The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Not quite Germany

Aminat kept asking about Sulfia. She was already in Germany, with me by her side; she was going to school and did her homework with the help of a dictionary; she even got a little allowance from me — one mark per week. And despite all of that, she asked about Sulfia. Whether she would return.

Where else would she go, I replied.

We couldn’t talk on the phone much — it was too expensive for Sulfia, and Dieter got nervous whenever we dialed an international number on his phone. I pressured him by saying I’d take Aminat home if something didn’t suit us, though I had my doubts as to how effective this argument still was.

Aminat had become disagreeable. She had gained weight. Never before had a woman in our family been fat, and it outraged me that she might be the first. She just plunged into sweets. No wonder she also had pimples. Every morning when I looked at her, I thought, Oh my God, there are even more.

Naturally I fought these developments. I still believed that somewhere deep inside her was her old beauty — the beauty she had inherited from me. I just needed to exhume it from beneath layers of fat and pimples.

I waged a constant battle against Aminat’s pimples. Twice a week I made her a steam bath. I boiled water with dried chamomile leaves and made Aminat hold her face over the pot. Afterward I popped all her pimples and disinfected them with Dieter’s aftershave.

Any sweets I found I threw in the garbage. I eliminated her one-mark allowance so she couldn’t buy any on her own. The only thing I was unable to stop was Dieter bringing her sweets. It was the only tender connection between the two of them. The otherwise petulant, incorruptible Aminat simply could not resist sweets.

My worry that Dieter would send us back home as a result of Aminat’s altered appearance came to nothing. He circled her the way a child does a dog on a leash, torn between the desire to get up the nerve to pet it and the fear of getting bitten. Because I was so busy with my cleaning work, I began to note capabilities in Dieter that had earlier escaped my notice: he was indeed able to keep the refrigerator stocked by himself, as well as to ensure a child had regular meals and clean laundry.

At first I took care of our laundry myself when I had time. I washed everything by hand in the sink and hung it to dry in the bathtub. Dieter explained how much more water I used by washing everything by hand. I let him show me where the laundry basket was and how the washing machine worked. There were a lot of buttons, but I wasn’t stupid. Our dirty underwear, however, I continued to keep in a plastic bag in our room and wash by hand.

One thing was clear: Dieter’s apartment was not quite Germany. No, suddenly I found his place a bit shabby. I’d seen a lot of other places by this point. And Dieter himself also no longer fit my image of a German. Now that I had a basis for comparison, I realized that some German men wore much more expensive shoes.

Aminat was no longer the granddaughter I had pictured, either.

I didn’t like the local children at all. At first glance, most of them were very poorly dressed. Then I started to look more closely. My perspective changed. There came a day when I found myself looking at a German girl on the tram — not a Turk, a real German girl — and realized I no longer thought the look was sloppy. I could have looked at her all day. The girl seemed so relaxed, so totally different from Aminat, who always had a stiff look on her face and hunched her shoulders awkwardly around her neck.

At first I thought Aminat could never become German. She always had a look on her face as if she didn’t understand anything. But that was deceptive on her part.

Once I came home and heard her shouting angrily. I was worried she would do something to Dieter, and ran to her room. Fortunately he wasn’t injured. His frightened muttering continued like a second track beneath Aminat’s shouts. I stood outside the door and listened. I understood only a few words. I couldn’t catch what they were saying. Aminat cursed in German, in long, complicated sentences. She didn’t just speak better than I did, she spoke worlds better. She spoke like German children. I hadn’t noticed.

As I entered, they both stopped. Aminat turned her back to me and started hammering on Dieter’s computer keyboard.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Aminat.

“Everything’s fine,” said Dieter.

“When’s Sulfia coming back?” Aminat asked. Me. In German!

“In four days,” I said. That meant that a week later I would be flying to Russia. Dieter had paid for my flight in exchange for me taking care of some of the household tasks. I also bought my own clothes. I had found a few shops where I was able to shop cheaply. They sold used clothing by the kilo and it cost practically nothing. And if you looked long enough you could find nice stuff. At first I’d been disgusted, but eventually I started going almost every day to see whether anything nice had come in.

A lot of women in Germany didn’t pay much attention to their appearance, so it was easy for me to outdo them. Point to any random woman on the street and I was better dressed, better made-up, and I had a more enticing figure — which I showed off better than most young girls did here in Germany.

“You’ll finally be gone,” said Aminat. In German. To me.

But Sulfia didn’t come. Two days prior to her planned arrival, she called. I had suspected she might have problems. She couldn’t assemble documents as brilliantly as I could. She let herself be too easily intimidated or gotten rid of. I had sent twenty bars of chocolate back with her — milk chocolate with hazelnuts — so she could give them to the various officials at the right moment. But Sulfia found that embarrassing. That’s why, when I heard Sulfia’s voice on the phone, I thought she was calling to prepare me for all the work I had ahead of me back in Russia. But it was something else. Sulfia said Kalganow had suffered a stroke the day before.

“So?” I cried, and quickly tried to remember how Russian inheritance law worked. We were still not divorced, Kalganow and I.

“He’s not doing so well,” said Sulfia.

“What do you mean — he’s alive? If he’s not dead yet, won’t he survive now?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” said Sulfia, the professional.

What I heard next I could hardly believe. Sulfia was calling to say she wouldn’t be coming to Germany because she intended to take care of her father. The conditions in the hospitals had become so horrible that you couldn’t leave a living relative in one — as a healthcare worker she knew this, she said.

“What?” I screamed. “Are you completely crazy? He walked out on me and on you, too! You cannot be serious.”

Sulfia was stupid, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was beyond my powers to fly home, grab her by the hair, and drag her to the airport. It meant I would have to remain in Germany after all.

I couldn’t leave Aminat alone with Dieter. If she were to stab him over something she didn’t like, even if it were an accident, we could forget about marriage and citizenship.