My Name is Red

I AM CALLED BLACK

When the Head Treasurer and the chief officers opened the portal with great ceremony my eyes were so accustomed to the velvety red aura of the Treasury rooms that the early morning winter sunlight filtering in from the courtyard of the Royal Private Quarters of the Enderun seemed terrifying. I stood dead still, as did Master Osman himself: If I moved, it seemed, the clues we sought in the moldy, dusty and tangible air of the Treasury might escape.

With curious amazement, as if seeing some magnificent object for the first time, Master Osman stared at the light cascading toward us between the heads of the Treasury chiefs lined up in rows on either side of the open portal.

The night before, I watched him as he turned the pages of the Book of Kings. I noticed this same expression of astonishment pass over his face as his shadow, cast upon the wall, trembled faintly, his head carefully sank down toward his magnifying lens, and his lips first contorted delicately, as if preparing to reveal a pleasant secret, then twitched as he gazed in awe at an illustration.

After the portal was shut again, I wandered impatiently between rooms ever more restless; I thought nervously that we wouldn’t have time to cull enough information from the books in the Treasury. I sensed that Master Osman couldn’t focus adequately on his task, and I confessed my misgivings to him.

Like a genuine master grown accustomed to caressing his apprentices, he held my hand in a pleasing way. “Men like us have no choice but to try to see the world the way God does and to resign ourselves to His justice,” he said. “And here, among these pictures and possessions, I have the strong sensation that these two things are beginning to converge: As we approach God’s vision of the world, His justice approaches us. See here, the needle Master Bihzad blinded himself with…”

Master Osman callously told the story of the needle, and I scrutinized the extremely sharp point of this disagreeable object beneath the magnifying glass which he lowered so I might better see; a pinkish film covered its tip.

“The old masters,” Master Osman said, “would suffer pangs of conscience about changing their talent, colors and methods. They’d consider it dishonorable to see the world one day as an Eastern shah commanded, the next, as a Western ruler did-which is what the artists of our day do.”

His eyes were neither trained on mine nor upon the pages in front of him. It seemed as though he were gazing at a distant unattainable whiteness. In a page of the Book of Kings lying open before him, Persian and Turanian armies clashed with all their force. As horses fought shoulder to shoulder, enraged heroic warriors drew their swords and slaughtered one another with the color and joy of a festival, their armor pierced by the lances of the cavalry, their heads and arms severed, their bodies hacked apart or cloven in two, strewn all over the field.

“When the great masters of old were forced to adopt the styles of victors and imitate their miniaturists, they preserved their honor by using a needle to heroically bring on the blindness that the labors of painting would’ve caused in time. Yes, before the pureness of God’s darkness fell over their eyes like a divine reward, they’d stare at a masterpiece ceaselessly for hours or even days, and because they stubbornly stared out of bowed heads, the meaning and world of those pictures-spotted with blood dripping from their eyes-would take the place of all the evil they suffered, and as their eyes ever so slowly clouded over they’d approach blindness in peace. Do you have any idea which illustration I’d want to stare at till I’d attained the divine blackness of the blind?”

Like a man trying to recall a childhood memory, he fixed his eyes, whose pupils seemed to shrink as their whites expanded, on a distant place beyond the walls of the Treasury.

“The scene, rendered in the style of the old masters of Herat, wherein Hüsrev, burning madly with love, rides his horse to the foot of Shirin’s summer palace and waits!”

Perhaps he’d now go on to describe that picture as if reciting a melancholy poem eulogizing the blindness of the old masters. “My great master, my dear sire,” on a strange impulse, I interrupted him, “what I want to stare at for all eternity is my beloved’s delicate face. It’s been three days since we wed. I’ve thought of her longingly for twelve years. The scene wherein Shirin falls in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture reminds me of none other than her.”

There was a wealth of expression on Master Osman’s face, curiosity perhaps, but it had to do neither with my story nor with the bloody battle scene before him. He seemed to be expecting good news in which he could gradually take comfort. When I was sure he wasn’t looking at me, I abruptly grabbed the plume needle and walked away.

