The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

Sanatorium for children with lung conditions

I didn’t tell Aminat that she’d be spending three months in a sanatorium for children with lung conditions. Saying too much often hurt as much as it helped. On the prearranged day, I packed Aminat’s underwear and clothes in a backpack and dressed her warmly. The sanatorium was in an old villa in a pine forest — the villa had at one time belonged to the enemy class. We had to take a train two hours north and climb out at a tiny, forgotten station.

It was very cold. Aminat held my hand. We walked for half an hour through the woods before we reached the gates of the sanatorium. I always managed to find the shortest route wherever I went, even when I didn’t know the area. I never got lost, not in the city, not in the forest. I also always knew when and where buses went, and could feel them coming toward a bus stop before they were in sight.

“Why is it so horribly quiet here?” asked Aminat.

“Because,” I said.

I knew these new surroundings must have seemed very unfamiliar to Aminat. She was a city kid born and bred. I’d never taken her to a forest before, just an occasional visit to the park. She’d never seen trees like this, packed so tightly together. For her entire life, the smoking chimneys of factories had decorated the horizon. When she lay in bed, traffic noise lulled her to sleep.

Aminat looked around. Her eyes had narrowed to slits, a sure sign that she did not approve. And she didn’t even know yet that she had to stay here for three months, all by herself, among strangers, without her grandmother.

I opened the gate, climbed a stone staircase to the door, and entered a dark vestibule where children’s jackets hung from a row of hooks. The walls were covered in a faded ladybug print. Something clanged in the distance.

“Let’s go home,” said Aminat adamantly.

I freed my hand from her grip, took her by her collar, and led her down the long hallway to a glass door, behind which children with blank looks on their faces sat around little tables eating from metal dishes — which explained the clanging. I handed over Aminat, her backpack, and a note from her doctor to the first member of the sanatorium staff we ran across.

The woman wore a gray smock that had faded from repeated washings. She had the face of a supervisor. She read the doctor’s note through and said, “Aminat Kalganova? Ah, yes.”

She took my Aminat by the hand and led her away. Aminat went with her obediently, like a good little girl, but kept turning around mid-stride to look back at me. It went much more smoothly than I’d feared. Though I suppose Aminat must have thought that when she returned, I’d be there to take her back home. Oh well.

I waited until the two of them were out of sight and then quickly left. I didn’t manage to get out of hearing range quickly enough, though. Out on the forest path Aminat’s desperate, angry screams reached me.

Three weeks later I got a call informing me that Aminat had contracted scarlet fever and had to be picked up. I took the train to the forest station and followed the path I now knew back to the sanatorium.

Aminat was sitting in a glass cell with a bed and nightstand in it. Here she could be kept away from the other children, explained the director of the sanatorium. She was ready to hold me personally responsible for the outbreak of scarlet fever that would have resulted if Aminat had managed to infect the other kids.

Aminat sat on the bed in a t-shirt and tights and peered through the glass wall at all the people going past her. At first she didn’t recognize me. Her black eyes passed over me and then the director of the sanatorium. Then her eyes returned to me and began to sparkle.

Aminat threw her entire body against the glass pane. I saw her white teeth as her mouth formed a hopeful smile, pressed flat against the wall. The blotches on her face I noticed only later.

We entered the glass cell and Aminat jumped on me, wrapped her arms and legs around me, and squeezed so hard I could barely breathe. I patted her on the back, saying, “There, there.”

I tried to put her down.

“So?” said the director triumphantly.

Without another word the director sat down on the bed, clamped Aminat between her legs, and lifted up her t-shirt.

Suddenly I was looking at countless tiny red bumps that formed constellations and whole galaxies on Aminat’s back. I put on my glasses and bent down. Among the many things I knew was that scarlet fever looked very different from this.

“She’s just had a reaction to something she ate,” I said. “That’s not scarlet fever.”

“Do you have medical training?” asked the director.

She had medical training but couldn’t distinguish scarlet fever from hives. Or she didn’t wish to distinguish them. I suspected that already. Aminat was not an easy child to deal with at home, and probably not here either.

“Take her to your district clinic,” she said.

“You’re going to hear from us,” I said as we left.

I carried Aminat’s backpack. The paperwork with the doctor’s assessment that the Kalganova child was suffering from a highly infectious disease that threatened her life, and that she must be quarantined, I ripped into pieces and let flutter off between the pines.

Aminat held my hand and skipped through the snow. Her smile spread across her entire face and she recounted her three weeks in the sanatorium.

It was grim. She had to sleep in a room with fifty other children. For the first few days she had been unable to eat from the metal dishes because they made such a shrill noise when the spoon scraped across them. Before bed, all the children had to wash their feet together. The towels were always folded a certain way: longwise, longwise again, longwise one more time and then crossways. One of the staff members constantly told horror stories. Almost every morning Aminat woke up in a strange bed next to another child and didn’t know how she’d gotten there. She never, ever wanted to hear stories again. They got shots every day with needles so long they could have gone all the way through their arms and out the other side. Any children who wanted to go to the bathroom at night had to use a chamber pot that was emptied only the next morning. Aminat had just yesterday made her first friend, a girl who had received a package of candies from her parents and shared them all with Aminat. In the middle of the night she had begun to feel itchy, and in the morning Aminat had been asked whether she had ever had scarlet fever. That was the happiest moment of the entire three weeks for her because I soon came and picked her up.

We reached the forgotten little train station and sat down on a bench. The train that would take me and my little girl out of the forest and back home wouldn’t arrive for an hour. The sun peeked over the tops of the trees and a few anemic rays brushed our cheeks. We held our faces up to the sky.

“Aminat, be quiet,” I begged. I was getting a headache from all her jabber. I’d forgotten over these weeks just how much she talked.

“We had buckwheat porridge almost every night,” Aminat continued.

“Should I tell you a story instead?” I interrupted.

“No,” she cried.

I have rarely seen her as happy as she was on that day. But as far as stories went, it was clear: she wanted nothing more to do with them.