Dream Land (22 page)

The family walked on quickly, almost bumping into Lena as she popped out of a hidden cave entrance. She looked disappointed.

“I thought it was Lutfi. We were playing hide-and-seek with my little cousin, and I guess he got bored since he never came to find us—”

“Gotcha!” Lutfi jumped out from behind a bush and grabbed Lena one-handed. Shrieking, she tore herself away and dashed off along the plateau.

“She’s hard work, that girl.” Lutfi sat down next to Safi. “Look at that view. Just look…” His voice tailed away and he went quiet, gazing.

“You’ve never been up to the top of Mangup before, have you?” Safi scrunched the plants under her hand, and the clean scent of them was suddenly dizzying. “Isn’t it fantastic?”

“I’ve been up on the other side,” Lutfi said. He pointed out over their valley to where the lower cliffs rose. “That’s where I was when they knocked the house down.”

Safi looked at him sideways. Lutfi was concentrating on picking up the tiny green-gold crab apples, no bigger than acorns, that scattered the grass.

“There was nothing I could do. I never saw you.”

“Oh, well…” Safi blushed again. “I didn’t do much.”

“That’s not what everyone else thinks.”

“Anyway, the next house we build will be much better, now we’ve got rights to the land,” Safi said encouragingly.

“And everything’s going to be all right,
inshallah
.” Lutfi had that light that wasn’t sunlight in his green eyes. “You haven’t heard the news, I suppose. Lots of the Tatars are talking about it. The Chechen Republic has split, and the Russians are saying they’ll go to war with Chechnya.”

“To war?” The Chechens had been deported at the same time as the Tatars, but they had been permitted to return home years ago. Safi had heard rumours that Chechnya, now part of Russia, wanted independence, but she hadn’t paid much attention.

“You see. You think just because we get to build our house, everything’s all right. The Chechens are Muslims like us from the former Soviet Union, and the Russians are going to war with them just like one day they’ll be at war with us.”

Safi sat quiet. The sun poured into their skin, their bones; it was like sitting under a great healing hand. Lutfi knew what she wanted to say: they had Crimea, they had Mangup-Kalye, this garden with God, and it was their home, and wasn’t that enough to think about for now?

After a moment, he put an arm round her, breathing in deeply the flowers and the air and the huge sunlit space. “Yeah, it is fantastic. Nutty sister.”

“Hey, lazybones!” Lena peeked out from a tangle of branches close by. She waved and then ducked back, giggling.

“You’re not really playing hide-and-seek. How old are you?”

“Oh, she just wants to get me into the bushes.” Lutfi stuffed a handful of miniature apples down the back of Safi’s dress. She was so surprised she screamed in true Lena-style.

“Hey!” A hail of the tiny golden apples came flying out of the thicket, bouncing around their heads. Safi suddenly couldn’t stop laughing.

“I’m coming to get you!” Lutfi dived in, roaring. The bushes shook violently, and muffled shrieks came out of them. More crab apples rolled down the slope towards Safi. She waited, but Lutfi didn’t come out again.

She wasn’t sure she minded. Mehmed and Ibrahim and Refat were still sitting with their legs dangling over the edge of the plateau, contentedly annoying one another. Papa and Mama were perched on a ridge of broken wall overgrown with pink and yellow flowers. Mama’s head was on Papa’s shoulder. Soppy parents. Zarema was flying the kite with Ismet and Lena’s younger cousins; Refat’s mother was talking energetically to Andrei about something, no doubt being rude, and he was listening and laughing…

Quietly Safi turned away and began to step over the springy, flowery grass, past all the visitors enjoying the perfect summer day, the caves echoing with cheerful voices. She wanted to be alone for a while.

The sun had gone from her cave, but left its sweet warmth behind. The candle was on the shelf, and there was a slightly wilted bunch of flowers lying on the windowsill. Safi sat, letting the curve of the bench hold her comfortably, as it must have held all those hundreds of other people who had passed through leaving scarcely a trace: a smoothed edge of an alcove, a hollow in the stone, a handful of flowers, an apple core.

