The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky Read Free Book Online

liquid that, especially in the bags, looked like urine. I far preferred the tea fungus I’d received from a co-worker. All you had to do was feed it regularly with tea and sugar, and you could be sure the drink made from it was clean.
    My son-in-law reemerged, this time wearing a greasy bathrobe. I still wasn’t sure what to make of him. He poured me a bit of cold tea with the tea leaves swimming in it, and then filled the cup with hot water. As he did so, he asked whether my heart was doing better and how it had been at the sanatorium.
    Now I understood everything.
    Sulfia, the little dung beetle, had hidden me from him. She’d banished me by assigning me diseases and various places of residence. It certainly wasn’t a solution that showed much foresight.
    My heart beat steadily, slowly, and dependably, and had been doing so for years. For the most part it was other people who got sick. But I decided to play along with Sulfia’s lazy game.
    “It’s doing well again,” I said. “And did you enjoy the wedding?”
    “Oh yes, very much,” said my son-in-law with glazed eyes. “You know, we’re very happy at the moment. Since little Anja finally came to live with us, Soja has absolutely blossomed. It’s so wonderful you supported my wife in difficult times, but now she wants to handle things on her own. She wants our child to be with us. Any normal mother would want to have her child with her, isn’t that right?”
    I breathed in and then exhaled. Since when was Aminat “our child”? Since when was Sulfia a “normal mother”?
    “But Anja misses her grandmother very much,” my son-in-law told me. “Recently they had chocolates in kindergarten for one of the children’s birthday. Anja brought her chocolate home and said we should cut it into three pieces. One for her, one for Soja, and one for grandma. She wanted to save the piece for grandma. Obviously we didn’t do that—it was just a few crumbs.”
    “Soja?” I said, taken aback. He’d already mentioned the name, but I didn’t really understand who he meant.
    “Yes, Soja, my wife.”
    “Ah, right.” I said. So it’s Soja now.
    It turned out they had two bedrooms, not one. All to themselves. Just the three of them. This wasn’t some foreign paradise. Who here had a huge apartment for three people? Not even Kalganow, who was chairman of his union. But that was really his own fault: he didn’t want us to live better than others, and so he did far too little to make our lives easier. If not for me, he’d probably still be living in a room full of bunk beds in some institutional building.
    I looked closely at my son-in-law. How had Sulfia managed to land someone like this? Had she put something in his IV drip?
    “When I awoke from the anesthesia and saw Soja, I thought she must be an angel,” said my son-in-law, answering my silent question. He lifted the bottom of his robe and stuck out his leg. Fresh scars as pink as a piglet glistened between curly hairs.
    “I understand,” I said and was happy when he hid his limbs again.
    “Come visit us on Sunday,” I said. “I’d like to have you over for supper, the whole family, all three of you. I cook really well. We’re Tartars, you know?”
    My son-in-law blinked. “Sure, it would be a pleasure.”
    The sun clung to his wheat-colored eyelashes.
     
    They didn’t come on Sunday. I was just about to start cooking. I had thought a lot about what to make. Preferably a typical Tartar dish, something my son-in-law had never tried before. The problem was that I myself had not been raised on Tartar cuisine. After the heroic death of my parents in 1945, the last year of the Great Patriotic War, my brother and I had landed in an orphanage, and there we mainly got barley soup. Of course, I could cook well despite that—I taught myself later. But there was no grandmother to introduce me to the fine points of our culinary tradition. I never saw my grandmother Aminat. I just heard about what a tenacious