The other passengers cursed at him and called him an idiot. I agreed with them in principle. He finally extricated himself just as the bus doors were closing.
I waited until he had gotten out, then began to stroll slowly along Lenin Avenue. Almost immediately he was by my side. We walked a few steps together. He said nothing and didn’t look at me. I lost my patience and began to walk faster. He picked up his pace, caught up with me, and put his hand on my elbow.
“Take your hand off me,” I said gently. He looked at me. His pupils were the size of pins because the sun was shining directly in his eyes.
“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he said ardently.
I found him charming. With a few subtle hints, I let him know that I wouldn’t consider it beneath me to eat an éclair with him at a café. We sat down and talked about my beauty and my thoughts about Shakespeare. We discovered the first thing we had in common: we both loved springtime. We talked a little about his marriage. I finished my coffee and could feel a sad look lingering on my back as I walked away from him.
He appealed to me. Two days later we saw each other on the bus again. It was something I knew would happen. He beamed when he saw me. This time he couldn’t offer me his seat because he was standing, holding on to a pole with one hand. He smelled of soap and nervous sweat. When the bus braked, I leaned against him as if by accident and felt his heart beating with excitement.
I was excited, too. I was actually rather inexperienced, at least about the logistics of these things. I suggested we go to my place. He didn’t say another word.
Klavdia wasn’t home. I asked the man to wait in my kitchen, locked the door, and dialed Sulfia’s number. I told her to call me in an hour. If I didn’t answer, she should call the police. The man looked harmless enough, but I wanted to be sure. What I liked about Sulfia was that she always did whatever she was told, and didn’t ask any gratuitous questions.
While the man waited in the kitchen, I went into the bedroom. I decided to take off all my clothes. I was really out of practice. I didn’t need any strange, nervous fingers on my hooks and buttons. As I pulled the nylons from my legs, I was enraptured by the form of my calves. I freshened up my makeup, slipped into bed, pulled the covers up to my chin, and called loudly to my new acquaintance.
He fumbled his way down our long dark hallway until he found the right door. Then he entered. I had practiced my seductive smile in the mirror. He took a running start like a long-jumper, threw himself on me, and began to kiss me. You could tell he hadn’t cheated very often. He couldn’t kiss well and his hands felt clammy.
My excitement faded. He peeled off his shirt and simultaneously kicked off his pants. I thought he was funny but made sure not to laugh. He threw himself on me again and caught my hair under his elbow. I let out a cry. He took it for a sign of impatience and headed directly for the target. My hair was still pinned. I was worried he’d scalp me. He finished and rolled off me. I patted my hair back into place. I had just had the second man of my life.
He put an arm around me and whispered, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I whispered back.
I asked myself when he was going to leave. Then the phone rang. It was Sulfia. I had to answer. Otherwise she’d call the police according to my instructions. But it hadn’t been more than half an hour. She couldn’t even read a clock correctly. I told her everything was fine, and told my guest that my daughter was on her way over to see me.
He began to collect his things, he straightened his wedding ring, and approached me with his eyes gleaming and his arms held wide.
“When will we see each other again?” he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. He asked for my phone number. I could hardly say I had no phone since he had just heard me talking in the foyer. I rattled off a random series of numbers, which he wrote on his hand with a pen. Next to it he drew a rose, something I found charming.
Once he had finally left, I took a shower. It was strange to smell of a man. I scrubbed myself. I sprayed myself too generously with perfume I’d bought three months before at a bazaar. Now I smelled like a girl who worked as a cashier. I got back in the shower and washed off the scent.
I was making tea when Klavdia came home. She was breathing heavily. In the last few years she had added to her already excessive weight by gaining at least thirty more pounds. She plopped onto a stool, pulled my plate of cookies to her, and began to stuff them into her mouth one after another. I watched her, happy not to be in her skin.
“If you smack your lips like Klavdia while eating, then one day you will look like Klavdia,” I told Aminat sometimes.
