The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Alina Bronsky

THE HOTTEST DISHES
OF THE TARTAR CUISINE

Translated from the German
by Tim Mohr

For Stephan

“As in every language, there is no shortage of extremely
crude expressions in Tartar. Understanding these vulgarities
helps one read and manage a variety of situations.
The following words, then, are not intended to be used
but simply to aid the understanding of specific situations.”
—From the chapter “Insults and Oaths in Tartar”
in
Word for Word
(Travel and Knowhow Editions)
 

As my daughter Sulfia was explaining that she was pregnant but that she didn’t know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap.

Sulfia was sitting on a kitchen stool. Her shoulders were scrunched up and her eyes were red; instead of simply letting her tears flow she insisted on rubbing them into her face with the backs of her hands. This despite the fact that when she was still a child I had taught her how to cry without making herself look ugly, and how to smile without promising too much.

But Sulfia wasn’t very gifted. In fact, to be honest, I’d say she was rather stupid. And yet somehow she was my daughter—worse still, my only daughter. As I looked at her—her nose running, perched there on the stool with her back hunched like a parrot in a cage—I had mixed feelings. I desperately wanted to shout at her, “Sit up straight! Stop sniffling! Wipe that pathetic look off your face! Don’t scrunch your eyes like that!”

But I also felt sorry for her. After all, she was mine. Somehow! I had no other daughter, no son, and for years my body had been hollow inside—as barren as the sands of a desert. This daughter I did have was deformed and bore no resemblance to her mother. She was short—she only came up to my shoulders. She had no figure whatsoever. She had small eyes and a crooked mouth. And, as I said, she was stupid. She was already seventeen years old, too, so there was little chance she would get any smarter.

I only hoped that her simplemindedness might prove attractive enough to some man that he wouldn’t notice her awful legs until the two of them were already standing in front of a justice of the peace.

Thus far that hope had come to nothing. Sulfia had a few female friends on our block, but the last time she had spoken to a boy was probably ten years before, just after she started primary school. Yet, one day, there I was sautéing a fish in oil (it was 1978, and anthrax spores had just leaked from the huge lab in our city), and Sulfia put her hand over her nose and then threw up four times in the toilet.

Even that witch Klavdia, who lived in another room of our communal apartment, noticed something amiss. Klavdia worked in a birthing center as a midwife. That was her version, at least. I didn’t believe her. She probably wasn’t anything more than a janitor. There were two parties in our apartment. One party—our family—had two bedrooms; the other party—Klavdia—had one. We shared a common bathroom and kitchen. It was a nice old building, and very central.

Sulfia sat on the stool and in answer to my questions told me that her sudden pregnancy could only have come about from
dreaming
of a man at night, while asleep, and I believed her immediately. The streets were full of pretty girls in short skirts, and a real man would never come anywhere near Sulfia unless he was nearsighted or perverted.

I looked sternly at Sulfia, disappointment in my eyes, but she just stared down at her little feet. I knew such cases existed, cases of virgins having a dream and nine months later bringing a child into the world. And there were even worse cases. I knew of one personally: my cousin Rafaella found her daughter in the blossom of a huge exotic house plant of unknown origin—she’d brought the seed from somewhere down south, she said. I can still remember just how baffled she was.

I looked at my daughter and wondered what I could do now for her future and my reputation. I had some ideas.

I went down to the pharmacy and bought mustard powder. Then I scrubbed the bathtub until it was gleaming and filled it with hot water. We were lucky that we had hot water just then, for it had been shut off time and again over the previous weeks.

I sprinkled the powder into the water and then stirred it in with the broken-off handle of a snow shovel I’d found on the street the previous winter and brought home with me because it looked solid. Sure enough, I’d already found a use for it.

I stirred and Sulfia stood next to me, watched, and shivered.

“Get undressed,” I said.

She quickly climbed out of her dress and her white panties and looked at me.

“Get in,” I said.

You always had to connect the dots for her.

She gingerly lifted one of her ugly, dark legs and braced herself on me. She dunked her big toe into the water and started moaning about it being way too hot.

“It’s even hotter in hell,” I said patiently.

She looked at me, tried to put her foot in, and cringed, jerking it back out.

I was losing my patience. The water has to be hot, not lukewarm, I explained. She looked at me with a wounded look, and then let herself drop into the bathtub. Water splashed onto the floor.

“Are you crazy?” I shouted and turned the tap back on
very hot
.

As I mopped up the puddles on the tiled floor, Sulfia whimpered in the tub: it was too hot, she was going to be scalded to death.

“Nobody has ever been scalded to death,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. When her whimpering stopped, I looked up. Sulfia lay in the tub with her eyes closed and her mouth hanging open. I lifted her up and ran cold water over her with the showerhead. Better a pregnant daughter than a dead one, I thought. Sulfia came to. Her skin was red, and she immediately began to complain.

I dragged Sulfia past Klavdia’s curious face and into our room, put her in bed, and gave her cranberry tea to drink. She fell asleep. She slept for twenty-two hours, tossing and turning and groaning the whole time. I kept checking the sheet beneath her. It remained white.

After the mustard bath, Sulfia’s skin began to peel, but otherwise nothing happened. So I went to the market and bought a large bag of bay laurel leaves from one of my countrymen. I boiled up the leaves into a brew and gave it to Sulfia. She drank it obediently, like a good daughter. She didn’t even make it to the toilet before throwing up several times in the washbasin—in plain view of nosy Klavdia. She couldn’t hold any of it down, so it didn’t do anything.

