The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (4 page)

Two days later the bumps were gone. But I didn’t take her back to the sanatorium. She looked healthy. At every meal I gave her a piece of bread and a clove of garlic and showed her how she should rub the garlic on the bread crust. Aminat set the bread aside and ate the garlic clove whole. I was sure she would not get sick anymore: there were lots of vitamins in garlic. I sent her back to kindergarten. One evening three days later I arrived to pick her up only to learn Aminat had already been picked up.

I was barely able to keep myself from punching the teacher who told me. I wanted to punch her right in the chest—right on the nametag pinned to her white smock. The smock was new and so was the teacher. I’d never seen her stupid face there before. She was very young and must have just finished her training and certification. You could see she hadn’t learned much from the pedagogical training. I had worked at a teacher’s college myself and knew how they worked. I knew the type of girls who came through those schools. They all thought of themselves as fond of children but were for the most part just lazy, interested only in boys. And they had stupid faces.

“Her mommy already came,” lisped the new kindergarten teacher chirpily.

I sat down on a low bench where the children sat to tie their shoes.

“What?” I hissed.

“Her mommy picked Anja up. Anja was so happy that today she wasn’t the last one picked up.”

I closed my eyes to collect myself.

“Her mommy is mentally handicapped,” I said calmly. “Her mother is an evil psychopath. Are you not aware that you’re not even to let her mother
set foot
on the premises?”

The idiot straightened a garland hung from the doorframe, a decoration for the national holidays celebrating the Soviet Army.

“No, I don’t know anything about that,” she said placidly. “I wasn’t given any instructions like that.”

I left without another word. Bitterly I realized that she was right. The protective wall I had erected around Aminat was built of paper, and it was just a matter of time before it collapsed. I had to admit to myself that I’d been too naïve, too goodhearted. At the end of the day this was fair punishment.

Except that Aminat didn’t deserve it.

I went home. Kalganow was already there. He was eating some of the meatballs I’d made the night before and left in a dish in the refrigerator. They were stone cold but heating them up would obviously have been too much for his meager abilities.

“SULFIA!” I shrieked, running to the phone.

I dialed the number of her dormitory.

“Sulfia Kalganova,” I shouted into the phone. “She kidnapped a small child.”

I could hear jovial voices in the background. They were celebrating.

“Lady,” said a voice, “Sulfia Kalganova hasn’t lived here for ages.”

I hung up the phone and staggered back into the kitchen. My husband had folded his hands across his stomach and sat staring out the window.

“When was the last time you saw Sulfia?” I cried.

He gasped with surprise.

“Two weeks ago, I think,” he mumbled. “When she, um, how should I put it—when she got married.”

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t count on anyone: traitors were coming out of the woodwork. Now even Kalganow, that amoeba, that spineless creature, that venom-less jellyfish, had dared to deceive me. And once again I’d been so unsuspecting.

Now it came out: he had secrets. He had gone to see our daughter Sulfia and told me only now when there was no other choice. You simply couldn’t count on anyone in this world.

“Why didn’t you tell me, you animal?”

“Because she asked me not to,” he mumbled. “Because she’s afraid of you.”

“Afraid? Of me? Who could possibly be afraid of me? Nobody should ever be afraid of me. I only want what’s best. Put those plates in the sink, you tyrant.”

An hour later we left our apartment together. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to see everything. I wanted Aminat back. I wanted to make sure nothing bad had happened to her.

Even my husband could understand that. After I explained everything to him, he agreed and took me to see the restaurant where Sulfia had held her wedding reception. Astonishingly, it wasn’t a bad restaurant. Then we took the bus eleven more stops so he could show me the street where she lived now.

He knew everything! The only thing he didn’t have was a telephone number, he said. They didn’t have a phone line yet; it was a new building.

Sulfia’s husband, Kalganow explained, was a former patient of hers. He had been hit by a car and was patched back together in her ward. She had nursed him back to health. On the day he was released, he asked her to marry him. His name was Sergej.

“Sergej,” I snorted disdainfully, and, dragging my Kalganow behind me, started down the street between the endless rows of newly constructed nine-story apartment buildings.

“Not so fast, Rosie,” he begged.

“Aren’t you at least sure which street she lives on, you tarantula?”

He squinted. It was snowing, and snowflakes clung to the black eyelashes I had so loved twenty-five years ago.

