The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

The knitting needle

As my daughter Sulfia was explaining that she was pregnant but that she didn’t know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap.

Sulfia was sitting on a kitchen stool. Her shoulders were scrunched up and her eyes were red; instead of simply letting her tears flow she insisted on rubbing them into her face with the backs of her hands. This despite the fact that when she was still a child I had taught her how to cry without making herself look ugly, and how to smile without promising too much.

But Sulfia wasn’t very gifted. In fact, to be honest, I’d say she was rather stupid. And yet somehow she was my daughter — worse still, my only daughter. As I looked at her — her nose running, perched there on the stool with her back hunched like a parrot in a cage — I had mixed feelings. I desperately wanted to shout at her, “Sit up straight! Stop sniffling! Wipe that pathetic look off your face! Don’t scrunch your eyes like that!”

But I also felt sorry for her. After all, she was mine. Somehow! I had no other daughter, no son, and for years my body had been hollow inside — as barren as the sands of a desert. This daughter I did have was deformed and bore no resemblance to her mother. She was short — she only came up to my shoulders. She had no figure whatsoever. She had small eyes and a crooked mouth. And, as I said, she was stupid. She was already seventeen years old, too, so there was little chance she would get any smarter.

I only hoped that her simplemindedness might prove attractive enough to some man that he wouldn’t notice her awful legs until the two of them were already standing in front of a justice of the peace.

Thus far that hope had come to nothing. Sulfia had a few female friends on our block, but the last time she had spoken to a boy was probably ten years before, just after she started primary school. Yet, one day, there I was sautéing a fish in oil (it was 1978, and anthrax spores had just leaked from the huge lab in our city), and Sulfia put her hand over her nose and then threw up four times in the toilet.

Even that witch Klavdia, who lived in another room of our communal apartment, noticed something amiss. Klavdia worked in a birthing center as a midwife. That was her version, at least. I didn’t believe her. She probably wasn’t anything more than a janitor. There were two parties in our apartment. One party — our family — had two bedrooms; the other party — Klavdia — had one. We shared a common bathroom and kitchen. It was a nice old building, and very central.

Sulfia sat on the stool and in answer to my questions told me that her sudden pregnancy could only have come about from dreaming of a man at night, while asleep, and I believed her immediately. The streets were full of pretty girls in short skirts, and a real man would never come anywhere near Sulfia unless he was nearsighted or perverted.

I looked sternly at Sulfia, disappointment in my eyes, but she just stared down at her little feet. I knew such cases existed, cases of virgins having a dream and nine months later bringing a child into the world. And there were even worse cases. I knew of one personally: my cousin Rafaella found her daughter in the blossom of a huge exotic house plant of unknown origin — she’d brought the seed from somewhere down south, she said. I can still remember just how baffled she was.

I looked at my daughter and wondered what I could do now for her future and my reputation. I had some ideas.

I went down to the pharmacy and bought mustard powder. Then I scrubbed the bathtub until it was gleaming and filled it with hot water. We were lucky that we had hot water just then, for it had been shut off time and again over the previous weeks.

I sprinkled the powder into the water and then stirred it in with the broken-off handle of a snow shovel I’d found on the street the previous winter and brought home with me because it looked solid. Sure enough, I’d already found a use for it.

I stirred and Sulfia stood next to me, watched, and shivered.

“Get undressed,” I said.

She quickly climbed out of her dress and her white panties and looked at me.

“Get in,” I said.

You always had to connect the dots for her.

She gingerly lifted one of her ugly, dark legs and braced herself on me. She dunked her big toe into the water and started moaning about it being way too hot.

“It’s even hotter in hell,” I said patiently.

She looked at me, tried to put her foot in, and cringed, jerking it back out.

I was losing my patience. The water has to be hot, not lukewarm, I explained. She looked at me with a wounded look, and then let herself drop into the bathtub. Water splashed onto the floor.

“Are you crazy?” I shouted and turned the tap back on very hot.

As I mopped up the puddles on the tiled floor, Sulfia whimpered in the tub: it was too hot, she was going to be scalded to death.

“Nobody has ever been scalded to death,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. When her whimpering stopped, I looked up. Sulfia lay in the tub with her eyes closed and her mouth hanging open. I lifted her up and ran cold water over her with the showerhead. Better a pregnant daughter than a dead one, I thought. Sulfia came to. Her skin was red, and she immediately began to complain.

I dragged Sulfia past Klavdia’s curious face and into our room, put her in bed, and gave her cranberry tea to drink. She fell asleep. She slept for twenty-two hours, tossing and turning and groaning the whole time. I kept checking the sheet beneath her. It remained white.

After the mustard bath, Sulfia’s skin began to peel, but otherwise nothing happened. So I went to the market and bought a large bag of bay laurel leaves from one of my countrymen. I boiled up the leaves into a brew and gave it to Sulfia. She drank it obediently, like a good daughter. She didn’t even make it to the toilet before throwing up several times in the washbasin — in plain view of nosy Klavdia. She couldn’t hold any of it down, so it didn’t do anything.

I began to worry. I didn’t want to send my daughter to the doctor, and I didn’t want any idiotic chatter at the school where she’d been studying nursing since the beginning of the year. I hoped to avoid any additional hurdles for Sulfia, who was hardly popular as it was. And I also knew that at hospitals they treated stupid young girls in her condition like pieces of meat. I wanted to spare her that.

I never would have expected God to send help in the person of Klavdia, of all people — that stupid clucking hen. But after observing my increasingly desperate attempts, Klavdia took the initiative. She put a hand on my elbow in our shared kitchen and whispered that she had helped a few other people in her time and knew exactly what to do.

I listened to her and then nodded. I had no choice. The next day we went into Klavdia’s room and pushed a big table into the middle. Klavdia brought in a washable tablecloth covered with a floral pattern of forget-me-nots and bachelor buttons. I went and brought in Sulfia, whose black eyes bounced around the room in panic.

I explained to Sulfia once again that though they could arise on their own, problems never took care of themselves. They had to be solved. She trembled in my arms for a while. Then she obediently climbed onto the table.

Klavdia said she couldn’t work this way. With Sulfia shaking so badly, she wouldn’t be able to find the right spot. I had to hold Sulfia down — if she jerked around in the middle of it, Klavdia might stick the needle into her gut. I threw myself across my daughter’s midsection.

“Hold her mouth shut,” said Klavdia. As I smothered Sulfia’s suddenly rising scream, Klavdia pulled a bloody knitting needle from between Sulfia’s legs with a quick motion.

Maybe she is more than a janitor after all, I thought, impressed with Klavdia’s steady hand. Then I released my grip on Sulfia’s clenched jaw. Her head lolled to one side. The frail child had passed out again.

I carried Sulfia to our room on my back. I laid a waterproof pad beneath her pale bum and wrapped her in warm blankets.

She came to again. Her eyes, dark and round like raisins, wandered around the room. She made a soft whining sound.

Her face slowly got whiter. My husband, Kalganow, came home from work.

“What does Sonja have?” he asked.

He didn’t call our daughter by her Tartar name. He called her what the Russians called her because it was beyond their capabilities to remember a Tartar name, much less pronounce one.

My husband was an absolutist. He didn’t believe in God; the only thing he believed was that all people were alike, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was still living in the Middle Ages. My husband didn’t like it when we made distinctions between ourselves and others.

I told him our stupid little Sulfia just had the flu. He went to her bedside and put his hand on her forehead.

“But she’s cold,” he said. “Cold and moist.”

Well, I couldn’t get everything right. Sulfia moaned and tossed and turned.