第 2 章

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. Though I drew my last breath long ago and my heart has stopped beating, no one, apart from that vile murderer, knows what’s happened to me. As for that wretch, he felt for my pulse and listened for my breath to be sure I was dead, then kicked me in the midriff, carried me to the edge of the well, raised me up and dropped me below. As I fell, my head, which he’d smashed with a stone, broke apart; my face, my forehead and cheeks, were crushed; my bones shattered, and my mouth filled with blood.

For nearly four days I have been missing: My wife and children must be searching for me; my daughter, spent from crying, must be staring fretfully at the courtyard gate. Yes, I know they’re all at the window, hoping for my return.

But, are they truly waiting? I can’t even be sure of that. Maybe they’ve gotten used to my absence—how dismal! For here, on the other side, one gets the feeling that one’s former life persists. Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I’d been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I was happy; I know now that I’d been happy. I made the best illuminations in Our Sultan’s workshop; no one could rival my mastery. Through the work I did privately, I earned nine hundred silver coins a month, which, naturally, only makes all of this even harder to bear.

I was responsible for painting and embellishing books. I illuminated the edges of pages, coloring their borders with the most lifelike designs of leaves, branches, roses, flowers and birds. I painted scalloped Chinese-style clouds, clusters of overlapping vines and forests of color that hid gazelles, galleys, sultans, trees, palaces, horses and hunters. In my youth, I would decorate a plate, or the back of a mirror, or a chest, or at times, the ceiling of a mansion or of a Bosphorus manor, or even, a wooden spoon. In later years, however, I only worked on manuscript pages because Our Sultan paid well for them. I can’t say it seems insignificant now. You know the value of money even when you’re dead.

After hearing the miracle of my voice, you might think, “Who cares what you earned when you were alive? Tell us what you see. Is there life after death?

Where’s your soul? What about Heaven and Hell? What’s death like? Are you in pain?” You’re right, the living are extremely curious about the Afterlife. Maybe you’ve heard the story of the man who was so driven by this curiosity that he roamed among soldiers in battlefields. He sought a man who’d died and returned to life amid the wounded struggling for their lives in pools of blood, a soldier who could tell him about the secrets of the Otherworld. But one of Tamerlane’s warriors, taking the seeker for the enemy, cleaved him in half with a smooth stroke of his scimitar, causing him to conclude that in the Hereafter man gets split in two.

Nonsense! Quite the opposite, I’d even say that souls divided in life merge in the Hereafter. Contrary to the claims of sinful infidels who’ve fallen under the sway of the Devil, there is indeed another world, thank God, and the proof is that I’m speaking to you from here. I’ve died, but as you can plainly tell, I haven’t ceased to be. Granted, I must confess, I haven’t encountered the rivers flowing beside the silver and gold kiosks of Heaven, the broad-leaved trees bearing plump fruit and the beautiful virgins mentioned in the Glorious Koran—though I do very well recall how often and enthusiastically I made pictures of those wide-eyed houris described in the chapter “That Which Is Coming.” Nor is there a trace of those rivers of milk, wine, fresh water and honey described with such flourish, not in the Koran, but by visionary dreamers like Ibn Arabi. But I have no intention of tempting the faith of those who live rightfully through their hopes and visions of the Otherworld, so let me declare that all I’ve seen relates specifically to my own very personal circumstances. Any believer with even a little knowledge of life after death would know that a malcontent in my state would be hard-pressed to see the rivers of Heaven.

I AM CALLED BLACK

After an absence of twelve years I entered Istanbul like a sleepwalker. “The earth called to him,” they say of men who are about to die, and in my case, it was death that drew me back to the city where I’d been born and raised. When I first returned, I thought there was only death; later, I would also encounter love. Love, however, was a distant and forgotten thing, like my memories of having lived in the city. It was in Istanbul, twelve years ago, that I fell helplessly in love with my young cousin.

Four years after I first left Istanbul, while traveling through the endless steppes, snow-covered mountains and melancholy cities of Persia, carrying letters and collecting taxes, I admitted to myself that I was slowly forgetting the face of the childhood love I’d left behind. With growing panic, I tried desperately to remember her, only to realize that despite love, a face long not seen finally fades. During the sixth year I spent in the East, traveling or working as a secretary in the service of pashas, I knew that the face I imagined was no longer that of my beloved. Later, in the eighth year, I forgot what I’d mistakenly called to mind in the sixth, and again visualized a completely different countenance. In this way, by the twelfth year, when I returned to my city at the age of thirty-six, I was painfully aware that my beloved’s face had long since escaped me.

Many of my friends and relatives had died during my twelve-year exile. I visited the cemetery overlooking the Golden Horn and prayed for my mother and for the uncles who’d passed away in my absence. The earthy smell of mud mingled with my memories. Someone had broken an earthenware pitcher beside my mother’s grave. For whatever reason, gazing at the broken pieces, I began to cry. Was I crying for the dead or because I was, strangely, still only at the beginning of my life after all these years? Or was it because I’d come to the end of my life’s journey? A faint snow fell. Entranced by the flakes blowing here and there, I became so lost in the vagaries of my life that I didn’t notice the black dog staring at me from a dark corner of the cemetery.

My tears subsided. I wiped my nose. I saw the black dog wagging its tail in friendship as I left the cemetery. Sometime later, I settled into our neighborhood, renting one of the houses where a relative on my father’s side once lived. It seems I reminded the landlady of her son who’d been killed by Safavid Persian soldiers at the front and so she agreed to clean the house and cook for me.

I set out on long and satisfying walks through the streets as if I’d settled not in Istanbul, but temporarily in one of the Arab cities at the other end of the world. The streets had become narrower, or so it seemed to me. In certain areas, on roads squeezed between houses leaning toward one another, I was forced to rub up against walls and doors to avoid being hit by laden packhorses. There were more wealthy people, or so it seemed to me. I saw an ornate carriage, a citadel drawn by proud horses, the likes of which couldn’t be found in Arabia or Persia. Near the “Burnt Column,” I saw some bothersome beggars dressed in rags huddling together as the smell of offal coming from the chicken-sellers market wafted over them. One of them who was blind smiled as he watched the falling snow.

Had I been told Istanbul used to be a poorer, smaller and happier city, I might not have believed it, but that’s what my heart told me. Though my beloved’s house was where it’d always been among linden and chestnut trees, others were now living there, as I learned from inquiring at the door. I discovered that my beloved’s mother, my maternal aunt, had died, and that her husband, my Enishte, and his daughter had moved away. This is how I came to learn that father and daughter were the victims of certain misfortunes, from strangers answering the door, who in such situations are perfectly forthcoming, without the least awareness of how mercilessly they’ve broken your heart and destroyed your dreams. I won’t describe all of this to you now, but allow me to say that as I recalled warm, verdant and sunny summer days in that old garden, I also noticed icicles the size of my little finger hanging from the branches of the linden tree in a place whose misery, snow and neglect now evoked nothing but death.

