The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (19 page)

Aminat and Sulfia wrote letters to each other. Sulfia kept them pretty short. She began them always with the same words: “My beloved little daughter, dear mother, and Dieter.” Then she reported on Kalganow: “Better and better.” She said she thought about us often and felt bad that we were alone in a foreign land. I lingered on the sections where she talked about grocery prices and skimmed the rest.

Aminat’s letters, on the other hand, I read far more closely.

It was handy that she had to give me her letters—I reigned sovereign over our supply of envelopes and stamps. That way I always knew what Aminat wrote. Most of it was uninteresting. She wrote about her school, her class schedule, the individual subjects, and the material being taught in each. I looked for places where she alluded to me or Dieter: “Grandma works a lot and is often gone. We’re doing well. Kisses, your daughter Aminat.”

One day Aminat stayed home and said she wasn’t feeling well. I had no time because I had to get to a job. I felt her forehead, which was cool, and decided she couldn’t be too sick. I told Dieter he should make her a chamomile tea, and then I left.

When I came home that evening, Aminat was lying in bed again. Dieter said she had been quiet all day long. She had gotten out of bed once in a while, then she would go back and lie down. She didn’t drink her tea. She did, however, write another letter to Sulfia, a short one ending with the words, “I’ll write again when my stomach doesn’t hurt so horribly.”

I went into the room and looked at Aminat. She was curled up on her side and still awake, despite the fact that it was late. When I felt her forehead, it was still cool and moist.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Aminat.

I told her she needed to sleep. In order to get healthy, you need to sleep a lot.

In the morning, Aminat couldn’t stand up. I told Dieter she would spend another day in bed. While I was in the shower, Dieter called an ambulance. When I emerged from the bathroom, dressed, with my hair nicely done, an emergency doctor was pressing with his hand around Aminat’s torso. Her legs shot into the air and she screamed. I figured out that the German word everyone was saying,
Blinddarmentzündung
, was just banal appendicitis. Now Aminat had a fever. I still intended to work. It wasn’t as if I could operate on Aminat myself.

“I’ll go,” said Dieter, whose hands were trembling.

“Calm down, calm down,” I said. “This is Germany. Nothing bad happens to people here.”

Dieter looked at me as if I were crazy. He often looked at me that way.

After work, I went straight to the children’s hospital. I asked for Aminat Kalganova. Nobody recognized the name. I wrote it down. I held my stomach, to show what was wrong with her. A nurse told me Aminat was in the gynecological ward.

“What?” I asked.

She wrote something on a piece of paper, the name of the ward and another name, probably the name of the doctor.

I hurried along the corridors with the piece of paper. My heart pounded in my ears. I was unbelievably upset. I could put two and two together. I could tell how red in the face I was and thought I might pass out from a sudden attack of high blood pressure. I yanked open a glass door and went down the hall. Dieter was sitting in a recessed seating area beside a fish tank, looking at colorful recipes in a magazine.

“You pig!” I screamed, before I ripped the magazine out of his hands, rolled it up, and batted his face with it. I didn’t know how to say much more than that in German, so I switched to my native tongue.

“How dare you . . . she’s only fourteen . . . that wasn’t the deal! I trusted you. And you still haven’t married Sulfia!”

Dieter shielded his face with his hands. But I tossed the magazine aside and looked around for something harder. The aquarium was too big, as was the pot with the yucca plant in it. I reached into the pot and grabbed a handful of potting soil and threw it in Dieter’s face.

I stopped only when I heard footsteps in the hall. Dieter had also managed to grab my wrists. Switching back to German, I screamed: “Let me go, you child-fucker.” He let my wrists go and held my mouth shut. Just then two nurses appeared and said that if we didn’t immediately leave the building, they would call the police.

Outside I sat down next to Dieter on a bench in the shadows. I lit a cigarette. When I got upset I liked to smoke, but only very rarely because I didn’t want to lose the freshness of my face.

Dieter wasn’t to blame. Aminat wasn’t pregnant. She was a virgin. In fact, that was the problem—she was an iron maiden, a little medical wonder. She had reached an age at which she had been overcome by the plague of all women. But Aminat was impermeable and had to be de-virginized on an operating table with a scalpel. The doctor said a half liter of blood sloshed onto his pants when he did it. That was what they had taken for appendicitis prior to the first operation: the hardened stomach, the pain, and the infected fluid in the abdominal cavity. Now they had opened the sluice of Aminat’s central canal and cleaned her abdomen from inside.

