The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

A foreign idiot

It took a few months before Dieter was sufficiently recuperated to accept my friendly offer.

During that time, I felt as if I had gotten to know him quite well. Sulfia seemed to have established a good rapport with him. Sometimes I wondered why her coworkers didn’t fight her over such patients. Then I realized — Sulfia’s men had faults. You could tell at first glance that Sergej was a skirt chaser and Michail a Jew. I knew too little about Dieter. He was a foreigner, yes, but whether he was much of a catch wasn’t clear at first glance. He apparently had no relationships and little money — otherwise he wouldn’t have spent several months in Sulfia’s care in a ten-bed hospital room without receiving a single visit. It was fitting that Sulfia’s foreigner wasn’t the luxury model. But Dieter Rossman was certainly better than nothing.

He had blue eyes, a snub nose, and a small mouth. His face reminded me of a pig. He was wearing a leather jacket, and beneath that a coarsely knit sweater he’d probably bought at a bazaar from some old lady.

He looked pale and malnourished, but still had a big stomach.

When I went to give him slippers, he lifted a foot to show me his thick woolen socks that matched the sweater. If he hadn’t been a foreigner and our situation so dire, I would have decided at that moment that Sulfia could just as well grow old in peace without a man.

Dieter had a look that must have attracted small-time criminals on the street. His smile said, “I’m new here and don’t have the slightest clue. Please take all my money and punch me in the head.”

I invited him to the table with a smile so sugary sweet that the corners of my mouth hurt.

It wasn’t so easy in these meager times to put something on the table. I got hold of some old beef that had been several times deep-frozen and thawed, but I was missing butter, eggs, and sour cream. I tried to make up for that with carrots, potatoes, and sour pickles from my garden. We sat down at the table and I was already sorry about the effort and the money I’d sunk into this.

Dieter sat across from Aminat and looked at her intently.

“Is this also your daughter?” he asked me in his funny Russian.

“No, that is her daughter,” I said, pointing to Sulfia.

My German was improving with every sentence.

“How are you?” I asked. “Does your head still hurt?”

I filled Dieter’s bowl with a kvass soup into which I’d cut vegetables. It was actually a summer dish, but at least I had the ingredients. Dieter took his napkin, unfolded it, and spread it across his lap.

“Don’t stare,” I said quietly to Aminat.

“She looks like you,” said Dieter to me.

“Who?” I asked.

“She,” Dieter said, pointing his spoon at Aminat.

“That’s right,” I said proudly.

Dieter ate oddly. He skewered pieces of vegetable with his fork, guided them into his mouth, and closed his eyes. As he chewed his eyeballs moved beneath his closed eyelids. We were all a bit embarrassed. Sulfia and I averted our eyes at the same time. Aminat snorted. I kicked her under the table. Dieter swallowed and opened his eyes. He picked up his wine glass, raised it to his mouth, and sniffed at it extensively.

“The wine’s not gone off,” I said hurriedly. Sulfia had received it as a gift, but naturally I didn’t say that.

Dieter moved his eyebrows, which crawled around his pig face like two fat caterpillars, and took a sip. It looked disgusting: instead of swallowing, he slurped the wine from one cheek to the other as if he were rinsing his mouth to dull a toothache. The only thing left was for him to start gargling it.

“I’ve heard that you collect recipes,” I said, so he would stop eating. I was practically nauseous. It was easier for Sulfia. As a nurse, she was used to much worse.

Dieter finally swallowed the wine.

“Oh yes, oh yes,” he said with his childlike delivery.

“And what do you do with them?”

He took a corner of the napkin in his lap and dabbed at the grease on his lips.

“I’m writing a book,” he said.

“What about, if I may ask?”

“About recipes, just recipes,” said Dieter. “Old, original recipes.”

“And who will make the recipes — your wife?” I asked unhopefully.

“I am a person who is not with a woman married,” is how Dieter formulated his answer in his funny Russian.

“Then your mother?”

“God forbid.”

