Dream Land (20 page)

The gold thread was tarnished and scratchy. Safi picked at the embroidery, only half listening.

“And this is like life. The
nar
grows, and it divides. From each
nar
come stems, and from each stem falls a little drop, another life, a child. The child grows up, and the bud or flower grows a leaf. Safinar, listen.”

“But it’s not true.” The threads were starting to unravel beneath her rebellious fingers. “None of it’s true, and I’m tired of listening to stories! We’re not all living nice and neat in little squares inside this
nar
thing. We’re here and Lenara’s in Uzbekistan and Lutfi’s gone and—”

And I’m going
, she realized she wanted to say. She was thinking of Lutfi’s unrecognizable, angry face as he ran away into the trees on Mangup-Kalye. She was thinking of the clean, unburdened caves waiting in the mountain. There was only her cave, empty and free of stories and history and hate, all that weight of misery and pride that the Tatars seemed to drag around with them wherever they went. There was only Safi’s house.

“You kept telling us we were coming home, but this isn’t home!” she cried. “It isn’t where we belong and you’ve spoilt our family by bringing us back.”

“
Safinar
!
” Zarema said.

Safi couldn’t look at her, or at Grandpa to whom she was never disrespectful, who she knew loved her the best. She jumped up and stormed out of the tent – and bumped into Refat and Mehmed.

“Have you found Lutfi?”

But she could see right away from their faces that they hadn’t.

Not that day, nor the next. At Adym-Chokrak the Tatars were camped out behind a forest of new notices, but the locals did not come back. The streets of Krasniy Mak were empty. The bulldozer was back at the collective farm; the two cars and the drunken men seemed to have disappeared. The police were doing nothing.

Ravens soared high above the valley, turning and flapping in the hot bright sky. The rocks on Mangup-Kalye baked. The rubble of the house had already been partly cleared and Mama’s
chaykhana
propped back up, although it now leant at a slightly drunken angle. The valley simmered with angry, confident expectancy. The whole of Crimea simmered.

A low grumbling rose into the air, like the sound of the heat rising. It wasn’t a bulldozer; it was a black Volga car with an official number plate, approaching very slowly, a police car behind it.

Safi crept her hand into Mehmed’s, who was nearest to her. The cars halted a little way away from the pond. From the black Volga emerged, first, Lena’s father, looking hot and flustered, then a man in a shirt and tie and a very smartly dressed woman holding a piece of paper.

“It’s the chairman of the Krasniy Mak council,” Refat said. “What’s all this about?”

“Come to apologize for the inconvenience, I expect.
She’s
the secretary from the Bakhchisaray administration. I’d know her anywhere; she’s shut the door in my face enough times, the stuck-up tarty b—”

“Mehmed!”

“Sorry.” Mehmed spat on the ground with vicious disgust.

“There’s the little girl,” Lena’s father said to the chairman. To her alarm, Safi realized he was pointing at her. “They nearly killed her with that bulldozer. She jumped right in front of it.”

“She looks all right to me,” said the woman in a tone that said clearly,
Pity really
.

Refat took a threatening step forward. “What do you want? Come to pay Safinar compensation for what happened, have you?”

The woman’s mouth curled in a sneer. “What right do you think you’ve got to demand compensation? I’m surprised you even know what the word means.”

“We can’t pay compensation,” the chairman interrupted with a faint cough. “Your building was illegal. Those men were drunk from what we know, but we’ve been unable to track them down—”

“Unable to track them down!” Mehmed hooted with bitter mirth. “I suppose you can’t explain either how they came to take away the farm bulldozer and then return it again all with no one noticing?”

“Hrrrm.” The chairman cleared his throat. “Well now. We’re all civilized people; no one wants children to get hurt—”

“
Some
of us are civilized,” the secretary said, staring the Tatars down with her hard blue eyes.

“Tamara Vasilievna! Can I have the order, if it’s not too much trouble?”

