My Name is Red

I, SHEKURE

Black had hidden us away in the house of a distant relative, where I spent a sleepless night. In the bed where I curled up with Hayriye and the children, I was occasionally able to nod off amid the sounds of snoring and coughing, but in my restless dreams, I saw strange creatures and women whose arms and legs had been severed and randomly reattached; they wouldn’t stop chasing me and continually woke me. Toward morning, the cold roused me and I covered Shevket and Orhan, embracing them, kissing their heads and begging Allah for pleasant dreams, such as I’d enjoyed during the blissful days when I slept in peace under my late father’s roof.

I couldn’t sleep, however. After the morning prayers, looking out on the street through the shutters of the window in the small, dark room, I saw what I’d always seen in my happy dreams: A ghostly man, exhausted from warring and the wounds he’d received, brandishing a stick as if it were a sword, longingly approach me with familiar steps. In my dream, whenever I was on the verge of embracing this man, I’d awake in tears. When I saw the man in the street was Black, the scream that would never leave my throat in dreams sounded.

I ran and opened the door.

His face was swollen and bruised purple from fighting. His nose was mangled and covered in blood. He had a large gash from his shoulder to his neck. His shirt had turned bright red from the blood. Like the husband of my dreams, Black smiled at me faintly because he had, in the end, successfully returned.

“Get inside,” I said.

“Call for the children,” he said. “We’re going home.”

“You’re in no condition to return home.”

“There’s no reason to fear him anymore,” he said. “The murderer is Velijan Effendi, the Persian.”

“Olive…” I said. “Did you kill that miserable rogue?”

“He’s fled to India on the ship that departed from Galleon Harbor,” he said and avoided my eyes, knowing that he hadn’t properly accomplished his task.

“Will you be able to walk back to our house?” I said. “Shall we have them bring a horse for you?”

I sensed that he would die upon arriving home and I pitied him. Not because he would die alone, but because he’d never known any true happiness. I could see from the sorrow and determination in his eyes that he wished not to be in this strange house, and that he actually wanted to disappear without being seen by anybody in this horrible state. With some difficulty, they mounted him on a horse.

During our trip back, as we passed through side streets clinging to our bundles, the children were at first too frightened to look Black in the face. But from astride the slowly ambling horse, Black was still able to describe how he foiled the schemes of the wretched murderer who’d killed their grandfather and how he challenged him to a sword fight. I could see that the children had warmed up to him somewhat, and I prayed to Allah: Please, don’t let him die!

When we reached the house, Orhan shouted, “We’re home!” with such joy I had the intuition that Azrael, the Angel of Death, pitied us and Allah would grant Black more time. But I knew from experience that one could never tell when exalted Allah would take one’s soul, and I wasn’t overly hopeful.

We helped Black down from the horse. We brought him upstairs, and settled him into the bed in my father’s room, the one with the blue door. Hayriye boiled water and brought it upstairs. Hayriye and I undressed him, tearing his clothes and cutting them with scissors, removing the bloodied shirt stuck to his flesh, his sash, his shoes and his underclothes. When we opened the shutters, the soft winter sunlight playing on the branches in the garden filled the room, reflected off the ewers, pots, glue boxes, inkwells, pieces of glass and penknives, and illuminated Black’s deathly pale skin, and his flesh- and sour-cherry-colored wounds.

I soaked pieces of bedding in hot water and rubbed them with soap. Then I wiped clean Black’s body, carefully as though cleaning a valuable antique carpet, and affectionately and eagerly as though caring for one of my boys. Without pressing on the bruises that covered his face, without jarring the cut in his nostril, I cleansed the horrible wound on his shoulder as a doctor might. As I’d do when bathing the children when they were babies, I cooed to him in a singsong voice. There were cuts on his chest and arms as well. The fingers of his left hand were purple from being bitten. The rags I used to wipe his body were soon bloodsoaked. I touched his chest; I felt the softness of his abdomen with my hand; I looked at his cock for a long time. The sounds of the children were coming from the courtyard below. Why did some poets call this thing a “reed pen”?