“You’re so strange,” said Klavdia, looking me up and down. I was worried she’d smell the man on me and, just to be sure, went and took a bath.
I was used to male attention. Men had always turned to watch me go by. They held their umbrellas for me and let me slip into line in front of them. That was earlier. What happened now bordered on magic.
I was constantly stopped and asked for my number. Several times men spontaneously handed me bouquets of flowers on the street. I ate pastries at cafés more often than I had ever before in my entire life. I could leave my wallet at home with confidence. Strange men paid for me at cafés, on the bus, and in grocery stores, saying it would be their pleasure.
I couldn’t have them all. That just wouldn’t work. I didn’t want to have them all anyway. But even among those I wanted in theory, I couldn’t have them all. I still had to work, eat, sleep, and call Aminat on the phone to go over homework.
I had a scheme to make it easier to choose. I immediately eliminated men who smelled, who had acne, or who had a cold. Good manners were important, and so were clean fingernails. And I always sent men to the bathroom to wash their hands before they could get in bed with me. After all, they would be touching intimate parts of my body. Talking too much was a negative, as was a sullen look.
Male beauty made me weak. I was an aesthete. A wedding ring was always good. Someone like that wouldn’t be always pestering me. Nice clothes—yes. That was impressive because it was so rare. Same with owning a car—I began to automatically eliminate men who rode the bus. With one exception: those who looked as though they were riding the bus because their car was in the shop.
I must say that I rarely made mistakes. I had a good eye for men with enough sense to be tender and decisive in the right moments, and who were man enough to understand when I no longer wanted to see them. On occasion one would ambush me at a bus stop or in front of my office to ask why I no longer wanted to meet him. Every once in a while one cried, too. Two took sleeping pills but were saved. Flowers often appeared on my doorstep or in my mailbox. Hardly any calls, though: I let everyone know I didn’t appreciate it when my phone was monopolized.
In my spare room, sumptuous bars of chocolate piled up along with shrink-wrapped bottles of perfume, a few books, costly bottles of liquor in gift boxes, cast-iron sculptures, vases, imported nylons, a Russian-Polish dictionary (you never knew what you might need), and a little oil painting of an orange on a wooden table (one of the men had a studio).
Of course, it wasn’t possible to hide all of this from the ever-watchful Klavdia. Too often she was sitting in her dirty bathrobe sipping tea in the kitchen as I was tasting a new acquaintance’s lips for the first time and reaching as I did for the key to my room. That’s why, right from the start, I didn’t try to keep her out of the stuff. I gave her the perfumes I didn’t like or had multiple bottles of. I gave her most of the chocolate (I had to watch my figure), a pair of nylons, some foreign buttons with animated film characters on them, and a cassette by a woman who shared her name with the mother of God.
Klavdia changed, too. She got a perm and polished her nails with the nail polish I gave her from among the ones I’d received. But she began to be nasty to me, and I realized what she needed.
I wasn’t greedy. Klavdia could have my discarded men. The next time I broke it off with
one for good, Klavdia took over, looked after him with tea and chocolates from among the gifts of his predecessors, and let him cry in her lap. This took the bite out of her nastiness and allowed us to put up with each other again.
It just wasn’t possible without me
One Sunday, a lover had just gotten up and dressed himself to go pick up his wife and mother-in-law at the airport. While I lay in bed playing with my new ring, I realized what I had been forgetting the whole time.
I kissed my lover and pushed him toward the door: “You’ll be late!” I said, though in reality it was I who was in a rush.
I put on a pair of Indian jeans and a sky-blue sweater that I had knitted myself. I zipped up my boots and put my hair up in a bun with knitting needles.
Klavdia stuck her head out the door of her room, looking satisfied; she’d had a man the day before.
“What are you wearing?” she said. “Has all that sperm gone to your head? Have you forgotten how old you are?”
