Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [38]
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