The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (18 page)

Aminat kept asking about Sulfia. She was already in Germany, with me by her side; she was going to school and did her homework with the help of a dictionary; she even got a little allowance from me—one mark per week. And despite all of that, she asked about Sulfia. Whether she would return.

Where else would she go, I replied.

We couldn’t talk on the phone much—it was too expensive for Sulfia, and Dieter got nervous whenever we dialed an international number on his phone. I pressured him by saying I’d take Aminat home if something didn’t suit us, though I had my doubts as to how effective this argument still was.

Aminat had become disagreeable. She had gained weight. Never before had a woman in our family been fat, and it outraged me that she might be the first. She just plunged into sweets. No wonder she also had pimples. Every morning when I looked at her, I thought, Oh my God, there are even more.

Naturally I fought these developments. I still believed that somewhere deep inside her was her old beauty—the beauty she had inherited from me. I just needed to exhume it from beneath layers of fat and pimples.

I waged a constant battle against Aminat’s pimples. Twice a week I made her a steam bath. I boiled water with dried chamomile leaves and made Aminat hold her face over the pot. Afterward I popped all her pimples and disinfected them with Dieter’s aftershave.

Any sweets I found I threw in the garbage. I eliminated her one-mark allowance so she couldn’t buy any on her own. The only thing I was unable to stop was Dieter bringing her sweets. It was the only tender connection between the two of them. The otherwise petulant, incorruptible Aminat simply could not resist sweets.

My worry that Dieter would send us back home as a result of Aminat’s altered appearance came to nothing. He circled her the way a child does a dog on a leash, torn between the desire to get up the nerve to pet it and the fear of getting bitten. Because I was so busy with my cleaning work, I began to note capabilities in Dieter that had earlier escaped my notice: he was indeed able to keep the refrigerator stocked by himself, as well as to ensure a child had regular meals and clean laundry.

At first I took care of our laundry myself when I had time. I washed everything by hand in the sink and hung it to dry in the bathtub. Dieter explained how much more water I used by washing everything by hand. I let him show me where the laundry basket was and how the washing machine worked. There were a lot of buttons, but I wasn’t stupid. Our dirty underwear, however, I continued to keep in a plastic bag in our room and wash by hand.

One thing was clear: Dieter’s apartment was not quite Germany. No, suddenly I found his place a bit shabby. I’d seen a lot of other places by this point. And Dieter himself also no longer fit my image of a German. Now that I had a basis for comparison, I realized that some German men wore much more expensive shoes.

Aminat was no longer the granddaughter I had pictured, either.

I didn’t like the local children at all. At first glance, most of them were very poorly dressed. Then I started to look more closely. My perspective changed. There came a day when I found myself looking at a German girl on the tram—not a Turk, a real German girl—and realized I no longer thought the look was sloppy. I could have looked at her all day. The girl seemed so relaxed, so totally different from Aminat, who always had a stiff look on her face and hunched her shoulders awkwardly around her neck.

At first I thought Aminat could never become German. She always had a look on her face as if she didn’t understand anything. But that was deceptive on her part.

Once I came home and heard her shouting angrily. I was worried she would do something to Dieter, and ran to her room. Fortunately he wasn’t injured. His frightened muttering continued like a second track beneath Aminat’s shouts. I stood outside the door and listened. I understood only a few words. I couldn’t catch what they were saying. Aminat cursed in German, in long, complicated sentences. She didn’t just speak better than I did, she spoke worlds better. She spoke like German children. I hadn’t noticed.

As I entered, they both stopped. Aminat turned her back to me and started hammering on Dieter’s computer keyboard.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Aminat.

“Everything’s fine,” said Dieter.

“When’s Sulfia coming back?” Aminat asked. Me. In German!

“In four days,” I said. That meant that a week later I would be flying to Russia. Dieter had paid for my flight in exchange for me taking care of some of the household tasks. I also bought my own clothes. I had found a few shops where I was able to shop cheaply. They sold used clothing by the kilo and it cost practically nothing. And if you looked long enough you could find nice stuff. At first I’d been disgusted, but eventually I started going almost every day to see whether anything nice had come in.

A lot of women in Germany didn’t pay much attention to their appearance, so it was easy for me to outdo them. Point to any random woman on the street and I was better dressed, better made-up, and I had a more enticing figure—which I showed off better than most young girls did here in Germany.

“You’ll finally be gone,” said Aminat. In German. To me.

But Sulfia didn’t come. Two days prior to her planned arrival, she called. I had suspected she might have problems. She couldn’t assemble documents as brilliantly as I could. She let herself be too easily intimidated or gotten rid of. I had sent twenty bars of chocolate back with her—milk chocolate with hazelnuts—so she could give them to the various officials at the right moment. But Sulfia found that embarrassing. That’s why, when I heard Sulfia’s voice on the phone, I thought she was calling to prepare me for all the work I had ahead of me back in Russia. But it was something else. Sulfia said Kalganow had suffered a stroke the day before.

