The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (25 page)

I was happy that John decided to take care of Lena. He gave her a tour of the area, driving her around in his Mercedes. She had evidently coped well with the urn incident and squealed happily around the house. She was thrilled by how clean and green everything was in Germany. She had brought Russian books for me, and a poppyseed cake from a Tel Aviv bakery. She was a somewhat different Sulfia, lighthearted, with a gleam in her eyes. She was almost always in a good mood and she didn’t get upset about things or hold grudges. She asked me a thousand questions about me and her mother. But I didn’t feel like answering. John didn’t know anything about our history so luckily he couldn’t help her, either.

About Aminat I said only that she was away.

I found out from John why Lena had suddenly landed on our doorstep. She had a boyfriend who was a little bit older and who had a job that revolved around mass-produced Chinese copies of well-known paintings by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, that kind of thing. Lena’s boyfriend sold the copies in Germany. Why, of all things, an Israeli was selling Chinese forgeries wasn’t clear to me. It all sounded downright crooked to me. Lena said he wasn’t making much at it but that it allowed him to fulfill a dream—living in Germany. She’d been to visit him in Hamburg and now she was here with us. Finally, she said. And as she did she took my hand. I took it back.

John said she could stay at his house as long as she wanted. I gasped silently. I tried to talk to him about it and he said: “It’s no problem, I like your family.”

“This little whore is not family and never will be” were the words that came to me, but I swallowed them as I heard Lena’s laugh waft in from the garden, where she was talking on the phone. Sulfia had never laughed like that. Maybe she would have if she had ever had something to laugh about.

I was still waiting for Aminat. But who should ring? Kalganow.

I recognized him from the wheezing on the line long before he spoke a word. He had snored in exactly the same rhythm.

“Kalganow,” I cooed pleasantly. I was in a good mood because Lena was out somewhere and John had brought home some new kind of cookie. “Kalganow, are you calling in your sleep?”

“Rosie,” said Kalganow, choking back a miserable cough. “Rosie, my most beloved.”

It turned out his teacher of Russian and literature had died.

“When?” I asked mistrustfully.

“Two weeks ago,” he said.

The time that had elapsed since then was sufficient for him to realize he could no longer live without me—that, in fact, he never had been able to.

“Kalganow, I have a man!” I yelled. “I have an English gentleman with a big garden and twenty kinds of tea in the pantry.”

“It doesn’t matter, Rosie,” said Kalganow. “We’re still married for all eternity.”

“You wouldn’t even survive the plane ride,” I said.

“Then you can bury me, which would suit me just fine,” he answered.

I didn’t say anything to him about how expensive funerals were in Germany. I went straight to John. I said that Kalganow was an old relative of mine and didn’t have long to live. John kissed my hand. At that moment I wished very much that he would ask me to be his wife. I even thought about telling him how much I wanted it. After all, he had fulfilled all my wishes up to now—with the exception of seeing Aminat. But I was too proud. And besides, it was true: I was still married to Kalganow.

I sent Kalganow a plane ticket and the formal invitation necessary for a visa. With John, I picked him up at the airport. He had gone completely gray, still wore his old work jacket, and walked with a cane.

Kalganow wet my cheeks with his kisses and said that everyone around him was old or dead, and I was the only one who was still as fresh as in the days of our youth. And that was true, of course. John shook Kalganow’s hand and took his luggage—an old suitcase with holes in the leather and wire wrapped around it to hold it closed, and a big plastic bag. Kalganow leaned on me as we walked to the parking garage. Using all of our strength, John and I managed to help him into the backseat and balance him upright. We put his cane in the trunk.

Kalganow pressed his face to the window. He liked the autobahn. He kept letting out cries of excitement. It reminded me of my arrival in Germany. I felt ashamed—both for him and because of my memories.

“You are so beautiful, Rosie,” muttered Kalganow from the backseat.

I looked at John out of the corner of my eye. And although his face was as placid as always, I had the feeling that somewhere in the corner of his mouth a smile was hiding.

