Corsin sent me postcards of bright, picturesque Alpine cottages. As a result I realized that what I had taken for an odd, childlike version of German was actually a completely different language. He and his entire village spoke the language of the ancient Romans, and he wrote in that language on his postcards.
He wrote, “Gronda buna a mia amur e splendur al firmament,” and “vaiel tei fetg bugen,” and “far lamur in cun lauter, leinsa?” I had no idea what any of it meant.
Corsin was like a Tartar in his country. He had other roots, other dishes, another language, and, importantly, a much more handsome look than the rest of the populace. In Russia, nobody would ever have considered sending out words someone else couldn’t understand. But Corsin obviously thought nothing of it. I had tried to talk about it a few times with him. At some point I realized that his enthusiasm for talking about how different he was from normal Swiss people wasn’t a flaw in his upbringing. It was just something deeply ingrained in him, something that couldn’t be erased. Of course, he hadn’t experienced a Soviet upbringing. His was somewhat more primitive. His urge to show off his roots reminded me of the way little children lifted their skirts to show everyone their underwear.
Once Corsin sent me a postcard written in German. He wrote that he missed me and that he was coming to visit the following Tuesday, driving the five hours from the mountains in his car.
His visit put me in a predicament. Fortunately one of my employers was on vacation. I took Corsin to her apartment in a nice old building, hoping not to be seen by the neighbors. It occurred to me only belatedly that beyond the ski slopes a man like Corsin was less a trophy than a joke. He was muscular, perhaps just a little too thin, and he looked around like a scared rabbit. Between the sheets my suspicions were confirmed: he only knew his way around the mountains.
The best daughters
I was pleased with myself. I was working a lot because I wanted to take Aminat to the beach that summer. Without Dieter, but with Sulfia—she needed to see a bit of sun, too. Then the phone rang one night and Kalganow was on the line. The same Kalganow Sulfia had been taking care of for four years now since his stroke. I didn’t recognize Kalganow’s voice. It was different than I remembered it. But it didn’t matter whose voice it was once it said that Sulfia was dead.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
I dismissed it as a tasteless joke and hung up.
The phone rang again. I looked at the display and saw a long number starting with the Russian country code. I didn’t move. It rang and rang, until Aminat came out from her room still half asleep, looked at the number, and grabbed the phone.
“Mama?” she cried.
She had finally gotten over the ski holiday and was in a better mood. I looked at her, still hoping she would tell me any second that nothing I had heard was true. But I saw her face change as she held the phone to her ear. At first her face froze in a stiffly pensive expression. Then she frowned deeply, and I knew immediately that my powers of comprehension had not deceived me.
I flew to Russia and Aminat stayed at Dieter’s.
I had to take care of the funeral. Who could possibly have handled it better than I could? When I arrived, I ran into people acting as hysterical as orphaned children. The biggest child was Kalganow, on whose conscience—I told him this immediately—Sulfia’s death should have weighed very heavily. It was all because of him that she was kept far from my supervision and care. Now Kalganow was in a state of shock, which meant he was actually doing better. He was able to get out of bed and speak—his call with the news of Sulfia’s death had been the first time he’d been able to compose a sentence.
His teacher of Russian and literature looked every bit the stereotype of an old teacher. She got on my nerves with her endless sobbing. I looked at her for the first time and had the feeling that she vaguely reminded me of someone. Every once in a while she clutched at her heart until finally I told her she should lock herself in her room and stop getting in other people’s way.
“People like you live forever,” I said. “And you kill the best daughters of other families.”
A lot had changed in my old country. It had a new name. My city had a different name now, too. Everything was very dirty, and everybody was selling something. Stands and kiosks—some made out of nothing more than stacked cardboard boxes—stood shoulder to shoulder. Groceries, clothes, books, and empty Coca-Cola cans were all for sale.
People were dressed poorly and everyone looked miserable. All the girls looked like hookers. Most of them were hookers, too. Old women counted out coins with shaking hands. A decent woman couldn’t contemplate entering a public toilet.
