The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (10 page)

One Sunday, a lover had just gotten up and dressed himself to go pick up his wife and mother-in-law at the airport. While I lay in bed playing with my new ring, I realized what I had been forgetting the whole time.

I kissed my lover and pushed him toward the door: “You’ll be late!” I said, though in reality it was I who was in a rush.

I put on a pair of Indian jeans and a sky-blue sweater that I had knitted myself. I zipped up my boots and put my hair up in a bun with knitting needles.

Klavdia stuck her head out the door of her room, looking satisfied; she’d had a man the day before.

“What are you wearing?” she said. “Has all that sperm gone to your head? Have you forgotten how old you are?”

“In the West,” I said, smoothing out my sweater, “everyone dresses like this.”

At work I often leafed through the pages of a sewing magazine one of my co-workers borrowed from her neighbor and brought with her to the office. I couldn’t take it home with me and make copies of the patterns. But I took note of the things that appealed to me.

I took a private taxi to Aminat and Sulfia’s place. Although I had bought new clothes, mostly from private collections rather than from shops, I still had more money than ever. Sometimes I found large banknotes in my coat pockets.

I hadn’t seen Aminat in four weeks because I’d been so busy. I had just called her from time to time. Now I was suddenly anxious: how was she doing without me?

Sulfia was sitting in the living room, sewing. She was putting cuffs and a collar on Aminat’s school uniform.

The school clothes were brown but had cuffs and collar made out of white lace. The clothes didn’t need to be washed very often because they didn’t show dirt—and besides, it took them ages to dry. But the cuffs were constantly dirty. All the mothers took the cuffs and collar off each weekend, washed them, ironed them, and reattached them.

I had done this for Aminat, too, so she wouldn’t look messy. Later I had shown Sulfia how you reattached the ends, and I had also gotten hold of a second set of cuffs and a spare collar. That way she could exchange them without having to wash them immediately.

Now I saw Sulfia trying to sew them on. She held a large needle in her hand, and her fingertips were covered with red pinpricks. As I walked in, she stuck herself once again and shoved her finger into her mouth. She was so clumsy. She held a cuff with her thumb and pressed it onto the needle. She stuck herself again. She was a nurse, or a half-nurse, I thought to myself—is this how she tried to stitch up her patients?

She looked up from her sewing, let Aminat’s dress fall, stood up, came over to me, and without warning draped herself around my neck. I patted her bony back. I put my arms around her not because I wanted to but out of a sense of duty.

“Where’s Aminat?” I asked.

She looked at me.

“Aminat,” I repeated.

“Aminat?”

“Aminat. The girl, Aminat. My granddaughter, your daughter.”

Sulfia looked at me silently.

“AMINAT!” I roared.

I spent the next hour running through the building. I managed to get out of Sulfia that Aminat had been there at noon. What had happened after that, she didn’t know. I rang the neighbor’s doorbell.

From almost a dozen mouths on four different floors I heard that nobody had seen her that day, and that, changing the subject, it would be nice if she wouldn’t stomp and scream so loudly. The walls were thin, and the floors, too. I promised to tame Aminat. Three times I was asked to make sure Aminat stopped putting stray cats and their newborn litters behind the dumpster. One neighbor said he had found the animals and thrown the kittens into the dumpster and chased off the mother cat. I promised everything to everyone and ran on, until I heard Aminat’s voice calling from above.

I went back up to the apartment, angry and panting heavily. Aminat was standing in the door smiling. She had a gap in her teeth. Her hair, which had already grown back somewhat, was standing up; she had dirty fingernails. She wore a nightgown she’d long since outgrown, along with tights that had a hole in the knee. She was a neglected child once again. I looked at her and sighed. My men would have to wait for me a bit until this child had grown up. It just wasn’t possible without me. I had to invest every second in this child or else everything would fall to pieces.

“Where were you?” I asked, my voice shaking with rage.

“In the wardrobe,” said Aminat. “I often hide in there, ha ha. And mama looks for me.”