I was getting a headache. Dieter smiled broadly.

“I cook,” he said. “I, I, I.”

“Oh,” I said.

A foreign idiot. As if we didn’t have enough of our own.

I could hardly wait for him to leave. He stubbornly remained seated, however. He probably felt comfortable here. Because he ate in such tiny bites and chewed for such a long time, it took forever for us to work from one course to the next. I waited for him to ask questions about the dishes, but he didn’t. He ate my born-out-of-necessity delicacies as if they were the-day-before-yesterday’s mashed potatoes. I was a bit relieved, though, that I didn’t have to provide him with commentary and answers. I had tried to remember the dishes Kalganow’s country relatives prepared, but they certainly weren’t the types of things that would interest the German. And in order to get the right ingredients for them I would have to have been a magician. I had decided that in a pinch I would just lie and make up recipes and say they had been passed down from generation to generation. But I was also happy to be able to put that off.

Between the main dish and the dessert, Dieter suddenly asked Aminat to show him her room. I pinched her under the table. They withdrew together and I cleared the dirty plates with Sulfia and put out the clean ones. We put a new tablecloth out. I pulled out the dessert of my own invention — a sort of cold cake made out of ground-up butter cookies, margarine, and apples.

Then I went to Aminat’s room, stood behind the partially closed door, and eavesdropped. Dieter was playing with Aminat’s things. He had taken a little stool, covered it like a table, and placed three of her old puppets and a teddy bear around it. Aminat hadn’t played with dolls in a long time, but she played along so as not to offend the guest.

“And what should they eat now?” asked Aminat. I could hear how annoyed she was in the tone of her voice. But she fought bravely to improve our living conditions.

“Kystybyi,” said Dieter. “Do you like it?”

“I don’t know it,” said Aminat.

“Kullama?”

“Don’t know it.”

“Talkysh-kaleve?”

“What are you talking about?”

Aminat didn’t know anything about Tartar cuisine, and I had failed to prime her for the unusual questions. She had become a Soviet girl, just as Kalganow always wanted. She had no idea what the words were and didn’t hide her ignorance.

“Will you give me a kiss?” asked Dieter.

“Only if you marry my mama,” said Aminat.

I didn’t tell Sulfia about the conversation I’d overheard. I had to think it over first. Of course, now I knew I could reach my goal much more quickly than I had planned, and that it didn’t matter whether Sulfia wore short skirts or fishnet stockings. I kept my knowledge to myself — I wanted to wait until we had red passports in our hands.

Sulfia had watched Dieter sorrowfully after he stuck his wool-stockinged feet in his shoes and laboriously tied the laces. He formed loops with each set of laces and wrapped them around each other in an odd, very foreign fashion.

Aminat, Sulfia, and I stood in a row in front of him, watched, and waited until he was finished. This didn’t disturb him. He pulled on a finished knot and undid the entire structure. Aminat sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Sulfia moved her fingers. She was barely able to keep herself from kneeling in front of Dieter and doing the task for him.

As the door closed behind him, I looked around. Aminat’s face was contorted, as it always was when she had to keep herself under control. She had really worked wonders as far as her composure. Sulfia looked sad and wistful. I cast a sideways glance at my face in the mirror. It had a look of grim determination.

“And now?” asked Sulfia, heading into the kitchen with her head hanging. I followed her. She turned on the water but nothing came out. We were prepared and had a supply in buckets and in the bathtub. I poured some into our largest pot and put it on the stove in order to heat it to use to wash the dishes.

“We’ll see him again soon,” I said.

“You think so?”

She looked at me as if once again she believed I knew everything in the world. Unlike Aminat, she was apparently reaching an age at which she finally valued maternal wisdom.

“He’ll be back very soon, my daughter,” I said. “Didn’t you notice — he practically devoured you with his eyes. There are no women like you in Germany.”

“But he barely looked at me,” Sulfia countered tentatively.

“Out of shyness,” I said. “Chin up, daughter. If we all play our cards right, we’ll soon be in Germany.”