In a dark part of the third of the Treasury rooms, the one abutting the baths, there was a corner cluttered with hundreds of strange clocks sent as presents from Frankish kings and sovereigns; when they stopped working, as they usually did within a short time, they were set aside here. Withdrawing to this room, I carefully scrutinized the needle that Master Osman claimed Bihzad had used to blind himself.

By the red daylight filtering inside, reflecting off the casings, crystal faces and diamonds of the dusty and broken clocks, the golden tip of the needle, coated with a pinkish liquid, occasionally shimmered. Had the legendary Master Bihzad actually blinded himself with this implement? Had Master Osman done the same terrible thing to himself? The expression of an impish Moroccan, the size of a finger and colorfully painted, attached to the mechanism of one of the large clocks seemed to say “Yes!” Evidently, when the clock was working, this man in the Ottoman turban would merrily nod his head as the hour tolled-a small joke on the part of the Hapsburg king who sent it, and his skillful clock-maker, for the amusement of Our Sultan and the women of His harem.

I looked through quite a few very mediocre books: As the dwarf confirmed, these were among the effects of pashas whose properties and belongings were confiscated after they were beheaded. So many pashas had been executed that these volumes were without number. With a pitiless joy, the dwarf declared that any pasha so intoxicated by his own wealth and power as to forget he was a subject of the Sultan and to have a book made in his own honor, illuminated with gold leaf as if he were a monarch or a shah, well deserved to be executed and have his possessions expropriated. Even in these volumes, some of which were albums, illuminated manuscripts or illustrated collections of poetry, whenever I came across a version of Shirin falling in love with Hüsrev’s picture, I stopped and stared.

The picture within a picture, that is, the picture of Hüsrev which Shirin encountered during her countryside outing, was never rendered in detail, not because miniaturists couldn’t adequately depict something so small-many had the dexterity and finesse to paint upon fingernails, grains of rice or even strands of hair. Why then hadn’t they drawn the face and features of Hüsrev-the object of Shirin’s love-in enough detail so that he might be recognized? Sometime in the afternoon, perhaps to forget my hopelessness, and thinking, as I leafed through a disorderly album I’d chanced upon, that I’d broach such questions to Master Osman, I was struck by the image of a horse in a picture of a bridal procession painted on cloth. My heart skipped a beat.

There before me was a horse with peculiar nostrils carrying a coquettish bride. The beast was looking at me out of the picture. It was as though the magical horse were on the verge of whispering a secret to me. As if in a dream, I wanted to shout, but my voice was silent.

In one continuous movement, I collected up the volume and ran among the objects and chests to Master Osman, laying the page open before him.

He looked down at the picture.

When no spark of recognition appeared on his face, I grew impatient. “The nostrils of the horse are exactly like those made for my Enishte’s book,” I exclaimed.

He lowered his magnifying lens over the horse. He bent down so far, bringing his eye to the lens and picture, that his nose nearly touched the page.

I couldn’t stand the silence. “As you can see, this isn’t a horse made in the style and method of the horse drawn for my Enishte’s book,” I said, “but the nose is the same. The artist attempted to see the world the way the Chinese do.” I fell quiet. “It’s a wedding procession. It resembles a Chinese picture, but the figures aren’t Chinese, they’re our people.”

The master’s lens seemed to be flat against the page, and his nose was flat against the lens. In order to see, he made use of not only his eyes, but his head, the muscles of his neck, his aged back and his shoulders with all his might. Silence.

“The nostrils of the horse are cut open,” he said later, breathless.

I leaned my head against his. Cheek to cheek we stared at the nostrils for a long long time. I sadly realized that not only were the horse’s nostrils cut, but Master Osman was having difficulty seeing them.

“You do see it, don’t you?”

“Only very little,” he said. “Describe the picture.”

“If you ask me, this is a melancholy bride,” I said mournfully. “She’s mounted on a gray horse with its nostrils cut open, she’s on her way to be wed, with her companions and an escort of guards who are strangers to her. The faces of the guards, their harsh expressions, intimidating black beards, furrowed eyebrows, long thick mustaches, heavy frames, robes of simple thin cloth, thin shoes, headdresses of bear fur, their battle-axes and scimitars indicate that they belong to the Whitesheep Turkmen of Transoxiana. Perhaps the pretty bride-who appears to be on a long journey to judge by the fact she’s traveling with her bridesmaid at night by the light of oil lamps and torches-is a melancholy Chinese princess.”

