The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (11 page)

I told Sulfia what she should wear. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance this time. Even Sulfia seemed to understand this.

I had a feeling that the situation this time worked in our favor. Sulfia’s ugliness and shyness would make her the perfect bride in the eyes of the Rosenbaums. She was modest and a nurse to boot. After all, the Jews knew what it was all about. Now all that was left to do was to cover up her shortcomings as a housewife.

First, I wanted to tell them that the meal I served them had been cooked entirely by Sulfia. I rummaged through cookbooks and asked co-workers and thought long and hard. I decided to make gefilte fish and
vorschmack
, and for dessert
tzimmes
. I’d be making all of these things for the first time in my life, which excited me. The
vorschmack
turned out to be the same as an appetizer I’d made every New Year’s Eve for years. I put chunks of brined herring, moistened white bread, onion, and a large apple through a meat grinder and grated hard-boiled egg yolks with vinegar.

The gefilte fish turned out to be a sort of cold fishcake that took hours of my time only to taste like nothing at all. I didn’t think the effort was worth it. The grated mixture of horseradish and red beets made up for that a bit, and I ate a large amount of it on white bread to make sure I had gotten it just right. As for the
tzimmes
, I decided not to hold myself responsible for the flavor. Braised carrots with raisins and dried plums, served with balls of cream of wheat—if that was what the Jews ate, there was no magic I could perform to improve things.

Sulfia dressed herself properly for once. That is, not particularly attractively, but at least appropriately for the occasion. Her knee-length gray dress looked cheap, but at least it was clean. She had pulled her hair into a ponytail like a schoolgirl. It was obvious that a daughter-in-law like this wouldn’t spend all the money on clothes.

Aminat had to be there, though I’d rather have been rid of her. I had worked so hard with her and had made a lot of progress, but she was still so unpredictable. But the Jews should see the whole family. Aminat was also the best evidence that Sulfia was capable of producing a pretty and healthy child.

I took Aminat aside and insisted to her that Sulfia would become sick if she, Aminat, acted out of line. Other than losing her cat Parasite, that was the only thing Aminat really feared.

An hour before our guests arrived, Kalganow rang the doorbell. He had on a gray suit that we had bought together once. Lint and threads hung from the arms, so I took a brush and cleaned it up. I retied his tie, too—at least Kalganow hadn’t forgotten it. I had called him three times to remind him.

“Sit down somewhere and wait for the guests to get here,” I said. “Don’t make a mess or get yourself dirty.”

“Yes, Rosie,” he answered.

And then they arrived—the Rosenbaums, in their brown clothes made out of high-quality material. They brought Aminat a piece of halva and were all quite shy. Rosenbaum wasn’t a big man, but his parents were tiny.

Sulfia hid herself behind my back. I grabbed her and shoved her in front of me. Then I pulled Aminat aside by her pigtail. She shouldn’t steer all the attention to herself. Sulfia was the one who was supposed to be getting married.

Her conduct was exemplary. She faced Rosenbaum’s parents, nearly as short as they were, very bashful, and smiled at the floor as red splotches spread across her face. I thought to myself: if I had such a mama’s boy as Rosenbaum, I’d be quite pleased with a daughter-in-law like Sulfia. And indeed Rosenbaum’s parents seemed to look on her favorably.

I sat Aminat next to me so I could monitor her at all times. Sulfia I sat between the two old Rosenbaums. The young Rosenbaum sat beside me.

I instructed Kalganow to sit at the head of the table and, given the opportunity, to talk about his work—but not about anything else.

I had made just one mistake: I had forgotten to tell him that Sulfia was pregnant. And so it came to pass that we were in the middle of a perfectly smooth conversation about how children were the joy in life, and Rosenbaum’s parents, like Kalganow, were poking at their fish with preoccupied looks on their faces, when Kalganow, pulling a bone from his mouth, cried, “But of course, we’ve got one already, and that’s more than enough!”

