boys ignored her and she walked on. Perhaps they had learned to avoid the Slavs. The lark’s song rose above their shouts and cries as they beat the metal hub.
The density of the shanties increased as she approached the notional centre of the derelict habitation. They were all Tatars who lived here, it was a refuge for Tatars who continued to return from the lands of Central Asia and from Siberia where Stalin had exiled their forefathers. The sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of Stalin’s slaves were returning to their own land and had been returning in fits and starts since 1991 when Ukraine won its independence. Their former homes in the cities of the Crimea had long since been requisitioned or just stolen from them at the end of the Great Patriotic War in 1944. Stalin had chosen to ignore the contribution of the vast majority of Tatars who had fought in the Soviet Army and punished the whole group for the errors of the few who had joined the Nazis. They had done so in the forlorn belief that Hitler would give them an independent Crimea. Once a majority, the Tatars were now a disaffected, unwanted minority who were viewed with suspicion and hatred by those who’d stolen their land and property.
Anna came to a rough circle of shanties. Most had prayer mats laid outside them on the ground. In lieu of a mosque, this was their prayer centre where they turned towards the southeast and Mecca. A few cooking fires were burning, sullen men without work smouldered beside them. They stared blankly at her or continued to squat or whittle sticks—empty activities without a purpose. The women seemed to be inside the makeshift structures. There was a smell of stale coffee and vegetable waste that mingled together in the warm morning air.
Anna approached a group of men who were smoking and talking in low voices, leaning against a stripped World War Two truck. They looked at her with a mixture of hate and curiosity. A “white” woman never came here at all, let alone unaccompanied.
“I’m looking for Irek,” she said.
“Who shall I say is calling?” one of the men said with an insolent pretence at formality.
“A benefactor.”
The man laughed scornfully and drew on the last grains of tobacco from the cigarette that was clamped between his front teeth. He had a wild flame of black hair that fell across his face, behind which the intense whites of his eyes glittered angrily.
“What have you brought us? Bread and liberty?” He laughed harshly again and threw the cigarette end to the ground.
“Where is he?” Anna said.
The man looked at her, studying her without speaking, surprised at her assurance in so hostile an environment. Then he snapped some words to a boy playing nearby, some instruction spoken in their language, and the boy raced off up the hill and disappeared behind the irrational turmoil of the shanties. Anna made no further attempt to communicate. She sat down on the ground, removed her pack, and crossed her legs. She was hot. The sun was climbing and by midday the temperature looked set to rise to a summer heat up here on the hill. By adopting this submissive position, she guessed the men would relax and ignore her.
In a short while, the boy returned and spoke to the man who’d given him instructions. The man turned to her and switched to speaking Russian, telling her to follow him. Three other men joined him, and as she got up from the ground they surrounded her and walked like a guard escort, shielding whoever they were taking her to meet at the top of the camp.
They reached a traditional, tentlike structure that had a few rugs laid out on the bare earth and two poles that supported several plastic sheets. It was a larger place than the rest of the shanties. One of the men went inside, bending beneath the low, plastic sheet that served as an entrance. From inside, Anna heard the Tatar twang, its Turkic origins dating back from when the Huns swept west and assaulted the Roman empire. Finally, the man emerged from the tent and beckoned to her.
When she entered, she saw there was an attempt at making a home of sorts. Cushions were strewn around a rug that was frayed and eaten with holes. An ancient radio that looked like it had been salvaged stood on an upturned fish crate. A couple of metal pots and some cooking utensils hung from a string. Only the old man who sat on a cushion facing the tent’s opening didn’t have a temporary look about him.
Anna watched his expression closely. Irek, the senior man in the community, had fierce dark eyes set deeply in a face that was nut brown and lined in generous gouges of flesh that stretched tightly over high cheekbones. His cropped hair was grizzled and grey and his ears stood out from his head, unnaturally large against the veined and shrunken skull.
It was true, he must be ninety years old, Anna thought. That was what she’d been told in the briefing, although there was no record of his birth.
Nearly every trace of Tatar culture in the Crimea had been erased by the Russians after the Second World War. Ancient texts and even Marxist-Leninist tracts in translation had been burned. Mosques and cemeteries were destroyed, records obliterated, and whole villages razed. All the Tatar place-names in the Crimea had been changed. Irek was one of the oldest of a people who had been brought to the brink of extinction, both literally and culturally, and one of the few still alive from those times. He had been crammed into a cattle truck in 1944 and sent on a ten-day journey without food and barely any water, to be left with the less than half of his people who survived the journey. They were simply thrown out of the cattle trucks onto the winter steppes of Kazakhstan to fend for themselves. He’d had four sons and four daughters, as far as she knew, half of whom died in infancy and the rest in the years of brutal hard labour and starvation.
“You are Russian,” Irek stated.
“I’m an American now,” she replied.
“Russians…Americans…what’s the difference? You say you are a benefactor. Neither is our benefactor. We are a hounded people.” He shrugged. “What brings you here?”
A thin plastic curtain inside the tent was pushed aside and a large woman in a single piece of shapeless brown clothing that reached to her ankles entered carrying a plate of biscuits that she laid on the rug between them as if it was a rare speciality. A tea urn bubbled in the background and when the woman returned she brought two tin cups with a leaf tea the aroma of which Anna didn’t recognise.
“I’ve come with a request,” Anna said when the woman had gone, “and an offer of help.”
He lifted his mug of tea and indicated for her to do the same.
“Giving and taking at the same time, is that it?” Irek said, but without acrimony. “First, what are you offering? What justifies your claim to be a benefactor?”
She watched the shrewd eyes watching her and sipped from the tin mug. That he had seen her at all was a testament to how desperate these people were. But she knew he would examine what she had to say carefully and reject it if he had no trust in her.
“The people I represent believe they have uncovered a conspiracy,” she said quietly. “It concerns an organisation called Qubaq.”
She saw him stiffen. “What about it?” he said sharply.
“There are people who wish to implicate it in terrorist acts,” she replied. “The bomb at the nightclub in Odessa, for example. Back in January. These people wish to hide their own deeds by blaming Qubaq for them.”
He didn’t reply. He reached his arm behind his back without turning and brought out a hookah pipe that had been hidden from her. Without responding to what she’d said at all, he began to flake a sweet-smelling tobacco into the bowl and lit a small piece of charcoal which he then placed over it. He fit a cheap plastic mouthpiece over the pipe and drew the smoke through the water deeply. Then he replaced the mouthpiece with another and offered it to her. As she smoked, he began.
“We are not extremists,” he said. “The Tatars have never been extremists for Islam. We are like the Turks, a Turkic people. We do not share the aims of the extremists. What we want, quite simply, is justice. We are not looking for the restoration of our property, we are not looking for financial compensation for the evils of the past. We want a new start. We want political freedom in the parliament of the Crimea, within Ukraine, not separation. We are too worn down to be used for anything by anybody.”
“You will be made the scapegoats,” Anna replied. “That is the conspiracy. Your weakness is no defence against that. It simply invites it.”