“So?” I cried, and quickly tried to remember how Russian inheritance law worked. We were still not divorced, Kalganow and I.

“He’s not doing so well,” said Sulfia.

“What do you mean—he’s alive? If he’s not dead yet, won’t he survive now?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” said Sulfia, the professional.

What I heard next I could hardly believe. Sulfia was calling to say she wouldn’t be coming to Germany because she intended to take care of her father. The conditions in the hospitals had become so horrible that you couldn’t leave a living relative in one—as a healthcare worker she knew this, she said.

“What?” I screamed. “Are you completely crazy? He walked out on me and on you, too! You cannot be serious.”

Sulfia was stupid, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was beyond my powers to fly home, grab her by the hair, and drag her to the airport. It meant I would have to remain in Germany after all.

I couldn’t leave Aminat alone with Dieter. If she were to stab him over something she didn’t like, even if it were an accident, we could forget about marriage and citizenship.

Dieter wasn’t too upset that Sulfia didn’t come back. I could see that. Presumably he regretted the fact that I was still there. In the next few weeks I talked a lot on the phone with Sulfia. I still needed to find someone to sublet Sulfia and Aminat’s old apartment. I counseled Sulfia over the phone—she needed to make sure that the new tenant knew she couldn’t smoke in the apartment, couldn’t drink, and couldn’t throw parties with more than ten people. Sulfia repaid me with reports on Kalganow’s health. He was still in bed, drooling and staring into space.

“And the teacher?” I asked.

“She’s taken it hard,” said Sulfia.

I almost forgot that Sulfia was herself also sick. She didn’t like to talk about her own health. She always just said everything was fine.

Aminat was angry—at me. She seemed to think that I controlled everything in the world. Which wasn’t entirely wrong. She said to me, “It’s your fault mama isn’t coming!”

I told her what the real story was: Sulfia didn’t want to come because Kalganow was sick.

“Like you that time?” Aminat asked hatefully.

I thought she had long since forgotten the whole Israel episode. In the meantime we had all learned that Israel was a dangerous place. Buses constantly blew up there. Germany was much safer—and the climate here wasn’t so harsh, either.

The most important thing was that Aminat did her homework. I had made clear that she had to do well in school. She needed to get good grades, study medicine, become a doctor, and make lots of money. I alternated the end goal: either “make lots of money” or “discover a treatment that will heal Sulfia.”

Aminat sat reading books in her room a lot because she didn’t have any friends. I picked up on this at some point—it wasn’t normal for a girl to sit in her room all the time and never get a phone call or have a visitor. She needed friends, particularly as she was letting her looks go. She would end up turning into a second Sulfia otherwise. I told Dieter that she needed some girlfriends.

I realized as I did that I actually liked him a little bit. Maybe for his loyalty to Aminat. There were many things about me that annoyed him, but he always reacted patiently to Aminat. He had yelled at me once when I was cooking spaghetti and broke the dry strands so they would fit into the pot. When Aminat did the same thing (and she was often hungry in the evening and crept into the kitchen to make herself noodles that she gulped down with ketchup and grated cheese), Dieter never said a word—not even that she shouldn’t eat so much. Even when she left the water running while she brushed her teeth rather than filling a cup and turning off the faucet, he kept his composure. He was different with me.

Still, he was horribly cheap. He saved on light, water, paper, heat, and even supermarket bags—despite the fact that they were free. He put his garbage in shopping bags and avoided paying for nice, practical garbage bags. As soon as I left a room, he actually ran in after me to make sure I had turned off the lights. When it began to get slightly dark outside, he lowered the shades. That way the apartment wouldn’t lose heat, he explained, and the neighbors wouldn’t be able to see inside the lit apartment.

Dieter didn’t bring a woman home a single time. He was never gone long enough to be meeting a woman somewhere else, either. He never called anybody. He had only us. He and I were bound by the fact that we both loved the same girl, one who had lately become repellent.

Dieter said it was normal. Aminat was approaching puberty. I found even the word “puberty” obscene. Dieter said it happened to every girl. I tried to remember what it had been like for Sulfia, or even for myself, and concluded that neither of us had gone through anything like this. First you were a child, then at some point you were an adult. There was no reason to get fat, ugly, or belligerent.

On the positive side, said Dieter, Aminat was intelligent. I just looked at him silently. Fine, if that was his opinion, he was entitled to it. But it didn’t make things any better. Only an attractive woman could allow herself to show any intelligence if she ever hoped to get a man. Dieter said things were different in Germany, but I didn’t believe him.

