The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Sulfia, you need a foreigner

Times were getting tougher.

Sulfia moved through the day like a ghost and Aminat began to adopt the same facial expression as her mother: the corners of her mouth hung down and her eyes stared off into space. I noticed that neither of them had any respect for me anymore, either. Sulfia and Aminat looked politely in my direction when I offered my thoughts on the weather or the ruble’s nosedive, but their faces betrayed the fact that they couldn’t wait for me to finally stop talking.

Times had changed outside, too. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty. It was a struggle to get enough to eat. Before I went shopping, I first returned all the empty milk and kefir bottles, thoroughly rinsed, for the deposits, carefully counting the coins I got back. With that money I bought bread and potatoes.

Fortunately I had my garden outside the city, which got us through these times. My cucumbers and tomatoes grew in a greenhouse. The bus ride to the garden took nearly two hours. I would have preferred to call Kalganow so he could drive us there in his car and, more importantly, drive us back with our boxes of vegetables and baskets of fruit. I took Aminat with me, and she wandered silently between the plant beds and picked chives and stuffed them in her mouth by the bushel. She needed vitamins.

We didn’t let anything go to waste. Sulfia spent hours on a ladder, a bucket hanging from a rope around her neck, picking sea buckthorn berries for marmalade. It was hard work, and I was happy Sulfia didn’t complain, even when thorny branches cut her hands and juice from burst berries ran into the cuts and burned. For nights on end I stood in the kitchen sterilizing the canning jars filled with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and mushrooms, with marmalade and compote, and dreamed occasionally of having a freezer.

Politics didn’t interest me. I stopped reading the papers, too, because there were things in there that further depressed me. I didn’t need bad news from the paper. I could see everything with my own eyes. While the economy imploded, I made sure my family didn’t go hungry. The rows of canning jars stacked neatly in the bedroom and covered with old wool blankets served as a daily reminder that without me, life would be impossible. But things still got more and more difficult. It was a stroke of luck when you could buy sugar, for instance, and I needed it for the marmalades and for my tea fungus.

We had long since gotten used to food rationing. It was nothing new for someone from the housing authority to sit in the staircase and have all the residents line up to get coupons that entitled them to purchase a certain amount of sausage or sugar. The difficulty was actually using the coupons. As soon as I heard there was sugar for sale someplace, I immediately dropped what I was doing at work and went straight there. I always had Sulfia’s, Aminat’s, and my coupons with me just in case. I traded sausage coupons with my coworkers for sugar coupons. I had decided the vitamins in my marmalade were better than the mix of gristle, skin, and paper they called sausage, and which took a lot of luck to get hold of anyway.

At some point I had to concede that I would no longer be able to service the tea fungus’s enormous appetite for sugar. I took it to my garden and threw it on the compost pile, though it hurt me to my soul.

If there was one thing I would really like to have had during this time, it was a cow. Milk had become a rarity. Near our building was a pavilion with an automated milk dispenser, where people took milk cans and empty three-liter bottles to fill. Long lines formed in front of the pavilion, and murmurs would race through the line when the dispenser had run out. Of course, in front of most of the milk dispensaries hung signs that read “No Milk Today.” I couldn’t understand why milk would suddenly become so scarce. Where were all the dairy farmers? Had the endless grasslands of our country been abandoned?

The same mystery surrounded eggs. It had been a long time since I had eaten an egg. A woman who lived upstairs kept a live chicken in her kitchen. Once in a while she took it out and let it pick through the flowerbeds outside. I was wildly envious.

Aminat’s school building was too small to hold all the students, and there were too few teachers. Her class now had the afternoon shift: her school day began at two. She came home after dark. Mornings she hung around by herself. When I finished work early enough, I would pick her up from school in the evening. A lot of girls went missing in broad daylight during those years only to be found raped and murdered in the basements of random buildings.

Letters from Tel Aviv became shorter and less frequent. Eventually all that came were postcards for birthdays. Every card said basically the same thing, with only slight variations: “We send best wishes, optimism, and sunshine.” Lena had long hair in the photos. International calls, which were recognizable by the different ringtone, became very seldom and very short, and the conversation was always the same. We didn’t have anything more to say to each other.

“Sulfia,” I said one morning, “you need a man.”

She was stirring a spoonful of coffee powder into her cup. The canister was nearly empty; in two days we’d have no more coffee, with little chance of getting more for a long time to come. I didn’t think I had said anything special. But Sulfia, calm, ugly, bitter-looking Sulfia, threw her cup to the floor and began to scream.

She screamed that I should never again interfere in her life, a life I had already destroyed, this time forever, broken her heart, robbed her of her dear little daughter, taken away her family, shattered her future, and chained her and poor Aminat to me.

It was clear that Sulfia was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Which is why I didn’t let her words bother me. In her moments of madness she sometimes said hurtful things. But I didn’t hold a grudge.

“Sulfia,” I said tenderly, “it’s for Aminat’s sake, don’t you see? She has no future in this country. It will eat her up and won’t even spit out the bones. You need to find a foreigner, Sulfia.”

Sulfia sat down on the floor right next to the puddle of coffee and the shards of the broken cup and broke down in tears.

She had just signed some divorce papers. Rosenbaum had asked her in a very amiable way to take this step. Based on her behavior, he had concluded that she never really intended to join him; he had given up hope and fallen in love with another émigré in Tel Aviv.

Sulfia signed everything and gave the papers to a man who had introduced himself as an emissary and lawyer for the Rosenbaum family. He spoke good Russian, but with a velvety accent. He seemed pleasantly surprised that everything had been so easily resolved. When he left, he kissed both me and Sulfia on the hand and said Rosenbaum intended never again to set foot on Russian soil.

I looked him up and down, from his bald head to his expensively shod feet, and let him leave. He wore a showy, unmistakably new wedding ring.