“Or perhaps we only think the bride is Chinese now, because the miniaturist, to emphasize her flawless beauty, whitened her face as the Chinese do and painted her with slanted eyes,” said Master Osman.

“Whoever she might be, my heart aches for this sad beauty, traveling the steppe in the middle of the night accompanied by grim-faced foreign guards, heading to a strange land and a husband she’s never seen,” I said. Then I immediately added, “How shall we determine who our miniaturist is from the clipped nostrils of the horse she rides?”

“Turn the pages of the album and tell me what you see,” said Master Osman.

Just then, we were joined by the dwarf whom I’d seen sitting on the chamber pot as I was running to bring the volume to Master Osman; the three of us looked at the pages together.

We saw strikingly beautiful Chinese maidens depicted in the style of our melancholy bride gathered together in a garden playing a peculiar-looking lute. We saw Chinese houses, morose-looking caravans heading out on long journeys, vistas of the steppes as beautiful as old memories. We saw gnarled trees rendered in the Chinese style, their spring blossoms in full bloom, and nightingales tipsy with elation perched on their branches. We saw princes in the Khorasan style seated in their tents holding forth on poetry, wine and love; spectacular gardens; and handsome nobles, with magnificent falcons clutching their forearms, hunting bolt upright astride their exquisite horses. Then, it was as if the Devil had passed into the pages; we could sense that the evil in the illustrations was most often reason itself. Had the miniaturist added an ironic touch to the actions of the heroic prince who slew the dragon with his gigantic lance? Had he gloated at the poverty of the unfortunate peasants expecting comfort from the sheikh in their midst? Was it more pleasurable for him to draw the sad, empty eyes of dogs locked in coitus or to apply a devilish red to the open mouths of the women laughing scornfully at the poor beasts? Then we saw the miniaturist’s devils themselves: These weird creatures resembled the jinns and giants the old masters of Herat and the artists of the Book of Kings drew frequently; yet the sardonic talent of the miniaturist made them more sinister, aggressive and human in form. We laughed watching these terrifying devils, the size of a man yet with misshapen bodies, branching horns and feline tails. As I turned the pages, these naked devils with bushy brows, round faces, bulging eyes, pointed teeth, sharp nails and the dark wrinkled skin of old men began to beat each other and wrestle, to steal a great horse and sacrifice it to their gods, to leap and play, to cut down trees, to spirit away beautiful princesses in their palanquins and to capture dragons and sack treasuries. I mentioned that in this volume, which had seen the touch of many different brushes, the miniaturist known as Black Pen, who’d made the devils, also drew Kalenderi dervishes with shaved heads, ragged clothes, iron chains and staffs, and Master Osman had me one by one repeat their similarities, listening closely to what I said.

“Cutting open the nostrils of horses so they might breathe easier and travel farther is a centuries-old Mongol custom,” he said later. “Hulagu Khan’s armies conquered all of Arabia, Persia and China with their horses. When they entered Baghdad, put its inhabitants to the sword, plundered it and tossed all its books into the Tigris, as we know, the famous calligrapher, and later, illuminator Ibn Shakir fled the city and the slaughter, heading north on the road by which the Mongol horsemen had come, instead of south along with everyone else. At that time, no one made illustrations because the Koran forbade them, and painters weren’t taken seriously. We owe the greatest secrets of our noble occupation to Ibn Shakir, the patron saint and master of all miniaturists: the vision of the world from a minaret, the persistence of a horizon line visible or invisible, and the depiction of all things from clouds to insects the way the Chinese envisaged them, in curling, lively and optimistic colors. I’ve heard that he studied the nostrils of horses in order to keep himself moving northward during that legendary journey into the heartland of the Mongol hordes. However, as far as I’ve seen and heard, none of the horses he drew in Samarkand, which he reached after a year’s travel on foot undaunted by snow and severe weather, had clipped nostrils. For him, perfect dream horses were not the sturdy, powerful, victorious horses of the Mongols that he came to know in his adulthood; they were the elegant Arab horses that he’d sorrowfully left behind in his happy youth. This is why for me the strange nose of the horse made for Enishte’s book brought to mind neither Mongol horses nor this custom the Mongols spread to Khorasan and Samarkand.”

