Chapter 24 I AM CALLED BLACK

Silent and unseen, under cover of early morning darkness, I left like a guilty houseguest and walked tirelessly through the muddy backstreets. At Bayazid, I performed my ablution in the courtyard, entered the mosque and prayed. Inside, there was no one but the Imam Effendi and an old man who could sleep as he prayed—a talent only rarely achieved after a lifetime of practice. You know how there are moments in our sleepy dreams and sad memories when we feel Allah has taken notice of us and we pray With the hopeful anticipation of one who's managed to thrust a petition into the Sultan's hand: Thus did I beg Allah to grant me a cheerful home filled with loving people.

When I'd reached Master Osman's house, I knew that within a week's time he'd gradually usurped my late Enishte's place in my thoughts. He was more contrary and more distant, but his belief in manuscript illumination was more profound. introspective elderly dervish more than the great master who'd kicked up tempests of fear, awe and love among the miniaturists for so many years. As we traveled from the master's house to the palace—he mounted on a horse and hunched slightly, I on foot and likewise hunched forward—we must've recalled the elderly dervish and aspiring disciple in those cheap illustrations that accompany old fables.

At the palace, we found the Commander of the Imperial Guard and his men even more eager and ready than we. Our Sultan was certain that once we'd looked at the three masters' horse drawings this morning we could, in a trice, determine who among them was the accused murderer; and so, He'd ordered that the criminal be quickly put to torture without even allowing him to answer the accusation. We were taken not to the executioners' fountain where everyone could see and take warning, but to that small slapdash house in the sheltered seclusion of the Sultan's Private Garden, which was preferred for interrogation, torture and strangling.

A youth, who seemed too elegant and polite to be one of the Commander's men, authoritatively placed three sheets of paper on a worktable. Master Osman took out his magnifying lens and my heart began to pound. Like an eagle gliding elegantly over a tract of land, his eye, which he maintained at a constant distance from the lens, passed ever so slowly over the three marvelous horse illustrations. And like that eagle catching sight of the baby gazelle which would be its prey, he slowed over each of the horses' noses and focused on it intently and calmly. "It's not here," he said coldly after a time.

"What isn't here?" asked the Commander. I'd assumed the great master would work with deliberation, scrutinizing every aspect of the horses from mane to hoof. “The damned painter hasn’t left a single trace,” said Master Osman. “We won’t be able to determine who illustrated the chestnut horse from these pictures.” Taking up the magnifying lens he'd put aside, I looked at the horses' nostrils: The master was correct; there was nothing in the three horses resembling the peculiar nostrils of the chestnut horse drawn for my Enishte's manuscript. Just then, my attention turned to the torturers waiting outside with an implement

whose purpose I couldn't fathom. As I was trying to observe them through the half-opened door, I saw somebody scuttle quickly backward as if possessed by a jinn, seeking shelter behind one of the mulberry trees. At that moment, like an ethereal light that illuminated the leaden morning, His Excellency Our Sultan, the Foundation of the World, entered the room. Master Osman confessed to Him that he hadn't been able to determine anything from the illustrations. Nevertheless, he couldn't refrain from drawing Our Sultan's attention to the horses in these magnificent paintings: the way one reared, the delicate stance of the next and, in the third, a dignity and pride matching the content of ancient books. Meanwhile, he speculated about which artist had made each picture, and the pageboy who'd gone door to door to the artists' houses confirmed what Master Osman said.

“My Sovereign, don't be surprised that I know my painters like the back of my hand,” said the master. “What bewilders me is how one of these men, whom I indeed know like the back of my hand, could make a completely unfamiliar mark. For even the flaw of a master miniaturist has its origins." “You mean to say?” said Our Sultan. "Your Excellency, Prosperous Sultan and Refuge of the World, in my opinion, this concealed signature, evident here in the nostrils of this chestnut horse, is not simply the meaningless and absurd mistake of a painter, but a sign whose roots reach into the distant past to other pictures, other techniques, other styles and perhaps even other horses. If we were allowed to examine the marvelous pages of centuries-old books that You keep under lock and key in the cellsars, iron chests, and cabinets of the Inner Treasury, we might be able to identify as technique what we now see as mistake; then, we could attribute it to the brush of one of the three miniaturists."

