第 7 章

In the dead of night in the cold Treasury room, as I turned pages with frozen fingers and gazed upon the pictures in books that I’d dreamed of for forty years, I knew I was much happier than the artists in this pitiless story from Bukhara. It gave me such a thrill to know, before going blind and passing into the Hereafter, that I was handling the very books whose legends I’d heard about my whole life, and at times I would murmur, “Thank you, God, thank you” when I saw that one of pages I was turning was even more marvelous than its legend.

For instance, eighty years ago Shah Ismail crossed the river and by the sword reconquered Herat and all of Khorasan from the Uzbeks, whereupon he appointed his brother Sam Mirza governor of Herat; to celebrate this joyous occasion, his brother, in turn, had a manuscript prepared, an illuminated version of a book entitled The Convergence of the Stars, which recounted a story as witnessed by Emir Hüsrev in the palace of Delhi. According to legend, one illustration in this book showed the two rulers meeting on the banks of a river where they celebrated their victory. Their faces resembled the Sultan of Delhi, Keykubad, and his father, Bughra Khan, the Ruler of Bengal, who were the subjects of the book; but they also resembled the faces of Shah Ismail and his brother Sam Mirza, the men responsible for the book’s creation. I was absolutely certain that the heroes of whichever story I conjured while looking at the page would appear there in the sultan’s tent, and I thanked God for giving me the chance to see this miraculous page.

In an illustration by Sheikh Muhammad, one of the great masters of the same legendary era, a poor subject whose awe and affection for his sultan had reached the level of pure love was desperately hoping, as he watched the sultan play polo, that the ball would roll toward him so he could grab it and present it to his sovereign. After he’d waited long and patiently, the ball did indeed come to him, and he was depicted handing it to the sultan. As had been described to me thousands of times, the love, awe and submission that a poor subject aptly feels toward a great khan or an exalted monarch, or that a handsome young apprentice feels toward his master, was rendered here with such delicacy and deep compassion, from the extension of the subject’s fingers holding the ball to his inability to summon the courage to look at the sovereign’s face, that while looking at this page, I knew there was no greater joy in the world than to be apprentice to a great master, and that such submissiveness verging on servility was no less a pleasure than being master to a young, pretty and intelligent apprentice—and I grieved for those who would never know this truth.

I turned the pages, gazing hurriedly but with rapt attention upon thousands of birds, horses, soldiers, lovers, camels, trees and clouds, while the Treasury’s happy dwarf, like a shah of elder days given the opportunity to exhibit his riches and wealth, proudly and undauntedly removed volume after volume from chests and placed them before me. From two separate corners of an iron chest stuffed with amazing tomes, common books and disorderly albums, there emerged two extraordinary volumes—one bound in the Shiraz style with a burgundy cover, the other bound in Herat and finished with a dark lacquer in the Chinese fashion—which contained pages so resembling each other that at first I thought they were copies. While I was trying to determine which book was the original and which the copy, I examined the names of the calligraphers on the colophons, looked for hidden signatures, and finally came to the realization, with a shudder, that these two volumes of Nizami were the legendary books that Master Sheikh Ali of Tabriz had made, one for the Khan of the Blacksheep, Jihan Shah, and the other for the Khan of the Whitesheep, Tall Hasan. After he was blinded by the Blacksheep shah to prevent him from making another version of the first volume, the great master artist took refuge with the Whitesheep khan and created a superior copy from memory. To see that the pictures in the second of the legendary books, made when he was blind, were simpler and purer, while the colors in the first volume were more lively and invigorating, reminded me that the memory of the blind exposes the merciless simplicity of life but also deadens its vigor.

Since I myself am a genuine great master, so acknowledged by Almighty Allah, who sees and knows all, I knew that one day I would go blind, but is this what I wanted now? Since His presence could be sensed quite nearby in the exquisite and terrifying darkness of the cluttered Treasury, like a condemned man who wishes to look upon the world one last time before he is beheaded, I asked Him: “Allow me to see all these illustrations and have my fill of them.”

As I turned the pages, by the force of God’s inscrutable wisdom, I frequently came across legends and matters of blindness. In the famous scene showing Shirin on a countryside outing falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture on the branch of a plane tree, Sheikh Ali Rıza from Shiraz had drawn distinctly all the leaves of the tree one by one so they filled the entire sky. In answer to a fool who saw the work and commented that the true subject of the illustration wasn’t the plane tree, Sheikh Ali replied that the true subject wasn’t the passion of the beautiful young maiden either, it was the passion of the artist, and to proudly prove his point he attempted to paint the same plane tree with all its leaves on a grain of rice. If the signature hidden beneath the beautiful feet of Shirin’s darling lady attendants hadn’t misled me, I was of course seeing the magnificent tree made by the blind master on paper—not the tree made on a grain of rice, which he left half finished, having gone blind seven years and three months after he started the task. On another page, Rüstem blinding Alexander with his forked arrow was depicted in the manner of artists who knew the Indian style, so vivaciously and colorfully, that blindness, the ageless sorrow and secret desire of the genuine miniaturist, appeared to the observer as the prologue to a joyous celebration.

