My Name is Red (33 page)

Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. I’m not saying we can’t relate to other souls overwhelmed by these feelings, on the contrary, we sympathize with them. What we cannot fathom is the odd disquiet our souls sink into at such times. This silent turmoil dims our intellects and dampens our hearts, usurping the place reserved for the true joy and sadness we ought to experience.

I had buried her father, thank God, hurried home from the funeral, and in a gesture of condolence, embraced my wife, Shekure; then suddenly, in a fit of tears she collapsed onto a large cushion with her children, who were glaring at me with spite, and I didn’t know what to do. Her misery coincided with my victory. In one fell swoop, I had wed the dream of my youth, freed myself from her father who belittled me, and become master of the house. Who would ever believe the sincerity of my tears? But believe me, it wasn’t like that. I truly wanted to grieve, but couldn’t: Enishte had always been more of a father to me than my real father. But since the meddlesome preacher who’d performed Enishte’s final ablution never stopped babbling, the rumor that my Enishte died under mysterious circumstances spread among the neighbors during the funeral-as I could sense standing in the courtyard of the mosque. I didn’t want my inability to cry to be interpreted negatively; I don’t have to tell you how real the fear of being branded “stonehearted” is.

You know how some sympathetic aunt will always attest that “he’s crying on the inside” to prevent someone like me from being banished from the group. I did in fact cry on the inside as I tried to hide in a corner from the busybody neighbors and distant relatives with their astonishing abilities to summon a downpour of tears; I thought about being the master of the house and whether I should somehow take charge of the situation, but just then there came a knock at the door. A moment of panic. Was it Hasan? Regardless, I wanted to save myself from this hell of whimpering at whatever cost.

It was a royal page, summoning me to the palace. I was stunned.

As I exited the courtyard, I found a mud-covered silver coin on the ground. Was I afraid to go to the palace? Yes, but I was also happy to be outside in the cold among the horses, dogs, trees and people. I thought I’d befriend the pageboy like those hopeless daydreamers who, believing they might sweeten the world’s cruelty before facing the executioner, attempt a lighthearted conversation with the dungeon guard about this and that, the beauties of life, the ducks afloat on the pond, or the strangeness of a cloud in the sky; but alas he disappointed me, proving a rather morose, pimply, tight-lipped youth. As I passed the Hagia Sophia, noticing with awe the slender cypresses delicately stretching into the hazy sky, it wasn’t the horror of dying right after marrying Shekure after all these years that made my hair stand on end. It was the injustice of dying at the hands of the palace torturers without having shared one good session of lovemaking with her.

We didn’t walk toward the terrifying spires of the Middle Gate, beyond which the torturers and the quick-handed executioners saw to their work, but toward the carpentry shops. As we headed between the granaries, a cat cleaning itself in the mud between the legs of a chestnut horse with steaming nostrils turned but didn’t look at us: The cat was preoccupied with its own filth, much as we were.

Behind the granaries, two figures, whose rank and affiliation I couldn’t determine from their green and purple uniforms, relieved the pageboy, and locked me into the dark room of a small house, which I could tell was new by the smell of fresh lumber. I knew locking a man up in a dark room was meant to arouse fear before torture; hoping they’d begin with the bastinado, I thought about the lies I could tell to save my hide. A crowd in the adjoining room seemed to be raising quite a ruckus.

There are most certainly those of you who can’t attribute my mocking and mirthful tone to that of a man on the verge of torture. But haven’t I mentioned I consider myself one of God’s luckier servants? And if the birds of fortune that alighted upon my head these last two days after years of deprivation aren’t proof enough, surely the silver coin I found outside the courtyard gate must be some indication.

Awaiting my torture, I was comforted by the silver coin and had complete faith it would protect me; I palmed it, rubbed it and repeatedly kissed this token of good fortune that Allah had sent me. But at whatever time they removed me from the darkness and brought me into the next room where I saw the Commander of the Imperial Guard and his bald-headed Croatian torturers, I knew the silver coin was worthless. The pitiless voice within me was absolutely correct: The coin in my pocket hadn’t come from God, but was one of those that I’d showered Shekure with two days ago-that the children overlooked. Hence, in the hands of my torturers, I had nothing in which to take refuge.

