Dream Land (15 page)

Safi looked down. She was confused by this story. It wasn’t at all funny, and she wasn’t entirely sure if it was sad either. “So was your mother wrong to look after that pilot?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Grandpa said, “My mother never lost her faith in kindness. My war was the war for the Crimean Tatars, for our homeland, and I’ve fought it all my life since I was seventeen years old and they took me away from it. Your father’s fighting it now, Safi. And your brother. My mother’s was a different war. A war for kindness, and she too fought it all her life. When she cared for that German soldier and that Soviet pilot, she was hoping that somebody somewhere was doing the same for my cousin Khatije with the partisans. She hoped the same when I was beaten by the camp guards on the Hungry Steppe, and when my son, Asim, your father, was arrested and sent to prison in Uzbekistan. She’s dead now, but I know she hasn’t given up the fight.”

“Why?”

“Because in my heart I have the same hope for you. In the end, Safi, kindness is all we’ve got.”

“You mean like Andrei was kind?” Safi scuffed the ground with her shoe. “Papa doesn’t like him because he’s Russian; he’ll never like Lena either. I thought maybe you didn’t as well.”

Grandpa had said Papa was fighting a war for the Crimean Tatars. Was that the same war she was fighting, and Mama? Safi didn’t know. She was used to assuming her parents were right (except about not allowing her to go to the cinema with Jemile on Saturday afternoons, or get her ears pierced, or let Lutfi go out with Larissa). She’d never questioned the big things they’d told her all her life: that she was Crimean Tatar and her home was here in Crimea, and the most important thing she could ever do was return to claim it. Now she simply wasn’t sure any more. How could Crimea be her true home when she knew nothing and no one here, when people like Lena and Andrei had lived here all their lives? She wished Grandpa had told her a different story, one that was easier to understand and that cheered her up.

Grandpa stood up, wincing at the stiffness in his bones, and held out his hand to her. “Come along. Time to go back.” He knew exactly what she was thinking, as he looked at his granddaughter’s dissatisfied face. He wanted to tell her that she was growing up. But that was something Safi had to realize for herself.

You’re growing out of my stories and into your own, he thought. For all these years we Crimean Tatars have made our home in the past, in stories and memories. All the years fighting to return to Crimea were like steps up this path onto Mangup-Kalye, fraught with danger and excitement and fear, and at the end of it the promise of where we belong, just like as a boy I was running to my Safinar waiting for me. But at the end too is the future, where I don’t belong. Too much has changed; I’m on the wrong side of the rock. The future is the children’s.

A
week later, everything changed. Promptly on 1 May the sky turned high clear blue, the sun shone and the May day holiday brought tourists to the ruins. A few turned up at the pea-green pond in cars; more often they came walking, loaded with rucksacks and sleeping bags and guitars and water bottles. They were young, cheerful Ukrainians and Russians from Kiev or Moscow, and they were surprised to find the signs by the pond, the Tatar house and tents. Some of them turned back, or got in their cars and drove away. But others came on up the valley, and even more than their surprise was their pleasure at being able to buy cheap good food, and lounge drinking tea in Mama’s shady
chaykhana
. Now it was Papa who tried not very hard to hide his I-told-you-so look as he quickly put up another
chaykhana
. Mehmed drove to Bakhchisaray with the last of their money to buy ingredients and borrow every single Uzbek teapot and drinking bowl he could lay his hands on. Lutfi trekked up and down to the spring for water, Mama and Safi chopped onions and rolled pastry, while Ibrahim and Grandpa took turns frying
chebureki
. Refat took charge of the big pots of
plov
; he turned out to be a wonderful cook.

“If only I’d known that these last two months!” Mama teased him. “Just wait till all the girls find out. They’ll be queuing up for you!”

