Dream Land (3 page)

“The soldier’s hand with the pistol began to tremble. ‘Who are you? I’ll shoot!’

“I was struck with a sudden amazing idea. We Crimean Tatars spent all day breaking up and draining that salty plain, ready for a cotton plantation. Our clothes, our faces and hands were completely covered with salt dust, and in that fantastic moonlight I must have glowed white as a ghost. I lifted my arms and groaned a third time as hideously as I could, and intoned, ‘Did you think I wouldn’t come back to haunt you?’

“‘H-haunt me?’

“‘Yes, you! Look at your hands. Look at the blood on them!’

“The soldier screamed, ‘Go away! Who are you? Where did you come from?’

“‘You know who I am,’ I said sepulchrally. ‘And I came from … there!’ I pointed at the coffee grinder. ‘I am the ghost who will never let you go. We Crimean Tatars never give up, not even if you kill us!’

“Oh, how that soldier cried. Like a baby. ‘Leave me alone, God help me!’ And he ran away from me as fast as he could.

“‘We
never
give up!’ I shouted after him. Then I couldn’t shout any more for laughing. That moon, it went straight to my head. I picked up the coffee pot and grinder, went back to the camp, got over the fence and under my blanket, and slept like the dead until next morning.”

Lutfi was laughing too. “What happened to the soldier?”

“He never came back.” Grandpa tapped out the ash from his pipe and returned it to its little pouch. “The next day, a shipment of corn arrived.”

“So you didn’t starve after all.” Safi was glad. It was a funny story, but sad too. “But,
Khartbaba
, who were you the ghost of?”

Grandpa sighed. “Oh, Safi. There were so many ghosts to choose from, in those terrible days. Too many.”

“Isn’t that what we’ve come home for?” Papa said suddenly. “To lay them to rest.”

A
path led from the high, stony field where the Tatars were going to build their houses, down into Bakhchisaray. From up here the town was a jumble of rooftops, spiked with two tall mosque minarets beside the khan’s palace. Safi waited at the top of the path, watching the short, upright figure of her grandfather toil up it towards her, and hopping with impatience. She was longing to hear about his visit to the town. Years ago, when he was a boy, he had walked there every day to lessons in the old Zindjirli
medresse
, and then to the fountain where the boys and girls loitered away each long, rose-scented sunny afternoon. It was always sunny in Grandpa’s stories about Crimea.

Safi’s smile as Grandpa reached her was a little puzzled, a little disappointed. She held the umbrella up to cover his head in its round black sheepskin
kalpak
, and asked, “
Khartbaba
, did it often rain like this when you lived here?”

“Real Crimean mud,” Grandpa replied, lifting a shoe ponderous as a moon boot with clagging soil.

The rain had hardly stopped since they’d arrived two days ago. It was a fine, gauzy rain such as Safi had never seen before, and she might have enjoyed it had they not been living in a tent. Water ran in rivulets down the canvas and pooled around the tent pegs. The walls sagged and ballooned inwards with damp. The ground, churned up by digging and building work, turned to thick clayey mud that was impossible to clean off their clothes. The campfires spat and smoked sulkily; even the bread was soggy. It was miserable. Safi was looking forward to hearing about Grandpa’s morning to remind her of all the stories she loved and cheer herself up.

“Did you go to the khan’s palace? What about the fountain?”

“All the fountains have gone. Every single one.” Grandpa took the umbrella and held it over them both, tucking Safi’s hand into its accustomed place under his arm. “And the khan’s palace is a museum, but it was all closed up. I felt like a ghost. You remember the smell of coffee in the Hungry Steppe?”

“Of course. From our coffee grinder.”

“That smell was real; it took me home. And now that I really am home in Crimea…” He couldn’t carry on.

“What,
Khartbaba
?” Safi prompted. “Did you smell coffee in Bakhchisaray, from the cafes?”

“All the cafes have gone too. The smells, even the sounds have changed. Before, in the mornings, you’d hear the clatter of apprentices taking down the shutters from the workshops, calling to the customers. The mornings were busy, but the afternoons were slow and lazy and full of the click of back-gammon pieces from the coffee houses. And Tatar spoken everywhere. Now there’s only Russian, Russian, Russian. In those days, of course we knew Russian too but everyone in Crimea spoke Tatar – Greeks, Armenians, Russians, Karaims, it didn’t matter. Now no one remembers our language.”

He didn’t mean to sound accusing, but Safi hung her head. She’d gone to classes with Lutfi, but Tatar had seemed hard to learn and, to be honest, a bit pointless in Uzbekistan, where nearly everyone spoke Russian.

Grandpa was still far away in his memories. Bakhchisaray had changed so much, he could almost doubt that the clean, lively town he remembered had ever existed. It was as if he had dreamt the whole place.

“And what about the
medresse
?”

Grandpa looked down at her. “You tell me about the Zindjirli
medresse
, Safi.”

He had told her a hundred stories about it. Grandpa’s father’s brothers, and
their
fathers and brothers, had studied there; it was the oldest Muslim Tatar school in Crimea. “It was built by Khan Mengli Giray,” she said promptly. “And he hung three chains over the doorway, so the students had to bow their heads when they went in.”

“That’s right. Three chains hung long ago to suspend the Zindjirli
medresse
like a golden box from paradise. Those chains are still there, and still you must bow your head, but the people passing under them are like ghosts.”

“What do you mean?” Safi’s eyes were round.

“It has a high wall around it now, with a padlocked gate and a guardhouse.”

“And what’s inside?”

