The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Just us

When I reopened my aching eyes, I saw Sulfia, who, with her eyes averted, was measuring my blood pressure. I closed my eyes again and tried to think.

I remembered the goodbye party, Aminat’s sweaty forehead, her cheek pressed to the mattress, and her arm holding little Lena in her sleep. That was my misfortune: I was about to lose Aminat to the land of the Jews just because Sulfia had married a Rosenbaum. It was light outside, and Sulfia, who should have long since transferred to an airplane in Moscow bound for Tel Aviv, stood before me in the flesh, packing up her blood pressure cuff. I must have missed something.

Sulfia stood up and went to the window. I opened my eyes a bit and looked at her skinny back. On the windowsill were two large bags, and Sulfia rummaged around in one of them now.

I felt my body under the covers. I had on a different nightgown. Someone had changed me. I touched my hair to check on the state of it. I wet my fingers with saliva and felt my eyelashes. Someone had changed me and washed my face.

I didn’t realize right away that Sulfia had turned back around and was looking at me. It was too late to close my eyes again. I looked back at her silently.

“How do you feel?” she asked without smiling.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. Speaking proved difficult. My throat was raw and dry.

Sulfia didn’t answer.

“Where’s Aminat?” I wheezed.

Sulfia left and returned with a half-filled glass of water. She put her hand under my back and pulled me upright. She held the glass to my lips. I took a sip of water. The cold moisture hurt my throat.

“Where’s Aminat?”

Sulfia put the glass down on the windowsill.

“At school.”

“And the Rosenbaums?”

Sulfia turned to face the window, with her back to me.

“In Tel Aviv.”

“And you? When are you flying there?”

“I’m not.”

“And Lena?”

“What about Lena?”

“Where is she?”

Sulfia turned and looked at me with dull eyes.

“Lena is in Tel Aviv. Sleep now, mother.”

It was just us again: Aminat, Sulfia, and me, with no men, no new children, in two huge apartments, one of which was unfurnished. That’s why Aminat and Sulfia had moved in here, into the room where the two of them had lived just after Aminat’s birth.

“She’s afraid that you’ll do something to yourself again,” Klavdia told me in the kitchen. But that was nonsense. Why would I do something to myself now that my darling was with me again?

Sulfia never talked about that night, the one during which she had decided not to get on the plane. She must have changed her mind in the space of a few hours. I never found out what made her come after me, or what happened when she did. She had obviously saved me without the help of a medic, because otherwise I’d have awoken not in my own home but locked in a psychiatric ward as suicidal. I could tell Klavdia knew more than she let on, and I suspected something was wrong with her tablets — they were too cheap and apparently didn’t have enough active ingredient.

My throat burned for a long time, and my stomach was shredded and raw, as if I’d puked up rocks. I didn’t complain. I lay in bed, hands folded over the covers, and Sulfia stayed with me. Sometimes I had the feeling that the blankets were too warm. I didn’t have to say anything. Sulfia could tell from the look on my face. She shook the blankets out and turned them over. She was my daughter and I’d spent a lifetime taking care of her. Now it was her turn to do something for me.

While Sulfia shook out the blankets, wiped my face with a moist towel, gave me things to drink, injected me with this and that, and monitored my blood pressure, Aminat fumed in the next room. Through the wall I could hear her stomping her feet and jumping up and down, slamming herself against the wall, and throwing things around. It was as if she’d gone mad. Sometimes she screamed, and then Sulfia would leave and go into the next room. I heard her dry whispers. Aminat would quiet down.

While I was sick, Aminat didn’t come into my room a single time. At first I was glad. I was too weak, and I wouldn’t have known what to say to her. Then I began to miss her. I asked Sulfia about her. Sulfia said I was still too weak and Aminat too ill-behaved. I understood what she meant. Aminat wouldn’t be able to control herself around me; she’d scream and rant and say things to me that she’d bitterly regret sometime after my death, which had been delayed for now.

If I hadn’t been found in time, she would have shed a few tears in Tel Aviv and perhaps called out my name in the night until the memories of me eventually faded. I would have become just a photo on her wall.

Now everything would be different. The Rosenbaums would be bathing in the Dead Sea alone.

Sulfia went back to work at the surgical clinic, Aminat went back to school, and I had sufficiently recovered to take a few strolls around the block, though I did stop frequently to catch my breath. Sulfia was transformed into an old woman in a matter of a few days. It mustn’t last, I thought to myself — with such an embittered expression on her face she’d never get another man.

Aminat had changed, too. She had stopped throwing fits. She became an oddly quiet child, never said a word too many, and came straight home from school and did her homework. When she was finished, she would lie on the bed with her face to the wall.

“What’s her problem?” I asked Sulfia. “Promise her we’ll take a beach holiday soon. Rosenbaum should send you money. Surely he’s rich by now.”

Sulfia looked at me and said, “What are you talking about the beach for? She misses her sister.”

Of course. Now I saw it, too. Aminat was longing for that chubby-faced baby with the messy fluff on her head. She had stashed photos in her books and notebooks: Lena on a rocking horse, Lena with an apple, Lena on her potty. She never mentioned her sister, but photos slipped out all over the place, and Aminat quickly gathered them up and tucked them back into her things.

Sulfia never mentioned Lena either. When in the evening she went into the room she was sharing with Aminat I heard only silence. They didn’t speak to each other. I had the feeling they were both refusing to speak about the same thing.

Meanwhile the phone continued to ring at our place. Aminat would run to the foyer and grab for the phone. Initially Rosenbaum called often. He reported that they had settled in well, said how hot it was, explained that they were living in an empty apartment — just the four of them — and then that they’d gotten some secondhand furniture from the neighbors. How they were attending language classes, how he sorted fruit at a stand early in the morning because there was no other work, how his mother was in poor health but his father was thriving.

“Let me talk to Lena,” Aminat pleaded, and then I heard her shout, “Lena, it’s your big sister Aminat!” and then whisper things into the phone that only Lena was supposed to hear. “Now you tell me something,” she demanded, and was quiet for a little while.

Lena couldn’t talk at all yet. At two, she was a little overdue. Rosenbaum probably took the phone away from Lena quickly because it was expensive to call. Aminat went to her room and closed the door. The silence pressed against the walls.

One day a letter of several pages arrived from Rosenbaum, which, according to the postmark, had been in transit for two months. On the stamps were contorted letters, and the address sounded like something from another world. In the envelope were photos: Lena at the beach, in front of a stone wall, and eating an ice cream.

“She’s gotten so big!” said Aminat, though Lena looked exactly the same as she had before her departure. She was wearing strange things. A t-shirt with a cartoon mouse on it, a sunhat, and wet shorts. There was a deserted sandy beach in the background.

Aminat spent hours looking at the photos, unlike Sulfia, who took only a fleeting look at them and then looked away.

“Look, mama,” said Aminat.

“Yes, yes, sweetie,” said Sulfia.

“You have to see this!”

“I already have, sweetie.”

Sulfia didn’t read Rosenbaum’s long letter, either. Aminat really wanted to know what it said, but she couldn’t decipher the erratic handwriting. So I read it to her. For the most part Rosenbaum just enumerated all the products available in the stores and their prices, but he also wrote that Lena’s first word was in Hebrew and that they couldn’t wait to welcome the missing members of the family so they’d be whole again. At that point I stopped and peered over the edge of the letter at Aminat, who was looking at me through narrowed eyes.

I folded the letter. Aminat ripped it out of my hand and went to her room.