Mikha went to get their rucksacks out of the storeroom, and began digging around for their passports. He found them, and put them on the desk in front of the receptionist. She began inspecting them diligently, looking in the last pages for their officially registered addresses, and the stamp proving they were legally married.
Just at this time, a family entered the hotel. It was a husband and wife, who were getting on in years, and a daughter who looked about fourteen. They were Tatars from Central Asia. This was evident from the Uzbek tubeteika on the man’s head, from the woman’s striped dress, from their high cheekbones, from the silver bracelets studded with red carnelian on the fragile wrists of the girl, and from the anxiety written on their faces. The man pulled two passports out of the inner pocket of his suit coat and placed them in front of the receptionist.
The jacket was not new; the back of it was faded. Nearly the entire front, however, from his shoulders to his waist, was covered with military decorations and orders.
The sullen receptionist put the passports of the Moscow travelers aside, and opened their passports. She shook her head.
“There’s no room.”
“What do you mean, there’s no room? You’re lying! There are vacancies!” Mikha objected. “We have booked two rooms. Please give this family one of ours.”
“We don’t have any for you, either,” the woman said, pushing the pile of passports toward Mikha.
“What? We made an agreement!”
“Our first priority is to serve business travelers, and only then to accommodate ‘savages.’ There’s no room here.”
“We traveled more than a thousand miles to look at the graves of our ancestors. Here are our return tickets. In two days we are flying back to Tashkent,” the man said, still holding out some hope.
“Don’t you understand Russian? I said there’s no room here!”
“I understand Russian. Perhaps in the private sector it would be possible to stay for only one night?”
“Stay wherever you want. It’s not my concern! But just remember—you’ll be answerable for violating the passport rules.”
Mikha was boiling with anger. His response to injustice was instantaneous and passionate, even corporeal. It felt like a hammer pounding in his temples. His hands spontaneously curled up into fists.
“Bastards! What bastards!” he whispered to Edik. “Do you realize what’s happening? This is a Tatar family that was deported…” Just a few days before, their friend Maria Stepanovna had told them about the events of May 1944. This information was still fresh in his mind, and the injustice of it still rankled. “While this man was fighting at the front, they evicted his family from their home and deported them!”
“Take it easy,” Edik whispered to him. “We’ll think of something.”
The much-decorated Tatar wrapped up the passports in a silk handkerchief, and put them carefully back into his inner pocket.
“Let’s get out of here. They’ll call the police any minute now!” Edik bent down nearly in half to whisper to the Tatar.
He nodded, and they all made their way to the door, onto the street, where it was already pitch-dark. The darkness seemed peaceful and safe, in contrast to the loathsomeness of the reception area, albeit illuminated by electricity.
Natasha Khlopenko, the receptionist, was already dialing the number to contact the police. This was her duty—to inform them about Tatars arriving in Bakhchisaray. But the officer on duty didn’t answer the phone, and she threw down the receiver in relief: her mother was a Karaite Jew, and her father a recently arrived Ukrainian. It wasn’t that she felt any special sympathy toward the deported Tatars, but more that she didn’t want to be an accessory to this long-standing war of nationalities and peoples, which involved her to a degree. To a very small degree.
Seven people left the hotel, and the Tatar man silently headed up their exodus.
“Let’s go. I know a place where we can find shelter for the night. You’re not afraid of cemeteries, are you?”
“No, let’s go,” Edik said.
Although it was completely dark, the Tatar walked confidently westward, and up a hill.
They walked about a mile and a half, and came to an ancient Tatar cemetery.
The ruins of a small mausoleum seemed cozy, rather than threatening. And perhaps the Tatar’s trust in this place was so great that it communicated itself to the young people. They sat on a slope—or reclined, as it were. The slope was as comfortable as a floating pillow. Edik pulled out a bottle of Crimean port from his rucksack. The domestic Zhenya took out the feta cheese they had bought in the store, some salted tomatoes, and bread, which they had planned to eat in their room at the hotel.
They didn’t light a fire. A full moon suddenly rose in the sky, illuminating the landscape with an intense brilliance: every stone, every branch, became visible.
The two fat braids of the Tatar girl gleamed in the moonlight with an oily sheen, and her silver bracelets shimmered. Her mother unfolded a muslin napkin and took out some dry Tatar pies, and they all partook of their feast in solemn silence and spiritual concord.
After the meal a conversation got under way, little by little—curiously disjointed, not following any particular path, but somehow concerned with everything at once—about the strange circumstances that had brought them all together, seemingly random, disparate people, unrelated through the past or the future, unconnected by blood or by fate … about the beauty that seemed to have dropped down from the heavens …
The moon retreated, slipping down to the edge of the sky, and an hour later a rose-colored ribbon of light appeared in the east, brightening the comforting darkness. The Tatar man, whose name was Mustafa, said:
“I’ve remembered this dawn so many times, through so many years. As a boy, I herded cattle here. I looked at these mountains thousands of times, always waiting for the first ray of sunlight. Sometimes it seemed to just shoot out. I thought I would never see it again.”
When it was light, they parted ways. The young people went to Chufut-Kale, and the Tatar family stayed in the ancient cemetery. Mustafa wanted to find his grandfather’s grave.
They agreed to meet at two o’clock at the bus station, and to travel to Moscow together.
At the bus station, it was impossible to avoid the police. The young people surrounded “their” Tatars, and began making a happy commotion. Zhenya waylaid two policemen, flirting with them and babbling away to them about nothing. Eventually Edik pulled out his press pass, long expired, and waved it in front of the lieutenant’s face. The provincial police turned out to be shyer than their Moscow counterparts. Or perhaps Edik’s towering height and horn-rimmed glasses threw them off. In any case, the bus opened its doors, gave an impatient roar, and all seven of them packed in and drove off. Or maybe these servants of the law just didn’t want to take on any extra trouble for themselves.
After that everything went like clockwork. The train staff turned out to be from Kazakhstan, and they put the “illegal” passengers in “illegal” seats, shielding them from the conductors and guards the whole way, until they finally arrived at Komsomol Square two days later. A half hour later, Mikha and Alyona and their Tatar guests were already in the long-suffering Aunt Genya’s room. In another twenty-four hours, the former Hero of the Soviet Union and former captain Usmanov, one of the initiators of the movement for Crimean Tatars to return to their homeland, with his wife, Aliye, and his daughter, Ayshe, took a flight from the capital of our homeland to the capital of Uzbekistan, and finally sat down in their Tashkent home, where their friends and relatives were waiting for them. Usmanov, a Communist and a hero, placed a handful of stones from the ancient Muslim cemetery of Eski-Yurt on a tray.