The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

by Alina Bronsky

  I was very proud of myself. Aminat was in Germany. I was by her side.

  And Sulfia was about the marry for the third time.

  You should be happy

  So there we were in Germany, in Dieter’s three-room apartment. I had gotten a temporary residence permit. The first thing I did was take away all of Aminat’s Russian books so that from now on she would read only German. Second, I told Dieter he needed to enroll her in school. A child belonged in school. I had already noticed that Dieter liked to do things the way they were supposed to be done. He strayed too far from the correct path in some areas to risk not toeing the line in others.

  Gradually I came to better understand where exactly we were. Dieter lived in a suburb of a city that wasn’t very big or very nice. A bus went into the city once an hour—punctual to the minute. A schedule hung at the bus stop. The Germans had such things well organized.

  The ride into town cost three marks and 40 pfennigs. Much too expensive, Dieter told me. Especially if you considered the cost of a round trip. Once in a while he drove himself into town in his car, and he would take me and Aminat.

  During the second week after Sulfia had left, Aminat started going to school. She had to take the bus into town and switch to a tram.

  We bought notebooks and pens, and Dieter pulled a gray backpack out of the attic. This was what children here took to school, he explained. We flipped through the glossy pages of the notebook and smelled the new rubber erasers, which looked like strawberries.

  “Be happy,” I said to Aminat.

  Aminat looked past me.

  Sometimes I picked Aminat up from school in order to see how she was settling in. I found the school easily because shouting children were streaming out of it. Let it be stated that German children were very loud. I first realized that on the tram. Their shouting reverberated through the entire trolley car. At first I thought they were about to have a fistfight. But they were laughing. I also saw that most of the children were dressed very messily. I always made sure that Aminat left the house with her hair braided and in freshly ironed pants and a freshly ironed sweater. That way she would stand out.

  It was easy to recognize Aminat in the flood of children spilling out of the school. She was the only one with nicely pressed clothes but also the only one who was always alone. And she moved at a different pace from the other children. Her face warned everyone not to talk to her.

  I asked myself what else she could possibly want. She was already in Germany. She had new pens and t-shirts. She was driven to school almost every morning in a car. And still she looked like that.

  I took her aside and told her that it just wasn’t acceptable. Dieter had not yet married Sulfia. They had been to City Hall, but only to pick up the list of necessary documents. He could easily get out of it still since he wasn’t bound except by his word, which for men carried no weight at all. If Aminat kept up this behavior, Dieter would probably send us back and go look somewhere else for a sweet, affectionate little girl.

  I explained all of this to Aminat one night in our shared room. I slept on the couch and she continued to sleep on the air mattress. I had offered to let her sleep next to me, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to be anywhere near me. And naturally, she wanted to be anywhere near Dieter even less. But she also made an effort—perhaps because I told her that without Dieter her mother wouldn’t be allowed back into Germany. And then Sulfia would never get well, I said. Shortly before our departure we had found out that she was sick. Her body was destroying her organs from within. That’s why she was often tired and had to take medicine. I told Aminat that Sulfia’s health depended entirely on her.

  I didn’t allow Aminat to write to her friends back home. Who knew, maybe we would have to go back. The friends shouldn’t find out that we had been in rich Germany. Calling was out of the question because it was so expensive.

  Aminat wrote letters to Sulfia. I read them before I put them in the envelope. Aminat wrote many letters, but they all began with the same words: “Dear Mama, how are you? I’m fine.” I collected them and sent a few at a time in one envelope in order to save on postage.

  Dieter said he wasn’t in a position to support us. He didn’t go to work. He just wrote on his computer and pored over books. He had written a few himself, too. I had found a few on the shelves with his name on the spine. Probably nobody wanted to buy them.

  I should do something, too, Dieter said. I would love to, I answered. I’d done highly skilled work my entire life. Dieter should support his new family—meaning Aminat and Sulfia. I could get by without him somehow. Surely there were teach­ers’ colleges here, too.

  When I said this to Dieter, he laughed hard. In fact, he laughed so hard I thought he was having some sort of nervous breakdown. I’d already noticed he had a few nervous tics. Now he said, “But you can’t speak any German.”