I could hear Esther enter the kitchen with that joyous voice and mysterious air she adopted when she brought news, and I went down to greet her.

She was so excited she began without embracing or kissing me: Olive’s severed head was found in front of the workshop; the pictures proving his guilt in the crimes and his satchel had also been recovered. He was intending to flee to Hindustan, but had decided first to call at the workshop one last time.

There were witnesses to the ordeal: Hasan, encountering Olive, had drawn his red sword and cut off Olive’s head in a single stroke.

As she recounted, I thought about where my unfortunate father was. Learning that the murderer had received his due punishment at first put my fears to rest. And revenge lent me a feeling of comfort and justice. At that instant, I wondered intensely whether my now-dead father could experience this feeling; suddenly, it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.

“Don’t cry, my dear,” said Esther. “You see, in the end everything has turned out fine.”

I gave her four gold coins. She took them, one at a time, into her mouth and bit down upon them crudely with eagerness and longing.

“Coins counterfeited by the Venetians are everywhere,” she said, smiling.

As soon as she’d left, I warned Hayriye not to let the children upstairs. I went up to the room where Black lay, locked the door behind me and cuddled up eagerly next to Black’s naked body. Then, more out of curiosity than desire, more out of care than fear, I did what Black wanted me to do in the house of the Hanged Jew the night my poor father was killed.

I can’t say I completely understood why Persian poets, who for centuries had likened that male tool to a reed pen, also compared the mouths of us women to inkwells, or what lay behind such comparisons whose origins had been forgotten through rote repetition-was it the smallness of the mouth? The arcane silence of the inkwell? Was it that God Himself was an illuminator? Love, however, must be understood, not through the logic of a woman like me who continually racks her brain to protect herself, but through its illogic.

So, let me tell you a secret: There, in that room that smelled of death, it wasn’t the object in my mouth that delighted me. What delighted me then, lying there with the entire world throbbing between my lips, was the happy twittering of my sons cursing and roughhousing with each other in the courtyard.

While my mouth was thus occupied, my eyes could make out Black looking at me in a completely different way. He said he’d never again forget my face and my mouth. As with some of my father’s old books, his skin smelled of moldy paper, and the scent of the Treasury’s dust and cloth had saturated his hair. As I let myself go and caressed his wounds, his cuts and swellings, he groaned like a child, moving further and further away from death, and it was then I understood I would become even more attached to him. Like a solemn ship that gains speed as its sails swell with wind, our gradually quickening lovemaking took us boldly into unfamiliar seas.

I could tell by the way he was able to navigate these waters, even on his deathbed, that Black had plied these seas many times before with who knows what manner of indecent women. While I was confused as to whether the forearm I kissed was my own or his, whether I was sucking my own finger or an entire life, he stared out of one half-opened eye, nearly intoxicated by his wounds and pleasure, checking where the world was taking him, and from time to time, he would hold my head delicately in his hands, and stare at my face astounded, now looking as if at a picture, now as if at a Mingerian whore.

At the peak of pleasure, he cried out like the legendary heroes cut clear in half with a single stroke of the sword in fabled pictures that immortalized the clash of Persian and Turanian armies; the fact that this cry could be heard throughout the neighborhood frightened me. Like a genuine master miniaturist at the moment of greatest inspiration, holding his reed under the direct guidance of Allah, yet still able to take into consideration the form and composition of the entire page, Black continued to direct our place in the world from a corner of his mind even through his highest excitement.

“You can tell them you were spreading salve onto my wounds,” he said breathlessly.

These words not only constituted the color of our love-which settled into a bottleneck between life and death, prohibition and paradise, hopelessness and shame-they also were the excuse for our love. For the next twenty-six years, until my beloved husband Black collapsed next to the well one morning to die of a bad heart, each afternoon, as the sunlight filtered into the room through the slats of the shutters, and for the first few years, to the sounds of Shevket and Orhan playing, we made love, always referring to it as “spreading salve onto wounds.” This was how my jealous sons, whom I didn’t want to suffer beatings at the jealous whims of a rough and melancholy father, were able to continue sleeping in the same bed with me for years. All sensible women know how it’s much nicer to sleep curled up with one’s children than with a melancholy husband who’s been beaten down by life.

