The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

by Alina Bronsky

  But I didn’t have time to savor this triumph. Sulfia fell apart completely. She just wouldn’t follow the example I had given her.

  She stayed in bed all day. Aminat began to set the alarm herself. When the alarm rang, she got out of bed and walked down the hallway barefoot to say good morning to her mother and to see whether she was still alive. Aminat’s biggest fear was that Sulfia might die.

  Sulfia just rolled over silently. Aminat went to the kitchen and made herself toast with butter. Then she took her knapsack and the apartment keys and left for school in a wrinkled school uniform, with dirty fingernails, and with pigtails that disintegrated into tangled strands during the first class.

  I went every day and tried my best to keep things in order and bring some life back into the household. I pulled off Sulfia’s covers, but she didn’t stir. A few times I dumped cold water over her, but that didn’t have any effect either. She was a difficult case. I had to work, and couldn’t spend days on end sitting at her bedside watching her do nothing. Before I left I put a cup of tea and a few slices of bread and cheese on her nightstand.

  After work I went shopping and rushed back to Sulfia and Aminat. Sulfia lay in bed and she hadn’t touched her breakfast. More and more often Aminat wasn’t there. I would go out to look for her, call her name, check behind the garages, in the basement, and among the shrubs. Aminat would always turn up when I was looking in the opposite direction and call out behind me, “Here I am!”

  “Where were you?” I would ask, yanking hard on one of her messy pigtails. She would smile at me and answer, “Taking a walk.”

  “With whom?” I would ask sternly.

  “Alone!” she would laugh.

  It was obvious that the time had come to keep a closer eye on Aminat.

  She was only seven years old, a first-grader, but she’d grown four inches the previous summer. She had gangly legs now and looked like a fawn. Her knees were bony and scratched. There was something hard about the look in her eyes, something even frightening if you looked right into them. She squinted a lot. I warned her not to, because it caused permanent wrinkles.

  In the weeks while Sulfia lay senseless in bed, I didn’t manage to supervise Aminat the way she needed to be. I was too busy running two households. Cooking food and trying to get some of it into Sulfia. I brought in doctors, first from the local clinic, then from private practices, for which I paid out of my own pocket. One said Sulfia needed to snap herself out of it, another said things would get better on their own. A third prescribed cupping therapy and vitamin injections.

  Sulfia didn’t take part in the speculation. She just stared out the window or dozed. She didn’t even do the crossword puzzle I left next to her bed in the hope of teasing a little life into her.

  But I didn’t worry. To my knowledge, nobody had ever died from lying in bed for too long. Then one day Aminat came home, opened the door, tossed in her school things, and left again. On the floor were her knapsack and her red cap. She was gone, without even a word. I realized I’d neglected my granddaughter—and that once again it was Sulfia’s fault.

  I immediately began to straighten up. I opened her knapsack and turned it upside down. Out came a few greasy notebooks, a couple of sunflower seed shells, and a flood of five- and ten-kopek coins. I stacked and counted them. Seven rubles and ninety kopeks: a lot of money!

  Fearing the worst, I picked up Aminat’s school journal, a record of her homework assignments, grades, and teachers’ notes. I should have looked much earlier. Aminat hadn’t logged any homework assignments in months. There were countless entries written in red by the teachers: “Aminat disturbed the class,” “Homework not completed,” “Must do additional reading at home,” “Parents requested to schedule teacher meeting,” “Disturbed class again,” “Aggressive,” “Urgently need to talk to parents.” Page after page.

  No, I wasn’t shocked. It was fitting. If you didn’t support and look after children, didn’t raise them properly and teach them right from wrong, they’d grow up badly. This child was out on her own all the time, and obviously stole money. It was also no coincidence that sunflower husks fell out of Aminat’s bag. That meant she was hanging around with the old ladies who sat in front of the market and sold things from their own gardens—potatoes, wild garlic, and lilies of the valley. They had a huge open sack of sunflower seeds and for ten kopeks these uneducated women would fill a cup with seeds and dump them into a baggie made of newspaper or directly into the jacket pocket of the buyer.