“I think so,” he said.

“You think so? You only think so? You don’t know for sure?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything. What does everyone expect from me? There’s nothing I can do.”

I punched him between the shoulder blades. My fist sank into the expensive leather of his two-year-old shearling coat. I made sure he dressed well. He was after all my husband—and he also had an important position at the workers’ union. I left him standing there and walked on ahead. He grabbed me and I hit him again. He was a turd, but he was the husband I was stuck with.

Then I forgot about Kalganow for a second because somewhere a child started to cry.

“Do you hear that? Do you hear that? Is it her?”

“What?” My husband stood there looking around.

“That. A baby crying.”

My husband strained to hear. I had the impression that beneath his fur hat his ears perked up to hear better.

“I don’t hear anything,” he said.

“You’re deaf.”

We walked up and down the street a little more.

I looked at the buildings, the balconies, the windows. Skis and skates sat on the balconies. Bags of deep-frozen meat hung from the windows. Inside on the windowsills were houseplants and cats. A few of the balconies were piled with dilapidated furniture, worn-out shoes, and empty bottles. These people had just moved in and had already created such pigsties. In the window boxes fresh snow covered dead flowers. Here and there I saw old Christmas trees draped with tinsel.

My husband swore that Sulfia hadn’t given him her address. She had probably suspected he wouldn’t be able keep mum.

“I don’t know the address, Rosie, scout’s honor,” he said.

Several thousand people lived in the buildings here on this street. I tried to figure out how long it would take to go into every building and ring every doorbell.

Just then a woman came along pushing a stroller with a snotty little brat in it. I wasn’t fooled for a second: the child was too small and ugly to be Aminat.

My husband’s nose was running. Tears began to trickle from his eyes. It was extremely cold and he looked miserable. Why was I, of all people, stuck with someone like him at my side? At least he wasn’t complaining.

“We’re going home,” I said.

“Really?” He was as happy as a child. He lacked perseverance and just wanted to get warm, drink a cup of tea, eat meatballs.

“We’re going back to the bus stop, for your sake, you snake,” I said, turning toward the bus stop and walking off.

I went back five times, alone. I walked up and down the street at various times, day and night. I stopped people coming out of buildings and asked them whether they knew a Sulfia Kalganova. Nobody knew her. I asked them whether they’d seen a scrawny Tartar woman holding hands with a pretty little girl. Nobody had seen them.

Three weeks later I finally ran into her.

It was both of them. Sulfia held the hand of my little girl. I could see immediately that Aminat was carelessly dressed. She didn’t have a scarf on, and her hat had shifted so that her ears were exposed to the biting cold. Her black hair hung in her face. Her nose was red. She definitely had a cold, and no wonder with this mother.

I took a few steps to the side and hid behind a dumpster. Sulfia and Aminat walked past me hand in hand. I watched them turn toward a building and saw which doorway they entered. I hurried after them. I listened to the elevator go up for a long while, up to the top floor. Somewhere way up above I heard a door close.

It smelled good in the foyer of this building because it was still new. The scent of paint and chemicals hung in the air, a very clean smell, but I knew it wouldn’t last long. A year from now the freshly painted walls would be covered with scribbling, drunks and cats would have pissed in every corner, and it would be lucky if even a hint were left of the hope for a better life that was built into every new house.

A short time later I stood on the ninth floor, just beneath the roof of the building. There were four doors on this floor. Behind one of them I heard the warbling of a child’s voice I recognized.

I didn’t ring Sulfia’s doorbell. Not yet. Stepping lightly I descended the stairs, went outside, and breathed in the cold, watermelon-scented winter air. Hope filled my lungs; I could have floated off like a balloon.

“What does Sulfia’s husband do? This guy Sergej?” I asked Kalganow as he sat in the kitchen cutting up meat-filled
blini
with a fork.

He mumbled something. As always, his mouth was full.

“Some kind of physicist,” he said finally, a leftover piece of onion between his teeth.

“Aha,” I said pensively. “Not bad.”

I didn’t really believe it. What would my daughter Sulfia, who wasn’t bright enough to read before the age of nine and who to this day had trouble with numbers, want with a physicist? And more importantly, what would a physicist want with her? To talk about atoms?