When we entered the house, Kalganow’s feeble eyes played a mean joke on him. Lena came down the steps calling “Grandpa!” loudly, and Kalganow opened his arms wide, barely keeping his balance. As he did, however, he cried out the name of our daughter. They fell into each other’s arms and said silly things to each other. I couldn’t stand it any longer and went to my bedroom, turned on the TV, and cheered on Aminat.

“Show them what you can do, my child. Don’t let me down.”

The four of us sat together on John’s leather sofa as Aminat was crowned the most talented young singer in Germany, having won the final round of viewer voting. Kalganow cried, I sat there frozen with excitement, unable to move. John’s face was as clear as a cloudless sky. Lena had her hands squeezed between her knees and shook her head.

“What is it?” I hissed at her, for in her ability to annoy me, she exceeded even Kalganow.

“Poor, poor thing,” whispered Lena.

I attributed the distressed look on Lena’s face to pure envy.

Aminat stood on the stage with a stone face as glitter rained down on her and white doves circled above her head. She now had a record contract. All the cameras were pointed at her and all the microphones awaited her words. The audience was giving her a standing ovation and she lifted one of her stiff, thin arms and waved. I just hoped the viewers wouldn’t realize what a mistake they had made in choosing her. But anyway, I thought, the first step to fame has been accomplished. She still had a lot ahead of her. Germany is just a small country.

Dieter died the day after Aminat was crowned.

It would be blasphemous to suggest that it actually suited me. But the timing really wasn’t bad. I had to take care of everything, and I was happy to get out of the house. Lena and Kalganow somehow managed to be in every nook of the house at every moment—her giggling, him wheezing—and I couldn’t just lock myself in my room all day. John trimmed the roses, looked at the clouds, and made tea. I didn’t ask him whether the company of a poorly raised Israeli and a slobbering old Russian suited him. The smile I’d always thought I detected lurking in his face had recently come tentatively to the surface. To keep myself occupied, I organized Dieter’s funeral and cleaned up his apartment. When I went into his bedroom, in which the stench of sickness and fear still hung, I opened a drawer and found a pile of handwritten notes.

The label on the first notebook said: “Tartar Cuisine.” I opened it. “
Pechleve
—a layered dessert,” I read. Dieter’s writing was small, curvy, and the letters were rounded—if I didn’t know better, I would have taken it for a woman’s handwriting. The neat script was easy to read. After the first few sentences, images of my old life flooded my mind. I had up to that day never believed that Dieter had really been travelling around the Soviet Union to research ethnic cuisines. But now I held the proof in my hands. Descriptions of his wanderings through half-derelict villages, sketches of landscapes, and, first and foremost, recipes. “
Kystybyi
, also called
kuzikmak
, is a sort of pierogi made out of unleavened dough.” “
Katyk
denotes curdled milk that the Tartars heat for a long time in a clay pot. It is sometimes finished with the addition of cherries or red beets.” “For the filling of
gubadia
, a baked layered pie made for festive occasions, they sometimes use
qurut
, a uniquely processed dried yoghurt.”

In one of the notebooks I found the angelic photo of Aminat that I’d sent Dieter many years ago, in another life.

Tartar words were sprinkled in among the notes. He had tried to learn the language and maintained a kind of vocabulary book:

Bola
—child

Singil
—little sister

Oschyjsym kila
—I’m hungry

Sin bik sylu
—you’re very pretty

Schajtan
—demon

Ischak
(as in, you’re as stubborn as an
ischak
)—donkey

And then the note: “It is proving practically impossible to write a cookbook about Tartar cuisine.”

I shoved all the notebooks into a large duffel bag that I found on top of the dresser, gray with dust and cobwebs.

I would like to have left Dieter’s apartment and forgotten it forever. But I wasn’t one to run away. I bore a share of the responsibility—after all, I’d lived here, and Dieter had no next of kin aside from me. I worked quickly, sorting, stuffing nonessential things into plastic bags, taking them downstairs. I arranged for the removal of the bulky items, sold Dieter’s leather sofa and matching chairs to the Turkish neighbor, and washed the windows.

I’d always thought Dieter’s dishes were appalling, but I found some real treasures in his kitchen cabinets—two heavy cast-iron woks, a genuine copper kazan, various African clay pots, all apparently unused, covered with cobwebs. I wrapped it all in newspaper and put it in a box to take with me. The kitchen furniture I sold very cheaply to the landlord, who as a favor then agreed to help me carry my box down to the car.