“Oh, if you must.” With a look of shrivelling disdain, she gave the chairman the paper and sat back in the car.

“Asim Ismailov, Mehmed and Ibrahim Abdulaev, Refat Mamutov.” The man looked in the crowd for Papa. “This order’s from the Bakhchisaray administration. We had an emergency meeting after this, hrrrm, unfortunate incident. Your application for land has been reviewed, and in light of … of recent events the decision—”

Toot toot! To-o-o-t!
To-o-o-ot!

“The decision has been made—”

T-o-o-o-ot!
It was the familiar horn of the blue and white bus, but now it was blaring urgently. The bus flew round the corner and squealed to a halt. Andrei stuck his head out of the window.

“
Quickly
! Asim, where’s Asim? The police have Lutfi.”

“
What?
” Papa ran right past Lena’s father and the chairman. “Where?”

“The same thing’s happened at another squatters’ settlement. A fight started; the boys were throwing petrol bombs. The special forces turned up and they took a whole group of Tatars away. Lutfi was one of them.”

A growl went up from the crowd. Mehmed was already running for his car.

“Where was it? How do you know?” Papa had actually reached up to grab Andrei’s shirt and was dragging him half out of the window.

“Saw it,” Andrei said. “In Molodezhnoe, Zarema’s village.”

It was only now that Papa seemed to notice that Andrei had blood on his shirt, and one eye was closing up in a red-black bruise.

“Couldn’t stop them,” Andrei said. “Came as soon as I could. Others are on their way to Simferopol. Get in.”

Papa had already let him go and was turning to the others. “Molodezhnoe. Four of you in the back of the car.”

“No,” Andrei said. “There’s nothing there, the fight’s over. All of you, get in. I’ll take you to Simferopol.”

Papa paid no heed. The Tatars were dividing themselves between cars, their rage rising in a seething roar. The police were leaning out of their car windows, the village council chairman was hovering near his own Volga, holding his piece of paper indecisively. Through the shouting Safi heard him say plaintively, “Oh dear. Oh God. I thought you’d want to know that the decision is in your favour…”

“Where did they take Lutfi and the others?” Mama asked Andrei.

“We don’t know.”

Mama took Safi’s arm and pushed her up into the bus. “All of you. On the bus.”

“Elmira—”

“We’re going to Simferopol.” Mama’s voice was quiet, but it cut like a knife. “All of us. We’re going to demand Lutfi and the others’ return, and we don’t leave until we have them back.”

S
afi swayed on her feet, and felt Papa’s hand quickly tighten to hold her up. She was squeezed between Papa and Refat, Mama and Grandpa and Mehmed around her all linking arms, part of a great human chain. Refat yawned hugely, and then clapped his hand over his mouth, looking embarrassed. It could have been the most amazing bravado, or else it was somehow disrespectful to yawn when the whole of Simferopol had been barricaded like a city under siege; when facing the Crimean Tatars were lines of riot police behind shields, and soldiers with guns that might start firing at any time. And still no one knew what had happened to the twenty-four Tatars from Molodezhnoe, Lutfi among them, or when they would be freed.

Safi had told Lena that the Crimean Tatar movement was peaceful. But this felt like the beginning of a war. Anyone coming to join the cordon had to pass rows of closed-off side streets jammed with armoured troop carriers and blue and white striped buses like Andrei’s, except these buses were full of soldiers and police special forces in black uniforms and men in no uniform at all. The Tatars who made it through the police lines talked about the ones who hadn’t, who had been sent back or who had been beaten. But those who had been beaten got up and carried on; the ones who had been sent back just turned right round and came to join the cordon anyway. It stretched, sometimes fifty people thick, completely round the parliament building and down the street to surround the Cabinet of Ministers. No minister or deputy could get in or out without breaking the line, and the line would only be broken if the soldiers opened fire, or when the Tatars got what they wanted. They had promised that.

“Sorry,” Refat muttered, smothering another yawn.