I didn’t even notice that tears began to fall from my eyes. I wanted to beg, but as in a dream, no sound issued from my mouth. I knew from wars, deaths and political assassination and torture (which I’d witnessed from afar) that life could be extinguished instantaneously, but I’d never experienced it this closely. They were going to strip me from this world just as they’d stripped off my garments.

They took off my vest and shirt. One of the executioners sat on me, driving his knees into my shoulders. Another placed a cage over my head with all the practiced elegance of a woman preparing food and began slowly turning the screw at its front. Nay, it wasn’t a cage, but rather a vise that gradually squeezed my head.

I screamed at the top of my lungs. I begged, but incoherently. I cried, mostly because my nerves had given out.

They stopped momentarily and asked: “Were you the one who killed Enishte Effendi?”

I took a deep breath: “Nay.”

They began to tighten the vise again. It was excruciating.

They asked again.

“Nay.”

“Who then?”

“I don’t know!”

I wondered if I should just tell them I’d killed him. The world spun pleasantly about my head. I was overcome with reluctance. I asked myself if I were growing accustomed to the pain. My executioners and I stayed still for a moment. I felt no pain, I was simply terrified.

Just as I decided from the silver coin in my pocket that they weren’t going to kill me, they suddenly released me. They removed the viselike contraption that had actually done little damage to my head. The executioner who’d pinned me down stood up without even a hint of apology. I donned my shirt and vest.

There passed a very long silence.

At the other end of the room, I saw Head Illuminator Osman Effendi. I went to him and kissed his hand.

“Don’t be concerned, my child,” he said to me. “They were just testing you.”

I knew at once that I’d found a new father to replace Enishte, may he rest in peace.

“Our Sultan has ordered that you not be tortured at this time,” said the Commander. “He deemed it appropriate for you to help Head Illuminator Master Osman find the rogue who’s been killing His miniaturists and the loyal servants preparing His manuscripts. You have three days in which to interrogate the miniaturists, scrutinize the illuminated pages they’ve made and find the sly culprit. The Sovereign is quite appalled by the rumors being spread by mischief makers about His miniaturists and illuminated manuscripts. Both the Head Treasurer Hazım Agha and I will help you find this scoundrel, as the Sultan has decreed. One of you has been very close to Enishte Effendi, and has thus heard his recitations and knows about the miniaturists who visited him at night and the story behind the book. The other is a great master who takes pride in knowing all the miniaturists of the workshop like the back of his hand. Within three days, if you fail to produce that swine along with the missing page he stole-about which much gossip is flying-it is Our Just Sultan’s express desire that you, my child Black Effendi, be the first to undergo torture and interrogation. Afterward, let there be no doubt, each of the other master miniaturists will have his turn.”

I could detect no secret gestures or signs between these two old friends, who’d worked together for years: Head Treasurer Hazım Agha, who commissioned the work, and Head Illuminator Master Osman Effendi, who received the funds and materials through him from the treasury.

“Everyone knows, whenever a crime is committed within Our Sultan’s wards, regiments and divisions, that the entire group is considered guilty until one among them is identified and turned in. A section that fails to name the murderer in its midst goes down in the judicial records as a ”division of murderers,“ including its officer or master, and is punished accordingly,” said the Commander. “Therefore, our Head Illuminator Master Osman will keep a sharp watch, scrutinize each of the illustrations with his penetrating gaze, uncover the devilry, ruse, mischief and instigation that has set the innocent miniaturists at each other’s throats, and remand the guilty party to the unwavering justice of the Refuge of the World, Our Sultan, thereby clearing the good name of his guild. To this end, we’ve ordered that whatsoever Master Osman may require be granted to him. My men are at this moment confiscating each of the manuscript pages that the master miniaturists have been illuminating in the privacy of their homes.”

The Commader of the Imperial Guard and the Head Treasurer reiterated Our Sultan’s decrees before leaving the two of us alone. Of course, Black was exhausted by fear, crying and the ruse of torture. He fell quiet like a boy. I knew I would come to like him, and I didn’t disturb his peace.