I reached out and smacked her in the face.

“Whore,” I said. “Evil, evil child. Show me your notebooks.”

Aminat silently brought me her schoolwork. I looked through everything, reading every page. I was amazed. The notebooks were clean. No smudges, no stray marks, precise and orderly handwriting, straight lines.

I looked at her journal. The grades were flawless, all her homework had been completed, and there were just a few things here and there in red: “Was fresh to the teacher,” “Ruined the other children’s appetite.”

I closed the journal.

“You’ve done well at that, at least.”

I pulled out my wallet, found a one-ruble banknote, and gave it to her. It was a lot of money. She wasn’t sure whether to take it. Apparently no one had ever given her money; it must be a mistake.

“It’s for you,” I said. “You earned it.”

I had an idea. I called Aminat over to me, gave her a pen and piece of paper, and asked her, “What do you want most in the world?”

“A father and a cat,” said Aminat without hesitation.

“Then listen up,” I said. “If, first, you take care not to look so messy, and, second, keep doing so well in school, and, third, you do the washing up every other night, switching off with your mother, and, fourth, you vacuum every Saturday, and, fifth, lay your clothes out so they are easy for your mother to wash, and, sixth, remind her when it’s time to buy food . . . Have you got all that? Good. If you do all that for three months, you can have a cat.”

Aminat listened without blinking. She held the pen firmly in her fist.

“Go on now, write it down. Do I need to repeat it?”

Aminat scratched her neck with the pen, then began to write. A few minutes later she showed me a numbered list. The last line read: “If I do this, I get a CAT.”

I took the pen and signed my name beneath it.

My private life I put on ice. We women always have more important things to worry about. After work, I went to Sulfia’s. I opened the door with my own key and went through the rooms peering into the corners. It was as if a confirmed bachelor had suddenly gotten married. Dirty laundry no longer lay around, the floor was clean, and the piles of empty milk and kefir containers had disappeared.

Finally there was a housewife in this apartment, a head of the family, a proxy for me, all rolled into one person: my eight-year-old granddaughter Aminat.

When she was at home she was always busy doing some kind of work, warbling the theme songs from movies as she worked. You barely had to instruct her because she had learned so many things on her own. She collected the empty plastic bags, rinsed them out in the sink, and hung them to dry on the heaters as if she’d done it her whole life. She never threw out any food. When a sausage in the refrigerator started to turn green, she cut off the bad spots, boiled the sausage, and then pan-fried it briefly. I couldn’t have done it more expertly myself.

It was clear. Children need responsibility. Maybe I had gone about things wrong with Sulfia; because of her shortcomings I had done much too much for her. Aminat greeted every visit with a loud command: “Take your boots off, I just mopped!”

Even her voice changed, and she often held herself a certain way in order to speak. She reminded me uncomfortably of someone I knew. But I couldn’t think who it might be. I asked Sulfia.

“She’s imitating you,” said Sulfia.

I thought of my childhood. I had always been hungry, had only one dress and one pair of tights, and four of us lived in a single room. And those were the best parts of it. In comparison, Aminat was spoiled.

I met my end of the bargain shortly before three months had passed.

Aminat had not once spoken of it. Three months was a long time—it represented many hours with the vacuum and countless cleaned plates. But Aminat didn’t whine or ask about it. Later, stuck to the inside of a cabinet door, I discovered a piece of paper on which she had been crossing off the days.

On a Saturday seven days before the end of her obligations, I picked Aminat up. I had on a somewhat older jacket that I usually wore only when I went to my garden out in the country. Sulfia was peeling potatoes. Aminat’s mother had followed her example. She too had picked up some skills that would make survival easier.

I told Aminat to dress herself warmly but not in her good clothes. A surprise awaited her. I was secretive. Aminat grew very quiet as we got off the bus near the bird market. She had never been to the bird market, and if I had told her where we were heading she would have been disappointed because she might have taken the name literally.

