Dream Land (16 page)

“This bit of the coast has a microclimate; that’s why the roses are out already,” Lena told them. “The sea’ll be too cold to swim in, though.”

Safi didn’t think so; she was used to the jade-green, hurrying rivers of Uzbekistan that stayed cold as mountain snow even in the heat of summer. She told Lena about them as they took off their shoes and paddled out into the unbelievably blue sea and climbed onto the rocks. The water slapped and splashed noisily around the rock edges, but the weed growing on them underwater swayed silently and smoothly in green glass, as if listening to a different, dreamy rhythm. Hundreds of tiny red and brown crabs scampered sideways into the cracks, and then as the children sat still, soaking up warmth like the sun-warmed stone, they crept out again. Lena’s cousins pounced and caught them, waving them in Lena’s face so that she shrieked at the sharp pincers snapping almost on her nose.

Her cousins were three boys, the youngest as small as Lenara, the eldest a year or so younger than Lutfi. When Safi unpacked the lunch Mama had given them and carefully divided it up to share, they looked at it in disgust.

“What’s that?”

“It smells weird.”

“Like dog food.”

“And that looks like a dog turd.”

Safi looked down at the slices of
kobete
and the
churchkhela
in bewilderment. Mama had baked the pie specially, disregarding the expense of the meat, and the lumpy, sausage-like
churchkhela
were treats all the way from Uzbekistan. After weeks of living on not enough pasta and rice, this was a feast. “All right, don’t eat it then. See if I care.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing.” Lena picked up a
churchkhela
. “You’re so unadventurous. I’d like to see what you’d do if someone dropped you in the middle of Uzbekistan. Run off screaming if you saw a camel.” She bit off the end gingerly. “It is a bit weird.”

“Are there camels in Uzbekistan?” The youngest boy gazed at Safi.

“In the desert. You see them in town sometimes. They dribble.”

“Camel turd…” The middle boy poked at another
churchkhela
disdainfully. Actually, Safi had to admit, it did look quite turdish.

“How did you know? Most people don’t guess what it is, because it doesn’t taste half as bad as you’d expect. People only eat it in really hot countries; the desert nomads use it for long journeys because it stops you sweating and keeps you hydrated.”

Lena stopped mid-chew. “You don’t mean…”

“It’s only from very young camels that are still drinking milk, so it’s quite rare and really expensive. It takes ages to dry – about five weeks – but it keeps a long time.”

Lena had her mouth half open, with a look on her face as if she didn’t know whether to choke or be sick.

“You’re kidding! That’s
disgusting
,” said the middle boy.

“When you’re trekking across the desert, one of those will keep you going for three days,” Safi added helpfully.

“Wow,” said the youngest boy, staring at Safi in total wonder.

“Present!” said Lutfi. He had crept up behind Lena, and now he dropped a scrabbling crab into her lap. Lena jumped and screamed. The crab scuttled away. Lena gulped and coughed a little. Then she put her hand to her throat.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “I swallowed it. I just swallowed it. Oh no.”

Lutfi gazed at her in puzzlement. “What’s the matter?”

“Go on, tell us, what are those really made of?” The eldest boy pointed at the remaining reddish sausages.

“
Churchkhela
?
” Lutfi looked at Lena’s horrified face, and at the boys’ wonder and disgust. “Oh, those. Yeah. It is a bit revolting, I suppose. But the crap is brilliant for dehydration; it’s got all these mineral salts in, so doctors really recommend it for hot weather. It’s from these birds in the desert in Uzbekistan, a bit like condors. There’s a whole tribe of women who live in the desert and all they do is collect up the bird crap—”

“You
pigs
!” Lena shrieked. “I believed you; I really thought … oh, I was nearly sick!”

Safi rolled on the ground laughing. The youngest boy picked up a
churchkhela
and waved it at Lena, crowing, “Camel turd, camel turd.”

Lutfi looked around with an absolutely innocent face. “What? What’s the matter? It’s actually really interesting. Anthropologists have studied this tribe of women and concluded that it’s the only one in the world whose migratory patterns are totally dictated by – by p-p-poo…”

“Pigs,” Lena moaned, hiding her face in Lutfi’s shoulder and pummelling him weakly with her fists.

