Father, speak of that day,
This is vital and crucial to me.
Don’t spare me, don’t have pity on me,
Again go away from your home,
Lose your relatives in the train cars anew,
Again count those who are left alive.
I want to get to know everything
To be able to pass it on to your heirs.
From a poem by Lilâ Bucurova
Today, I was in Bakhchysarai again. I skimmed through my father’s historical books. He used to bring them home and always asked me to look at them closely. I was ten when I first touched them. They lay in the cabinet under the TV set where they periodically caught my eye when I cleaned the house with my mother, and needed to shift them. Then I did not really want to read them as there was too much pain in them. I also saw how my father’s eyes sparkled with tears when he opened them.
At the age of fifteen, I read my father’s entire library. However, I was able to genuinely comprehend everything written in his books only after 2014, when events from the past began to come to life.
I would very much like my contemporaries not to write such books. However, we live in some kind of terrible historical spiral in which my small Muslim nation has been trapped for centuries.
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My father always dreamed of living in his parents’ house. When in 1988 he returned to Crimea from Uzbekistan, where his mother had been deported in 1944, however, he found that other people were living in the family home in the village of Tav-Badrak. He did not seek their eviction, and would hardly have been able to, but he often brought us to look at the house.
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