I’d already learned about some of what had befallen my relatives through a letter my Enishte sent to me in Tabriz. In that letter, he invited me back to Istanbul, explaining that he was preparing a secret book for Our Sultan and that he wanted my help. He’d heard that for a period while in Tabriz, I made books for Ottoman pashas, provincial governors and Istanbulites. What I did then was to use the money advanced by clients who’d placed manuscript orders in Istanbul to locate miniaturists and calligraphers who were frustrated by the wars and the presence of Ottoman soldiers, but hadn’t yet left for Kazvin or another Persian city, and it was these masters—complaining of poverty and neglect—whom I commissioned to inscribe, illustrate and bind the pages of the manuscripts I would then send back to Istanbul. If it weren’t for the love of illustrating and fine books that my Enishte instilled in me during my youth, I could have never involved myself in such pursuits.

At the market end of the street, where at one time my Enishte had lived, I found the barber, a master by trade, in his shop among the same mirrors, straight razors, pitchers of water and soap brushes. I caught his eye, but I’m not sure he recognized me. It delighted me to see that the head-washing basin, which hung by a chain from the ceiling, still traced the same old arc, swinging back and forth as he filled it with hot water.

Some of the neighborhoods and streets I’d frequented in my youth had disappeared in ashes and smoke, replaced by burnt ruins where stray dogs congregated and where mad transients frightened the local children. In other areas razed by fire, large affluent houses had been built, and I was astonished by their extravagance, by windows of the most expensive Venetian stained glass, and by lavish two-story residences with bay windows suspended above high walls.

As in many other cities, money no longer had any value in Istanbul. At the time I returned from the East, bakeries that once sold large one-hundred drachma loaves of bread for one silver coin now baked loaves half the size for the same price, and they no longer tasted the way they did during my childhood. Had my late mother seen the day when she’d have to spend three silver pieces for a dozen eggs, she’d say, “We ought to leave before the chickens grow so spoiled they shit on us instead of the ground.” But I knew the problem of devalued money was the same everywhere. It was rumored that Flemish and Venetian merchant ships were filled with chests of counterfeit coin. At the royal mint, where five hundred coins were once minted from a hundred drachmas of silver, now, owing to the endless warring with the Persians, eight hundred coins were minted from the same amount. When Janissaries discovered that the coins they’d been paid actually floated in the Golden Horn like the dried beans that fell from the vegetable-sellers pier, they rioted, besieging Our Sultan’s palace as if it were an enemy fortress.

A cleric by the name of Nusret, who preached at the Bayazid Mosque and claimed to be descended from Our Glorious Prophet Muhammad, had made a name for himself during this period of immorality, inflation, crime and theft. This hoja, who was from the small town of Erzurum, attributed the catastrophes that had befallen Istanbul in the last ten years—including the Bahçekapı and Kazanjılar district fires, the plagues that claimed tens of thousands, the endless wars with the Persians at a cost of countless lives, as well as the loss of small Ottoman fortresses in the West to Christians in revolt—to our having strayed from the path of the Prophet, to disregard for the strictures of the Glorious Koran, to the tolerance toward Christians, to the open sale of wine and to the playing of musical instruments in dervish houses.

The pickle seller who passionately informed me about the cleric from Erzurum said that the counterfeit coins—the new ducats, the fake florins stamped with lions and the Ottoman coins with their ever-decreasing silver content—that flooded the markets and bazaars, just like the Circassians, Abkhazians, Mingarians, Bosnians, Georgians and Armenians who filled the streets, were dragging us toward an absolute degradation from which it would be difficult to escape. I was told that scoundrels and rebels were gathering in coffeehouses and proselytizing until dawn; that destitute men of dubious character, opium-addicted madmen and followers of the outlawed Kalenderi dervish sect, claiming to be on Allah’s path, would spend their nights in dervish houses dancing to music, piercing themselves with skewers and engaging in all manner of depravity, before brutally fucking each other and any boys they could find.

I didn’t know whether it was the melodious sound of a lute that compelled me to follow, or if in the muddle of my memories and desires, I could simply no longer endure the virulent pickle seller, and seized upon the music as a way out of the conversation. I do, however, know this: When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you’ll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favorite promontories.

This was how I happened to leave the Farrier’s Market and ended up watching the snow as it fell into the Golden Horn from a spot beside the Süleymaniye Mosque: Snow had already begun to accumulate on the rooftops facing north and on sections of the dome exposed to the northeasterly breeze. An approaching ship, whose sails were being lowered, greeted me with a flutter of canvas. The color of its sails matched the leaden and foggy hue of the surface of the Golden Horn. The cypress and plane trees, the rooftops, the heartache of dusk, the sounds coming from the neighborhood below, the calls of hawkers and the cries of children playing in mosque courtyards mingled in my head and announced emphatically that, hereafter, I wouldn’t be able to live anywhere but in their city. I had the sensation that my beloved’s face, which had escaped me for years, might suddenly appear to me.

I began to walk down the hill and melded into the crowds. After the evening prayer was called, I filled my stomach at a liver shop. In the empty shop, I listened carefully to the owner, who fondly watched me eat each bite as if he were feeding a cat. Taking his cue and following his directions, I found myself turning down one of the narrow alleys behind the slave market—well after the streets had become dark—and located the coffeehouse.

Inside, it was crowded and warm. The storyteller, the likes of whom I had seen in Tabriz and in Persian cities and who was known thereabouts as a “curtain-caller,” was perched on a raised platform beside the wood-burning stove. He had unfolded and hung before the crowd a picture, the figure of a dog drawn on rough paper hastily but with a certain elegance. He was giving voice to the dog, and pointing, from time to time, at the drawing.

Allow me to remind you of “The Cave,” the most beautiful of the Koran’s chapters. I’m reminding you not because I suspect there may be those who never read the Koran among us in this good coffeehouse, but because I want to refresh your memories: This chapter recounts the story of the seven youths who grow tired of living among pagans and take refuge in a cave where they enter a deep sleep. Allah then seals their ears and causes them to doze off for exactly three hundred and nine years. When they awake, they learn just how many years have passed only after one of them enters the society of men and tries to spend an outdated silver coin. All of them are stunned to learn what has happened. This chapter subtly describes man’s attachment to Allah, His miracles, the transitory nature of time and the pleasure of deep sleep, and though it’s not my place, allow me to remind you of the eighteenth verse, which makes mention of a dog resting at the mouth of this cave where the seven youths have fallen asleep. Obviously, anyone would be proud to appear in the Koran. As a dog, I take pride in this chapter, and through it I intend to bring the Erzurumis, who refer to their enemies as dirty mongrels, to their senses.

So then, what’s the actual reason for this animosity toward dogs? Why do you persist in saying that dogs are impure, and cleaning and purifying your homes from top to bottom if a dog happens to enter? Why do you believe that those who touch us spoil their ablutions? If your caftan brushes against our damp fur, why do you insist on washing that caftan seven times like a frenzied woman? Only tinsmiths could be responsible for the slander that a pot licked by a dog must be thrown away or retinned. Or perhaps, yes, cats. . .

When people left their villages for the sedentary life of the city, shepherd dogs remained in the provinces; that’s when rumors of the filthiness of dogs like me began to spread. Yet before the advent of Islam, two of the twelve months of the year were “months of the dog.” Now, however, a dog is considered a bad omen. I don’t want to burden you with my own problems, my dear friends who have come to hear a story and ponder its moral—to be honest, my anger arises out of the esteemed cleric’s attacks upon our coffeehouses.

