for a few months now, into the new realities of foreign climes…
But here I mean professionally. One of my books, Dream Land, has been translated into French and is available from the publisher Naïve Livres, with a great new cover, very different from the English version.
I am so excited to be in a foreign language! And delighted that the remarkable history and culture of the Crimean Tatars will hopefully reach a wider audience.
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?
We all tell stories to explain and confirm who we are. In Dream Land I told stories that are not my own; they belong to the Crimean Tatars and define this group of people who were deprived of a homeland, a language and an identity for fifty years.
For that reason, I was very nervous about getting Dream Land right. I wanted to make the experiences of Safi and the other characters in the book accessible to anyone who has moved to a new strange place, who has felt unwanted, who has wondered about where they are truly at home and learned the hard way how to grow beyond their family and into the wider world. But I also wanted the characters and events to be recognisable to the Crimean Tatars themselves and to be true to this remarkable and inspiring group of people.
So I was really pleased to get this review from someone who knows a great deal about the history and present situation in Crimea. Be warned, it gives away rather a lot of the plot though. And I’m not sure about the Anne Frank analogy – as I’ve said, Safi’s story is not my own, however closely I identified with her when I was writing the book, or how strongly I feel about the Crimean Tatar cause and the questions of homeland and belonging that are so important not only to the Tatars but to all of us.
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.
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.
