The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (8 page)

Sulfia didn’t have enough time to put my plan into action. One month later Sergej called me. It was early in the morning and I was about to head out to work. He said I needed to come over because Sulfia wasn’t feeling well and he didn’t have time to look after her and Aminat.

I immediately took a private taxi. Strangely enough, I somehow had more money since Kalganow had left and taken his salary with him. It defied all logic, but it was pleasant.

Sulfia lay on the couch in the living room, her head hanging down and her hair touching the floor. She had thrown up on the carpet. Now she was snoring loudly. Next to the couch was a vodka bottle. It was on its side, its contents spilled on the floor. I picked it up and stood it upright, but there was nothing left inside.

I heard a strange snuffle. Aminat had squeezed herself under the little side table, despite the fact that she’d grown quite tall recently. Her long uncombed hair hung in her face. Her black eyes peered at me through the strands of her hair. She sniffled louder now that there was someone to hear it.

“Come out of from under there,” I said. Aminat crawled out on all fours and stood up. She had on a nightgown I’d patched the elbows on.

I dried Aminat’s face with my lacy handkerchief.

“You have no reason to cry,” I said sternly. “Nobody has died. Rosa will take care of everything.”

Aminat looked up at me. She didn’t believe me.

“You look bad. I’ll speak further with you only after you clean yourself up. Take a bath, brush your teeth, comb your hair, get dressed!”

She ran out of the room and I attended to Sulfia.

My daughter never drank alcohol. No vodka, no beer, no Crimean champagne. None at all, ever, not even on New Year.

I placed Sulfia’s head on the couch. Brought a moist towel and wiped her face. Got a rag and cleaned the floor. Put up her hair. She groaned and her arms and legs twitched. She smelled like a homeless person. I spread a down coverlet over her.

Aminat returned—wearing her brown school uniform with a wrinkled skirt, and with her hair braided into two pigtails. The part she had made snaked sloppily across the top of her head. I took the hair bands off her pigtails, combed her hair, and then parted and braided her pigtails again. I gave Aminat her fleece jacket along with her hat, gloves, and knapsack and shoved her toward the door.

I poured cold water over Sulfia’s head until she came to. Then I made her a strong cup of coffee with lots of sugar and lemon, and scrambled her an egg. I convinced her to get into her bed. I fluffed the pillows. Tears streamed down her face in torrents that soaked through the fresh nightgown I’d put on her.

She was sick. She had a headache and had to throw up. She was totally unaccustomed to alcohol. She thought it was made to dull emotional pain, not knowing that you should never drink when you were heartbroken—alcohol amplified everything, unhappiness as much as happiness.

“Why didn’t you get pregnant?” I asked.

“How?” said Sulfia. I sighed.

She fell asleep later. I called Sergej at his job.

“Come home and look at this,” I said.

“I’ve already seen it,” he answered dryly.

“You know you’re going to hell for this?” I asked, realizing immediately that it was the wrong approach. Sergej didn’t believe in hell: he was a physicist.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You deserve to die.” This was also below my usual standard for insults.

He was silent.

“She’s an angel,” I said.

“I’d prefer a woman,” said Sergej.

“Coward,” I said, and hung up.

He came by again to talk. Fortunately I was there at the time making cream of wheat for Aminat. Sulfia stayed in bed all the time. I heard Sergej unlock the door and heard his steps in the depths of the apartment. I decided not to interfere. Spouses should resolve things between themselves. I stayed in the kitchen, until Aminat tugged me toward the living room by my skirt, saying, “Mama is crazy.”

It looked as if she were right. Sergej was packing books into his suitcase. Sulfia lay on the floor holding on to his ankles.

“Get up!” I roared.

“You see?” Sergej said unhappily to me.

It was as if Sulfia had lost her mind. Now she was trying to hold on to his sleeve. He kept ripping himself free of her. I held Sulfia back by force.

“Get out of here,” I said to Sergej while I wrestled with Sulfia. “I’ll expect you tomorrow afternoon at one in front of the Lenin monument. We’ll talk there.”

“I can’t make it then,” said Sergej.

“I wasn’t asking. Now get out.”

He took his suitcase hurriedly to the elevator. Sulfia was hanging in my arms like a puppet; I let her sink to the carpet and went and slammed the door behind Sergej. The more prolonged the breakup, the more tears, I thought to myself. A waste.