What would you think if I said that this Husret of Erzurum was of dubious birth? But they’ve also said of me, “What kind of dog do you think you are? You’re attacking the venerable cleric because your master is a picture-hanging storyteller who tells tales at a coffeehouse and you want to protect him. Go on, scat!” God forbid, I’m not denigrating anyone. But I’m a great admirer of our coffeehouses. You know, I have no problem with the fact that my portrait was drawn on such cheap paper or that I’m a four-legged beast, but I do regret that I can’t sit down like a man and have a cup of coffee with you. We’d die for our coffee and our coffeehouses—what’s this? See, my master is pouring coffee for me from a small coffeepot. A picture can’t drink coffee, you say? Please! See for yourselves, this dog is happily lapping away.

Ah, yes, that hit the spot, it’s warmed me up, sharpened my sight and quickened my thoughts. Now listen to what I have to tell you: Besides bolts of Chinese silks and Chinese pottery adorned with blue flowers, what did the Venetian Doge send to Nurhayat Sultan, the esteemed daughter of our respected Sultan? A soft and cuddly Venetian she-dog with a coat of silk and sable. I heard that this bitch is so spoiled she has a red silk dress as well. One of our friends actually fucked her, that’s how I know, and she can’t even engage in the act without her dress. In that Frankish land of hers, all dogs wear outfits like that anyway. I’ve heard tell that over there a so-called elegant and well-bred Venetian woman saw a naked dog—or maybe she saw its thing, I’m not sure—anyway, she screamed, “My dear God, the dog is naked!” and fainted dead away.

In the lands of the infidel Franks, the so-called Europeans, every dog has an owner. These poor animals are paraded on the streets with chains around their necks, they’re fettered like the most miserable of slaves and dragged around in isolation. These Franks force the poor beasts into their homes and even into their beds. Dogs aren’t permitted to walk with one another, let alone sniff and frolic together. In that despicable state, in chains, they can do nothing but gaze forlornly at each other from a distance when they pass on the street. Dogs who roam the streets of Istanbul freely in packs and communities, the way we do, dogs who threaten people if necessary, who can curl up in a warm corner or stretch out in the shade and sleep peacefully, and who can shit wherever they want and bite whomever they want, such dogs are beyond the infidels’ conception. It’s not that I haven’t thought that this might be why the followers of the Erzurumi oppose praying for dogs and feeding them meat on the streets of Istanbul in exchange for divine favors and even why they oppose the establishment of charities that perform such services. If they intend both to treat us as enemies and make infidels of us, let me remind them that being an enemy to dogs and being an infidel are one and the same. At the, I hope, not too distant executions of these disgraceful men, I pray our executioner friends invite us to take a bite, as they sometimes do to set a deterring example.

Before I finish, let me say this: My previous master was a very just man. When we set out at night to thieve, we’d cooperate: I’d begin to bark, and he’d cut the throat of our victim whose screams would be drowned out by my barking. In return for my help, he’d cut up the guilty men that he’d punished, boil them and feed them to me. I don’t like raw meat. God willing, the would-be executioner of that cleric from Erzurum will take this into account so I won’t upset my stomach with that scoundrel’s raw flesh.

I WILL BE CALLED A MURDERER

Nay, I wouldn’t have believed I could take anyone’s life, even if I’d been told so moments before I murdered that fool; and thus, my offense at times recedes from me like a foreign galleon disappearing on the horizon. Now and again, I even feel as if I haven’t committed any crime at all. Four days have passed since I was forced to do away with hapless Elegant, who was a brother to me, and only now have I, to some extent, accepted my situation.

I would’ve preferred to resolve this unexpected and awful dilemma without having to do away with anybody, but I knew there was no other choice. I handled the matter then and there, assuming the burden of responsibility. I couldn’t let the false accusations of one foolhardy man endanger the entire society of miniaturists.

Nevertheless, being a murderer takes some getting used to. I can’t stand being at home, so I head out to the street. I can’t stand my street, so I walk on to another, and then another. As I stare at people’s faces, I realize that many of them believe they’re innocent because they haven’t yet had the opportunity to snuff out a life. It’s hard to believe that most men are more moral or better than me simply on account of some minor twist of fate. At most, they wear somewhat stupider expressions because they haven’t yet killed, and like all fools, they appear to have good intentions. After I took care of that pathetic man, wandering the streets of Istanbul for four days was enough to confirm that everyone with a gleam of cleverness in his eye and the shadow of his soul cast across his face was a hidden assassin. Only imbeciles are innocent.

Tonight, for example, while warming up with a steaming coffee at the coffeehouse located in the back streets of the slave market, gazing at the sketch of a dog hanging on the back wall, I was gradually forgetting my plight and laughing with the rest of them at everything the dog recounted. Then, I had the sensation that one of the men beside me was a common murderer like myself. Though he was simply laughing at the storyteller as I was, my intuition was sparked, either by the way his arm rested near mine or by the way he restlessly rapped his fingers on his cup. I’m not sure how I knew, but I suddenly turned and looked him directly in the eye. He gave a start and his face contorted. As the crowd dispersed, an acquaintance of his took him by the arm and said, “Nusret Hoja’s men will surely raid this place.”

Raising an eyebrow, he signaled the man quiet. Their fear infected me. No one trusted anyone, everyone expected to be done in at any moment by the man next to him.

It had become even colder, and snow had accumulated on street corners and at the bases of walls. In the blindness of night, I could find my way along the narrow streets only by groping with my hands. At times, the dim light of an oil lamp still burning somewhere inside a wooden house filtered out from behind blackened windows and drawn shutters, reflecting on the snow; but mostly, I could see nothing, and found my way by listening for the sounds of watchmen banging their sticks on stones, for the howling of mad dogs, or the sounds coming from houses. At times the narrow and dreadful streets of the city seemed to be lit up by a wondrous light coming from the snow itself; and in the darkness, amid the ruins and trees, I thought I spotted one of those ghosts that have made Istanbul such an ominous place for thousands of years. From within houses, now and again, I heard the noises of miserable people having coughing fits or snorting or wailing as they cried out in their dreams, or I heard the shouts of husbands and wives as they tried to strangle each other, their children sobbing at their feet.

For a couple of nights in a row, I came to this coffeehouse to relive the happiness I’d felt before becoming a murderer, to raise my spirits and to listen to the storyteller. Most of my miniaturist friends, the brethren with whom I’d spent my entire life, came here every night. Since I’d silenced that lout with whom I’d made illustrations since childhood I didn’t want to see any of them. Much embarrasses me about the lives of my brethren, who can’t do without gossiping, and about the disgraceful atmosphere of joviality in this place. I even sketched a few pictures for the storyteller so they wouldn’t accuse me of conceit, but that failed to put an end to their envy.

They’re justified in being jealous. Not one of them could surpass me in mixing colors, in creating and embellishing borders, composing pages, selecting subjects, drawing faces, arranging bustling war and hunting scenes and depicting beasts, sultans, ships, horses, warriors and lovers. Not one could approach my mastery in imbuing illustrations with the poetry of the soul, not even in gilding. I’m not bragging, but explaining this to you so you might fully understand me. Over time, jealousy becomes an element as indispensable as paint in the life of the master artist.