I had known for a while that something wasn’t right with Aminat. I hadn’t hit upon an explanation like this, however. Who would think of something like that? A scalpel was far preferable to Dieter in my mind, and certainly cleaner.

I liked the doctor who operated on Aminat. He wore jeans and a white smock and had gray hair and a boyish grin. When he came in to see his patient, he joked with everyone.

Aminat did not joke around. She lay there with a look on her face like a soon-to-be mass murderer. I was a little ashamed of her for being so antisocial. Sure, the surroundings were probably a bit much for a young girl. I remembered Aminat’s conception—in a dream—and I asked myself how it all fit together. I asked the gray-haired doctor whether she would still be able to have children.

“As many as she wants,” he said.

“I’m going to throw up,” said Aminat.

Out in the hallway I took the doctor by the sleeve of his smock and told him how Aminat had come into the world. The doctor listened with a furrowed brow. It was the first time I’d ever let a stranger burrow so deeply into our family history.

The doctor said, “Don’t worry, she is healthy.”

Then he added that I should wait for him, he wanted to give me something. I waited in the hall while he left and returned. Bowing formally he handed me a brochure for an organization called the Family Education Center.

I didn’t say anything to Sulfia about Aminat having an operation. Aminat agreed that it would just have unnecessarily alarmed her mother. Sulfia was doing poorly enough without bad news from Germany. Kalganow’s teacher called me and said desperately that I needed to get hold of some medicine for Sulfia. The medicine she usually took had suddenly stopped being produced. We needed to get it for her in Germany. She read me the name of the medicine.

I took the matter seriously. I called them back and Sulfia answered. She sounded feeble and didn’t want to talk about medicine. She said it was true about the medicine but that there was a substitute; she was taking that now and, as a result, everything was fine. That I shouldn’t think twice about it, that I had enough troubles of my own to worry about.

I noticed that by German standards, I was a fairly young woman. It was as if I had stopped aging. Of course, I hadn’t forgotten my real age. In Russia I knew I was young but that other women my age no longer were. Here I realized that the women my age really were young, even if they looked worse than me.

Even some women much older than me were still young. I stared at the first real old lady I saw—one with violet-colored hair—after she passed me on her bicycle. I took a picture of the second one. The third time I saw an older woman on a bike, it made me think. Then I bought myself a secondhand bicycle from a newspaper ad.

I sat for the first time ever on a bike. It wasn’t easy. But if these grannies could do it, I wanted to be able to do it as well. At first I tried to ride by myself. The bike fell over. I remembered how children learned to ride a bike. They always had an adult who pushed them.

I made Dieter do it. He didn’t have anything else to do. Evenings we went to an empty supermarket parking lot, I stepped on the pedals, and Dieter steadied my bike. At first it took a lot of effort on his part. I screamed at him when the bike began to tip to one side or the other. We practiced for a few weeks and I could have sworn that Dieter’s skin took on a healthier hue during that time.

I managed pretty quickly to keep my balance. After a few weeks I could ride a couple meters without being braced. I released Dieter from his obligation. He had already begun to intimate that I was too heavy and that he had a weak back. After that I practiced by myself again. I rode in circles in the parking lot and soon also on the sidewalk.

I always rode on the sidewalk regardless of how crowded it was. I just didn’t trust car drivers.

Next, I learned to drive a car.

I already knew a man who ran a driving school, whose wife had in the meantime given birth to the baby and whose face I never glimpsed once she was back home. The woman wore a sour-smelling burp cloth on her shoulder as a constant accessory. Milk apparently didn’t agree with her baby, and the entire house was covered with stains now.

I went to driving school at night. For a working woman like myself, it was very practical that the school was open at night. There were a lot of women in Germany who did not work, and the world revolved around them. In any event, at the school I saw the man whose wife paid me to clean. He was filling out some piece of paper on a table. He looked at me and said, “Ah! What now?”

“I want to learn to drive,” I said.

“Ever tried before?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He pulled out a registration form and began to fill it out. I moved closer to him and bent down.

“At a steep discount,” I said conspiratorially in his hairy ear.

We looked each other in the eyes. I was sure that he wouldn’t kill me. In Germany you ended up in jail for that kind of thing. He shoved a piece of paper at me to sign and then gave me a couple brochures. I was to begin the classroom portion of the training in two days.