I had three days to examine the pages that the Commander’s men collected from the homes of my calligraphers and master miniaturists, and to determine who had worked on them. You all know how disgusted I was when I first laid eyes on the paintings prepared for Enishte Effendi’s book, and how Black had given them to the Head Treasurer Hazım Agha to clear his name. Granted, there must be something to those pages for them to arouse such violent disgust and hatred in a miniaturist like myself who’s devoted his life to artistry; merely bad art wouldn’t provoke such a reaction. So, with newfound curiosity, I began to reexamine the nine pages that the deceased fool had commissioned from the miniaturists who came to him under cover of night.

I saw a tree in the middle of a blank page, situated within poor Elegant’s border design and gilding work, which gracefully framed every page. I tried to conjure the scene and story to which the tree belonged. If I had told my illustrators to draw a tree, dear Butterfly, wise Stork and wily Olive would have begun by conceiving of this tree as part of a story so they might draw the image with confidence. If I were then to scrutinize that tree, I’d be able to determine which tale the illustrator had in mind based on its branches and leaves. This, however, was a miserable, solitary tree; behind it, there was a quite high horizon line that hearkened back to the style of the oldest masters of Shiraz and accentuated the feeling of isolation. There was nothing at all, however, filling the area created by raising the horizon. The desire to depict a tree simply as such, as the Venetian masters did, was here combined with the Persian way of seeing the world from above, and the result was a miserable painting that was neither Venetian nor Persian. This was how a tree at the edge of the world would look. Attempting to combine two separate styles, my miniaturists and the barren mind of that deceased clown had created a work devoid of any skill whatsoever. But it wasn’t that the illustration was informed by two different worldviews so much as the lack of skill that incurred my wrath.

I felt the same way as I looked at the other pictures, at the perfect dream horse and the woman with the bowed head. The choice of subject matter also iritated me, whether it was the two wandering dervishes or Satan. It was obvious that my illustrators had coyly inserted these inferior pictures into Our Sultan’s illuminated manuscript. I felt renewed awe at exalted Allah’s judgment in taking Enishte’s life before the book had been finished. Needless to say, I had no desire whatsoever to complete this manuscript.

Who wouldn’t be annoyed by this dog, drawn from above but staring at me from just beneath my nose as if it were my brother? On the one hand, I was astounded by the plainness of the dog’s positioning, the beauty of its threatening sidelong glance, head lowered to the ground, and the violent whiteness of its teeth, in short, by the talent of the miniaturists who’d depicted it (I was on the verge of determining precisely who’d worked on the picture); on the other hand, I couldn’t forgive the way this talent had been harnessed by the absurd logic of an inscrutable will. Neither the desire to imitate the Europeans nor the excuse that the book Our Sultan had commissioned as a present for the Doge ought to make use of techniques familiar to the Venetians was adequate to explain the fawning pretension in these pictures.

I was terrified by the passion of red in one bustling picture, wherein I at once recognized the touch of each of my master miniaturists in each corner. An artist’s hand that I couldn’t identify had applied a peculiar red to the painting under the guidance of an arcane logic, and the entire world revealed by the illustration was slowly suffused by this color. I spent some time hunched over this crowded picture pointing out to Black which of my miniaturists had drawn the plane tree (Stork), the ships and houses (Olive), and the kite and flowers (Butterfly).

“Of course, a great master miniaturist like yourself, who’s been head of a book-arts division for years, could distinguish the craft of each of his illustrators, the disposition of their lines and the temperament of their brush strokes,” Black said. “But when an eccentric book lover like my Enishte forces these same illustrators to paint with new and untried techniques, how can you determine the artists responsible for each design with such certainty?”