My eyes wandered over these pictures and volumes, no less with the excitement of one who wanted to behold for himself these legends he’d heard about for years than with the worry of an old man who sensed he would soon enough never see anything more. There, in the cold Treasury room suffused with a dark red that I’d never seen before—caused by the color of the cloth and dust within the peculiar light of the candles—I would occasionally cry out in admiration, whereupon Black and the dwarf would rush to my side and look over my shoulder at the magnificent page before me. Unable to restrain myself, I’d begin to explain:

“This color red belongs to the great master Mirza Baba Imami from Tabriz, the secret of which he took with him to the grave. He’s used it for the edges of the carpet, the red of Alevi allegiance on the Persian Shah’s turban, and look, it’s here on the belly of the lion on this page and on this pretty boy’s caftan. Allah never directly revealed this fine red except when He let the blood of his subjects flow. So that we might wearily strive to find this variety of red that is only visible to the naked eye on man-made cloth and in the pictures of the greatest of masters, God did, however, consign its secret to the rarest of insects living beneath stones,” I said and added, “Thanks be to Him who has now revealed it to us.”

“Look at this,” I said much later, once again unable to refrain from showing them a masterpiece—this one could’ve belonged in any collection of ghazals, which spoke of love, friendship, spring and happiness. We looked at the trees of springtime blooming in an array of color, the cypresses in a garden reminiscent of Heaven and the elation of the beloveds reclining in that garden as they drank wine and recited poetry; it was as if we in the moldy, dusty and icy Treasury could also smell those spring blossoms and the delicately scented skin of the joyous revelers. “Notice how the same artist who rendered the forearms of the lovers, their beautiful naked feet, the elegance of their stances and the lazy delight of the birds fluttering about them with such sincerity, also made the crude shape of the cypress in the background!” I said, “This is the work of Lütfi of Bukhara whose ill-temper and belligerence caused him to leave each of his illustrations half finished; he fought with every shah and khan claiming that they understood nothing of painting, and he never remained in one city for long. This great master went from one shah’s palace to another, from city to city, quarreling all the way, never able to find a ruler whose book was deserving of his talents, until he ended up in the workshop of an inconsequential chieftain who ruled over nothing but bare mountaintops. Claiming that ‘the khan’s dominions might be small but he knows painting,’ he spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life there. Whether he ever knew that this inconsequential lord was blind remains, even today, a subject of conjecture and a source of humor.”

“Do you see this page?” I said well into the night, and this time they both rushed to my side, candlesticks aloft. “From the time of Tamerlane’s grandchildren to the present, this volume has seen ten owners on its way here from Herat over a span of one hundred fifty years.” Using my magnifying lens, the three of us read the signatures, dedications, historical information and names of sultans—who’d strangled one another—filling every corner of the colophon page, pinched together, between and on top of each other: “This volume was completed in Herat, with the help of God, by the hand of Calligrapher Sultan Veli, son of Muzaffer of Herat, in the year of the Hegira 849 for Ismet-üd Dünya, the wife of Muhammad Juki the victorious brother of the Ruler of the World, Baysungur.” Later still, we read that the book had passed into the possession of the Whitesheep Sultan Halil, thence to his son Yakup Bey, and thence to the Uzbek sultans in the North, each of whom happily amused himself with the book for a time, removing or adding one or two pictures; beginning with the first owner, they added the faces of their beautiful wives to the illustrations and appended their names proudly to the colophon page; afterward, it passed to Sam Mirza who’d conquered Herat, and he made a present of it, with a separate dedication, for his elder brother, Shah Ismail, who in turn brought it to Tabriz and had it prepared as a gift with yet another dedication. When the denizen of paradise Sultan Selim the Grim defeated Shah Ismail at Chaldiran and plundered the Seven Heavens Palace in Tabriz, the book ended up here in this Treasury in Istanbul, after traveling across deserts, mountains and rivers along with the victorious sultan’s soldiers.

How much of an aging master’s interest and excitement did Black and the dwarf share? As I opened new volumes and turned their pages, I sensed the profound sorrow of thousands of illustrators from hundreds of cities large and small, each with a distinctive temperament, each painting under the patronage of a different cruel shah, khan or chieftain, each displaying his talent and succumbing to blindness. I felt the pain of the beatings we all received during our long apprenticeships, the blows inflicted with rulers, until our cheeks turned bright red, or with marble polishing stones upon our shaven heads, as I flipped—with humiliation—through the pages of a primitive book that displayed methods and implements of torture. I had no idea what this miserable book was doing in the Ottoman Treasury: Instead of seeing torture as a necessary practice administered before the supervision of a judge to ensure Allah’s justice in the world, infidel travelers would convince their coreligionists of our cruelty and evil-heartedness by having dishonorable miniaturists abase themselves and dash off these pictures in exchange for a few gold pieces. I was embarrassed at the obvious depraved pleasure with which this miniaturist had drawn pictures of bastinados, beatings, crucifixions, hangings by the neck or the feet, hookings, impalings, firings from cannon, nailings, stranglings, the cutting of throats, feedings to hungry dogs, whippings, baggings, pressings, soakings in cold water, the plucking of hair, the breaking of fingers, the delicate flayings, the cutting off of noses and the removal of eyes. Only true artists like us who’d suffered throughout our apprenticeships merciless bastinados, random pummelings and fists so that the irritable master who drew a line incorrectly might feel better—not to mention hours of blows from sticks and rulers so that the devil within us would perish to be reborn as the jinn of inspiration—only we could feel such extreme joy by depicting bastinados and tortures, only we could color these implements with the gaiety of coloring a child’s kite.

