The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (7 page)

That night I dreamed of Kalganow for the first time. It was strange. In the dream my husband was still young. He looked the way he had when we first met. I was sixteen, and he was a friend of my brother. Five years older, a grown man. Three years later my brother jumped from the twelfth floor of a high rise. He was always a peculiar person.

Boris, I thought. Boris was my husband’s first name. I had never called him that, though. I had my own names for him. I remembered how I opened the door for him one day when he came to visit my brother. I had just left the orphanage and moved in with my brother. He was my only close relative, and now that he was in his early twenties he was grown up and responsible. I remembered how suavely Kalganow said, “Hello cutie.” And how amazed I was that a man could be so handsome. Yes, my husband had been handsome at one time. I had completely forgotten that. I was so attracted to him that I immediately thought to myself, If I married somebody like him, our children would be lovely. Not exactly, as it turned out.

We got married shortly after my eighteenth birthday. He’d had a girlfriend in the meantime. She was neither attractive nor smart, but I was still sick with jealousy. I had secretly kneeled down in the bath and prayed to God for assistance. Actually, I just wanted to make sure my future husband didn’t decide to marry this other girl before I was old enough. But God overdid it a little. My future husband’s girlfriend died suddenly of tuberculosis.

As far as Kalganow was concerned, there was no God. He was with the Communist Union of Youth, which I thought was good. It was also clear that it opened horizons. I embraced his political fervor.

Though it was obvious at first glance he was Tartar, he never wanted to talk about it. He used to say it was all arbitrary, the categorization of people as Russians or Ukrainians, Jews or Gypsies, Uzbeks, Bashkirs, Azeris, Armenians, Chechens, Moldavians . . . or Tartars. He was born in Kazan, but he never liked the place. He had a dream: that all people would mix together, stay far away from their ancestral homes, and cast off their cultural roots as they would so much dead weight. He was of the opinion that all these various people were discriminated against.

In our first few years together he spoke a lot about that. I listened to him—I knew how a wife had to behave. The most important part was not to point out to the husband what stupid things he said. A woman’s tolerance in this area was key to a stable marriage. I understood all of this in theory, and then passed muster in practice. I was the perfect spouse.

We were a nice couple at the beginning. Both of us handsome, slim, healthy, with sparkling eyes. Back then I got pregnant constantly; it was a problem. We had no money and no apartment, despite his job. He was a communist idealist, not one who made sure to look after his family. In his opinion we shouldn’t be any better off that anyone else. I stopped counting the number of innocent souls I sent back to heaven as a result. But it wasn’t any more than anyone else.

At some point my husband brought home condoms. My influence on him was having some effect: slowly but steadily he began to build a career. He started as a simple worker, then he became active in the union. His ambition grew, he continued to climb and be promoted, and he had access to things other people hadn’t even heard of.

Like these condoms, for instance. They prevented children reliably. In fact, they prevented the act that led to children. They were rare and valuable. After use I washed them and hung them to dry. I let them dangle from the clothesline in our room. I had the feeling that the longer they hung there, the less frequently my husband made advances on me. Back then I was tired and gaunt, I was studying pedagogy and working nights as a janitor in an all-day kindergarten. My enthusiasm for the marriage slowly but steadily dwindled.

Then came the prospect of our two rooms in the communal apartment. The next soul that knocked on my door, I would let live. It was Sulfia. I never asked myself what would have become of the children I sent back to heaven. God forgave me. He gave me Sulfia, and that was something, I suppose—he could have given me a complete cripple.

When Sulfia was born, my husband remained unmoved. He didn’t like her Tartar name. Unlike me, he had a large family full of Tartar names. I had nobody except my cousin Rafaella.

Kalganow wanted to name our daughter Maria. But no Maria was going to enter my house. There were flocks of little Maschas wandering around, populating the kindergartens and the playgrounds.

My husband didn’t show much interest in our daughter, especially after I named her Sulfia. And when he did things with her, for the most part he made mistakes. He nearly dropped her when he held her. And with Sulfia, it was clear that if she were dropped even once, it was over. She was scrawny and weak. She could spend hours on end just staring into space doing nothing. I’d never seen a child like that.

“What’s wrong with our daughter?” I asked my husband.

“Leave her alone,” he answered. “Maybe she’s thinking.”

“Thinking?” I said. “That’s not an activity.”

That’s not to say I never thought about things. But to do so I didn’t need to sit down, fold my hands in my lap, and put a faraway look on my face. It was something I did alongside other things. I had to work and raise my daughter. Nobody helped me.

I didn’t want to work with kids; Sulfia was enough for me. I didn’t want to work with students at a vocational school, either. They had nothing in their heads. I found a good position at the teachers’ college. My work was very important: I collected information on all the latest scientific developments in pedagogy and archived the material. I put Sulfia in a boarding kindergarten. That is, I took her there on Monday and picked her up again on Friday—coughing and sniffling because Sulfia was so unremarkable that she often went overlooked. It seemed to me the kindergarten teachers fed and washed her only because they were afraid of me.

