The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (6 page)

I always listened closely to everything Aminat said. One of the reasons she seemed so ill mannered was that she could say very perceptive things. I battled her instinct to say whatever occurred to her because her frank observations often hit the bull’s-eye, making people uncomfortable. Aminat had no patience for foolishness and could point out the flaws of others very precisely. Naturally this couldn’t continue, and I worked hard with her on self-control. But I listened closely to what she said.

On the day Aminat told me she wouldn’t love me anymore, I took my boot without a word and left my daughter’s apartment without even saying goodbye. I took the bus home. Aminat’s voice echoed in my ears for the entire ride: “I don’t want to have an evil grandmother, I don’t want to have an evil grandmother.”

Was I an evil grandmother? I looked at my reflection in the dirty window of the bus. Is that what an evil grandmother looked like?

At home I stared at myself closely, this time in the polished full-length mirror.

I didn’t look anything like a grandmother at all. I looked good. I was pretty and young looking. You could see that I had vitality and was intelligent. I often had to mask my expression to keep other people from reading my thoughts and stealing my ideas.

I went into the kitchen, where my husband was eating a vegetable casserole, and asked him whether I was an evil woman.

He choked and began to cough. I waited patiently. He coughed some more. His round eyes were petrified. I waited. He continued to cough and I hit him on the back.

“So,” I insisted, “am I an evil woman?”

He speared a piece of eggplant with his fork. I snatched it away from him before he could stuff his mouth again.

“Am I an evil woman?”

He looked at the floor. The thick black eyelashes I had once so loved fluttered like a little girl’s. My heart warmed; I thought of the hungry years of my youth. Too bad Sulfia hadn’t inherited those lashes, I thought. But at least Aminat had them.

“So,” I said, “am I an evil woman?”

“Why would you think that, sweetie?” stammered my husband. “You’re really, really wonderful. You’re the best. You’re so smart . . . so beautiful . . . and you cook so well!”

“But none of that has anything to do with whether or not I’m evil,” I insisted. “I could be a terrific cook and still make everyone around me suffer.”

“No, no, my little squirrel,” said my husband, using a term of endearment from our early years. “Nobody suffers . . . nobody suffers because of you. You’re so good to all of us.”

“Even Sulfia?”

“Sulfia . . . ,” My husband thought for a moment.

I waited.

“Sulfia,” said my husband, “is your only daughter. You always wanted the best for her.”

“I still do.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you think Sulfia knows it, too?”

“Of course. Though perhaps she didn’t realize it earlier. It’s normal for children not to value their parents. But now she’s grown up, and I think she knows how much you love her.”

I listened carefully. I was surprised my husband had thought about it so much.

“Are you sure?” I said.

My husband turned and poked at the casserole on his plate, then looked over at me with his eyes narrowed, as if afraid I was about to take away his food.

“Very, very sure,” he said. “You’re the best, the most beautiful . . . and you have such a good heart.”

If my husband saw me that way, it couldn’t have escaped Aminat. So she couldn’t have meant what she said. She was just being fresh.

Five days later I came home and found a letter from my husband on the windowsill. In the letter he wrote that he loved another woman and wanted to live with her from now on. He thanked me for our years together and begged me to leave him in peace.

There was nothing more.

Apparently there are women who break into tears at such news. Their legs buckle and they sink to the tiled floor of the kitchen, with its checkerboard pattern, and other people must step over them in order to get to the refrigerator. I wasn’t one of those women.

First I made a cup of tea, following all the rules of the art. I warmed the teapot and then poured boiling water over the tea leaves. If there was one thing I hated, it was poorly made, low-grade tea. I drank my excellent tea in small sips, ate homemade gooseberry jam, and thought things over.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to come through the door and not hear someone noisily chewing in the kitchen. Someone who annoyed me by eating the food—which I made in advance—cold because it was beyond him to warm it up. Food in general: I could almost completely abandon cooking now. I’d have oatmeal in the morning and make a salad in the evening. I’d be able to save so much time! And with that time I could read, watch TV, or do gymnastics.

I continued to think. I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone when I came home from work. I started to count the number of shirts I would no longer have to wash and iron each week—not to mention the socks, pants, and underwear.

