Gone but not forgotten part II

Of course, it’s not actually that simple to forget people and events in real life, or when books are based on real life. Characters have a habit of living on in the imagination.

Dream Land, which is a novel about the return of the Crimean Tatars to Crimea in the 1990s, tells largely true stories, many of them heard from friends. I still visit Crimea, and worry about what is happening there. The characters I invented for the book do have a future that goes beyond the last page. I think Safi, the heroine, is married now, and handing on her grandfather’s stories to her children, who are not all that interested in them. Her brother in the book is radicalised by the hardships and discrimination they suffered as teenagers; I’m afraid  he went on to fight against the Russians in Chechnya. I hope he came back. I expect he’s angrier than ever now, campaigning for the rights of his oppressed comrades in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza.

I watched a programme about Palestinian children in Gaza this week. There are some similarities between the situation there and that in Crimea with the returning Crimean Tatars. I was thinking about them as I watched these children talk about what it is like to have to live in a tent with your family, to watch your house being bulldozed right in front of you. To witness the death of your father or your brother, shot by soldiers. To be living every day with the pain of bits of shrapnel in your head.

The future for most of these Palestinian children is almost unimaginable, although they themselves tried to think about it. One wanted to avenge the deaths of his father and brother. Another longed to be free to travel the world. And a third said she wanted to die.

The programme ended, as documentaries and sometimes movies do, with a few paragraphs of information, those bald sentences flashed up on the screen summarising ‘what happened afterwards’. Finishing the story. Those paragraphs informed us that of the two children featured who had leukaemia and were unable to leave Gaza to get treatment, one subsequently reached a hospital in Israel. The other died.

And that’s that. End of the story. Except of course it isn’t, because there are devastated parents and helpless medical workers and border guards just doing their job and furious brothers and opportunist politicians and– and– and–

Stories are the way everyone makes sense of the world. I don’t think it would be possible to live otherwise. The children of Gaza are making their lives into stories – playing games of being stopped by soldiers, of torturing and being tortured, of shooting Israelis. The documentary told a story too, that us lucky viewers could sigh at or feel impotent rage over (and even vent it afterwards on a lovely channel 4 forum for online ranting).

I wish those children were in a book I’d written, so I could invent mostly happy futures for them and then mostly forget about them. But they’re not, and neither are the Crimean Tatar children. In real life, the people I wrote about in Dream Land have built busy, complicated, difficult, unexpected, fulfilling existences for themselves in Crimea. And in real life in Gaza?

Lost in time

Sometimes, on a still, silent, out-of-season day in Crimea, the past feels close enough to touch, as close as the next range of mountains looks in these astonishingly clear late Autumn afternoons.

I’ve been staying in South-West Crimea, and yesterday I climbed up to Shuldan cave monastery, where brother Anatoly lives in a way that can scarcely differ from that of the monks here a hundred or five hundred years ago.

From the caves I looked out over the hills down towards Sevastopol, and the cliffs by Balaklava, and the sea glittering silver. It’s a view, give or take a few factory chimneys and roads, which I guess a soldier in the Crimean war a hundred and sixty years ago would perfectly recognise, were he lucky enough to get away from fighting and cholera and make it up here, to fresh air and peace and brother Anatoly offering words of wisdom like pearls not to be cast before swine.

Still day-dreaming about Crimean war soldiers escaping from the battlefield, I walked on towards Eski-Kermen cave city (of which mediaeval travellers recorded that no one knew who built it or even what it was called…) I was climbing down into a valley when someone called out to me “Halt! Who goes there?”

Round the next outcrop of rock I came across peaked white tents, stacks of straw bales, and what seemed to be a heap of dismantled cannons.

“Have you been sent from the Spanish camp?” inquired a soldier in white breeches and blue coat, with white cross belts and gold buttons. Behind me, the sound of a musket being fired.