I began to worry. I didn’t want to send my daughter to the doctor, and I didn’t want any idiotic chatter at the school where she’d been studying nursing since the beginning of the year. I hoped to avoid any additional hurdles for Sulfia, who was hardly popular as it was. And I also knew that at hospitals they treated stupid young girls in her condition like pieces of meat. I wanted to spare her that.

I never would have expected God to send help in the person of Klavdia, of all people—that stupid clucking hen. But after observing my increasingly desperate attempts, Klavdia took the initiative. She put a hand on my elbow in our shared kitchen and whispered that she had helped a few other people in her time and knew exactly what to do.

I listened to her and then nodded. I had no choice. The next day we went into Klavdia’s room and pushed a big table into the middle. Klavdia brought in a washable tablecloth covered with a floral pattern of forget-me-nots and bachelor buttons. I went and brought in Sulfia, whose black eyes bounced around the room in panic.

I explained to Sulfia once again that though they could arise on their own, problems never took care of themselves. They had to be solved. She trembled in my arms for a while. Then she obediently climbed onto the table.

Klavdia said she couldn’t work this way. With Sulfia shaking so badly, she wouldn’t be able to find the right spot. I had to hold Sulfia down—if she jerked around in the middle of it, Klavdia might stick the needle into her gut. I threw myself across my daughter’s midsection.

“Hold her mouth shut,” said Klavdia. As I smothered Sulfia’s suddenly rising scream, Klavdia pulled a bloody knitting needle from between Sulfia’s legs with a quick motion.

Maybe she is more than a janitor after all, I thought, impressed with Klavdia’s steady hand. Then I released my grip on Sulfia’s clenched jaw. Her head lolled to one side. The frail child had passed out again.

I carried Sulfia to our room on my back. I laid a waterproof pad beneath her pale bum and wrapped her in warm blankets.

She came to again. Her eyes, dark and round like raisins, wandered around the room. She made a soft whining sound.

Her face slowly got whiter. My husband, Kalganow, came home from work.

“What does Sonja have?” he asked.

He didn’t call our daughter by her Tartar name. He called her what the Russians called her because it was beyond their capabilities to remember a Tartar name, much less pronounce one.

My husband was an absolutist. He didn’t believe in God; the only thing he believed was that all people were alike, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was still living in the Middle Ages. My husband didn’t like it when we made distinctions between ourselves and others.

I told him our stupid little Sulfia just had the flu. He went to her bedside and put his hand on her forehead.

“But she’s cold,” he said. “Cold and moist.”

Well, I couldn’t get everything right. Sulfia moaned and tossed and turned.

That night I suddenly got worried that Sulfia might die on me. It had been years since I worried about her, and I didn’t like the feeling. I lifted Sulfia’s blanket. Things looked good. I cleaned her up, gathered the bloody stuff, stuck it in a plastic bag, and wrapped the bag in a newspaper. I quietly left our apartment and heard Klavdia turn over in bed as I did. I carried the bloody bundle through the dark, empty streets and stuffed it in a dumpster a few blocks away.

In the morning Sulfia had a fever. She was bleeding like a stuck pig. I pulled a jar of caviar out of the depths of my refrigerator—I’d been saving it for New Year. I smeared it thickly on four slices of bread and fed it to Sulfia. Caviar was known to be good for replenishing blood.

Sulfia’s teeth chattered. She had the chills. Tiny translucent orange balls of caviar stuck to her chin. I poured a drink made out of sea buckthorn berries into her twisted mouth. I had a garden out of town, and I’d picked the berries there in the fall. My hands had bled from being stuck by the thorns; it had ruined the skin on my fingertips. Afterward I pureed the berries with sugar, ten liters’ worth in canning jars. That way the sea buckthorns kept through the winter. Now I mixed spoonfuls of the puree into hot water and gave it to Sulfia to drink so she’d get some vitamins.

She sniffled and groaned, but my labors paid off. After a few days Sulfia stopped bleeding and was able to get out of bed and make it to the bathroom on her own. After a few more days she went back to her nursing school. Klavdia gave us an official note saying that Sulfia had been out with the flu. For the next few months I had an easier time putting up with her, until I noticed her belly starting to get round. At some point it became blatantly obvious. But I noticed it rather late. It had just never occurred to me. Eventually even Kalganow, who normally missed everything, noticed.

“What’s Sonja got in there?” he asked, pointing with his finger. “How did that happen?”

“She’s just a growing girl,” I said hastily. I put my hand on Sulfia’s stomach and froze. The kick I felt against my hand spelled trouble.

God was mocking me. God or Klavdia.

“Must have been twins,” Klavdia said, shrugging her shoulders. “So what?”

She said we’d paid her to take care of only one baby, and she’d done that. Since she knew nothing about a twin, she couldn’t have gotten rid of a second baby. She just stuck the one closest to the exit.

In fact, said Klavdia, the survival of the second twin was evidence of her skill. Others couldn’t even ensure the survival of the mother.

I locked myself in the bathroom and let the tears flow, silently, so no one could hear me and so my eyes wouldn’t get red. Sulfia sat on a kitchen stool and stroked her belly, smiling, eyes wide, munching on slices of bread stacked with cheese and cold cuts, fresh pickles I’d bought at the market, sour pickles I’d canned the past summer, marinated tomatoes, apples, a piece of apple tart, one bowl full of yoghurt, and another filled with cream of wheat and raisins.

Because I knew my husband would never believe the story about being impregnated in a dream, I told him she’d been raped by the neighbor two floors up from us. The neighbor was related to my husband’s most senior supervisor. After that Kalganow didn’t say anything more, not to me, not to Sulfia, and not to the neighbor, and we began to prepare for the arrival of the baby, never losing the faint hope that some calamity—an illness or a botched medical procedure—might still arrive first.