Dream Land (21 page)

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Oh, this is so scary…”

The noise of the sea broke up into separate sounds: shouting and clattering and, somewhere further down the line, shrill screams. Safi blinked. Scrambling towards her, hands up in the air, was Lena.

Safi’s hand was curled round a chunk of concrete. She wasn’t even sure how it had got there. Lena reached her and clutched her shoulders, panting. “Oh, wow, is this a riot?”

“What are you doing? How did you know we were here?”

Lena managed a magnificent snort. “Don’t you realize, the whole of Crimea’s talking about you?”

“If they’re saying we started a riot, we didn’t; we just want Lutfi back—”

“Silly, I don’t mean about you the Tatars, though they’re talking about that too. I mean the whole of Crimea’s talking about
you
, Safi.”

Something hit the back of Safi’s head. It didn’t hit very hard, but it was enough to mess up her careful plaits. Slowly she put her hand up to her head.

“After you jumped in front of that bulldozer and they thought they’d killed you…”

“They didn’t even see me.” There was something wet and sticky matted into her hair at the back.

“They were totally drunk, but they saw you all right; and when everyone in the council heard about what happened, they changed their minds…”

Safi brought her hand down from her head and looked at it. There was red stuff all over her fingers. She felt suddenly hot and sick all over; she thought it was a great flush of embarrassment at what a stupid thing she’d done, one girl jumping in front of a bulldozer; it was like all these unarmed Tatars standing in front of half the army and smashing windows: stupid…

A warm wet worm crawled down the back of her neck. Screams dinned in her ears. A man was running along the line, waving his arms wildly and ducking the police truncheons. “Stop! They’ve agreed; they’re bringing them back! All of them – we’ve got them back!”

“Safi?” said Lena. “You’re not listening. Safi, you did it! Safi…”

Lena’s face swung upside down and turned a strange shade of yellowish grey. There was a long torpedo-shaped object in front of Safi. She screwed up her eyes to see it better. It was a submarine, with curly lettering along its side that read … that read
A Sausage
, no,
A Souvenir from Crimea
. She tried to put out her hand to pick it up, and darkness shut down on her like a lid.

“Why does it say
sausage
, I mean
souvenir
? It isn’t a souvenir; it’s a submarine.”

“What? Safi! Hey, Safi…”

She opened her eyes. Lutfi was leaning over her.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice came out a strange croak.

Lutfi smiled lopsidedly. “Hey.” His voice croaked too. “What are you babbling on about, nutty little sister?”

“Nutty brother. You look horrible.” Lutfi’s smile was lopsided because his lip was twice the size it ought to be, and half his face was covered in bruises.

“Speak for yourself. You should have seen you, with half a window stuck in your head – you looked like a robot from Mars.”

Safi put up an experimental hand, and felt tightly wound bandages.

“Now you just look like an Egyptian mummy.”

Giggling made her head hurt. “What happened? Is the riot over?”

“It was a demonstration, not a riot. Half of Simferopol’s still blocked off but they’ve set up an emergency commission to deal with Crimean Tatar demands— ”

“Have I been arrested too? Or have they let you out?”

“We’ve all been arrested. Yeah, this is it, Safi.” Lutfi leant back, so she could see she was lying in bed in a dim room painted green. Mama and Papa were sitting squashed together on a chair near by. Papa had his arms round Mama and they looked very uncomfortable, but they were both fast asleep.

“Everyone? Grandpa, and Refat and Mehmed, Andrei and everyone?”

“Everyone.”

Safi gazed round the drab little room. It looked oddly like a hospital. Was this prison, and would she stay in it for ever? Or would they finally all be sent back to Uzbekistan, and was this room the last thing she’d see of Crimea?

“It’s not fair,” she said in that unrecognizable, croaky voice. “We did everything –
everything
– so we could stay in Crimea. I don’t want to go back!” She sat up and swung her legs off the side of the bed. Bright shapes danced in front of her eyes.