We, my children and I, were happy, but Black couldn’t be. The most obvious reason for this was the wound on his shoulder and neck that never completely healed; my beloved husband was left “crippled,” as I heard him described by others. But this didn’t disrupt his life, other than in its appearance. There were even times when I heard other women, who’d seen my husband from a distance, describe him as handsome. But Black’s right shoulder was lower than the left and his neck remained oddly cocked. I also heard gossip to the effect that a woman like myself could only marry a husband whom she felt was beneath her, and how as much as Black’s wound was the cause of his discontent, it was also the secret source of our shared happiness.

As with all gossip, there is perhaps an element of truth in this as well. However deprived and destitute I felt at not being able to pass down the streets of Istanbul mounted tall on an exceptionally beautiful horse, surrounded by slaves, lady servants and attendants-what Esther always thought I deserved-I also occasionally longed for a brave and spirited husband who held his head high and looked at the world with a sense of victory.

Whatever the cause, Black always remained melancholy. Because I knew that his sadness had nothing to do with his shoulder, I believed that somewhere in a secret corner of his soul he was possessed by a jinn of sorrow that dampened his mood even during our most exhilarating moments of lovemaking. To appease that jinn, at times he’d drink wine, at times stare at illustrations in books and take an interest in art, at times he’d even spend his days and nights with miniaturists chasing after pretty boys. There were periods when he entertained himself in the company of painters, calligraphers and poets in orgies of puns, double entendres, innuendos, metaphors and games of flattery, and there were periods when he forgot everything and surrendered himself to secretarial duties and a governmental clerkship under Hunched Süleyman Pasha, into whose service he’d managed to enter. Four years later, when Our Sultan died, and with the ascension of Sultan Mehmed, who turned his back entirely on all artistry, Black’s enthusiasm for illumination and painting turned from an openly celebrated pleasure into a private secret pursued behind closed doors. There were times when he’d open one of the books left to us by my father, and stare, guilty and sad, at an illustration made during the era of Tamerlane’s sons in Herat-yes, Shirin falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture-not as if it were part of a happy game of talent still being played in palace circles, but as if he were dwelling upon a sweet secret long surrendered to memory.

In the third year of Our Sultan’s reign, the Queen of England sent His Excellency a miraculous clock that contained a musical instrument with a bellows. An English delegation assembled this enormous clock after weeks of toil with various pieces, cogs, pictures and statuettes that they brought with them from England, erecting it on a slope of the Royal Private Garden facing the Golden Horn. The crowds that collected on the slopes of the Golden Horn or came in caïques to watch, astonished and awed, saw how the life-size statues and ornaments spun around each other purposefully when the huge clock played its noisy and terrifying music, how they danced elegantly and meaningfully by themselves in time to the melody as if they were creations of God rather than of His servants, and how the clock announced the time to all Istanbul with a chime that resembled the sounding of a bell.

Black and Esther told me on different occasions how the clock, as well as being the focus of endless astonishment on the part of Istanbul ’s riffraff and dull-witted mobs, was understandably a source of discomfort to the pious and to Our Sultan because it symbolized the power of the infidel. In a time when rumors of this sort abounded, Sultan Ahmed, the subsequent sovereign, woke up in the middle of the night under Allah’s instigation, seized His mace and descended from the harem to the Private Garden where He shattered the clock and its statues to pieces. Those who brought us the news and the rumors explained how as Our Sultan slept, He saw the sacred face of Our Exalted Prophet bathed in holy light and how the Apostle of God warned Him: If Our Sultan allowed his subjects to be awed by pictures and, worse yet, by objects that mimicked Mankind and thus competed with Allah’s creations, the sovereign would be diverging from divine will. They also added that Our Sultan had taken up His mace while still dreaming. This was more or less how Our Sultan dictated the event to His faithful historian. He had this book, entitled The Quintessence of Histories, prepared by calligraphers, upon whom He lavished purses full of gold, though He forbade its illustration by miniaturists.