  In our early years together Kalganow had also bought himself sunflower seeds, but I quickly broke him of the bad habit. There was nothing more peasant-like, crude, and unhygienic than putting unshelled seeds in your mouth and then spitting out the husk the way old women did, sitting around gossiping on stoops or on warped park benches, dirtying the ground at their feet. I used to root around in all of Kalganow’s pockets looking for a seed that would betray him, and now, so many years later, I would have to do the same thing with my granddaughter. To let things like this go could be disastrous—I knew that from my pedagogical training. It was also partly my fault; I’d let myself get too distracted with Sulfia.

  I went into Sulfia’s room and ripped off her covers, grabbed her by her bony shoulders, and shook her hard. Sulfia let out moaning sounds, but her eyes sprang back to life.

  “Get up,” I said. “Start cleaning up.”

  I let go of her, picked up my pretty new handbag, and went out to look for Aminat. I was angry that she, too, was making things difficult for me.

  I looked for nearly two hours, asking children on the street, looking into random entryways, pushing through branches to look in the shrubs that ringed buildings and playgrounds in the area. I ruined my nylons. Finally I found Aminat—with God’s help and my intuition—in the moldy basement of a neighboring high-rise apartment building. She and a girl I didn’t recognize were squatting in front of a tattered basket in which multicolored balls of wool were writhing.

  At first I thought they were rats. Then I saw they were kittens, two weeks old at most, their eyes just opened. They made soft noises, and Aminat was listening to them so intently that she didn’t hear my footsteps on the concrete floor as I approached. She turned around only when I wrapped her pigtail around my wrist.

  “Grandma!” she shouted.

  It was a wonder of self-control; instead of fear and guilt, her voice expressed only joy.

  “Look at how cute the kittens are, Grandma! As soon as their mother is no longer nursing them, we’ll take one home, okay?”

  I dragged Aminat out of the basement by her pigtail. The hair pulled at her scalp, but after an initial wail she fell silent. And she remained mute as I took her out behind the garage, dropped her pants, and thrashed her with Kalganow’s old leather belt, which I had packed in my pretty new handbag as a precaution. After that I took her home. She didn’t say another word. She just kept wiping her face on her sleeve until I forced her to stop because it might get dangerous germs in her eyes and nose.

  A clean girl

  It was the simple truth: the best thing a woman could do for her family was to provide clear and firm guidance. They didn’t need coddling. When I entered the apartment with Aminat, Sulfia was standing in the kitchen washing up.

  I pulled the petulant Aminat past her and into the bathroom, where I filled the tub with warm water and dribbled in some fragrant bubble bath Sergej had brought back from East Germany in a pretty bottle. You couldn’t buy bubble bath here, and we used it exceedingly sparingly. Aminat watched the mountain of foam rise as the water streamed into the tub. She didn’t move until I ordered her to undress. She took off her dress and threw it sloppily to the floor. I pushed it aside with my foot.

  “Get in,” I said.

  “Too hot,” said Aminat, after she dipped her big toe into the water.

  “It’s hotter in hell,” I said.

  Aminat hesitated, took her foot out, then put it back in and let it disappear in the foam before l
etting herself drop into the tub, splattering me from head to toe with water and bubbles.

  “Watch what you’re doing!” I shouted.

  Aminat dunked herself under again and again. Foam adorned her head like a crown. She blew the foam and laughed.

  I didn’t let her enjoy her bath for too long. She didn’t deserve to. I told her to stand up in the tub and I scrubbed her from head to toe with a sponge. I wanted her to be really clean again. She put on a sullen expression that reminded me of her mother. I washed her body thoroughly with the sponge, all around and in every crevice.

  I told her to kneel and I washed her hair twice. It was much too long. I got her out of the tub and wrapped her in a bath towel. She had red streaks on her skin; the sponge was old and hard.

  “Now you are a big girl instead of a filthy pig,” I said.