God only knows how much I tended to this child. Every summer we spent a month in the country with distant relatives of my husband who made their own sausages instead of buying them in a shop.

Kalganow’s relatives were devotees of
qaziliq
, the horsemeat sausage. First they soaked the meat in pots they left standing around. Then they turned animal intestines inside out, washed them with cold water, and scrubbed the slime off the intestinal walls. Then they turned them right side in again and sewed one end shut. They filled them with meat and fat, tied off the open end, and hung them out in the sun for several days. The sausages hung around, gently swinging in the wind with fat dripping onto the ground through holes poked in the casings. After a few days the sausages headed down to the basement for a few months, but in the evening I found cooked
qaziliq
—cut into thick discs—on my plate from an earlier batch. I didn’t touch it: these relatives never washed their hands.

It was awful, but I clenched my teeth. They were very simple people. They spoke nightmarishly bad Russian. I spoke Tartar with them because otherwise they wouldn’t understand. I had nearly forgotten the language because I’d lost my family early and Russian was spoken in the orphanage. I dredged the words out of the depths of my memory and was surprised how well it went.

With their constant grins and twinkling teeth, Kalganow’s relatives even got Sulfia to smile. First she started to imitate their speech, mumbling
tyr-pyr-myr
. Then she started to say words and phrases she’d picked up, not all of which were nonsense. I didn’t do anything to encourage her. I was proud of my flawless Russian, especially now that I realized it wasn’t a given.

Fortunately they had goats. That was the main reason we went out to the country—and only secondarily for the good country air. Though I far preferred the fumes of my city to the smell of cow shit I had to breathe in the country. But I endured for the sake of my child. I had heard that goat’s milk made you strong and healthy, and Sulfia was so scrawny.

Every morning and every evening Sulfia got a glass of freshly milked goat’s milk. Obviously boiled, because everything out here was full of germs. I boiled it myself using a cast-iron cauldron built into their earthen stove.

Sulfia made a rueful face whenever she saw the full cup. She didn’t like the taste. I told her it was a vaccination against stupidity. Sulfia sniffed the cup, disgusted, unhappy. She looked at me. My gaze was enough to make other people jump out of a window. So it was child’s play to make Sulfia drink her goat’s milk. The first time she gulped it down. Then she grabbed her stomach. When you drank it so quickly, naturally you got a stomachache. Sulfia’s pathetic expression drove me nuts. Then she suddenly put her hands over her mouth, ran out, and threw up into the raspberry patch outside. She was a brave little girl and would never have made a mess on the floor. After she had regurgitated the goat’s milk, I gave her a second cup and made sure she drank it very slowly. I’m not sure she would have survived to school age without this milk. I sacrificed myself for her betterment.

I myself didn’t drink any goat’s milk. I did taste it once, out of curiosity, after Sulfia complained about its bitterness—she never complained about things otherwise. I took a sip and instantly dashed out to the raspberry bushes. Yes, this milk was not enjoyable stuff, and I was happy I wasn’t the one who had to drink it.

During the initial period without my husband, I filled the empty hours with thoughts. I thought a lot. I conducted a thorough evaluation of my life. It was clear that not everything had gone smoothly. But I had always made the best out of every situation. In my late twenties, for instance, I had to get a new passport because my old one had been stolen. For that I needed my birth certificate, which I no longer had. The orphanage where I spent the bulk of my childhood had burned down, and all the records destroyed. The passport-issuing authority had to take my word—so I made myself seven years younger, which seemed about right for me anyway.

I had always tried to make up for the failures of others, whether through advice, action, or my own good will. That’s a notoriously thankless job.

Occasionally I interrupted my reflections and walked to the window. Often I saw my husband standing next to the lamppost. Sometimes at night, too. I asked myself what this meant. I didn’t open the window because I didn’t want him to think I was going to ask him to come up. He never did anything; he just stood there looking wretched.

But I had other things to worry about.

I’d seen my son-in-law downtown with a young blonde.

They were sitting at a café, at a little round table in the sun—like something out of a foreign movie. They were eating ice cream from glass bowls. Sulfia never did that kind of thing, sitting in a café eating ice cream. The stranger laughed like a lunatic. My son-in-law smiled and looked at her. Now and then he took her hand, which she would quickly pull away to gesture wildly in the air. She was a very fidgety young woman.

I hid behind the Lenin monument. With my eagle eyes I could see everything. How he paid the bill and helped her into her coat. A light green one, a daring color. I knew every style that had been in stores during the last five years—could rattle them off by heart—and this coat was not among them. It looked suspiciously like something from America. My son-in-law had obviously not brought slippers back for this woman.

They walked together to a trolley station. They kissed each other in front of everyone. How shameless. Couldn’t they at least find a building entryway or an empty spot in a park?

