The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

A civilized family

We were a civilized family.

The first time I picked up Aminat from her new kindergarten, she screamed with joy and jumped around in a circle. I told her to put on her coat. She kept celebrating and dancing. A teacher interrupted: “Anja, you’re disturbing the entire group again.”

Aminat stuck out her tongue.

I spoke to her sternly.

“Get your things on, you Satan.”

Aminat stopped screaming, sat down on the bench with a dreamy smile, and held her feet out to me. I put her feet into her boots and wrapped the scarf around her skinny neck. It was all so casual and normal. As if the time when I thought my heart would rip apart from the sorrow of not seeing her had never been. I hadn’t forgotten what it was like without her. I hadn’t forgotten one bit.

I pulled Aminat’s woolen mittens over her fidgeting hands. She looked me straight in the eyes. Sulfia never did that. Sulfia’s gaze had always shifted around, and still did. But Aminat never looked away, regardless of who she was looking at.

I took her by the hand and led her to the bus stop. Aminat stomped in the puddles and splashed water all around. I hardly reprimanded her, though, because my own heart was celebrating. Winter was fading; the snow was shrinking into itself and turning gray. The air was warming and filling with scents. The trees were still bare, but their branches had a new vitality.

We boarded the bus that would take us home. Aminat sat at the window, laughed, and pointed at the many things that caught her attention. Spring was at the doorstep, and my heart beat with love.

We were a civilized family and got along well with one another. I often picked up Aminat from kindergarten in order to help the young couple, who had to work a lot.

I asked myself what they had done before, without me. Without my advice, without my help. I often took Aminat home to my place because it was cleaner there and I had everything she needed. Sulfia preferred it when Aminat stayed in her apartment; when Sergej also asked me to do that I granted his wish. From then on I looked after Aminat in Sulfia’s apartment, even though it was less practical. We played, I read to her, we painted together, I told her instructive stories from my life and from the lives of others. She listened, but not very attentively. At some point her thoughts would wander and she would begin to hum to herself.

I considered it my duty to bring up Aminat properly, to teach her right from wrong. I hadn’t studied pedagogy for nothing. Around me she didn’t eat with her mouth open or grab serving bowls meant to be shared. I smacked her face or her knuckles when she did things I had for good reasons forbidden, like picking her nose or scratching herself between the legs. I cursed at her in Tartar, calling her “Satan” and “donkey”—but affectionately. And anyway, she didn’t know what it meant.

I took on Sulfia’s housekeeping, too. Someone had to do it. I cleaned up in the kitchen, in the foyer, and in the bedroom. I vacuumed up dust, mopped the floors, and scrubbed the toilet. I didn’t want Aminat to grow up in filth, with her stepfather’s intestinal bacteria on the toilet brush and his herpes virus on the cloth handkerchiefs he left lying around everywhere. I gathered them — from between the sheets and pillows in their bed, from under the couch — and washed them in a bowl, hung them to dry, and then ironed them. Just as I did with all the other laundry.

Sulfia was, as always, ungrateful. All she said was, “Just leave it, mother.”

She even screamed at me. That was after I straightened out her wardrobe. I sorted and folded the underwear, bras, and leggings, and repaired the holes in them by hand. I did all this despite the fact that I would rather have been watching TV or reading the paper. But she shouted at me so loudly that Aminat came to the door of the room and asked, “Mama, are you crazy?”

Up to then Sulfia had never shouted. She had just helplessly exclaimed, “Mother, why? Just leave it, mother. Mother, please don’t touch that.”

I let her scream. Everybody needed to scream once in a while in his or her life. But after a few minutes I also thought enough was enough.

When I decided she had gone on long enough, I picked up my boot and hit Sulfia in the face with it. She put her hand on her cheek. Aminat jumped on me, pulled at the boot — which I was still holding — and bawled: “If you hurt my mama again, I won’t love you anymore!”

I was stunned. Love was an enduring theme in our family. We always knew that we loved each other. We told each other often, particularly Aminat and I. I let the boot drop. Aminat did not run off, though. She didn’t even turn away. She stood there belligerently, like a little construction worker, and looked with her black eyes straight into mine.

“What did you say?”

“If you hurt mama again, I won’t love you anymore. At all.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because I don’t want to have an evil grandmother,” said Aminat, hopping away on one leg.