Shopping! I wouldn’t have to carry home heavy shopping bags anymore because I’d need so much less food. I would have much less filth to clean up, as I myself didn’t make any. I could talk to God as much as I wanted. I would get upset much less, since there was nobody there I constantly needed to get upset at. And I could meet men. New, younger men who would pay me compliments, then leave to go home to mommy, or to their girlfriend, for all I cared. Men who would make me feel like a woman again. Because I have to admit that it had been a long time since I had liked to be touched by Kalganow. When he accidentally brushed my leg in his sleep, I recoiled in disgust. He hadn’t touched me intentionally in ages.

Of course the letter on the windowsill wasn’t all for the good. Nothing in life came for free. I would have to pay for my freedom. For instance, I was now a woman who had been left. That wasn’t exactly an envious status. I had to live with the fact that people would look at me funny. But, God willing, everything else was in my own hands.

My husband was a coward: he left it to me to tell his daughter and granddaughter that he had left.

I decided not to show my lack of sorrow. I figured this episode would make everyone forget the earlier friction and the boot and the unpleasant words. Before I set out for work, I left a letter for Kalganow on the windowsill. “We should behave civilly with one another. I wish you all the best, and good health to boot. Please leave me your telephone number so we can wrap up everything. Your Rosa.”

I knew he’d come by again to pick up his things, and he’d make sure he did it at a time I wasn’t there. If he avoided me during better times, he certainly wouldn’t risk running into me now.

That evening I took the bus to Sulfia’s. She opened the door and her face looked tired and distant.

“Mother? Come in.”

I hadn’t worn any lipstick, and had only a dusting of powder on my cheeks and forehead. I had on my plainest dress, one I normally wore only when I went to our garden outside of town. I did, however, wear my boots with heels.

“Is everything alright?” asked Sulfia when she finally looked me in the face.

“Don’t you know?”

“Has something happened to Papa?”

“You could say that,” I said.

Now she was frightened. “What’s happened?”

“Your father left me.”

She leaned against the wall. Her face fell.

“What?” she said. “What did you say?”

“YOUR FATHER LEFT ME.”

“No . . . He? . . . You? . . . No.”

“It’s true,” I whispered.

Sulfia sank to her knees.

“Mama,” she said imploringly, “Mama, don’t.”

She must have thought I was crying.

I covered my face with my hands so as not to spoil that impression. She stood up quickly and put her hands on mine. I flinched. It had been a long time since we had had physical contact.

“Mama,” she said helplessly, “please don’t be sad, mama.”

“Leave me alone,” I said. Sulfia’s lips began to quiver as if she, not I, had been left.

“It’s not as if anyone died,” I said, in case she had misunderstood.

“Would you have preferred him to die?

I thought for a second.

“Yes, that might have been better.”

Sulfia didn’t ask any more questions.

The departure of my husband had, as I mentioned, its advantages. One of them was that Sulfia began to like me. It seemed as if it occurred to her for the first time what an amiable person I actually was.

She began to speak to me. She called me every morning to ask me the same question. It seemed she was worried I might have hanged myself overnight. I responded to her feelings attentively, giving her a not altogether happy portrayal of my current situation.

Then one day she called me and said, “I know who she is—papa’s new woman.”

I was polishing my nails. I’d bought the polish at a bazaar. It was supposedly from Germany. It was cherry red. I held my left hand in the air with my fingers spread. I held the phone with my right. The nails on the right hand were already polished. I made sure not to smear them. The polish dried quickly; it was much too old. I noticed as I applied it that it was too thick. I had paid four rubles for the bottle and I’d been taken. This wasn’t German, it was rubbish.

“So?” I asked angrily.

Sulfia’s voice quivered over the phone. She didn’t know about my nail polish disappointment. She thought her news had upset me.

“Please calm down,” she pleaded. “There’s no way to undo things.”

Perhaps some things, I thought. But I could take back the dried-out nail polish, throw it in the vendor’s face, and demand my money back.

I could also put a few drops of acetone into the bottle, which would make the polish fluid again.

“Ach, you don’t give a damn,” I said and hung up.

An hour later she was standing at my front door. Aminat hopped around her in a circle. The peephole distorted my daughter’s face in a particularly ugly way. Her nose was huge and her eyes abnormally small. “Hello, hello,” sang Aminat. She threw off one of her boots and hopped around our foyer in one sock.

“Hello, my dear grandma, hello, my dear grandma, Anja is here, Anja is here.”

She disappeared into her old room. A moment later the second boot flew out the door and bounced off the wall. All the work I had put into this child, and still she was so ill behaved. It was time that I got close to Aminat again before it was too late. I had room in the apartment now, and time, too.

