The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Tartar cuisine

Dieter died the day after Aminat was crowned.

It would be blasphemous to suggest that it actually suited me. But the timing really wasn’t bad. I had to take care of everything, and I was happy to get out of the house. Lena and Kalganow somehow managed to be in every nook of the house at every moment — her giggling, him wheezing — and I couldn’t just lock myself in my room all day. John trimmed the roses, looked at the clouds, and made tea. I didn’t ask him whether the company of a poorly raised Israeli and a slobbering old Russian suited him. The smile I’d always thought I detected lurking in his face had recently come tentatively to the surface. To keep myself occupied, I organized Dieter’s funeral and cleaned up his apartment. When I went into his bedroom, in which the stench of sickness and fear still hung, I opened a drawer and found a pile of handwritten notes.

The label on the first notebook said: “Tartar Cuisine.” I opened it. “Pechleve — a layered dessert,” I read. Dieter’s writing was small, curvy, and the letters were rounded — if I didn’t know better, I would have taken it for a woman’s handwriting. The neat script was easy to read. After the first few sentences, images of my old life flooded my mind. I had up to that day never believed that Dieter had really been travelling around the Soviet Union to research ethnic cuisines. But now I held the proof in my hands. Descriptions of his wanderings through half-derelict villages, sketches of landscapes, and, first and foremost, recipes. “Kystybyi, also called kuzikmak, is a sort of pierogi made out of unleavened dough.” “Katyk denotes curdled milk that the Tartars heat for a long time in a clay pot. It is sometimes finished with the addition of cherries or red beets.” “For the filling of gubadia, a baked layered pie made for festive occasions, they sometimes use qurut, a uniquely processed dried yoghurt.”

In one of the notebooks I found the angelic photo of Aminat that I’d sent Dieter many years ago, in another life.

Tartar words were sprinkled in among the notes. He had tried to learn the language and maintained a kind of vocabulary book:

Bola — child

Singil — little sister

Oschyjsym kila — I’m hungry

Sin bik sylu — you’re very pretty

Schajtan — demon

Ischak (as in, you’re as stubborn as an ischak) — donkey

And then the note: “It is proving practically impossible to write a cookbook about Tartar cuisine.”

I shoved all the notebooks into a large duffel bag that I found on top of the dresser, gray with dust and cobwebs.

I would like to have left Dieter’s apartment and forgotten it forever. But I wasn’t one to run away. I bore a share of the responsibility — after all, I’d lived here, and Dieter had no next of kin aside from me. I worked quickly, sorting, stuffing nonessential things into plastic bags, taking them downstairs. I arranged for the removal of the bulky items, sold Dieter’s leather sofa and matching chairs to the Turkish neighbor, and washed the windows.

I’d always thought Dieter’s dishes were appalling, but I found some real treasures in his kitchen cabinets — two heavy cast-iron woks, a genuine copper kazan, various African clay pots, all apparently unused, covered with cobwebs. I wrapped it all in newspaper and put it in a box to take with me. The kitchen furniture I sold very cheaply to the landlord, who as a favor then agreed to help me carry my box down to the car.

From that point on, Lena and Kalganow didn’t bother me at all. I stopped asking when they planned to leave. I trembled with curiosity about Dieter’s notes.

I sat on a silk cushion on the floor and read. I had no idea that Dieter had written so many things about Aminat — the story of her life, beginning long before her birth, beginning, in fact, with my story. I had no idea Dieter knew so much about my life. I couldn’t remember telling him about my family. Maybe it had been Sulfia who told him about things I hadn’t even talked about with her. Maybe talking with her hadn’t been necessary — maybe she had the stories in her blood the same way Aminat had Tartar words in hers.

I came across Aminat’s drawings, which Dieter had carefully taped into a notebook. I ran my finger along sentences that Aminat was supposed to have said as a child. I read about Dieter’s efforts to distinguish — with German precision — Tartar cuisine from other ethnic groups’ national cuisines and his failure to be able to do so. About his exasperation when he realized the subject of his interest was influenced by the surrounding Bashkir, Kazak, Uzbek, Azerbaijan, and Yakut cuisines and that the boundaries blurred. It must have been something very difficult for him to deal with.

I pored over sketches and maps in which he had tried to track the spread of various Tartar offshoots during bygone periods about which nobody cared anymore. I suspect he may have just made some of it up. And as usual, he had devoted the most energy — not to mention ink — to the least important things.

John entered the room and sat down on a chair nearby. I didn’t hold it against him that he hadn’t been able to bring Aminat to me. It was the only thing so far that he hadn’t pulled off — and he still had a better success rate than God.