  Of course I could speak German. I tried to explain this to Dieter in his own language, but he didn’t want to understand, the same way I often didn’t want to understand him. He explained something about my having a residency permit without a work permit and then he said he had a great idea for me.

  Two days later I had a job.

  Dieter gave me a piece of paper with an address on it, a map of the city, and money for bus fare. I left two hours before the actual appointment. I never showed up late, at least not to an important job. And this was going to be my first job in Germany. I dressed myself well, in a trim pair of slacks, a cream-colored blouse, fishnet stockings, and a new pair of summer heels. I put my hair up and accentuated my facial features with powder, rouge, and eye shadow.

  It was smart on my part to leave early. I had a little difficulty with the address. I asked several people on the street. What they said was difficult to understand. They spoke far too fast and indistinctly. I showed them my map and they traced their finger up and down and along the streets and dug their nail in where my target was supposed to be. But they didn’t look me in the eye.

  Eventually I found myself in front of a fence with a little gate. I compared the name on the bell to the one on my piece of paper—Schmidtbauer. Odd name, though a lot of people in Germany had names like that. The lawn in front of the building was well manicured, each blade of grass the same length as the rest. The Germans had their lawns under control.

  Farther back were a brightly colored plastic slide and a sandbox with pails and shovels. It was a kindergarten. Good. I wasn’t a kindergarten teacher, but I did have a degree in education.

  A woman appeared at the door. My first thought was that I hoped she wasn’t going to be my boss, for it had practically become the norm for supervisors to be younger than their workers. The woman let me into the building. She had short hair and dark rings under her eyes. I could also see the straps of her bra in the neck opening of her shirt, which seemed a little sloppy. She waved me into a large room with a white couch and several chairs. A conference room? She motioned to a chair and I sat down.

  Next I understood her to be asking whether I would like something to drink.

  “Coffee,” I said. “With milk and sugar.”

  The woman brought me a coffee with a white foam crown. I tried it. She had forgotten the sugar.

  “Sugar,” I said again.

  “Oh, forgive me,” she said. She stood up and brought me a metal jar and a spoon.

  It was quiet. The children must already have been picked up. It was clear to me that this couldn’t be a normal kindergarten. It was obviously very exclusive—which, I knew as an educator, usually meant problematic children.

  I tried to understand what the woman said to me. She made a gesture with her hand—an invitation to follow her. I stood up elegantly. Not everyone had the ability to gracefully extricate oneself from a soft chair. But I did.

  I followed the woman, who showed me the rooms and made circular motions with her hands. She was a little agitated. In the kitchen she opened the microwave and again made a circular motion. Then we went on and sh
e showed me the toilet and even the toilet brush. We went up a marble staircase and I was stunned: the room she showed me was definitely a bedroom. Did she think I wanted to move in?

  Then she pulled open another door, flipped on the light switch, and stepped to the side. I looked in with curiosity.

  It was a very small room filled with shelves. On the shelves sat bottles and tubes. I had seen such things in the supermarket: they were cleaning materials.

  The woman made another gesture, another invitation.

  Then she walked away. I stood there staring at all the colorful bottles. I’d never seen such a sumptuous supply of chemical cleaning aids. The woman returned and handed me a pair of rubber gloves. In her other hand was a pair of orange slippers. She put them down at my feet and left me alone.

  There had obviously been some sort of misunderstanding. I considered my next move. Then I took off my shoes and put my feet into the slippers. I left my fishnet stockings on—you never knew who had worn the shoes before, and the last thing I needed was German foot fungus on my toes. I put my shoes in an empty spot on a shelf in the cleaning pantry.

  I put on the gloves and looked down at myself. I wasn’t very appropriately dressed, but I was capable of working without getting myself dirty. I filled a bucket with water, poured in some light blue liquid, and began to mop the floor.

  I mopped for several hours. There were a lot of floors in this building. But they were already quite clean. I soon got bored. So I abandoned the floor and went looking for dirt elsewhere. I looked under the kitchen table and found some crumbs. I took care of them immediately. I checked the stove. It consisted of a single smooth surface, but there were lots of stains on it. I had just taken a sponge out of the bucket when the woman suddenly walked up behind me and started gesticulating wildly.

