Dream Land (8 page)

Ayshe caught her eye and gave her a rueful, sympathetic smile. “It’s OK,” she murmured encouragingly. “It’s not that bad.”

Somehow that just made Safi feel even worse. There were still twenty minutes till the end of the lesson. She picked up her book and hid her flaming face behind it, trying to concentrate on the bit of text they were supposed to be reading.

It was about the partisans in the Second World War; guerrilla fighters who had fought against the Germans when they occupied Crimea. It reminded Safi of Grandpa’s friend Ayder, and other stories too. She frowned at the book, forgetting her clothes, and nudged Ayshe.

“What?”

“Look. This book’s wrong.”

“Safinar.” The teacher was glaring at her over his glasses. “Would you like to share whatever you’re whispering about with the whole class?”

“Sorry, sir. It was nothing.”

“I’m sure it was something. Perhaps you’ve found an error in the textbook that you’d like to correct, hmm?” The teacher had a sarcastic grin. “Do let us hear the Crimean Tatar version.”

Safi bit her lip. She wanted to put her head down and pretend she was a nice ordinary schoolgirl like the others. But she’d always been told she should be proud of being Crimean Tatar, and that meant she couldn’t back down. “It’s a question, sir. There’s a list of partisans here who fought in Crimea in the war. But there are only Russians on it. I was wondering where the Crimean Tatars are. I know they fought too.”

“Oh, you know that, do you?” The teacher was suddenly at her side, snatching the book out of her hand.

“Yes. My grandfather’s cousin—”

“This book was written by respected historians,” the teacher snapped, “while you are an uneducated little barbarian, and entirely wrong. If you disrupt this class any more I’ll send you home. Do you have anything else to say?”

“But… It’s a Soviet textbook, sir,” Safi said haltingly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Nothing, sir,” she whispered.

“She’s right, sir,” said a voice behind her. Safi peeked round. A boy sitting near the back had his hand up. “There were Tatar partisans. My grandfather was one too.”

“Yes,” Ayshe chimed in.

Just then the bell rang. At once the classroom filled with the sound of scraping chairs as the other children rushed out for lunch, although some lingered to watch the new girl get into trouble. The teacher stayed by Safi’s desk, tapping the book against his palm and studying her and Ayshe and the boy at the back.

“I grew up in the Soviet Union with this textbook,” he said at last, in a different, somehow less teacherly voice. “In those days, we always believed what we were told. What makes you think you can tell me what is and isn’t true?”

“My grandpa said—” Safi began, and at the same time the boy at the back said, “The Crimean Tatars—”

“I know, you think the whole of Crimea belongs to you.” The teacher suddenly slammed the book down on the desk. “Get out of here, and don’t you dare disrupt my lesson again.”

Outside the classroom, the boy grinned at her. “My name’s Rustem. Good one, Safinar.” And Ayshe squeezed her hand and said, “Hey, will you come to tea sometime? Sometime soon? I’ll ask my parents.”

Safi beamed. She had friends. Ayshe and Rustem weren’t as good as Jemile, of course, but they were a million times better than no one. They were better than any disaster to get her through the rest of the day in her stinking clothes.

On the bus home after school she watched out of the window anxiously, so as not to miss the pea-green pond at the bottom of the valley where she should get off. She was too shy to meet the looks of any of the other children, although she knew they were staring at her.

At last the bus rounded a corner and she recognized the big rocks on the other side of the road. She got up and made her way to the front.

“Please can you stop.”

The driver took no notice.

“Please can you stop for me here, by the pond,” she said, louder.

The bus actually seemed to speed up, and she grabbed the back of a seat to stop herself falling over. She knew perfectly well the whole busload was watching her.

“Remember, my father agreed with you this morning that you’d drop me off here. At Adym-Chokrak, the village.”

“There’s no village here,” the driver snapped without turning round. “Now sit down.”

“But—”

“
Sit down!
”

Defeated, Safi stumbled back to her seat. The whole bus was snickering.

