Authors: Lily Hyde
Dream Land
2 Did You Think We Wouldn’t Come Back To Haunt You?
9 You Can’t Live in Dreams For Ever
10 How Khatije Joined The Partisans
14 Have You Come for The Treasure?
18 Have You Ever Seen The Sea?
24 All Crimea is Talking About You
For the Crimean Tatars
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.
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
.
Crimea, Ukraine: 1992
A
t 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 smell, 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.
