The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (22 page)

I didn’t wake up until the next day. I had slept for nearly twenty hours. During that time, Kalganow—or so he told me—had kept checking to make sure I was still breathing.

“We thought you, too, were dead,” he said.

But he’d gotten his hopes up in vain.

Then I realized that the teacher of Russian and literature had touched some of Sulfia’s things. She had taken her few clothes and organized them.

I could barely breathe from indignation. “What are you doing, you old hag? And why are you putting your filthy paws on my daughter’s things?”

“I was going to wash them,” she said ruefully.

I pushed them out of the room. I sat down on the cot and picked up an undershirt. It was gray and threadbare. It had been washed too many times. It was almost small enough for a child to wear. I wiped away my tears with it.

As I pressed the undershirt to my face, I remembered that the teacher had a niece somewhere. This knowledge burrowed its way into the middle of my thoughts and I could see her in front of me—an unknown niece I’d never even seen before, a little slut with a child and no husband, in a one-bedroom with her old parents. Suddenly I understood why the teacher wanted to wash the laundry.

I sat there for a long time with my face buried in the undershirt. Then I got up and threw the laundry into an empty box. The dirty pieces I carried to the bathroom and piled in the bathtub. Then I knocked on the bedroom door. The teacher was sitting on the bed blowing her nose into a tissue.

“Sit up straight and . . . ” I began and then clapped my hand to my mouth. Things were beginning to blur.

I shoved the box into their room with my foot.

“Take it,” I said. “Give it to your niece.”

The teacher took the tissue away from her face. I wish she hadn’t.

“Sulfia doesn’t need it anymore,” I said and went back to the cot.

Sulfia had nothing. For all intents and purposes she had no worldly possessions. Any pants and sweaters I found I gave to the teacher for her niece. I didn’t bother with the washing—it didn’t hurt when someone like her lifted a finger once in a while. In the corner of a cabinet I discovered a little box with a cheap ring and a necklace and a smaller box full of letters. It was Aminat’s letters, collected over the years. I put them in my suitcase.

Three days before my departure Kalganow picked up the urn. It was clear that I would take it with me. It was pretty. The sides were made of marbled stone and her name was on it in golden letters—just as it should be. She had a pretty name and it would no longer get mangled now.

Kalganow walked slumped over. He wanted to inter the urn somewhere nearby, actually, and he even had the audacity to tell me that. I wanted to hit him over the head with the urn, but I had enough respect not to do so.

I wrapped the urn in a wool scarf and put it in a carry-on bag. I wanted to take it onboard with me. I wanted to get home, home to Aminat. I laid out the documents: my passport, Sulfia’s death certificate, banknotes in an envelope. I had brought a lot of money, more than I needed in the end. I hadn’t counted on Sulfia’s friends collecting money—so much, in fact, that it paid for the funeral. I asked myself why they had done it. After all, Sulfia was dead, they didn’t know me, and there was no reason to try to get in Kalganow’s good graces. He was totally insignificant now.

The only possible reason was that Sulfia wasn’t really dead. Others died, but not her. I was more and more sure of it.

I took the notes out of the envelope. Twenty 100-mark notes that I’d brought. A fortune. I held them up and spread them like a fan. They were new and smelled good. I went into the kitchen. Kalganow and his teacher sat opposite each other in silence. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem to be pleased that I was leaving. They turned their faces to me—faces that in their hopelessness looked ever more similar. I laid the bills down on the kitchen table between them and left, this time for good.

There were no complications. Nobody was interested in my bags at the airport. They just waved me through at every point.

“See, Sulfia,” I said. “And you were so worried.”

But this wasn’t true. Sulfia wasn’t worried at all about the proper transport of the urn. She stood next to me and smiled. Why had I never noticed that her smile was so nice?

To my great surprise, Dieter picked me up at the airport. Aminat was next to him. I wasn’t prepared for that. She had lost weight. Before I saw who it was, I had thought, What a lovely girl—she could even be a Tartar.

Dieter gave me a quick hug. Aminat kept her distance.

“What is it?” she asked me while we were in Dieter’s car.

“Everything’s fine,” I told her.

At home I took out the box of letters and gave it to her. I wasn’t sure how she would react. She ripped it out of my hands, opened the top, and shouted: “You didn’t read them, did you?”

“I had better things to do,” I shouted back.

She turned and went into her room.

That evening as Aminat lay in bed, I grabbed a bottle of vodka and two glasses and sat down at the kitchen table with Dieter. He picked up the bottle.

