Free The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky Page A

he was Tartar, he never wanted to talk about it. He used to say it was all arbitrary, the categorization of people as Russians or Ukrainians, Jews or Gypsies, Uzbeks, Bashkirs, Azeris, Armenians, Chechens, Moldavians . . . or Tartars. He was born in Kazan, but he never liked the place. He had a dream: that all people would mix together, stay far away from their ancestral homes, and cast off their cultural roots as they would so much dead weight. He was of the opinion that all these various people were discriminated against.
    In our first few years together he spoke a lot about that. I listened to him—I knew how a wife had to behave. The most important part was not to point out to the husband what stupid things he said. A woman’s tolerance in this area was key to a stable marriage. I understood all of this in theory, and then passed muster in practice. I was the perfect spouse.
    We were a nice couple at the beginning. Both of us handsome, slim, healthy, with sparkling eyes. Back then I got pregnant constantly; it was a problem. We had no money and no apartment, despite his job. He was a communist idealist, not one who made sure to look after his family. In his opinion we shouldn’t be any better off that anyone else. I stopped counting the number of innocent souls I sent back to heaven as a result. But it wasn’t any more than anyone else.
    At some point my husband brought home condoms. My influence on him was having some effect: slowly but steadily he began to build a career. He started as a simple worker, then he became active in the union. His ambition grew, he continued to climb and be promoted, and he had access to things other people hadn’t even heard of.
    Like these condoms, for instance. They prevented children reliably. In fact, they prevented the act that led to children. They were rare and valuable. After use I washed them and hung them to dry. I let them dangle from the clothesline in our room. I had the feeling that the longer they hung there, the less frequently my husband made advances on me. Back then I was tired and gaunt, I was studying pedagogy and working nights as a janitor in an all-day kindergarten. My enthusiasm for the marriage slowly but steadily dwindled.
    Then came the prospect of our two rooms in the communal apartment. The next soul that knocked on my door, I would let live. It was Sulfia. I never asked myself what would have become of the children I sent back to heaven. God forgave me. He gave me Sulfia, and that was something, I suppose—he could have given me a complete cripple.
    When Sulfia was born, my husband remained unmoved. He didn’t like her Tartar name. Unlike me, he had a large family full of Tartar names. I had nobody except my cousin Rafaella.
    Kalganow wanted to name our daughter Maria. But no Maria was going to enter my house. There were flocks of little Maschas wandering around, populating the kindergartens and the playgrounds.
    My husband didn’t show much interest in our daughter, especially after I named her Sulfia. And when he did things with her, for the most part he made mistakes. He nearly dropped her when he held her. And with Sulfia, it was clear that if she were dropped even once, it was over. She was scrawny and weak. She could spend hours on end just staring into space doing nothing. I’d never seen a child like that.
    “What’s wrong with our daughter?” I asked my husband.
    “Leave her alone,” he answered. “Maybe she’s thinking.”
    “Thinking?” I said. “That’s not an activity.”
    That’s not to say I never thought about things. But to do so I didn’t need to sit down, fold my hands in my lap, and put a faraway look on my face. It was something I did alongside other things. I had to work and raise my daughter. Nobody helped me.
    I didn’t want to work with kids; Sulfia was enough for me. I didn’t want to work with students at a vocational school, either. They had nothing in their heads. I found a good position at the teachers’