Sulfia turned a shade of pink. I tried to kick Kalganow under the table. Then Rosenbaum’s father wiped his lips with a napkin and started to make strange noises. I looked at his small mouth and tried to figure out what the sounds meant. Only gradually was I able to figure out he was giggling. Yes, giggling like some demented fool. God, he wasn’t going to keel over, was he? Just because his son had impregnated a not-so-young Tartar girl? He pointed with his finger at the fish left on his plate and laughed himself senseless. I had just explained that Sulfia made these strange fishcakes once a week. (Somehow I’d be able to get her to master it by the time of the wedding, I thought. If I really wanted to, I could teach even a guinea pig to cook.) Then I said that all people were friends, something like what Kalganow had always told me at the beginning of our marriage. Then old giggling Rosenbaum lost his balance and his gray-haired head fell onto his plate.

His wife looked at him sternly and he straightened himself up again and kissed her on the temple. Then he reached across the table, took my hand, and kissed it. I wasn’t sure for a second how to take this. His wife looked on rigidly, but not upset. Apparently he did this kind of thing often.

I found him gallant. My husband had never been so gallant. He, Kalganow, was now leaning slightly to the side. No, it couldn’t be true. He was about to fall asleep at the table. How could he? What had the teacher of Russian and literature let him become? He was on the verge of falling out of his chair snoring, and nobody but me had noticed. Unfortunately I couldn’t reach him to nudge him discreetly.

Something had to be done to distract the guests before he disgraced us all. I couldn’t think of anything except setting the tablecloth on fire. I had a pack of matches in the pocket of my skirt; I always needed them for the gas stove. I decided to sacrifice my beautiful tablecloth to this higher cause. And as the flames began to dance up the cloth and everyone screamed and jumped up, nobody noticed how hard I yanked on Kalganow’s ear in order to wake him.

The young Rosenbaum brought a bucket of water and dumped it on the dirty plates. Soon the fire was out. Kalganow looked around with an irritated look on his face, as if he no longer knew where he was. Dinner was over.

Rosenbaum went out laughing. His wife hissed and cursed at him—I could hear her from the staircase. Apparently the Jews lived just like normal people.

Rosenbaum and Sulfia wed on a bleak, cold winter day. The wedding was modest. It snowed nonstop, and as the bridal couple left City Hall, giant snowflakes stuck unmelted in Sulfia’s black hair. Neither family had invited many guests. Rosenbaum’s side thought big weddings were bourgeois. In reality they were just cheap, but I acted as if I took their reasoning at face value. I had decided it was wiser not to insult them before Sulfia had the ring on her finger. And anyway, as far as I was concerned it made sense—no reason to draw undue attention from potentially jealous people to the fact that Sulfia had once again somehow ended up with a good man.

She wore the bridal dress that Rosenbaum’s mother had worn to her own wedding. They were both scrawny women, but that cream-colored dress could make a princess out of anyone. Even out of Sulfia. Her black hair was pinned up, the train reached to the ground, and her eyes glowed so with happiness that it was tempting to take her for pretty. She was now Sulfia Rosenbaum. I’d have to get used to that.

For the photos, Rosenbaum’s father stood behind Sulfia and giggled the whole time. Rosenbaum’s mother stood next to him holding her husband’s arm and trying to keep him under control. I was grateful to Kalganow for leaving his teacher at home. The Rosenbaums didn’t need to know the family wasn’t whole until after the wedding.

Rosenbaum didn’t move in immediately with Sulfia and Aminat. I was prepared to give him some time. Not too much, of course. By the time of the birth of the new baby he should have gotten used to being Sulfia’s husband. Little by little, the newlyweds developed a certain rhythm. Rosenbaum began to stay with Sulfia and Aminat over the weekend, then also during the week. He brought things from home when he had a chance, homemade cookies, a piece of a roast, meatballs, or a jar of marinated tomatoes. He didn’t boss Aminat around and he washed his own dirty dishes. He took his laundry home to mother Rosenbaum. It wasn’t a situation meant for the long term, but it was perfect for Sulfia.

One night I was awakened by a bang. I quickly fell back to sleep. In the morning I pulled aside the heavy curtain on the window and was shocked. A huge black column of smoke curled up into the sky on the horizon. The main train station was in that area. Sulfia and Aminat lived in another direction, but I called them anyway. Aminat answered.