Hundreds of years hence, men looking at our world through the illustrations we’ve made won’t understand anything. Desiring to take a closer look, yet lacking the patience, they might feel the embarrassment, the joy, the deep pain and pleasure of observation I now feel as I examine pictures in this freezing Treasury—but they’ll never truly know. As I turned the pages with my old fingers numbed from the cold, my trusty mother-of-pearl-handled magnifying lens and my left eye passed over the pictures like an old stork traversing the earth, little surprised by the view below, yet still astonished to see new things. From these pages withheld from us for years, some of them legendary, I came to know which artist had learned what from whom, in which workshop under which shah’s patronage the thing we now call ‘style’ first took shape, which fabled master had worked for whom, and how, for example, the curling Chinese clouds I knew had spread throughout Persia from Herat under Chinese influence were also used in Kazvin. I would occasionally allow myself an exhausted “Aha!”; but an agony lurked deeper within me, a melancholy and regret I can scarcely share with you for the belittled, tormented, pretty, moon-faced, gazelle-eyed, sapling-thin painters—battered by masters—who suffered for their art, yet remained full of excitement and hope, enjoying the affection that developed between them and their masters and their shared love of painting, before succumbing to anonymity and blindness after long years of toil.

It was with such melancholy and regret that I entered this world of fine and delicate feelings, the possibility of whose depiction my soul had quietly forgotten over years of rendering wars and celebrations for Our Sultan. In an album of collected pictures I saw a red-lipped, thin-waisted Persian boy holding a book on his lap exactly as I was holding one at that moment, and it reminded me of what shahs with a weakness for gold and power always forget: The world’s beauty belongs to Allah. On the page of another album drawn by a young master from Isfahan, with tears in my eyes, I beheld two marvelous youths in love with each other, and was reminded of the love my own handsome apprentices nourished for painting. A tiny-footed, transparent-skinned, weak and girlish youth had bared a delicate forearm, which aroused in one the desire to kiss it and die, while a cherry-lipped, almond-eyed, sapling-thin, button-nosed beauty of a maiden gazed with wonder—as though viewing three lovely flowers—upon the three small, deep marks of passion the youth had burned onto the inside of that adorable arm to demonstrate the strength of his love and his attachment to her.

Oddly, my heart began to quicken and pound. As had happened sixty years ago in my early apprenticeship, while I was looking at some rather indecent illustrations of handsome marble-skinned boys and slim small-breasted maidens drawn in the black-ink style of Tabriz, beads of sweat accumulated on my forehead. I recalled the passion for painting I felt and the depth of thought I experienced when, a few years after I’d married and taken my first steps toward master status, I saw a lovely angel-faced, almond-eyed, rose-petal-skinned youth brought in as an apprentice candidate. For a moment, I had the strong feeling that painting was not about melancholy and regret but about this desire I felt and that it was the talent of the master artist that first transformed this desire into a love of God and then into a love of the world as God saw it; so strong was this feeling that it caused me to relive with ecstatic delight all the years I’d spent over the drawing board until my back was hunched, all the beatings I’d endured while learning my craft, my dedication to courting blindness through illustration and all the agonies of painting I’d suffered and made others suffer. As if running my eyes over something forbidden, I stared long and silently at this wondrous illustration with the same delight. Much later I was still staring. A teardrop slid from my eye over my cheek into my beard.

When I noticed that one of the candlesticks slowly floating through the Treasury was approaching me, I put the album away and randomly opened one of the volumes the dwarf had recently set beside me. This was a special album prepared for shahs: I saw two deer at the edge of a green copse enamored of each other, with jackals watching them in hostile envy. I turned the page: Chestnut and bay horses that could’ve been the work of only one of the old masters of Herat—how spectacular they were! I turned the page: A confidently seated governmental official greeted me from a seventy-year-old picture; I couldn’t determine who it was from the face because he looked like anybody, or so I thought, yet the air of the painting, the seated man’s beard painted in various hues recalled something. My heart beat quickly as I recognized the execution of the magnificent hand in the piece. My heart knew before I did, only he could’ve drawn such a splendid hand: This was the work of Bihzad. It was as if light were gushing from the painting to my face.

I had seen pictures drawn by the Great Master Bihzad a few times before; perhaps because I hadn’t looked at them alone, but in a group of former masters years ago, perhaps because we couldn’t be certain whether it was indeed the work of the great Bihzad, I hadn’t been as taken as I was now.

The heavy moldy darkness of the Treasury chamber seemed to brighten. This beautifully drawn hand merged in my mind with that thin, magnificent arm branded with signs of love, which I’d just now seen. Again, I praised God for showing me such spectacular beauty before I went blind. How do I know I’ll soon be blind? I don’t know! I sensed that I could share this intuition of mine with Black, who’d sidled up to me holding a candle and was looking at the page, but something else came out of my mouth.

“Behold the remarkable rendering of the hand,” I said. “It’s Bihzad.”

My hand went of its own will to hold Black’s, as if it were holding the hand of one of those soft, velvet-skinned, beautiful apprentice boys, each of whom I’d loved in my youth. His hand was smooth and firm, warmer than my own, delicate and broad, and I was thrilled by the veined side of his wrist. When I was young, I would take an apprentice child’s hand into my palm and, before telling him how to hold the brush, I’d gaze with affection into his sweet, frightened eyes. That’s how I looked at Black. Reflected in his pupils, I saw the flame of the candle he held aloft. “We miniaturists are brethren,” I said, “but now everything is coming to an end.”

“How do you mean?”