“Stupid Tatar.”

“Serves you right.”

“It’s our bus. Why should it stop for you?”

Something hit the back of her head, not hard, but enough to mess up her hair. “Stinky Tatar.”

At Krasniy Mak Safi hurried away from the bus stop. She’d have to walk all the way to the valley now, and Mama would want to know why she hadn’t got off by the pond. The road was deserted, running deeply between trees. From here, Mangup-Kalye looked quite different; it was a high, unbroken wall of rock rising above the woods, dotted with the black holes of caves. She realized from this side she was seeing the hard edge of the fist.

Halfway along she met Mama, walking at her usual swift, elegant pace to meet her.

“I saw the bus go past. Why didn’t you get off by the pond?”

“I missed the place. And the driver forgot.” Safi avoided her mother’s eye. She knew if she said that the driver had refused to stop, there’d be no more school for her, and she didn’t want that.

Mama let it pass. “So how was it?”

“It was great, except… Oh, Mama, you’ve got to do something about my clothes!”

Safi launched into an impassioned account of the awful smell. She was looking at Mama for sympathy as she talked, but then she faltered. Mama’s way of walking was the same as ever, but instead of her old smart clothes she was wearing a grubby coat pulled tight, and boots that had split across one toe. There was no make-up round her eyes to hide the dark shadows of tiredness. No sweet drift of perfume to mask the woodsmoke and damp. A few days ago Mama had marched into the school director’s office, knowing exactly how she smelt and looked, and somehow persuaded him to take Safi in school. You would never guess to look at her now that back in Uzbekistan, Mama had had a job much more important than head teacher; she’d been deputy director of a whole district health department.

Safi felt silly and small. “Oh, well,” she finished lamely. “Maybe we can air them outside or something.”

“I’ll wash them this evening,” Mama said shortly. “And get the men to look at the stove again. How were your classes?”

“Fine, except I had an argument with the history teacher.”

“On your first day? Oh, Safi.”

“I couldn’t help it. We were learning about the partisans in the war, and there wasn’t anything about Crimean Tatars. So I asked why not, because I know Grandpa’s cousin was a partisan, and lots of others.”

“If you’d asked that question five years ago in the Soviet Union you’d have been expelled,” Mama said. “You weren’t expelled, were you?”

“Of course not!” Safi wasn’t sure if Mama was joking. “The teacher told me I was wrong, that’s all, and I said I was right, and then Rustem and Ayshe joined in and agreed with me.”

“Who are Rustem and Ayshe?”

The rest of the way back to the valley passed quickly as Safi told her mother about the two Tatar children.

“So can I go to tea with Ayshe? Can I?”

“I don’t see why not, if she’s Tatar.” Mama ruffled Safi’s hair lightly. “You miss your friends, don’t you? Back in Samarkand I hardly saw you, you were always out and about with them.”

“I especially miss Jemile. And Lenara.” They were back by the pond, the entrance to their narrow valley, and Safi felt her heart sinking under the weight of green silence. There wasn’t even the sound of building today, and the familiar red car was missing, because the men had driven to the Simferopol meeting.

“And I miss them too, but at least here I’ve got you to myself.” Mama gave her an affectionate pat. “There’ll be lots of children for you to play with soon, when the permits are granted and the houses are built; all the Crimean Tatars will send for their families. And now, about that bus. Did the driver really forget?” She looked at Safi’s face. “I didn’t think so.”

“He wouldn’t stop. He said there was no village here. But Mama…” Safi clutched her mother’s sleeve anxiously. “Please don’t tell Papa or Grandpa. I want to keep going to school. I don’t mind walking from Krasniy Mak.”

“I never knew you were so keen on lessons,” Mama teased, although her smile was rather half-hearted. “You just want to abandon me to do all the cooking on my own, is that it?”