Lutfi patted her back soothingly. “That’s right, let it digest; you won’t have to drink again for a week now.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you really did eat turds.”

Lutfi looked up sharply at this, but the eldest boy had already turned his back and was wandering away, kicking up the pebbles.

On the way back from the shore, Lena put her lips close to Safi’s ear and whispered, “Your brother is s-o-o-o gorgeous. It doesn’t matter that he’s Tatar, does it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…” Lena was twisting a lock of hair round her fingers. “You know. You’re Muslims and all. You know people say you must be mafia or something, to have enough money to build your own houses. They say you want to start a civil war here, kick all us Russians and Ukrainians out and have laws like in Arab countries. Don’t women have to cover their heads or faces all the time? And the men have loads of wives.”

“Don’t be so stupid,” Safi said. “You’ve seen my mother. She doesn’t cover her face, does she? And she’s Papa’s only wife. We haven’t got lots of money. I don’t know anything about Arab laws, and the whole point of the Tatar movement is that it’s peaceful.” She suddenly felt deeply miserable. “Anyway, it isn’t like you’re marrying Lutfi; what do you care about how many wives people have or where we get our money from?”

“Yeah, but you’re my friends,” Lena said. “Aren’t you?” She looked at Safi through the strands of hair. “So, what are those church things
really
made of?”

The sun was warm again, and Safi’s skin smelt magically of the salt sea. “Not telling you. You’ll have to marry a Tatar to find out.”

A
rkady Yakubovich spoke Tatar better than Grandpa. The inside of the room overlooking the park in Alupka was full of cheap, modern Soviet furniture and knick-knacks, but as they talked in the language of fifty years ago Grandpa felt as though he were sitting in his uncle’s cluttered workroom once more, surrounded by jeweller’s tools and velvet pouches of semi-precious stones, sniffing the smells of hot metal and coffee warming over the Bunsen burner, watching his uncle tease out the coils of wire with tiny pliers held in his blackened silversmith’s fingers.

“I’m Russian and my wife was Greek, but we were both born in Alupka and we always spoke Tatar together; she never liked Russian,” Arkady Yakubovich said. “Remember how we all spoke Tatar here, before the war? Few spoke it as beautifully as your uncle, though; he was a real scholar.” His sunken, pale blue eyes creased up in thought. “Everyone in Alupka knew him and his filigree jewellery. We thought he was writing a great ethnic history of Crimea in his spare time. That’s why the Soviets didn’t like him, but they left him alone because he had silver in his pockets, and the chief of the propaganda department enjoyed talking to him.”

“He was one of the only educated Tatars left in Crimea,” Grandpa said. “The purges in the thirties, the war, even the German occupation, somehow passed him by.”

“Well, the Germans were very polite, very educated. They had their own theories about ethnic origins, and the German commissar liked to discuss them with your uncle.”

“He was no collaborator!” Grandpa exclaimed.

“Did I say he was?” Grimacing, Arkady Yakubovich bit into a dry biscuit. “Many of us were disappointed in the Soviets, and believed German promises. I still remember the gingerbread the fascists gave the children. No Communist ever gave children such gingerbread. If we all had to answer for what we did during the occupation, perhaps most of us would hang from the lamp posts, Ismail
Aga
.”

It was soothing yet troubling to hear the honorific
aga
from a Russian man speaking Tatar, Grandpa thought. When he was last in this house he’d been no “older brother” to be respected, but a boy of seventeen, cadging a curl of silver for the girl he wanted to marry.

“Your uncle didn’t believe it when they came to take him away,” Arkady Yakubovich went on. “I remember when the soldiers arrived at his door in 1944, he just sat there like a fool saying it had to be a mistake. That’s why he took nothing with him. No silver, no precious stones.”

“If he had taken them, perhaps he would have survived in exile.”