There were slow, fumbling footsteps outside the window, where as far as she knew there was only a hundred-metre drop. A big hand reached round the edge of the window, an arm, and then her whole grandfather followed. He stepped carefully over the sill and stood in her cave.

“How did you get here?” Safi leant out of the window. There was a narrow ledge she’d never noticed, and a very steep, worn flight of steps curving up the outside of the cliff. “I thought there was only one way in.”

“Through the hole in the ceiling? I was always too big for it.” Grandpa put his hand gently on the pillar. “Safi’s house,” he said.

“How did you know? Oh! Did you come here when you were young and living in Adym-Chokrak?” Safi felt slightly affronted. This was
her
cave. “You never told me any stories about it.” She fell silent, looking at her grandfather’s face. He ran his hands slowly and lightly over the roof, round the alcoves, the way you might touch something delicious – rose petals, the silken lip of a shell – to see what it felt like. “Why did you call it Safi’s house,
Khartbaba
?”

“Because that’s its name. Here on Mangup nothing changes; nothing is lost. Can you reach, Safi?”

“Reach what?” Safi knelt up on the seat. The alcoves, she only noticed now that Grandpa showed her, had faint traces of paint on the sides: sky blue, scarlet and tawny yellow, too faded to see what the patterns had once been. In the corner of one was a crack in the stone.

“In there. You’ve got small fingers, like hers.”

“There might be spiders.” But she was too curious to really care. She inched her fingers into the crack, and felt a cold, sharp edge. “There is something in here…”

Carefully she eased it out and it fell into her hand: a rusty black metal key, with sharp flanges and the end shaped like a heart.

“Is that what you were looking for?”

Grandpa felt around in his pocket, and dropped into Safi’s hand a second key. It was slightly larger, but it was of the same dark metal, with the same heart-shaped handle.

“What do they open?”

“Safinar’s father was a locksmith. He made both of them, the keys to our houses.”

“Which houses? Who’s Safinar?” It was funny talking about someone with the same name as herself. “Is this her house?” Safi sat back down on the seat, hugging her knees expectantly, warming the keys in her hand.

“Safinar lived in the village on the other side of Mangup-Kalye, near where Krasniy Mak is now. She used to bring the cow up here to pasture in summer, where the grass is sweetest.”

“I’ve seen the cow,” Safi said eagerly, but Grandpa went on as if he hadn’t heard.

“She locked her house and came up here all day, with an apple and a piece of pie wrapped in a bit of paper. We’d meet in this cave. In Safi’s house. From up here we watched the war going on, and tried to spit on the planes flying down the valleys. We sat on this bench and looked out at Crimea. We were going to be married, when the war was over and we were old enough.”

Safi waited. It wasn’t like one of Grandpa’s usual stories.

“Then what happened?”

“We sat in this cave and we watched the soldiers come for us on a May morning in 1944. I was seventeen, and she made my world go round.” Grandpa’s face seemed to crack. “It was a long time ago.”

“Did she go with you, into exile?”

“She didn’t have to. She was only half Tatar; her mother was Russian. Safinar could stay.”

“Maybe she’s still here,” Safi said gently. “You could try to find her. I’m sure she remembers you…”

“Here on Mangup nothing changes; nothing is lost. What a silly old fool I am, eh, Safi?” He put his hand on her head, smoothing her plaits. “Not much of a story, is it? It’s time you made your own stories. Now I’ve got to get back up these steps for the last time.”

“Be careful.”

Anxious, she leant out to watch him stepping with surprising lightness up the worn staircase and up, up out of sight, into the blue.

B
ir zamanda bar eken, bir zamanda yok eken.
That means, “sometime it was, or sometime it wasn’t at all.” It’s the proper way to start a story, Grandpa told me
.

He told me it’s time I made my own stories, but he’s left me with an unfinished one. I’m still sitting in this cave, in Safi’s house that isn’t really mine after all; it belongs to another Safinar, and I don’t think he told me the truth. Or he let me think that the end was different. She went with him into exile, I’m sure of it. How else would Grandpa know her key was still here? Safinar went with him into exile, even though she didn’t have to, and she died on the way. Grandpa didn’t want to tell me that, because all his stories are too sad, and if I’m going to make up my own, I want them to be happier
.