“Why aren’t you at school?” I asked.

“Mama’s crying,” said Aminat. “Because of the explosion.”

“She’s not allowed to cry,” I said.

I called my office and said I couldn’t come in because of the explosion. They apparently knew more than I did because they didn’t ask any questions. Out on the sidewalk, broken glass crunched beneath my boots. I raised my arm and a little orange Moskwitsch pulled over immediately. At the steering wheel sat a cheerful bearded man. I gave him Sulfia’s address and cursed about the shards of glass that had ruined the soles of my shoes.

“Is your window cracked, too, lady?” the driver asked me.

I wiped my hand across the upholstery.

“This is unacceptable—it’s a pigsty,” I said.

“I asked whether your window was cracked.”

“Why?”

“Because in our building a lot of windows are blown out.”

“Did someone break them?”

“No—were you drunk last night? A tanker blew up at the main station.”

By the time I got to Sulfia’s, I knew everything. At the station, a rail car filled with something flammable went off the rails and slammed into another. There was a detonation that almost leveled some buildings in the area around the station and damaged a lot of others.

An emergency doctor was already there. Sulfia lay in bed pressing one hand to her belly and the other to her face. Tears dripped through her fingers.

“Michail’s buried,” Sulfia gasped when I pushed past the white lab coats to ask what was wrong with her this time.

“Aha,” I said. “Don’t get upset, daughter.”

But Sulfia didn’t listen to me, and became terribly agitated. Her body shook with fits of crying. I could understand a little of this; she had just married, so this was a pity.

“Did he die immediately?” I asked.

She screamed at me: “Dead?! What are you saying? Why would you?”

“He isn’t even dead?” I asked.

“Listen, lady, please wait outside the door,” said the emergency doctor as Sulfia reared up like a lunatic.

A few minutes later she was carried past me on a stretcher. She reached for my hand.

“Mother, please promise me . . . ”

“What?”

“That you’ll take care of them.”

“Of whom?” That I would take care of Aminat and that damn Parasite went without saying.

“Of Michail, mother, and father,” whispered Sulfia.

“Mother and father?”

The medic wanted to get past me. I pulled my hand away from Sulfia and quickly wiped her cheeks dry.

“Have a nice time in the hospital, daughter,” I said.

“Will you promise me that? That you won’t leave them in a lurch?”

“My god, Sulfia, don’t we have enough worries of our own?”

“Please!”

Against my will I nodded yes, and then remained in the apartment with a weeping Aminat and an intimidated Parasite, who now climbed out of the shoe rack where she had been hiding from all the strangers.

I was too honest and too good-natured. I kept my word once again. I began to make calls. Yes, the floor above the Rosenbaums’ apartment had collapsed, as had some of their own walls. Mother and son Rosenbaum were basically uninjured. But a piece of the falling wall had put a dent in the old man’s skull. He was now in the hospital, at Sulfia’s surgery station. Everyone apparently crossed paths there. Except now Sulfia, who was in a gynecological unit.

A little while later the two healthy Rosenbaums stood in front of the door. The old woman was hysterical.

“Don’t be so sad, my dear,” I said as I let them into the apartment along with a heavy bundle that they were carrying like war refugees.

“My house was destroyed,” his mother cried loudly, pulling at her hair, which was also a mess.

“But you’re still whole,” I said.

“My husband is badly injured,” she sobbed.

“Men are tough,” I assured her.

The woman was totally worked up. She certainly was a sensitive type—mustn’t forget that my very first meeting with her had ended with an ambulance coming. At least now she was still standing. Though she looked like a homeless person; where were her poise and style? The young Rosenbaum stood behind her, looking around helplessly.

“Where’s Sulfia?” he asked.

I explained that she was in danger of losing the baby because she had been so worried about him.

Rosenbaum sat down on a kitchen stool and covered his face with his hands. His mother broke into even louder shrieks of anguish.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “Not that, too! It’s the end of the world!”

It took everything I had just to tolerate her, and on top of it all, Aminat was not handling the situation well. She always became strange when anything was wrong with Sulfia.

“Please be considerate of the child,” I said sharply.

