“Wait,” I said, and went into my room.
The carry-on bag was on my pillow. I reached in and pulled out the urn, heavy and beautiful. I carried it to the kitchen and put it on the table between us. I winked at Sulfia and raised my glass.
“We’re not going to clink glasses,” I said, forgetting I’d already made that clear.
Dieter leaned his head sideways to read the golden writing on the side of the urn. Then he spilled his vodka.
“What is that?”
He pushed his chair back from the table.
“Is she in there?”
I leaned my head back. Looking at the white ceiling helped me gather my thoughts.
“In part,” I said.
“Get rid of her,” said Dieter. “You can’t bring that into the house! How am I supposed to sleep tonight with that here?”
“Lying down,” I said.
Now he looked at me with disgust. Hysterical men were divine retribution.
“That’s . . . you can’t just keep that around the house,” he cried. “Take it to the basement.”
I took the urn in my arms. I had the feeling that I had to protect her from him.
“Get rid of it,” he begged.
“This is an urn with the ashes of your wife!” I screamed.
“That doesn’t make it any better!” he shouted in response.
I held the urn in my arms and pushed past him. He jumped back, but in the wrong direction, so I ended up hitting his stomach with the edge of the urn. For a second I pondered whether to give him a hard, mind-clearing knock on the head. But Sulfia put her cool hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry, dear,” I said. “Not as long as you’re here.”
Dieter looked at me horrified.
“I didn’t mean you,” I said. “You can drop dead.”
I went to my room, put the urn on my nightstand, and fell fast asleep.
The next thing I knew, I became aware of a burning smell. Things jumbled together in my mind. I thought of the ashes supposedly in the urn—unless they’d lied to me at the crematorium. I pictured Sulfia laughing while being engulfed in flames. And just before I awoke, I thought to myself that the flames suited her. Then I finally woke up and ran through the apartment following the trail of smoke. It was coming from the kitchen. Aminat was burning paper in the sink.
“Have you lost your mind?” I screamed.
I reached over her shoulder and lifted a charred corner of paper with a stamp on it. Aminat was burning her letters, the ones I had brought back from Russia. I turned on the faucet. She turned it off again.
“You can’t do this!” I yelled. “You have to save these. What if you become famous?”
We hadn’t spoken for a long time about how she needed to become famous—or at least successful, or at the very least rich.
“I don’t want to be famous,” she said.
“Then become a doctor,” I said.
“Why me?” she asked.
“Sulfia would have liked it,” I said.
Aminat looked into the sink. Scraps of paper floated among clumps of ash in the little bit of water that had streamed in.
“I’ll clean it up for you,” I said. “You go to your room and think things over.”
“Think what over?” she asked.
“Think about how you can improve yourself in ways that would make Sulfia happy.”
For a split second I felt uncomfortable as she stared at me. Then she turned around and left, and I could breathe more easily.
In Sulfia’s voice
I was very busy at first. I called the offices of the cemetery and applied for a place for the urn. I called stonemasons about a grave marker. Sulfia needed to be properly interred with a nice gravestone. I made a sketch of how I wanted it. The money didn’t matter but I still had everyone send me estimates. If an estimate took too long to arrive, I called the office and told them that this wasn’t just any old job and that God saw everything.
Whenever I got overly worked up or started yelling too loudly, I felt Sulfia’s cool hand on my shoulder. I understood that my screaming disturbed her, and I settled down. Sulfia liked quiet, and I did everything I could to make her comfortable.
I wasn’t going to be able to inter the urn. The idiots who designed graves just didn’t understand what I wanted. Even for several thousand euros. I had the feeling that they didn’t want to understand. It was the first time that I failed at something, but Sulfia said it didn’t matter.
I had to admit she was right—the urn was beautiful and easy to handle. She didn’t need a grave. I just left her on the nightstand next to a bouquet of white roses. I bought fresh roses every few days. Dieter said nervously that it was illegal. I told him where he could stick those regulations.
I kept working. I had to take care of my granddaughter. She was now an orphan and I had to replace her mother and father. Not that it was anything new for me. But something had changed. Before I had spoken only for myself, but now I was doing everything on Sulfia’s behalf.
I spoke in Sulfia’s voice. And what was even weirder about it was that I spoke with Sulfia’s tone of voice. One morning when Aminat didn’t want to get out of bed despite the fact that she had to go to school, I didn’t say, “Go on like that and you’ll end up in the gutter! Your German classmates got out of bed hours ago!”
Instead I said, “Sure, stay in bed, my child.”
I bit my tongue as I soon as I said it. What would become of her if I continued to react like that—another Sulfia?
I started to form another sentence that would have featured the word “gutter,” but before I got it out I realized I had no desire to say it. Instead I went to the kitchen and made a cup of strong, sweet hot chocolate and put it next to Aminat’s bed.
“Stay in bed, my child,” I said. “You’ve been through so much in the last few years.”
I practically choked on my words, and it took a tremendous effort of will not to let a few other things pass my lips before I went off to work.
