Dream Land (7 page)

“Adym-Chokrak.”

“But Adym-Chokrak doesn’t exist any more, does it? Look at a map of Crimea. There’s nothing marked here except for Mangup-Kalye and the caves.”

“Refat said there was a whole city up at the top.”

“With a cafe where we can get a drink, thank goodness. I need it.” Lutfi was panting from the steep climb.

“Daft.”

“There is. Refat said. Best drinks in Crimea. I can’t wait, I’m really thirsty, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got no money,” Safi said doubtfully.

“I’ll buy you something. What would you like? They’ve got Tatar tonic, Karaim cola, Russian rum and vodka, Ukrainian, um, unicycles…”

“You—!”

Lutfi dodged her thump. “Of course, it’s totally staffed by the ghosts of whoever lived in this city…”

They came to two long trailing stems of ivy laid across the path in front of them, as if to say,
No further
. Beyond, the ground was alight with pale yellow flowers growing thickly among scattered gravestones.

They halted. The graves were everywhere, tumbled among the tree roots, leaning at crazy angles and green with moss. They were shaped like narrow stone beds with high ends carved deep with writing. The thousands of flowers glowed like lamps on the ground under the trees, lighting up this still, secret cemetery.

“I guess we’ve found who lived here,” Lutfi said quietly. “Do you think they’re Tatars? They don’t look like Muslim graves. I don’t recognize this writing.”

“Let’s go back,” Safi said. Her voice trembled.

She turned to retrace her steps, and Lutfi followed.

“Is that why Grandpa never talks about Mangup?” he wondered as they thudded downwards, knees aching from the steepness. “Let’s ask him. Maybe it really is haunted.”

Safi shrugged. “They’re just graves.” She wished they had never found them.

T
he Bakhchisaray authorities refused even to see Papa and Grandpa. But while they waited in corridors and knocked on doors at the town hall, Mama had been to one of the schools. She’d met the director and somehow managed to arrange for Safi to attend classes, even though the whole family lacked residence permits.

Papa teased her about it. “We should have sent you to the authorities to get the rights to the land, instead of picketing for months. Trust a woman to get exactly what she wants in one afternoon.” But Safi could see he was really quite annoyed. He wanted his children to help rebuild a Tatar Crimea before going off to get a Russian education. “We’ll open proper Tatar schools, or at least classes, in Crimea soon,” he said. “Then they can go to school.”

Mama was adamant. In Bakhchisaray she’d also called Jemile’s mother and talked to Lenara, who was staying at their house. There were still tears in her eyes when she got back to the valley, and she wasn’t in the mood for teasing or arguing. “It’s not right for Safi to be stuck here all the time: the only girl, the only child. She helps as much as she can, but she’s still young, and you know an education’s important, Russian or Ukrainian or Tatar. If we’re going to live here, we’ll have to try and fit in with the local people. Lutfi really should go as well.”

“Lutfi stays and works on the house. We need him.”

“Flipping house,” Lutfi muttered, too low for anyone except Safi to hear. But he looked a bit proud too, because Papa had said he was needed, like a man. Lutfi had never been much interested in school anyway, except as a place to meet friends, and in Samarkand Papa had often shouted at him about his grades.

“All right then, until it’s built.” Mama clearly understood there was no point arguing about Lutfi. “But I insist on Safi going now, at least a couple of days a week. There’s a school bus from Krasniy Mak. It goes right past here, so we can arrange for it to stop for her.”

“Well, we’ll try it. Just as long as I don’t see my daughter behaving like a Russian schoolgirl.” Papa gave in with a short laugh.

Despite their failure at the town hall, Papa and Mehmed had returned in a fiercely jubilant mood, because the authorities had finally granted permission for the Tatars from the Bakhchisaray camp to build houses. There was going to be a big meeting in Simferopol in two days’ time to celebrate, and to demand the same rights for the other squatter settlements like their own. They talked excitedly about it all evening. No one seemed to want to discuss Safi’s school any more. She sat in the corner and worried. What was she going to wear? Would she have learnt completely different things in Uzbekistan, and be way behind the other children? Would they like her?

At last it was Refat who noticed. He came to sit beside her. “So, did you go up on Mangup-Kalye? What did you find?”

“A cemetery,” Safi said glumly. She didn’t really want to be reminded of those tombstones, mossy and tumbled on their cold carpet of flowers.

But Refat was interested. “I wonder who’s buried there. Let’s ask your grandfather about it.”

Grandpa was silent for a long time, and Safi wondered if he was angry at their questions. The ivy tendrils across the path had been a warning, a sign to keep out.

“We didn’t go in,” she said. “We weren’t expecting to find it.”

“My best friend once came looking for my grave there,” said Grandpa.

Safi went cold. She was glad when Refat pointed out, “But you’re not dead, Ismail
Aga
.”

“But I was so far away, so gone without a trace, I might as well have been.” Grandpa’s gaze was distant, turned back to a painful past. “My friend Ayder came from the war to find us, but he was too late, and we had all gone.”

“You mean Ayder
Aga
?” Safi remembered him, a crumpled, sad-eyed man who had often come to visit Grandpa in Samarkand before he died.

“Was he in the Red Army?” Ibrahim asked.

“That’s right. He defended the Soviet Union against the Germans. Alongside him fought Russians and Chechens, Ukrainians and Uzbeks, Azeris and Armenians. It didn’t matter. They were all from the Soviet Union. They all wanted the same thing: to get the German fascists out of their country so they could return to their families; to stay alive.

“Ayder was in Azerbaijan with his unit when an Azeri officer, a Muslim like him, said he should go back to Crimea as fast as he could. He said he’d heard something about the Crimean Tatars, and he’d help Ayder get leave to go home before it was too late. But he didn’t say what it might be too late for.