I decided to answer with a parable: “Once upon a time there was a shah who ruled over Isfahan; he was a lover of book arts, and lived all alone in his castle. He was a strong and mighty, intelligent, but merciless shah, and he had love only for two things: the illustrated manuscripts he commissioned and his daughter. So devoted was this shah to his daughter that his enemies could hardly be faulted for claiming he was in love with her-for he was proud and jealous enough to declare war on neighboring princes and shahs in the event that one sent ambassadors to ask for her hand. Naturally, there was no husband worthy of his daughter, and he confined her to a room, accessible only through forty locked doors. In keeping with a commonly held belief in Isfahan, he thought that his daughter’s beauty would fade if other men laid eyes on her. One day, after an edition of
Hüsrev and Shirin
that he’d commissioned was inscribed and illustrated in the Herat style, a rumor began to circulate in Isfahan: The pale-faced beauty who appeared in one bustling picture was none other than the jealous shah’s daughter! Even before hearing the rumors, the shah, suspicious of this mysterious illustration, opened the pages of the book with trembling hands and in a flood of tears saw that his daughter’s beauty had indeed been captured on the page. As the story goes, it wasn’t actually the shah’s daughter, protected by forty locked doors, who emerged to be portrayed one night, but her beauty which escaped from her room like a ghost stifled by boredom, reflecting off a series of mirrors and passing beneath doors and through keyholes like a ray of light or wisp of smoke to reach the eyes of an illustrator working through the night. The masterful young miniaturist, unable to restrain himself, depicted the beauty, which he couldn’t bear to behold, in the illustration he was in the midst of completing. It was the scene that showed Shirin gazing upon a picture of Hüsrev and falling in love with him during the course of a countryside outing.”

“My beloved master, my good sir, this is quite a coincidence,” said Black. “I, too, am quite fond of that scene from
Hüsrev and Shirin
.”

“These aren’t fables, but events that actually happened,” I said. “Listen, the miniaturist didn’t depict the shah’s beautiful daughter as Shirin, but as a courtesan playing the lute or setting the table, because that was the figure he was in the midst of illustrating at the time. As a result, Shirin’s beauty paled beside the extraordinary beauty of the courtesan standing off to the side, thus disrupting the painting’s balance. After the shah saw his daughter in the painting, he wanted to locate the gifted miniaturist who’d depicted her. But the crafty miniaturist, fearing the shah’s wrath, had rendered both the courtesan and Shirin, not in his own style, but in a new way so as to conceal his identity. The skillful brush strokes of quite a few other miniaturists had gone into the work as well.”

“How had the shah discovered the identity of the miniaturist who portrayed his daughter?”

“From the ears!”

“Whose ears? The ears of the daughter or her picture?”

“Actually, neither. Following his intuition, he first laid out all the books, pages and illustrations that his own miniaturists had made and inspected all the ears therein. He saw what he’d known for years in a new light: Regardless of the level of talent, each of the miniaturists made ears in his own style. It didn’t matter if the face they depicted was the face of a sultan, a child, a warrior, or even, God forbid, the partially veiled face of Our Exalted Prophet, or even, God forbid again, the face of the Devil. Each miniaturist, in each case, always drew the ears the same way, as if this were a secret signature.”

“Why?”

“When the masters illustrated a face, they focused on approaching its exalted beauty, on the dictates of the old models of form, on the expression, or on whether it should resemble somebody real. But when it came time to make the ears, they neither stole from others, imitated a model nor studied a real ear. For the ears, they didn’t think, didn’t aspire to anything, didn’t even stop to consider what they were doing. They simply guided their brushes from memory.”

“But didn’t the great masters also create their masterpieces from memory without ever even looking at real horses, trees or people?” said Black.

“True,” I said, “but those are memories acquired after years of thought, contemplation and reflection. Having seen plenty of horses, illustrated and actual, over their lifetimes, they know that the last flesh-and-blood horse they see before them will only mar the perfect horse they hold in their thoughts. The horse that a master miniaturist has drawn tens of thousands of times eventually comes close to God’s vision of a horse, and the artist knows this through experience and deep in his soul. The horse that his hand draws quickly from memory is rendered with talent, great effort, and insight, and it is a horse that approaches Allah’s horse. However, the ear that is drawn before the hand has accumulated any knowledge, before the artist has weighed and considered what it is doing, or before paying attention to the ears of the shah’s daughter, will always be a flaw. Precisely because it is a flaw, or imperfection, it will vary from miniaturist to miniaturist. That is, it amounts to a signature.”