Kalganow’s country relatives from outside Kazan suggested Sulfia be buried in the traditional Tartar way, wrapped in a cloth instead of a coffin. I didn’t even react to that crazy idea. I had enough to worry about. They tried to convince Kalganow, but he just said, “Rosie always knows best.” They gave up after that, but during the funeral they wore openly reproachful looks on their faces.
In the coffin, Sulfia had on a white dress and white silk shoes. I put flowers on her forehead and on the pillow her head was resting on and urged the funeral director to put real effort into her makeup. A lot of people came. It was news to me that so many people knew Sulfia. People who had gone to school with her, co-workers, neighbors, there were hundreds of people. Everyone could see what a beautiful woman she was: the long black hair, the white face, as symmetrical as a doll’s, the fine, curved nose, the black eyelashes that cast shadows on her cheeks. I guess she had inherited quite a bit from me after all.
It emerged that Sulfia had not had her own room. She had a cot at Kalganow and the teacher’s place. It was in the living room, separated from the rest of the room by a folding screen. Kalganow and his woman had a double bed in their bedroom, and they’d turned it into a double sickbed. Nightstands stood on each side, each covered with medicines.
After the funeral, I lay down on Sulfia’s cot. It sagged, and the comforter on it was worn to tatters. I gritted my teeth. The bloodsuckers in the next room alternately sobbed and talked quietly to each other. I took off one of my shoes and threw it against the wall. Then it was quiet.
It was disgusting to lie in bed fully dressed and with one shoe on, but I did it anyway. I stared at the ceiling. At some stage the neighbor above must have had flooding because the ceiling was covered with stains shaped like exotic flowers. If someone had done that to me, I would have dangled them out the window by their feet until they agreed to pay for renovations and a new carpet—even if they had to pay with their gold fillings. But Sulfia was as gentle as a flower. If someone spat on her she took it for fresh rain and stretched out her petals to soak it up.
My head began to swell from within. It was probably just too full. The thoughts began to ball together, got tangled up with each other, pulled at others. My mind was an unimaginably crowded place. Everything pushed outward against my temples, pressed hard against my eyes and even my tongue. I held my head together with my hands. Sulfia, I thought suddenly. Sulfia always knew when someone was doing poorly. She could tell when someone needed her. You never had to say anything. She just knew where it hurt. She could tell from thousands of miles away. And she knew what she could do about it. She could chase the pain away. Sulfia, I thought to myself, had been a magician.
“Sulfia,” I whispered with my lips stiff and unwilling to obey me. “Sulfia!”
My eyes burned and throbbed. The pressure was so extreme I worried they might pop. I held them in with my hands.
Then the pain let up. It happened so slowly and subtly that I didn’t even notice it until I was able to open my eyes again, still worried they might pop out of their sockets. My thick, elongated eyelashes, from which I had yet to remove my makeup, tickled the palms of my hands as I pulled them off my eyes. I sat up. The room was dark, a streetlamp shone in the window. The headlights of passing cars crisscrossed the room and played on the pattern of the comforter.
&nb
sp; “Sulfia,” I said. “Sit down.”
Sulfia sat down next to me, but not the one who had just disappeared into the crematorium. This was the Sulfia I had seen at our last meeting, exhausted but smiling, with tired but attentive eyes. So lifelike that I began to worry about her again. Then I stopped and grabbed the sides of the cot so I didn’t give in to my urge to reach out to a ghost.
“Sulfia,” I said. “I . . . ”
Sulfia looked at me and smiled. She was too tired to speak. She was always working so much. She put her finger to her lips. And then I lay down in bed again, fully dressed, still in my makeup. Sulfia thought it would be okay for me to do so on a day like today. The second shoe, however, fell to the floor. The comforter, which smelled like Sulfia, shielded me from the emptiness and loneliness of this room and held the heartbreak at bay.
