Dream Land (6 page)

“Seit Ahmet’s middle brother was a school-teacher by this time, with a wife from the village who had once worn gold thread in her plaits. But now their youngest brother was studying in the Zindjirli
medresse
. Seit Ahmet lay on the cool Crimean earth and pondered the laws of Islam: honour Allah above all, and His prophet, and next honour the family, the homeland and education. ‘What must be, must be,
inshallah
,’ said Seit Ahmet, and he rode away a third time to the wars.”

“So many wars,” Mama murmured.

“He fought for three more years, and he came back with a hole where a bullet had gone right through him. When he rode into the village he said, ‘I’m an old bachelor of thirty-eight; what girl will look at me now?’”

“Those heartless girls.” Mehmed nudged Refat again. Refat was in his thirties, and his mother was always on at him to get married.

“Wait till the end of the story,” Safi said. That was her favourite bit.

“Seit Ahmet sat at the edge of the freshly ploughed tobacco field, and he said, ‘I’ve fought alongside the Russians against many different countries, and all I’ve learnt is that none of them keep the promises they make to us. I’ve learnt that there’s nowhere in the world finer than Crimea, and there’s no one to love and defend Crimea but us Crimean Tatars.’

“‘And one day perhaps we’ll die for Crimea; but for the moment, how about helping me plant this field instead of sitting there philosophizing like a great lump?’ said a voice behind him.

“My father jumped half out of his skin to see a young girl, not eighteen if she was a day, in the field with a bag of seeds tied round her waist. When he had returned to Adym-Chokrak before, the girls had stayed at home, peeking out through their windows at the world and the handsome soldiers riding by, waiting for a husband to come courting. Yet here now was a girl out in the field frowning and smiling at him, pretty as a painting and bold as brass. Seit Ahmet felt his stern heart stirring, and wondered if thirty-eight was perhaps, after all, not so very old. Ah, what must be, must be,
inshallah
!”

“And that was my great-grandmother!” said Safi.

“She was a fighter too,” Grandpa said. “And sometimes she fought with Seit Ahmet, but never over the things that really matter.”

“What matters is Crimea,” Papa said to Mama.

Grandpa looked at him. “My mother knew that what really matters is kindness. One day I’ll tell you a story about that too.”

S
afi woke up to a strange new brightness. When she looked, the other two beds in the house, where Mama and Grandpa slept, were already empty. Safi pulled the quilt up almost to her eyes and peeked overhead, frightened that the plastic sheeting had blown away in the night. But the pale morning light was slanting in through the window; the boards fixed over it had gone. When she wriggled out of bed and went outside she discovered why. Lutfi was painting on them. The big red letters spelt out the unfinished message:
REBUILD OUR ANCIENT TATAR V—

Refat was working on a second board. His read:
RECAIM OUR CRIMEAN TATAR LAND!

“What are you doing?” Safi yawned and shivered, her toes curling in the damp grass.

“Put some shoes on,” Refat said distractedly. His broad, high-cheekboned face was anxious, and he was trying to put the missing ‘
L
’ into ‘
RECAIM
’ so it wasn’t too noticeable.

“Yes, but what are you doing?”

“Protesting,” Lutfi said. “Down by the pond.” He sounded pleased, probably because at last something different was happening in their monotonous valley.

“Put some shoes on first!” Refat called after her as she went to investigate.

There was a police car parked by the pond. Three policemen were standing in front of it. Opposite them stood Safi’s parents and grandfather with Mehmed, in tense silence.

“What’s happening?” Safi slipped her hand into her mother’s, and Mama jumped; she hadn’t heard her approach.

“Safi! Go back to the house at once.”

One of the policemen turned and spat on the ground. “You’d even bring your filthy brats into this. You should be ashamed.”

Papa made a sharp movement, but Mehmed put a hand on his arm.

“Our children fight our fight,” Grandpa said. “For our homeland, our country.”

“Poor kid looks half starved,” said another policeman. “Hasn’t even got any shoes. Bet you’d rather go home, wouldn’t you, little girl, instead of living here like gypsies.”

