The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (13 page)

When I reopened my aching eyes, I saw Sulfia, who, with her eyes averted, was measuring my blood pressure. I closed my eyes again and tried to think.

I remembered the goodbye party, Aminat’s sweaty forehead, her cheek pressed to the mattress, and her arm holding little Lena in her sleep. That was my misfortune: I was about to lose Aminat to the land of the Jews just because Sulfia had married a Rosenbaum. It was light outside, and Sulfia, who should have long since transferred to an airplane in Moscow bound for Tel Aviv, stood before me in the flesh, packing up her blood pressure cuff. I must have missed something.

Sulfia stood up and went to the window. I opened my eyes a bit and looked at her skinny back. On the windowsill were two large bags, and Sulfia rummaged around in one of them now.

I felt my body under the covers. I had on a different nightgown. Someone had changed me. I touched my hair to check on the state of it. I wet my fingers with saliva and felt my eyelashes. Someone had changed me and washed my face.

I didn’t realize right away that Sulfia had turned back around and was looking at me. It was too late to close my eyes again. I looked back at her silently.

“How do you feel?” she asked without smiling.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. Speaking proved difficult. My throat was raw and dry.

Sulfia didn’t answer.

“Where’s Aminat?” I wheezed.

Sulfia left and returned with a half-filled glass of water. She put her hand under my back and pulled me upright. She held the glass to my lips. I took a sip of water. The cold moisture hurt my throat.

“Where’s Aminat?”

Sulfia put the glass down on the windowsill.

“At school.”

“And the Rosenbaums?”

Sulfia turned to face the window, with her back to me.

“In Tel Aviv.”

“And you? When are you flying there?”

“I’m not.”

“And Lena?”

“What about Lena?”

“Where is she?”

Sulfia turned and looked at me with dull eyes.

“Lena is in Tel Aviv. Sleep now, mother.”

It was just us again: Aminat, Sulfia, and me, with no men, no new children, in two huge apartments, one of which was unfurnished. That’s why Aminat and Sulfia had moved in here, into the room where the two of them had lived just after Aminat’s birth.

“She’s afraid that you’ll do something to yourself again,” Klavdia told me in the kitchen. But that was nonsense. Why would I do something to myself now that my darling was with me again?

Sulfia never talked about that night, the one during which she had decided not to get on the plane. She must have changed her mind in the space of a few hours. I never found out what made her come after me, or what happened when she did. She had obviously saved me without the help of a medic, because otherwise I’d have awoken not in my own home but locked in a psychiatric ward as suicidal. I could tell Klavdia knew more than she let on, and I suspected something was wrong with her tablets—they were too cheap and apparently didn’t have enough active ingredient.

My throat burned for a long time, and my stomach was shredded and raw, as if I’d puked up rocks. I didn’t complain. I lay in bed, hands folded over the covers, and Sulfia stayed with me. Sometimes I had the feeling that the blankets were too warm. I didn’t have to say anything. Sulfia could tell from the look on my face. She shook the blankets out and turned them over. She was my daughter and I’d spent a lifetime taking care of her. Now it was her turn to do something for me.

While Sulfia shook out the blankets, wiped my face with a moist towel, gave me things to drink, injected me with this and that, and monitored my blood pressure, Aminat fumed in the next room. Through the wall I could hear her stomping her feet and jumping up and down, slamming herself against the wall, and throwing things around. It was as if she’d gone mad. Sometimes she screamed, and then Sulfia would leave and go into the next room. I heard her dry whispers. Aminat would quiet down.

While I was sick, Aminat didn’t come into my room a single time. At first I was glad. I was too weak, and I wouldn’t have known what to say to her. Then I began to miss her. I asked Sulfia about her. Sulfia said I was still too weak and Aminat too ill-behaved. I understood what she meant. Aminat wouldn’t be able to control herself around me; she’d scream and rant and say things to me that she’d bitterly regret sometime after my death, which had been delayed for now.

If I hadn’t been found in time, she would have shed a few tears in Tel Aviv and perhaps called out my name in the night until the memories of me eventually faded. I would have become just a photo on her wall.

Now everything would be different. The Rosenbaums would be bathing in the Dead Sea alone.

Sulfia went back to work at the surgical clinic, Aminat went back to school, and I had sufficiently recovered to take a few strolls around the block, though I did stop frequently to catch my breath. Sulfia was transformed into an old woman in a matter of a few days. It mustn’t last, I thought to myself—with such an embittered expression on her face she’d never get another man.