As he spoke, Master Osman looked now at the book and now at us, as if he could see only those things he conjured in his mind’s eye.

“Besides horses with clipped noses and Chinese painting, the devils in this book are another thing brought with the Mongol hordes to Persia and thence all the way here to Istanbul. You’ve probably heard how these demons are ambassadors of evil dispatched by dark forces from deep beneath the ground to snatch away human lives and whatever we deem valuable and how they’re bent on carrying us off to their underworld of blackness and death. In this underground realm everything, whether cloud, tree, object, dog or book, has a soul and speaks.”

“Quite so,” said the elderly dwarf. “As Allah is my witness, some nights when I’m locked in here, not only the spirits of the clocks, the Chinese plates and the crystal bowls that chime constantly anyway, but the spirits of all the rifles, swords, shields and bloody helmets grow restless and begin to converse in such a ruckus that the Treasury becomes the swarming field of an apocalyptic battle.”

“The Kalenderi dervishes, whose pictures we’ve seen, brought this belief from Khorasan to Persia, and later all the way to Istanbul,” said Master Osman. “As Sultan Selim the Grim was plundering the Seven Heavens Palace after defeating Shah Ismail, Bediüzzaman Mirza-a descendant of Tamerlane-betrayed Shah Ismail and together with the Kalenderis that constituted his followers, joined the Ottomans. In the train of the Denizen of Paradise, Sultan Selim, as he returned through winter cold and snow to Istanbul, were two wives of Shah Ismail, whom he’d routed at Chaldiran. They were lovely women with white skin and slanting almond eyes, and with them came all the books preserved in the Seven Heavens Palace library, books left by the former masters of Tabriz, the Mongols, the Inkhanids, the Jelayirids and the Blacksheep, and taken as plunder by the defeated shah from the Uzbeks, the Persians and the Timurids. I shall stare at these books until Our Sultan and the Head Treasurer remove me from here.”

Yet by now his eyes showed the same lack of direction that one sees in the blind. He held his mother-of-pearl-handled magnifying glass more out of habit than to see. We fell silent. Master Osman requested that the dwarf, who listened to his entire account as though to some bitter tale, once again locate and bring him a volume whose binding he described in detail. Once the dwarf had gone away, I naively asked my master:

“So then, who’s responsible for the horse illustration in my Enishte’s book?”

“Both the horses in question have clipped nostrils,” he said, “regardless of whether it was done in Samarkand or, as I said, in Transoxiana, the one you’ve found in this album is rendered in the Chinese style. As for the beautiful horse of Enishte’s book, that was made in the Persian style like the wondrous horses drawn by the masters of Herat. Indeed, it is an elegant illustration whose equal would be difficult to find anywhere! It’s a horse of artistry, not a Mongol horse.”

“But its nostrils are cut open like a genuine Mongol horse,” I whispered.

“It’s apparent that two hundred years ago when the Mongols retreated and the reign of Tamerlane and his descendants began, one of the old masters in Herat drew an exquisite horse whose nostrils were indeed cut open-influenced either by a Mongol horse that he’d seen or by another miniaturist who’d made a Mongol horse with clipped nostrils. No one knows for certain on which page in which book and for which shah it was made. But I’m sure that the book and picture were greatly admired and praised-who knows, maybe by the sultan’s favorite in the harem-and that they were legendary for a time! I’m also convinced that for this very reason all the mediocre miniaturists, muttering enviously to themselves, imitated this horse and multiplied its image. In this fashion, the wonderful horse with its nostrils gradually became a model of form ingrained in the minds of the artists in that workshop. Years later, after their rulers were defeated in battle, these painters, like somber women headed to other harems, found new shahs and princes to work for in new countries, and carried with them, stowed in their memories, the image of horses whose nostrils were elegantly cut open. Perhaps under the influence of different styles and different masters in different workshops, many of the artists never made use of and eventually forgot this unusual image which nonetheless remained preserved in a corner of their minds. Others, however, in the new workshops they joined, not only drew elegant clipped-nosed horses, they also taught their pretty apprentices to do the same with the encouragement that ”this is how the old masters used to do it.“ So then, in this manner, even after the Mongols and their hardy horses retreated from the lands of the Persians and Arabs, even centuries after new lives had begun in ravaged and burned cities, some painters continued drawing horses this way, believing it was a standard form. I’m also sure that others still, completely unaware of the conquering Mongol cavalry and the clipped noses of their steeds, draw horses the way we do in our workshop, insisting that this too is ”a standard form.“”