But at the same time, you can’t really lie about the past, can you? Or the future. I can’t pretend that everything’s going to be all right now. We got permission to rebuild Adym-Chokrak, but at Molodezhnoe they’re still squatting the land, and at all those other Tatar villages. We Tatars still can’t get jobs in Crimea, we can’t even get treatment in hospital. There’s going to be a war in Chechnya and maybe Lutfi will go away and fight it, or maybe he’s right, one day there’ll be a war here too. How many more bulldozers will we have to jump in front of before things come right, hey, Safinar? Safi’s house! Listen! What happened here? What happened to all the people who lived here, and built houses and told stories? What’s going to happen to us?

I know you’re listening. You’re still here, aren’t you, Safinar? I met your cow. It was you who put the ivy over the path by the cemetery, who took my hand and led me onto Mangup-Kalye. You showed me your house. Maybe you went with Grandpa into the cattle trucks and died there; or maybe you went to, I don’t know, Moscow, and studied to be a … a brain surgeon and married one of your patients who fell in love with you on the operating table
. Bir zamanda bar eken, bir zamanda yok eken.
There, I’ve made up my first story
.

But up here on Mangup-Kalye everything changes; nothing is lost. You’re still here in Safi’s house, looking after us
.

Or maybe that bit of glass in my head really has made me go a bit nutty
.

I look at the keys in my hand, their black iron warmed by my skin. They belong together. Kneeling up, I push them both carefully back into the alcove. That’s the end of their story, to lie together hidden safe in the stone, until someone finds them and wonders what they are. But our story’s just beginning
.

I pull myself up again through the hole in the corner of the cave, up onto the plateau, onto the top of our world, our paradise. It’s all golden up here now as the sun sinks down. You never saw so much gold, filling the valleys, gilding the hills; and the distant sea’s shining brighter than stars. I run to where they’re waiting for me, my family and all the others, in a row like the Crimean Tatar Star Alley, with a space at the head for Grandpa, and a space at the end where Lenara should be. I can’t wait for her to come. I want to show her everything: Mangup-Kalye and our new house and school and the sea
.

“Where have you been, love?” Mama gives me a slightly anxious kiss. She’s all warm and soft from the sun. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

“I’m fine. I’ve been exploring.” I will show them Safi’s house, but not yet, not quite yet
.

“Isn’t this Mangup-Kalye the most wonderful place? Don’t you think Lenara will love it?”

So Mama has been thinking about Lenara too
.

“Of course she will,” I say. “Let’s build our new home as quick as we can so she can come over. How long will it take this time?”

Papa laughs at me. He’s bright-eyed and fiercely happy. “Not long. After all, we’ve had some practice.”

All the characters in this book, except Catherine the Great, Joseph Stalin, Soviet Security Chief Lavrenty Beria and First Deputy People’s Commissar for State Security Bogdan Kobulov, are fictional. The things that happen to them, however, are closely based on real events.

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea in 1944 is documented in telegrams sent to Stalin by Kobulov and his associates. There is no published official documentation concerning the fate of the Tatars from the Arabat Spit; the story in Chapter 21 is based on eyewitness accounts published in the Crimean Tatar newspaper
Yani Dunya
.

The verses in Chapter 1 are from
Tatarligim
by Shevki Bektore, and in Chapter 20 from Numan Chelebi Jihan’s
Ant Etkenmen
, which has been adopted as the Crimean Tatar national anthem. Chelebi Jihan (1885–1918), poet, lawyer and nationalist, was the first head of the Crimean Tatar National Directorate, which governed Crimea for a few months between 1917 and 1918. He was arrested and shot by Bolshevik Black Sea Fleet sailors. Shevki Bektore (1888–1961) developed the first Crimean Tatar alphabet based on Arabic script; he was arrested in the 1930s for nationalist activities and spent years in Soviet prison camps before emigrating to Turkey in the 1950s.