The second one was a handsome, bright-eyed, bushy tailed man. He was at least ten years younger than Cemile Abla, well off, and apparently had a hankering for older women. So much so that by their second meeting he had two plane tickets in his pocket and had already booked a room at a hotel in Bodrum. “Are we going to stay in the same room?” Cemile Abla had asked. Was it such a bad idea for them to slip under a blanket and get to know one another better for a few days, seeing as they were about to share the same pillow for the rest of their lives? The worst part about it was that the man’s smoky voice and the sparse hair on his fingers up to the first joint actually turned her on. “I’m not going anywhere until you say yes,” the young candidate had announced. When he smiled, his lower lip protruded ever so slightly.
Today’s guest didn’t look much like a mama’s boy. And he had no intention of locking Cemile Abla up in a hotel suite or anything of the sort. He was very polite; his first wife had died of breast cancer (—What a pity /—Yes, it was truly a pity); he was Nalan’s brother’s army buddy, so he wasn’t really a stranger. His eyes were red, as if he cried all the time (—I think I need to change my glasses prescription /—Oh my, yes, you should get that looked at right away); he was a retired history teacher (—Yet you’re still so young /—But I just can’t deal with teenagers anymore); he suffered from gastritis and ulcers; he couldn’t have salt because of his blood pressure; and he was very lonely.
Cemile Abla was too happy with her own life to settle for alleviating some guy’s loneliness. The thought of growing old and dying in a home full of stomach pills and history books gave her goosebumps. (—What’s the matter, Cemile Hanım? Are you okay? /—Oh, it’s nothing. Just a little chill.) Besides, she’d made her decision as soon as he told her that he hadn’t had a bite of fish since he was a child, and that he held his nose whenever he walked by a fish stand.
“You see, I had this accident once when my mother tried to force me to swallow fish oil,” he’d explained, and just as he was about to go into the details, Cemile Abla excused herself and went to the kitchen.
Cemile Abla had long ago reconciled herself to the fact that she would never be able to find a husband like her father; and deep inside she was relieved about this. But at the same time, she didn’t want to be rude to her matchmaker friends, or the eager potentials who came to visit. At some point in the middle of their first meeting, she would get lost in thought and weigh the possible match thoroughly, sincerely, without prejudice, and with a clear head. But there was no need to waste any time considering the possibility of a man who couldn’t tolerate the smell of fish.
Timur Bey (—My father was a great admirer of Tamberlaine, that’s how I got my name. /—Won’t you have another piece of cake?) was so excited that he failed to notice Cemile Abla’s evasive answers, her distress, her constant escapes to the kitchen. His mind was elsewhere: He had one foot in the grave, he was certain that this was his last chance, so he had promised himself that he wouldn’t give up until he had resolved this matter once and for all.
When Cemile Abla returned from the kitchen with fresh cups of tea, she found Timur Bey standing there expectantly. He took a small box covered in red velvet from his pocket, opened it with his thin fingers, and removed a diamond ring.
“It was my grandmother’s. My late wife, may she rest in peace, wore it all the time, and I hope that you, too, will like it.”
“Timur Bey, I’m shocked,” said Cemile Abla. She placed the tray on the coffee table. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Please. Please, I beg you, don’t say no.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “If you reject me, I don’t know what I will do, I don’t know how I will survive. Believe me, I couldn’t bear it, I don’t think I could possibly go on. I’ve waited so long, only the thought of the day I would once again give this ring to a woman I love has kept me going. But I swear, I’m at the end of my rope. If you don’t... life for me will be meaningless...” He took the fingers of Cemile Abla’s left hand into his own and squeezed them so hard he nearly broke them.
Cemile Abla stared ahead blankly, hoping that this response would put an end to the conversation.
“Forgive me...” said Timur Bey. “I’m so terribly excited, I don’t know what I have to say to convince you. But I can tell you this — I’ll talk for as long as it takes, for hours if I must. I’ll do whatever, whatever it takes...”
Waiting for the cake in the oven to rise, Cemile Abla laid her knives out on the marble counter, which smelled of detergent. She still used her father’s set of knives. Those ebony-handled, steel blades had become an extension of her own body; they were more familiar to her than her own hands, her own fingers. She laid the five knives out according to size, the smallest of them the length of her pinky and as thin as a razor, the largest bulky enough to split a soda can in half. The chopping knife which she used to cut the heads off of larger fish she placed lengthwise at the top of the row. Next to the chopping knife she set the scissors that she used to remove their fins; they were sharp enough to cut off a tree branch as thick as her wrist. She caressed each of them, a sweet shiver of pleasure running through her as she felt their metal upon her flesh, and then like a nurse preparing for surgery, she conducted a final inspection of each.
She could see the towers of Hisar from her kitchen window. Who knows what went through the minds of the war-weary janissaries as they leaned upon those rocks and rolled their cigarettes five centuries ago, she thought. Was there a woman watching them from behind the tulle curtains of her kitchen window on the hill behind them? Was there a seaside road for the carriages, or did fields covered with trampled grass extend to the edge of the Bosphorus? Could you look into the water and see the bottom back then? Did they ever imagine that years later the Turks would be selling tickets to “infidels” so that they could climb up those steep stairs and take in the view from above? That concerts would be held right in the center of the towers, behind those high walls? Or that college students would play backgammon and drink tea on the slope where heads used to roll? It frightened Cemile Abla the way everything changed, incessantly, over time. Actually, she was rather fond of the small innovations, like color television, markets selling hundreds of varieties of cheese, and hot water every day; she had no objections to these. But she knew that if things were simply left to take their course, soon there wouldn’t be anything familiar left around her, and she would find herself caught up in the wheels of a way of life utterly foreign to her. But she had no intention of changing her way of life just because everything else had changed.
She washed the bluefish thoroughly before laying it out on the counter. When she had to deal with a really big fish, first she’d cut it up into pieces in the bathtub, roll it in newspaper so as not to make a mess, and then carry it to the kitchen before she set about boning it. This time she wouldn’t have to go to so much trouble. She used the sharp side of the mid-sized knife to scrape off the fish’s scales. The crisp crunchy sound of the fins as she cut through them always gave her goose bumps on the back of her neck (according to her father, these very scissors were responsible for slicing off four fingers of a careless apprentice). She removed its gills. She made a shallow cut into its belly with the thin knife and plunged her hand in to remove its intestines. The gooey mass that clung to her fingers no longer made her sick to her stomach. With two swift swings of the meat cleaver she separated the head and the tail. She suddenly got the feeling that the fish was stirring beneath her hand, struggling to escape; but she just took a deep breath and proceeded with her task. Using her pinky and ring finger, which were still clean, she turned on the faucet and cleaned the blood clots off the fish. With the razor-sharp edge of the small knife she sliced the fish open along the length of its spine, from where its head had just been moments before, all the way down to its now absent tail. She used a large knife to pry into the fish horizontally and in a series of rapid movements separated out the bones, gathering them together in a pile on the side. Throwing out the bones of the fish would be a sin; she’d boil them for soup in the evening.