There were birds for sale here, of course—canaries, parakeets, parrots, ravens, and chickens, birds bred and birds caught, in all sizes and colors. Chirps and tweets from thousands of throats hung in the air, mixed with the barks and whines of other animals that for a few rubles would change hands today.

“Oh!” was all Aminat said, and her eyes became big and round. “Oh! Oh!”

The birds, flapping around in cages far too small for them, chirped frantically. Puppies and piglets were sold out of the trunks of cars. Falsified certifications of origin were shuffled here and there.

Aminat watched a little girl walk off with a hamster in a plastic bag. The little animal flailed in agony in the shredded paper lining the bag. It would suffocate by the time she made it to the trolley, I guessed. At the latest. But I didn’t say anything. People need to make their own mistakes. It was enough that I helped guide my own family.

“Can I as well?” breathed Aminat.

“What?”

“Get a hamster like that.”

“I thought you wanted a cat?”

She smiled tentatively, one side of her mouth curling upward. She didn’t trust me. We walked along the rows. There were loads of cats: little fur balls purring in baskets, boxes, and on spread-out blankets.

“Pick one out,” I said.

Aminat took me by the hand. The backs of her hands were raw and cracked, which happened when she walked around in freezing temperatures without gloves or when she didn’t dry her hands sufficiently. I would have to rub glycerin into her skin that night so her skin would get soft again.

“I want that one!” said Aminat, pointing to a gray kitten sitting in the palm of a bearded man who reeked of alcohol. It was certainly the smallest and most nondescript cat that would be sold here today.

“Pick out another one,” I said. “That one’s too small—it’ll die immediately.”

“No, I want that one,” said Aminat and asked the man, “How much is this cat?”

The bearded man moved his giant hand and squinted at Aminat. The kitten fell to the ground and he picked it up again.

“This is a pure-blooded Chinese shorthair,” he said passionately. “It’s a special cat. It’s ten rubles.”

“What?” I said, annoyed. “Let’s go, Aminat.”

“I want this one,” she said stubbornly.

I walked on but she just stood there. The bearded oaf stretched out his hand to her. Aminat stroked the tiny kitten with one finger as the man talked persuasively.

“You should be ashamed,” I said indignantly.

“A better cat you will not find,” said the man conspiratorially in Aminat’s ear. He had leaned way down to her. I could tell Aminat was doing her best not to show her disgust at the smell of his breath.

“You’re not getting this one, Aminat,” I said from a few steps away.

“Then I don’t want one at all,” she said.

“But look at all the beautiful cats here.”

“I want this one.”

“We can try to find one like it,” I said. I made clear my strong opposition, but she just shook her head.

“This one.”

“Then we’ll go home,” I said and took her hand.

She immediately tore her hand away.

We headed for the exit. I was upset with myself. I was here to indulge Aminat, and that had backfired badly. I should have known. Trying to fulfill a child’s dreams was treacherous business. Instead of love and gratitude I had earned only resentment. Aminat was about to cry.

“Stop!” we heard from behind. “Wait, Tartar woman!”

The bearded liar was running after us in his giant rubber boots.

“Don’t pay attention to him,” I ordered.

Aminat dug in her heels and waited until he caught up to us.

“Here,” he said, placing the gray fur ball in Aminat’s hands. “You should have it. For free.”

Then he trudged back to his car and Aminat, her eyes lit up, turned her triumphant gaze to me.

“Aren’t I lucky, grandma? Don’t I have the most incredible luck?”

I said nothing. It had been a bad idea to take her to the bird market and let her choose. Aminat began to shower the little cat with kisses and terms of endearment. Before I could react, she had surely infected herself with all the diseases this runt had in its miserable body.

“Keep it away from your face!” I cried. “Cats are dangerous. You can get blotches over your entire body from them, and intestinal worms.”

Aminat was no longer listening to me.

For the first few weeks I waited for the little cat to die. I’d been through this kind of thing before: if I didn’t happen to like someone, then sometimes that person just up and died. But the cat didn’t die. It just got very sick—no wonder, since it had been separated from its mother too early. The cat came down with sticky eyes and diarrhea, and Sulfia called me in a panic.