Aminat had changed, too. She had stopped throwing fits. She became an oddly quiet child, never said a word too many, and came straight home from school and did her homework. When she was finished, she would lie on the bed with her face to the wall.

“What’s her problem?” I asked Sulfia. “Promise her we’ll take a beach holiday soon. Rosenbaum should send you money. Surely he’s rich by now.”

Sulfia looked at me and said, “What are you talking about the beach for? She misses her sister.”

Of course. Now I saw it, too. Aminat was longing for that chubby-faced baby with the messy fluff on her head. She had stashed photos in her books and notebooks: Lena on a rocking horse, Lena with an apple, Lena on her potty. She never mentioned her sister, but photos slipped out all over the place, and Aminat quickly gathered them up and tucked them back into her things.

Sulfia never mentioned Lena either. When in the evening she went into the room she was sharing with Aminat I heard only silence. They didn’t speak to each other. I had the feeling they were both refusing to speak about the same thing.

Meanwhile the phone continued to ring at our place. Aminat would run to the foyer and grab for the phone. Initially Rosenbaum called often. He reported that they had settled in well, said how hot it was, explained that they were living in an empty apartment—just the four of them—and then that they’d gotten some secondhand furniture from the neighbors. How they were attending language classes, how he sorted fruit at a stand early in the morning because there was no other work, how his mother was in poor health but his father was thriving.

“Let me talk to Lena,” Aminat pleaded, and then I heard her shout, “Lena, it’s your big sister Aminat!” and then whisper things into the phone that only Lena was supposed to hear. “Now you tell me something,” she demanded, and was quiet for a little while.

Lena couldn’t talk at all yet. At two, she was a little overdue. Rosenbaum probably took the phone away from Lena quickly because it was expensive to call. Aminat went to her room and closed the door. The silence pressed against the walls.

One day a letter of several pages arrived from Rosenbaum, which, according to the postmark, had been in transit for two months. On the stamps were contorted letters, and the address sounded like something from another world. In the envelope were photos: Lena at the beach, in front of a stone wall, and eating an ice cream.

“She’s gotten so big!” said Aminat, though Lena looked exactly the same as she had before her departure. She was wearing strange things. A t-shirt with a cartoon mouse on it, a sunhat, and wet shorts. There was a deserted sandy beach in the background.

Aminat spent hours looking at the photos, unlike Sulfia, who took only a fleeting look at them and then looked away.

“Look, mama,” said Aminat.

“Yes, yes, sweetie,” said Sulfia.

“You have to see this!”

“I already have, sweetie.”

Sulfia didn’t read Rosenbaum’s long letter, either. Aminat really wanted to know what it said, but she couldn’t decipher the erratic handwriting. So I read it to her. For the most part Rosenbaum just enumerated all the products available in the stores and their prices, but he also wrote that Lena’s first word was in Hebrew and that they couldn’t wait to welcome the missing members of the family so they’d be whole again. At that point I stopped and peered over the edge of the letter at Aminat, who was looking at me through narrowed eyes.

I folded the letter. Aminat ripped it out of my hand and went to her room.

Times were getting tougher.

Sulfia moved through the day like a ghost and Aminat began to adopt the same facial expression as her mother: the corners of her mouth hung down and her eyes stared off into space. I noticed that neither of them had any respect for me anymore, either. Sulfia and Aminat looked politely in my direction when I offered my thoughts on the weather or the ruble’s nosedive, but their faces betrayed the fact that they couldn’t wait for me to finally stop talking.

Times had changed outside, too. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty. It was a struggle to get enough to eat. Before I went shopping, I first returned all the empty milk and kefir bottles, thoroughly rinsed, for the deposits, carefully counting the coins I got back. With that money I bought bread and potatoes.

Fortunately I had my garden outside the city, which got us through these times. My cucumbers and tomatoes grew in a greenhouse. The bus ride to the garden took nearly two hours. I would have preferred to call Kalganow so he could drive us there in his car and, more importantly, drive us back with our boxes of vegetables and baskets of fruit. I took Aminat with me, and she wandered silently between the plant beds and picked chives and stuffed them in her mouth by the bushel. She needed vitamins.

We didn’t let anything go to waste. Sulfia spent hours on a ladder, a bucket hanging from a rope around her neck, picking sea buckthorn berries for marmalade. It was hard work, and I was happy Sulfia didn’t complain, even when thorny branches cut her hands and juice from burst berries ran into the cuts and burned. For nights on end I stood in the kitchen sterilizing the canning jars filled with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and mushrooms, with marmalade and compote, and dreamed occasionally of having a freezer.