“Hey, lie down!” Lutfi sounded alarmed. “You can’t get up yet. I was only—”

“What? What?” Mama sat up so suddenly that her head banged into Papa’s chin with an audible thud. Papa yelped, overbalanced, and fell off the edge of the chair.

“Safi!” Mama exclaimed, untangling herself from Papa. “Oh, Safi, love, how do you feel? Don’t try to move! Where are you going?”

“Safi!” Lutfi hissed in an agonized whisper. “I was only—”

The door burst open and Grandpa hurried in, followed by Zarema and Lena. Lena? Safi put a hand to her bandaged head. Surely Lena hadn’t been arrested…

“You’re awake!” Lena squealed. “Safi, you heroine you, that bit of glass nearly sliced your head off—”

“I don’t want to go back!” Safi howled. “I don’t want to go to prison. I want to stay in Crimea!”

“Safi…”

“Whatever are you saying?”

“Shall I call the doctor?”

Grandpa sat on the bed beside her and eased her head gently against his shoulder. “Calm down, Safinar.” His big hand rubbed her back soothingly. “Calm down. Shh.
Bir zamanda bar eken, bir zamanda yok eken.”

“
Safi!
” Lutfi positively screamed under his breath.

Safi peeked at him out of the corner of her eye. He was pink with shame under the bruising. Finally realizing, she reached out and punched him on his knee, which was the nearest bit she could reach.

“Lutfi, you … you … you
liar
!”

T
he top of Mangup-Kalye was like paradise. Up you went and up, among gravestones, past ruins and through darkness, braving the ghosts on the way that held you back, the difficulties and fears and unsolved questions. There was clean cold water to wash them away, before you came out at the top and everything was changed.

Grandpa stepped out from among the trees, and the air and light burst on him like a great white parachute opening. It was so bright; it was so the same as it always had been that it hurt. Here at the top of Mangup you could see for ever, and all was clear. He clutched his chest and leant over, fighting to catch his breath.

“What’s the matter? Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t you go collapsing. If it’s not enough that my fool of a son dragged me up here to catch a glimpse of my old village…” Refat’s mother put her arm round Grandpa and squeezed tightly. She had the same high cheekbones and round black eyes as Refat, but while her son was the size of a bear, she was tiny, the skin under her eyes and between her fingers transparent as tissue paper. “I’m certainly not going to carry you, old man, so pull yourself together.”

“I’m going…” Grandpa murmured. “Going…”

“Where? You aren’t going anywhere! You can go to the devil if you like!” She dragged him out willy-nilly onto the plateau, onto the back of the hand. That strange, high green country was like an island in itself, closer to the sky than to the rest of the earth falling away on all sides in translucent layers of violet and blue, the almost-island Crimea fading further, further, until it met the silver line that was the sea.

“So where’s my village then?” Refat’s mother shaded her eyes and peered out into the distance. “I don’t believe my great lump of a son ever went there; he certainly never dug up our family treasure.”

Grandpa momentarily forgot the pain in his chest. “Do you mean to say there really is treasure buried there?”

“Of course there is. Some candlesticks, and the silver belt my father gave my mother as a wedding present. We buried it back in 1941, before those scheming devils of Germans arrived, to be on the safe side.”

“Six paces past the walnut tree,” Grandpa murmured.

“Oh well, I expect it’s long gone, like everything else.” Refat’s mother breathed in deeply. “Couldn’t steal the air, though, could they? Fill your lungs with it! Don’t tell me that air doesn’t make you feel better, old man.”

“I’m younger than you, Fatime
Tata
,” said Grandpa with dignity.

“And I bet you haven’t had four strokes like I have; after the last one they thought they might as well bury me in Uzbekistan, but I made sure Allah knew I wasn’t going to die so easily, not before I’d seen the homeland again. However much it has changed.”

“Mangup-Kalye hasn’t changed,” Grandpa said. “Everything else has altered, but Mangup lasts for ever. And to think I was afraid to come up here…”

Fatime patted his arm with shrewd kindness, and let him drift off into his thoughts. On Mangup-Kalye, things had been changing for so long that no one could remember what they were like before. Who could imagine that once there had been houses and wine cellars, churches and mosques and kenessas? A whole city, buried now peacefully under flowers.