“Like beggars. Why did you have to come back? What was wrong with Uzbekistan or wherever you’ve come from?”

It was on the tip of Safi’s tongue to say there was nothing wrong with Uzbekistan; it was much nicer than this miserable Crimea. But her parents were listening. Instead she said timidly, “But we always lived here.”

She looked to Grandpa for support, and he said, “Crimea’s our home.”

“We Russians always lived here too. And it was you who betrayed us to the German fascists!”

“Traitors.”

“Safi,
go back to the house
.”

Mama fairly pushed Safi back the way she had come. Past the pond she met Lutfi running down. He’d nailed a post onto the back of the board to make a notice:
REBUILD OUR ANCIENT TATAR VILLAGE!

“Are they going to arrest us?” Safi asked anxiously.

“They can’t,” Lutfi said. “They’d have to arrest ten thousand of us, all over Crimea. There’s no law any more that says the Tatars can’t come back. They’re just going to have to put up with us.” He ran on, pushed the post into the soft chalky ground by the roadside and stood by it defiantly.

The police didn’t arrest anyone, but they didn’t go away. They sat in their car, and Refat and Mehmed sat down by Lutfi’s sign, and they stared at each other. Lutfi stayed with them for a bit, until he got bored because nothing was happening and went to make more signs with Ibrahim instead. Ibrahim’s notices were in Arabic.

“What do they say?” Lutfi asked.

“Get lost, Russian occupiers, I hope.”

“I don’t think that line’s in the Koran either…”

When two days later the police turned up again and sat there glowering, Mehmed drove Mama, Papa and Grandpa to Bakhchisaray to try to talk to the local administration. Ibrahim sat down by the signs, with a book to read. Refat pottered around the outside of the house fixing and tidying, for all the world like a proud housewife. The walls of yellow blocks were so high now that Safi couldn’t reach the top of them standing on tiptoe, and there were several windows. All of the men, even Lutfi, were so proud you would think they were building a palace. But every time she looked at it, Safi just thought about the house they’d left behind in Samarkand, surrounded by its bright sunlit garden, and remembered her own room where she’d actually undressed before going to bed, not like here where they all put on extra clothes to keep warm at night. She longed for that lost cosiness and safety, for a roof over her head.

Refat noticed her glum expression, and told Safi to go and explore.

“Where to?” she asked dismally.

“The caves. They’re famous, older than even the Tatars. Churches and mosques and kenessas, wine cellars and all sorts – a whole city.”

“What are kenessas?”

“Karaim places of worship.”

“Who lived there?”

Refat gestured vaguely. “Someone. Everyone… Ages ago.”

Since they had arrived, Safi had been no further up the valley than to the spring. None of them had. They’d been too busy building. Safi had hardly noticed the snowdrops withering away, and starry yellow flowers with pointed petals taking their place in the grass around the tents and
chaykhana
. Now she looked along the track doubtfully. Round the corner, she knew, she’d be in sight of the eye in the rock.

“Off you go,” Refat said encouragingly as he set off towards the pond. “Don’t get lost, mind. Take Lutfi with you.”

Lutfi was in a bad mood. Safi was the only one who knew why; he’d been hoping to go to Bakhchisaray as well, to post a letter he’d written to his girlfriend, Larissa, in Samarkand. Safi found him sulking in the house, reading over the closely scrawled pages.

“Maybe there’s a post office in the next village,” Safi offered, after a while of sitting with him in sympathetic silence. “You can always ask Refat.” She was trying to make Lutfi laugh; Refat’s daily letters to his mother, and her grumpy answers that she sent via friends in Bakhchisaray, were legendary.

“When am I going to get a chance to go there,” Lutfi growled, “when we’re so busy building this hovel?” All his enthusiasm for the house had disappeared. He aimed a kick at the wall, and a chunk of mortar fell out from between the stones.

“Larissa will wait for your letter; she won’t mind.”