During my walks, which grow increasingly longer due to my restlessness, I come face-to-face occasionally with one of our most pure and innocent religious countrymen, and a strange notion suddenly enters my head: If I think about the fact that I’m a murderer, the man before me will read it on my face. Therefore, I force myself to think of different things, just as I forced myself, writhing in embarrassment, to banish thoughts of women when performing prayers as an adolescent. But unlike those days of youthful fits when I couldn’t get the act of copulation out of my thoughts, now, I can indeed forget the murder that I’ve committed.

You realize, in fact, that I’m explaining all these things because they relate to my predicament. But if I were to divulge even one detail related to the killing itself, you’d figure it all out and this would relieve me from being a nameless, faceless murderer roaming among you like an apparition and relegate me to the status of an ordinary, confessed criminal who has given himself up, soon to pay for his crime with his head. Give me the license not to dwell on every single detail, allow me to keep some clues to myself: Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief. This, in turn, brings us to the issue of “style,” which is now of widespread interest: Does a miniaturist, ought a miniaturist, have his own personal style? A use of color, a voice all his own?

Let’s consider a piece by Bihzad, the master of masters, patron saint of all miniaturists. I happened across this masterpiece, which also nicely pertains to my situation because it’s a depiction of murder, among the pages of a flawless ninety-year-old book of the Herat school. It emerged from the library of a Persian prince killed in a merciless battle of succession and recounts the story of Hüsrev and Shirin. You, of course, know the fate of Hüsrev and Shirin, I refer to Nizami’s version, not Firdusi’s:

The two lovers finally marry after a host of trials and tribulations; however, the young and diabolical Shiruye, Hüsrev’s son by his previous wife, won’t give them any peace. The prince has his eye on not only his father’s throne but also his father’s young wife, Shirin. Shiruye, of whom Nizami writes, “His breath had the stench of a lion’s mouth,” by hook or crook imprisons his father and succeeds to the throne. One night, entering the bedchamber of his father and Shirin, he feels his way in the dark, and on finding the pair in bed, stabs his father in the chest with his dagger. Thus, the father’s blood flows till dawn and he slowly dies in the bed that he shares with the beautiful Shirin, who remains sleeping peacefully beside him.

This picture by the great master Bihzad, as much as the tale itself, addresses a grave fear I’ve carried within me for years: The horror of waking in the black of night to realize there’s a stranger making faint sounds as he creeps about the blackness of the room! Imagine that the intruder wields a dagger in one hand as he strangles you with the other. Every detail, the finely wrought wall, window and frame ornamentation, the curves and circular designs in the red rug, the color of the silent scream emanating from your clamped throat and the yellow and purple flowers embroidered with incredible finesse and vigor on the magnificent quilt upon which the bare and vile foot of your murderer mercilessly steps as he ends your life, all of these details serve the same purpose: While augmenting the beauty of the painting, they remind you just how exquisite are the room in which you will soon die and the world you will soon leave. The indifference of the painting’s beauty and of the world to your death, the fact of your being totally alone in death despite the presence of your wife, this is the inescapable meaning that strikes you.

“This is by Bihzad,” the aging master said twenty years ago as we examined the book I held in my trembling hands. His face was illuminated not by the nearby candle, but by the pleasure of observation itself. “This is so Bihzad that there’s no need for a signature.”

Bihzad was so well aware of this fact that he didn’t hide his signature anywhere in the painting. And according to the elderly master, there was a sense of embarrassment and a feeling of shame in this decision of his. Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

Fearing for my life, I murdered my unfortunate victim in an ordinary and crude manner. As I returned to this fire-ravaged area night after night to ascertain whether I’d left behind any traces that might betray me, questions of style increasingly arose in my head. What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

I could’ve located this place even without the brilliance of the falling snow, for this spot, razed by fire, was where I’d ended the life of my companion of twenty-five years. Now, snow covered and erased all the clues that might have been interpreted as signature, proving that Allah concurred with Bihzad and me on the issue of style and signature. If we actually committed an unpardonable sin by illustrating that book—as that half-wit had maintained four days ago—even if we had done so unawares, Allah wouldn’t have bestowed this favor upon us miniaturists.

That night, when Elegant Effendi and I came here, the snow hadn’t yet begun to fall. We could hear the howling of mongrels echo in the distance.

“Pray, for what reason have we come here?” the unfortunate one had asked. “What do you plan to show me out here at this late hour?”

“Just ahead lies a well, twelve paces beyond which I’ve buried the money I’ve been saving for years,” I said. “If you keep everything I’ve explained to you secret, Enishte Effendi and I will see that you are happily rewarded.”

“Am I to understand that you admit you knew what you were doing from the beginning?” he said in agitation.

“I admit it,” I lied obligingly.

“You acknowledge the picture you’ve made is in fact a desecration, don’t you?” he said innocently. “It’s heresy, a sacrilege that no decent man would have the gall to commit. You’re going to burn in the pits of Hell. Your suffering and pain will never diminish—and you’ve made me an accomplice.”

As I listened to him, I sensed with horror how his words had such strength and gravity that, willingly or not, people would heed them, hoping that they would prove true about miserable creatures other than themselves. Many rumors like this about Enishte Effendi had begun to fly due to the secrecy of the book he was making and the money he was willing to pay—and because Master Osman, the Head Illuminator, despised him. It occurred to me that perhaps my brother gilder, Elegant, had with sly intent used these facts to buttress his false accusations. To what degree was he being honest?

I had him repeat the claims that pitted us against each other, and as he spoke, he didn’t mince his words. He seemed to be provoking me to cover up a mistake, as during our apprentice years, when the goal was to avoid a beating by Master Osman. Back then, I found his sincerity convincing. As an apprentice, his eyes would widen as they did now, but back then they hadn’t yet dimmed from the labor of embellishing. But finally I hardened my heart; he was prepared to confess everything to everyone.

“Do listen to me,” I said with forced exasperation. “We make illuminations, create border designs, draw frames onto pages, we brightly ornament page after page with lovely tones of gold, we make the greatest of paintings, we adorn armoires and boxes. We’ve done nothing else for years. It is our calling. They commission paintings from us, ordering us to arrange a ship, an antelope or a sultan within the borders of a particular frame, demanding a certain style of bird, a certain type of figure, take this particular scene from the story, forget about such-and-such. Whatever it is they demand, we do it. “Listen,” Enishte Effendi said to me, “here, draw a horse of your own imagining, right here.” For three days, like the great artists of old, I sketched hundreds of horses so I might come to know exactly what “a horse of my own imagining” was. To accustom my hand, I drew a series of horses on a coarse sheet of Samarkand paper.

I took these sketches out and showed them to Elegant. He looked at them with interest and, leaning close to the paper, began to study the black and white horses in the faint moonlight. “The old masters of Shiraz and Herat,” I said, “claimed that a miniaturist would have to sketch horses unceasingly for fifty years to be able to truly depict the horse that Allah envisioned and desired. They claimed that the best picture of a horse should be drawn in the dark, since a true miniaturist would go blind working over that fifty-year period, but in the process, his hand would memorize the horse.”

The innocent expression on his face, the one I’d also seen long ago, when we were children, told me that he’d become completely absorbed in my horses.

“They hire us, and we try to make the most mysterious, the most unattainable horse, just as the old masters did. There’s nothing more to it. It’s unjust of them to hold us responsible for anything more than the illustration.”