The money from the visitors trickled in steadily. But along with the tourists came more locals from Krasniy Mak. They put down cloths by the pond and laid out bottles of lemonade, home-made wine, bread and cakes to sell. That way they got to the arriving tourists first. Then Papa put up a new notice by the road. It was bigger than any of their protest signs and said:
TATAR HOME COOKING: CHEBUREKI, PLOV, UZBEK SPECIALITIES, TEA
, with an arrow pointing up the valley. More visitors started to bypass the Krasniy Mak sellers. After a day the notice disappeared and Lutfi found it floating face down in the pond.

“I told you they were worried about losing business,” Lena said. She’d come over to the valley too, not to sell anything but to hang around the visitors (“It’s so
boring
in Krasniy Mak; thank goodness for tourists”) and to see Safi, although Safi thought that trying to get Lutfi to talk to her was also a pretty big reason.

“We’ve got more right to be here than they have; this was our village.” Lutfi scowled at her. “Anyway, it’s their fault if they haven’t set up a proper business. It was up to us to start selling hot food and tea; Tatars have always been better organized and that’s why you’re scared of us.”

“You can see their point, though,” Lena said reasonably. “I mean, I know Adym-Chokrak was your village, but Krasniy Mak is our village and we’ve got to make a living too; and you did come along without asking and just set up here.”

“We have asked! My father’s been asking the pigging authorities for eight months to give us back
our
land, where we lived in
our
houses—”

“Don’t bite my head off! Honestly, Lutfi, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder the size of Mangup-Kalye. How would you feel if some Karaim or someone turned up and said they’d lived here before you and so it was their place and you had no right here at all?”

“Why would they do that?” Lutfi grinned suddenly. “They’re all buried in that haunted graveyard.”

“It’s not haunted.”

“Yes, it is. Only Tatars are brave enough to live near it; you Russians are too scared.”

“Yeah, right…” Lena threw a handful of daisies at him.

The sunshine had brought all sorts of new flowers out of the grass. Now the house and
chaykhana
stood in the middle of the prettiest, floweriest meadow, sprinkled with white petals from the blossoming fruit trees. The leaves of the forest on Mangup-Kalye shone and sparkled as they tossed in the breeze, and the ridges at the top gleamed sharp and silver. Safi often went round the bend in the track now to look at the eye in the rock. With the sky through it, it was the unforgettable blue of the tiles on old Muslim mosques in Samarkand. She watched the tourists walking up the track with anxious envy. She hoped none of them found
her
cave, her house. At least with their great rucksacks and guitars they’d be much too big to fit through the entrance.

“Hey, Safi.” Lena tapped her shoulder. “Have you ever seen the sea?”

“Only from the plane.”

“Well, my dad’s driving to Alupka in a couple of days to see my cousins who are here on holiday. If you want you can come too and we’ll go to the sea. What do you think?”

The sea… Safi remembered that ruffled carpet she’d seen from the aeroplane. “Oh, I’d love to. But I don’t know if my parents will let me.”

“Why not? It’s just for a day.”

Safi couldn’t explain. Lena wouldn’t understand that it was because she was Russian; she’d get all offended again. “We’re so busy here,” she said instead. “And they don’t like me going off on my own.”

“Lutfi can come too,” Lena said immediately. “Ooh, I’ll tell you what. There’s an old Russian man living next door to my cousins who speaks Tatar.” She regarded Safi with the triumph of a magician who has just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “Really. He’s ancient, and he’s always talking about what it was like when the Tatars lived here. You can meet him, and then we’ll go to the sea. There.”

“I can’t speak Tatar. Neither can Lutfi.”

“Then bring your Grandpa along,” Lena said, with a wave of her hand.

As they drove away from their valley two days later, past Krasniy Mak and further than she’d ever been in this direction, Safi felt her spirits lift. She sat beside the window in the back, with Lena next to her and then Lutfi. They went past sunny vineyards, the vines just starting to cover the lines of stretched wire, and then they turned onto a main road and before long there was the sea far below, a glorious silken expanse of blue. Lutfi wound down his window to let in the breeze, filling the car with the scents of salt and pine.

“It smells fantastic!”

“It’s ozone,” Lena said wisely. “Really good for you. The Russians invented it and brought it to Crimea.”

“Oh, don’t start that again!”