John had adopted the habit of locking himself in his bedroom as soon as I arrived to clean his place. And sure enough, the first time I returned after my break, he hid himself from me. I didn’t knock on his bedroom door. Actually I didn’t even think about him. I didn’t think about anything. I just mopped and wiped and felt quite peaceful. Which is why I jumped when he suddenly asked me with a furrowed brow where I had been hiding.
I continued to clean but told him as I did about the dress Sulfia had on in the coffin and the bouquet of flowers I had put in her hand so she would look like a princess. John followed me around the room. When I turned on the vacuum cleaner, he pulled the plug out of the wall complaining that he couldn’t hear me over the noise.
When I was finished he asked whether he could drive me home. I figured I had talked enough, said “No thanks,” and took the bus.
Obviously it wasn’t good to spoil Aminat. I had always known that. And it was no good that Sulfia had convinced me to let the girl get away with everything. Now Aminat, whose life had been a rollercoaster ride, spiraled downward. But Sulfia held me back from doing anything about it. Instead I acted like Sulfia, watching and sighing pitifully.
Aminat was held back in school. My talk with the rector and my assertions about how gifted she was had no effect. “Just leave it,” said Sulfia. I could see the gutter before my eyes: dark, filthy, stinking. I told Sulfia that at this rate Aminat would never be a renowned doctor. Sulfia shrugged her shoulders in her own inimitable way.
I went in to see Aminat, who’d been lying in bed reading comics for days.
“Aminat, my granddaughter and daughter of your mother Sulfia, if you don’t get up this very instant and try to fill in some of the gaps in your knowledge, you will never become a renowned doctor. You will never have a line of patients waiting to enter your gleaming practice that smells of disinfectant.”
“I don’t care,” said Aminat.
I elbowed Sulfia aside.
“But I care, and I want you to be a doctor!”
“If it’s so important to you, do it yourself,” said Aminat, turning the page in her comic book.
I thought about it for two days and five hours. Aminat was right: my problem had always been that I undertook too many things for other people. Then they didn’t do their part. Of course, I could follow through on anything I undertook on my own behalf. So I went to the basement and retrieved the old suitcase where I kept a lot of important documents. They were all in Russian and had all yellowed, but the official stamps were all still legible and in decent shape.
I took a blue plastic folder—labeled “biology”—from Aminat’s desk and carefully put all of my credentials into it. I took this portfolio to the offices of the internal medicine specialist whose place I cleaned.
His receptionist couldn’t understand what I wanted even after a long conversation. But then a side door opened and I saw the metal frames of my client’s glasses. I walked into the room where he was, sat down, and was soon telling him about my plan. He was going to secure me a place at medical school.
He laughed for a second and then was serious again. He said I didn’t have the educational qualifications. When I objected that I was a trained educator, he countered that we might as well put my old Russian credentials in a pipe and smoke them. I had to have a German high school diploma, and “at my advanced age” getting one would be “an ambitious challenge.” I said I definitely wanted to work at a hospital.
He had an idea, he said, though he wasn’t sure whether it was what I had in mind. He took his glasses off and polished them with a cloth, fidgeting around. Then he said he couldn’t make any promises but that he would be willing to lobby for a job for me as a cleaning woman at the hospital where he was affiliated.
My women
It was a women’s ward, and you had to start very early. That was fine with me, because Aminat was no longer going to school and otherwise I just sat around all morning stewing about it. The work would distract me. It wasn’t much money, but it was a proper job—my first in Germany.
I signed a contract and received a white smock. I’d have to bring my own white slippers. I was extremely proud: I was a full-time employee of a hospital.
Some rooms housed three women, others were set up for just one per room. I cleaned quickly and well, and as my hands did the work I asked the women in the beds what was wrong with them. Some of them didn’t answer at all. But a few talked. There were some with uterine myomas, others had cysts, a few were trying to conceive, and a few were already pregnant and had to be on bed rest in order not to lose the baby.
Soon I got to know them all—the talkative ones and the silent ones—because I worked very quickly. And because I also cleaned the offices and conference room, I saw all the patients’ records, which were kept in large black folders in a rolling file cabinet. I knew all the women’s names, their birthdates, and their addresses—some of the addresses were familiar because I’d cleaned somewhere nearby.
I read their medical histories, though the writing was difficult to decipher. I looked in the medicine cabinet, saw who got what and how much, and filed away all the information in my head. I have a good memory and an astute understanding. I spent all morning at the hospital. After I’d gone through all the rooms I’d be sent to change the sheets or take care of some mess or other that had happened during the course of the morning. I also pushed patients down to the OR if the nurses were too busy. Some of the patients were scared before their operations. I told them everything would be fine, and since I knew what was wrong with everyone I was able to be very precise about what exactly would be fine for each of them personally.
After three weeks I felt totally at home at the hospital.
I put off my plans to enter a medical training program. There was enough to learn here. I began to be able to read the doctors and nurses’ writing more easily on the forms they filled out about the patients. I figured out where each type of medicine was kept. Then came the first time that a patient fresh from surgery was moaning in pain and I couldn’t find anyone to help her. I went and got the right little vials and added them to her IV drip. I watched over her for a while to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake and that she didn’t die. A day and a half later her husband picked her up and she walked out leaning on his arm.