“In the West,” I said, smoothing out my sweater, “everyone dresses like this.”
At work I often leafed through the pages of a sewing magazine one of my co-workers borrowed from her neighbor and brought with her to the office. I couldn’t take it home with me and make copies of the patterns. But I took note of the things that appealed to me.
I took a private taxi to Aminat and Sulfia’s place. Although I had bought new clothes, mostly from private collections rather than from shops, I still had more money than ever. Sometimes I found large banknotes in my coat pockets.
I hadn’t seen Aminat in four weeks because I’d been so busy. I had just called her from time to time. Now I was suddenly anxious: how was she doing without me?
Sulfia was sitting in the living room, sewing. She was putting cuffs and a collar on Aminat’s school uniform.
The school clothes were brown but had cuffs and collar made out of white lace. The clothes didn’t need to be washed very often because they didn’t show dirt—and besides, it took them ages to dry. But the cuffs were constantly dirty. All the mothers took the cuffs and collar off each weekend, washed them, ironed them, and reattached them.
I had done this for Aminat, too, so she wouldn’t look messy. Later I had shown Sulfia how you reattached the ends, and I had also gotten hold of a second set of cuffs and a spare collar. That way she could exchange them without having to wash them immediately.
Now I saw Sulfia trying to sew them on. She held a large needle in her hand, and her fingertips were covered with red pinpricks. As I walked in, she stuck herself once again and shoved her finger into her mouth. She was so clumsy. She held a cuff with her thumb and pressed it onto the needle. She stuck herself again. She was a nurse, or a half-nurse, I thought to myself—is this how she tried to stitch up her patients?
She looked up from her sewing, let Aminat’s dress fall, stood up, came over to me, and without warning draped herself around my neck. I patted her bony back. I put my arms around her not because I wanted to but out of a sense of duty.
“Where’s Aminat?” I asked.
She looked at me.
“Aminat,” I repeated.
“Aminat?”
“Aminat. The girl, Aminat. My granddaughter, your daughter.”
Sulfia looked at me silently.
“AMINAT!” I roared.
I spent the next hour running through the building. I managed to get out of Sulfia that Aminat had been there at noon. What had happened after that, she didn’t know. I rang the neighbor’s doorbell.
From almost a dozen mouths on four different floors I heard that nobody had seen her that day, and that, changing the subject, it would be nice if she wouldn’t stomp and scream so loudly. The walls were thin, and the floors, too. I promised to tame Aminat. Three times I was asked to make sure Aminat stopped putting stray cats and their newborn litters behind the dumpster. One neighbor said he had found the animals and thrown the kittens into the dumpster and chased off the mother cat. I promised everything to everyone and ran on, until I heard Aminat’s voice calling from above.
I went back up to the apartment, angry and panting heavily. Aminat was standing in the door smiling. She had a gap in her teeth. Her hair, which had already grown back somewhat, was standing up; she had dirty fingernails. She wore a nightgown she’d long since outgrown, along with tights that had a hole in the knee. She was a neglected child once again. I looked at her and sighed. My men would have to wait for me a bit until this child had grown up. It just wasn’t possible without me. I had to invest every second in this child or else everything would fall to pieces.
“Where were you?” I asked, my voice shaking with rage.
“In the wardrobe,” said Aminat. “I often hide in there, ha ha. And mama looks for me.”
I reached out and smacked her in the face.
“Whore,” I said. “Evil, evil child. Show me your notebooks.”
Aminat silently brought me her schoolwork. I looked through everything, reading every page. I was amazed. The notebooks were clean. No smudges, no stray marks, precise and orderly handwriting, straight lines.
I looked at her journal. The grades were flawless, all her homework had been completed, and there were just a few things here and there in red: “Was fresh to the teacher,” “Ruined the other children’s appetite.”
I closed the journal.
“You’ve done well at that, at least.”
