Dream Land Read Online Free

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