Dream Land Read online

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  1 The Air of Your Homeland

  2 Did You Think We Wouldn’t Come Back To Haunt You?

  3 Ghosts

  4 Where is our Village?

  5 Crimean Tatar Star Alley

  6 Seit Ahmet

  7 Who Lived There?

  8 Empty Beds

  9 You Can’t Live in Dreams For Ever

  10 How Khatije Joined The Partisans

  11 Is That Your Brother?

  12 Crimean Salt

  13 The Debt

  14 Have You Come for The Treasure?

  15 Keys

  16 Safi’s House

  17 The Other Side of The Rock

  18 Have You Ever Seen The Sea?

  19 You Never Say Sorry

  20 Surgun

  21 Must I Remember This?

  22 Why Do They Hate Us?

  23 Where is Lutfi?

  24 All Crimea is Talking About You

  25 Safi’s House

  Epilogue

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  For the Crimean Tatars

  Preface

  I once said to a Crimean Tatar friend how sad it was that such a beautiful place as Crimea should have seen so much warfare throughout its history.

  “But that’s why!” she replied. “Everyone wants to live here, and so they fight over it. If it wasn’t so beautiful, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  Crimea is a peninsula in the Black Sea, full of flowery meadows and mountains, vineyards and villages, beaches – and battlefields. It has been part of many states and empires, from Scythian to Khazar, Mongol to Russian. Rulers have come and gone, but for seven hundred years the Crimean Tatars have called Crimea home, although they have always shared it with many other nationalities.

  The Crimean Tatars are Muslim, and speak a language related to Turkish. They formed a khanate, or kingdom, in Crimea from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, when the peninsula was conquered by Catherine the Great of Russia. The Russian empire ceased to exist with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and in 1921 Crimea became part of the Soviet Union. At first, Soviet policy was to support the different ethnic groups it incorporated, but that soon changed to repression. During the Second World War, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deported all the Crimean Tatars. They were resettled far away in Central Asia and Siberia, and prohibited from returning.

  But the Crimean Tatars never ceased to call Crimea home. In 1986 a political process called perestroika began, which led eventually to the break-up of the Soviet Union into many independent countries. Under perestroika the laws were relaxed, and thousands of Crimean Tatars sold their houses, packed their bags and came home to Crimea.

  L.H.

  PROLOGUE

  I’d tell them but I’m not sure they would understand. I thought I was going to die when we took off. I, who made this whole journey the other way among the thousands of us dying. Then, it took us eighteen days, south through the Caucasus, across the Caspian Sea, casting out the bodies from the cattle trucks at each stop. And now it’s less than five hours: that’s all the time it takes to bring us home. It’s unnatural, this flying, but not inhuman. Inhuman is what they did to us fifty years ago.

  I never thought I’d live to come back. Yet here I am with my daughter-in-law and grandchildren, and behind and in front other Crimean Tatars, row upon row of us, silent with hope and dread. Together we are remembering the horrors of our journey into exile: the wails, the prayers, the shouts of the Russians as they cursed us for being traitors. Nearly fifty years gone, but I hear them still under the smooth humming of the aircraft pushing into my ears. The young flight attendant said it was the pressure, and brought round boiled sweets to suck. As if we were children to be comforted.

  My grandson, Lutfi, was insulted and refused, ignoring the attendant’s polished smile. He’s thinking about his girl, the one he believes we don’t know about. If I thought he’d listen I would tell him: leaving a girl behind in another land is not hardship, my fine young grandson. Taking your beloved with you into exile, and having her die in your arms: that’s real suffering. Pray Allah you never live through that. Safinar, my Safinar, you’ll never come home.

  Next to me, my granddaughter squeals and squashes her nose to the small oblong of window. “The sea’s finishing. I can see land! Is that it, Khartbaba? Is it?”