Politics didn’t interest me. I stopped reading the papers, too, because there were things in there that further depressed me. I didn’t need bad news from the paper. I could see everything with my own eyes. While the economy imploded, I made sure my family didn’t go hungry. The rows of canning jars stacked neatly in the bedroom and covered with old wool blankets served as a daily reminder that without me, life would be impossible. But things still got more and more difficult. It was a stroke of luck when you could buy sugar, for instance, and I needed it for the marmalades and for my tea fungus.

We had long since gotten used to food rationing. It was nothing new for someone from the housing authority to sit in the staircase and have all the residents line up to get coupons that entitled them to purchase a certain amount of sausage or sugar. The difficulty was actually using the coupons. As soon as I heard there was sugar for sale someplace, I immediately dropped what I was doing at work and went straight there. I always had Sulfia’s, Aminat’s, and my coupons with me just in case. I traded sausage coupons with my coworkers for sugar coupons. I had decided the vitamins in my marmalade were better than the mix of gristle, skin, and paper they called sausage, and which took a lot of luck to get hold of anyway.

At some point I had to concede that I would no longer be able to service the tea fungus’s enormous appetite for sugar. I took it to my garden and threw it on the compost pile, though it hurt me to my soul.

If there was one thing I would really like to have had during this time, it was a cow. Milk had become a rarity. Near our building was a pavilion with an automated milk dispenser, where people took milk cans and empty three-liter bottles to fill. Long lines formed in front of the pavilion, and murmurs would race through the line when the dispenser had run out. Of course, in front of most of the milk dispensaries hung signs that read “No Milk Today.” I couldn’t understand why milk would suddenly become so scarce. Where were all the dairy farmers? Had the endless grasslands of our country been abandoned?

The same mystery surrounded eggs. It had been a long time since I had eaten an egg. A woman who lived upstairs kept a live chicken in her kitchen. Once in a while she took it out and let it pick through the flowerbeds outside. I was wildly envious.

Aminat’s school building was too small to hold all the students, and there were too few teachers. Her class now had the afternoon shift: her school day began at two. She came home after dark. Mornings she hung around by herself. When I finished work early enough, I would pick her up from school in the evening. A lot of girls went missing in broad daylight during those years only to be found raped and murdered in the basements of random buildings.

Letters from Tel Aviv became shorter and less frequent. Eventually all that came were postcards for birthdays. Every card said basically the same thing, with only slight variations: “We send best wishes, optimism, and sunshine.” Lena had long hair in the photos. International calls, which were recognizable by the different ringtone, became very seldom and very short, and the conversation was always the same. We didn’t have anything more to say to each other.

“Sulfia,” I said one morning, “you need a man.”

She was stirring a spoonful of coffee powder into her cup. The canister was nearly empty; in two days we’d have no more coffee, with little chance of getting more for a long time to come. I didn’t think I had said anything special. But Sulfia, calm, ugly, bitter-looking Sulfia, threw her cup to the floor and began to scream.

She screamed that I should never again interfere in her life, a life I had already destroyed, this time forever, broken her heart, robbed her of her dear little daughter, taken away her family, shattered her future, and chained her and poor Aminat to me.

It was clear that Sulfia was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Which is why I didn’t let her words bother me. In her moments of madness she sometimes said hurtful things. But I didn’t hold a grudge.

“Sulfia,” I said tenderly, “it’s for Aminat’s sake, don’t you see? She has no future in this country. It will eat her up and won’t even spit out the bones. You need to find a foreigner, Sulfia.”

Sulfia sat down on the floor right next to the puddle of coffee and the shards of the broken cup and broke down in tears.

She had just signed some divorce papers. Rosenbaum had asked her in a very amiable way to take this step. Based on her behavior, he had concluded that she never really intended to join him; he had given up hope and fallen in love with another émigré in Tel Aviv.

Sulfia signed everything and gave the papers to a man who had introduced himself as an emissary and lawyer for the Rosenbaum family. He spoke good Russian, but with a velvety accent. He seemed pleasantly surprised that everything had been so easily resolved. When he left, he kissed both me and Sulfia on the hand and said Rosenbaum intended never again to set foot on Russian soil.

I looked him up and down, from his bald head to his expensively shod feet, and let him leave. He wore a showy, unmistakably new wedding ring.