My Name is Red

I AM CALLED BLACK

Within the darkness of the house of the Hanged Jew, Shekure furrowed her brow and began raving that I might easily stick the monstrosity I held in my hands into the mouths of Circassian girls I’d met in Tiflis, Kipchak harlots, poor brides sold at inns, Turkmen and Persian widows, common prostitutes whose numbers were increasing in Istanbul, lecherous Mingerians, coquettish Abkhazians, Armenian shrews, Genoese and Syrian hags, thespians passing as women and insatiable boys, but it would not go into hers. She angrily accused me of having lost all sense of decorum and self-control by sleeping with all manner of cheap, pathetic riffraff-from Persia to Baghdad and from the alleyways of small hot Arabian towns to the shores of the Caspian-and of having forgotten that some women still took pains to maintain their honor. All my words of love, she charged, were insincere.

I respectfully listened to my beloved’s outburst, which caused the guilty member in my hand to fade, and though I was thoroughly embarrassed by the situation and the rejection I was suffering, two things pleased me: 1. that I refrained from lowering myself to match Shekure’s wrath with a response of similar hue, as I often had reacted viciously to other women in similar situations, and 2. that I discovered Shekure’s particular awareness of my travels, proof that she’d thought of me much more than I’d assumed.

Seeing how downcast I’d become at being unable to carry out my desires, she’d already begun to pity me.

“If you truly loved me, passionately and obsessively,” she said as if trying to excuse herself, “you’d try to control yourself like a gentleman. You wouldn’t try to offend the honor of the woman toward whom you entertained serious intentions. You’re not the only man who’s making motions to marry me. Did anyone see you on your way here?”

“Nay.”

As if she heard someone walking in the dark and snow-covered garden, she turned her sweet face, which for twelve years I hadn’t been able to recall, toward the door and gave me the pleasure of seeing her profile. When we heard a momentary clattering, we both waited in silence, but nobody entered. I recalled how even when she was only twelve, Shekure had aroused in me an odd feeling because she knew more than I did.

“The ghost of the Hanged Jew haunts this place,” she said.

“Do you ever come here?”

“Jinns, phantoms, the living dead…they come with the wind, possess objects and make sounds out of silence. Everything speaks. I don’t have to come all the way here. I can hear them.”

“Shevket brought me here to show me the dead cat, but it was gone.”

“I understand you told him that you killed his father.”

“Not exactly. Is that the way my words were twisted? Not that I killed his father, rather that I’d like to become his father.”

“Why did you say that you’d killed his father?”

“He’d asked me first if I’d ever killed a man. I told him the truth, that I’d killed two men.”

“In order to boast?”

“To boast, and to impress a child whose mother I love, because I realized that this mother comforted those two little brigands by exaggerating the wartime heroics of their father and by showing off the remnants of his plunder in the house.”

“Go on boasting then! They don’t like you.”

“Shevket doesn’t like me, but Orhan does,” I said, in the prideful glow of having caught my beloved’s error. “Yet, I shall become father to them both.”

We shuddered anxiously and trembled in the half-light as though the shadow of some nonexistent thing had passed between us. I pulled myself together and saw that Shekure was crying with tiny sobs.

“My ill-fated husband has a brother named Hasan. As I waited for my husband’s return, I lived two years in the same house with him and my father-in-law. He fell in love with me. Lately, he’s suspicious of what might be going on. He’s furious imagining that I might marry somebody else, you perhaps. He sent word declaring that he wants to take me back to their house by force. They say that since I’m not a widow in the eyes of the judge, they’re going to force me back there in the name of my husband. They might raid our house at any time. My father doesn’t want me to be declared a widow by verdict of the judge either. If I am granted a divorce, he thinks I’ll find myself a new husband and abandon him. By returning home with my children, I brought him great happiness in the loneliness he suffered after the death of my mother. Would you agree to live with us?”

“How do you mean?”

“If we were wed, would you live with my father, together with us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about this as soon as possible. You don’t have much time, believe me. My father senses that some evil is coming our way, and I think he’s right. If Hasan and his men raid our home with a handful of Janissaries and bring my father before the judge, would you testify that you’d in fact seen my husband’s corpse? You’ve recently come from Persia, they would believe you.”

“I would testify, but I wasn’t the one who killed him.”

“All right, then. Together with another witness, in order that I be declared a widow, would you testify before the judge that you saw my husband’s bloody corpse on the battlefield in Persia?”

“I didn’t actually see it, my dear, but for your sake I would testify so.”

“Do you love my children?”

“I do.”

“Tell me, what is it about them that you love?”

“I love Shevket’s strength, decisiveness, honesty, intelligence and stubbornness,” I said. “And I love Orhan’s sensitive and delicate demeanor and his astuteness. I love the fact that they’re your children.”

My black-eyed beloved smiled slightly and shed a few tears. Then, in the calculated fluster of a woman hoping to accomplish a lot in a short time, she changed the subject:

“My father’s book ought to be completed and presented to Our Sultan. This book is the source of the bad luck that plagues us.”

“What devilry has plagued us besides the murder of Elegant Effendi?”

This question displeased her. Appearing insincere in her attempt to be sincere, she said:

“The followers of Nusret Hoja are spreading rumors that my father’s book is a desecration and bears the marks of Frankish infideldom. Have the miniaturists who frequent our house grown jealous of each other to the degree that they’re hatching plans? You’ve been among them, you would know best!”

