My Name is Red Read online

  The less confident he became, the more he raised his voice and the more fiercely he gripped the inkpot. Would somebody passing down the snowy street hear his shouting and enter the house?

  “How did you kill him?” I asked, more to buy time than out of curiosity. “How did you chance to meet at the mouth of that well?”

  “The night Elegant Effendi left your house, he came to me,” he said, with an unexpected desire to confess. “He said he’d seen the final double-leaf painting. I tried at length to dissuade him from making an issue out of it. I got him to walk over to the area ravaged by the fire. I told him I had money buried near the well. When he heard that, he believed me…What better proof that an illustrator is motivated by greed alone? That’s another reason I’m not sorry. He was a talented, but mediocre artist. The greedy oaf was ready to dig into the frozen earth with his fingernails. You see, if I truly had gold pieces buried beside that well, I wouldn’t have had to do away with him. Yes, you hired yourself quite a miserable wretch to do your gilding. The dearly departed had finesse, but his choice of color and application was ordinary, and his illuminations were uninspired. I didn’t leave a trace…Tell me, then, what is the essence of “style?” Today, both the Franks and the Chinese talk about the character of a painter’s talent, what they call “style.” Should style distinguish a good artist from others or not?”

  “Fear not,” I said, “a new style doesn’t spring from a miniaturist’s own desire. A prince dies, a shah loses a battle, a seemingly never-ending era ends, a workshop is closed and its members disband, searching for other homes and other bibliophiles to become their patrons. One day, a compassionate sultan will assemble these exiles, these bewildered but talented refugee miniaturists and calligraphers, in his own tent or palace and begin to establish his own book-arts workshop. Even if these artists, unaccustomed to one another, continue at first in their respective painting styles, over time, as with children who gradually become friends by roughhousing on the street, they’ll quarrel, bond, struggle and compromise. The birth of a new style is the result of years of disagreements, jealousies, rivalries and studies in color and painting. Generally, it’ll be the most gifted member of the workshop who fathers this form. Let’s also call him the most fortunate. To the rest of the miniaturists falls the singular duty of perfecting and refining this style through perpetual imitation.”

  Unable to look me straight in the eye, he assumed an unexpected gentle manner, and begging my compassion as much as my honesty, he asked me, trembling like a maiden:

  “Do I have a style of my own?”

  I thought tears would flow from my eyes. With all the gentleness, sympathy and kindness I could muster, I hastened to tell him what I believed to be the truth:

  “You are the most talented, divinely inspired artist with the most enchanted touch and eye for detail that I’ve seen in all my sixty years. If you put a painting before me which had seen the combined work of a thousand miniaturists, I’d still be able to recognize instantly the God-given magnificence of your pen.”

  “Agreed, but I know you’re not wise enough to appreciate the mystery of my skill,” he said. “You’re lying, now, because you’re afraid of me. Describe, once again, the character of my methods.”

  “Your pen selects the right line seemingly of its own accord, as if without your touch. What your pen draws is neither truthful nor frivolous! When you portray a crowded gathering, the tension emerging from the glances between figures, their positioning on the page and the meaning of the text metamorphose into an elegant eternal whisper. I return to your paintings again and again to hear that whisper, and each time, I realize with a smile that the meaning has changed, and how shall I put it, I begin to read the painting anew. When these layers of meaning are taken together, a depth emerges that surpasses even the perspectivism of the European masters.”

  “Fine and well. Forget about the European masters. Start from the beginning.”

  “You have such a truly magnificent and forceful line, that the observer believes in what you’ve painted rather than in reality itself. And just as your talent could create a picture that would force the most devout man to renounce his faith, it could also bring the most hopeless, unrepentant unbeliever to Allah’s path.”

  “True, but I’m not sure that amounts to praise. Try again.”

  “There’s no miniaturist who knows the consistency of paint and its secrets as well as you do. You always prepare and apply the glossiest, most vibrant, most genuine colors.”

  “Yes, and what else?”