In the background I could hear Aminat sobbing. At first I thought the problem had taken care of itself, but I had underestimated this cat’s will to live. I told Sulfia that she had to take care of at least a few things on her own. Sulfia agreed with me, apologized, and hung up.

I later found out that she went to a veterinarian and got a prescription for medicines and a special food mixture. It cost a fortune. This cat was tough. First it managed to get up from its deathbed, and eventually it returned to full health. Aminat named the cat Little Peter, but I always called it Parasite.

The cat had its pluses. For some incomprehensible reason, Aminat assumed Parasite belonged to me. All I had to do was threaten to take it away from her and Aminat did anything I wanted. Among those things was to stop taking leftover sausage to the stray cats.

I had heard that cats brought luck to a home. And sure enough, Sulfia met another man just one month later.

This man also had been one of her patients. One day I found him in Sulfia’s kitchen. I had managed to get hold of two pounds of oranges for Aminat—after waiting in line for hours—and I was worried this man was immediately going to eat them all up. I had the impression that with Sulfia that when she fell for a man, he could have anything from her. But not Aminat’s oranges!

This man wasn’t bad. He was cleanly dressed, and his shirt had a dignified pattern. He was, however, a Jew. I could always recognize a Jew. When he saw me, he stood up and kissed my hand. He seemed chivalrous. He told me his name—Michail. I asked about his last name. And sure enough—his name was Rosenbaum.

I found this alarming, but not catastrophic. Jews were Jews. You had to watch out for them, but wasn’t that true of everybody? I was sure that it had never occurred to Sulfia that he was a Jew. She smiled at him shyly, like a little girl, and he smiled back. He must have noticed what a great apartment Sulfia had. Jews were practical.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

He lived near the main station, which wasn’t exactly around the corner. Did he work someplace near here, I wondered—was he trying to use this acquaintance to shorten his commute? If you were unlucky and had to get to the far side of the city every morning for work, you might wait for an hour for a bus that was then too full to squeeze your way onto when it finally arrived.

“And do you live alone?” I asked.

“With my parents,” he said in a friendly tone.

“And what do you do for work, if I may ask?”

He was an engineer.

“That’s original,” I said.

He was also into sports. In winter he skied and in summer he climbed mountains. I was astounded that Jews did such things. I had always thought them to be too sensible. He’d sustained a compound fracture on one climb. Sulfia had nursed him back to health. Admittedly, he did have a limp, but there was nothing she could have done about that. He was bald and nearly forty years old. That was good. It was probably best for Sulfia not to be with a man any other woman might want.

I said a friendly goodbye. Out in the hallway I found Parasite chewing on one of my boots and shoved the beast aside. Once I got home, I rang Sulfia. The Jew had already left, which spoke well of him. A man who wanted to stay too long was suspicious. I told Sulfia he had nice teeth. Sulfia didn’t understand what I was really trying to tell her: that I thought the Jew was alright and that I wished her luck with him.

Of course, I didn’t mean that she should get pregnant straight away. But Sulfia was still haunted by Sergej and remembered what might happen if she ignored my advice. In any event, she was soon pregnant with a tiny Jew. I wouldn’t have expected such virility from Rosenbaum.

Sulfia was happy. Aminat as well. Her deepest wishes were being fulfilled. First she got a cat, and now a baby sibling would soon follow. She began to sort her toys so the new baby would have things to play with.

There was just one problem: Rosenbaum was in no hurry to marry despite the fact that my daughter was carrying his Jewish baby beneath her Tartar heart. I sat Sulfia down for a talk and found out he hadn’t even proposed to her. Worse still, his parents didn’t know that she even existed.

“His parents are old, and his mother has heart problems,” said Sulfia. She was already in her fourth month.

“He needs to tell his parents and marry you,” I insisted. “Immediately. Otherwise he’ll weasel his way out of it.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” said Sulfia dreamily.

“Then he should marry you.”

“He will. Later.”