I said, “Everything is coming to an end” like a great master who longs for blindness, having devoted his years to a lord or a prince, having created masterpieces in his workshop in the style of the ancients, having even ensured that this workshop had its own style, a great master who knows, whenever his patron lord loses his last battle, that new lords will come in the wake of the plundering enemy, disband the workshop, tear apart bound volumes leaving the pages in disarray and belittle and destroy what remains, including the fine details that he long believed in, that were of his own discovery and that he loved like his own children. But I needed to explain this to Black differently.

“This illustration is of the great Poet Abdullah Hatifi,” I said. “Hatifi was such a great poet that he simply stayed home while everybody else rushed out and toadied up to Shah Ismail after the king took Herat. In response, Shah Ismail personally went all the way to his house on the outskirts of the city to see him. We know this is Hatifi, not from Bihzad’s rendering of Hatifi’s face, but from the writing beneath the illustration, don’t we?”

For Ottoman miniaturists like us who were astonished by ordinary books with seven or eight illustrations, looking through this volume, which contained 250 large illustrations, was like roaming through an exquisite palace while its inhabitants slept. We stared at the incredibly rich pages with a quiet pious reverence as if beholding the Gardens of Paradise that had appeared miraculously for a fleeting moment. And for the following twenty-five years we discussed this book which remained locked in the Treasury.

I silently opened the thick cover of the Book of Kings as if opening a huge palace door. As I turned the pages, each of which made a pleasant rustle, I was overcome by melancholy more than awe.

1. Mindful of the stories suggesting that all the master miniaturists of Istanbul had stolen images from the pages of this book, I couldn’t give my full attention to the pictures.

2. Thinking that I might chance upon a hand drawn by Bihzad in some corner, I couldn’t devote myself wholeheartedly to the masterpieces that appeared in one of every five or six pictures (how decisively and with what grace did Tahmuras lower his mace upon the heads of the demons and giants, who later, in a time of peace, would teach him the alphabet, Greek and various other languages!).

3. The noses of horses and the presence of Black and the dwarf prevented me from surrendering myself to what I saw.

Naturally, I was disappointed to find myself observing more with my mind than with my heart, despite the great luck of having Allah, in His munificence, grant me the chance to have my fill of this legendary book before the velvet curtain of darkness descended over my eyes—the divine grace bestowed upon all great miniaturists. By the time the light of dawn reached the Treasury, which had gradually begun to resemble an icy tomb, I’d gazed upon each of the 259 pictures in this superlative book. Since I looked with my mind, allow me once more to categorize, as if I were an Arab scholar interested only in reasoning:

1. Nowhere could I locate a horse with nostrils that resembled what the wretched murderer had drawn: Not among the variously colored horses that Rüstem encountered while pursuing horse thieves in Turan; not among Feridun Shah’s extraordinary horses which swam the Tigris after the Arab Sultan had denied him permission to do so; not among the gray horses sorrowfully watching Tur’s treachery in beheading his younger brother Iraj, of whom he was jealous because their father, while doling out his territory, gave the best country, Persia, and far away China to Iraj, while leaving only the western lands to Tur; not among the horses of the heroic armies of Alexander that included Khazars, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs, all equipped with armor, iron shields, indestructible swords and glimmering helmets; not the fabled horse that killed Shah Yazdgird—whose nose bled perpetually as a result of the divine punishment for rebelling against God’s fate—by trampling him on the shores of the green lake whose restorative waters eased his affliction; and not among the hundreds of mythical and perfect horses all drawn by six or seven miniaturists. Yet, there was still more than one entire day ahead of me in which to examine the other books in the Treasury.

2. There’s a claim that has been a persistent topic of gossip among master illuminators for the last twenty-five years: With the express permission of the Sultan, an illustrator entered this forbidden Treasury, found this spectacular book, opened it and by candlelight copied into his sketchbook examples of a number of exquisite horses, trees, clouds, flowers, birds, gardens and scenes of war and love for later use in his work. . .Whenever an artist created an amazing and exceptional piece, jealousy prompted such gossip from the others, who sought to belittle the picture as nothing but Persian work from Tabriz. Back then, Tabriz was not Ottoman territory. When such slander was directed at me, I felt justifiably angry, yet secretly proud; but when I heard the same accusation about others, I believed it. Now, I sadly realized that in some strange way the four of us miniaturists who’d looked at this book once twenty-five years ago ingrained its images into our memories, and since then, we’ve recalled, transformed, altered and painted them into the books of Our Sultan. My spirits were dampened not by the mercilessness of overly suspicious sultans who wouldn’t take such books out of their treasuries and show them to us, but by the narrowness of our own world of painting. Whether it be the great masters of Herat or the new masters of Tabriz, Persian artists had made more extraordinary illustrations, more masterpieces, than we Ottomans.

Like a lightning flash, it occurred to me how appropriate it’d be if two days hence all my miniaturists and I were put to torture; using the point of my penknife I ruthlessly scraped away the eyes beneath my hand in the picture that lay open before me. It was the account of the Persian scholar who learned chess simply by looking at a chess set brought by the ambassador from Hindustan, before defeating the Hindu master at his own game! A Persian lie! One by one, I scraped away the eyes of the chess players and of the shah and his men who were watching them. Flipping back through the pages, I also pitilessly gouged out the eyes of the shahs who battled mercilessly, of the soldiers of imposing armies bedecked in magnificent armor and of severed heads lying on the ground. After doing the same to three pages, I slid my penknife back into my sash.

My hands trembled, but I didn’t feel so bad. Did I now feel what so many lunatics felt after committing this strange act whose results I encountered frequently during my fifty-year tenure as a painter? I wanted nothing more than blood to flow onto the pages of this book from the eyes I had blinded.