“How much shall I pour you?” he asked.

“Can’t you see the top of the glass?” I asked, taking the bottle from him and filling the glasses.

“Let’s go,” I said. “We’re not going to clink our glasses.”

He took a sip and grimaced.

“You have to just pour it down,” I said. “Are you a widower now or what?”

Half an hour later he was crying bitterly. I didn’t understand what was wrong with him. It just spilled out of him. He was pale and wrinkly. He spent too little time outside and did too little exercise.

I wanted to talk about Sulfia. I was sure he wanted the same thing. Perhaps he was just realizing how important she had been to him. He tried to tell me something, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand what he was trying to articulate.

“Wait,” I said, and went into my room.

The carry-on bag was on my pillow. I reached in and pulled out the urn, heavy and beautiful. I carried it to the kitchen and put it on the table between us. I winked at Sulfia and raised my glass.

“We’re not going to clink glasses,” I said, forgetting I’d already made that clear.

Dieter leaned his head sideways to read the golden writing on the side of the urn. Then he spilled his vodka.

“What is that?”

He pushed his chair back from the table.

“Is she in there?”

I leaned my head back. Looking at the white ceiling helped me gather my thoughts.

“In part,” I said.

“Get rid of her,” said Dieter. “You can’t bring that into the house! How am I supposed to sleep tonight with that here?”

“Lying down,” I said.

Now he looked at me with disgust. Hysterical men were divine retribution.

“That’s . . . you can’t just keep that around the house,” he cried. “Take it to the basement.”

I took the urn in my arms. I had the feeling that I had to protect her from him.

“Get rid of it,” he begged.

“This is an urn with the ashes of your wife!” I screamed.

“That doesn’t make it any better!” he shouted in response.

I held the urn in my arms and pushed past him. He jumped back, but in the wrong direction, so I ended up hitting his stomach with the edge of the urn. For a second I pondered whether to give him a hard, mind-clearing knock on the head. But Sulfia put her cool hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry, dear,” I said. “Not as long as you’re here.”

Dieter looked at me horrified.

“I didn’t mean you,” I said. “You can drop dead.”

I went to my room, put the urn on my nightstand, and fell fast asleep.

The next thing I knew, I became aware of a burning smell. Things jumbled together in my mind. I thought of the ashes supposedly in the urn—unless they’d lied to me at the crematorium. I pictured Sulfia laughing while being engulfed in flames. And just before I awoke, I thought to myself that the flames suited her. Then I finally woke up and ran through the apartment following the trail of smoke. It was coming from the kitchen. Aminat was burning paper in the sink.

“Have you lost your mind?” I screamed.

I reached over her shoulder and lifted a charred corner of paper with a stamp on it. Aminat was burning her letters, the ones I had brought back from Russia. I turned on the faucet. She turned it off again.

“You can’t do this!” I yelled. “You have to save these. What if you become famous?”

We hadn’t spoken for a long time about how she needed to become famous—or at least successful, or at the very least rich.

“I don’t want to be famous,” she said.

“Then become a doctor,” I said.

“Why me?” she asked.

“Sulfia would have liked it,” I said.

Aminat looked into the sink. Scraps of paper floated among clumps of ash in the little bit of water that had streamed in.

“I’ll clean it up for you,” I said. “You go to your room and think things over.”

“Think what over?” she asked.

“Think about how you can improve yourself in ways that would make Sulfia happy.”

For a split second I felt uncomfortable as she stared at me. Then she turned around and left, and I could breathe more easily.

I was very busy at first. I called the offices of the cemetery and applied for a place for the urn. I called stonemasons about a grave marker. Sulfia needed to be properly interred with a nice gravestone. I made a sketch of how I wanted it. The money didn’t matter but I still had everyone send me estimates. If an estimate took too long to arrive, I called the office and told them that this wasn’t just any old job and that God saw everything.

Whenever I got overly worked up or started yelling too loudly, I felt Sulfia’s cool hand on my shoulder. I understood that my screaming disturbed her, and I settled down. Sulfia liked quiet, and I did everything I could to make her comfortable.

I wasn’t going to be able to inter the urn. The idiots who designed graves just didn’t understand what I wanted. Even for several thousand euros. I had the feeling that they didn’t want to understand. It was the first time that I failed at something, but Sulfia said it didn’t matter.