I pulled out my wallet, found a one-ruble banknote, and gave it to her. It was a lot of money. She wasn’t sure whether to take it. Apparently no one had ever given her money; it must be a mistake.
“It’s for you,” I said. “You earned it.”
I had an idea. I called Aminat over to me, gave her a pen and piece of paper, and asked her, “What do you want most in the world?”
“A father and a cat,” said Aminat without hesitation.
“Then listen up,” I said. “If, first, you take care not to look so messy, and, second, keep doing so well in school, and, third, you do the washing up every other night, switching off with your mother, and, fourth, you vacuum every Saturday, and, fifth, lay your clothes out so they are easy for your mother to wash, and, sixth, remind her when it’s time to buy food . . . Have you got all that? Good. If you do all that for three months, you can have a cat.”
Aminat listened without blinking. She held the pen firmly in her fist.
“Go on now, write it down. Do I need to repeat it?”
Aminat scratched her neck with the pen, then began to write. A few minutes later she showed me a numbered list. The last line read: “If I do this, I get a CAT.”
I took the pen and signed my name beneath it.
My private life I put on ice. We women always have more important things to worry about. After work, I went to Sulfia’s. I opened the door with my own key and went through the rooms peering into the corners. It was as if a confirmed bachelor had suddenly gotten married. Dirty laundry no longer lay around, the floor was clean, and the piles of empty milk and kefir containers had disappeared.
Finally there was a housewife in this apartment, a head of the family, a proxy for me, all rolled into one person: my eight-year-old granddaughter Aminat.
When she was at home she was always busy doing some kind of work, warbling the theme songs from movies as she worked. You barely had to instruct her because she had learned so many things on her own. She collected the empty plastic bags, rinsed them out in the sink, and hung them to dry on the heaters as if she’d done it her whole life. She never threw out any food. When a sausage in the refrigerator started to turn green, she cut off the bad spots, boiled the sausage, and then pan-fried it briefly. I couldn’t have done it more expertly myself.
It was clear. Children need responsibility. Maybe I had gone about things wrong with Sulfia; because of her shortcomings I had done much too much for her. Aminat greeted every visit with a loud command: “Take your boots off, I just mopped!”
Even her voice changed, and she often held herse
lf a certain way in order to speak. She reminded me uncomfortably of someone I knew. But I couldn’t think who it might be. I asked Sulfia.
“She’s imitating you,” said Sulfia.
I thought of my childhood. I had always been hungry, had only one dress and one pair of tights, and four of us lived in a single room. And those were the best parts of it. In comparison, Aminat was spoiled.
I met my end of the bargain shortly before three months had passed.
Aminat had not once spoken of it. Three months was a long time—it represented many hours with the vacuum and countless cleaned plates. But Aminat didn’t whine or ask about it. Later, stuck to the inside of a cabinet door, I discovered a piece of paper on which she had been crossing off the days.
On a Saturday seven days before the end of her obligations, I picked Aminat up. I had on a somewhat older jacket that I usually wore only when I went to my garden out in the country. Sulfia was peeling potatoes. Aminat’s mother had followed her example. She too had picked up some skills that would make survival easier.
I told Aminat to dress herself warmly but not in her good clothes. A surprise awaited her. I was secretive. Aminat grew very quiet as we got off the bus near the bird market. She had never been to the bird market, and if I had told her where we were heading she would have been disappointed because she might have taken the name literally.
There were birds for sale here, of course—canaries, parakeets, parrots, ravens, and chickens, birds bred and birds caught, in all sizes and colors. Chirps and tweets from thousands of throats hung in the air, mixed with the barks and whines of other animals that for a few rubles would change hands today.
“Oh!” was all Aminat said, and her eyes became big and round. “Oh! Oh!”
The birds, flapping around in cages far too small for them, chirped frantically. Puppies and piglets were sold out of the trunks of cars. Falsified certifications of origin were shuffled here and there.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine Page 9