  “You know you’re the greatest of painters after Bihzad and Mir Seyyid Ali.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of this. If you are too, why are you making the book with that model of mediocrity Black Effendi?”

  “First, the work he does doesn’t require a miniaturist’s skill,” I said. “Second, unlike yourself, he’s not a murderer.”

  He smiled sweetly under the influence of my joke. With this, I thought I might be able to escape this nightmare thanks to a new expression — this word “style.” Upon my broaching the subject, we began a pleasant discussion concerning the bronze Mongol inkpot he held, not like father and son, but like two curious and experienced old men. The weight of the bronze, the balance of the inkpot, the depth of its neck, the length of old calligraphy reed pens and the mysteries of red ink, whose consistency he could feel as he gently swung the inkpot before me…We agreed that if the Mongols hadn’t brought the secrets of red paint — which they’d learned from Chinese masters — to Khorasan, Bukhara and Herat, we in Istanbul couldn’t make these paintings at all. As we talked, the consistency of time, like that of the paint, seemed to change, to flow ever more quickly. In a corner of my mind I was wondering why no one had yet returned home. If only he’d put down that weighty object.

  With our customary workaday ease, he asked me, “When your book is finished, will those who see my work appreciate my skill?”

  “If we can, God willing, finish this book without interference, Our Sultan will look it over, of course, checking first to see whether we used enough gold leaf in the appropriate places. Then, as if reading a description of Himself, as any sultan would, He’ll stare at his own portrait, struck by His own likeness rather than by our magnificent illustrations; thereafter, if He takes the time to examine the spectacle we’ve painstakingly and devotedly created at the expense of the light of our eyes, so much the better. You know, as well as I, that barring a miracle, He’ll lock the book away in His treasury without even asking who made the frame or the gilded illuminations, who painted this man or that horse — and like all skillful artisans, we’ll go back to painting, ever hopeful that one day a miracle of acknowledgment will find us.”

  We were silent for a while, as if patiently waiting for something.

  “When will that miracle happen?” he asked. “When will all those paintings we’ve worked on until we could no longer see straight truly be appreciated? When will they give me, give us, the respect we deserve?”

  “Never!”

  “How so?”

  “They’ll never give you what you want,” I said. “In the future, you’ll be even less appreciated.”

  “Books last for centuries,” he said proudly but without confidence.

  “Believe me, none of the Venetian masters have your poetic sensibility, your conviction, your sensitivity, the purity and brightness of your colors, yet their paintings are more compelling because they more closely resemble life itself. They don’t paint the world as seen from the balcony of a minaret, ignoring what they call perspective; they depict what’s seen at street level, or from the inside of a prince’s room, taking in his bed, quilt, desk, mirror, his tiger, his daughter and his coins. They include it all, as you know. I’m not persuaded by everything they do. Attempting to imitate the world directly through painting seems dishonorable to me. I resent it. But there’s an undeniable allure to the paintings they make by those new methods. They depict what the eye sees just as the eye sees it. In
deed, they paint what they see, whereas we paint what we look at. Beholding their work, one comes to realize that the only way to have one’s face immortalized is through the Frankish style. And it’s not only the inhabitants of Venice who are captured by this notion, but all the tailors, butchers, soldiers, priests and grocers in all the Frankish lands…They all have their portraits made this way. Just a glance at those paintings and you too would want to see yourself this way, you’d want to believe that you’re different from all others, a unique, special and particuliar human being. Painting people, not as they are perceived by the mind, but as they are actually seen by the naked eye, painting in the new method, allows for this possibility. One day everyone will paint as they do. When “painting” is mentioned, the world will think of their work! Even a poor foolish tailor who understands nothing of illustrating will want such a portrait so he might be convinced, upon seeing the unique curve of his nose, that he’s not an ordinary simpleton, but an extraordinary man.”

  “So? We can make that portrait, as well,” quipped the witty assassin.

  “We won’t!” I replied. “Haven’t you learned from your victim, the late Elegant Effendi, how afraid we are of being labeled imitators of the Franks? Even if we venture bravely to paint like them, it’ll amount to the same thing. In the end, our methods will die out, our colors will fade. No one will care about our books and our paintings, and those who do express interest will ask with a sneer, with no understanding whatsoever, why there’s no perspective — or else they won’t be able to find the manuscripts at all. Indifference, time and disaster will destroy our art. The Arabian glue used in the bindings contains fish, honey and bone, and the pages are sized and polished with a finish made from egg white and starch. Greedy, shameless mice will nibble these pages away; termites, worms and a thousand varieties of insect will gnaw our manuscripts out of existence. Bindings will fall apart and pages will drop out. Women lighting their stoves, thieves, indifferent servants and children will thoughtlessly tear out the pages and pictures. Child princes will scrawl over the illustrations with toy pens. They’ll blacken people’s eyes, wipe their runny noses on the pages, doodle in the margins with black ink. And religious censors will blacken out whatever is left. They’ll tear and cut up our paintings, perhaps use them to make other pictures or for games and such entertainment. While mothers destroy the illustrations they consider obscene, fathers and older brothers will jack off onto the pictures of women and the pages will stick together, not only because of this, but also due to being smeared with mud, water, bad glue, spit and all manner of filth and food. Stains of mold and dirt will blossom like flowers where the pages have stuck together. Rain, leaky roofs, floods and dirt will ruin our books. Of course, together with the tattered, faded and unreadable pages, which water, humidity, bugs and neglect will have reduced to pulp, the one last volume to emerge intact, like a miracle, from the bottom of a bone-dry chest will also one day disappear, swallowed up in the flames of a merciless fire. Is there a neighborhood in Istanbul that hasn’t been burned to the ground at least once every twenty years that we might expect such a book to survive? In this city, where every three years more books and libraries disappear than those the Mongols burned and plundered in Baghdad, what painter could possibly imagine that his masterpiece might last more than a century, or that one day his pictures might be seen, and he revered like Bihzad? Not only our own art, but every single work made in this world over the years will vanish in fires, be destroyed by worms or be lost out of neglect: Shirin proudly watching Hüsrev from a window; Hüsrev delightfully spying on Shirin as she bathes by moonlight; lovers gazing at each other with grace and subtlety; Rüstem’s wrestling a white demon to death at the bottom of a well; the anguished state of a lovelorn Mejnun befriending a white tiger and a mountain goat in the desert; the capture and hanging of a deceitful shepherd dog who presents a sheep from his flock to the she-wolf he mates with each night; the flower, angel, leafy twig, bird and teardrop border illuminations; the lute players that embellish Hafiz’s enigmatic poems; the wall ornamentations that have ruined the eyes of thousands, nay tens of thousands of miniaturist apprentices; the small plaques hung above doors and on walls; the couplets secretly written between the embedded borders of illustrations; the humble signatures hidden at the bases of walls, in corners, in facade embellishments, under the soles of feet, beneath shrubbery and between rocks; the flower-covered quilts covering lovers; the severed infidel heads patiently awaiting Our Sultan’s late grandfather as he victoriously marches upon an enemy fortress; the cannon, guns and tents that even in your youth you helped illustrate and that appeared in the background as the ambassador of the infidels kissed the feet of Our Sultan’s great-grandfather; the devils, with and without horns, with and without tails, with pointed teeth and with pointed nails; the thousands of varieties of birds including Solomon’s wise hoopoe, the jumping swallow, the dodo and the singing nightingale; the serene cats and restless dogs; fast-moving clouds; the small charming blades of grass reproduced in thousands of pictures; the amateurish shadows falling across rocks and tens of thousands of cypress, plane and pomegranate trees whose leaves were drawn one after another with the patience of Job; the palaces — and their hundreds of thousands of bricks — which were modeled on palaces from the time of Tamerlane or Shah Tahmasp but accompanied stories from much earlier eras; the tens of thousands of melancholy princes listening to music played by beautiful women and boys sitting on magnificent carpets in fields of flowers and beneath flowering trees; the extraordinary pictures of ceramics and carpets that owe their perfection to the thousands of apprentice illustrators from Samarkand to Islambol beaten to the point of tears over the last one hundred fifty years; the sublime gardens and the soaring black kites that you still depict with your old enthusiasm, your astounding scenes of death and war, your graceful hunting sultans, and with the same finesse, your startled fleeing gazelles, your dying shahs, your prisoners of war, your infidel galleons and your rival cities, your shiny dark nights that glimmer as if night itself had flowed from your pen, your stars, your ghostlike cypresses, your red-tinted pictures of love and death, yours and all the rest, all of it will vanish…”