They sat in silence for a while, two old men remembering the past. Then the Russian said, “Crimea was never the same after you Tatars left. The people who came to settle here afterwards were scum. Riff-raff. All they knew how to plant was potatoes. They dug up the orchards, filled up the springs and the seashore with concrete and rubbish. Like my neighbours. Good-natured enough, but idiots.”

“Yet they gave you this house.”

“More tea, Ismail
Aga
?”

Oh, these Russians, thought Grandpa. What I wouldn’t give for a proper cup of coffee. His fingers trembled with anger as he took up his teacup. But he was an old man; it was undignified to get angry. It was ridiculous.

“What’s that you said?” Arkady Yakubovich enquired.

“The Soviets gave you this house.”

“
Your
house,” Papa said. They were sitting in Mama’s candlelit
chaykhana
, surrounded by the cool, starry May night. Mama and Papa and the men were recovering from a hard day working with the tourists, and Grandpa was telling them about his visit to Alupka. “That was Seit Ahmet’s youngest brother’s house, wasn’t it? And he had no children, so it belongs to you now.”

“Yes,” Grandpa agreed. “That’s what I told him. I said, ‘My uncle died in exile, dreaming of the homeland, while you lived here in peace. By right this house belongs to my family, and you are still living in it.’ I said to him, ‘None of you, not one, has ever even said you are sorry.’”

“And what did he do?” Refat asked eagerly. Safi was sure he was thinking of his mother’s house.

Grandpa smiled faintly. “He asked me if I remembered the cow.”

There was a pause, and the hoot of an owl sounded down the valley like a plaintive question.

“Did you say,
the cow
?” Refat asked incredulously.

“No,
he
said,
the cow
.” Grandpa stroked Safi’s cheek where she rested against his arm, half asleep after her sun-filled, sea-filled day. “He told me about the people who lived in that house before my uncle. They were a wealthy Karaim family of landowners, with their own herd of cows. Then in the 1930s the Communists began collectivization, taking all land and livestock away from individuals and putting them instead into the Soviet collective farms.

“It was a crime to be wealthy, in the thirties. That family was stripped of everything it owned. The father was shot as an enemy of the people. All his cattle were collectivized, but there was one cow that didn’t agree with the concept of common property. She broke out of the collective farm barn and came stalking back to that house by the park, and the new owner had a hard job persuading the Communists he hadn’t stolen her. The next day she was back again, mooing for her dead master. It didn’t matter where they put her, behind what fences and walls, she always broke through.” Grandpa looked around at the listening faces. “Arkady Yakubovich told me how that cow woke my uncle every morning, mooing under his window at five o’clock sharp. I don’t remember it. I never asked how my uncle got that house. He got it nice and cheap, stolen from its owner. Something for nothing.”

Papa rubbed the edge of the table moodily. “It’s not the same.”

“So many wrongs have been done in Crimea,” Ibrahim said. “Decades of them. Centuries. I don’t know if we can put them all right.”

“What did you say to what’s-his-name, Arkady thingy, after that?” Safi asked drowsily.

“I felt like a fool with my anger. A silly seventeen-year-old fool. Arkady Yakubovich asked me who should be saying sorry now, and I said that if we all had to pay for what we did, perhaps there wouldn’t be enough lamp posts in Crimea.”

“Lamp posts?”

Grandpa pulled Safi gently upright. “And then he went to get more tea. That’s all. I think it’s time you went to bed.”

That wasn’t really all that had been said. When Arkady Yakubovich had come back with the fresh tea, he was carrying a roll of cloth. “I told you your uncle took nothing with him when he left. Nearly everything of value disappeared afterwards, of course, to fund our great Communist Party via a few private pockets, but a few things I managed to save.”

He unrolled the cloth. It was spotted with age now, but Grandpa recognized it immediately. Inside was the length of fine cotton he had once chosen so carefully, embroidered with the old Crimean Tatar patterns of the tree of life, the elegantly curved
nar
. And lapped in its folds was a small heap of tarnished metal. Grandpa untangled a pair of earrings like filigree stars, and a ring and bracelet linked with delicate silver webbing: a precious glove to adorn the hand of a Tatar bride.