Thus withered the red rose of the joy of painting and illumination that had bloomed for a century in Istanbul, nurtured by inspiration from the lands of Persia. The conflict between the methods of the old masters of Herat and the Frankish masters that paved the way for quarrels among artists and endless quandries was never resolved. For painting itself was abandoned; artists painted neither like Easterners nor Westerners. The miniaturists did not grow angry and revolt, but like old men who quietly succumb to an illness, they gradually accepted the situation with humble grief and resignation. They were neither curious about nor dreamed about the work of the great masters of Herat and Tabriz, whom they once followed with awe, or the Frankish masters, whose innovative methods they aspired to, caught indecisively between envy and hatred. Just as the doors of houses are closed of an evening and the city is left to darkness, painting was also abandoned. It was mercilessly forgotten that we’d once looked upon our world quite differently.

My father’s book, sadly, remained unfinished. From where Hasan scattered the completed pages on the ground, they were transferred to the Treasury; there, an efficient and fastidious librarian had them bound together with other unrelated illustrations belonging to the workshop, and thus they were separated into several bound albums. Hasan fled Istanbul, and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Shevket and Orhan never forgot that it wasn’t Black but their Uncle Hasan who was the one who killed my father’s murderer.

In place of Master Osman, who died two years after going blind, Stork became Head Illuminator. Butterfly, who was also quite in awe of my late father’s talents, devoted the rest of his life to drawing ornamental designs for carpets, cloths and tents. The young assistant masters of the workshop gave themselves over to similar work. No one behaved as though abandoning illustration were any great loss. Perhaps because nobody had ever seen his own face done justice on the page.

My whole life, I’ve secretly very much wanted two paintings made, which I’ve never mentioned to anybody:

1. My own portrait; but I knew however hard the Sultan’s miniaturists tried, they’d fail, because even if they could see my beauty, woefully, none of them would believe a woman’s face was beautiful without depicting her eyes and lips like a Chinese woman’s. Had they represented me as a Chinese beauty, the way the old masters of Herat would’ve, perhaps those who saw it and recognized me could discern my face behind the face of that Chinese beauty. But later generations, even if they realized my eyes weren’t really slanted, could never determine what my face truly looked like. How happy I’d be today, in my old age-which I live out through the comfort of my children-if I had a youthful portrait of myself!

2. A picture of bliss: What the poet Blond Nazım of Ran had pondered in one of his verses. I know quite well how this painting ought to be made. Imagine the picture of a mother with her two children; the younger one, whom she cradles in her arms, nursing him as she smiles, suckles happily at her bountiful breast, smiling as well. The eyes of the slightly jealous older brother and those of the mother should be locked. I’d like to be the mother in that picture. I’d want the bird in the sky to be depicted as if flying, and at the same time, happily and eternally suspended there, in the style of the old masters of Herat who were able to stop time. I know it’s not easy.

My son Orhan, who’s foolish enough to be logical in all matters, reminds me on the one hand that the time-halting masters of Herat could never depict me as I am, and on the other hand, that the Frankish masters who perpetually painted mother-with-child portraits could never stop time. He’s been insisting for years that my picture of bliss could never be painted anyhow.

Perhaps he’s right. In actuality, we don’t look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is precisely what they cannot depict. That’s why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.

In the hopes that he might pen this story, which is beyond depiction, I’ve told it to my son Orhan. Without hesitation I gave him the letters Hasan and Black sent me, along with the rough horse illustrations with the smeared ink, which were found on poor Elegant Effendi. Above all, don’t be taken in by Orhan if he’s drawn Black more absentminded than he is, made our lives harder than they are, Shevket worse and me prettier and harsher than I am. For the sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn’t a lie Orhan wouldn’t deign to tell.

1990-92, 1994-98