3. This brings me to the torment and consolation awaiting me at the end of my life. No part of this excellent book, which Shah Tahmasp had completed by spurring Persia’s most masterful artists for ten years, had seen the touch of the great Bihzad’s pen, and his excellent rendering of hands was nowhere to be found. This fact confirmed that Bihzad was blind in the last years of his life, when he fled from Herat—then a city out of favor—to Tabriz. So, I once again decided happily that after he attained the perfection of the old masters by working his entire life, the great master blinded himself to avoid tainting his painting with the desires of any other workshop or shah.

Just then, Black and the dwarf opened a thick volume they were carrying and placed it before me.

“No, this isn’t it,” I said without being contrary. “This is a Mongol Book of Kings: The iron horses of Alexander’s iron cavalry were filled with naphtha and set aflame like lamps, before being set against the enemy with flames shooting from their nostrils.”

We stared at the flaming army of iron copied from Chinese paintings.

“Jezmi Agha,” I said, “we later depicted in the Chronicle of Sultan Selim the gifts that Shah Tahmasp’s Persian ambassadors, who also presented this book, brought with them twenty-five years ago. . .”

He swiftly located the Chronicle of Sultan Selim and placed it in front of me.

I’d caught sight of it while passing into the next room; I stood and looked, yes, there it was: an ivory mirror with a twisted handle and thick ebony frame, its length nicely embellished with script. I sat down again and gazed at my own eyes. How beautifully the flame of the candle danced in my pupils—which had witnessed my hand paint for sixty years.

“How had Master Bihzad done it?” I asked myself once more.

Never once taking my eyes off the mirror, with the practiced movements of a woman applying kohl to her eyelids, my hand found the needle on its own. Without hesitation, as if making a hole at the end of an ostrich egg soon to be embellished, I bravely, calmly and firmly pressed the needle into the pupil of my right eye. My innards sank, not because I felt what I was doing, but because I saw what I was doing. I pushed the needle into my eye to the depth of a quarter the length of a finger, then removed it.

In the couplet worked into the frame of the mirror, the poet had wished the observer eternal beauty and wisdom—and eternal life to the mirror itself.

Smiling, I did the same to my other eye.

For a long while I didn’t move. I stared at the world—at everything.

As I’d surmised, the colors of the world did not darken, but seemed to bleed ever so gently into one another. I could still more or less see.

The pale light of the sun fell over the red and oxblood cloth of the Treasury. In the accustomed ceremony, the Head Treasurer and his men broke the seal and opened the lock and the door. Jezmi Agha changed the chamber pots, lamps and brazier, brought in fresh bread and dried mulberries and announced to the others that we would continue searching for the horses with oddly drawn nostrils within Our Sultan’s books. What could be more exquisite than looking at the world’s most beautiful pictures while trying to recollect God’s vision of the world?

I AM CALLED BLACK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked down at the picture.

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

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

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

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

Silence.

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

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

“You do see it, don’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He fell silent.

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

“Who then?” I said. “Butterfly?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I AM ESTHER

I was putting lentil soup on the boil for our evening meal when Nesim said, “There’s a visitor at the door.” I replied, “Make sure the soup doesn’t burn,” handing him the spoon and giving it a couple of turns in the pot while holding his aged hand. If you don’t show them, they’ll stand there for hours idly holding the spoon in the pot.

“Mother, have Orhan open the door,” I said in a moment of inspiration and in a sweet voice, as if I were speaking to the boy. “He wants to go home, no one will take issue with that.”

The words had hardly left my mouth when Orhan freed himself from his mother’s loosening arms, and like somebody who’d lived here for years, slid open the bolt, lifted the wooden bar, then unfastened the latch, and moved backward two steps. The cold from outside entered as the door yawned open. There was such a silence that all of us heard a lazy dog bark off in the distance. Shekure kissed Orhan, who was back in his mother’s lap, and Shevket said, “I’m going to tell Uncle Hasan.”

I saw Shekure stand, take up her cloak and prepare her bundle to leave, and I was so greatly relieved, I was afraid I might laugh. I seated myself and had two more spoonfuls of the lentil soup.

Black was intelligent enough not to come anywhere near the door of the house. For a time, Shevket locked himself in his late father’s room, and even though we called for Black’s help, neither he nor his men came. After Shekure agreed to let Shevket take along his Uncle Hasan’s ruby-handled dagger, the boy was willing to leave the house with us.

“Be afraid of Hasan and his red sword,” said the father-in-law with genuine worry rather than an air of defeat and vengeance. He kissed each of his grandchildren, sniffing their heads. He also whispered into Shekure’s ear.

When I saw Shekure gazing one last time at the door, walls and stove of the house, I remembered once again how this was where she spent the happiest years of her life with her first husband. But could she also tell that this same house was the refuge of two miserable and lonely men, and that it bore the stench of death? I didn’t walk with her on the way back for she had broken my heart by coming back here.

It wasn’t the cold and blackness of the night that brought together the two fatherless children and three women—one servant, one Jewess and one widow—it was the strange neighborhoods, the nearly impassable streets and the fear of Hasan. Our crowded company was under the protection of Black’s men, and just like a caravan carrying treasure, we walked over out-of-the-way roads, backstreets and solitary, seldom-visited neighborhoods, so as to avoid running into guards, Janissaries, curious neighborhood thugs, thieves or Hasan. At times, through blackness in which you couldn’t see your hand before your face, we groped our way, perpetually bumping against each other and the walls. We walked clinging to one another, overcome by the sensation that the living dead, jinns and demons would surely emerge from underground and abduct us into the night. Just behind the walls and closed shutters, which we felt blindly with our hands, we heard the snoring and coughing of people in the nighttime cold as well as the lowing of beasts in their stables.