I showed up half an hour late to the Lenin monument. I was still a woman. Sergej was already there and appeared to be alone. He had a pair of American sunglasses sitting on the bridge of his nose and his hair was longer. I hadn’t noticed that yesterday.

“Buy me a cup of coffee?” I asked.

We sat at the same café table where I’d seen him with his new girlfriend. The server made us wait—we still had socialism, after all. I said nothing; I wanted Sergej to be the first to talk. But he leaned back and looked . . . I couldn’t actually tell where he was looking because he still had on his sunglasses. We sat in silence for five minutes, and then ten.

“And now?” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders and folded his hands in his lap.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Aren’t you ashamed?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very much.”

“She’s physically ill from grief,” I said. “And it’s all your fault.”

“But you’re there with her,” said Sergej.

“I’m going to curse and damn you,” I said.

He sighed and looked off into the horizon.

“She’s keeping the apartment.”

Sergej showed the first sign of emotion.

“Excuse me? And where am I supposed to live? That place is much too much for two people. We’re going to offer it in a trade for two smaller places. One for me, one for her.”

“That’s not what you’re going to do. Sulfia is going to stay in the apartment with Aminat. You can move in with your new girl.”

“She still lives with her parents.”

“Your problem.”

Now he looked genuinely distressed. I knew that the scarcity of apartments could really put a damper on romance. What good was passion when behind thin walls the in-laws were watching TV and little nieces and nephews could storm into the room at any moment? Sergej would never again have it as good as he had had it with Sulfia—at least I would try to make sure of that.

He finally took off his glasses. His eyes were red.

“I have nothing more to say to you,” I said, standing up.

“Get in touch if anything comes up,” said Sergej. Without the glasses, his face reminded me of a dog’s snout.

“Oh, I will,” I promised and walked away in my high heels.

Getting the apartment was a clear-cut victory, one that had been oddly effortless. If Sergej had balked (and if I’d been in his new girlfriend’s position, I would have made sure in advance that he had arranged an apartment trade), I didn’t have much to fall back on: Sulfia and Sergej were both registered occupants, and it would have been entirely legal for him to divide it or trade it for two smaller places.

But I didn’t have time to savor this triumph. Sulfia fell apart completely. She just wouldn’t follow the example I had given her.

She stayed in bed all day. Aminat began to set the alarm herself. When the alarm rang, she got out of bed and walked down the hallway barefoot to say good morning to her mother and to see whether she was still alive. Aminat’s biggest fear was that Sulfia might die.

Sulfia just rolled over silently. Aminat went to the kitchen and made herself toast with butter. Then she took her knapsack and the apartment keys and left for school in a wrinkled school uniform, with dirty fingernails, and with pigtails that disintegrated into tangled strands during the first class.

I went every day and tried my best to keep things in order and bring some life back into the household. I pulled off Sulfia’s covers, but she didn’t stir. A few times I dumped cold water over her, but that didn’t have any effect either. She was a difficult case. I had to work, and couldn’t spend days on end sitting at her bedside watching her do nothing. Before I left I put a cup of tea and a few slices of bread and cheese on her nightstand.

After work I went shopping and rushed back to Sulfia and Aminat. Sulfia lay in bed and she hadn’t touched her breakfast. More and more often Aminat wasn’t there. I would go out to look for her, call her name, check behind the garages, in the basement, and among the shrubs. Aminat would always turn up when I was looking in the opposite direction and call out behind me, “Here I am!”

“Where were you?” I would ask, yanking hard on one of her messy pigtails. She would smile at me and answer, “Taking a walk.”

“With whom?” I would ask sternly.

“Alone!” she would laugh.

It was obvious that the time had come to keep a closer eye on Aminat.

She was only seven years old, a first-grader, but she’d grown four inches the previous summer. She had gangly legs now and looked like a fawn. Her knees were bony and scratched. There was something hard about the look in her eyes, something even frightening if you looked right into them. She squinted a lot. I warned her not to, because it caused permanent wrinkles.