  I take her hand, leaning across her to look. I love my granddaughter Safi the best, although I will never tell her so. Down below is too far away for my old eyes worn out by tears and the salt steppe. I can make out blue and green, and patches of white that my grandchildren assure me are clouds. If they had told me in the cattle trucks that I’d live to see clouds from the top downwards, it is I who would not have listened.

  “Is it Crimea?” Safinar looks up at me, brimming with excitement.

  I can’t see but it doesn’t matter. That green diamond set in the blue Black Sea, that almost-island we left behind almost fifty years ago – I know it as well as I know my Safi’s face; all that time it has been engraved on my heart.

  1

  THE AIR OF YOUR HOMELAND

  Crimea, Ukraine: 1992

  At the bottom of the aeroplane steps, Safi thought she was not the only one wondering whether to kneel and kiss the ground. The passengers moved hesitantly, as if half expecting the firm earth to vanish, the way it does when you’re just dropping off to sleep and suddenly, shockingly, you’re falling. They had the look of people jerked awake – dazed, wondering, innocent. Grandpa bent and scraped up a few specks of gravel from the tarmac. “Home,” he said doubtfully, shutting them in his big palm.

  Home. It was what everyone was saying, the whole crowd off the plane from Uzbekistan, bundling bulging suitcases through the airport and into the shouting rabble of taxi drivers. Safi shrank behind Lutfi, but then there, miraculously, was Papa, bright-eyed and fiercer than ever, his face smudged with stubble and tiredness. He kissed Grandpa and Lutfi on the cheeks, hugged Mama, and at last his arm was round Safi, warm as she remembered. But then Papa seemed to be looking for someone else. Safi felt another pang of disbelief that Lenara wasn’t with them; they’d had to leave her little sister behind in Uzbekistan because she was still too young to come back. Papa didn’t know that Lenara stood nearly as tall as Safi’s chest now, that she could write her name, and she had a big gap where her front teeth had come out and the new ones hadn’t grown yet.

  For the last six months, Papa had been away from his family, sorting out their new home here in Crimea. Their true home, Safi corrected herself. Crimea seemed new and unknown, but really it wasn’t at all; it was the place where, as long as she could remember, she’d been told she belonged.

  Oh, but it felt strange. Squashed up on Mama’s knee in the back of the car, she gazed, subdued, at the grey town of Simferopol, full of strangers in dark coats. Papa’s old friend Mehmed was driving; he’d given Safi a kiss tickly with moustache, and at every red traffic light he turned round to smile at them. Lutfi was looking out of the window too, watching the girls passing by. When Safi caught his eye she gave him a secret sympathetic smile. That was another thing Papa didn’t know: nobody except Safi knew that her brother was in love.

  As the town gradually gave way to countryside, Mehmed slowed the car and pointed to a muddy brown field rising to low hills. “Look.”

  The slope was covered in orderly rows of tents and tarpaulin shelters, barely distinguishable from the grass and mud. Between the tents, lines of shirts and trousers and the occasional striped silk dress hanging out to dry made splashes of colour.

  “It looks like an army camp,” Lutfi said. “Except for the dresses.”

  A fine bluish haze of woodsmoke covered the camp, and its s
mell, mixed with that of roasting mutton and rice, reached them as they drove slowly past.

  “It’s us, the Crimean Tatars,” Papa said. “It’s a camp now but it will be a town, one day soon. Whether we get permission or not, we’ll build it.”

  They left the camp behind and drove on past orchards of low, leafless trees. The hills on the darkening horizon started to heave themselves into abrupt cliffs and plateaux, snow still lying pale in the folds of them. Grandpa gazed and gazed, until suddenly he said imperiously, “Stop the car.”

  They opened the doors and the early March air flooded in: fresh, quiet, with an edge of damp chill. Grandpa unfolded himself from his seat and stood on the grassy roadside, breathing deeply.

  “I know these trees.” There was still a touch of doubt in his voice. He said, more confidently, “I know those hills. I know this air.”

