The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

The mountain didn’t want me

The next morning Aminat refused to continue practicing. I was sorely tempted to smack her in the face, but my client and her prosecutor were still in the apartment and I didn’t want to make a bad impression. I left Aminat in the apartment with a book.

I got dressed, took my skis, and went by myself to the lift. I was just as elegant and confident as the arrogant bitches that came here every year and wore their mirrored sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads.

Once at the top, I started down, gliding along behind the skier in front of me and matching his speed. Below me everything was white. Everything all around me was white, too. Then suddenly I realized that it was white above me, as well. I slowed and then fell down. I was taken by surprise by the snow. The flakes swirled around me and I could no longer distinguish the sky from the ground. The wind blew tiny pieces of ice into my face, making my eyes water.

I couldn’t see a thing. The tears froze on my eyelashes, blinding me. The mountain didn’t want me. I’d been too brazen for its taste, and now the mountain wanted to kill me.

I had stopped myself just in the nick of time at the edge of not just a drop but an abyss. My legs were shaking. I asked God whether my time had come and God answered with a flash of inspiration: Corsin!

That’s right, Corsin, who could ski even better than I could, who said he knew every slope around here like the back of his hand. I stripped off my glove and pulled the prosecutor’s mobile phone out of my pocket along with the piece of paper with Corsin’s number on it. For a second, my fingers were too stiff to move. Then I pulled the antenna out. It was the first time I’d ever used a mobile phone. I breathed on my fingertips and then started to push the buttons with the number. Calling a Swiss number was probably going to cost a fortune, I thought.

There was a tooting sound in the earpiece and then someone answered. It wasn’t clear whether the voice belonged to a woman or a child. I had forgotten for an instant that even though Corsin skied like a god, he spoke like a five-year-old.

“Help me!” I yelled.

I shouted the name of the slope I’d started down, but Corsin — if it was even him on the line — didn’t understand. He just kept asking: “What? Who’s there?”

The wind howled in the phone. It was probably difficult to understand me, but then again understanding wasn’t Corsin’s strength anyway. In any event, I was lost.

I shouted, “Drop dead!”

The mountain was saying the exact same thing to me.

I hung up on Corsin and tried to reach my employer. It was futile.

I shoved the phone back in my pocket, put my glove back on, and grabbed my ski poles. I looked down at the slick, ice-covered wall below. This must have been what they called a black diamond trail. I tried to calculate how many shifts in direction I’d have to make to get down the hill — or rather, how many I could survive.

Just as I was crossing myself with my cramped fist, a fleck of red appeared in the swirling snow. A person, maybe a man. I was just getting ready to start skiing, and had with superhuman effort positioned my skis parallel to the cliff edge. Now I shouted and waved my poles to draw attention to my precarious position. The person in red stopped just below me, hanging on the wall of ice like a fly on a window. I saw a flash of teeth through the snow soup, and Corsin’s soft little-girl voice said, “Hold on to me, I’ll get you down.”

I was nearly paralyzed with happiness and relief. Corsin took the ski poles from my hands and tucked the ends into his waistband. He stood with his legs wide apart and reached out his hand to me. I slid toward the wedge Corsin had formed, my legs weak and shaking. The wind whooshed in my ears as I followed Corsin’s broad shoulders, braking just enough to avoid planting my face on his red jacket. It felt as if it took an hour, maybe even two, and by the time we reached the parking lot at the base of the ski run, blood was dripping from my lips because I had bitten them so badly. Corsin smiled — he hadn’t so much as broken a sweat.

“You’re a brave woman,” he said. “Going up the mountain alone even though you can’t ski.”

“How did you know it was me?” I asked.

He put his hand on the left chest pocket of his jacket and said, “I had a feeling.”

I came out of the mountains like a conquering hero, slightly bronzed and with the bearing of a ski queen. The only problem was that I couldn’t say the same of Aminat.

Corsin sent me postcards of bright, picturesque Alpine cottages. As a result I realized that what I had taken for an odd, childlike version of German was actually a completely different language. He and his entire village spoke the language of the ancient Romans, and he wrote in that language on his postcards.

He wrote, “Gronda buna a mia amur e splendur al firmament,” and “vaiel tei fetg bugen,” and “far lamur in cun lauter, leinsa?” I had no idea what any of it meant.

Corsin was like a Tartar in his country. He had other roots, other dishes, another language, and, importantly, a much more handsome look than the rest of the populace. In Russia, nobody would ever have considered sending out words someone else couldn’t understand. But Corsin obviously thought nothing of it. I had tried to talk about it a few times with him. At some point I realized that his enthusiasm for talking about how different he was from normal Swiss people wasn’t a flaw in his upbringing. It was just something deeply ingrained in him, something that couldn’t be erased. Of course, he hadn’t experienced a Soviet upbringing. His was somewhat more primitive. His urge to show off his roots reminded me of the way little children lifted their skirts to show everyone their underwear.

Once Corsin sent me a postcard written in German. He wrote that he missed me and that he was coming to visit the following Tuesday, driving the five hours from the mountains in his car.

His visit put me in a predicament. Fortunately one of my employers was on vacation. I took Corsin to her apartment in a nice old building, hoping not to be seen by the neighbors. It occurred to me only belatedly that beyond the ski slopes a man like Corsin was less a trophy than a joke. He was muscular, perhaps just a little too thin, and he looked around like a scared rabbit. Between the sheets my suspicions were confirmed: he only knew his way around the mountains.