My Name is Red

WE TWO DERVISHES

Yea, the rumor that our picture was among the pages from China, Samarkand and Herat comprising an album hidden away in the remotest corner of the Treasury filled with the plunder of hundreds of countries over hundreds of years by the ancestors of His Excellency, Our Sultan, was most probably spread to the miniaturists’ division by the dwarf Jezmi Agha. If we might now recount our own story in our own fashion-the will of God be with us-we hope that none of the crowd in this fine coffeehouse will take offense.

One hundred and ten years have passed since our deaths, forty since the closing of our irredeemable, Persia-partisan dervish lodges, those dens of heresy and nests of devilry, but see for yourselves, here we are before you. How could this be? I’ll tell you how: We were rendered in the Venetian style! As this illustration indicates, one day we two dervishes were tramping through Our Sultan’s domains from one city to the next.

We were barefoot, our heads were shaven, and we were half naked; each of us was wearing a vest and the hide of a deer, a belt around our waists and we were holding our walking sticks, our begging bowls dangling from our necks by a chain; one of us was carrying an axe for cutting wood, and the other a spoon to eat whatever food God had blessed us with.

At that moment, standing before a caravansary beside a fountain, my dear friend, nay, my beloved, nay, my brother and I had given ourselves over to the usual argument: “You first please, no you first,” we were noisily deferring to each other as to who’d be the first to take up the spoon and eat from the bowl, when a Frank traveler, a strange man, stopped us, gave us each a silver Venetian coin and began to draw our picture.

He was a Frank; of course, he was weird. He situated us right in the center of the page as if we were the very tent of the Sultan, and was depicting us in our half-naked state when I shared with my companion a thought that had just then dawned upon me: To appear like a pair of truly impoverished Kalenderi beggar dervishes, we should roll our eyes back so our pupils look inward, the whites of our eyes facing the world like blind men-and that’s exactly what we proceeded to do. In this situation, it’s the nature of a dervish to behold the world in his head rather than the world outside; since our heads were full of hashish, the landscape of our minds was more pleasant than what the Frank painter saw.

Meanwhile, the scene outside had grown even worse; we heard the ranting of a Hoja Effendi.

Pray, let us not give the wrong idea. We’ve now made mention of the respected “Hoja Effendi,” but last week in this fine coffeehouse there was a great misunderstanding: This respected “Hoja Effendi” of whom we speak has nothing whatsoever to do with His Excellency Nusret Hoja the cleric from Erzurum, nor with the bastard Husret Hoja, nor with the hoja from Sivas who made it with the Devil atop a tree. Those who interpret everything negatively have said that if His Excellency Hoja Effendi becomes a target of reproach here once again, they’ll cut out the storyteller’s tongue and lower this coffeehouse about his head.

One hundred and twenty years ago, there being no coffee then, the respected Hoja, whose story we’ve begun, was simply steaming with rage.

“Hey, Frank infidel, why are you drawing these two?” he was saying. “These wretched Kalenderi dervishes wander around thieving and begging, they take hashish, drink wine, bugger each other, and as is evident from the way they look, know nothing of performing or reciting prayers, nothing of house, or home, or family; they’re nothing but the dregs of this good world of ours. And you, why are you painting this picture of disgrace when there’s so much beauty in this great country? Is it to disgrace us?”

“Not at all, it’s simply because illustrations of your bad side bring in more money,” said the infidel. We two dervishes were dumbfounded at the soundness of the painter’s reasoning.

“If it brought you more money, would you paint the Devil in a favorable light?” the Hoja Effendi said, coyly trying to start an argument, but as you can see from this picture, the Venetian was a genuine artist, and he’d focused upon the work before him and the money it’d bring rather than heeding the Hoja’s empty prattle.

He did indeed paint us, and then slid us into the leather portfolio on the back of his horse’s saddle, and returned to his infidel city. Soon afterward, the victorious armies of the Ottomans conquered and plundered that city on the banks of the Danube, and the two of us ended up coming back this way to Istanbul and the Royal Treasury. From there, copied over and over, we moved from one secret book to another, and finally arrived at this joyous coffeehouse where coffee is drunk like a rejuvenating, invigorating elixir. Now then:

A Brief Treatise on Painting, Death and Our Place in the World

The Hoja Effendi from Konya, whom we’ve just mentioned, has made the following claim somewhere in one of his sermons, which are written out and collected in a thick tome: Kalenderi dervishes are the unnecessary dross of the world because they don’t belong to any of the four categories into which men are divided: 1. notables, 2. merchants, 3. farmers and 4. artists; thus, they are superfluous.

Additionally, he said the following: “These two always tramp about as a pair and always argue about which of them will be the first to eat with their only spoon, and those who don’t know that this is a sly allusion to their true concern-who’ll be the first to bugger the other-find it amusing and laugh. His Excellency Please-Don’t-Take-It-Wrong Hoja has uncovered our secret because he, along with us, the pretty young boys, apprentices and miniaturists, are all fellow travelers on the same path.”

However, the real secret is this: While the Frank infidel was making our picture, he gazed at us so sweetly and with such attention to detail that we took a liking to him and enjoyed being depicted by him. But, he was committing the error of looking at the world with his naked eye and rendering what he saw. Thus, he drew us as if we were blind although we could see just fine, but we didn’t mind. Now, we’re quite content, indeed. According to the Hoja, we’re in Hell; according to some unbelievers we’re nothing but decayed corpses and according to you, the intelligent society of miniaturists gathered here, we’re a picture, and because we’re a picture, we stand here before you as though we were alive and well. After our run-in with the respected Hoja Effendi and after walking from Konya to Sivas in three nights, through eight villages, begging all the way, one night we were beset by such cold and snow that we two dervishes, hugging each other tightly, fell asleep and froze to death. Just before dying I had a dream: I was the subject of a painting that entered Heaven after thousands and thousands of years.