“Um, no…” said I, feebly, thinking that history had taken a step a little too close…

The soldier’s uniform was fifty years out of date for the Crimean war, and the Napoleonic war re-enactors (as they turned out to be) were preparing for a geographically inaccurate battle between French and Spanish. They weren’t particularly pleased to have me, in my hiking boots and rucksack, intrude on their fantasy, although they were impeccably polite. “Where are you from, sudarynya? England? And you’re travelling quite alone? Prikol’no.”

I didn’t say that they were intruding on my fantasy of the Crimean war, and that surely finding a whole camp of people dressed up in Napoleonic uniform in a remote valley usually inhabited only by horses was a good deal more prikol’no (funny). Anyway there was something inexpressibly charming about being addressed as sudarynya, like a lady in a story by Lermontov or Pushkin, in such unlikely surroundings.

I left them to their dreams and walked on busy with my own, hearing the whispers of the soldiers and settlers, the monks and wine-makers; the Tatars, Karaims, Khazars, Goths, Greeks, Genoese, Russians, Ukrainians… all the people who jostle so closely in the history of Crimea.

Because I’m more experienced now

The 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars was on the BBC yesterday, in World War Two: Behind Closed Doors. This series is about the Soviet Union’s relations first with Germany and then with the Allies; more specifically, about the atrocities Stalin’s regime committed and (sometimes) tried to cover up during the war. What I find most interesting and disturbing are the interviews with Russians who were part of the killings and tortures, the mass deportations and mass cover-ups. Old men and women now, with teary eyes and trembling, liver-spotted hands. Someone’s fond old grandparents, boring on about the war. What do they think about the terrible things they did under orders? How do they think about them?

“I understand that it was cruel because I’m more experienced now,” said one old man. “Now we have democracy.” That is his excuse; it’s all he has to say.

I’m reminded of one of Ayder’s stories. Ayder is a Crimean Tatar businessman from Bakhchisaray. His mother was deported in 1944 to the Ural mountains, where she and her family almost died of cold and starvation. Her house in Crimea is still standing, but the Saint Petersburg family who own it as a holiday home refuse to sell it back to Ayder.

A few years ago, Ayder told me, he was in Moscow staying with colleagues when an elderly Russian neighbour came round to visit. After a few drinks and over a cigarette on the balcony he started reminiscing about his time in the war, and specifically in 1944, when as a young NKVD officer in Crimea he had spent one spring night driving the length and breadth of the peninsular on his motorbike, organising the action…

Ayder looked at his friends. There was only one ‘action’ they could think of that would require an NKVD officer to cross and recross the whole of Crimea in one night in 1944: the deportation of all the Crimean Tatars. They were face to face with a man who had been responsible, as a member of the Soviet secret police, for driving Ayder’s own mother from her home and into an exile so harsh that it killed up to a third of the entire Crimean Tatar nation. Ayder said he looked at his friends and they were all thinking, ‘Let’s throw him off the balcony.’

“Next morning,” Ayder said, “when he’d sobered up, he couldn’t look us in the eye. He was that scared.”

I asked if Ayder had said anything to him. Ayder shrugged. “He was just a poor old man.”

I wonder if this man too realised that what he’d done years ago was cruel. In some cases, it’s because of people like him that atrocities have come to light at all. We know about the slaughter of the Crimean Tatar villagers on the Arabat Spit, or the secret execution of a group of Crimean Tatar officers who had been awarded Red Army medals, only because the young soldiers who’d taken part chose later, years later, to speak out about what they had done.

Sticking heads in the sand – or into teacups

Dream Land was finally published this month, and by strange and awful coincidence Crimea, where the book’s set, is in the news, thanks to Russia and Georgia’s conflict in South Ossetia, and press speculation about where might be next. You can read some of my thoughts on this here at the Walker Books website.

The media might be full of parallels between Crimea and South Ossetia, but on my trip to Crimea last week – to the south coast and Bakhchisaray – no one I met wanted to talk about them at all. I don’t know if these Crimeans and holiday-makers are behaving like ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, or they’re wise people who know it’s all a storm in a media teacup… or maybe they’re just fed up of talking about bad news.