At home I chatted with Dieter about the medical histories of the women in my ward. I called it “my ward” and also soon referred to “my women.” Sometimes Aminat came in and slouched down in a chair while we talked. She began to shower again, to iron her t-shirts, and to go to the salon to have her hair done. I continued to ignore her. She started going outdoors again. She never said where she had gone and I never asked. I ignored her. She began looking through her biology textbook again. I took care of my own business. I had taken a textbook out of a doctor’s office and read it all the way through at home. Somehow I realized that Aminat had also paged through it. I let her. Perhaps she’d become a renowned doctor after all.
Just as I thought her life might be heading in the right direction, one that didn’t lead to the gutter, she disappeared along with a large sum of cash from one of my drawers, money I had been saving for her education.
Dieter wanted to go to the police and register her as a missing person. Sulfia kept me from doing that, and I in turn kept Dieter from doing it. I should just leave Aminat alone, Sulfia said. It was no easy trick, since I figured I had lost her forever. I pictured her hacked up in the trunk of a car somewhere. But Sulfia laughed—as she often did at the most inappropriate times—and shook her head.
Aminat was eighteen and had run away from home. It was an embarrassment. Granddaughters didn’t run away from good grandmothers. At first I reacted all through the night to any noise in the staircase and checked several times a day that the phone was working.
Sulfia took all the blame. She said she’d been a miserable mother and that there’d been no way for me to compensate for that. She was right, of course. But we were still in a pickle. Dieter blustered, but I told him that if he filed a missing persons report, I would go to the police to file a very different report. He quieted right down.
In order to keep from going crazy, I poured myself into my work at the hospital. I studied the new patients and tried to figure out what was wrong with them from their facial expressions and body language. I sketched out a clinical diagnosis of my own, and then I read what my scientifically trained colleagues had written in their files. At first I made a lot of mistakes, but the accuracy of my diagnoses soon improved. I began to immediately recognize women who were unable to have children. They all looked the same. But I also could tell whether the fallopian tubes were blocked, or whether the women were too masculine, too thin, or were with the wrong man. I was surprised nobody else could see these things. Then came a day when I approached a patient who was pulling on some anti-thrombosis stockings in preparation for surgery and said in her ear: “If I were you, I wouldn’t let them remove my uterus. You might still need it.”
Her fingers, fighting with a sock, suddenly froze.
“It’s your body,” I said. “Don’t listen to their hogwash. You’re fine.”
I went into the hall and started washing a windowsill. I heard a door close. The patient had gotten dressed and run down the hall with her overnight bag. Her compression stockings lay on the floor next to her hospital gown. I picked them up and threw them in the trash, and began to strip the bedding.
The next morning I was fired.
Now I had time. Time I spent with Sulfia. I lay in bed talking to her. Then I got up and went searching. I went to the park. I usually avoided it because of all the homeless people loitering there. I talked to them now, asking their names and whether they’d seen my girl. I went to the train station and even took trains a little way to their next stop. I didn’t know whether Aminat had left town and if so in which direction she’d gone.
Sulfia walked along behind me but she didn’t participate in the search.
Sometimes I thought I saw Aminat in the middle of a large group of people. I’d run to catch up, grab breathlessly at her arm—and a total stranger would turn to me. I carried photos around with me. Of Aminat somewhat younger, with nicely groomed hair and a smile that even then was unusual. And of Aminat as she had last looked, a disagreeable vision with straw-like hair and infected pimples on her forehead. Every day I removed her photo from my purse and showed it at least a hundred times.
After I’d been thrown out of the hospital, I also lost five important clients one after the next. Eventually I had just two cleaning jobs left, one of which was at John’s place. Then only John was left. But I no longer did my work thoroughly. When I went to John’s I had no desire to do anything. It would have been more honest just to quit.
I tried, actually, but he wouldn’t allow it. So I showed up fifteen minutes later than arranged (me, who was always so punctual!), and instead of wearing my boots and changing into rubber slippers, I would wear normal street shoes and walk straight across his Persian rugs into the kitchen and sit down at the table. I didn’t even bother to pick up the cleaning rags. He would just have taken them out of my hand.
As I sat there and read the Meals on Wheels menu that was stuck on John’s refrigerator, he made tea with milk, following all the rules of tea-making that at one time I had paid such attention to. A heated teapot, loose tea leaves from an expensive-looking canister, boiling water, and warm milk that John poured into each cup before the tea. He served it with English cookies topped with sugar crystals. I dipped them in my tea. I drank two or three large cups while John told me about the goings-on in the world. He had begun once again to read the papers and watch the news on TV. I acted as if I were listening. I asked him to keep an eye out for Aminat’s face or name, preferably in reference to someone who was alive. He promised me he would. I gave him some photos of Aminat. He put them on his refrigerator with magnets.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine Page 22