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Yulia finds Leon Rubinstein distractingly, almost annoyingly attractive. She wants to take him out on a date to some relatively less dingy cafeteria. She wants to kiss his beard and bite his thighs. She wants to talk to him about his papers. It’s a little embarrassing how starry-eyed she is about this energetic little paleozoologist.
Mostly, though, she wants him to try kazan chai.
“Arno likes it,” she tells him.
“Arno’s favourite dish is something called bread soup,” Rubinstein parries, and sighs. “But - anything for you, Yulechka.”
Wolfie addresses her as Dr Beshikchi. Arno calls her Yulia Safatovna. She likes these names; they confer respect. But she feels a special frisson of pleasure at being addressed as Yulechka, like she’s still twenty-five, carefree and fresh out of university.
Or maybe it is merely because she enjoys the sound of it on Rubinstein’s lips.
They walk over to her tent, where a small blackened steel pot is simmering away over a fire. It has to be boiling. If a little bit of skin comes off the roof of your mouth when you take the first sip, you’re doing it right.
Yulia gets on her knees, lifts the sun-heated blue tarpaulin flap, and anchors it on a tree branch. Then she makes a gesture of invitation, and Rubinstein comes in and settles down on the floor mat, his legs sticking out towards the fire. His eyes, an unusual sweet, mellow honey brown, search the interior of her makeshift quarters with curiosity.
He makes a slight noise of recognition and reaches out for the ceramic blue hamsa hanging off the ceiling. “Hand of Miriam,” he says.
“Fatima qol,” Yulia agrees.
“I have one of my own somewhere.” He smiles at her and then looks down at his own thick, calloused hands. “I try not to take it out too much, though. In the first place, I’m prone to losing things; and then one can never be too careful. It’d be some pretty rotten luck if it got me in trouble, eh?”
He laughs like it’s the funniest thing, and she laughs with him. It is pretty funny - a ward against the Evil Eye that attracts the Third Section’s evil eye. A bad luck good luck charm.
Yulia fishes a piala out of her backpack - she brings them everywhere, not on account of any particular cultural attachment, but simply because she finds them more convenient than metal cups and plates - and dips it into the pot. The kazan chai is an appetising thick, creamy yellow with little pools of fat floating on the surface. She takes an experimental sip and finds herself satisfied: the consistency of the greasy, salty, herby mixture is perfect. “If you put a teaspoon in the pot, it should stick straight up,” was what her mother used to say. Yulia doesn’t have a teaspoon handy, but she fancies that her chai would pass the test.
Something occurs to her, however, that she didn’t think about before.
“It’s got lamb fat in it, though,” she says, turning to Rubinstein.
“So?”
“Wouldn’t that make it, uh,” she wants to say haram, “wouldn’t it break the- because it’s got milk and animal fat, you know?”
“You mean that it’s treif?” Rubinstein looks up at her, his crow’s-feet crinkling with laughter. “It takes someone with a weaker survival instinct than mine to adhere to kashrut under the Skein, Yulechka.”
She shrugs a little, wrapping both hands around the piala. The thick clay is pleasantly warm against her palms. “We still have food rules in auls. Of course, it’s easier there, when you raise your own cattle. But I’m not observant, and it’s been a long time since I’ve met other tatarlar, so I’m not sure how they handle it when they’re not in a community of their own.”
Rubinstein shakes his head. “If I eat only kosher food, die of malnutrition, and come before Hashem, he will not say: you’re a good boy, Leon, you’ve never broken halakha. He will say: Leon, you’re an idiot. I didn’t give you kashrut so that you’d kill yourself with it.”
They’re a fine couple - two lapsed children of dying faiths. But this is how they survive: by hiding. The scarlet wave of the Skein rolls over them and still they live, persistent like wormwood in the wake of a wildfire.
“A clever lesson from a clever man,” she says, and offers him her piala. He takes it from her hands, the tips of his ears growing red at the compliment. With a jolt of delight, she imagines how much redder he’d get if she kissed him.
His mouth touches the red lacquered rim where hers did. The hot cream leaves a glistening white line on his beard as he takes a deep swig.
"It's wonderful," he says, sincerely, and her heart beats faster.