“My dear master,” I said, overwhelmed with awe, “as we hoped, your ”courtesan method“ truly did produce an answer. It seems that each artist also bears his own hidden signature.”

“Not each artist, but each workshop,” he said with pride. “And not even each workshop. In certain miserable workshops, as in certain miserable families, everyone speaks in a different voice for years without acknowledging that happiness is born of harmony, and that as a matter of course, harmony becomes happiness. Some painters try to illustrate like the Chinese, some like the Turkmen and some like they do in Shiraz, fighting for years on end, never attaining a happy union-like a discontented husband and wife.”

I saw that pride quite definitely ruled his face; the cross expression of a man who wanted to be all powerful had now replaced the look of the morose, pitiable old man that I’d seen him wear for so long.

“My dear master,” I said, “over a period of twenty years here in Istanbul, you’ve united various artists from the four corners of the world, men of all natures and temperaments, in such harmony that you’ve ended up creating and defining the Ottoman style.”

Why did the awe that I’d felt wholeheartedly only a short time ago give way to hypocrisy as I voiced my feelings? For our praise of a man, whose talent and mastery genuinely astounds us, to be sincere, must he lose most of his authority and influence and become slightly pathetic?

“Now then, where’s that dwarf hiding?” he said.

He said this the way powerful men who are pleased by flattery and praise but recollect vaguely that they ought not be would-as though he wished to change the subject.

“Despite being a great master of Persian legends and styles, you’ve created a distinct world of illustration worthy of Ottoman glory and strength,” I whispered. “You’re the one who brought to art the power of the Ottoman sword, the optimistic colors of Ottoman victory, the interest in and attention to objects and implements, and the freedom of a comfortable lifestyle. My dear master, it’s been the greatest honor of my life to look at these masterpieces by the old legendary masters with you…”

For a long time I whispered on in this manner. Within the icy darkness and cluttered disarray of the Treasury, which resembled a recently abandoned battlefield, our bodies were so close that my whispering became an expression of intimacy.

Later, as with certain blind men who can’t control their facial expressions, Master Osman’s eyes assumed the look of an old man lost in pleasure. I praised the old master at length, now with heartfelt emotion, now shuddering with the inner revulsion I felt toward the blind.

He held my hand with his cold fingers, caressed my forearm and touched my face. His strength and age seemed to pass through his fingers into me. I, again, thought of Shekure who awaited me at home.

Standing still that way for a time, pages opened before us, it was as if my lavish praise and his self-admiration and self-pity had so fatigued us that we were resting. We’d become embarrassed of each other.

“Where’s that dwarf gone to?” he asked again.

I was certain that the wily dwarf was hiding in some niche watching us. As if I were searching him out, I turned my shoulders right and left, but kept my eyes trained attentively on Master Osman. Was he truly blind or was he trying to convince the world, including himself, that he was blind? I’d heard that some untalented and incompetent old masters from Shiraz feigned blindness in their old age to curry respect and to prevent others from mentioning their failures.

“I would like to die here,” he said.

“My great master, my dear sir,” I fawned, “in this age when value is placed not on painting but on the money one can earn from it, not on the old masters but on imitators of the Franks, I so well understand what you’re saying that it brings tears to my eyes. Yet it is also your duty to protect your master illustrators from their enemies. Please tell me, what conclusions have you drawn from the ”courtesan method“? Who is the miniaturist who painted that horse?”

“Olive.”

He’d said this with such ease that I had no chance to be surprised.

He fell silent.