Even Esther, no stranger to the poorest and worst districts, who’d walked all the streets of Istanbul—that is excluding those neighborhoods wherein migrants and the members of various unfortunate communities congregated—occasionally felt that we would vanish on these streets, which twisted and turned without end through an endless blackness. Yet I could still make out certain street corners that I’d patiently passed in the daytime toting my satchel; for example, I recognized the walls of Head Tailor’s Street, the sharp smell of manure—which for some reason reminded me of cinnamon—coming from the stable adjacent to Nurullah Hoja’s property, the fire-ravaged sites on Acrobats Street and the Falconers Arcade that led into the square with the Blind Haji Fountain, and thus I knew we weren’t heading toward the house of Shekure’s late father at all, but to some other, mysterious destination.

There was no telling what Hasan would do if angered, and I knew Black had found another place to hide his family from him—and from that devil of a murderer. If I could’ve made out where that place was, I would tell you, now, and Hasan tomorrow morning—not out of spite, but because I’m convinced that Shekure will again want to have Hasan’s interest. But Black, intelligent as he was, no longer trusted me.

We were walking down a dark street behind the slave market when a commotion of cries and wails erupted at the far end of the street. We heard the sounds of a scuffle, and I recognized with fear the clamorous start of a fight: the clash of axes, swords and sticks and the bellow of bitter pain.

Black handed his own large sword to one of his most trusted men, forcibly took the dagger from Shevket, causing the boy to cry, and had the barber’s apprentice and two other men move Shekure, Hayriye and the children a safe distance away. The theology student told me he’d take me home by way of a shortcut; that is, he didn’t let me stay with the others. Was this a twist of fate or some cunning attempt to keep secret the whereabouts of their hideout?

There was a shop, which I understood to be a coffeehouse, at the end of this narrow street we were passing down. Perhaps the swordfight stopped as soon as it’d begun. Crowds of men were hooting as they entered and left; at first I thought they were looting, but no, they were destroying the coffeehouse. They carefully took out all of the ceramic cups, brass pots, glasses and low tables under the light of the torches of the onlookers and destroyed them all as a warning. They roughed up a man who tried to stop them, but he was able to get away. Originally, I thought their target was only coffee, as they themselves claimed. They were condemning its ill effects, how it harmed the sight and the stomach, how it dulled the intellect and caused men to lose their faith, how it was the poison of the Franks and how Exalted Muhammad had turned down coffee even though it was offered to him by a beautiful woman—Satan in disguise. It was as if this were the theatrics for a night of instruction in moral etiquette, and if I finally made it home, I thought I might even scold Nesim, warning him not to drink too much of that poison.

Since there were quite a few rooming houses and cheap inns nearby, a curious crowd formed in no time, made up of idle wanderers, homeless men and no-good mongrels who’d snuck illegally into the city, and they emboldened these enemies of coffee. It was then I understood that these men were the henchmen of Preacher Nusret Hoja of Erzurum. They intended to clean up all the dens of wine, prostitution and coffee in Istanbul and punish severely those who veered from the path of Exalted Muhammad; those who, for example, used dervish ceremonies as an excuse for belly-dancing to music. They railed against the enemies of religion, men who collaborated with the Devil, pagans, unbelievers and illustrators. I suddenly recalled this was the coffeehouse on whose walls drawings were hung, where religion and the hoja from Erzurum were maligned and where disrespect knew no bounds.

A coffee maker’s apprentice, his face spattered with blood, emerged from inside, and I thought he might collapse, but he wiped the blood from his forehead and cheeks with the cuff of his shirt, melded in with our group and began to watch the raid. The crowd pulled back a little out of fear. I noticed Black recognize somebody and hesitate. By the way the Erzurumis began to collect together, I knew that the Janissaries or some other band armed with clubs was on its way. The torches were extinguished and the crowd became a confused mob.

Black grabbed me by the arm and had the theology student take me away. “Go by way of the backstreets,” he said. “He’ll see you to your house.” The student wanted to slip away as soon as possible and we were almost running as we departed. My thoughts were with Black, but if Esther’s taken out of the scene, she can’t possibly continue with the story, can she now?

I AM A WOMAN

Not at all! When I pulled on my mother’s rose-embroidered wool underclothes, a gentle sense of well-being spread over me and I felt as sensitive as she. The touch against my bare skin of my aunt’s pistachio-green silk shirt, which she could never bring herself to wear, made me feel an irrepressible affection toward all children, including myself. I wanted to nurse everybody and cook for the whole world. After I understood to some extent what it was like to have breasts, I stuffed my chest with whatever I could find—socks and washcloths—so I might understand what really made me curious: how it felt to be a large-breasted woman. When I saw these huge protrusions, yes, I admit it, I was as proud as Satan. I understood at once that men, merely catching sight of the shadow of my overabundant breasts, would chase after them and strive to take them into their mouths; I felt quite powerful, but is that what I wanted? I was befuddled: I wanted both to be powerful and to be the object of pity; I wanted a rich, powerful and intelligent man, whom I didn’t know from Adam, to fall madly in love with me; yet I also feared such a man. Sliding on the bracelets made of twisted gold that my mother hid at the bottom of her trousseau chest next to the sheets embroidered with leafy designs, in lavender-scented wool socks, applying the rouge with which she brightened her cheeks on the way back from the public baths, donning my aunt’s evergreen cloak and putting on the thin veil of the same color after gathering up my hair, I stared at myself in the mirror with the mother-of-pearl frame, and shuddered. Although I hadn’t touched them, my eyes and eyelashes had become those of a woman. Only my eyes and cheeks were exposed, but I was an extraordinarily attractive woman and this made me very happy. My manliness, which took note of this fact before even I had, was erect. Naturally, this upset me.