“What do you know about it?” Lutfi hunched his shoulders away from her, ignoring her hurt face.

This was so unfair. Safi was the only one who knew about Larissa, and she knew because she’d carried messages between them and covered up for Lutfi when he was out with her instead of at the sports club or Tatar language classes. Papa and especially Grandpa didn’t approve of Lutfi meeting Russian girls; they wanted him to find a good Crimean Tatar girlfriend, and he hadn’t been allowed out late even with a Tatar girl. They didn’t understand love.

Lutfi seemed to realize he’d been mean, because after a moment he turned back to Safi and pulled one of her plaits. “What d’you want then?”

“Refat said you should come with me exploring up the mountain.”

“To those old caves?” Lutfi looked through his letter one last time, with his sad faraway face on, and then put it in his pocket. “All right.”

Along the track past the spring they came to a chalky path leading off to the right into the woods and up between two of the ridges of rock.

“Let’s go this way.” Safi was anxious to get off the track, away from the eye in the furthest outcrop.

Lutfi peered up the path sceptically. “I suppose it goes to the top. Have you noticed, Safi, that in all Grandpa’s stories about the village, he never talks about Mangup-Kalye?”

Safi pondered this as they walked into the wood. She knew all about the houses in Adym-Chokrak, the fountain and the mosque, the tobacco field where Seit Ahmet had met her great-grandmother; she knew so much that she’d always thought when they came back to it, she’d be able to make her way around as if she’d lived there all her life. But about where this path went to, she knew nothing.

“You’re right. And now the village has disappeared, but the mountain is left.” She glanced up at the slopes above – a spiteful look. “Maybe that’s why I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be here. It’s not fair that it’s still here.”

“Don’t you like it? It’s just a mountain.”

“It’s spooky.” Safi tried not to sound too serious, because it was silly to be scared by a mountain, she knew.

Lutfi gave her a quizzical look. “Nutty little sister. It’s not spooky. It’s just boring. This whole flipping valley is so boring: no one around; nowhere to go.”

It wasn’t exactly a mountain, Safi realized as they walked on. Their valley lay deep between high grey plateaux of rock. The spines of Mangup-Kalye were really more like the knuckles of four great fingers digging into the wooded slopes. The whole of Mangup was a clenched fist, and they were walking up between the first and second knuckle.

“Lutfi, what did Mama say about the police when she came back from Simferopol with the container?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you.”

Safi just waited. She knew he would; Lutfi was hopeless at keeping secrets from her.

“She and Mehmed got stopped by the police from Krasniy Mak.” That was the village on the other side of Mangup. “The same ones who are sitting by the pond now. They asked to see our residence permits, but they must have known we don’t have any. Mama told them we’ve applied in Bakhchisaray and are just waiting for a decision, but the police said we’d never get permission and we’ll be sent back to Uzbekistan by the end of the month.”

“They can’t send us back!” Along with the shock, Safi was ashamed to feel a nudge of hope. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go back to their lovely house, and Lenara, and Jemile… But they’d sold the house in Samarkand.

“Of course they can’t.” Safi thought Lutfi sounded slightly regretful. He had left behind lots of friends too, as well as Larissa. “They just want to scare us by making pathetic threats and sitting on their fat backsides by the pond. The Russians have been trying to scare the Tatars away from Crimea for over two hundred years, ever since they first invaded; they’ve always wanted it for themselves.” Lutfi kicked a stone, scowling. “Stupid police. Papa was angry with Mama for even being upset about them.”

“They never used to argue, did they?”

“No.”

Overhead the trees had tiny buds clinging to their smooth grey branches, and shining drops of water from the morning’s rain. The birds sang and sang, as if desperate to fill the silence, but they couldn’t; they only made it echo larger than ever. The path zigzagged steeply between tree roots and big stones padded with moss. The air smelt green.

“Even if I could send the letter to Larissa, she couldn’t reply anyway,” Lutfi grumbled as they climbed. “Where would she send it to? Poky Little Valley Miles from Anywhere Under a Mountain?”