  I cut the nails on her fingers and toes. I cut the nails so short on a few of her fingers that they started to bleed. But she didn’t complain. I took her into the living room, spread newspaper on the floor, set a kitchen stool down on the papers, and had her sit down.

  “Close your eyes,” I said, and she obeyed unsuspectingly.

  Only as the fifth bundle of hair fell to the floor did she figure out what I was going to do.

  “What are you doing?” she cried, trying to jump off the stool.

  I pushed her back onto the seat.

  “Stay seated or I’ll cut off one of your ears,” I said. She slapped at my hand. I grabbed her wrist.

  “You saw how sick mama was, didn’t you?” I whispered in her ear.

  Aminat looked at me out of the side of her eye, frightened, and nodded.

  “And do you know why she was so sick? Because you’ve been such an ill-behaved child. You have been, haven’t you?”

  Aminat now sat silently on the stool. Yes, she’d been bad, and she knew it. She had always had a clear idea of herself and the world.

  “And you want mama to get better, don’t you?” I asked, cutting another clump of hair.

  Aminat’s eyes followed the strands of hair as they fell to the floor. She nodded, turned her head, and caught her ear on the end of the scissors.

  I took my handkerchief and wiped the blood from the blades.

  “Then you should always do what I tell you,” I said. I could tell my words were being planted in fertile soil.

  I had succeeded in breaking her resistance. The hardness disappeared from Aminat’s face. She blinked, she grimaced, and she began to cry silently as I walked around her with the scissors and continued to shorten her hair down to a few inches so she’d look like a clean, neatly groomed girl.

  To be honest, she now looked like a boy, a pretty one with short hair. When I allowed her to stand up, she ran into the hall to look at herself in the mirror. She stayed there suspiciously long while I gathered up her hair. It was a substantial mound of glistening black hair. I couldn’t resist taking a lock, wrapping it in newspaper, and putting it in my pretty handbag. The rest I wrapped in a double layer of newspaper and carried to the trashcan. As I did, I went past Aminat, who was still standing in front of the mirror apparently unable to move. It must have appalled her—what little girl wanted to look like a boy? But a little outrage could do this child good.

  I was wrong: Aminat was thrilled. She thought it was great to look like a boy. She decided to be one. If I’d realized the haircut would have this effect, I would have had second thoughts.

  But there was no time to reconsider at this point. Now I had to deal with her work habits.

  The first thing I did was visit her teacher. She was a short, round person with large glasses and her hair in a bun. I watched for her after class ended and the children came out of the classroom one after the other. I saw Aminat push a boy in the back with both hands so hard that his nose landed between the shoulder blades of the child in front of him. Surely the boy had started it.

  Aminat was so busy she didn’t notice me. That suited me. I waited until the throng had headed off in the direction of the school cafeteria and then entered the classroom. I had on slightly shiny black pants that emphasized the nice shape of my legs. In my heels, I towered above the little teacher, and she looked up at me with shock as she continued to shuffle through some notebooks.

  “I’m Aminat Kalganova’s grandmother,” I said, smiling pleas­antly. “Please allow me to offer you this small present.”

  I put a box of chocolate pralines down on her desk. I had found them at Sulfia’s; she often received gifts from patients. You had to wonder how these sick people managed to get their hands on chocolates and cognac, just the sorts of things that were beginning to vanish from shops. I had picked out a medium-sized box. Sulfia had never thought to give something to Aminat’s teacher. Unlike me, she didn’t understand how to establish a good rapport.

  At first the teacher said she couldn’t accept them; then she said it wasn’t necessary; finally she thanked me and covered them with the notebooks, so they would no longer distract us.

  We sat down together at a school table. The teacher was an insecure person. She said she had just taken over the class from a sick colleague. She talked her way around the obvious topic for a while. This type of woman made me impatient. It took forever to tease out any useful information. The pralines did not fail to have their effect, however, as the teacher restrained herself from unleashing a curse-filled tirade about my granddaughter. So she could be bought cheaply, too. I had already figured that I’d have to buy her goodwill with a pair of winter boots the next time, but I had overestimated the price of her good grace.

