looked at how much of his book Ibrahim had left to read. He wasn’t yet halfway through. “Oh, I think we’ve got long enough.”

The rest of the cement they took into the cold, damp house, where Papa, Refat and Mehmed were building a crude stove from bricks and metal piping.

Safi looked at it dubiously. It was distinctly wonky. “Is that really going to stay up and keep us warm?”

“Of course. Soon stop your mother from coughing. Where’s Ibrahim?”

“He’s really busy.”

“I bet,” Mehmed muttered.

“Oh, don’t disturb him…”

The stove was built and it was starting to get dark when there was a shout from outside. Ibrahim had finished his book.

“What the—”

“I don’t remember
that
line from the Koran.” Refat grinned.

It took half an hour to chip Ibrahim and the bucket free from the cement, and his shoe would never be the same. Mama, coming slowly back from the spring with two buckets of water, stared.

“Whatever are you doing?”

Safi and Lutfi had been in trouble, but now when Mama started laughing they knew they were forgiven. Mama hadn’t laughed much recently. It was her idea to make a real Crimean Tatar Star Alley, a row of their footsteps in cement beside the front doorstep: Grandpa first, as the oldest and most respected, and then, in order of size, bear-sized Refat, Mehmed and Papa (who argued about whose feet were bigger until Mama had to arbitrate), Ibrahim (“What, again?”), Lutfi, Mama and Safi, and a space at the end where Lenara’s little feet would be.

They all stepped back to admire the result. After some thought, Ibrahim took a stick and wrote an Arabic sentence in the wet cement over the doorway.

“What does it say?”

“Respect your elders, especially when they’re scholars hard at work studying.” Ibrahim ducked his brother’s hand.

“No shirking. Now’s the time for building, not books.”

“Never trust two children alone with a load of wet cement.”

“I’m not a child,” Lutfi objected.

“Then don’t behave like one,” said Papa, but he wasn’t really cross.

Ibrahim translated. “It’s from the Koran. It says: ‘Lord, build for me a home with Thee in the garden … and deliver me from the unjust people.’”

Safi looked doubtfully at the great bulk of Mangup-Kalye, wondering if this was their garden.

Grandpa nodded approvingly. “Perfect.”

The new stove wasn’t a huge success. There was no shortage of wood from the slopes of Mangup-Kalye, but Mama had never had to manage a wood-burning stove before, just as the men had never had to build one. It kept going out, and it smoked horribly. The smell got into their hair, their quilts, their few clothes hanging on nails in the stone and mortar walls. Mama’s cough changed from a damp chesty one to a dry hacking one that afflicted Grandpa too. Still, it warmed the house a little, and dried out the concrete foundations, so at last they could collect their container that had arrived in Simferopol from Uzbekistan. It fitted snugly in the cellar, and everyone gathered round as Papa opened it up.

Inside were all the things they’d boxed up so carefully in Samarkand: clothes and shoes, pictures and books and china. Ibrahim’s eyes sparkled at the books, but Mama hardly looked at these things, searching through them quickly until she found the packages of pasta, beans, rice, dried fruit and green tea.

“Safi, get the tea things out of that box.”

Safi tore herself away from the folded clothes. Mama had always been smartly dressed in Uzbekistan, and the smell of perfume rising out of the container took her straight back to their old house, Mama sitting at her mirror each morning before work, wafting scent bottles under Safi’s nose and asking, “Which one today, Safi?”

“That one, the rosy one. It goes with your dress…”

“Quickly, Safinar.” Mama had given up waiting for the water to boil on the wood stove, and had lit their stinking little Primus instead. She held out her hands for the teapot and bowls, her thin wrists sticking out from her jumper. Mama hadn’t worn perfume since they came to Crimea. Now she smelt of woodsmoke and paraffin and damp.

“Not in here. Lutfi, bring the tray,” Papa said. He had a bright, mischievous expression on his face. He guided Mama carefully out of the house and round to the back. “There.”

While Mama had been collecting the container with Mehmed, Papa had been busy. Helped by Lutfi and Refat, he had built an open-sided wooden shelter which Grandpa had draped with camouflage netting. The floor of the shelter was about as high off the ground as a bed would be, and Safi and Lutfi had arranged their blankets and quilts on it. In the middle Papa had put a low table, and Safi had filled a jar with snowdrops from the edge of the woods to decorate it. It was a proper
chaykhana
, like at home in Uzbekistan. Now they could sit on quilts and cushions drinking green tea out of shallow bowls, as though everything was all right.

Papa looked at Mama expectantly. Mama gazed at the
chaykhana
. It looked a little lost and lonely in the empty valley.

“What pretty flowers,” she said at last. She leant against Papa. “Lutfi, you forgot the sugar.”

Papa’s fierce, lively face was a little disappointed. He drank his tea with hasty gulps. “Now I know we’re home,” he said. “Our very own tea, brewed on our very own land, and drunk in our very own
chaykhana
.” He kissed Mama on the cheek.

“It isn’t our very own land,” Mama said tiredly.

“It was ours, and we’re making it ours again.” Papa’s voice was sharp. “Elmira, where’s your faith?”

“We met the police on the way back. They stopped us…” Mama looked at Safi. “Safi, go and see if you can find the sugar bowl in the box.”