From that point on, Lena and Kalganow didn’t bother me at all. I stopped asking when they planned to leave. I trembled with curiosity about Dieter’s notes.

I sat on a silk cushion on the floor and read. I had no idea that Dieter had written so many things about Aminat—the story of her life, beginning long before her birth, beginning, in fact, with my story. I had no idea Dieter knew so much about my life. I couldn’t remember telling him about my family. Maybe it had been Sulfia who told him about things I hadn’t even talked about with her. Maybe talking with her hadn’t been necessary—maybe she had the stories in her blood the same way Aminat had Tartar words in hers.

I came across Aminat’s drawings, which Dieter had carefully taped into a notebook. I ran my finger along sentences that Aminat was supposed to have said as a child. I read about Dieter’s efforts to distinguish—with German precision—Tartar cuisine from other ethnic groups’ national cuisines and his failure to be able to do so. About his exasperation when he realized the subject of his interest was influenced by the surrounding Bashkir, Kazak, Uzbek, Azerbaijan, and Yakut cuisines and that the boundaries blurred. It must have been something very difficult for him to deal with.

I pored over sketches and maps in which he had tried to track the spread of various Tartar offshoots during bygone periods about which nobody cared anymore. I suspect he may have just made some of it up. And as usual, he had devoted the most energy—not to mention ink—to the least important things.

John entered the room and sat down on a chair nearby. I didn’t hold it against him that he hadn’t been able to bring Aminat to me. It was the only thing so far that he hadn’t pulled off—and he still had a better success rate than God.

One evening John and I were driving to the opera because I had bought myself a new dress and John had gotten hold of tickets. I was caressing the silk in my lap and the leather of my new handbag when John stopped at a traffic light and I looked to the side. I saw an open door that led to a dimly lit room. It was a bar called Istanbul. The windows facing the street were filthy. There were a few tables and chairs out on the sidewalk. I tugged on John’s sleeve and said, “Can you pull over?”

He parked in front of the bar. We had some time to kill. I took my handbag, hooked my arm through his, and we went into the place and sat down at a table. The table was covered with a layer of grease and I refused to touch it. John leaned back in his chair and said nothing.

From a side room came a stocky man with a bushy black moustache and the eyes of a beaten dog.

“Closed,” he said.

I could tell from his nose that he was no Turk. He was an Azeri.

“Closed,” he repeated.

I didn’t move, and John asked for the wine menu.

“CLOSED!” yelled the man. “NO WINE MENU! RESTAURANT CLOSED FOREVER!”

We remained seated.

He left, rustled around loudly in the next room, and finally returned with a bottle and three glasses.

“You’re my last customers,” he said. “I’m broke.”

We lifted our glasses and drank them down without clinking them together. We respected his sorrow. His moustache was already soaked. Then I stood up and went into the kitchen. It smelled like burnt oil and a spice that reminded me of the childhood I had never had. I found a rag and a nearly empty bottle of dishwashing liquid. I squeezed the last drops out of it and began to clean the cooking surfaces. The bar owner came and stood in the kitchen doorway. I heard him breathing but I didn’t turn around.

He left me alone again and continued talking with John in the other room. I didn’t listen—accounting didn’t interest me. I moistened crusty stains and thought about Aminat. I’d read in some paper that she was pregnant by a Canadian who was actually an Indian whose tribe lived in Toronto. I didn’t believe anything anymore—but that I believed straight away. Aminat had never listened to me. She always did the opposite of what I wanted of her. Now, barring any unforeseen complications, she was going to give me an Indian great-grandchild. So be it, I thought—as long as they didn’t name the child Jacqueline.

I had all the time in the world to wait for Aminat, and I wanted to make good use of that time. John always kept his word in the end. Pressuring him was unnecessary. Besides, I was a little afraid to ask him when Aminat would be coming back to me. I was afraid to hear that she had already been there and that I hadn’t noticed. I much preferred freeing metal countertops from encrusted bits of food and sending silent thanks to God, mechanically, out of courtesy—I mean, so he wouldn’t feel totally useless.