“Inside, when I looked through the gate, I saw such people…”

Despite the rainy weather, there had been several men and women wandering in the
medresse
grounds. Most of them wore very shabby clothes, or even pyjamas. It was hard to tell what they were doing. They had an abstracted air of trying to remember something, as if they’d been sent on an errand but forgotten what it was halfway through, and now weren’t quite sure where they were or why.

“I couldn’t understand it,” Grandpa told Safi. “Who were they? It was like something from a nightmare, when a place you know and love is suddenly full of strangers: no, not just strangers but creatures who have lost their souls. There was something inexplicably
wrong
about these people wandering around so aimlessly. As I watched, a woman in a white coat came round the corner of the building and started shooing them inside like chickens. And then the guard noticed me.”

The guard had shouted at Grandpa, “Hey! How did you get out?”

“Out from where?” Grandpa was bewildered.

The man approached slowly, speaking in an overloud voice, as if to someone very stupid or very old. “Come along now. Back you go.” He took hold of Grandpa’s sleeve.

“Let go of me,” Grandpa said severely. “What have you done to the Zindjirli
medresse
?”

“Don’t you worry about no zindjermy dresser. Let’s get you in where you belong.” The guard shouted over his shoulder at the white-coated woman, “Got one of your patients here. Reckon he must’ve got out somehow.”

The woman hurried over to stare through the bars of the gate. She saw Grandpa’s round sheepskin cap and snapped, “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s a Tatar. This used to be an old Tatar school or something.”

“A Tatar? You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Honestly, these people!” the woman huffed. “They come here and expect us to give everything back to them, like the last fifty years never happened.”

The guard let go of Grandpa’s arm with a disgusted look. “Psychos, Tatars, what’s the difference? All right, beat it, old man. Or we’ll lock you up in here after all – don’t think we won’t. Best place for people like you.”

Grandpa was angry, but he turned away. There was no point in arguing.

“After that, I just wanted to get back to my family and my people,” he told Safi, winding up the story. “I felt like I’d had enough of Bakhchisaray for one day.”

Safi was frowning. “I don’t get it. The guard thought you were a patient from a hospital?”

“Not just any hospital. The
medresse
has been turned into a psychiatric ward. He thought I was an escaped lunatic.”

“
No!
” Safi didn’t know whether to laugh or be outraged, and came out with a snort that was a bit of both. “That’s crazy! You don’t look like a lunatic!”

The snort made Grandpa smile. “Those poor mad people. Maybe it wasn’t such a silly mistake. They looked as lost as I feel here, now that everything’s gone.”

“You’re not lost,” Safi said indignantly. She tucked her hand tighter under her grandfather’s arm, leaning close. “And it can’t all really be gone. We’re going to your village tomorrow, Adym-Chokrak. Then you’ll see.”

“Oh, my Safinar.” Grandpa wasn’t sure if it was Safi leaning closer to him, or him leaning closer to her. Bakhchisaray had made him feel so tired and old. If I thought you’d understand I’d tell you, he thought. I am like those patients in the
medresse
, no longer knowing where they are or why. Your hand under my arm feels like the only thing anchoring me here.

“Let’s go this way.” Safi steered Grandpa quickly towards the Tatar camp, away from the group of children from Bakhchisaray who were loitering at the edge of the field, staring and pointing and shouting.

“What are they saying?” Grandpa asked, straining to hear.

“Oh, nothing.” Safi tried not to sound upset. She was painfully missing her friends back in Samarkand. Most of the Tatars in the camp were men or boys of Lutfi’s age or older, who had come back to Crimea ahead of their families. Lutfi was always off talking with them, but there was hardly anyone of Safi’s age, so at first she’d been pleased to see the local children.

The locals, though, didn’t want to make friends.

“Go home… Dirty Tatars…” Their shouts pursued them towards the shelters. At least no one threw any mud this time.

“They don’t sound very welcoming,” Grandpa observed.

“They’re not.” Safi was almost too hurt to feel properly angry. In Uzbekistan she’d had lots of Russian friends; she couldn’t remember ever being picked on because of her nationality. “They’re saying stupid things about us being Tatars.”

And that was the real change, Grandpa thought. Not the vanished fountains and mosques but these local people, the Soviet Russians and Ukrainians who had locked up their mentally ill in the
medresse
and let Bakhchisaray crumble into grey rubbish-filled shabbiness.

“Years ago, we all lived here together,” he said. “Russian, Tatar, Ukrainian. And then in the war the Soviet authorities decided we had sided with the German fascists, and they exiled us. Some Russians never liked us Tatars much, but it was the Soviets who taught them to hate us. They’ve hated us ever since.”

Grandpa paused to negotiate a big puddle. “When the Soviet soldiers took us away in 1944, they couldn’t have known what they were doing,” he went on slowly, more to himself than to Safi. “They said we had betrayed them, but it was them that betrayed Crimea. By deporting us Tatars, they cut out its soul. All those years in exile, we kept ourselves alive by tending the soul of Crimea. But for all our care, I don’t know whether in the end it turned into a ghost. Just a ghost.”

S
afi scrambled from the car, staring in disbelief. Bedraggled ducks floated on an opaque pea-green pond. A dirt road led up the narrow valley, past two tents and a half-ruined building of spongy-looking yellow blocks. The woods cloaking the mountainous slopes of Mangup-Kalye closed them in with silence and with noise. The noise was the racketing birds, and the silence was what they couldn’t fill with their singing: a huge, echoing void. Birdsong and silence that had not known people for a long, long time.