  “Ceramic cooking surface! Don’t scratch! Ceramic! Don’t scratch!” she said.

  I shrugged my shoulders and devoted myself instead to the floor.

  Now she stayed near me. When I went into the bedroom she brought me a vacuum cleaner. I plugged it in and began to vacuum beneath the bed. Now I understood: this was her bed. I just didn’t understand why she had lured me here. I would never have tolerated any strangers in my bedroom, even if I were too lazy to clean it up myself.

  The vacuum hose crackled—it had picked up some dirt. I went around the woman with it and vacuumed in the corners. I looked up at the ceiling and saw a few spider webs. I vacuumed those up. I lost track of time and stopped only when she tapped me on the shoulder from behind and said, “Enough! Enough!”

  Apparently she said everything twice. It didn’t bother me if it helped her.

  I nodded, stripped off the rubber gloves, and hung them over the rim of the bucket. I put my nice shoes back on, went into the bathroom that I’d just cleaned, and freshened up. When I emerged the woman was standing there with an envelope.

  “Thanks a lot! Thanks a lot!” she said.

  I took the envelope, nodded, and put it in my pocket. Then I went to the door. The woman stopped me.

  “Next Tuesday? Next Tuesday?” she asked.

  I looked over my shoulder at her.

  “Okay. Okay,” I said.

  Out on the street I opened the envelope and looked inside. There were three ten mark notes. Ten marks for an hour’s work. I began to calculate. Eighty marks for an eight-hour workday. 560 marks per week—it was a start.

  I took the bus home. I paid for my own ticket. I felt like a queen.

  Dieter said my new profession was called “cleaning lady.” I thought it sounded rather regal. Dieter said he’d make sure I got more jobs. I nodded majestically.

  He said I should keep my mouth shut since I wasn’t paying any taxes. I didn’t know who I would have told anyway. I didn’t know anyone here.

  As was the case with everything I had ever turned my hand to, I shone at this new enterprise, too.

  Naturally, I could clean. Of course, I’d never been paid for it before. It was clear to me, however, that it took talent to clean. And I certainly had it.

  You only had to see how I worked. When I entered a house I was happy if it was dirty. And soon I went into a lot of houses. The first woman who had asked me to clean her house quickly gave my number to all of her friends who were likewise incapable of tidying up on their own. I soon had a map in my head. I was able to orient myself by my own set of landmarks: over there is the toilet that smells so bad, and there is the kitchen where I had to wash red splashes off the wall.

  I felt as if all these apartments and houses belonged to me. They waited for me to arrive and make them clean. I was pleased to find spiderwebs, breadcrumbs, and streaks on the mirror. I brought proper work clothes: rubber gloves, rubber shoes, and a nicely fitted blue coverall that one of the apartment owners gave me in order to shield a pair of stretch pants I had on one day.

  I felt a bit sorry for the people whose places I cleaned. They were like children—unable to look after themselves. Without me they’d have been forced to bathe in a tub of standing water because the drain was clogged with hair.

  I began to expand the scope of my skills. I didn’t just clean brilliantly but also very quickly. That way I had time for a few extras. Instead of just wiping the refrigerator clean, I also sorted out the food inside. Things that were about to go off I pulled to the front. Moldy or rotten things I threw out. When I found an open bottle of wine in the refrigerator I poured it out.

  Sometimes I took a few things home, especially if I had the feeling that they were still good but wouldn’t be eaten there anyway. I took apples from the fruit drawer, baggies of trail mix when their expiration dates were approaching, even vitamin pills.

  That was something I loved about Germany: you could buy so many vitamins and even minerals. I found a lot of them in kitchen and bathroom cabinets. I sometimes refilled the little plastic tubes I always had with me. And if I found aspirin, suppositories for an upset stomach, or other useful things, I took a few of those, too. I assembled a little home pharmacy that way, and it made me feel more comfortable.

  Not quite Germany

  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.