In the weeks while Sulfia lay senseless in bed, I didn’t manage to supervise Aminat the way she needed to be. I was too busy running two households. Cooking food and trying to get some of it into Sulfia. I brought in doctors, first from the local clinic, then from private practices, for which I paid out of my own pocket. One said Sulfia needed to snap herself out of it, another said things would get better on their own. A third prescribed cupping therapy and vitamin injections.

Sulfia didn’t take part in the speculation. She just stared out the window or dozed. She didn’t even do the crossword puzzle I left next to her bed in the hope of teasing a little life into her.

But I didn’t worry. To my knowledge, nobody had ever died from lying in bed for too long. Then one day Aminat came home, opened the door, tossed in her school things, and left again. On the floor were her knapsack and her red cap. She was gone, without even a word. I realized I’d neglected my granddaughter—and that once again it was Sulfia’s fault.

I immediately began to straighten up. I opened her knapsack and turned it upside down. Out came a few greasy notebooks, a couple of sunflower seed shells, and a flood of five- and ten-kopek coins. I stacked and counted them. Seven rubles and ninety kopeks: a lot of money!

Fearing the worst, I picked up Aminat’s school journal, a record of her homework assignments, grades, and teachers’ notes. I should have looked much earlier. Aminat hadn’t logged any homework assignments in months. There were countless entries written in red by the teachers: “Aminat disturbed the class,” “Homework not completed,” “Must do additional reading at home,” “Parents requested to schedule teacher meeting,” “Disturbed class again,” “Aggressive,” “Urgently need to talk to parents.” Page after page.

No, I wasn’t shocked. It was fitting. If you didn’t support and look after children, didn’t raise them properly and teach them right from wrong, they’d grow up badly. This child was out on her own all the time, and obviously stole money. It was also no coincidence that sunflower husks fell out of Aminat’s bag. That meant she was hanging around with the old ladies who sat in front of the market and sold things from their own gardens—potatoes, wild garlic, and lilies of the valley. They had a huge open sack of sunflower seeds and for ten kopeks these uneducated women would fill a cup with seeds and dump them into a baggie made of newspaper or directly into the jacket pocket of the buyer.

In our early years together Kalganow had also bought himself sunflower seeds, but I quickly broke him of the bad habit. There was nothing more peasant-like, crude, and unhygienic than putting unshelled seeds in your mouth and then spitting out the husk the way old women did, sitting around gossiping on stoops or on warped park benches, dirtying the ground at their feet. I used to root around in all of Kalganow’s pockets looking for a seed that would betray him, and now, so many years later, I would have to do the same thing with my granddaughter. To let things like this go could be disastrous—I knew that from my pedagogical training. It was also partly my fault; I’d let myself get too distracted with Sulfia.

I went into Sulfia’s room and ripped off her covers, grabbed her by her bony shoulders, and shook her hard. Sulfia let out moaning sounds, but her eyes sprang back to life.

“Get up,” I said. “Start cleaning up.”

I let go of her, picked up my pretty new handbag, and went out to look for Aminat. I was angry that she, too, was making things difficult for me.

I looked for nearly two hours, asking children on the street, looking into random entryways, pushing through branches to look in the shrubs that ringed buildings and playgrounds in the area. I ruined my nylons. Finally I found Aminat—with God’s help and my intuition—in the moldy basement of a neighboring high-rise apartment building. She and a girl I didn’t recognize were squatting in front of a tattered basket in which multicolored balls of wool were writhing.

At first I thought they were rats. Then I saw they were kittens, two weeks old at most, their eyes just opened. They made soft noises, and Aminat was listening to them so intently that she didn’t hear my footsteps on the concrete floor as I approached. She turned around only when I wrapped her pigtail around my wrist.

“Grandma!” she shouted.

It was a wonder of self-control; instead of fear and guilt, her voice expressed only joy.

“Look at how cute the kittens are, Grandma! As soon as their mother is no longer nursing them, we’ll take one home, okay?”

I dragged Aminat out of the basement by her pigtail. The hair pulled at her scalp, but after an initial wail she fell silent. And she remained mute as I took her out behind the garage, dropped her pants, and thrashed her with Kalganow’s old leather belt, which I had packed in my pretty new handbag as a precaution. After that I took her home. She didn’t say another word. She just kept wiping her face on her sleeve until I forced her to stop because it might get dangerous germs in her eyes and nose.