“With some things, you shouldn’t wait too long.”

It was clear that I’d have to look after everything once again.

“Give me his address,” I said.

“What for?”

“Just give me his address.”

“Please don’t, mother.”

“I’m not going to do anything. I just need the address.”

“No,” said Sulfia.

“Don’t tell me you don’t have his address!”

She said nothing. I had hit the bull’s-eye again.

I found the address in the phone book.

As always, I prepared myself systematically. I didn’t want to attack them, I wanted to give them a chance to treat my pregnant daughter right. They should see me as a sort of dove—an emissary of peace.

I took two bars of chocolate with me from Sulfia’s supply—I wanted to be friendly but also humble. I rang the bell by a wood-paneled door (just the kind of door I had always wanted) and waited.

It took a few minutes before the door was opened. First I saw a dark shadow in the peephole—someone looked at me for a long time.

The door opened slowly, with the chain still on. I saw a nose and the lens of a pair of glasses, then the whole woman—small, gray-haired, intellectual.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Rosalinda Achmetowna and I’d like to speak to you about your son. About Michail,” I added, so she knew I wasn’t just bluffing, that I really knew him.

The eyes behind the glasses took on a look of concern.

“Has something happened?”

“Depends on how you look at it,” I said.

She took off the chain and let me in.

Rosenbaum’s mother was round and tense. Her entire being gave off a sense of distrust. Nonetheless, she gave me a pair of slippers to slip over the skin-colored nylons on my delicate feet and led me into the kitchen, where she sat down and folded her hands in her lap.

She blinked, agitated. I wondered what she was expecting. The situation was clear: Rosenbaum was a Jewish mama’s boy. Here in this place, lined with carpets and filled with heavy furniture, he had grown up like a frail flower in a greenhouse.

“It’s about my daughter Sulfia,” I said. “She’s a very sweet girl.”

Rosenbaum’s mother blinked repeatedly.

“We’re unbelievably excited about the baby,” I said.

She opened her mouth and froze, a dumbfounded look on her face.

“It’s so nice to have a chance to meet you,” I said. “I’m sure our families will get along swimmingly.”

She clutched at her chest.

“We’re Tartars,” I said. “And you’re . . . well, anyway, my husband says all people are the same. The only important thing is that they have a sense of decency.”

Rosenbaum’s mother started to keel over.

Rosenbaum was upset with me because his mother had had a heart attack. He put the blame on me. I put it right back on him. He shouldn’t try to make me responsible for his failure to tell his parents about Sulfia and about his imminent fatherhood.

One thing that spoke well of him: once Rosenbaum’s mother had been released from the hospital he immediately arranged a get-together. He wanted his parents to invite us over. I wanted it the other way around. I wanted to show that Sulfia had a good family and that she would be a good mother. I knew Jews were very critical. That was something we had in common with them.

The Rosenbaums accepted my invitation. What else could they do? With this occasion in mind, I phoned the teacher of Russian and literature and asked to speak to my husband. I always called him “my husband” so the ownership of the title remained clear, this despite the fact that “my husband” sounded increasingly like “my problem.”

He got on the phone and said, “Rosie, how nice to hear your voice.”

I got right to the point.

I said, “Kalganow, your daughter is getting married.”

He said nothing.

“Sulfia,” I said, helping him along. “She found a man.”

I told him what I wanted. The parents of the groom were coming to see us, to have dinner with us, and I wanted them to have a good impression of the family—first and foremost of the bride’s parents.

“That’s me and you,” I clarified. “Do you understand?”

“But . . . ” he said and fell silent again.

I sighed. Then I started to explain everything again from the beginning. I told him this had nothing to do with him coming back to me. It was just to create a good image. The Jews needed to have the impression that our family was whole. Kalganow breathed heavily into the phone. He’d been in better shape when he was with me.

“What is it?” I asked, annoyed. “Will you come or not? It’s for your daughter’s sake.”

“For Sulfia,” he said.

“Have you any other daughters?” I asked and hung up.

He would come. Of that I was sure.