On the street, Aminat was often taken for a Turk. I couldn’t understand it. I liked little Turkish girls with their pretty dresses and the colorful clips in their hair. The older ones were no longer pretty or well dressed, though you couldn’t see them beneath their shrouds anyway. And Turkish was somewhat similar to Tartar. But I was still happy that Aminat kept her distance from the Turks. From everyone else as well, unfortunately.

Once she came home and asked what a Tartar was. She had to write an essay on the topic.

“Who asked you to do that?” I wondered.

“The teacher,” said Aminat.

Everyone in class had to write an essay about the place their family was from. I considered this a stupid assignment—why should the children busy themselves with things that had no relevance in their lives anymore?

“Write that you’re a descendent of Genghis Khan,” I said to encourage Aminat.

“Who?” asked Aminat.

I tried to explain things to her. Unfortunately I realized I didn’t remember much. It was probably Kalganow’s influence. He never wanted anything to do with such things, and now Aminat was paying the price. I didn’t know much about my family because my parents had died so early and then my brother did, too. I had never even seen my grandmother Aminat from the mountains. We had never discussed Tartar traditions in the orphanage or in school. I always had something better to do. I spoke perfect Russian and worked hard. I had always lived among Russians, and Aminat’s questions annoyed me now.

She looked at me through squinted eyes and then went to Dieter. He pulled out some books and thick notebooks full of scribbled notes. I shrugged my shoulders and cleaned the stove as a diversion.

That evening after Aminat had gone to bed, I went and got her folders out of her backpack and read through what she had written. There were five pages.

I did not understand a single word.

Now, one insight followed another. I spoke better and better German because I got to know so many people. I cleaned so many people’s places that I hardly had time to clean up at home. So at home Dieter cleaned. He said he couldn’t afford me. It was a joke.

I observed the women whose beds I aired and whose toilets I scrubbed, and naturally I observed their men as well. In fact I knew a lot about these people: who was diabetic, who had something on their thyroid gland, who was cheating, and which of them took pills.

Some houses appealed to me so much that I looked at the women who lived there and wondered whether Sulfia could take the place of one of them. Unfortunately even German women looked better than Sulfia.

I liked German men. They were tall and fair, and often outdoors. All of them except Dieter. I didn’t like Turks. They reminded me of Kalganow. I liked Poles even less—for the same reason. But I liked to look at German men. Though since the experience with Dieter, I also knew the dangers of building up expectations just because something is unfamiliar.

Once I was cleaning a kitchen and my employer, a driving instructor with spiky blond hair, came in. I realized only when he gave my backside a pat. I had dealt mostly with his wife, who was currently pregnant. She was in the hospital just then because she had nearly miscarried, and he stood in front of me and smiled.

I looked him up and down. He had a whiff of beer about him, which doesn’t necessarily detract from a man, I find. I wagged my finger at him playfully and then turned my back to him again. I felt his breath on my ear as his hand slid into my blouse.

I hadn’t had a man in a long time, and this one here was very red-blooded and ready to go. Perhaps too much so, in fact. I felt sorry for his wife—as a change of pace this sort of man could be nice, but on a regular basis he would really rub someone raw. I was worried about the bottom seam of my silk dress. I had my coverall in the laundry, so I was cleaning in that silk dress, flesh-tone nylons, and pumps. He obviously didn’t understand how the nylons worked. I will have to just throw them out, I thought the whole time.

When I turned around again, he left the kitchen.

I went into the bathroom and got myself back together. I threw my nylons and underwear in the trashcan under the sink, removed the plastic bag, and knotted it so I could get rid of it on the way home. I used the bidet that I had just polished—I didn’t like the idea of smelling like the man. I had another pair of nylons in my bag but no spare underwear, so I stayed as I was. I dried the hemline of my dress with a washcloth. Then I went back into the kitchen and continued where I had left off.

Later, when I finished the job, I hung up the apron in the kitchen pantry and looked around. I had always found the money in an envelope with my name on it sitting on the table, but today the woman was in the hospital and there was no envelope.

“Hello!” I called through the house. “Sir?”

I found him in the bedroom. He was lying on the bed I had just made with his shoes on, reading the paper. His entire face expressed disapproval at the fact that I had not just vanished into thin air.

“What?” he asked.

“I need my money,” I said.

I leaned against the doorframe and watched as he picked himself up, looked for his wallet, and finally found it in the pocket of the coat he had thrown on the floor.

“How much is it again?” he asked without looking at me.

“Four hundred marks,” I said calmly.

He dropped the wallet, but caught it in the air. I knew the house belonged to his wife, because I had cleaned their den and their desk and tidied their papers.

He found a twenty-mark note and gave it to me.

“Five hundred,” I said.

We looked each other in the eyes. I never looked away first. He handed me four one-hundred mark notes. I waited. He gave me a fifty and three tens. I waited. He started to rummage through the coins in his wallet. Once he had gathered up all the change, he put it in my hand and dashed out of the room.

That, I thought, should take care of that.