One morning at nine I finally rang the doorbell of Sulfia’s apartment. I had on my nice long fur coat, a fur hat, heels, and tasteful lipstick. And I had a box of chocolate-covered meringues under my arm. The candy was a bit old—I’d been holding on to it for an important occasion. And now that occasion had arrived.

At first all was quiet behind the door. Then I heard rustling, coughing and cursing, and bare feet on linoleum. The door opened and for the first time I glimpsed the living, breathing man who actually lived with Sulfia—my son-in-law.

My first impression of him made me doubt even more that he really was a physicist. He looked scatterbrained. But he must have been some sort of academic because he didn’t have to go to work on time. He was apparently home alone late in the morning. Big as a bear, with hair the color of wheat at harvest time, long, curly, mussed. The hair on his chest was somewhat darker. His legs . . .

With a start, the man hid himself behind the door.

“What is it?” he asked, with just his head peeking out now.

“I’m Rosalinda,” I said, putting on a sweet smile. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Ro-sa . . . lin-da?” he said, pronouncing each syllable. Yes, I did have a pretty name, like something out of a foreign romance novel. I wasn’t just another Katja or Larissa.

“Rosalinda . . . ” he mumbled. “You must be . . . ”

“I’m sure you have heard a lot about me from my daughter!” I said, placing one of my high heels across the threshold.

He reacted quickly; perhaps he was a physicist after all.

“Oh, how awkward. You are healthy again?”

“Healthy?”

As I answered his question with a question, I pushed the door open with both hands. It was difficult, as he was standing behind it. I must have bumped something, because he let out a stifled cry. He let me into the apartment and begged my pardon a thousand times.

I nodded majestically as he dashed around the corner. At his size and stature, it wasn’t a given that he could move like that. His underpants were new and clean.

Kalganow needed some new underwear, I decided.

“Please make yourself comfortable,” called my apparently well-mannered son-in-law from the depths of the apartment. “I’ll be right back.”

The apartment had a living room, a kitchen, and at least one bedroom. I took off my jacket but decided to keep my heels on. I went into the kitchen and sat down on a stool.

The kitchen was nice—it must have been 100 square feet. The table was new, as was the plastic tablecloth on top of it. Next to a couple of plates set out to dry was Aminat’s cup, the one with the rabbit on it. The stove wasn’t too clean. Glasses of water sat on the windowsill with onions sprouting in them, the green shoots straining toward the ceiling. Sulfia learned that from me: it was an inexpensive way to get vitamins in the winter.

Vitamins, I had learned, were the most important things in life. Seeing those onions put me in a peaceful, tolerant frame of mind. I decided to bring Sulfia some of the tea fungus I had cultivated in my kitchen. The fungus produced a very flavorful, healthy drink that tasted like kvass. And it was certainly better for you, since the kvass you could buy from street vendors was definitely unhygienic. Even so, in the past I had bought kvass once in a while for Kalganow or even Aminat. But these days, head held high, I walked right past the kvass vendors along the sidewalks with their barrels, the women in dirty aprons filling jugs or plastic bags with the foamy yellowish liquid that, especially in the bags, looked like urine. I far preferred the tea fungus I’d received from a co-worker. All you had to do was feed it regularly with tea and sugar, and you could be sure the drink made from it was clean.

My son-in-law reemerged, this time wearing a greasy bathrobe. I still wasn’t sure what to make of him. He poured me a bit of cold tea with the tea leaves swimming in it, and then filled the cup with hot water. As he did so, he asked whether my heart was doing better and how it had been at the sanatorium.

Now I understood everything.

Sulfia, the little dung beetle, had hidden me from him. She’d banished me by assigning me diseases and various places of residence. It certainly wasn’t a solution that showed much foresight.

My heart beat steadily, slowly, and dependably, and had been doing so for years. For the most part it was other people who got sick. But I decided to play along with Sulfia’s lazy game.

“It’s doing well again,” I said. “And did you enjoy the wedding?”

“Oh yes, very much,” said my son-in-law with glazed eyes. “You know, we’re very happy at the moment. Since little Anja finally came to live with us, Soja has absolutely blossomed. It’s so wonderful you supported my wife in difficult times, but now she wants to handle things on her own. She wants our child to be with us. Any normal mother would want to have her child with her, isn’t that right?”

I breathed in and then exhaled. Since when was Aminat “our child”? Since when was Sulfia a “normal mother”?