But Lutfi laughed and pinched Lena. She pinched him back. With every minute they left Mangup-Kalye behind, Lutfi seemed to get happier and less interested in putting Lena down. He was almost his old careless self, and it struck Safi how he must hate the valley as much as she did. Lutfi had never gone to school at all in Crimea, never had a chance to make new friends. He was always stuck with the men, building. Poor Lutfi didn’t even know about the cave on the plateau that she escaped to as often as she could. She thought she would tell him about it, when she got a chance.

Now she leant forward and put her hands on Grandpa’s shoulders. Despite Papa’s good mood, now that they had money again and could buy materials to continue building, he’d frowned when Safi had told him about Lena’s invitation. Then Grandpa had decided to come to meet the Russian neighbour who could speak Tatar, and there had been no more discussion after that. Safi secretly thought that the real reason Grandpa had insisted was not because he wanted to meet the old man, but because he knew how much she wanted to see the sea.

“Thank you,
Khartbaba
,” she whispered in his ear.

Grandpa reached up and patted her hand. “We should thank Igor Petrovich.”

“Don’t mention it. Always glad of the company.” Lena’s father took both hands off the wheel to wave their thanks away. “Whoops!” The car swerved across the road and he corrected it hastily. He was brown and freckled like Lena, but much fatter. “So how long is it since you were last in Alupka?”

“Nearly fifty years,” Grandpa answered in a hollow voice.

“Such a long time. I expect you’ll find it’s changed a lot. It used to be a wonderful place, when the Communists kept it in order. Everything was affordable; everything was organized. We all had regular holidays; there were none of the shortages we’ve got now, the power cuts, the unemployment. These last years since perestroika, Alupka’s gone to seed, like the whole of Crimea. Like the whole damn country.”

“Blah blah blah,” Lena muttered under her breath.

“It’s because of perestroika that we could return to Crimea,” Lutfi said argumentatively from the back seat.

“Blah blah blah.” Lena rolled her eyes.

“Do you still have any friends or relatives in Alupka?”

“They have all gone,” Grandpa said in the same hollow voice. “Almost fifty years ago my father’s brother lived in a house by the park. He was exiled to Kazakhstan.”

“Honestly, Papa, you’re asking really stupid questions,” Lena said, hitting him lightly on the head. “You know all the Tatars were deported, so how could anyone still be there? Use your brain for once.”

Safi was rather fascinated; she would never dream of behaving like this with her own father, and she wondered naughtily whether this was one of those “Russian morals” Papa was so opposed to. Lena’s father at any rate appeared used to such treatment.

“That’s right, that’s right,” he said meekly. He didn’t seem to know quite what to make of his passengers; Safi kept catching his eyes in the mirror dubiously studying her and Lutfi sitting on either side of his daughter. “Well, you’ll love talking to Arkady Yakubovich. Amazing old fellow, memory like a book; he can jabber away in that language of yours, but since his wife died he’s got no one to speak it with. He lives next to the park too, by the way.”

He didn’t just live next to the park. He lived in the pretty pink-painted house where Grandpa’s uncle had lived.

Grandpa was almost speechless. He got out of the car and stared, muttering, “It’s the same. The same…”

From one doorway a bundle of people as fat and freckled as Igor tumbled out, laughing and shouting. From another a very old man emerged. He looked disapprovingly at his noisy neighbours, and then he saw Grandpa beside the car, staring at the house. Very slowly, his face split into an astonished smile. “
Salaam aleikhum
,” he said. “
Khosh sefa keldiniz!
”

They left the two old men together, talking happily in Tatar over tea and biscuits, and went with Lena’s cousins down to the sea. Alupka was full of roses, falling from lamp posts and over walls in extravagant cascades. Safi had almost stopped believing in the Crimea of her grandfather’s stories, but the roses were as drowsily sweet-smelling as he had always described them. The little painted, peeling houses of the town were so jumbled together they looked as if they were about to slide into the sea below, but the cats on the windowsills and balconies lounged and stretched unconcerned.