The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

by Alina Bronsky

  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.

  All the time in the world

  One evening John and I were driving to the opera because I had bought myself a new dress and John had gotten hold of tickets. I was caressing the silk in my lap and the leather of my new handbag when John stopped at a traffic light and I looked to the side. I saw an open door that led to a dimly lit room. It was a bar called Istanbul. The windows facing the street were filthy. There were a few tables and chairs out on the sidewalk. I tugged on John’s sleeve and said, “Can you pull over?”

  He parked in front of the bar. We had some time to kill. I took my handbag, hooked my arm through his, and we went into the place and sat down at a table. The table was covered with a layer of grease and I refused to touch it. John leaned back in his chair and said nothing.

  From a side room came a stocky man with a bushy black moustache and the eyes of a beaten dog.

  “Closed,” he said.

  I could tell from his nose that he was no Turk. He was an Azeri.

  “Closed,” he repeated.

  I didn’t move, and John asked for the wine menu.

  “CLOSED!” yelled the man. “NO WINE MENU! RESTAURANT CLOSED FOREVER!”

  We remained seated.

  He left, rustled around loudly in the next room, and finally returned with a bottle and three glasses.

  “You’re my last customers,” he said. “I’m broke.”

  We lifted our glasses and drank them down without clinking them together. We respected his sorrow. His moustache was already soaked. Then I stood up and went into the kitchen. It smelled like burnt oil and a spice that reminded me of the childhood I had never had. I found a rag and a nearly empty bottle of dishwashing liquid. I squeezed the last drops out of it and began to clean the cooking surfaces. The bar owner came and stood in the kitchen doorway. I heard him breathing but I didn’t turn around.

  He left me alone again and continued talking with John in the other room. I didn’t listen—accounting didn’t interest me. I moistened crusty stains and thought about Aminat. I’d read in some paper that she was pregnant by a Canadian who was actually an Indian whose tribe lived in Toronto. I didn’t believe anything anymore—but that I believed straight away. Aminat had never listened to me. She always did the opposite of what I wanted of her. Now, barring any unforeseen complications, she was going to give me an Indian great-grandchild. So be it, I thought—as long as they didn’t name the child Jacqueline.

  I had all the time in the world to wait for Aminat, and I wanted to make good use of that time. John always kept his word in the end. Pressuring him was unnecessary. Besides, I was a little afraid to ask him when Aminat would be coming back to me. I was afraid to hear that she had already been there and that I hadn’t noticed. I much preferred freeing metal countertops from encrusted bits of food and sending silent thanks to God, mechanically, out of courtesy—I mean, so he wouldn’t feel totally useless.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alina Bronsky was born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia. She moved to Germany when she was thirteen. Her debut novel, Broken Glass Park, was nominated for one of Europe’s most important literary awards, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, and was published by Europa Editions in 2010.