There was a commotion. The Commander’s men were bringing into the old workshop the pages they’d collected from the homes of the miniaturists and the calligraphers.

“Besides, ears are actually a human flaw,” I said, hoping Black would smile. “They’re at once distinct and common to everyone: a perfect manifestation of ugliness.”

“What happened to the miniaturist who’d been caught by the authorities through his style of painting ears?”

I refrained from saying, “He was blinded,” to keep Black from becoming even more downcast. Instead, I responded, “He married the shah’s daughter, and this method, which has been used to identify miniaturists ever since, is known by many khans, shahs and sultans who fund book-arts workshops as the ”courtesan method.“ Furthermore, it is kept secret so that if one of their miniaturists makes a forbidden figure or a small design that conceals some mischief and later denies having done so, they can quickly determine who was responsible-genuine artists have an instinctive desire to draw what’s forbidden! Sometimes their hands make mischief on their own. Uncovering these transgressions involves finding trivial, quickly drawn and repetitive details removed from the heart of the painting, such as ears, hands, grass, leaves, or even horses’ manes, legs or hooves. But beware, the method doesn’t work if the illustrator himself is mindful that this detail has become his own secret signature. Mustaches won’t work, for instance, because many artists are aware how freely they’re drawn as a sort of signature anyway. But eyebrows are a possibility: No one pays much attention to them. Come now, let’s see which young masters have brought their brushes and reed pens to bear upon late Enishte’s illustrations.”

Thus we brought together the pages of two illustrated manuscripts, one that was being completed secretly and the other openly, two books with different stories and subjects, illustrated in two distinct styles; that is, deceased Enishte’s book and the
Book of Festivities
recounting our prince’s circumcision ceremony, whose creation was under my control. Black and I looked intently wherever I moved my magnifying lens:

1. In the pages of the
Book of Festivities
, we first studied the open mouth of the fox whose pelt a master of the furrier’s guild, in a red caftan and purple sash, held on his lap as the guild passed before Our Sultan, watching the parade from a loge made specifically for the event. Unmistakably, Olive had made both the fox’s teeth, which were individually distinguishable, and the teeth in Enishte’s illustration of Satan, an ominous creature, half-demon and half-giant, that appeared to have come from Samarkand.

2. On a particularly joyous day of the festivities, below Our Sultan’s loge overlooking the Hippodrome, a division of impoverished frontier ghazis appeared in tattered clothes. One of their lot made a plea: “My Exalted Sultan, we, your heroic soldiers, fell captive as we fought the infidel in the name of our religion and were only able to gain our freedom by leaving a number of our brethren behind as hostages; that is, we were set free in order to amass ransom. However, when we arrived back in Istanbul, we found everything so expensive that we’ve been unable to collect the money to save our brethren who languish as prisoners of the kaffirs. We’re at the mercy of your aid. Please grant us gold or slaves that we might take back to exchange for their freedom.” Stork clearly made the nails of the lazy dog off to the side-glaring with one open eye at Our Sultan, at our poor, destitute ghazis and at the Persian and Tatar ambassadors in the Hippodrome-as well as the nails of the dog occupying a corner of the scene depicting the adventures of the Gold Coin in Enishte’s book.

3. Among the jugglers spinning eggs on pieces of wood and turning somersaults before Our Sultan was a bald man with bare calves wearing a purple vest, who played a tambourine as he sat off to one side on a red carpet; this man held the instrument exactly the same way the woman held a large brass serving tray in the illustration of Red in Enishte’s book: doubtless the work of Olive.

4. As the cooks’ guild pushed past Our Sultan, they were cooking stuffed cabbage with meat and onions in a cauldron resting on a stove in their cart. The master cooks accompanying the cart stood on pink earth resting their stew pots on blue stones; these stones were rendered by the same artist who made the red ones on dark-blue earth above which floated the half-ghostly creature in the illustration that Enishte called Death: the unmistakable work of Butterfly.