“Your late husband’s brother,” I said, “does he have any association with these miniaturists, your father’s book or the followers of Nusret Hoja, or does he keep to himself?”

“He’s not involved in any of that, but he doesn’t keep to himself at all,” she said.

A mysterious and strange quiet passed.

“When you lived in the same house with Hasan wasn’t there any way you could get away from him?”

“As much as possible in a two-room house.”

A few dogs, not too far away, giving themselves over completely to whatever they were up to, began barking excitedly.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask why Shekure’s late husband, a man who’d emerged victorious from so many battles and had become the proprietor of a fief, saw fit to have his wife live together with his brother in a two-room house. Timidly and hesitantly, I asked my childhood beloved the following question: “Why did you see fit to marry him?”

“I was, of course, certain to be married off to someone,” she said. This was true, and it succinctly and cleverly explained her marriage in a way that avoided praising her husband and upsetting me. “You’d left, perhaps never to return. Disappearing in a sulk might be a symptom of love, yet a sulking lover is also tiresome and holds no promise of a future.” This was true as well, but it wasn’t cause enough to marry that rogue. It wasn’t too difficult to deduce from her coy expression alone that a short time after I’d abandoned Istanbul, Shekure had forgotten about me, like everyone else had. She’d told me this blatant lie to mend my broken heart, if only a little, and I considered it a sign of her good intentions, which demanded my gratitude. I began to explain how during my travels I couldn’t get her out of my thoughts, how at night her image haunted me like a specter. This was the most secret, most profound agony I’d suffered and I assumed I’d never be able to share it with another; the agony was quite real, but as I realized with surprise at that instant, it wasn’t the least bit sincere.

So that my feelings and desires might be rightfully understood, I must presently lay bare the meaning of this distinction between truth and sincerity that I’ve come to know for the first time: How expressing one’s reality in words, as truthful as they might be, goads one to insincerity. Perhaps, the best example might be made of us miniaturists, who’ve grown edgy of late due to the murderer in our midst. Consider a perfect painting-the image of a horse, for instance-no matter how well it represents a real horse, the horse meticulously conceived by Allah or the horses of the great master miniaturists, it might still fail to match the sincerity of the talented miniaturist who drew it. The sincerity of the miniaturist, or of us humble servants of Allah, doesn’t emerge in moments of talent and perfection; on the contrary, it emerges through slips of the tongue, mistakes, fatigue and frustration. I say this for the sake of those young ladies who will become disillusioned when they see that there was no difference between the strong desire I felt for Shekure at that moment-as she too could tell-and, say, the dizzying lust I’d felt for a delicately featured, copper-complexioned, burgundy-mouthed Kazvin beauty during my travels. With her profound God-given savvy and jinnlike intuition, Shekure understood both my being able to withstand twelve years of pure torture for love’s sake as well as my behaving like a miserable thrall of lust who thought of nothing but the quick satisfaction of his dark desires the first time we were alone. Nizami had compared the mouth of that beauty of beauties, Shirin, to an inkwell filled with pearls.

When the eager dogs began barking with renewed fervor, a restless Shekure said, “I ought to go now.” It was at that moment we both realized that the house of the Jew’s ghost had indeed become quite dark, although there was still time before nightfall. My body sprung up of its own volition, to hug her once again, but like a wounded sparrow, she quickly hopped away.

“Am I still beautiful? Answer me quickly.”

I told her. How beautifully she listened to me, believing and agreeing with what I said.

“And my clothes?”

I told her.

“Do I smell nice?”

Of course, Shekure also knew that what Nizami referred to as “love chess” did not consist of such rhetorical games, but of the hidden emotional maneuvers between lovers.

“What kind of living do you expect to earn?” she asked. “Will you be able to care for my fatherless children?”

As I talked about my more than twelve years of governmental and secretarial experience, the vast knowledge I’d acquired in battle and witnessing death and my luminous prospects, I embraced her.

“How beautifully we embraced each other just now,” she said. “And already everything has lost its primal mystery.”

To prove how sincere I was, I hugged her even tighter. I asked her why, after having kept it for twelve years, she’d had Esther return the painting I’d made for her. In her eyes I read surprise at my weariness and an affection that welled up within her. We kissed. This time I didn’t find myself immobilized by a staggering yoke of lust; both of us were stunned by the fluttering-like a flock of sparrows-of a powerful love that had entered our hearts, chests and stomachs. Isn’t lovemaking the best antidote to love?

As I palmed her large breasts, Shekure pushed me away in an even more determined and sweeter way than before. She implied that I wasn’t a mature-enough man to maintain a trustworthy marriage with a woman that I’d sullied beforehand. I was careless enough to forget that the Devil would get involved in any hasty deeds and too inexperienced to know how much patience and quiet suffering underlie happy marriages. She’d escaped my arms and was walking toward the door, her linen veil having fallen around her neck. I caught sight of the snow falling onto the streets, which always succumbed to the darkness first, and forgetting that we’d been whispering here, perhaps to avoid disturbing the spirit of the Hanged Jew, I cried out:

“What are we to do now?”

“I don’t know,” she said, minding the rules of “love chess.” Walking through the old garden, she left delicate footprints in the snow-certain to be erased by the whiteness-and disappeared quietly.