“But I’m also certain that Olive wasn’t the one who murdered your Enishte or unfortunate Elegant Effendi,” he said calmly. “I believe that Olive drew the horse because he’s the one who’s most bound to the old masters, who knows most intimately the legends and styles of Herat and whose master-apprentice genealogy stretches back to Samarkand. Now I know you won’t ask me, ”Why haven’t we encountered these nostrils in the other horses that Olive drew over the years?“ since I’ve already mentioned how at times a detail-the wing of a bird, the way a leaf is attached to a tree-can be preserved in memory for generations, passing from master to apprentice, and yet might not manifest on the page due to the influence of a moody or rigid master or on account of the particular tastes and whims of a particular workshop or sultan. So then, this is the horse that dear Olive, in his childhood, learned directly from the Persian masters without ever being able to forget it. The fact that the horse suddenly appeared for the sake of Enishte’s book is a cruel trick of Allah’s. Hadn’t all of us taken the old masters of Herat as our models? Just like the Turkmen illustrators for whom the face of a beautiful woman meant one with Chinese features, didn’t we think exclusively of the masterpieces of Herat when we thought of well-executed pictures? We are all their devoted admirers. Nourishing all great art is the Herat of Bihzad, and supporting this Herat are the Mongol horsemen and the Chinese. Why should Olive, thoroughly bound to the legends of Herat, murder poor Elegant Effendi, who was even more bound-even blindly devoted-to the same old methods?”

“Who then?” I said. “Butterfly?”

“Stork!” he said. “This is what I know in my heart of hearts, for I am well acquainted with his greed and fury. Listen, in all probability while gilding for your Enishte, who foolishly and clumsily imitated Frankish methods, poor Elegant Effendi came to believe that this venture might somehow be dangerous. Since he was enough of a dolt to listen earnestly to the drivel of that foolish preacher from Erzurum-unfortunately, masters of gilding, though closer to God than painters, are also boring and stupid-and moreover, because he knew your silly Enishte’s book was an important project of the Sultan, his fears and doubts clashed: Should he believe in his Sultan or in the preacher from Erzurum? Any other time this unfortunate child, whom I knew like the back of my hand, would’ve come to me about a dilemma that was eating away at him. But even he, with his bird brain, knew very well that the act of gilding for your Enishte, that mimic of the Franks, amounted to a betrayal of me and our guild; and so he sought another confidant. He confided in the wily and ambitious Stork and made the mistake of letting himself be awed by the intellect and morality of a man whose talent impressed him. I’ve seen plenty of times how Stork manipulated Elegant Effendi by taking advantage of the poor gilder’s admiration. Whatever argument took place between them, it resulted in Elegant Effendi’s murder at Stork’s hands. And since the deceased long ago confided his worries to the Erzurumis, they, in a fit of vengeance and to demonstrate their power, went on to kill your Frankophile Enishte, whom they held responsible for the death of their companion. I can’t say that I’m all that sorry about the whole matter. Years ago, your Enishte duped Our Sultan into having a Venetian painter-his name was Sebastiano-make a portrait of His Excellency in the Frankish style as if He were an infidel king. Not satisfied with that, in a disgraceful affront to my dignity, he had this shameful work given to me as a model to be copied; and out of dire fear of Our Sultan, I dishonorably copied that picture which was made using infidel methods. Had I not been forced to do that, perhaps I could grieve for your Enishte, and today help find the scoundrel who killed him. But my concern is not for your Enishte, it’s for my workshop. Your Enishte is responsible for the way my master miniaturists-whom I love more than if they were my own children, whom I trained with doting attention for twenty-five years-betrayed me and our entire artistic tradition; he’s to blame for their enthusiastic imitation of European masters with the justification that ”it is the will of Our Sultan.“ Each of those disgraceful masters deserves nothing but torture! If we, the society of miniaturists, learn to serve foremost our own talent and art instead of Our Sultan who provides us with work, we shall have earned entry through the Gates of Heaven. Now then, I’d like to study this book alone.”