“Stay with me,” I begged as I fell asleep.
Sulfia did as I asked. She always did. I couldn’t compel her to do anything, but the things I simply begged her to do never went unfulfilled. Sulfia never left behind anyone in need. That wasn’t her way.
When I woke up, my entire body ached. The fake lashes had fallen off and lay on the pillow. My face was encrusted in dried makeup and tears. The black dress that so flattered my figure did not smell too good.
I went into the kitchen. Kalganow and his teacher were there. She sat on a stool and he stood at the stove stirring something in a pot. I suddenly saw them as a unit, like two drops of grease on the surface of a bowl of soup that melt into one. Later I’d tell them what I thought of them.
I went to the bathroom and got myself together. I ran cold water through my hair so it would shine, and washed my face and refreshed it with cold water, too. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe that was hanging from the back of the door. It had no scent. But I could tell it had belonged to Sulfia and now it was mine.
Kalganow put a bowl of cream of wheat in front of me. I tried it. It was clumpy but I didn’t say anything. I studied the kitchen tiles, each adorned with Sulfia’s face. It was a wonderful portrait, an almost photographic likeness. I touched one of the tiles. It was warm and smooth.
“How did you do that?” I asked Kalganow.
“What?”
“That . . . the images on the tiles.”
“What images?”
“Those,” I said, pointing to Sulfia’s face on one of the tiles.
“They’re white,” he said.
We had to sort out a few things. Material things. Sulfia’s belongings. She didn’t have much. She had two shelves in the bureau. She didn’t have anything else—she had signed over the lease on her apartment to Kalganow.
“You took everything away from her!” I yelled.
“Rosie,” Kalganow whispered. “It was her idea.”
“But why? You’re just a couple of old bags. She was young and . . . had her whole life in front of her.”
There was nothing to be done at that point about the apartment. Unless I wanted to take the two of them to court. At first I planned to do that. I convinced myself to do it in Sulfia’s name. But it was hard to commit to it—I just had no desire. I was exhausted. Normally I was never tired. I didn’t sleep much as a rule—five hours was fine, and with six I was completely rested. But now I was sleepy. I covered my mouth with my hand so I wouldn’t yawn directly in the bloated face of the teacher of Russian and literature.
“I’m tired,” I said to the teacher.
She looked at me as if I were crazy.
“Then you might consider going back to bed,” she said.
She was speaking in a more formal tone to me now, which I liked. During the funeral she had tried to speak to me in a very familiar way. I had thought it rude for her to try to ingratiate herself with me at a moment of weakness.
“I can’t lie down,” I said. “Unlike you, I have a lot to do.”
I wanted to sort out Sulfia’s things. Her few things—clothes, letters, documents.
But instead I went back to my cot and fell asleep.
As long as you’re here
I didn’t wake up until the next day. I had slept for nearly twenty hours. During that time, Kalganow—or so he told me—had kept checking to make sure I was still breathing.
“We thought you, too, were dead,” he said.
But he’d gotten his hopes up in vain.
Then I realized that the teacher of Russian and literature had touched some of Sulfia’s things. She had taken her few clothes and organized them.
I could barely breathe from indignation. “What are you doing, you old hag? And why are you putting your filthy paws on my daughter’s things?”
“I was going to wash them,” she said ruefully.
I pushed them out of the room. I sat down on the cot and picked up an undershirt. It was gray and threadbare. It had been washed too many times. It was almost small enough for a child to wear. I wiped away my tears with it.
As I pressed the undershirt to my face, I remembered that the teacher had a niece somewhere. This knowledge burrowed its way into the middle of my thoughts and I could see her in front of me—an unknown niece I’d never even seen before, a little slut with a child and no husband, in a one-bedroom with her old parents. Suddenly I understood why the teacher wanted to wash the laundry.
I sat there for a long time with my face buried in the undershirt. Then I got up and threw the laundry into an empty box. The dirty pieces I carried to the bathroom and piled in the bathtub. Then I knocked on the bedroom door. The teacher was sitting on the bed blowing her nose into a tissue.