“I’ll explain it all to Enishte Effendi, and he’ll burn the pictures. What other recourse is there? If one of Nusret Hoja’s followers hears of such an allegation, nothing will remain of us or the book-arts workshop. Are you familiar with any of the Erzurumis? Accept this money so that we can be certain you won’t inform on us.”

“What is the money contained in?”

“There are seventy-five Venetian gold pieces inside an old ceramic pickle jar.”

The Venetian ducats made good sense, but where had I come up with the ceramic pickle jar? It was so foolish it was believable. I was thereby reassured that God was with me and had given me a sign. My old companion apprentice, who’d grown greedier with each passing year, had already started excitedly counting off the twelve steps in the direction I indicated.

There were two things on my mind at that moment. First of all, there were no Venetian coins or anything of the sort buried there! If I didn’t come up with some money this buffoon would destroy us. I suddenly felt like embracing the oaf and kissing his cheeks as I sometimes did when we were apprentices, but the years had come between us! Second, I was preoccupied with figuring out how we were going to dig. With our fingernails? But this contemplation, if you could call it that, lasted only a wink in time.

Panicking, I grabbed a stone that lay beside the well. While he was still on the seventh or eighth step, I caught up to him and struck him on the back of his head with all my strength. I struck him so swiftly and brutally that I was momentarily startled, as if the blow had landed on my own head. Aye, I felt his pain.

Instead of anguishing over what I’d done, I wanted to finish the job quickly. He’d begun thrashing about on the ground and my panic deepened further.

Long after I’d dropped him into the well, I contemplated how the crudeness of my deed did not in the least befit the grace of a miniaturist.

“Every picture serves to tell a story,” I said. “The miniaturist, in order to beautify the manuscript we read, depicts the most vital scenes: the first time lovers lay eyes on each other; the hero Rüstem cutting off the head of a devilish monster; Rüstem’s grief when he realizes that the stranger he’s killed is his son; the love-crazed Mejnun as he roams a desolate and wild Nature among lions, tigers, stags and jackals; the anguish of Alexander, who, having come to the forest before a battle to divine its outcome from the birds, witnesses a great falcon tear apart his woodcock. Our eyes, fatigued from reading these tales, rest upon the pictures. If there’s something within the text that our intellect and imagination are at pains to conjure, the illustration comes at once to our aid. The images are the story’s blossoming in color. But painting without its accompanying story is an impossibility.

“Or so I used to think,” I added, as if regretfully. But this is indeed quite possible. Two years ago I traveled once again to Venice as the Sultan’s ambassador. I observed at length the portraits that the Venetian masters had made. I did so without knowing to which scene and story the pictures belonged, and I struggled to extract the story from the image. One day, I came across a painting hanging on a palazzo wall and was dumbfounded.

“More than anything, the image was of an individual, somebody like myself. It was an infidel, of course, not one of us. As I stared at him, though, I felt as if I resembled him. Yet he didn’t resemble me at all. He had a full round face that seemed to lack cheekbones, and moreover, he had no trace of my marvelous chin. Though he didn’t look anything like me, as I gazed upon the picture, for some reason, my heart fluttered as if it were my own portrait.

“I learned from the Venetian gentleman who was giving me a tour through his palazzo that the portrait was of a friend, a nobleman like himself. He had included whatever was significant in his life in his portrait: In the background landscape visible from the open window there was a farm, a village and a blending of color which made a realistic-looking forest. Resting on the table before the nobleman were a clock, books, Time, Evil, Life, a calligraphy pen, a map, a compass, boxes containing gold coins, bric-a-brac, odds and ends, inscrutable yet distinguishable things that were probably included in many pictures, shadows of jinns and the Devil and also, the picture of the man’s stunningly beautiful daughter as she stood beside her father.

“What was the narrative that this representation was meant to embellish and complete? As I regarded the work, I slowly sensed that the underlying tale was the picture itself. The painting wasn’t the extension of a story at all, it was something in its own right.

“I never forgot the painting that bewildered me so. I left the palazzo, returned to the house where I was staying as a guest and pondered the picture the entire night. I, too, wanted to be portrayed in this manner. But, no, that wasn’t appropriate, it was Our Sultan who ought to be thus portrayed! Our Sultan ought to be rendered along with everything He owned, with the things that represented and constituted His realm. I settled on the notion that a manuscript could be illustrated according to this idea.

“The Venetian virtuoso had made the nobleman’s picture in such a way that you would immediately know which particular nobleman it was. If you’d never seen that man, if they told you to pick him out of a crowd of a thousand others, you’d be able to select the correct man with the help of that portrait. The Venetian masters had discovered painting techniques with which they could distinguish any one man from another—without relying on his outfit or medals, just by the distinctive shape of his face. This was the essence of “portraiture.”

“If your face were depicted in this fashion only once, no one would ever be able to forget you, and if you were far away, someone who laid eyes on your portrait would feel your presence as if you were actually nearby. Those who had never seen you alive, even years after your death, could come face-to-face with you as if you were standing before them.”

He recounted to me that the Sultan wanted to have the book completed in time for the thousandth-year anniversary of the Hegira. Our Sultan, Refuge of the World, wanted to demonstrate that in the thousandth year of the Muslim calendar He and His state could make use of the styles of the Franks as well as the Franks themselves. Because He was also having a Book of Festivities made, the Sultan granted that the master miniaturists, whom He knew were quite busy, be permitted to sequester themselves at home to work in peace instead of among the crowds at the workshop. He was, of course, also aware that they all regularly paid clandestine visits to my Enishte.

“You shall visit Head Illuminator Master Osman,” said my Enishte. “Some say he’s gone blind, others that he’s lost his senses. I think he’s blind and senile both.”

Despite the fact that my Enishte didn’t have the standing of a master illustrator and that this wasn’t his field of artistic expertise at all, he did have control over an illustrated manuscript. This, in fact, was with the permission and encouragement of the Sultan, a situation that, of course, strained his relationship with the elderly Master Osman.

Thinking of my childhood, I allowed my attention to be absorbed by the furniture and objects within the house. From twelve years ago, I still remembered the blue kilim from Kula covering the floor, the copper ewer, the coffee set and tray, the copper pail and the delicate coffee cups that had come all the way from China by way of Portugal, as my late aunt had boasted numerous times. These effects, like the low X-shaped reading desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the stand for a turban nailed to the wall, the red velvet pillow whose smoothness I recalled as soon as I touched it, were from the house in Aksaray where I’d passed my childhood with Shekure, and they still carried something of the bliss of my days of painting in that house.

Painting and happiness. I would like my dear readers who have given close attention to my story and my fate to bear these two things in mind, as they are the genesis of my world. At one time, I was contented here, among these books, calligraphy brushes and paintings. Then, I fell in love and was banished from this Paradise. In the years I endured my amorous exile, I often thought how I was in fact deeply indebted to Shekure and my love for her, because they had enabled me to adapt optimistically to life and the world. Since I had, in my childlike naïveté, no doubt that my love would be reciprocated, I grew exceedingly assured and came to regard the world as a good place. You see, it was with this same earnestness that I involved myself with books and came to love them, to love the reading my Enishte required of me back then, my religious school lessons and my illustrating and painting. But as much as I owed the sunny, festive and more fertile first half of my education to the love I felt for Shekure, I owed the dark knowledge that poisoned the latter time to being rejected; my desire on icy nights to sputter out and vanish like the dying flames in the iron stoves of a caravansary, repeatedly dreaming after a night of love that I was plunging into a desolate abyss along with whichever woman lay beside me, and the notion that I was simply worthless—all of it was furnished by Shekure.

