The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

In Sulfia’s voice

I was very busy at first. I called the offices of the cemetery and applied for a place for the urn. I called stonemasons about a grave marker. Sulfia needed to be properly interred with a nice gravestone. I made a sketch of how I wanted it. The money didn’t matter but I still had everyone send me estimates. If an estimate took too long to arrive, I called the office and told them that this wasn’t just any old job and that God saw everything.

Whenever I got overly worked up or started yelling too loudly, I felt Sulfia’s cool hand on my shoulder. I understood that my screaming disturbed her, and I settled down. Sulfia liked quiet, and I did everything I could to make her comfortable.

I wasn’t going to be able to inter the urn. The idiots who designed graves just didn’t understand what I wanted. Even for several thousand euros. I had the feeling that they didn’t want to understand. It was the first time that I failed at something, but Sulfia said it didn’t matter.

I had to admit she was right — the urn was beautiful and easy to handle. She didn’t need a grave. I just left her on the nightstand next to a bouquet of white roses. I bought fresh roses every few days. Dieter said nervously that it was illegal. I told him where he could stick those regulations.

I kept working. I had to take care of my granddaughter. She was now an orphan and I had to replace her mother and father. Not that it was anything new for me. But something had changed. Before I had spoken only for myself, but now I was doing everything on Sulfia’s behalf.

I spoke in Sulfia’s voice. And what was even weirder about it was that I spoke with Sulfia’s tone of voice. One morning when Aminat didn’t want to get out of bed despite the fact that she had to go to school, I didn’t say, “Go on like that and you’ll end up in the gutter! Your German classmates got out of bed hours ago!”

Instead I said, “Sure, stay in bed, my child.”

I bit my tongue as I soon as I said it. What would become of her if I continued to react like that — another Sulfia?

I started to form another sentence that would have featured the word “gutter,” but before I got it out I realized I had no desire to say it. Instead I went to the kitchen and made a cup of strong, sweet hot chocolate and put it next to Aminat’s bed.

“Stay in bed, my child,” I said. “You’ve been through so much in the last few years.”

I practically choked on my words, and it took a tremendous effort of will not to let a few other things pass my lips before I went off to work.

John had adopted the habit of locking himself in his bedroom as soon as I arrived to clean his place. And sure enough, the first time I returned after my break, he hid himself from me. I didn’t knock on his bedroom door. Actually I didn’t even think about him. I didn’t think about anything. I just mopped and wiped and felt quite peaceful. Which is why I jumped when he suddenly asked me with a furrowed brow where I had been hiding.

I continued to clean but told him as I did about the dress Sulfia had on in the coffin and the bouquet of flowers I had put in her hand so she would look like a princess. John followed me around the room. When I turned on the vacuum cleaner, he pulled the plug out of the wall complaining that he couldn’t hear me over the noise.

When I was finished he asked whether he could drive me home. I figured I had talked enough, said “No thanks,” and took the bus.

Obviously it wasn’t good to spoil Aminat. I had always known that. And it was no good that Sulfia had convinced me to let the girl get away with everything. Now Aminat, whose life had been a rollercoaster ride, spiraled downward. But Sulfia held me back from doing anything about it. Instead I acted like Sulfia, watching and sighing pitifully.

Aminat was held back in school. My talk with the rector and my assertions about how gifted she was had no effect. “Just leave it,” said Sulfia. I could see the gutter before my eyes: dark, filthy, stinking. I told Sulfia that at this rate Aminat would never be a renowned doctor. Sulfia shrugged her shoulders in her own inimitable way.

I went in to see Aminat, who’d been lying in bed reading comics for days.

“Aminat, my granddaughter and daughter of your mother Sulfia, if you don’t get up this very instant and try to fill in some of the gaps in your knowledge, you will never become a renowned doctor. You will never have a line of patients waiting to enter your gleaming practice that smells of disinfectant.”

“I don’t care,” said Aminat.

I elbowed Sulfia aside.

“But I care, and I want you to be a doctor!”

“If it’s so important to you, do it yourself,” said Aminat, turning the page in her comic book.

I thought about it for two days and five hours. Aminat was right: my problem had always been that I undertook too many things for other people. Then they didn’t do their part. Of course, I could follow through on anything I undertook on my own behalf. So I went to the basement and retrieved the old suitcase where I kept a lot of important documents. They were all in Russian and had all yellowed, but the official stamps were all still legible and in decent shape.

I took a blue plastic folder — labeled “biology”—from Aminat’s desk and carefully put all of my credentials into it. I took this portfolio to the offices of the internal medicine specialist whose place I cleaned.

His receptionist couldn’t understand what I wanted even after a long conversation. But then a side door opened and I saw the metal frames of my client’s glasses. I walked into the room where he was, sat down, and was soon telling him about my plan. He was going to secure me a place at medical school.

He laughed for a second and then was serious again. He said I didn’t have the educational qualifications. When I objected that I was a trained educator, he countered that we might as well put my old Russian credentials in a pipe and smoke them. I had to have a German high school diploma, and “at my advanced age” getting one would be “an ambitious challenge.” I said I definitely wanted to work at a hospital.

He had an idea, he said, though he wasn’t sure whether it was what I had in mind. He took his glasses off and polished them with a cloth, fidgeting around. Then he said he couldn’t make any promises but that he would be willing to lobby for a job for me as a cleaning woman at the hospital where he was affiliated.