I had to admit she was right—the urn was beautiful and easy to handle. She didn’t need a grave. I just left her on the nightstand next to a bouquet of white roses. I bought fresh roses every few days. Dieter said nervously that it was illegal. I told him where he could stick those regulations.

I kept working. I had to take care of my granddaughter. She was now an orphan and I had to replace her mother and father. Not that it was anything new for me. But something had changed. Before I had spoken only for myself, but now I was doing everything on Sulfia’s behalf.

I spoke in Sulfia’s voice. And what was even weirder about it was that I spoke with Sulfia’s tone of voice. One morning when Aminat didn’t want to get out of bed despite the fact that she had to go to school, I didn’t say, “Go on like that and you’ll end up in the gutter! Your German classmates got out of bed hours ago!”

Instead I said, “Sure, stay in bed, my child.”

I bit my tongue as I soon as I said it. What would become of her if I continued to react like that—another Sulfia?

I started to form another sentence that would have featured the word “gutter,” but before I got it out I realized I had no desire to say it. Instead I went to the kitchen and made a cup of strong, sweet hot chocolate and put it next to Aminat’s bed.

“Stay in bed, my child,” I said. “You’ve been through so much in the last few years.”

I practically choked on my words, and it took a tremendous effort of will not to let a few other things pass my lips before I went off to work.

John had adopted the habit of locking himself in his bedroom as soon as I arrived to clean his place. And sure enough, the first time I returned after my break, he hid himself from me. I didn’t knock on his bedroom door. Actually I didn’t even think about him. I didn’t think about anything. I just mopped and wiped and felt quite peaceful. Which is why I jumped when he suddenly asked me with a furrowed brow where I had been hiding.

I continued to clean but told him as I did about the dress Sulfia had on in the coffin and the bouquet of flowers I had put in her hand so she would look like a princess. John followed me around the room. When I turned on the vacuum cleaner, he pulled the plug out of the wall complaining that he couldn’t hear me over the noise.

When I was finished he asked whether he could drive me home. I figured I had talked enough, said “No thanks,” and took the bus.

Obviously it wasn’t good to spoil Aminat. I had always known that. And it was no good that Sulfia had convinced me to let the girl get away with everything. Now Aminat, whose life had been a rollercoaster ride, spiraled downward. But Sulfia held me back from doing anything about it. Instead I acted like Sulfia, watching and sighing pitifully.

Aminat was held back in school. My talk with the rector and my assertions about how gifted she was had no effect. “Just leave it,” said Sulfia. I could see the gutter before my eyes: dark, filthy, stinking. I told Sulfia that at this rate Aminat would never be a renowned doctor. Sulfia shrugged her shoulders in her own inimitable way.

I went in to see Aminat, who’d been lying in bed reading comics for days.

“Aminat, my granddaughter and daughter of your mother Sulfia, if you don’t get up this very instant and try to fill in some of the gaps in your knowledge, you will never become a renowned doctor. You will never have a line of patients waiting to enter your gleaming practice that smells of disinfectant.”

“I don’t care,” said Aminat.

I elbowed Sulfia aside.

“But I care, and I want you to be a doctor!”

“If it’s so important to you, do it yourself,” said Aminat, turning the page in her comic book.

I thought about it for two days and five hours. Aminat was right: my problem had always been that I undertook too many things for other people. Then they didn’t do their part. Of course, I could follow through on anything I undertook on my
own
behalf. So I went to the basement and retrieved the old suitcase where I kept a lot of important documents. They were all in Russian and had all yellowed, but the official stamps were all still legible and in decent shape.

I took a blue plastic folder—labeled “biology”—from Aminat’s desk and carefully put all of my credentials into it. I took this portfolio to the offices of the internal medicine specialist whose place I cleaned.

His receptionist couldn’t understand what I wanted even after a long conversation. But then a side door opened and I saw the metal frames of my client’s glasses. I walked into the room where he was, sat down, and was soon telling him about my plan. He was going to secure me a place at medical school.

He laughed for a second and then was serious again. He said I didn’t have the educational qualifications. When I objected that I was a trained educator, he countered that we might as well put my old Russian credentials in a pipe and smoke them. I had to have a German high school diploma, and “at my advanced age” getting one would be “an ambitious challenge.” I said I definitely wanted to work at a hospital.

He had an idea, he said, though he wasn’t sure whether it was what I had in mind. He took his glasses off and polished them with a cloth, fidgeting around. Then he said he couldn’t make any promises but that he would be willing to lobby for a job for me as a cleaning woman at the hospital where he was affiliated.