I carefully considered my options.

One of them I rejected, namely to run up to the slut in green and shove her under the oncoming tram. I would take another path. I had no doubt there were other options. I just had to figure them out—and to judge by what I’d seen, I had very little time to do so.

Soon I had a good idea. I waited for Sulfia in front of the entrance to her surgical clinic. She worked a lot and had managed to repeat her training and become a proper nurse. When she finally came out of the building—loaded down with five mesh bags stuffed with the groceries she’d spent her lunch break buying at the market, like any normal married woman—she reacted calmly.

“Mother?” she said. “What’s the matter?”

She looked at the package I had in my hand and her eyebrows gathered.

“I’m not even going to try it on. Save yourself the trouble, please.”

A little while back I had tried to help her dress better. Now that I saw her more frequently, I just couldn’t stand it. Always a pair of pants that sagged in the knees and the behind, and a sweater from her husband’s dresser. It was really no wonder she was in her present predicament. So I had begun to bring her things offered for sale by friends and co-workers who had managed to get hold of them through labyrinthine channels only to find out they didn’t fit. They were nice things, not like the nightmarish clothes made of execrable materials that hung in the shops. I’d already offered Sulfia a cream-colored blouse with big golden buttons. And a dress that went to the knees and accentuated the bust—even if it was lacking, as in her case. All sorts of dresses, blouses, pants. But Sulfia refused to wear any of them. She didn’t so much as try any of them on, and even I was incapable of persuading her.

This time I had an extraordinary treasure in my hands. A light wool jacket in a subtle pink color. With her raven-black hair, she would have looked like a princess in it. I told her that. She shook her head, stubborn as a mule. Here I was trying to save her marriage, and all she could do was shake her head.

“You haven’t even seen the jacket yet,” I said.

“I don’t need a jacket,” said Sulfia. “This one is fine.”

“But, my daughter, that one is already ten years old.”

“So? It’s still like new.”

“Sulfia, listen to your mother.”

“Mother, we could save ourselves a lot of time if you would stop bringing all this stuff. I have enough things of my own.”

“I see that.”

“What I wear needn’t be to your liking,” said Sulfia.

And what about Sergej, I almost answered in the face of her cheekiness. I suppose it needn’t be to his liking either? Well, don’t worry then, because he doesn’t like it! If he could choose between a woman who looked like a mangy old crow and one like a spring breeze incarnate, I’ll give you three guesses as to which one he would choose!

“I’m tired, mother,” said Sulfia. “Can we possibly get together another time? I slept so little.”

“Wait,” I said. “I have to talk to you.”

Sulfia stayed put. Her bloated mesh bags, filled with potatoes, red beets, and cucumbers, knocked against her legs.

“Come to my place,” I said. “I have to tell you something.”

“Another time, mother, yeah? I’m going home.”

“It’s important,” I said.

“Then tell me now,” said Sulfia, looking over my shoulder at the bus that was just pulling away from the stop.

“I can’t tell you now. At least not here.”

“Then leave it for another time.”

She just didn’t want me to help her. She was keeping me from saving her marriage. She always resisted whatever I did. The good times between us were apparently over, just like the good times between her and Sergej.

“Mother, I’m so tired I’m about to fall over. Let me go, alright?”

I took her by the arm and looked directly into her eyes.

“Sulfia,” I said, “you need to get pregnant as soon as possible.”

Sulfia began to blink.

“What?” she said. “What do I need to do? In your opinion?”

“Get pregnant.”

“What?”

“Have a child.”

“What?”

“GET PREGNANT, SULFIA! God damn it!”

“But how?”

I sighed. It occurred to me that I’d never told her how it worked. At first I had thought she was too young, then I thought there was no need. Then Aminat was born. These days I figured that she wouldn’t need any explanation.

Sulfia looked at me affectionately.

“Mother, you’ve had a hard day. Shall I take you home?”

“But you didn’t want to a minute ago.”

“I think it would be better if I go with you.”

We went back and forth like that for a while. She offered to take me home, I turned her down. I just kept telling her that she desperately needed to have a baby. That it was her only path to happiness. Sulfia tried to put her cool hand on my forehead. I insisted on a new baby. I told her that Sergej could certainly produce a handsome son.

Sulfia’s pale cheeks blushed. But she didn’t contradict me. She took me by the arm and led me along the street. I let her do so—it gave me more of a chance to get my message through to her. I was sure that if I said it enough times, it would sink in. I just had to be persistent, and that I could be.

Sulfia opened my apartment door, helped me out of my coat, led me into the bedroom, and sat me down on the bed. I realized she thought I was having a nervous breakdown. Maybe she thought it happened to people who got left.

“When a man has a child, he’s not so quick to run off,” I whispered. “If he’s half decent, then he comes to his senses. Then he’s duty bound. Sergej would not leave his child in a lurch.”

I looked at Sulfia: she was very pale again.