  Wanting to stretch her legs, Safi climbed out after him. She watched as her grandfather knelt stiffly and did what she’d thought about at the airport: he actually bowed and kissed the earth. When he stood up again, he had tears in his eyes. Mama and Papa and Lutfi had joined them on the roadside, and suddenly – Safi didn’t know how it happened or quite why – they were all hugging and talking and crying and laughing.

  From the car Mehmed watched indulgently before starting up the engine again. “Yes, it’s good to be where we belong,” he called, “but we have much to do to claim it back.”

  As if something in the air had made them slightly drunk, the rest of the journey they all talked like crazy.

  “What do you mean, claim it back?”

  “When will it be a town?”

  “Is it the same as you remember, Ismail Aga?” Mehmed asked Grandpa.

  “The hills don’t change. The soil. But where are the peach trees? And the villages…”

  “How does it feel, children, the air of your homeland?”

  “It feels like growing things. Different than in Samarkand,” Lutfi reflected. “You can tell it rains more.”

  “Asim, what about the permission? Have we got it yet?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We will.”

  “But, Asim, the children. You promised me.”

  Papa patted Mama’s knee. “I couldn’t do it any longer without you. I wanted to bring you home. I want you all to take part in this. You hear me, children?” He looked at Lutfi and Safi. “We lost this land of ours nearly fifty years ago. And now we’re claiming it back. I want you to see it and know it and claim it yourselves.”

  “You bet,” Lutfi said flippantly. But it was the wrong answer for Papa’s fierce excitement and he added quickly, “I know. I do know. And I … I’ll do my best.”

  “And you, Safinar?”

  Safi looked away from those unknown, cold hills outside. She whispered, “Yes.”

  Papa laughed and put his hands on each side of her head, tucking his fingers between her careful plaits. “That’s my girl. Oh, how I’ve missed my family! And now tell me about my other little girl. How tall is Lenara? How many teeth has she got?”

  It was dark when they arrived at Bakhchisaray, so Safi could see little of the old capital of the Crimean Tatars where long ago Grandpa had gone to school. She looked out eagerly for the mosques and the khan’s palace, but all she saw was ordinary houses with warmly lit windows.

  Mehmed turned off the road and they began a bumpy ascent up a dirt track. The same smell of smoke and cooking reached them, and the headlights picked out low humped shapes rather like haystacks.

  “Army camp number two,” said Mehmed cheerfully, braking. He switched off the headlights and everything outside turned black, sprinkled with dots of dim yellow light.

  “Another town in the making,” Papa said. “Out you get.”

  “Is this where you’ve been living for the last six months, Papa?” No mosque, no palace. As Safi’s eyes got used to the darkness she could make out rows and rows of tents and shelters made of plastic sheeting draped over sticks and planks. The points of light came from paraffin lamps, and campfires glowed. A radio muttered away quietly to itself, and somewhere someone was singing an old Tatar song.

  Papa took her hand, leading her down a line of shelters. “Most of the time I was camping outside the town hall, which was much more uncomfortable than here.”

  “Why outside the town hall?”

  “Because we were picketing, to demand that the authorities give us back our land by Mangup-Kalye, where your grandfather grew up. That land belongs to our family; it always has. You know that, don’t you, Safi?”

  Of course Safi did. She’d known it for as long as she’d known anything. She was a Crimean Tatar, and her people had lived in Crimea for centuries, until the Second World War when the Soviet government had deported all the Crimean Tatars and let more Russians and Ukrainians settle in their place. Safi’s parents, Lutfi and she and Lenara had all been born and had grown up in Uzbekistan. But that didn’t change anything. Crimea was her home and now, since perestroika, she and all the other Tatars could finally return to it.

  “But if it belongs to us, why do the authorities have to give it back?” she asked Papa.

  “Exactly. And since they don’t want to, we’ve decided to take it for ourselves. Soon you’ll see the house we’re building there, in Grandpa’s village. But for the moment we’re going to stay here in Bakhchisaray. Do you like it?”