“I don’t like this valley,” Safi said. As soon as it was out of her mouth she tried to correct herself, because it sounded so disloyal to Grandpa and the village that had filled her dreams for as long as she could remember. “I mean, I’m sure I will like it, when the house is built and everything. It’s just … it’s just… I didn’t think everything would be gone. It’s not what I was expecting.”

“Life’s rarely what you expect, Safi. You can hope and you can dream, but in the end life’s something you build out of bricks and earth and sweat and tears.” Mama looked at her rather sternly. “Even life in Crimea. You can’t live in your grandfather’s dreams for ever. All right, the bus driver is our secret. Lutfi can walk you there and back from Krasniy Mak.”

When he returned with Mehmed that evening, Lutfi was buzzing from the meeting in Simferopol: thousands of Tatars holding up the traffic and taking over the main square outside the Crimean Cabinet of Ministers, buoyed by their victory in Bakhchisaray and more determined than ever to continue their peaceful campaign and press the rest of their demands.

“There are so many of us back in Crimea now, they have to listen to us,” he exulted. “Resettlement on all the old Tatar sites. Tatar representatives in the Crimean parliament. Crimean Tatar schools.”

“At school today—”

Lutfi didn’t even notice she’d spoken. “Crimean Tatar language to be the official language alongside Ukrainian and Russian…”

“But you can’t really speak Tatar,” Safi said. “Neither can I.” Most of the demands she had been hearing all her life, because as long as she could remember, Papa had campaigned for the right to return to Crimea – always away from home at meetings, taking petitions to Moscow, once even in prison. But she had never heard the demand about language before.

“I’ll learn.” Lutfi wasn’t to be sidetracked. “There was no need to know it while we were in Uzbekistan, but we’re back in our own country now. Why should we have to speak the language of those stupid Russians and Ukrainians? They should learn ours. Crimea isn’t theirs, it belongs to us.”

Lutfi was on fire with enthusiasm. In Simferopol they’d stood shoulder to shoulder, cheering the speakers, seeing the scared look on the Russians’ faces and knowing they would win. Safi regarded him sadly. In Uzbekistan she’d lied to Mama and Papa so that Lutfi could skive off Tatar language classes and meet Larissa instead. She hadn’t minded, because she’d do anything for her brother and it was exciting being involved, even at a remove, in a real romance. Now it looked as if Lutfi was forgetting all about that.

“Did you post your letter to Larissa?” she whispered to him when they went to bed.

Lutfi got a sudden stricken look. “I… There wasn’t a chance to. We were so busy at the meeting. If you’d been there, you’d know what I mean.”

“Never mind,” Safi said. “I expect you can post it in Krasniy Mak tomorrow.” She knew Lutfi hadn’t missed the chance. She knew he’d forgotten.

S
afi didn’t really mean to tell Papa about the argument with her history teacher, but a few days later it came out anyway.

“You see?” Papa rounded on Mama. “They’ll just teach my daughter lies at that school. She’ll learn Russian values, Russian morals—”

“She’s my daughter too,” Mama said sharply. “And she can tell the difference between truth and lies.”

Safi was a little frightened of Papa when he was in a mood like this. She had to steel herself to ask, “What do you mean, Russian morals? You never said that about my old school, and there were lots of Russians there.”

“In the Soviet Union no one could talk about their beliefs,” Papa said. “It was banned, just like the truth. But we’re Muslim and always have been, and that means girls should be modest. Not like those Russian hussies: short skirts, smoking, boys—”

“Asim.” Mama spoke quietly, but in a tone Safi had never heard from her before. “If you want your daughter’s skirt to be longer, perhaps you should buy her a new one.”

There was no money for clothes; Safi knew that perfectly well. There wasn’t even enough for things like sugar and toothpaste. All the money went into the building: the wooden beams for the ceiling, glass for the windows, plaster for the walls. It was looking a bit more like a proper house these days, with a sturdy floor and even a door between the kitchen and the next room. Unfortunately the hinges must have dropped, because it didn’t shut properly. Mama went through it now, pulling it to behind her, and it scraped along the floor and then stuck.