“Were you aware,” my Enishte said much later, “that after death our souls will be able to meet with the spirits of men and women in this world who are peacefully asleep in their beds?”

“No, I was not.”

“We take a long journey after death, so I’m not afraid of dying. What I fear is dying before I finish Our Sultan’s book.”

Part of me felt I was stronger, more reasonable and more reliable than my Enishte, and part of me was dwelling on the cost of the caftan that I’d purchased on my way here to meet with this man who’d denied me his daughter’s hand and on the silver bridle and hand-worked saddle of the horse which, soon after going downstairs, I’d take out of the stable and ride away.

I told him I’d apprise him of everything I learned during my visits to the various miniaturists. I kissed his hand and brought it to my forehead. I walked down the stairs, entered the courtyard, and sensing the snowy cold upon me, accepted that I was neither a child nor an old man: I joyously felt the world upon my skin. As I shut the stable door, a breeze began to stir. I led my white horse by the bridle over the stone walkway to the earthen part of the courtyard, and we both shuddered: I felt as if his strong, large-veined legs, his impatience and his stubbornness were my own. As soon as we entered the street, I was about to swiftly mount my steed and disappear down the narrow way like a fabled horseman, never to return again, when an enormous woman, a Jewess dressed all in pink and carrying a bundle, appeared out of nowhere and accosted me. She was as large and wide as an armoire. Yet she was boisterous, lively and even coquettish.

“My brave man, my young hero, I see you’re truly as handsome as they say you are,” she said. “Might you be married? Or might you be a bachelor? Would you deign to buy a silk handkerchief for your secret lover from Esther, Istanbul’s premier peddler of fine cloth?”

“Nay.”

“A red sash of Atlas silk?”

“Nay.”

“Don’t go on piping ‘nay’ at me like that! How could a brave heart like you not have a fiancée or a secret lover? Who knows how many teary-eyed maidens are burning with desire for you?”

Her body lengthened like the slender form of an acrobat and she leaned toward me with an elegant gesture. At the same time, with the skill of a magician who plucks objects out of thin air, she caused a letter to appear in her hand. I stealthily grabbed it, and as if I’d been training for this moment for years, I hastily and artfully placed it into my sash. It was a thick letter and felt like fire against the icy skin of my side, between my belly and back.

Then there are those truly accursed letter-readers; pray, don’t you turn out to be like one of them: When the maiden takes the letter in her own hands to touch it again, desiring to look at it without understanding which words were spoken where, these beasts will say to her, “What are you trying to do? You can’t read, what more do you want to look at?” Some of them won’t even return the letter, treating it henceforth as if it belonged to them. At times, the task of accosting them and retrieving the letter falls to me, Esther. That’s the kind of good woman I am. If Esther likes you, she’ll come to your aid as well.

I, SHEKURE

Oh, why was I there at the window just when Black rode by on his white steed? Why did I open the shutters intuitively at that exact moment and stare at him so long from behind the snowy branches of the pomegranate tree? I can’t tell you for sure. I’d sent word to Esther by way of Hayriye. I was, of course, well aware that Black would take that route. Meanwhile, I’d gone up alone to the room with the built-in closet and the window facing the pomegranate tree to inspect the sheets in the chest. On a whim, and at just the right moment, I pushed the shutters open with all my strength and sunlight flooded the room: Standing at the window, I came face-to-face with Black, who, like the sun, dazzled me. Oh, it was quite lovely.

He’d grown and matured and, having lost his awkward youthful lankiness, he turned out to be a comely man. Listen Shekure, my heart did tell me, he’s not only handsome, look into his eyes, he possesses the heart of a child, so pure, so alone: Marry him. I, however, sent him a letter wherein I’d given him quite the opposite message.

Though he was twelve years my elder, when I was twelve, I was more mature than he. Back then, instead of standing straight and tall before me in a fashion befitting a man and announcing that he was going to do this or that, jump from this spot or climb onto that thing, he’d just bury his face in some book or picture, hiding as if everything embarrassed him. In time, he also fell in love with me. He made a painting declaring his love. We’d both matured by then. When I turned twelve, I sensed that Black could no longer look into my eyes, as if he were afraid I’d discover he loved me. “Hand me that ivory-handled knife,” he’d say, for example, looking at the knife but unable to look at me. If I asked him, for instance, “Is the cherry sherbet to your liking?” he couldn’t simply indicate so with a delicate smile or nod, as we do when our mouths are full, you see. Instead, he’d scream “Yes” at the top of his lungs, as if trying to communicate with a deaf man. He feared looking me in the face. I was a maiden of striking beauty then. Any man who caught sight of me even once, from afar, or from between parted curtains or yawning doors, or even through the layers of my modest head coverings, immediately became enamored of me. I’m not being a braggart, I’m explaining this so you’ll understand my story and be better able to share in my grief.

In the well-known tale of Hüsrev and Shirin, there’s a moment that Black and I had discussed at length. Hüsrev’s friend, Shapur, intends to make Hüsrev and Shirin fall in love. One day Shirin embarks on a countryside outing with her ladies of the court, when she sees a picture of Hüsrev that Shapur has secretly hung from the branch of one of the trees beneath which the outing party has stopped to rest. Beholding this picture of the handsome Hüsrev in that beautiful garden, Shirin is stricken by love. Many paintings depict this moment—or “scene” as the miniaturists would have it—consisting of Shirin’s look of adoration and bewilderment as she gazes upon the image of Hüsrev. While Black was working with my father, he’d seen this picture many times and had twice made exact copies by eyeing the original as he painted. After falling in love with me, he made a copy for himself. But this time in place of Hüsrev and Shirin, he portrayed himself and me, Black and Shekure. If it weren’t for the captions beneath the figures, only I would’ve known who the man and maiden in the picture were, because sometimes when we were joking around, he’d depict us in the same manner and color: I all in blue, he all in red. And if this weren’t indication enough, he’d also written our names beneath the figures. He’d left the painting where I would find it and run off. He watched me to see what my reaction to his composition would be.

I was well aware that I wouldn’t be able to love him like a Shirin, so I feigned ignorance. On the evening of that summer’s day when Black gave me his painting, during which we’d tried to cool ourselves with sour-cherry sherbets made with ice said to have been brought all the way from snow-capped Mount Ulu, I told my father that he’d made a declaration of love. At that time, Black had just graduated from the religious school. He taught in remote neighborhoods and, more out of my father’s insistence than his own desire, Black was attempting to obtain the patronage of the powerful and esteemed Naim Pasha. But according to my father, Black didn’t yet have his wits about him. My father, who’d taken great pains to win Black a place in Naim Pasha’s circle, at least as a clerk to begin, complained that he wasn’t doing much to further his own cause; in other words, Black was being an ignoramus. And that very night in reference to Black and me, my father declared, “I think he’s set his sights very high, this impoverished nephew,” and without regard for my mother’s presence, he added, “he’s smarter than we’d supposed.”