“This world is not good for children, no, it’s not good for children,” yammered the old Rosenbaum woman.

“CUP OF TEA?” I asked in a thunderous voice.

“Yes, mother, pull yourself together,” said Rosenbaum, finally taking his hands away from his face.

“Our house was destroyed!” screeched his mother.

She went on about how she had awoken in the middle of the night and felt as though the end of the world was imminent. How the walls collapsed on her, how the ceiling crashed down and shelves fell over, how she crawled through the rubble to get into the next room to save her child.

“That child there?” I asked, pointing to Rosenbaum, who was helping himself to a poppyseed cookie from a jar.

“I don’t have any others,” she wailed.

“Calm down,” I said. “My child just left for the hospital with sirens blaring and lights flashing while your child sits here happily munching on poppyseed cookies.”

Rosenbaum’s mother choked back her sobs.

“But where are we supposed to live?” she asked somewhat more sedately.

“Here,” I said with a sigh. I knew this was what Sulfia had in mind.

The old woman looked around intently. The craziness in her eyes slowly faded.

“It is a pretty big apartment,” she said matter-of-factly.

The moment I officially offered Sulfia’s apartment as a refuge, the old woman managed to get over her shock and began to settle in. First she unpacked the bundle she had brought. Inside were some rags which apparently had once been her clothes and which she had heroically rescued as the world ended. Then she splashed around in the bathtub for a long time, probably using up all the shampoo Sergej had brought back from East Germany. There was very little left and I’d been saving it for Aminat. Rosenbaum’s mother finally emerged wearing Sulfia’s bathrobe. She had wet hair and rosy cheeks, fresh as a bride, and asked hurriedly: “So where am I sleeping?”

Rosenbaum himself had sat the entire time in the kitchen and stared at the wall. It must have been his way of worrying about Sulfia and the baby. I made sure his mother didn’t try to install herself in Sulfia’s nice bedroom. I figured it would be Sulfia’s wish to have Rosenbaum himself sleep in the bedroom—after all, he was her husband and the father of the unborn child.

To his mother I said pleasantly but firmly: “In the living room.”

Yes, she was disappointed. Clearly she had bet on Aminat’s room. Though I was no Jew, I would have done the same. I was happy I’d been able to arrange everything without Sulfia. She would have given mother Rosenbaum Aminat’s room or perhaps even her own.

We set up the sleep sofa together. I showed Rosenbaum how comfortable she’d be.

“It’s upsetting to lose your home,” said mother Rosenbaum while I put sheets on the couch, laid down a pillow, and spread out the comforter.

I asked the young Rosenbaum to look after Aminat. As long as he was here, he shouldn’t sit around doing nothing.

Then I went to see the two patients. But first I walked all around town looking for vitamins. Normally this would have made as much sense as looking for a piece of gold in a compost heap. But I begged God for help and got it. By the end I was bathed in sweat, but I had procured a mesh bag full of oranges, two pounds of grapes, and a couple of newspapers.

For Sulfia I took underwear, two ironed nightgowns, a bathrobe, and a toothbrush. For old man Rosenbaum I had packed the old tracksuit Sergej had left behind when he moved out. Old Rosenbaum would have to roll up the sleeves and pant legs. The old Rosenbaum woman was in no shape to look after her husband, so I’d have to do everything, as usual.

First I visited Sulfia, who lay in a ten-bed room. When she caught sight of me she bravely tried to smile. She was attached to an IV drip and her eyes were red from crying. I unpacked my little presents and cleaned up her nightstand. The fruit came from the south and, naturally, was full of germs. I took the fruit to the sink and washed it carefully under running water, then went to the nurses to ask for boiling water to pour over the fruit. Predictably, they didn’t want to give it to me, saying this wasn’t a restaurant. But I reminded them that Sulfia was a colleague of theirs and that God saw everything. I got my water and was able to sterilize the fruit.

I put everything on the nightstand and shoved a grape between Sulfia’s lips. I peeled an orange, segmented it and skinned it, and pulled off the white threads. I put the segments into Sulfia’s mouth one after another.

