Free Dream Land by Lily Hyde Page B

being here.’
    “‘Yes, Abdul. But you wouldn’t, would you? Not before I tell you my fortune.’
    “Well, of course Abdul was interested; he was so conceited. He sat down opposite her, resting his revolver in his lap and putting his hands in his bulging pockets, and said, ‘Am I in it?’
    “‘Have you got something there for me, Abdul?’ Khatije asked slyly.
    “Abdul laughed and drew out from his pocket a blood-flecked handful of gold and silver. There were rings, and pocket watches, and a pair of earrings that Khatije recognized, because they were the ones that the Russian fortune-teller always wore in her ears.
    “‘I took them from a Russian,’ Abdul said. ‘And now they belong to the Tatars. That’s how it should be. Would you like some earrings, my Khatije? If you pay me, of course.’
    “Khatije slapped his hand off her knee. ‘Don’t you want to hear my fortune first?’ she asked, leaning forward and staring into his dewy black eyes. ‘It’s a sad fortune, because the handsome young man who I love … dies.’
    “‘D-dies?’
    “‘That’s right. He was a great hero of the Tatar people, but he was too good to live.’
    “Abdul laughed and laughed. ‘Are you trying to scare me, Khatije? I’ve got no intention of dying.’
    “‘But you’re no hero of the Tatar people.’
    “Abdul became aware of a strange emptiness in his lap. He looked down and discovered that his gun had gone.
    “‘You’re just a thief,’ said my cousin Khatije. ‘You sold your people for a pretty uniform and some scraps of gold. You aren’t anywhere in my fortune.’
    “Well, Abdul’s dainty city manners went out of the window with the names he started calling her, until Khatije brought the gun down on his head and laid him out cold. Then she lifted up her skirt and said coolly to the little partisan who’d been hiding under it all this time, ‘What are you waiting for? You can come out now, and wipe that cheeky grin off your face.’
    “But that partisan just kept on smiling…”
    “So
that’s
how Khatije joined the partisans,” Safi said. The flames of the bonfire crackled merrily, as though they were laughing. A few metres up the road, the police sat in their car and a second bonfire glowed, lit by a group of local men from Krasniy Mak. Safi wondered what they would make of this story, if they could have heard it. It was more complicated, but much better than anything she’d read in the textbook at school. “Khatije was a hero, wasn’t she?”
    “She helped blow up bridges. She ambushed a whole German battalion outside Sevastopol. When she was caught, she never told the fascists anything, and they hanged her.” Grandpa tossed another stick on the fire, and the bright sparks flew upwards. “It’s all in the official records, if you know how to look. You have to know, because she’s not called Khatije in the records; she’s called scout Katya. You’d never know she was a Tatar. All the Crimean Tatar names have been changed to Russian ones.”
    “We’ll rewrite the records,” Ibrahim said, flourishing his pen as though he were ready to start right now.
    Grandpa was looking at the second bonfire too, and the bored local men sitting around it. “In books about the partisans, there are lists of Russians, lists of Ukrainians, of Armenians, Greeks, Karaims … and where the Crimean Tatars should be, there’s a blank. A hole. A silence. What fills that hole is Abdul, Abdul, more and more Abduls, what the Russians would remember, so they can sleep easy in their beds.”

11

IS THAT YOUR BROTHER?
    T he trouble started when Safi got off the bus in Krasniy Mak and Lutfi wasn’t there. For the last few days she’d sat carefully still, wondering if Mama was watching the bus drive straight past their valley, and she’d thanked the driver politely when they arrived at the village. But today some of the other children didn’t seem satisfied with that.
    “Where are you going?”
    “Home.”
    “You