In the hand mirror I held, I watched a teardrop slide from my lovely eye and just then, a poem painfully came to mind. I’ve never been able to forget it, because at that same moment, inspired by the Almighty, I sang that poem rhythmically like a song, trying to forget my woes:

My fickle heart longs for the West when I’m in the East and for the East when I’m in the West.

My other parts insist I be a woman when I’m a man and a man when I’m a woman.

How difficult it is being human, even worse is living a human’s life.

I only want to amuse myself frontside and backside, to be Eastern and Western both.

I was going to say, “Let’s hope our Erzurumi brethren don’t hear the song issuing from my heart,” for they’ll be cross. But why should I be afraid? Perhaps they won’t be angry at all. Listen, I’m not saying this for the sake of gossip, but I’ve learned how that famous preacher the Exalted Not-Husret-by-a-Longshot Effendi, despite being married, prefers handsome boys to us women just as you sensitive painters do. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. But I pay no mind to any of this because I find him repulsive besides, and he’s so old. His teeth have fallen out and as the young boys who get close to him say, his mouth stinks, excuse the expression, like a bear’s ass.

All right then, I’m holding off on the hearsay to return to the real issue at hand: As soon as I saw how beautiful I was, I no longer wanted to wash clothes and dishes and parade about the streets like a slave. Poverty, tears, sorrow, gazing forlornly at a mirror of disappointment and crying are the lot of sad and ugly women. I must find a husband who’ll put me on a pedestal, but who might that be?

Black was also in the crowd watching the attack. I saw him holding a dagger accompanied by a group of odd-looking men, the well-known Esther the clothier and other women carrying cloth sacks. I had an urge to flee after seeing the establishment cruelly wrecked and the coffeehouse-goers beaten mercilessly as they tried to leave. Later, another mob, perhaps the Janissaries, arrived. The Erzurumis snuffed out their torches and fled.

There was nobody at the dark entrance of the coffeehouse, and no one was looking. I walked inside. Everything was in shambles. I stepped on the shattered cups, plates, glasses and bowls. An oil lamp hanging from a nail high on the wall hadn’t died out during the turmoil but only illuminated the soot marks on the ceiling, leaving in darkness the floor strewn with the boards of wrecked wood benches, broken low tables and other debris.

Stacking long cushions atop one another, I reached up and grabbed hold of the oil lamp. Within its circle of light, I noticed bodies lying on the floor. When I saw that one face was covered in blood, I turned away, and went to the next. The second body was moaning, and upon seeing my lamp, made a childlike noise.

Someone else entered. At first I was alarmed, though I could sense it was Black. The both of us leaned over the third body sprawled on the floor. As I lowered the lamp to his head, we saw what we’d suspected: They’d killed the storyteller.

There was no trace of blood on his face, which was made up like a woman’s, but his chin, brow and rouge-covered mouth were battered, and judging by his neck, covered in bruises, he’d been throttled. His hands were cast backward over his head on either side. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that one of them held the old man’s arms behind his back while the others beat him in the face before strangling him. I wonder, had they said, “Cut out his tongue so he never again slanders his Excellency the Preacher Hoja Effendi,” and then set about doing so?

“Bring the lamp here,” said Black. Near the stove, the light of the lamp struck broken coffee grinders, sieves, scales and pieces of broken coffee cups lying in the mud of spilled coffee. In the corner where the storyteller hung his pictures each night, Black was searching for the performer’s props, sash, magician’s handkerchief and popping stick. Black said he was after the pictures and held the lamp he’d taken from me to my face: Yes, of course I’d drawn two of them out of a sense of fraternity. We could find nothing but the Persian skullcap that the deceased wore over his perfectly shaved head.

Seeing no one else, we exited into the blackness of night through a narrow passageway that led away from the back door. During the raid much of the crowd and the artists within probably escaped through this door, but the knocked-over planters and bags of coffee strewn everywhere indicated that there was a struggle here as well.

The fact that the coffeehouse was raided and the master storyteller murdered, coupled with the terrifying blackness of night, brought Black and I closer together. This was also what caused the silence between us. We passed two more streets. Black handed the lamp back to me, then he drew his dagger and pressed it to my throat.

“We’re going to your house,” he said. “I want to search it so I can put my mind at ease.”

“It’s already been searched.”

Rather than be offended by him, I had the urge to tease him. Didn’t Black’s belief in the disgraceful rumors about me simply prove he was also jealous of me? He held the dagger without much confidence.

My house was opposite the direction we were heading along the road leading away from the coffeehouse. We tacked right and left down neighborhood streets and passed through empty gardens that bore the depressing scent of damp and lonely trees as we traced a wide arc back toward my house. We’d covered more than half the route, when Black stopped and said:

“For two days, Master Osman and I examined the masterpieces of the legendary masters in the Treasury.”