Soon I was sitting on a plastic chair along with ten seventeen-year-olds, all of us listening to the rules governing right of way. The owner of the driving school stood in front of a chalkboard, moved around magnets of various colors, and scrawled arrows around them. I preferred to look over the rules in my book afterward because I wasn’t sure he was explaining them correctly.

I passed the theory test with only a few errors (Aminat had quizzed me beforehand), and then I had my first hour of practice behind the wheel.

My instructor was a little old uncle-type with big ears and sad eyes behind thick glasses. I sat down at the wheel and he sat next to me. He showed me the mirrors and the pedals and the blinkers. I wanted to start driving and turned the key in the ignition. The car jumped. The instructor pulled out the key, put it in his pocket, and started again from the beginning. But I was the customer here and this was Germany.

“I’m here to drive,” I said.

The instructor told me that older women in particular had a lot of problems mastering driving. Even those who were capable of grasping the process intellectually tended to be too fearful at the wheel. They couldn’t drive because they got hung up on feelings. That’s why an older woman had to go over the procedures several times and practice a lot in parking lots before she had sufficiently steeled her nerves to venture into real traffic on even the least busy roads.

“Give me the key, you know-it-all,” I said, pointing to the pocket where he had stashed the key.

Then we had a brief skirmish. He was not the quickest. I got the key, put it in the ignition, stepped on the pedal, and yanked the gearshift. The car must have been in need of repairs, because it moved in a series of jumps before coughing and stalling.

I kept trying, elbowing the instructor as he tried again to take the key. He muttered and cursed in his soft voice.

“Pssst, grandpa,” I said, “why don’t you tell me how this works instead.”

He wiped his forehead with a cloth handkerchief. His knees seemed to be cramping. He had pedals on his side, too, which he had been standing on the whole time—that must have been the reason I couldn’t get anywhere.

He was amazed when I was able to steer the car across the parking lot. I caressed the steering wheel, stepped more confidently on the pedals, and started to develop a feel for the brakes and gas with my own body. I drove. I drove from the parking lot out onto the street. It was loud and lots of cars honked. The instructor beside me kept flinching and grabbing the wheel. I decided to let him if it made him feel better. The important thing was that I was driving.

I learned quickly. I had nerves of steel. Unfortunately I failed the practical portion of the driving test twice. But that was understandable: even in Germany there were mafias, and the driving testers must have wanted money; I had failed to understand. I registered for the test again, paid the requisite fee, and soon had a driver’s license in my hands. Later, however, when I looked at my receipt, I realized that I hadn’t paid anything beyond the standard test fee.

All the money I earned I put in envelopes and stashed them in my stacks of underwear. When I had a chance, I would count it, but for the most part I just kept an accounting ledger in my head. I earned so much because I was so good. I needed only say the word and my employers raised my rate by a couple marks per hour. And I didn’t spend much.

For haircuts I didn’t go to a salon because the prices were horrendous. One of my employers hired a hairdresser to come to her house and cut the entire family’s hair. I was permitted to join them. I had excellent hair, good genes, no gray. My nails I had done the same way at the home of another employer. I couldn’t do much with my fingernails because I needed them for work. But my toenails were perfect. Filed beautifully and polished cherry red. I had really nice feet, narrow, not too big and not too small, very well groomed, perfect to cuddle.

Dieter didn’t want to let me get behind the wheel of his car. But I had come to realize it was old and ugly—I’d seen a lot of others by now. So I started to take it without a word. He was home most of the time, and when I needed the car I would just take the keys out of the drawer and drive off.

I picked up Sulfia from the airport in Dieter’s car. It was the first time I had driven such a long way. Strictly speaking, it was also the first time I’d been on the autobahn by myself. I was bursting with pride and excitement. I took a few wrong turns, but I still managed to get there on time.

I hadn’t missed Sulfia because I’d been so busy. It was nonetheless good that she was here. Sulfia had yearned to see us. I couldn’t go see her because I didn’t want to leave Aminat alone with Dieter, and I couldn’t take her with me because I didn’t want to interrupt the acculturation process, in which she lagged so far behind me. Now Sulfia stood before me with a suitcase that I had gotten for her when she planned to emigrate long ago. It had wheels but she could barely pull it along. Her face was puffy, her skin doughy, and she had deep shadows beneath her eyes. I looked at her and felt nothing but deep hatred for Kalganow.