“Chew it thoroughly,” I said. Her eyes were tired and orange juice ran down her chin. I wiped the dribbles away with my handkerchief.

“I’ll come again tomorrow,” I said.

I left to find old Rosenbaum in the surgical clinic. Nobody would let me in to see him. He was still unresponsive; the dent in his head was apparently quite deep. I gave the nurses a few oranges to make sure they took good care of old Rosenbaum. Then I went home.

We came up with a system. It turned out that Rosenbaum could cook many different varieties of porridge. Not just oatmeal but also millet and buckwheat gruels, and on weekends he’d make sweet cream of wheat or rice pudding. In addition, he ironed Aminat’s school uniform. His mother spent most of her time in front of the television, all the while talking about how television made people stupid. I cursed Sulfia when I figured out that she had given all her grapes away to the other patients in her room. Sulfia and Rosenbaum were sent home from the hospital at almost the same time.

This meant things were about to get very tight in the apartment.

The Rosenbaums showed no sign of looking for another place to live. I asked young Rosenbaum whether they had any other relatives or friends. He shook his head sadly.

Sulfia arrived home pale almost to the point of transparency. She moved with small, soft steps, always holding her belly as if she were afraid the baby might fall out. I told her she should eat more oranges. I looked for oranges to buy before and after work and during lunch. It got to the point where I was hardly ever at work anymore.

Then I received unexpected support in the form of Rosenbaum’s mother. Whenever I wasn’t around, she assumed my role and followed Sulfia around with pieces of orange, her slippers, and a blanket, and urged her to lie down, not to bend over, not to lift anything heavier than a toothbrush, and not to stand near the drafty window. Three times a day the old woman insisted Sulfia get in bed and wrap herself in blankets so she could open all the windows to make sure there was fresh air in the apartment.

Rosenbaum’s father, on the other hand, should have stayed in the hospital for a year, I thought. He still wasn’t himself. He wore bandages on his head that made him look like a mummy. He never giggled anymore. He spent all day sitting at the window in the spot where Sulfia wasn’t allowed to sit because of the draft. He just stared vacantly. Sometimes he said things I couldn’t understand; I assumed it was Yiddish. Then the old woman would always say, “Shhh, father, it was just a bad dream,” even though he wasn’t sleeping at all, but rather wide awake, sitting upright on a chair.

Once in a while Sulfia changed his bandages and stroked his hand. She spoke tenderly to him and he’d occasionally snicker like in the old days. In those moments the old woman would say, “My angel, don’t worry about the old one. Look after yourself. There’s no helping him now.”

I agreed completely.

But Sulfia was obstinate. One day she just walked out. I was out again at the time. With tears in her eyes, the old woman told me how she had tried to keep Sulfia from leaving the apartment and had finally given up—“I couldn’t wrestle with her physically—what if something were to happen?”

Sulfia returned soon after and she had a radio with her. It remained her secret where she had gotten it, but it didn’t work anyway. She put it down on the windowsill in front of old Rosenbaum and gave him a screwdriver. His eyes lit up.

The old woman and I later rued the day we’d allowed Sulfia to bring that radio home. Because old Rosenbaum took the screwdriver in his hand and began to fiddle with it. After an hour, the windowsill was overflowing with countless little parts, screws, wires, and circuit boards. And whenever old lady Rosenbaum got near the mess with a cleaning rag, old Rosenbaum shrieked and waved his arms. He came off a bit like a hen protecting its eggs.

“Let him be,” Sulfia begged from the bedroom.

“Out of the question,” called the old woman and tried to approach him from the other side. Old Rosenbaum shoved her away with his fist.

“Now he’s getting violent, too,” said the old Rosenbaum woman tearfully. “Lie back down!” she said to Sulfia, who appeared with her bulging belly in the doorway.

“Let him be,” begged Sulfia. “For my sake.”

She put a hand on her belly.

The old woman found herself in a quandary. It was clear that Sulfia had declared old Rosenbaum’s tinkering her own personal matter. Any attempt to clear away his mess would from now on be seen as a kick to Sulfia’s belly. The Rosenbaum woman understood this. The hand in which she was holding the cleaning rag fell to her side and she looked at her husband with hatred.