they could return to their families; to stay alive.
“Ayder was in Azerbaijan with his unit when an Azeri officer, a Muslim like him, said he should go back to Crimea as fast as he could. He said he’d heard something about the Crimean Tatars, and he’d help Ayder get leave to go home before it was too late. But he didn’t say what it might be too late for.
“It was June 1944; Crimea had just been liberated from the Germans when Ayder arrived, met by the smell of roses. The flags welcoming the returning Red Army hung limp in the streets. Everywhere walls were shattered by bullets and bombs. From lamp posts dangled the stiff, dry bodies of collaborators.”
“Hanged?” Lutfi asked, goggle-eyed. Grandpa seemed not to hear.
“At his mother’s house in Akmesjit, the door was locked. Next door was empty too. There were no Tatar children playing in the yard. It was as if they had all stepped out for something, and if he waited they would come back. But he did wait, and no one came. Ayder was wearing his uniform, which made him look like any other soldier defending the Soviet Union, but the Russians and Ukrainians avoided his eye, and hurried away when he approached. All through the city was the same. The Tatar houses stood deserted; when he peered through the windows he could see the kind of mess people leave when they are in a hurry and expect to be back soon to tidy up.
“My friend thought perhaps the Tatars had fled the fighting and gone to the villages for refuge. So he came out here, to Adym-Chokrak. But here too, all he found was empty houses and silence, and up on Mangup-Kalye he found a cemetery. It wasn’t a Tatar cemetery, but there was nowhere else to look, nowhere else we could be. Ayder searched there for his family, for my grave, my mother’s grave, the graves of all the vanished Crimean Tatars.”
The silence of those narrow stone beds up on the hillside. Imagine the silence of a whole village emptied of people, the beds in the houses unslept in and stony cold. Safi wished more than ever that they’d never found the graveyard.
“But you weren’t buried there,
Khartbaba
,” she said.
“No. And it was our Karaim neighbour who told Ayder what had happened.”
“It’s a Karaim graveyard, and there’s one of their kenessas up on Mangup,” Mehmed said. “The Karaim people are so old no one knows where they came from. They’ve been in Crimea even longer than the Tatars.”
“Old Gulnara
Tata
tended the graveyard on Mangup, even though no one remembers who is buried there any more. She found my friend there, crying as he searched, and she told him, ‘They took all the Crimean Tatars away. Red Army soldiers, like you. Some people say they drowned them in the Caspian Sea, or took them to Siberia.’
“She went on cleaning the moss from the gravestones. That’s almost all that’s left of the Karaims in Crimea: their tombs, and the empty cave cities. ‘Sometimes it’s a good thing to have no real homeland,’ Gulnara
Tata
said to Ayder. ‘No one cares about us any more.’”
There was no sound in the little house but the paraffin lamp’s faint hiss. Everyone was listening to the story now.
“How did Ayder find you again?” Lutfi asked at last.
“He had nothing but his army uniform and his soldier’s papers. He went back to his unit, and a few months later he was sent west to the Front. He was with the Red Army when it marched into Berlin.”
Mehmed thumped the wall with his fist. “He was fighting the Germans when the Soviet authorities said he had betrayed this country to them.”
“He had always thought he was the same as all the other soldiers, wanting only to free their homeland and return to their families. But while he’d been struggling to stay alive, the Soviets had taken away his homeland and given it to the Russians,” Grandpa said. “After the war, he too was exiled to Uzbekistan. He kept on searching, and in 1950 he found me and my mother. His own family
“Ayder was in Azerbaijan with his unit when an Azeri officer, a Muslim like him, said he should go back to Crimea as fast as he could. He said he’d heard something about the Crimean Tatars, and he’d help Ayder get leave to go home before it was too late. But he didn’t say what it might be too late for.
“It was June 1944; Crimea had just been liberated from the Germans when Ayder arrived, met by the smell of roses. The flags welcoming the returning Red Army hung limp in the streets. Everywhere walls were shattered by bullets and bombs. From lamp posts dangled the stiff, dry bodies of collaborators.”
“Hanged?” Lutfi asked, goggle-eyed. Grandpa seemed not to hear.
“At his mother’s house in Akmesjit, the door was locked. Next door was empty too. There were no Tatar children playing in the yard. It was as if they had all stepped out for something, and if he waited they would come back. But he did wait, and no one came. Ayder was wearing his uniform, which made him look like any other soldier defending the Soviet Union, but the Russians and Ukrainians avoided his eye, and hurried away when he approached. All through the city was the same. The Tatar houses stood deserted; when he peered through the windows he could see the kind of mess people leave when they are in a hurry and expect to be back soon to tidy up.
“My friend thought perhaps the Tatars had fled the fighting and gone to the villages for refuge. So he came out here, to Adym-Chokrak. But here too, all he found was empty houses and silence, and up on Mangup-Kalye he found a cemetery. It wasn’t a Tatar cemetery, but there was nowhere else to look, nowhere else we could be. Ayder searched there for his family, for my grave, my mother’s grave, the graves of all the vanished Crimean Tatars.”
The silence of those narrow stone beds up on the hillside. Imagine the silence of a whole village emptied of people, the beds in the houses unslept in and stony cold. Safi wished more than ever that they’d never found the graveyard.
“But you weren’t buried there,
Khartbaba
,” she said.
“No. And it was our Karaim neighbour who told Ayder what had happened.”
“It’s a Karaim graveyard, and there’s one of their kenessas up on Mangup,” Mehmed said. “The Karaim people are so old no one knows where they came from. They’ve been in Crimea even longer than the Tatars.”
“Old Gulnara
Tata
tended the graveyard on Mangup, even though no one remembers who is buried there any more. She found my friend there, crying as he searched, and she told him, ‘They took all the Crimean Tatars away. Red Army soldiers, like you. Some people say they drowned them in the Caspian Sea, or took them to Siberia.’
“She went on cleaning the moss from the gravestones. That’s almost all that’s left of the Karaims in Crimea: their tombs, and the empty cave cities. ‘Sometimes it’s a good thing to have no real homeland,’ Gulnara
Tata
said to Ayder. ‘No one cares about us any more.’”
There was no sound in the little house but the paraffin lamp’s faint hiss. Everyone was listening to the story now.
“How did Ayder find you again?” Lutfi asked at last.
“He had nothing but his army uniform and his soldier’s papers. He went back to his unit, and a few months later he was sent west to the Front. He was with the Red Army when it marched into Berlin.”
Mehmed thumped the wall with his fist. “He was fighting the Germans when the Soviet authorities said he had betrayed this country to them.”
“He had always thought he was the same as all the other soldiers, wanting only to free their homeland and return to their families. But while he’d been struggling to stay alive, the Soviets had taken away his homeland and given it to the Russians,” Grandpa said. “After the war, he too was exiled to Uzbekistan. He kept on searching, and in 1950 he found me and my mother. His own family
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