A moment later, Mehmed yawned too. Safi felt her jaw muscles tingle and turned her face into Papa’s arm as yawny tears came to her eyes. They had been there all afternoon, all night, all morning, and now it was nearing evening again. Somewhere the Crimean Tatar leaders were negotiating with the authorities, but on the street no one came to listen to them. There were only the crowds beyond the police lines yelling insults and the armoured vans that drove slowly up and down, shouting orders through loudspeakers: “Go home, Tatars. Your action is illegal and will be broken up…”

Startled, Ismet let out a sudden wail and a sleepy “Mama!” Andrei jogged him tiredly, and handed him to Zarema. Andrei had stood with them all night, since the police realized that he was using his bus to bring Tatars to Simferopol. Then they’d taken the bus away, and Safi supposed it was parked down one of those side streets now with all the other buses that had brought the soldiers and the crowds to throw stones and bottles at them.

“They aren’t from Crimea,” Andrei said, frowning at the businesslike hatred of the crowd beyond the police line. “I don’t know where they’re from. They’ve been brought here specially.”

There were two other Russians standing with Andrei, a middle-aged couple who had approached them nervously that morning. They’d stopped near Safi, perhaps encouraged to see children.

“Our son was arrested by the police too,” the woman said. Her mouth quivered. “Three weeks ago. We still don’t know where he is. They don’t only happen to Tatars, these terrible, lawless things. We want to join you because you’re stronger than us, but what you’re demanding is right for everyone.”

Safi looked up at Papa. His face was stony. Zarema was nodding.

“Of course you can join us,” Safi said in a small voice, when no one else replied. Now the couple stood behind her, the woman smiling tentatively at Ismet.

A broken vodka bottle whistled over their heads and clattered to the ground beside Mama. The loudspeakers blared: “I repeat, you are breaking the law. Disband peacefully, or we will take action. This is an order.”

There was no face to talk to, no one to argue with. The armoured van, the rows of blank riot shields on one side and the sealed parliament windows on the other were like the bulldozer, a blade that moved in to crush them without even seeing them. Safi’s knees began to tremble. There was no one to rush in and save her this time, because Papa was squashed here next to her, with her family and the people she loved; they were all in the way of the bulldozer blade.

There was the sudden sharp tinkle of breaking glass, and Papa said, “Elmira!”

“How long must we stand here? I want my son back.” Mama’s eyes were burning. “All of them back, safe and unharmed.” There were red spots in her pale cheeks, and on her fingers where she had cut them when she picked up the bottle and threw it through the parliament window.

“Right,” said Refat. Loosing an arm, he removed his shoe and hurled it through the next window of the building.

“Whatever it takes,” Papa said over the shower of breaking glass. He was looking at Mama with astonishment and recognition and fearful love. “Let’s get these kerbstones up.”

Refat’s shoe came flying back out of the window, followed by a hole punch and a brass paperweight in the shape of a submarine.

“Who asked you here?” someone screeched piercingly from inside. “What right have you? You deserve what you get, vandals!”

And then the missiles began to fly and the voice was drowned out by the windows shattering one by one by one, right the way across the parliament facade. The shards glittered beautiful as silver fish in the sunlight, and the noise of their falling, the angry crowd and the soldiers lifting their shields and guns was like the roar of the sea in Safi’s ears. She didn’t want to die. There were a number of things she wanted to do first, like find out if Crimean bus drivers and perhaps handsome heroes would start chasing after her when she was fifteen, and get Ibrahim to teach her some of that lovely Arabic lettering so she could write secret messages to Rustem on her school books, and go out dancing until after midnight in the kind of dress Mama said she couldn’t wear till she’d finished tenth class. She wanted to meet Refat’s outrageously grumpy mother when she came to Crimea and was rude about everyone, and show Lenara the caves on Mangup-Kalye, and go swimming with Lutfi and Lena in the sun-warmed, glassy salt sea.