“It was June 1944; Crimea had just been liberated from the Germans when Ayder arrived, met by the smell of roses. The flags welcoming the returning Red Army hung limp in the streets. Everywhere walls were shattered by bullets and bombs. From lamp posts dangled the stiff, dry bodies of collaborators.”

“Hanged?” Lutfi asked, goggle-eyed. Grandpa seemed not to hear.

“At his mother’s house in Akmesjit, the door was locked. Next door was empty too. There were no Tatar children playing in the yard. It was as if they had all stepped out for something, and if he waited they would come back. But he did wait, and no one came. Ayder was wearing his uniform, which made him look like any other soldier defending the Soviet Union, but the Russians and Ukrainians avoided his eye, and hurried away when he approached. All through the city was the same. The Tatar houses stood deserted; when he peered through the windows he could see the kind of mess people leave when they are in a hurry and expect to be back soon to tidy up.

“My friend thought perhaps the Tatars had fled the fighting and gone to the villages for refuge. So he came out here, to Adym-Chokrak. But here too, all he found was empty houses and silence, and up on Mangup-Kalye he found a cemetery. It wasn’t a Tatar cemetery, but there was nowhere else to look, nowhere else we could be. Ayder searched there for his family, for my grave, my mother’s grave, the graves of all the vanished Crimean Tatars.”

The silence of those narrow stone beds up on the hillside. Imagine the silence of a whole village emptied of people, the beds in the houses unslept in and stony cold. Safi wished more than ever that they’d never found the graveyard.

“But you weren’t buried there,
Khartbaba
,” she said.

“No. And it was our Karaim neighbour who told Ayder what had happened.”

“It’s a Karaim graveyard, and there’s one of their kenessas up on Mangup,” Mehmed said. “The Karaim people are so old no one knows where they came from. They’ve been in Crimea even longer than the Tatars.”

“Old Gulnara
Tata
tended the graveyard on Mangup, even though no one remembers who is buried there any more. She found my friend there, crying as he searched, and she told him, ‘They took all the Crimean Tatars away. Red Army soldiers, like you. Some people say they drowned them in the Caspian Sea, or took them to Siberia.’

“She went on cleaning the moss from the gravestones. That’s almost all that’s left of the Karaims in Crimea: their tombs, and the empty cave cities. ‘Sometimes it’s a good thing to have no real homeland,’ Gulnara
Tata
said to Ayder. ‘No one cares about us any more.’”

There was no sound in the little house but the paraffin lamp’s faint hiss. Everyone was listening to the story now.

“How did Ayder find you again?” Lutfi asked at last.

“He had nothing but his army uniform and his soldier’s papers. He went back to his unit, and a few months later he was sent west to the Front. He was with the Red Army when it marched into Berlin.”

Mehmed thumped the wall with his fist. “He was fighting the Germans when the Soviet authorities said he had betrayed this country to them.”

“He had always thought he was the same as all the other soldiers, wanting only to free their homeland and return to their families. But while he’d been struggling to stay alive, the Soviets had taken away his homeland and given it to the Russians,” Grandpa said. “After the war, he too was exiled to Uzbekistan. He kept on searching, and in 1950 he found me and my mother. His own family vanished for ever. He never even found their graves.”

S
chool was wonderfully familiar. As she stepped through the doorway into a green-painted hall smelling of cabbage, Safi felt for the first time in Crimea that she was in a place she knew. It was just like her school in Samarkand: there were the rows of faded black and white photographs of war heroes on the walls; there were even exactly the same old Soviet notices about Keeping Clean and Working Hard and Growing Up to Become a Good Communist. It was several months since the Soviet Union had finally collapsed and Uzbekistan and Ukraine had become different countries, but no one seemed to have told the teachers in Bakhchisaray that.

The children milling about and shouting looked pretty much the same too, although there were no Uzbeks with their close-cropped black heads. Safi watched them shyly, wondering which ones might become her friends. She couldn’t understand why Papa had made a fuss about Russian and Ukrainian girls, when back in Samarkand she’d gone to school with Russians and Uzbeks and no one had said anything. But the best thing happened when she got to her class.

“Safinar Ismailova.” The teacher read out her name rather disapprovingly. “You’d better sit next to Ayshe. No doubt you’ll get along.”

Safi went to her seat eagerly. She knew at once from the name that Ayshe was Tatar too.

Ayshe smiled. She had black hair in a long ponytail, and was wearing a beautifully pressed dress. “Where are you from?” she whispered.

“Uzbekistan.”

“Me too. We came to Crimea two years ago. My father managed to buy a house in Bakhchisaray.”

“Oh, you’re so lucky.” Safi felt wildly envious, and suddenly rather self-conscious next to Ayshe’s tidy dress and glossy ponytail. Mama had dug out her old school clothes from the container, steaming the creases out over the boiling kettle before hanging them carefully on the end of one of the beds overnight. The result wasn’t entirely successful. “We’ve been here just a few weeks. We’re still building our house.”

“That explains—” Ayshe broke off suddenly.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.” Ayshe had her hand up over her nose but now she dropped it. “Shh. We’ll get told off.”

Safi sat through a pleasantly easy maths lesson and half a history lesson before she realized. There was a smell in the air, a sort of damp, scorched smell. She peered under the desk, and furtively over her shoulder, and then her heart lurched as if someone had thrown a large stone at her chest. It was coming from her. In the stuffy warmth of the classroom, all the dirt and smoke from their horrible stove was oozing out of her clothes. Back at Adym-Chokrak she was so used to the smoke she hardly noticed it any more. Now it seemed like the most overpoweringly awful smell in the world. Safi’s cheeks and ears burned. She hunched down in her seat and wished for a disaster. A fire, a revolution, the end of the world – anything to get her out of there.