The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Twins, so what?

That night I suddenly got worried that Sulfia might die on me. It had been years since I worried about her, and I didn’t like the feeling. I lifted Sulfia’s blanket. Things looked good. I cleaned her up, gathered the bloody stuff, stuck it in a plastic bag, and wrapped the bag in a newspaper. I quietly left our apartment and heard Klavdia turn over in bed as I did. I carried the bloody bundle through the dark, empty streets and stuffed it in a dumpster a few blocks away.

In the morning Sulfia had a fever. She was bleeding like a stuck pig. I pulled a jar of caviar out of the depths of my refrigerator — I’d been saving it for New Year. I smeared it thickly on four slices of bread and fed it to Sulfia. Caviar was known to be good for replenishing blood.

Sulfia’s teeth chattered. She had the chills. Tiny translucent orange balls of caviar stuck to her chin. I poured a drink made out of sea buckthorn berries into her twisted mouth. I had a garden out of town, and I’d picked the berries there in the fall. My hands had bled from being stuck by the thorns; it had ruined the skin on my fingertips. Afterward I pureed the berries with sugar, ten liters’ worth in canning jars. That way the sea buckthorns kept through the winter. Now I mixed spoonfuls of the puree into hot water and gave it to Sulfia to drink so she’d get some vitamins.

She sniffled and groaned, but my labors paid off. After a few days Sulfia stopped bleeding and was able to get out of bed and make it to the bathroom on her own. After a few more days she went back to her nursing school. Klavdia gave us an official note saying that Sulfia had been out with the flu. For the next few months I had an easier time putting up with her, until I noticed her belly starting to get round. At some point it became blatantly obvious. But I noticed it rather late. It had just never occurred to me. Eventually even Kalganow, who normally missed everything, noticed.

“What’s Sonja got in there?” he asked, pointing with his finger. “How did that happen?”

“She’s just a growing girl,” I said hastily. I put my hand on Sulfia’s stomach and froze. The kick I felt against my hand spelled trouble.

God was mocking me. God or Klavdia.

“Must have been twins,” Klavdia said, shrugging her shoulders. “So what?”

She said we’d paid her to take care of only one baby, and she’d done that. Since she knew nothing about a twin, she couldn’t have gotten rid of a second baby. She just stuck the one closest to the exit.

In fact, said Klavdia, the survival of the second twin was evidence of her skill. Others couldn’t even ensure the survival of the mother.

I locked myself in the bathroom and let the tears flow, silently, so no one could hear me and so my eyes wouldn’t get red. Sulfia sat on a kitchen stool and stroked her belly, smiling, eyes wide, munching on slices of bread stacked with cheese and cold cuts, fresh pickles I’d bought at the market, sour pickles I’d canned the past summer, marinated tomatoes, apples, a piece of apple tart, one bowl full of yoghurt, and another filled with cream of wheat and raisins.

Because I knew my husband would never believe the story about being impregnated in a dream, I told him she’d been raped by the neighbor two floors up from us. The neighbor was related to my husband’s most senior supervisor. After that Kalganow didn’t say anything more, not to me, not to Sulfia, and not to the neighbor, and we began to prepare for the arrival of the baby, never losing the faint hope that some calamity — an illness or a botched medical procedure — might still arrive first.