Master Osman uttered this last statement like the last wish of a disconsolate weary pasha who was responsible for military defeat and condemned to beheading. He opened the book Jezmi Agha placed before him and in a scolding voice ordered the dwarf to turn to the pages he wanted. With this accusatory tone, he instantly became the Head Illuminator with whom the entire workshop was familiar.

I withdrew into a corner among cushions embroidered with pearls, rusty-barreled rifles with jewel-studded butts and cabinets, and began eyeing Master Osman. The doubt gnawing away at me spread throughout my entire being: If he wished to stop the creation of Our Sultan’s book, it made perfect sense that Master Osman might’ve orchestrated the murders of poor Elegant Effendi and, afterward, of my Enishte-I reprimanded myself for just now feeling such awe toward him. On the other hand, I couldn’t restrain myself from feeling profound respect for this great master who now gave himself over to the picture before him and, blind or half blind, was peering at it closely as if looking with the countless wrinkles of his old face. It dawned on me that to preserve the old style and the regimen of the miniaturists’ workshop, to rid himself of Enishte’s book and to become again the Sultan’s only favorite, he would gladly surrender any one of his master miniaturists, and me as well, to the torturers of the Commander of the Imperial Guard. I furiously began to think of freeing myself from the love that bound me to him over the last two days.

Much later, I was still completely confused. I stared randomly at the illuminated pages of the volumes I extracted from chests solely to appease the demons that had risen within me and to distract my jinns of indecision.

How many men and women had fingers in their mouths! This was used as a gesture of surprise in all the workshops from Samarkand to Baghdad over the last two hundred years. As the hero Keyhüsrev, cornered by his enemies, safely crossed the rushing Oxus River aided by his black charger and Allah, the wretched raftsman and his oarsman, who refused to offer him safe passage on their raft each had a finger in his mouth. An astonished Hüsrev’s finger remained in his mouth as he saw for the first time the beauty of Shirin, whose skin was like moonlight as she bathed in the once glimmering lake whose silver leaf had tarnished. I spent even more time carefully examining the gorgeous women of the harem who, with fingers in their mouths, stood behind half-opened palace doors, at the inaccessible windows of castle towers and peered from behind curtains. As Tejav, defeated by the armies of Persia to lose his crown, was fleeing the battlefield, Espinuy, a beauty of beauties and his harem favorite, watched with sorrow and shock from a palace window, finger in mouth, begging him with her eyes not to abandon her to the enemy. As Joseph, arrested under Züleyha’s false accusation that he raped her, was being taken to his cell, she stared from her window, a finger in her beautiful mouth in a show of devilishness and lust rather than bewilderment. As happy yet somber lovers who emerged as if from a love poem were carried away by the force of passion and wine in a garden reminiscent of Paradise, a malicious lady servant spied on them with an envious finger in her red mouth.

Despite its being a standard image recorded in the notebooks and memories of all miniaturists, the long finger sliding into a beautiful woman’s mouth had a different elegance each time.

How much did these illustrations comfort me? As dusk fell, I went to Master Osman and said the following:

“My dear master, when the portal is opened once again, with your permission, I shall quit the Treasury.”

“How do you mean!” he said. “We still have one night and one morning. How quickly your eyes have had their fill of the greatest illustrations the world has ever known!”

As he said this, he hadn’t turned his face away from the page before him, yet the paleness in his pupils confirmed he was indeed gradually going blind.

“We’ve learned the secret of the horse’s nostrils,” I said confidently.

“Ha!” he said. “Yes! The rest is up to Our Sultan and the Head Treasurer. Perhaps they will pardon us all.”

Would he name Stork as the murderer? I couldn’t even ask out of fear, for I worried he wouldn’t allow me to leave. Even worse, I had the recurring thought that he might accuse me.

“The plume needle Bihzad used to blind himself is missing,” he said.

“In all probability the dwarf put it back in its place,” I said. “The page before you is so magnificent!”

His face lit up like a child’s, and he smiled. “Hüsrev, burning with love, as he waits astride his horse for Shirin before her palace in the middle of the night,” he said. “Rendered in the style of the old masters of Herat.”

He was now gazing at the picture as if he could see it, but he hadn’t even taken the magnifying glass into his hand.