  The teacher didn’t think Aminat was bad, just tomboyish (and I had cut her hair only a few days ago!). Yes, sure, Ami­nat disturbed class a lot; she was able to kick and throw wads of paper at anyone sitting within six feet of her. Yes, she failed to do her homework. Still, in class she often managed to answer correctly even when you thought she wasn’t listening. She also spent many hours sitting on the heater in the hallway as punishment for these disturbances. And she ruined her classmates’ appetites in the cafeteria by comparing the food to excrement.

  I clucked my tongue. For some reason this teacher was scared of me. She tapped her fingers on the tabletop and said that Aminat displayed the defiant demeanor of an intelligent but neglected child. And she liked to sing.

  “We often have broken families here,” said the teacher.

  I interrupted her. Aminat’s mother, my beloved daughter Sulfia, has been sick, I said. During this time I would have expected the school to follow through on its responsibility to educate, but this hope was not fulfilled. I let slip where Kalganow worked. I promised her that Aminat was going to become a completely different person now. And as far as her being fresh—no child had ever dared be fresh with me, I said.

  I asked the teacher for her telephone number. She looked more and more lost. Then she ripped a piece of lined paper out of a notebook. I hoped it wasn’t Aminat’s notebook. She wrote her number and her name—Anna Nikolaewna. I stuck the paper into my bag. I should have brought a much smaller box of chocolates.

  I kept my word. Aminat became an upstanding young lady. Sulfia was still on sick leave, though she wasn’t really sick—just lazy. I fought that. I made her pick up Aminat from school every day. I wrote out a weekly schedule for Sulfia to follow. At home Aminat was allowed to play for half an hour and then had to start on her homework. I came over in the evening. I ate Sulfia’s pan-fried potatoes, which were always either burnt or raw, and looked over Aminat’s homework assignments. And for every sunflower kernel I found in Aminat’s vicinity, she had to write “I do not want to be a country bumpkin” twenty times in a notebook reserved for that purpose.

  Aminat couldn’t recite a single grammar rule but she wrote everything correctly. Good spelling was in her blood: she never made mistakes. But she made up for it with smudges and grease spots. Her handwriting was also terrible.

  She didn’t notice any of that and always presented her homework to me proudly—she h
ad quickly gotten accustomed to me checking it. She also got used to me ripping the dirty paper out of her notebook and making her write everything over again. There were a lot of ripped out pages at first, until she figured out what I was expecting. She improved quickly.

  Aminat was amazed the first time she brought home a five—the highest grade possible. She had never earned one before. The next day she got another five. After two weeks she got a four—and was disappointed. That afternoon her homework was flawless the first time through. She didn’t want to perform poorly anymore.

  Sulfia started going to work again. I stopped visiting every day. Everything was running smoothly, and I wanted to savor the final years of my youth and beauty.

  I was actually rather inexperienced

  I decided I was ready. I would let men initiate conversations with me on the street. Up to now I had always put on a face that discouraged it. Even the stupidest man could see that I wouldn’t answer him. I was pretty, but not something for him. One day I flipped the switch.

  The first man spoke to me on the bus. He stood up to offer me his seat (men constantly offered me their seats when I used public transportation). Earlier I had always just nodded and forgotten about them immediately. This time I looked directly into the eyes of the man who gave me his seat. He had somewhat dilated pupils and a burst vein in his left eye. It was dark in the bus, but maybe he’d been aroused by my gaze. I estimated his age at thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old. He had on a wedding ring that was thin and probably didn’t cost much. His fingernails were cut short, something I welcomed in men. Though in his case they were cut angularly. The first thing I’d teach a man like that would be to use a nail file.

  I exited the bus just to test him. Naturally, he followed me out. The bus was full. Rather than elbowing people out of the way, he kept repeating in a loud voice: “Excuse me, please! I need to get out! Excuse me, please!”