Sulfia picked up the boot and put it on the shoe rack. Then she came over and hugged me.

I froze.

My God, was she short. She was scrawny, always had been. I had given her food nonstop, I made her clean her plate. When she was still at school I set out a sumptuous breakfast for her every morning—meat with a side dish or else a nutritious soup. She was never allowed to leave the house with an empty stomach. But she never got taller or heavier

I did everything possible to make her stronger. I painstakingly tried to teach her to swim, even though I myself didn’t know how. But the cold river water got to her. She shivered, her lips turned blue, and soon after, presto, she came down with a bladder infection that lasted for several weeks. God knows how much effort I put into her, and it was always for naught.

I pushed her away and went into the kitchen.

Sulfia served me in my own home now. Naturally she couldn’t make a decent cup of tea. The water wasn’t boiling, she used too few tea leaves. The brew had no aroma and looked unappetizing. I drank what she put in front of me anyway, as I didn’t want to discourage her.

Then she sat down opposite me, folded her hands, and said, “Mother, the woman is your age. Actually . . . she’s a little older than you.”

I looked at her silently. She was uncomfortable.

“Mother,” she said, “I met the woman. Turns out she’s sick. Her heart. Papa called me and asked me to introduce her to a doctor from our clinic. She’s very sick.”

She looked away, embarrassed.

“I feel so bad,” she said. “I saw her. She’s really not doing well. And I . . . I’m supposed to help her. And I . . . I don’t have any sympathy for her. Because it’s her fault that things are going so poorly for you.”

I thought of my God. I knew he would allow me the right to wish every ill in the world on this woman that Sulfia was talking about so oddly. But I didn’t wish her ill. I didn’t want her to die, though I also didn’t care whether she lived.

I was just a tiny bit curious.

“Keep talking,” I said.

The woman, Sulfia explained, was named Anna, and worked as a teacher of Russian and literature. She dressed in gray clothes, wore her hair in a bun, had red veins in her cheeks, needed glasses, and had a sweet smile. She was divorced and had no children. She had met Kalganow in a park as he was sitting on a bench thinking about death.

“He initiated the conversation with her?” I said suspiciously.

“Apparently, yes.” Sulfia looked unhappily into her teacup.

What do you know, I thought.

Sulfia had her address and phone number, and to prove it she said them both aloud. I asked myself what she expected from me now. Was I to call the number straight away and demand the release of my spouse? Or go knock on the teacher’s door with a half liter of hydrochloric acid? What did Sulfia think I should do now? Everything I did was significant: I was a role model after all.

One day I opened the bedroom window to let in some spring air. It was still sealed for winter. I ripped off the paper strips I had used to seal it shut in the fall and pulled out the wadding I’d stuffed into the cracks. I destroyed the results of hours of labor: it was miserable work to prepare the window in the fall so there wasn’t a draft that chilled the room. Klavdia left the insulation in and kept her window closed over the summer just to spare herself the work. But I wanted fresh air.

The room filled with the sound of motors, voices, and the jingle of the trolley bell. I stood at the window and took a deep breath. Yes, this was really spring. There were stands selling flowers and ice cream. The thick winter jackets and brown fur coats had disappeared. People were wearing light jackets and bold colors. Their steps had bounce. Many had left their hats at home. I saw hair again.

On the sidewalk, beneath a streetlamp, stood a man who also wasn’t wearing a hat. From above I could see the sun gleaming on his bald head.

It was Kalganow, my husband.

He stood at the foot of the streetlamp and looked right up at me. I hid behind the curtain. I felt caught off guard.

His light, round face remained tilted up toward me. I could see it through the cloth of the curtain. What did he want? Why wasn’t he with his teacher of Russian and literature? Had he lost the key to his new apartment? Gotten lost? He wasn’t thinking about coming back to me now, was he? I panicked. A little.

Kalganow was always good at that: ruining my mood. His presence could cast a shadow over any otherwise splendid moment. The spring day was beginning to fade. The wind no longer felt caressing, but rather treacherous. I closed the window and drew the curtain.

I sat down in my armchair and picked up my knitting needles. I was knitting a scarf for Aminat. Obviously not just an ordinary one. I was making a kitten pattern. To take such a basic thing as a scarf and make it as unique as possible—I had a knack for that kind of thing. I concentrated on counting stitches.