“Can you see the splendor in the leaves of the trees in the nighttime darkness, appearing one by one as if illuminated from within like stars or spring flowers, the humble patience implied by the wall ornamentation, the refinement in the use of gold leaf and the delicate balance in the entire painting’s composition? Handsome Hüsrev’s horse is as graceful and elegant as a woman. His beloved Shirin waits at the window above him, her neck bowed, but her face proud. It’s as if the lovers are to remain here eternally within the light emanating from the painting’s texture, skin and subtle colors which were applied lovingly by the miniaturist. You can see how their faces are turned ever so slightly toward one another while their bodies are half-turned toward us-for they know they’re in a painting and thus visible to us. This is why they don’t try to resemble exactly those figures which we see around us. Quite to the contrary, they signify that they’ve emerged from Allah’s memory. This is why time has stopped for them within that picture. No matter how fast the pace of the story they tell in the picture, they themselves will remain for all eternity there, like well-bred, polite, shy young maidens, without making any sudden gestures with their hands, arms, slight bodies or even eyes. For them, everything within the navy-blue night is frozen: The bird flies through the darkness, among the stars, with a fluttering like the racing hearts of the lovers themselves, and at the same time, remains fixed for all eternity as if nailed to the sky in this matchless moment. The old masters of Herat, who knew that God’s velvet blackness was lowering over their eyes like a curtain, also knew that if they went blind while staring motionless at such an illustration for days and weeks on end, their souls would at last mingle with the eternity of the picture.”

At the time of the evening prayer, when the portal of the Treasury was opened with the same ceremony and under the gaze of the same throng, Master Osman was still staring intently at the page before him, at the bird that floated motionless in the sky. But if you noticed the paleness in his pupils you’d also realize that he stared at the page quite oddly, as blind men sometimes incorrectly orient themselves to the food before them.

The officers of the Treasury detail, learning that Master Osman would stay inside and that Jezmi Agha was at the door, neglected to search me thoroughly and never found the plume needle I hid in my undergarment. When I emerged onto the streets of Istanbul from the palace courtyard, I slipped into a passageway and removed the terrifying object, with which the legendary Bihzad had blinded himself, from where it was, and stuck it into my sash. I practically ran through the streets.

The cold of the Treasury chambers had so penetrated my bones that it seemed as though the gentle weather of an early spring had settled over the city streets. As I passed the grocer, barber, herbalist, fruit and vegetable shop and firewood shop of the Old Caravansary Bazaar, which were shutting down one by one for the night, I slowed my pace and carefully examined the casks, cloth sheets, carrots and jars in the warm shops lit by oil lamps.

My Enishte’s street (I still couldn’t say “Shekure’s street” let alone “my street”) appeared even stranger and more distant after my two-day absence. But the joy of being reunited safe and sound with my Shekure, and the thought that I’d be able to enter my beloved’s bed tonight-since the murderer was as good as caught-made me feel so intimate with the whole world that upon seeing the pomegranate tree and the repaired and closed shutters, I had to restrain myself from shouting like a farmer hollering to someone across a stream. When I saw Shekure, I wanted the first words out of my mouth to be, “We know who the wretched murderer is!”

I opened the courtyard gate. I’m not sure if it was from the squeak of the gate, the carefree way the sparrow drank water from the well bucket, or the darkness of the house, but with the wolflike prescience of a man who’d lived alone for twelve years, I understood at once that nobody was home. Even bitterly realizing that one’s been left to his own devices, one will still open and close all of the doors, the cabinets and even lift the lids of pots, and that’s just what I did. I even looked inside the chests.

In this silence, the only sound I heard was the thudding of my own racing heart. Like an old man who’s done everything he will ever do, I felt consoled when I abruptly girded my sword, which I’d kept hidden at the bottom of the most out of the way chest. It was this ivory-handled sword which always provided me with inner peace and balance during all those years I worked with the pen. Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

I went down to the courtyard. The sparrow had flown away. As if abandoning a sinking ship, I left the house to the silence of an impending darkness.

My heart, now more confident, told me to run and find them. I ran, but I slowed through crowded places and the mosque courtyards where dogs picked up my trail and joyously followed, anticipating some kind of amusement.