“Sit up straight and . . . ” I began and then clapped my hand to my mouth. Things were beginning to blur.
I shoved the box into their room with my foot.
“Take it,” I said. “Give it to your niece.”
The teacher took the tissue away from her face. I wish she hadn’t.
“Sulfia doesn’t need it anymore,” I said and went back to the cot.
Sulfia had nothing. For all intents and purposes she had no worldly possessions. Any pants and sweaters I found I gave to the teacher for her niece. I didn’t bother with the washing—it didn’t hurt when someone like her lifted a finger once in a while. In the corner of a cabinet I discovered a little box with a cheap ring and a necklace and a smaller box full of letters. It was Aminat’s letters, collected over the years. I put them in my suitcase.
Three days before my departure Kalganow picked up the urn. It was clear that I would take it with me. It was pretty. The sides were made of marbled stone and her name was on it in golden letters—just as it should be. She had a pretty name and it would no longer get mangled now.
Kalganow walked slumped over. He wanted to inter the urn somewhere nearby, actually, and he even had the audacity to tell me that. I wanted to hit him over the head with the urn, but I had enough respect not to do so.
I wrapped the urn in a wool scarf and put it in a carry-on bag. I wanted to take it onboard with me. I wanted to get home, home to Aminat. I laid out the documents: my passport, Sulfia’s death certificate, banknotes in an envelope. I had brought a lot of money, more than I needed in the end. I hadn’t counted on Sulfia’s friends collecting money—so much, in fact, that it paid for the funeral. I asked myself why they had done it. After all, Sulfia was dead, they didn’t know me, and there was no reason to try to get in Kalganow’s good graces. He was totally insignificant now.
The only possible reason was that Sulfia wasn’t really dead. Others died, but not her. I was more and more sure of it.
I took the notes out of the envelope. Twenty 100-mark notes that I’d brought. A fortune. I held them up and spread them like a fan. They were new and smelled good. I went into the kitchen. Kalganow and his teacher sat opposite each other in silence. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem to be pleased that I was leaving. They turned their faces to me—faces that in their hopelessness looked ever more similar. I laid the bills down on the kitchen table between them and left, this time for good.
There
were no complications. Nobody was interested in my bags at the airport. They just waved me through at every point.
“See, Sulfia,” I said. “And you were so worried.”
But this wasn’t true. Sulfia wasn’t worried at all about the proper transport of the urn. She stood next to me and smiled. Why had I never noticed that her smile was so nice?
To my great surprise, Dieter picked me up at the airport. Aminat was next to him. I wasn’t prepared for that. She had lost weight. Before I saw who it was, I had thought, What a lovely girl—she could even be a Tartar.
Dieter gave me a quick hug. Aminat kept her distance.
“What is it?” she asked me while we were in Dieter’s car.
“Everything’s fine,” I told her.
At home I took out the box of letters and gave it to her. I wasn’t sure how she would react. She ripped it out of my hands, opened the top, and shouted: “You didn’t read them, did you?”
“I had better things to do,” I shouted back.
She turned and went into her room.
That evening as Aminat lay in bed, I grabbed a bottle of vodka and two glasses and sat down at the kitchen table with Dieter. He picked up the bottle.
“How much shall I pour you?” he asked.
“Can’t you see the top of the glass?” I asked, taking the bottle from him and filling the glasses.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We’re not going to clink our glasses.”
He took a sip and grimaced.
“You have to just pour it down,” I said. “Are you a widower now or what?”
Half an hour later he was crying bitterly. I didn’t understand what was wrong with him. It just spilled out of him. He was pale and wrinkly. He spent too little time outside and did too little exercise.
I wanted to talk about Sulfia. I was sure he wanted the same thing. Perhaps he was just realizing how important she had been to him. He tried to tell me something, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand what he was trying to articulate.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine Page 21