  “It’s exciting.” Safi had felt sleepy in the car, but now the smoke and darkness and the twinkling lamps made her feel wide awake and fluttery with half-scared delight. Some of the shelters glowed from inside like great dim lanterns, and shadows slid enormously over the walls. People called out from the entrances, or stopped to shake Papa’s hand as they walked past, and they touched Safi’s head and patted her shoulders with quick warm touches, as if she were a kind of talisman.

  “Salaam aleikhum!”

  “It’s good to see children.”

  “Another young one to join the fight.”

  “To reclaim the homeland…”

  “Welcome home!”

  Safi ducked her head, not entirely liking the many hands muzzing the plaits Mama had tied for her all that way away in Samarkand, in another country now. She was glad when they reached their tents, piled high inside with quilts and blankets. They all squashed into one, for company, and Mehmed brought them green tea and bowls of hot rice plov.

  Papa sat with his arms round Mama. “I see you haven’t been pining away for me, Elmira. Look at you; you’ve got fat.”

  “It’s all the extra clothes!” Mama protested. “And a few lovely pieces of paper hidden you-know-where.”

  Tucked inside her bra and tights Mama was carrying money, everything that was left from the sale of their house after they had bought the air tickets. Safi knew it wasn’t as much money as Mama had hoped; in the last months since the Soviet Union had collapsed, everything – even houses – had lost value.

  “Oh well, in that case…” Papa murmured something into Mama’s ear, and she pushed him away with one of those sweetly indignant giggles Safi hadn’t heard since her father had left.

  Grandpa took out his pipe and thumbed tobacco into the bowl. The paraffin lamp fizzed peacefully. Outside, the voice was still singing. Safi didn’t speak much Tatar – she spoke Russian like everyone else – but she knew the words to this song. For the last fifty years it had been forbidden because it spoke of their exile, but almost every Tatar child she knew had been taught the words secretly.

  “Wherever I went, I found the scattered Tatars

  Without a single flowering rose to smell

  True wanderers in their own homes and gardens

  But these are secrets; who can you really tell?”

  It was a sad song, but the man’s voice didn’t sound sad at all, because there was no one now to forbid him to sing it.

  “The wind has tossed them to the rocks and mountains

  This imperfect world has become a grave for the Tatars…”

  Images from the long,
long day began to flick through Safi’s head. The sea spread out like a dull blue carpet far below the aeroplane, turning jade green around the crinkly Crimean coastline. She’d never seen the sea before. But she couldn’t hold it; the waves were flowing backwards, turning into the sway and jerk of the bus they’d taken to the airport; and then she was back before that in Samarkand, in their empty, strangely echoing house. The boxes and bags were piled up in the doorway and the rooms where she’d lived all her life looked huge, emptied of all their furniture and pictures and people: nothing to fill them now but dusty sunlight. As she turned to go into her bedroom for one last time, the floor suddenly gave way and she was falling.

  She jumped violently. For a second she was nowhere, and then she was wide awake again and she was somewhere. She was in a tent in Crimea, and her home in Samarkand was far, far away. It would always be far away now, because this strange new place Crimea was home.

  “Khartbaba, will you tell me a story?” She was addressing Grandpa, but when her voice came out plaintive as a little girl’s she looked slightly apprehensively at her father. She had turned twelve while he had been away; perhaps he would think she was too old now for bedtime stories.

  Papa only smiled and nodded, nuzzling Mama’s hair. Even Lutfi, who was quite grown up at fifteen, propped himself up on one elbow expectantly.

  Grandpa’s pipe smoke twirled out of the tent doorway. There was a rising moon over the camp now, turning the cloud edges to silver. “All right then…”

  Safi wondered if he knew that she wanted a story to fill the cold space inside her and make her feel homey as his stories always did, because he’d been telling them to her for as long as she could remember. She smiled at him, a smile that felt a bit wobbly. Of course he knew. Grandpa knew everything.