“What happened here? Where did they all go?” Mama looked out at the fathomless sky, framed by flowers and pale stone. She ran her fingers over the cave wall, and a piece of rock flaked away into her hand. There were delicate silvery spirals in it, the stone ghosts of seashells or sea creatures. “Look, fossils! This must all have been underwater once. Why did we never come up here before, Asim? All that time in the valley, and I never knew. It’s wonderful.”

“I remember you called it a terrible mountain once,” Papa teased. “When you wanted to stay in Bakhchisaray.”

“Well, it blocked out all the sunlight then. It will again, in winter.”

“But by then we’ll have got the electricity lines extended out from Krasniy Mak, so it won’t matter.”

Mama raised an eyebrow. “By winter?”

“I think so. Now we’ve got permission, everything will go much faster. And Andrei’s worked as a builder; he’s already told me a few things we did wrong on the house the first time, and suggested where we can get cheaper materials.”

Mama held up a hand to Papa. “Oh, so Andrei’s helping us now, is he? Or rather, we’re accepting his help—”

Papa took her hand and pulled her out of the cave, into his arms. “Now, Elmira. I hope you aren’t accusing me of being prejudiced against Russians. There are some very good ones out there, but it’s still our country, not theirs.”

Above them a red triangle hung high in the blue sky, soared downwards over the valley, did an impressive loop the loop and then returned to hang, trembling slightly in the wind. Ismet squealed with delight and Andrei could be heard instructing Zarema. “Look, you have to pull on the left string … that’s right, not too far … no, not too much—”

The kite flew sideways and plummeted. Grandpa turned his head to watch it fall. “That’s how we watched the aeroplanes, zooming along the valleys when there was a war being won and lost and we could see it all laid out below like a map, like a game that had nothing to do with us up here, because up here was paradise, where nothing was ever lost…”

“Watch out.” Mehmed ducked. “Ibrahim!”

“Mmm.” Ibrahim didn’t take his nose out of his book. The kite missed his head by a fraction and Refat reached out and caught it before it tangled itself in a bush.

“One of these days…” said Mehmed, shaking his head. “You
were
reading a book when you fell off that ladder, weren’t you?”

“Mmm?” Ibrahim gently blew a fat furred bumble-bee off the edge of the page, looking up after it as it flew away. “Where did that kite come from?”

“Exactly.”

Ibrahim changed the subject. “So, Refat, when are you going to take your mother to Kermenchik?”

“I want her to see it from here.” Refat waved out at the distant valleys and hills. “The whole village is probably waiting to jump on us if we go back, to make us show them where the treasure is. It’s all Safi’s fault.”

“It wasn’t me!” Safi had come over for the kite. “It was Grandpa!”

“Yes, but you know we can’t be disrespectful to our elders.”

“Oh, all right then. Sorry about the treasure, Refat.”

“You’re our treasure,” said Refat. He leant back into the warm, thyme-scented grass and gazed upwards, heaving a contented sigh. “This is our treasure.”

“And it’s in our back garden,” said Mehmed.

Ibrahim turned the sunlit page. “‘Lord, build for me a home with Thee in the garden…’”

“‘…and deliver me from the unjust people’,” Mehmed finished. “Speaking of which…”

It looked like everyone had chosen to come to Mangup-Kalye this summer Sunday. Strolling along the plateau came a Russian family: the chairman of the Krasniy Mak council with his wife and two children.

The chairman glanced at them quickly and then away. Then he looked back, clearing his throat. “Good afternoon.”

“Afternoon.”

“
Salaam aleikhum
.”

“Lovely day,” said the chairman’s wife, nodding coolly at Safi. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” Safi blushed. The bandage had come off a week ago, leaving a small sprouting patch of hair that fortunately was mostly hidden under her plaits. It wasn’t fair: Lutfi had come out of all this with a bandaged wrist and bruises that made him look interesting and heroic, and she had to have this silly fuzzy bit where they’d shaved her head to put in stitches.