Alina Bronsky - The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

About Aminat I said only that she was away.

I found out from John why Lena had suddenly landed on our doorstep. She had a boyfriend who was a little bit older and who had a job that revolved around mass-produced Chinese copies of well-known paintings by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, that kind of thing. Lena’s boyfriend sold the copies in Germany. Why, of all things, an Israeli was selling Chinese forgeries wasn’t clear to me. It all sounded downright crooked to me. Lena said he wasn’t making much at it but that it allowed him to fulfill a dream — living in Germany. She’d been to visit him in Hamburg and now she was here with us. Finally, she said. And as she did she took my hand. I took it back.

John said she could stay at his house as long as she wanted. I gasped silently. I tried to talk to him about it and he said: “It’s no problem, I like your family.”

“This little whore is not family and never will be” were the words that came to me, but I swallowed them as I heard Lena’s laugh waft in from the garden, where she was talking on the phone. Sulfia had never laughed like that. Maybe she would have if she had ever had something to laugh about.

I was still waiting for Aminat. But who should ring? Kalganow.

I recognized him from the wheezing on the line long before he spoke a word. He had snored in exactly the same rhythm.

“Kalganow,” I cooed pleasantly. I was in a good mood because Lena was out somewhere and John had brought home some new kind of cookie. “Kalganow, are you calling in your sleep?”

“Rosie,” said Kalganow, choking back a miserable cough. “Rosie, my most beloved.”

It turned out his teacher of Russian and literature had died.

“When?” I asked mistrustfully.

“Two weeks ago,” he said.

The time that had elapsed since then was sufficient for him to realize he could no longer live without me — that, in fact, he never had been able to.

“Kalganow, I have a man!” I yelled. “I have an English gentleman with a big garden and twenty kinds of tea in the pantry.”

“It doesn’t matter, Rosie,” said Kalganow. “We’re still married for all eternity.”

“You wouldn’t even survive the plane ride,” I said.

“Then you can bury me, which would suit me just fine,” he answered.

I didn’t say anything to him about how expensive funerals were in Germany. I went straight to John. I said that Kalganow was an old relative of mine and didn’t have long to live. John kissed my hand. At that moment I wished very much that he would ask me to be his wife. I even thought about telling him how much I wanted it. After all, he had fulfilled all my wishes up to now — with the exception of seeing Aminat. But I was too proud. And besides, it was true: I was still married to Kalganow.

I sent Kalganow a plane ticket and the formal invitation necessary for a visa. With John, I picked him up at the airport. He had gone completely gray, still wore his old work jacket, and walked with a cane.

Kalganow wet my cheeks with his kisses and said that everyone around him was old or dead, and I was the only one who was still as fresh as in the days of our youth. And that was true, of course. John shook Kalganow’s hand and took his luggage — an old suitcase with holes in the leather and wire wrapped around it to hold it closed, and a big plastic bag. Kalganow leaned on me as we walked to the parking garage. Using all of our strength, John and I managed to help him into the backseat and balance him upright. We put his cane in the trunk.

Kalganow pressed his face to the window. He liked the autobahn. He kept letting out cries of excitement. It reminded me of my arrival in Germany. I felt ashamed — both for him and because of my memories.

“You are so beautiful, Rosie,” muttered Kalganow from the backseat.

I looked at John out of the corner of my eye. And although his face was as placid as always, I had the feeling that somewhere in the corner of his mouth a smile was hiding.

When we entered the house, Kalganow’s feeble eyes played a mean joke on him. Lena came down the steps calling “Grandpa!” loudly, and Kalganow opened his arms wide, barely keeping his balance. As he did, however, he cried out the name of our daughter. They fell into each other’s arms and said silly things to each other. I couldn’t stand it any longer and went to my bedroom, turned on the TV, and cheered on Aminat.

“Show them what you can do, my child. Don’t let me down.”

The four of us sat together on John’s leather sofa as Aminat was crowned the most talented young singer in Germany, having won the final round of viewer voting. Kalganow cried, I sat there frozen with excitement, unable to move. John’s face was as clear as a cloudless sky. Lena had her hands squeezed between her knees and shook her head.

“What is it?” I hissed at her, for in her ability to annoy me, she exceeded even Kalganow.

“Poor, poor thing,” whispered Lena.

I attributed the distressed look on Lena’s face to pure envy.

Aminat stood on the stage with a stone face as glitter rained down on her and white doves circled above her head. She now had a record contract. All the cameras were pointed at her and all the microphones awaited her words. The audience was giving her a standing ovation and she lifted one of her stiff, thin arms and waved. I just hoped the viewers wouldn’t realize what a mistake they had made in choosing her. But anyway, I thought, the first step to fame has been accomplished. She still had a lot ahead of her. Germany is just a small country.

Dieter died the day after Aminat was crowned.

It would be blasphemous to suggest that it actually suited me. But the timing really wasn’t bad. I had to take care of everything, and I was happy to get out of the house. Lena and Kalganow somehow managed to be in every nook of the house at every moment — her giggling, him wheezing — and I couldn’t just lock myself in my room all day. John trimmed the roses, looked at the clouds, and made tea. I didn’t ask him whether the company of a poorly raised Israeli and a slobbering old Russian suited him. The smile I’d always thought I detected lurking in his face had recently come tentatively to the surface. To keep myself occupied, I organized Dieter’s funeral and cleaned up his apartment. When I went into his bedroom, in which the stench of sickness and fear still hung, I opened a drawer and found a pile of handwritten notes.

The label on the first notebook said: “Tartar Cuisine.” I opened it. “Pechleve — a layered dessert,” I read. Dieter’s writing was small, curvy, and the letters were rounded — if I didn’t know better, I would have taken it for a woman’s handwriting. The neat script was easy to read. After the first few sentences, images of my old life flooded my mind. I had up to that day never believed that Dieter had really been travelling around the Soviet Union to research ethnic cuisines. But now I held the proof in my hands. Descriptions of his wanderings through half-derelict villages, sketches of landscapes, and, first and foremost, recipes. “Kystybyi, also called kuzikmak, is a sort of pierogi made out of unleavened dough.” “Katyk denotes curdled milk that the Tartars heat for a long time in a clay pot. It is sometimes finished with the addition of cherries or red beets.” “For the filling of gubadia, a baked layered pie made for festive occasions, they sometimes use qurut, a uniquely processed dried yoghurt.”

In one of the notebooks I found the angelic photo of Aminat that I’d sent Dieter many years ago, in another life.

Tartar words were sprinkled in among the notes. He had tried to learn the language and maintained a kind of vocabulary book: