My Name is Red Read online

  Her first gesture confirmed what I’d said, and moreover the cadence of her words conveyed that they were spoken under duress — to hide the truth.

  “What’s going on?” I asked abruptly, whispering as if I were her confidant.

  Indecisive Hayriye had of course understood that there was no hope of claiming any authority over Shekure after Enishte Effendi’s death. And a short while ago, she was the one mourning with the most heartfelt tears.

  “What’s to become of me, now?” she said.

  “Shekure holds you in high regard,” I said in my habit of giving news. Lifting up the lids of the pots of halva lined up between the large clay jar of grape molasses and the pickle jar, sneaking a fingerful from one or simply leaning over to smell another, I asked who’d sent each of them.

  Hayriye was rattling off who’d sent which pot: “This one’s from Kasim Effendi of Kayseri; this one, the assistant from the miniaturists division who lives two streets over; that’s from the locksmith, Left-Handed Hamdi; that one, the young bride from Edirne —” when Shekure interrupted her.

  “Kalbiye, the late Elegant Effendi’s widow, didn’t come to offer her condolences, didn’t send word and didn’t send any halva either!”

  She was heading from the kitchen door to the foot of the stairs. I followed her, knowing that she wanted to have a word with me in private.

  “There was no ill-will between Elegant Effendi and my father. On the day of Elegant’s funeral, we prepared our halva and sent it to them. I want to know what’s going on,” Shekure said.

  “I’ll go right away and find out,” I said, anticipating Shekure’s thoughts.

  Since I kept our chat brief, she kissed me on the cheek. As the cold of the courtyard bit into us, we embraced and stood there without moving. Afterward, I stroked my beautiful Shekure’s hair.

  “Esther, I’m afraid,” she said.

  “My dear, don’t be afraid,” I said. “Every cloud has a silver lining. Look, you’re finally married.”

  “But I’m not sure I did the right thing,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t let him get near me. I spent the night beside my unfortunate father.”

  She opened her eyes wide and looked at me in a way that said, You understand what I mean.

  “Hasan claims that your wedding is null in the eyes of the judge,” I said. “He sent this to you.”

  Though she said, “No more,” she immediately opened the small note and read, but this time she didn’t tell me what it contained.

  She was right to be discreet; we weren’t alone in the courtyard where we’d stood embracing: Above us, a smirking carpenter, reattaching the shutter of the hall window, which fell and broke for some unknown reason that morning, was also eyeing both us and the women mourning inside. Meanwhile, Hayriye came out of the house and rushed to open the door for the son of a loyal neighbor who’d called out, “the halva’s here,” as he knocked on the courtyard gate.

  “It’s been quite some time since we buried him,” said Shekure. “I can now sense that my poor father’s soul is leaving his body for good and rising into the heavens.”

  She removed herself from my arms, and gazing up at the bright sky, recited a long prayer.

  I suddenly felt so distant and estranged from Shekure that it wouldn’t have surprised me if I were the cloud she was gazing at. As soon as she finished her prayer, pretty Shekure kissed me affectionately on both cheeks.

  “Esther,” she said, “so long as my father’s murderer roams free, there’ll be no peace in this world for me or my children.”

  It pleased me that she didn’t mention her new husband’s name.

  “Go to Elegant Effendi’s house, talk casually to his widow and learn why they didn’t send us any halva. Let me know immediately what you find out.”

  “Do you have any messages for Hasan?” I said.

  I felt embarrassed, not because I’d asked this question, but because I couldn’t look her in the eye as I did so. To cover up my embarrassment, I stopped Hayriye and opened the lid of the pot she was holding. “Ohh,” I said, “semolina halva with pistachios,” as I had a taste. “And they’ve added oranges, too.”

  It made me happy to see Shekure smile sweetly as if everything were happening as planned.

  I grabbed my bundle and left. I’d taken no more than two steps when I saw Black at the end of the street. He’d just come from the burial of his father-in-law, and I could tell from his beaming face that this new husband was quite pleased with his life. In order not to dampen his spirits, I left the street, entered the vegetable rows and passed through the garden of the house where the brother of the lover of the famous Jewish doctor Moshe Hamon had lived before he was hanged. This garden, which recalled death, always brought such great sadness upon me when I walked through it that I invariably forgot I’d been charged to find a buyer for the property.

  The air of death was also in Elegant Effendi’s house, though for me it provoked no sadness. I was Esther, a woman who went in and out of thousands of homes and was acquainted with hundreds of widows; I knew that women who lost their husbands early were spellbound either by defeat and misery or anger and rebellion (although Shekure had suffered all these afflictions). Kalbiye had partaken of the poison of anger and I fast realized that this would serve to hasten my work.

  As with all conceited women to whom life has been cruel, Kalbiye quite rightly suspected that all her visitors came to pity her in her darkest hour, or even worse, to witness her agony and secretly rejoice in their own better situations; thus, she engaged in no pleasantries with her guests, but went straight to the heart of the matter forgoing any flowery small talk. Why had Esther come this afternoon, just as Kalbiye was about to take a consoling nap with her grief? Well aware she’d take no interest in the latest silks from China or handkerchiefs from Bursa, I didn’t even pretend to open my bundle, but came right to the point and described teary-eyed Shekure’s concern. “It has heightened Shekure’s misery to think that she has somehow hurt your feelings, with whom she shares the same sorrow,” I said.

  Arrogantly, Kalbiye confirmed that she hadn’t asked after Shekure’s well-being, hadn’t visited to express her condolences or mourn with her, nor could she bring herself to prepare and send any halva. Behind her pride, there also lurked a glee that she couldn’t conceal: The delight that her resentment had been recognized. It was from this point of entry that your sharp-witted Esther attempted to discover the reasons for and circumstances of Kalbiye’s anger.

  It didn’t take long for Kalbiye to admit that she’d been upset with the late Enishte Effendi due to the illustrated manuscript he was preparing. She said her husband, may he rest in peace, hadn’t agreed to work on the book for the sake of a handful of extra silver coins, but because Enishte Effendi convinced him the project was authorized by the Sultan. However, when her late husband became aware that the illuminations Enishte Effendi hired him to gild were slowly evolving from simple ornamented pages into full-blown illustrations, pictures moreover that bore the marks of Frankish blasphemy, atheism and even heresy, he grew uneasy and began to lose sight of right and wrong. Being a much more reasonable and prudent person than Elegant Effendi, she cautiously added that all these doubts arose gradually rather than at once, and since poor Elegant Effendi never found anything that would be considered blatant sacrilege, he was able to dismiss his worries as unfounded. Besides, he comforted himself by never missing a sermon given by Nusret Hoja of Erzurum, and if he skipped one of his five daily prayers it unsettled him. Just as he knew that certain scoundrels at the workshop ridiculed his complete devotion to the faith, so he understood very well that their brazen jokes arose out of envy of his talent and artistry.

  A large, glimmering tear slid from Kalbiye’s gleaming eye down her cheek, and at the first opportunity, your good-hearted Esther decided to find Kalbiye a better husband than the one she’d recently lost.

  “My late husband didn’t often share these concerns of his with me,” Kalbiye said cautio
usly. “Based on whatever I could remember and piece together I’ve concluded that everything happened on account of the illustrations that took him to Enishte Effendi’s house on his very last night.”

  This was some manner of apology. In response, I reminded her how her fate and Shekure’s, not to mention their enemies, were the same if one considered that Enishte Effendi had perhaps been killed by the same “scoundrel.” The two large-headed fatherless waifs staring at me from the corner suggested another similarity between the two women. But my merciless matchmaker’s logic quickly reminded me that Shekure’s situation was much more beautiful, rich and mysterious. I let Kalbiye know exactly what I felt:

  “Shekure told me to tell you that if she has wronged you, she’s sorry,” I said. “She wants to say that she loves you as a sister and as a woman who shares her fate. She wants you to think about this and help her. When the late Elegant Effendi left here on his last night, did he mention he’d be seeing anyone besides Enishte Effendi? Did you ever consider that he might’ve been going to meet somebody else?”

  “This was found on his person,” she said.

  She removed a folded piece of paper from a lidded wicker box, which contained embroidery needles, pieces of cloth and a large walnut.

  When I took up the crumpled piece of rough paper and examined it, I saw a variety of shapes drawn in ink that had run and smudged in the well water. I’d just determined what the forms were when Kalbiye voiced my thoughts.

  “Horses,” she said. “But late Elegant Effendi only did gilding work. He never drew horses. And no one would’ve ever asked him to render a horse.”

  Your elderly Esther was looking at the horses which had been quickly sketched, but she couldn’t quite make anything of them.

  “If I were to take this piece of paper to Shekure, she’d be quite pleased,” I said.

  “If Shekure desires to see these sketches, let her come get them herself,” said Kalbiye with no small hint of conceit.

  FOURTY

  I AM CALLED BLACK

  Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. I’m not saying we can’t relate to other souls overwhelmed by these feelings, on the contrary, we sympathize with them. What we cannot fathom is the odd disquiet our souls sink into at such times. This silent turmoil dims our intellects and dampens our hearts, usurping the place reserved for the true joy and sadness we ought to experience.

  I had buried her father, thank God, hurried home from the funeral, and in a gesture of condolence, embraced my wife, Shekure; then suddenly, in a fit of tears she collapsed onto a large cushion with her children, who were glaring at me with spite, and I didn’t know what to do. Her misery coincided with my victory. In one fell swoop, I had wed the dream of my youth, freed myself from her father who belittled me, and become master of the house. Who would ever believe the sincerity of my tears? But believe me, it wasn’t like that. I truly wanted to grieve, but couldn’t: Enishte had always been more of a father to me than my real father. But since the meddlesome preacher who’d performed Enishte’s final ablution never stopped babbling, the rumor that my Enishte died under mysterious circumstances spread among the neighbors during the funeral — as I could sense standing in the courtyard of the mosque. I didn’t want my inability to cry to be interpreted negatively; I don’t have to tell you how real the fear of being branded “stonehearted” is.

  You know how some sympathetic aunt will always attest that “he’s crying on the inside” to prevent someone like me from being banished from the group. I did in fact cry on the inside as I tried to hide in a corner from the busybody neighbors and distant relatives with their astonishing abilities to summon a downpour of tears; I thought about being the master of the house and whether I should somehow take charge of the situation, but just then there came a knock at the door. A moment of panic. Was it Hasan? Regardless, I wanted to save myself from this hell of whimpering at whatever cost.

  It was a royal page, summoning me to the palace. I was stunned.

  As I exited the courtyard, I found a mud-covered silver coin on the ground. Was I afraid to go to the palace? Yes, but I was also happy to be outside in the cold among the horses, dogs, trees and people. I thought I’d befriend the pageboy like those hopeless daydreamers who, believing they might sweeten the world’s cruelty before facing the executioner, attempt a lighthearted conversation with the dungeon guard about this and that, the beauties of life, the ducks afloat on the pond, or the strangeness of a cloud in the sky; but alas he disappointed me, proving a rather morose, pimply, tight-lipped youth. As I passed the Hagia Sophia, noticing with awe the slender cypresses delicately stretching into the hazy sky, it wasn’t the horror of dying right after marrying Shekure after all these years that made my hair stand on end. It was the injustice of dying at the hands of the palace torturers without having shared one good session of lovemaking with her.

  We didn’t walk toward the terrifying spires of the Middle Gate, beyond which the torturers and the quick-handed executioners saw to their work, but toward the carpentry shops. As we headed between the granaries, a cat cleaning itself in the mud between the legs of a chestnut horse with steaming nostrils turned but didn’t look at us: The cat was preoccupied with its own filth, much as we were.

  Behind the granaries, two figures, whose rank and affiliation I couldn’t determine from their green and purple uniforms, relieved the pageboy, and locked me into the dark room of a small house, which I could tell was new by the smell of fresh lumber. I knew locking a man up in a dark room was meant to arouse fear before torture; hoping they’d begin with the bastinado, I thought about the lies I could tell to save my hide. A crowd in the adjoining room seemed to be raising quite a ruckus.

  There are most certainly those of you who can’t attribute my mocking and mirthful tone to that of a man on the verge of torture. But haven’t I mentioned I consider myself one of God’s luckier servants? And if the birds of fortune that alighted upon my head these last two days after years of deprivation aren’t proof enough, surely the silver coin I found outside the courtyard gate must be some indication.

  Awaiting my torture, I was comforted by the silver coin and had complete faith it would protect me; I palmed it, rubbed it and repeatedly kissed this token of good fortune that Allah had sent me. But at whatever time they removed me from the darkness and brought me into the next room where I saw the Commander of the Imperial Guard and his bald-headed Croatian torturers, I knew the silver coin was worthless. The pitiless voice within me was absolutely correct: The coin in my pocket hadn’t come from God, but was one of those that I’d showered Shekure with two days ago — that the children overlooked. Hence, in the hands of my torturers, I had nothing in which to take refuge.

  I didn’t even notice that tears began to fall from my eyes. I wanted to beg, but as in a dream, no sound issued from my mouth. I knew from wars, deaths and political assassination and torture (which I’d witnessed from afar) that life could be extinguished instantaneously, but I’d never experienced it this closely. They were going to strip me from this world just as they’d stripped off my garments.

  They took off my vest and shirt. One of the executioners sat on me, driving his knees into my shoulders. Another placed a cage over my head with all the practiced elegance of a woman preparing food and began slowly turning the screw at its front. Nay, it wasn’t a cage, but rather a vise that gradually squeezed my head.

  I screamed at the top of my lungs. I begged, but incoherently. I cried, mostly because my nerves had given out.

  They stopped momentarily and asked: “Were you the one who killed Enishte Effendi?”

  I took a deep breath: “Nay.”

  They began to tighten the vise again. It was excruciating.

  They asked again.

  “Nay.”

  “Who then?”

  “I don�
��t know!”

  I wondered if I should just tell them I’d killed him. The world spun pleasantly about my head. I was overcome with reluctance. I asked myself if I were growing accustomed to the pain. My executioners and I stayed still for a moment. I felt no pain, I was simply terrified.

  Just as I decided from the silver coin in my pocket that they weren’t going to kill me, they suddenly released me. They removed the viselike contraption that had actually done little damage to my head. The executioner who’d pinned me down stood up without even a hint of apology. I donned my shirt and vest.

  There passed a very long silence.

  At the other end of the room, I saw Head Illuminator Osman Effendi. I went to him and kissed his hand.

  “Don’t be concerned, my child,” he said to me. “They were just testing you.”

  I knew at once that I’d found a new father to replace Enishte, may he rest in peace.

  “Our Sultan has ordered that you not be tortured at this time,” said the Commander. “He deemed it appropriate for you to help Head Illuminator Master Osman find the rogue who’s been killing His miniaturists and the loyal servants preparing His manuscripts. You have three days in which to interrogate the miniaturists, scrutinize the illuminated pages they’ve made and find the sly culprit. The Sovereign is quite appalled by the rumors being spread by mischief makers about His miniaturists and illuminated manuscripts. Both the Head Treasurer Hazim Agha and I will help you find this scoundrel, as the Sultan has decreed. One of you has been very close to Enishte Effendi, and has thus heard his recitations and knows about the miniaturists who visited him at night and the story behind the book. The other is a great master who takes pride in knowing all the miniaturists of the workshop like the back of his hand. Within three days, if you fail to produce that swine along with the missing page he stole — about which much gossip is flying — it is Our Just Sultan’s express desire that you, my child Black Effendi, be the first to undergo torture and interrogation. Afterward, let there be no doubt, each of the other master miniaturists will have his turn.”