Once she’d washed and thoroughly dried them off, she applied a thin coat of olive oil to the steel of her knives, meat cleaver, and scissors before wrapping each one up in a piece of cloth and placing them in their respective drawers.
Timur Bey was still on his feet, holding the wedding ring out to Cemile Abla.
“Please sit down, Timur Bey,” she said.
“Please don’t say no,” said Timur Bey.
“I can never say no, I just can’t.”
The man’s face suddenly lit up. “So that means you say yes. I haven’t misunderstood, right? You accept?”
“If only you had chosen someone worthy of your grandmother’s wedding ring. It would have been better for both of us, really.”
“I’m sure my grandmother would have gotten along with you wonderfully, if she were still alive,” said Timur Bey. He then plopped himself into the armchair, as if he’d only just realized he was standing up. Reaching for his tea, he seemed perplexed by the ring in his hand, not knowing where he should put it. But, thank goodness, he did not stand up again; instead he reached out, extending the ring to Cemile Abla from the armchair.
“I know from the films on TV how it’s supposed to be done nowadays, but... such things really don’t suit me. I apologize. The truth is, I was planning to get down on my knees to propose, but now that I’m here I just...”
Cemile Abla stared ahead. It would all be so easy, if only she knew a way to say it without hurting the man. But at the moment, she couldn’t think of anything at all.
“Please, I beg you, don’t turn me down, don’t do this to me,” he said. “I swear on my honor that I will do everything in my power to make you happy. Who knows, maybe you’ll grow to like me once you get to know me better.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that you are a very good, kind person, Timur Bey.”
“Besides, the important thing is to have a life partner to share your loneliness with, isn’t that right?”
Cemile Abla shook her head faintly, as if to say, I suppose so. The more the man talked, the more uneasy she became, and the greater her desire to open the windows and take a long, deep breath. She was horrified at the ring so stubbornly forced upon her, dangling there beneath her nose. As if completely unaware of how odd he was acting, Timur Bey remained still as a statue with his arm in the air, the faintly trembling ring held between his thumb and forefinger. Cemile Abla panicked at the thought that his arm might grow frozen in that position, remain airborne like that forever. She couldn’t stand it any longer, and she quickly grabbed the ring, thus rescuing the man from his perilous position.
Unable to come up with a better idea, she politely placed the wedding ring on the edge of the table.
“We should celebrate,” the man said.
“But you haven’t drunk your tea,” Cemile Abla quickly objected. “It must be ice cold by now.”
The man downed the tea in a single gulp and excitedly began making plans. “Let’s go out for a nice dinner, if you’d like. Look, we’re in luck, there’s a full moon out tonight. We have to celebrate, and we have to do it right. We can’t go just anywhere. Let’s go to your favorite restaurant...”
She had to wait a few more minutes before the medicine began to take effect. But Cemile Abla was tired of talking. “Have you ever thought about what happens to us after we’re dead, Timur Bey?” she finally asked, desperately wanting to change the subject.
Though thrown off guard by the question, Timur Bey did his best to respond, as courtesy demands. “Unfortunately, I’m not really able to perform the duties of our religion as well as I should. But still—”
“I think it’s going to be wonderful. We’ll float in an endless sky like white balloons. Now and then we’ll come together and form great big, even more beautiful clouds, then we’ll split up into small pieces again and glide off in different directions. We’ll wander in circles around a soothing light, and nothing will have a beginning or an end.”
Timur Bey struggled to keep his eyes open, fighting the dead weight of his eyelids. He tried to spring to his feet, but failed. When he asked in a barely audible voice where the bathroom was, Cemile Abla got worried. If the man locked himself in the bathroom, she would have a nasty situation on her hands. She would have to break down the door. But Timur Bey was already on his feet, staggering toward the dining room door.
“I just need to wash my face,” he mumbled. “It’s just because I’m so happy, I guess...”
As soon as he reached the hallway, he collapsed to the floor. Cemile Abla, who was just a few paces behind him, took a deep breath of relief. How nice that Timur Bey had already made it halfway to the bathtub all by himself.
Two hours later, as she once again wrapped her knives, scissors, and meat cleaver up in their cloths and returned them to their drawers, three large, black trash bags stood in front of the kitchen door.
The mother of the first of the two stubborn groom candidates had somehow gotten Cemile Abla’s telephone number and called less than a week after her son went missing. Her voice undulated with concern; she found the situation humiliating, that she had to talk with Cemile Abla under these conditions, when they hadn’t even met, but she had no other choice. “Well, I tell you, I’ve been really worried myself, ma’am,” said Cemile Abla. “I made all these preparations. I thought to myself that a man like your son, a man from such a good family, would at least call and let me know that he couldn’t make it. But unfortunately, I haven’t heard from him at all. And I had to give all those pastries and cakes to the neighbors’ kids.”
That night, she thought that she’d be able to carry the bags, which stood lined up in front of the kitchen door, by herself; she might not be able to carry them all at once, but certainly she was strong enough to take them out one by one. But her knees were so sore that she gave up after dragging the first bag down the hill. “There must be an easier way to do this,” she mumbled, when the solution struck her — Captain Hasan. She headed down the shore and found him sitting on a stool just on the other side of the pier, puffing on a cigarette as he gazed upon the lights of distant ships. Just as she had guessed he would, Captain Hasan got up from his seat without asking a single question, without waiting for any explanation, in fact, without even the slightest glint of curiosity in his eyes. He ground his cigarette beneath his foot and followed Cemile Abla over to the bottom of the hill. First they carried the bag she had brought down to the captain’s boat, then they went to her home and grabbed the other two bags. Even Captain Hasan had run short of breath; using the sleeve of his shirt, he inconspicuously wiped away the beads of sweat that had gathered on his brow from all the climbing.