The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

by Alina Bronsky

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to come through the door and not hear someone noisily chewing in the kitchen. Someone who annoyed me by eating the food—which I made in advance—cold because it was beyond him to warm it up. Food in general: I could almost completely abandon cooking now. I’d have oatmeal in the morning and make a salad in the evening. I’d be able to save so much time! And with that time I could read, watch TV, or do gymnastics.

  I continued to think. I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone when I came home from work. I started to count the number of shirts I would no longer have to wash and iron each week—not to mention the socks, pants, and underwear.

  Shopping! I wouldn’t have to carry home heavy shopping bags anymore because I’d need so much less food. I would have much less filth to clean up, as I myself didn’t make any. I could talk to God as much as I wanted. I would get upset much less, since there was nobody there I constantly needed to get upset at. And I could meet men. New, younger men who would pay me compliments, then leave to go home to mommy, or to their girlfriend, for all I cared. Men who would make me feel like a woman again. Because I have to admit that it had been a long time since I had liked to be touched by Kalganow. When he accidentally brushed my leg in his sleep, I recoiled in disgust. He hadn’t touched me intentionally in ages.

  Of course the letter on the windowsill wasn’t all for the good. Nothing in life came for free. I would have to pay for my freedom. For instance, I was now a woman who had been left. That wasn’t exactly an envious status. I had to live with the fact that people would look at me funny. But, God willing, everything else was in my own hands.

  My husband was a coward: he left it to me to tell his daughter and granddaughter that he had left.

  I decided not to show my lack of sorrow. I figured this episode would make everyone forget the earlier friction and the boot and the unpleasant words. Before I set out for work, I left a letter for Kalganow on the windowsill. “We should behave civilly with one another. I wish you all the best, and good health to boot. Please leave me your telephone number so we can wrap up everything. Your Rosa.”

  I knew he’d come by again to pick up his things, and he’d make sure he did it at a time I wasn’t there. If he avoided me during better times, he certainly wouldn’t risk running into me now.

  That evening I took the bus to Sulfia’s. She opened the door and her face looked tired and distant.

  “Mother? Come in.”

  I hadn’t worn any lipstick, and had only a dusting of powder on my cheeks and forehead. I had on my plainest dress, one I normally wore only when I went to our garden outside of town. I did, however, wear my boots with heels.

  “Is everything alright?” asked Sulfia when she finally looked me in the face.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Has something happened to Papa?”

  “You could say that,” I said.

  Now she was frightened. “What’s happened?”

  “Your father left me.”

  She leaned against the wall. Her face fell.

  “What?” she said. “What did you say?”

  “YOUR FATHER LEFT ME.”

  “No . . . He? . . . You? . . . No.”

  “It’s true,” I whispered.

  Sulfia sank to her knees.

  “Mama,” she said imploringly, “Mama, don’t.”

  She must have thought I was crying.

  I covered my face with my hands so as not to spoil that impression. She stood up quickly and put her hands on mine. I flinched. It had been a long time since we had had physical contact.

  “Mama,” she said helplessly, “please don’t be sad, mama.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said. Sulfia’s lips began to quiver as if she, not I, had been left.

  “It’s not as if anyone died,” I said, in case she had misunderstood.

  “Would you have preferred him to die?

  I thought for a second.

  “Yes, that might have been better.”

  Sulfia didn’t ask any more questions.

  I was a role model

  The departure of my husband had, as I mentioned, its advantages. One of them was that Sulfia began to like me. It seemed as if it occurred to her for the first time what an amiable person I actually was.

  She began to speak to me. She called me every morning to ask me the same question. It seemed she was worried I might have hanged myself overnight. I responded to her feelings attentively, giving her a not altogether happy portrayal of my current situation.

  Then one day she called me and said, “I know who she is—papa’s new woman.”

  I was polishing my nails. I’d bought the polish at a bazaar. It was supposedly from Germany. It was cherry red. I held my left hand in the air with my fingers spread. I held the phone with my right. The nails on the right hand were already polished. I made sure not to smear them. The polish dried quickly; it was much too old. I noticed as I applied it that it was too thick. I had paid four rubles for the bottle and I’d been taken. This wasn’t German, it was rubbish.

  “So?” I asked angrily.

  Sulfia’s voice quivered over the phone. She didn’t know about my nail polish disappointment. She thought her news had upset me.

  “Please calm down,” she pleaded. “There’s no way to undo things.”

  Perhaps some things, I thought. But I could take back the dried-out nail polish, throw it in the vendor’s face, and demand my money back.

  I could also put a few drops of acetone into the bottle, which would make the polish fluid again.

  “Ach, you don’t give a damn,” I said and hung up.

  An hour later she was standing at my front door. Aminat hopped around her in a circle. The peephole distorted my daugh­ter’s face in a particularly ugly way. Her nose was huge and her eyes abnormally small. “Hello, hello,” sang Aminat. She threw off one of her boots and hopped around our foyer in one sock.