Much later, nearly screaming, I said, “After a certain age, even if a painter shares a worktable with Bihzad, what he sees may please his eyes and bring contentment and excitement to his soul, but it won’t enhance his talent, because one paints with the hand, not the eyes, and the hand at my age, let alone at Master Osman’s, does not easily learn new things.”

Assured my beautiful wife was waiting for me, I spoke at the top of my voice to let her know I wasn’t alone so she might hide herself from Black—not that I took this pathetic dagger-wielding fool seriously.

We passed through the courtyard gate, and I thought I saw the light of a lamp moving in the house, but thank God all was in darkness now. It was such a merciless rape of my privacy for this knife-wielding beast to force his way into my heavenly home, where I spent my days, indeed all my time, seeking out and painting Allah’s memories until my eyes tired—whereupon I’d make love to my beloved, the most beautiful woman in the world—that I swore to take revenge upon him.

Lowering the lamp, he examined my papers, a page I was in the midst of completing—condemned prisoners pleading to the Sultan to be relieved of their chains of debt and receiving His benevolence—my paints, my worktables, my knives, my reed-cutting boards, my brushes, everything around my writing table, my papers again, my burnishing stones, my penknives and the spaces between my pen and paper boxes; he looked in cabinets, chests, beneath cushions, at one of my paper scissors, and beneath a soft red cushion and a carpet before going back, bringing the lamp closer and closer to each object and examining the same places once again. As he said when he first drew his weapon, he wouldn’t search my entire house, only my atelier. Indeed, couldn’t I conceal my wife—the only thing I wanted to hide—in the room from which she was now spying on us?

“There’s a final picture that belonged to the book my Enishte was having made,” he said. “Whoever killed him also stole that picture.”

“It was different from the others,” I said immediately. “Your Enishte, may he rest in peace, made me draw a tree in one corner of the page. In the background somewhere. . .and in the middle of the page, in the foreground, was to be someone’s picture, probably a portrait of Our Sultan. That space, quite large if I might add, was awaiting its picture. Because the objects in the background were to be smaller, as in the European style, he wanted me to make the tree smaller. As the picture developed, it gave the impression of being a view of this world from a window, nothing like an illustration at all. It was then I comprehended that in a picture made with the perspectival methods of the Franks, the borders and gilding took the place of a window frame.”

“Elegant Effendi was responsible for the borders and the gilding.”

“If that’s what you’re asking, I already told you I didn’t murder him.”

“A murderer never admits to his crime,” he said quickly, then asked me what I was doing at the coffeehouse during the raid.

He placed the oil lamp just beside the cushion upon which I was seated, in a way that would illuminate my face along with my papers and the pages I was illuminating. He himself was scurrying about the room like a shadow in the dark.

Besides telling him what I’ve told you, that I actually was an infrequent visitor to the coffeehouse and just happened to be passing by, I also repeated that I made two of the pictures which were hung on the wall there—although I actually disapproved of the goings-on at the coffeehouse. “Because,” I added, “the art of painting only ends up condemning and punishing itself when it derives its strength from the desire to condemn and punish the evils of life rather than from the painter’s own skill, love of his art and desire to embrace Allah. . .regardless of whether it’s the preacher from Erzurum or Satan himself that’s denounced. More importantly, if that coffeehouse crowd hadn’t targeted the Erzurumis, it might not have been raided tonight.”

“Even so, you would go there,” said the wretch.

“Yes, because I enjoyed myself there.” Had he an inkling of how honest I was being? I added, “Despite knowing how ugly and wrong something is, we descendants of Adam might still derive considerable pleasure from it. And I’m embarrassed to say I was also entertained by those cheap illustrations, the mimicry and those stories about Satan, the gold coin and the dog, which the storyteller told crudely without meter or rhyme.”

“Even so, why would you even step foot in that den of unbelievers?”

“Fine then,” I said resigning myself to an inner voice, “at times there’s also a worm of doubt that gnaws at me: Ever since I was openly recognized as the most talented and most proficient among the masters of the workshop, not only by Master Osman, but by Our Sultan as well, I began to be so terrified of the envy of the others that I tried, if only at times, to go where they went, to befriend them and to resemble them so they wouldn’t turn on me in a sudden fit of vengeance. Do you understand? And since they’ve begun labeling me an ‘Erzurumi,’ I’ve been going to that den of vile unbelievers so others might discount this rumor.”

“Master Osman said you often acted as if apologizing for your talent and proficiency.”

“The great Head Illuminator Master Osman most certainly meant no evil by this,” I said. “Allow me to put some linden tea on the boil for you, my dear guest.”

I passed into the adjoining room. My beloved tossed over my head the nightgown of Chinese silk she was wearing, which she’d purchased from Esther the clothier, then mockingly parroted me, “Allow me to put some linden tea on the boil for you, my dear guest,” and placed her hand on my cock.

I took out the agate-handled sword hidden among rose-scented sheets at the bottom of the chest on the floor nearest our roll-up mattress, which she’d hopefully spread out, and drew the weapon from its sheath. Its edge was so sharp that if you tossed a silk handkerchief over it, the sword would easily cut through it; if you placed a sheet of gold leaf upon it, the edges of the resulting pieces would be as straight as any cut with a ruler.

Concealing the sword as best I could, I returned to my atelier. Black Effendi was so pleased with his interrogation of me that he was still circling the red cushion, dagger in hand. I placed a half-finished illustration upon the cushion. “Take a look at this,” I said. He knelt out of curiosity, trying to understand the picture.