I remember with misery what my father did in the following days, how I kept my distance from Black and how he ceased to visit our house, but I won’t explain all of this for fear that you’ll dislike my father and me. I swear to you, we had no other choice. You know how in such situations reasonable people immediately sense that love without hope is simply hopeless, and understanding the limits of the illogical realm of the heart, make a quick end of it by politely declaring, “They didn’t find us suitably matched. That’s just the way it is.” But, I’ll have you know that my mother said several times, “At least don’t break the boy’s heart.” Black, whom my mother referred to as a “boy,” was twenty-four, and I was half his age. Because my father considered Black’s declaration of love an act of insolence, he wouldn’t humor my mother’s wishes.

This struck such excitement and fear into my heart that I walked around the room nearly atremble like the flame of the candle. If Shekure meant to present herself at the window, then why this letter, which put the opposite belief into play? Why did her father call for me? As I paced, I sensed that the door, wall and squeaky floor, stuttering as I myself did, were trying to creak their responses to my every question.

I looked at the picture I’d made years ago, which depicted Shirin stricken with love upon gazing at Hüsrev’s image hanging from a branch. It didn’t embarrass me as it would each time it came to mind in subsequent years, nor did it bring back my happy childhood memories. Toward morning, my mind had mastered the situation: By returning the picture, Shekure had made a move in an amatory chess game she was masterfully luring me into. I sat in the candlelight and wrote her a letter of response.

In the morning, after sleeping for a spell, I went out and walked a long way through the streets, carrying the letter upon my breast and my light pen-and-ink holder, as was my custom, in my sash. The snow widened Istanbul’s narrow streets and freed the city of its crowds. All was quieter and slower, as it’d been in my childhood. Crows seemed to have beset Istanbul’s roofs, domes and gardens just as they had on the snowy winter days of my youth. I walked swiftly, listening to my steps in the snow and watching the fog of my breath. I grew excited, expecting the palace workshop that my Enishte wanted me to visit to be as silent as the streets. Before I entered the Jewish quarter, I sent word by way of a little street urchin to Esther, who’d be able to deliver my letter to Shekure, telling her where to meet me before the noontime prayers.

I arrived early at the royal artisans’ workshop located behind the Hagia Sophia. Except for the icicles hanging from the eaves, there was no change in the building where I’d often visited my Enishte and for a time worked as a child apprentice.

Following a handsome young apprentice, I walked past elderly master binders dazed from the smell of glue and bookbinder’s paste, master miniaturists whose backs had hunched at an early age and youths who mixed paints without even looking into the bowls perched on their knees, so sorrowfully were they absorbed by the flames of the stove. In a corner, I saw an old man meticulously painting an ostrich egg on his lap, another elder enthusiastically embellishing a drawer and a young apprentice graciously watching them both. Through an open door, I witnessed young students being reprimanded as they leaned forward, their noses almost touching the pages spread before their reddened faces, as they tried to understand the mistakes they’d made. In another room, a mournful and melancholy apprentice, having forgotten momentarily about colors, papers and painting, stared into the street I’d just now eagerly walked down.

We climbed the icy staircase. We walked through the portico, which wrapped around the inner second floor of the building. Below, in the inner courtyard covered with snow, two young students, obviously trembling from the cold despite their thick capes of coarse wool, were waiting—perhaps for an imminent beating. I recalled my early youth and the beatings given to students who were lazy or who wasted expensive paints, and the blows of the bastinado, which landed on the soles of their feet until they bled.

We entered a warm room. I saw two novices who’d recently finished their apprenticeships. Since the great masters, whom Master Osman had given workshop names, now worked at home, this room, which once aroused excessive reverence and delight in me, no longer seemed like the workshop of a great and wealthy sultan but merely a largish room in some secluded caravansary in the remote mountains of the East.

Immediately off to the side, before a long counter, I saw the Head Illuminator, Master Osman, for the first time in fifteen years; he seemed like an apparition. Whenever I contemplated illustrating and painting during my travels, the great master would appear in my mind’s eye as if he were Bihzad himself; now, in his white outfit and in the snow-white light falling through the window facing the Hagia Sophia, he looked as though he’d long become one of the spirits of the Otherworld. I kissed his hand, which I noticed was mottled, and I introduced myself. I explained how my Enishte had enrolled me here as a youth, but that I’d preferred a bureaucratic post and left. I recounted my years on the road, my time spent in Eastern cities in the service of pashas as a clerk or treasurer’s secretary. I told him how, working with Serhat Pasha and others, I’d met calligraphers and illuminators in Tabriz and produced books; how I’d spent time in Baghdad and Aleppo, in Van and Tiflis, and how I’d seen many battles.

“Ah, Tiflis!” the great master said, as he gazed at the light from the snow-covered garden filtering through the oilskin covering the window. “Is it snowing there now?”

His demeanor befitted those old Persian masters who grew blind perfecting their artistry; who, after a certain age, lived half-saintly, half-senile lives, and about whom endless legends were told. I straightaway saw in his jinnlike eyes that he despised my Enishte vehemently and that he was furthermore suspicious of me. Even so, I explained how in the Arabian deserts snow didn’t simply fall to the Earth, as it was now falling onto the Hagia Sophia, but onto memories as well. I spun a yarn: When it snowed on the fortress of Tiflis, the washerwomen sang songs the color of flowers and children hid ice cream under their pillows for summer.

“Do tell me what those illuminators and painters illustrate in the countries you’ve visited,” he said. “What do they depict?”

A dreamy-eyed young painter who was ruling out pages in the corner, lost in revery, raised his head from his folding work desk along with the others in the room and gave me a look that said, “Let this be your most honest answer.” Many of these craftsmen didn’t know the corner grocer in their own neighborhood, or how much an oke’s worth of bread cost, but they were very curious about the latest gossip East of Persia, where armies clashed, princes strangled one another and plundered cities before burning them to the ground, where war and peace were contested each day, where the best verses were written and the best illustrations and paintings were made for centuries.

“Shah Tahmasp reigned for fifty-two years. In the last years of his life, as you know, he abandoned his love of books, illustrating and painting, turned his back on poets, illustrators and calligraphers, and resigning himself to worship, passed away, whereupon his son, Ismail, ascended to the throne,” I said. “Shah Tahmasp had been well aware of his son’s disagreeable and antagonistic nature, so he kept him, the shah-to-be, behind locked doors for twenty years. As soon as Ismail assumed the throne, in a mad frenzy, he had his younger brothers strangled—some of whom he’d blinded beforehand. In the end, however, Ismail’s enemies succeeded in plying him with opium and poisoning him, and after being liberated from his worldly presence, they placed his half-witted older brother Muhammad Khodabandeh on the throne. During his reign, all the princes, brothers, provincial governors and Uzbeks, in short everyone, started to revolt. They went after each other and our Serhat Pasha with such martial ferocity that all of Persia turned to smoke and dust and was left in disarray. Indeed, the present shah, bereft of money and intelligence and half-blind, is not fit to sponsor the writing and illustration of illuminated manuscripts. Thus, these legendary illustrators of Kazvin and Herat, all these elderly masters, along with their apprentices, these artisans who made masterpieces in Shah Tahmasp’s workshops, painters and colorists whose brushes made horses gallop at full speed and whose butterflies fluttered off the page, all of these master binders and calligraphers, every last one was left without work, penniless and destitute, homeless and bereft. Some migrated to the North among the Uzbeks, some West to India. Others took up different types of work, wasting themselves and their honor, and still others entered the service of insignificant princes and provincial governors, all sworn enemies of each other, to begin working on palm-size books containing at most a few leaves of illustration. Rapidly transcribed, hastily painted, cheap books appeared everywhere, matching the tastes of common soldiers, boorish pashas and spoiled princes.”