  “Hello, my dear grandma, hello, my dear grandma, Anja is here, Anja is here.”

  She disappeared into her old room. A moment later the second boot flew out the door and bounced off the wall. All the work I had put into this child, and still she was so ill behaved. It was time that I got close to Aminat again before it was too late. I had room in the apartment now, and time, too.

  Sulfia picked up the boot and put it on the shoe rack. Then she came over and hugged me.

  I froze.

  My God, was she short. She was scrawny, always had been. I had given her food nonstop, I made her clean her plate. When she was still at school I set out a sumptuous breakfast for her every morning—meat with a side dish or else a nutritious soup. She was never allowed to leave the house with an empty stomach. But she never got taller or heavier

  I did everything possible to make her stronger. I painstakingly tried to teach her to swim, even though I myself didn’t know how. But the cold river water got to her. She shivered, her lips turned blue, and soon after, presto, she came down with a bladder infection that lasted for several weeks. God knows how much effort I put into her, and it was always for naught.

  I pushed her away and went into the kitchen.

  Sulfia served me in my own home now. Naturally she couldn’t make a decent cup of tea. The water wasn’t boiling, she used too few tea leaves. The brew had no aroma and looked unappetizing. I drank what she put in front of me anyway, as I didn’t want to discourage her.

  Then she sat down opposite me, folded her hands, and said, “Mother, the woman is your age. Actually . . . she’s a little older than you.”

  I looked at her silently. She was uncomfortable.

  “Mother,” she said, “I met the woman. Turns out she’s sick. Her heart. Papa called me and asked me to introduce her to a doctor from our clinic. She’s very sick.”

  She looked away, embarrassed.

  “I feel so bad,” she said. “I saw her. She’s really not doing well. And I . . . I’m supposed to help her. And I . . . I don’t have any sympathy for her. Because it
’s her fault that things are going so poorly for you.”

  I thought of my God. I knew he would allow me the right to wish every ill in the world on this woman that Sulfia was talking about so oddly. But I didn’t wish her ill. I didn’t want her to die, though I also didn’t care whether she lived.

  I was just a tiny bit curious.

  “Keep talking,” I said.

  The woman, Sulfia explained, was named Anna, and worked as a teacher of Russian and literature. She dressed in gray clothes, wore her hair in a bun, had red veins in her cheeks, needed glasses, and had a sweet smile. She was divorced and had no children. She had met Kalganow in a park as he was sitting on a bench thinking about death.

  “He initiated the conversation with her?” I said suspiciously.

  “Apparently, yes.” Sulfia looked unhappily into her teacup.

  What do you know, I thought.

  Sulfia had her address and phone number, and to prove it she said them both aloud. I asked myself what she expected from me now. Was I to call the number straight away and demand the release of my spouse? Or go knock on the teacher’s door with a half liter of hydrochloric acid? What did Sulfia think I should do now? Everything I did was significant: I was a role model after all.

  One day I opened the bedroom window to let in some spring air. It was still sealed for winter. I ripped off the paper strips I had used to seal it shut in the fall and pulled out the wadding I’d stuffed into the cracks. I destroyed the results of hours of labor: it was miserable work to prepare the window in the fall so there wasn’t a draft that chilled the room. Klavdia left the insulation in and kept her window closed over the summer just to spare herself the work. But I wanted fresh air.

  The room filled with the sound of motors, voices, and the jingle of the trolley bell. I stood at the window and took a deep breath. Yes, this was really spring. There were stands selling flowers and ice cream. The thick winter jackets and brown fur coats had disappeared. People were wearing light jackets and bold colors. Their steps had bounce. Many had left their hats at home. I saw hair again.

  On the sidewalk, beneath a streetlamp, stood a man who also wasn’t wearing a hat. From above I could see the sun gleaming on his bald head.

  It was Kalganow, my husband.

  He stood at the foot of the streetlamp and looked right up at me. I hid behind the curtain. I felt caught off guard.

  His light, round face remained tilted up toward me. I could see it through the cloth of the curtain. What did he want? Why wasn’t he with his teacher of Russian and literature? Had he lost the key to his new apartment? Gotten lost? He wasn’t thinking about coming back to me now, was he? I panicked. A little.

  Kalganow was always good at that: ruining my mood. His presence could cast a shadow over any otherwise splendid moment. The spring day was beginning to fade. The wind no longer felt caressing, but rather treacherous. I closed the window and drew the curtain.

  I sat down in my armchair and picked up my knitting needles. I was knitting a scarf for Aminat. Obviously not just an ordinary one. I was making a kitten pattern. To take such a basic thing as a scarf and make it as unique as possible—I had a knack for that kind of thing. I concentrated on counting stitches.

  Perfect spouse

  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.
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  “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.