Safi went back to the house reluctantly. She knew she’d been sent out of the way. Mama didn’t really want the sugar bowl; she wanted to talk about how things were going wrong. For the first week or so Mama had tried to persuade Safi that it was fun living in the valley, like camping. But camping was only really fun because at the end of it you knew you could go back to your cosy warm house and have a bath and put on clean clothes. Here, there was nowhere to go back to. Mama never said anything outright, but as Safi helped her cook on the awful stove and watched her trying to keep everyone warm and clean, she couldn’t help noticing that her mother did not share the cheerful confidence of the men. Papa and the others were so busy building, they didn’t seem to notice how cold and lonely and difficult this valley was; what a horrible place to live. And it still didn’t belong to them. Papa and Mehmed were sure that by building on it they could claim the land as theirs, and it was true that so far no one had even come to look at what they were doing. No one ever seemed to come to this valley. The nearest village was half an hour’s walk along the road that skirted Mangup-Kalye, and Bakhchisaray was twenty kilometres the other way. The few cars that drove past sometimes slowed, their drivers leaning out to stare, but they never stopped. Why should they? There was nothing here: no village, no people. It was as if the Tatars had been abandoned to the huge brooding silence that was lying in wait right now outside the little
chaykhana
where they sat around the teapot. It was waiting for when the voices and laughter stopped, and then it would pounce.

Safi stirred the contents of an open box. There was no sugar bowl, but nestled among the woolly socks and striped Uzbek scarves she found the shiny brass coffee grinder and coffee pot. She stroked them gently with her finger. They looked so cosy tucked among the bright silk, she longed to climb in and snuggle up beside them. Lenara might still be small enough to do so, but Safi was far too big. With a deep sigh she closed the lid. It felt like home was inside that box, and she couldn’t fit in.

The voices from the
chaykhana
had gone quiet. Mehmed and Refat were politely sipping their tea and gazing at nothing in particular. Lutfi looked hunched and unhappy. Grandpa held out his hand. “Come here, Safinar.”

Safi’s fingers were sore and bruised from lugging around the sharp-edged building blocks, but Grandpa closed his warm, leathery palm round them very gently.

“We’ve had tea; now it’s time for a story,” Papa said. He was talking to Grandpa, but his eyes were on Mama. “Tell us about my grandfather, Seit Ahmet. To show how we belong here, and always have, in Adym-Chokrak.”

G
randpa began. “My father was born and bred here in Adym-Chokrak, like his father and his father before that. Seit Ahmet was my father’s name, and he was the eldest of three brothers. Knew the shape of our valley like his own hand, did Seit Ahmet.”

“He knew a week beforehand when snow would fall, and when it would melt in spring,” Papa continued. This was a story they had all heard many times. “Then it was time for the shepherds to take the fat-tailed sheep up to the high pastures; time to plant the tobacco field.”

“And then all summer to watch the plants grow tall and heady with flowers.” Grandpa took up the thread again. “The sheep fattened and the mountain orchards filled with small yellow apples and scarlet pears; the tobacco leaves lay drying in the barn. Adym-Chokrak was where Seit Ahmet was born, and Adym-Chokrak was where he wanted to die. But in between the heart may grow restless, taxes were high, and there were goods to be collected for the
bogcha
Seit Ahmet’s sister was embroidering for her marriage.”

“What’s a
bogcha
?” Lutfi whispered.

“Shh!”

“This was many years ago, when Crimea was part of Russia and ruled by the Russian tsar. When the officers arrived, recruiting for the tsar’s army, Seit Ahmet went away to the wars. After five long years he came riding back to Adym-Chokrak, his carbine on his shoulder and his sabre in his belt, and all the girls in the village looked out of their windows to admire his fine moustache and his medals.”

“He’d seen the world, and he’d seen the wars,” Papa said. “And he found out that there’s nowhere in the world as fine as Crimea, and no war worth fighting except the war for home.” He was still looking at Mama, and Mama was gently brushing the stiff white skirts of the snowdrops with her finger, and listening.

“Seit Ahmet sat at the edge of the flowering tobacco field, thinking about a certain girl with gold thread in her plaits who had looked very tenderly out of her window as he passed. That was when a messenger rode into the village. ‘Seit Ahmet! Your father has three sons, and now the tsar needs your middle brother to serve in his army.’”

“But Seit Ahmet’s middle brother was studying in the Zindjirli
medresse
,” Safi chimed in, “and he couldn’t just leave.”

“That’s right. Seit Ahmet pondered learning and warfare, family and honour, and at last he said, ‘What must be, must be,
inshallah
.’ He collected his carbine and his sabre, and once again he rode away to the wars.

“He served for four more years, and when he came back to Adym-Chokrak, all clinking medals and curling moustache, the girls looked out admiringly as he passed, but not quite so admiringly as before, because he wasn’t as young as he had been.”

“Oh, those girls,” Mehmed said, giving Refat a nudge.

“Shh!”

“Seit Ahmet sat at the edge of the field. The tobacco had all been gathered in, and in the distance Ai-Petri Mountain gleamed white with the first snow. He packed his pipe bowl with the sweet fresh tobacco and lay back watching the smoke twirl up into the air. Where’s my pipe, by the way?”

“Don’t interrupt the story!” several voices cried at once. They’d heard it many times before, but they all loved it.

“Well, all right then.
Ta-ta-tum, ta-ta-tum
, the hoof beats of a messenger came rattling up the valley. ‘Seit Ahmet! Your father has three sons, and now the tsar needs your youngest brother to serve in his army.’