“But Anja misses her grandmother very much,” my son-in-law told me. “Recently they had chocolates in kindergarten for one of the children’s birthday. Anja brought her chocolate home and said we should cut it into three pieces. One for her, one for Soja, and one for grandma. She wanted to save the piece for grandma. Obviously we didn’t do that—it was just a few crumbs.”

“Soja?” I said, taken aback. He’d already mentioned the name, but I didn’t really understand who he meant.

“Yes, Soja, my wife.”

“Ah, right.” I said. So it’s Soja now.

It turned out they had two bedrooms, not one. All to themselves. Just the three of them. This wasn’t some foreign paradise. Who here had a huge apartment for three people? Not even Kalganow, who was chairman of his union. But that was really his own fault: he didn’t want us to live better than others, and so he did far too little to make our lives easier. If not for me, he’d probably still be living in a room full of bunk beds in some institutional building.

I looked closely at my son-in-law. How had Sulfia managed to land someone like this? Had she put something in his IV drip?

“When I awoke from the anesthesia and saw Soja, I thought she must be an angel,” said my son-in-law, answering my silent question. He lifted the bottom of his robe and stuck out his leg. Fresh scars as pink as a piglet glistened between curly hairs.

“I understand,” I said and was happy when he hid his limbs again.

“Come visit us on Sunday,” I said. “I’d like to have you over for supper, the whole family, all three of you. I cook really well. We’re Tartars, you know?”

My son-in-law blinked. “Sure, it would be a pleasure.”

The sun clung to his wheat-colored eyelashes.

They didn’t come on Sunday. I was just about to start cooking. I had thought a lot about what to make. Preferably a typical Tartar dish, something my son-in-law had never tried before. The problem was that I myself had not been raised on Tartar cuisine. After the heroic death of my parents in 1945, the last year of the Great Patriotic War, my brother and I had landed in an orphanage, and there we mainly got barley soup. Of course, I could cook well despite that—I taught myself later. But there was no grandmother to introduce me to the fine points of our culinary tradition. I never saw my grandmother Aminat. I just heard about what a tenacious and proud woman she had been. There was Kalganow’s family, some of whom still lived out in the country, but what showed up on the table there made me sick to my stomach because it was so unhygienic.

I decided to improvise. In my student days I had shared a dorm room with two women, one an Uzbek and the other a Bashkir. I still remembered the two of them and the things they had sometimes cooked. I hit upon an idea—and I’d like to see somebody try to tell me it wasn’t proper Tartar cuisine.

I had bought rice and mutton at the market. Back at home I made dough for
chak-chak
for dessert. The phone rang. Ever since Sulfia’s disappearance, Kalganow had disliked answering the phone. But I yelled to him. My hands were covered with flour. He picked up the phone.

“It’s Sojuschka,” he called from the foyer. “You’ll have to come.”

I held my hands under the faucet and dried them on a hand towel. Then I went to the phone and took it from my husband. It still wasn’t clear to me who was on the line. I just couldn’t get used to Sulfia’s new name.

“Yes?” I said into the phone.

“I’m not coming,” the phone whispered in Sulfia’s voice.

“Too bad,” I said. “I’ll have your husband take something home for you.”

“
We’re
not coming,” rasped Sulfia’s voice in my ear. “I just can’t. We can’t. I don’t want to.”

“What is ‘I don’t want to’ supposed to mean?”

“Over my dead body. Forgive me.” She began to sob and I pulled the phone slightly away from my ear.

I could hear cars driving past at Sulfia’s end of the phone. She was obviously calling from a public phone.

“Is your husband perhaps nearby?” I asked.

“No!” she yelled. “Don’t talk to him!”

“You listen to me, daughter,” I said. “We are a family. We need to act civilly to each other.”

She hung up.

I invited Klavdia to eat with us since we had extra food. We had mountains of it, and Klavdia had a mighty appetite. We hoisted our glasses and toasted. Sooner or later she’ll come, I thought to myself.

I called my son-in-law at his office the next day. He apologized for Sulfia’s behavior. He said that sometimes she acted totally irrationally, and that he was helpless in the face of it. When she heard that he had accepted my invitation to Sunday dinner, she had started to sob and tremble. Then she had run out of the apartment.

I repeated my wish for a civil relationship. I said we were still a family. I told him I was counting on him.

He said he would do what he could.