Free Dream Land by Lily Hyde Page A

no one had ever kissed Khatije’s fingers before and told her she smiled like the sun coming out. The trouble was, in the next breath Abdul told her she was just a stupid dirty village girl. Khatije should have punched him. Instead she went around with a face longer than a summer’s day in Ramadan.”
    “Pig,” Safi said.
    “So we had enough reason not to like Abdul, but we put up with him until the Germans occupied Crimea. They were very charming, those German soldiers, with their clean pink hands and their downy hair. Abdul liked them at once. He was one of the first to volunteer for the Tatar self-defence brigades the Germans set up, because it meant he could march around in a nice new uniform shouting orders and lording it over the rest of us.”
    “He wasn’t the only one to volunteer,” Ibrahim said. “You know how the Soviet authorities treated the Crimean Tatars even before the war, Safi. For ten years they arrested the brightest, the richest, the cleverest, the best. The occupying Germans promised freedom, wealth, our own country again. A chance to get our own back. A lot of Tatars believed them.”
    Safi was confused. She knew that the reason the Crimean Tatars had been exiled was because the Soviets said they had sided with the Germans in the war. All her life she’d been told that was a lie. But now it sounded as if it was true after all.
    “I don’t understand about the self-defence whatsits,” she said plaintively.
    “Brigades. They were like a small local army of Tatars, given weapons and uniforms by the Germans to help fight the Soviet partisans. Sometimes they truly defended us, because the partisans were not always decent, honourable heroes either. But mostly Abdul’s brigade had fun. Abdul could requisition whatever he wanted from whoever he liked – or rather, didn’t like. He could clear whole villages just by a whisper of collaboration with the partisans.”
    “What do you mean, clear?”
    “I mean destroy,” Grandpa said. “It was enough to say that one person in a village was helping the partisans, and the brigades could burn every single house and shoot every last person living there. Think how much power that was to go to someone’s head! Soon Abdul started believing he was some kind of local god, while the rest of us were plotting how to get rid of him.
    “One morning my aunt sent Khatije to a nearby village, to an old Russian woman who could tell fortunes. She wanted to know what had happened to her son, who was at the Front. And Khatije thought she’d get her own fortune told, and see if Abdul was in it.
    “That day changed Khatije’s fortune all right. On that particular day the self-defence brigade had decided to clear the village, with its wealthy population of Russians and Greeks, and so they put about a whisper of collaboration… Only this time, someone really
was
helping the partisans. Khatije had just turned onto the main street, when suddenly there were bullets whistling about her ears, and roofs going up in flames, and partisans running silent as cats up the alleys.”
    “What did she do?” Ibrahim was so caught up in the story he hadn’t noticed his coat smouldering from a stray spark.
    Grandpa patted it out with his hand. “She dived for cover in the nearest house. Inside, crouched by the table, she found a terrified runt of a partisan who’d run out of bullets and didn’t even have the wit to escape through the window when, with a bang, the door flew open and Abdul came in calling, ‘Khatije! What are you doing in a collaborator’s village?’
    “My cousin plumped herself down on a stool by the table and smoothed her skirt tidily over her knees. ‘I came to have my fortune told.’
    “Abdul fairly dazzled in his new uniform. He prowled around the room, searching. ‘There was a partisan in here.’
    “Khatije looked as innocent as she could. ‘I don’t know where he went.’
    “Abdul was still suspicious. ‘I could have you shot, Khatije, for