  Raising the inkpot, he struck me on the head with all his strength.

  I tottered forward under the force of the blow. I felt a horrible pain that I could never even hope to describe. The entire world was wrapped in my pain and faded to yellow. A large portion of my mind assumed that this attack was intentional; yet, along with the blow — or perhaps because of it — another, faltering part of my mind, in a sad show of goodwill, wanted to say to the madman who aspired to be my murderer: “Have mercy, you’ve attacked me in error.”

  He raised the inkpot again and brought it down upon my head.

  This time, even the faltering part of my mind understood that this was no mistake, but madness and wrath that might very well end in my death. I was so terrified by this state of affairs that I began to raise my voice, howling with all my strength and suffering. The color of this howl would be verdigris, and in the blackness of evening on the empty streets, no one would be able to hear its hue; I knew I was all alone.

  He was startled by my wail and hesitated. We momentarily came eye to eye. I could tell from his pupils that, despite his horror and embarrassment, he’d resigned himself to what he was doing. He was no longer the master miniaturist I knew, but an unfamiliar and ill-willed stranger who didn’t speak my language, and this sensation protracted my momentary isolation for centuries. I wanted to hold his hand, as if to embrace this world; it was of no use. I begged, or thought I did: “My child, my dear child, please do not end my life.” As if in a dream, he seemed not to hear.

  He lowered the inkpot onto my head again.

  My thoughts, what I saw, my memories, my eyes, all of it, merging together, became fear. I could see no one color and realized that all colors had become red. What I thought was my blood was red ink; what I thought was ink on his hands was my flowing blood.

&n
bsp; How unjust, cruel, and merciless I found it to be dying at that instant. Yet, this was the conclusion that my aged and bloody head was slowly coming to. Then I saw it. My recollections were stark white, like the snow outside. My heart ached as it throbbed as if within my mouth.

  I shall now describe my death. Perhaps you’ve understood this long ago: Death is not the end, this is certain. However, as it is written everywhere in books, death is something painful beyond comprehension. It was as if not only my shattered skull and brain but every part of me, merging together, was burning and racked with torment. Withstanding this boundless suffering was so difficult that a portion of my mind reacted — as if this were its only option — by forgetting the agony and seeking a gentle sleep.

  Before I died, I remembered the Assyrian legend that I heard as an adolescent. An old man, living alone, rises from his bed in the middle of the night and drinks a glass of water. He places the glass upon the end table to discover the candle that had been there is missing. Where had it gone? A fine thread of light is filtering from within. He follows the light, retracing his steps back to his bedroom to find that somebody is lying in his bed holding the candle. “Who might you be?” he asks. “I am Death,” says the stranger. The old man is overcome by a mysterious silence. Then he says, “So, you’ve come.” “Yes,” responds Death haughtily. “No,” the old man says firmly, “you’re but an unfinished dream of mine.” The old man abruptly blows out the candle in the stranger’s hand and everything vanishes in blackness. The old man enters his own empty bed, goes to sleep and lives for another twenty years.

  I knew this was not to be my fate. He brought the inkpot down onto my head once again. I was in such a state of profound torment that I could only vaguely discern the impact. He, the inkpot and the room illuminated faintly by the candle had already begun to fade.