“How much would they go for?” asked Master Osman.

“I hear that the great Sadiki Bey illustrated a copy of Strange Creatures, commissioned by an Uzbek spahi cavalryman, for only forty gold pieces. In the tent of a vulgar pasha who was returning from his Eastern campaign to Erzurum, I beheld an album consisting of lewd pictures including paintings by the virtuoso Siyavush. A few great masters who hadn’t abandoned illustrating were making and selling individual pieces, which weren’t part of any story at all. By examining such single leaves, you couldn’t tell which scene or which story it represented; rather, you would admire it for its own sake, for the pleasure of beholding alone. For example, you might comment, ‘This is the exact likeness of a horse, how beautiful,’ and you’d pay the artist on this basis. Scenes of combat or fucking are quite common. The price for a bustling battle has fallen to three hundred silver coins, and there are hardly any interested clients. To sell pieces on the cheap and to better lure a buyer, some simply draw in black ink on nonsized, unfinished paper with nary a brushstroke of color.”

“There was a gilder of mine who was content as content could be and talented as talent would allow,” said Master Osman. “He saw to his work with such elegance that we referred to him as ‘Elegant Effendi.’ But he has abandoned us. It’s been six days, and he’s not to be found anywhere. He’s plain disappeared.”

“How could anyone quit such a workshop as this, such a joyous hearth?” I said.

“Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant, the four young masters whom I’ve trained since they were apprentices, now work at home at Our Sultan’s behest,” said Master Osman.

This apparently came about so they could work more comfortably on the Book of Festivities with which the entire workshop was involved. This time, the Sultan hadn’t arranged for a special workspace for His master miniaturists in the palace courtyard; rather, He decreed that they work on this special book at home. When it occurred to me that this order was probably issued for the sake of my Enishte’s book, I fell silent. To what degree was Master Osman making insinuations?

“Nuri Effendi,” he called to a pale and hunched painter, “present Our Master Black with a ‘survey’ of the workshop!”

The “survey” was a regular ritual of Our Sultan’s bimonthly visits to the miniaturists’ atelier during that exciting time when His Excellency had intently followed what transpired at the workshop. Under the auspices of Hazım, the Head Treasurer; Lokman, the Head Poetic Chronicler and Master Osman, the Head Illuminator, Our Sultan would be apprised of which pages in which books the masters were working on at any given moment: who did which gilding, who colored which picture, and one by one, how the colorists, the page rulers, the gilders and the master miniaturists, whose talent allowed them to accomplish miracles, were engaged. It saddened me that they were holding a fake ceremony in place of the one that was no longer performed because age and ill health bound the Head Poetic Chronicler Lokman Effendi, who wrote most of the books which were illustrated, to his home; because Master Osman often disappeared in a cloud of indignation and wrath; because the four masters known as Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant worked at home; and because Our Sultan no longer waxed enthusiastic like a child in the workshop. As happened to many miniaturists, Nuri Effendi had grown old in vain, without having fully experienced life or become a master of his art. Not in vain, however, did he spend those years over his worktable becoming hunchbacked: He always paid close attention to what happened in the workshop, to who made which exquisite page.

And so I eagerly beheld for the first time the legendary pages of the Book of Festivities, which recounted the circumcision ceremonies of Our Sultan’s prince. When I was still in Persia, I heard stories about this fifty-two-day circumcision ceremony wherein people from all occupations and all guilds, all of Istanbul, had participated, indeed at a time when the book that memorialized the great event was yet being prepared.

In the first picture placed before me, fixed in the royal enclosure of late Ibrahim Pasha’s palace, Our Sultan, the Refuge of the World, gazed upon the festivities in the Hippodrome below with a look that bespoke His satisfaction. His face, even though not so detailed as to permit one to distinguish Him from others by features alone, was drawn adeptly and with reverence. As for the right side of the double-leaf picture showing Our Sultan on the left, there were viziers, pashas, Persian, Tatar, Frankish and Venetian ambassadors standing in the arched colonnades and windows. Because they were not sultans, their eyes were drawn hastily and carelessly and focused on nothing in particular besides the general commotion in the square. Later, I noticed in other pictures that the same arrangement and page composition repeated—even though the wall ornamentation, the trees and terra-cotta shingles were depicted in different styles and colors. Once the text was written out by scribes, the illustrations completed and the book bound; the reader, turning pages, would each time see completely different activities in completely different colors in the Hippodrome which remained under the same watchful gazes of the Sultan and His crowd of guests—who always stood identically, forever gazing at the same area below.

There before me I saw people scrambling for hundreds of bowls of pilaf that were placed in the Hippodrome; I saw the live rabbits and birds emerge out of the roast ox and startle the crowd that had descended upon it. I saw the master coppersmiths’ guild riding in a wheeled cart before Our Sultan, its members hammering away at copper but never striking the one among them lying in the cart with the anvil balanced on his bare chest. I saw glaziers embellishing glass with carnations and cypresses as they paraded before Our Sultan in a wagon; confectioners reciting sweet poems as they drove camels laden with sacks of sugar and displayed cages holding sugar-parrots; and aged locksmiths who showed off a variety of hanging locks, padlocks, dead bolts and gearlocks as they complained of the evils of new times and new doors. Butterfly, Stork and Olive had worked on the picture that depicted the magicians: One of them was causing eggs to march down a pole without dropping them—as if on a broad slab of marble—to the beat of a tambourine played by another. In one wagon I saw precisely how Sea-Captain Kılıç Ali Pasha had forced the infidels he’d captured at sea to make an “infidels’ mountain” out of clay; he’d then loaded all the slaves into the cart, and when he was right before the Sultan, he exploded the powder within the “mountain” to demonstrate how he’d made infidel lands wail and moan with cannon fire. I saw clean-shaven butchers wielding cleavers, wearing rose- and purple-colored uniforms and smiling at the pink carcasses of skinned sheep hanging from hooks. The spectators applauded lion tamers who’d brought a chained lion before Our Sultan, provoking and enraging it until its eyes shone bloodred with rage; and on the next page, I saw the lion, representing Islam, chase away a gray-and-pink pig, symbolizing the cunning Christian infidel. I indulged my eyes at length on a picture of a barber suspended upside down from the ceiling of a shop built onto a cart, as he shaved a customer while his assistant, dressed in red, held a mirror and a silver bowl containing fragrant soap, waiting for baksheesh; I inquired after the identity of the magnificent miniaturist responsible for the piece.

“It is indeed important that a painting, through its beauty, summon us toward life’s abundance, toward compassion, toward respect for the colors of the realm which God created, and toward reflection and faith. The identity of the miniaturist is not important.”

Was Nuri the Miniaturist, who was much more subtle in thought than I’d assumed, being reserved because he understood that my Enishte sent me here to investigate, or was he merely parroting Head Illuminator Master Osman?

“Is Elegant the one responsible for all this gilding work?” I asked. “Who’s doing the gilding now, in his stead?”