“You wish to enter my Treasury?” said the Sultan in amazement. "That is my wish," said my master. This was a request as brazen as asking to enter the harem. Just then, I understood that in as much as the harem and the Treasury occupied the two prettiest spots in the courtyard of the Private Paradise of Our Sultan's Palace, they also occupied the two dearest spots in Our Sultan's heart. I was trying to read what would happen from Our Sultan's beautiful face, which I could now look upon without fear, but He suddenly vanished. Had He been incensed and offended? Would we, or even the miniaturists as a whole, be punished on account of my master's impudence?

Looking at the three horses before me, I imagined that I would be killed before seeing Shekure again, without ever sharing her bed. Despite the immediacy of all their beautiful attributes, these magnificent horses now seemed to have emerged from a quite distant world. I thoroughly realized during this horrifying silence that just as being taken into the heart of the palace as a child, being raised here and living here meant serving Our Sultan and perhaps dying for Him, so being a miniaturist meant serving God and dying for the sake of His beauty. Much later, when the Head Treasurer's men brought us up toward the Middle Gate, death occupied my mind, the silence of death. But, as I passed through the gate where countless pashas had been executed, the guards acted as if they didn't even see us. The Divan Square, which yesterday had dazzled me as if it were Heaven itself, the tower and the peacocks didn't affect me in the least, for I knew that we were being taken further inside, to the heart of Our Sultan's secret world, to the Private Quarters of the Enderun.

We passed through doors barred even to the Grand Viziers. Like a child who'd entered a fairy tale, I kept my eyes trained on the ground to avoid coming face-to-face with the wonders and creatures that might confront me. 't even look at the chamber where the Sultan held audiences. But my gaze happened to fall momentarily on the walls of the harem near an ordinary plane tree, one no different from other trees, and on a tall man in a caftan of shimmering blue silk. We passed among towering columns. Finally, we stopped before a portal, larger and more imposing than the rest, framed in ornate stalactite patterns. At its threshold stood Treasury chiefs in glimmering caftans;

Staring directly into our eyes, the Head Treasurer said: “You are truly blessed by fortune, His Excellency Our Sultan has granted you permission to enter the treasury of the Enderun. There, you will examine books that no one else has seen; you will gaze upon incredible pictures and pages of gold, and like hunters, you will track the spoor of your prey, the murderer. My Sultan bade me remind you that good Master Osman has three days—one of which is now over—until Thursday noon, in which to name the culprit in the miniaturists' midst; failing that, the matter shall be turned over to the Commander of the Imperial Guard to be resolved by torture." First, they removed the cloth sheath around the padlock, sealed to ensure no key entered the keyhole without permission. The Doorkeeper of the Treasury and the two chiefs confirmed the seal was intact, signaling with a nod. The key was introduced, the lock opened with a clatter that filled the pervasive silence. Master Osman suddenly turned an ashen gray. When one wing of the heavy, embellished-wood double door was opened, his face was struck by a dark radiance that seemed a remnant of ancient days. "My Sultan didn't want the scribal chiefs and the secretaries who keep inventory records to enter unnecessarily," said the Head Treasurer. "The Royal Librarian has passed away and there's no one to look after the books in his stead. For this reason , My Sultan has commanded that Jezmi Agha alone should accompany you within.” Jezmi Agha was a dwarf with bright, shining eyes who appeared to be at least seventy years old. His headdress, which resembled a sail, was even more peculiar than he. “Jezmi Agha knows the interior of the treasury like his own house; he knows the locations of books and all else better than anyone.” The aging dwarf displayed no pride in this. He was running an eye over the silver-legged heating brazier, the chamber pot with a mother-of-pearl inlaid handle, the oil lamp and the candlesticks that the palace pages were carrying. The Head Treasurer announced that the door would again be locked behind us and sealed with the seventy-year-old signet of Sultan Selim the Grim. After the evening prayers, at sunset, the seal would again be broken, before the witness of the attendant crowd of Treasury chiefs. Moreover, we should exercise great caution that nothing whatsoever “mistakenly” found its way into our clothes, pockets or sashes: we would be searched down to our undergarments upon exiting. We entered, passing between chiefs standing at either side. Inside, it was ice cold. When the door closed behind us, we were enveloped in blackness. I smelled a combination of mildew, dust and humidity that drove deep into my nasal passages. the clutter of objects, chests and helmets intermingled in a huge chaotic jumble. I had the feeling that I was witness to a great battle. My eyes adjusted to the odd light that fell over the entire space, which filtered through the thick bars of the high windows, through the balustrades of the stairs along the high walls and the railing of the second-floor wooden walkways. , tinged with the color of the velvet cloth, carpets and kilims hanging on the walls. With due reverence, I considered how the accumulation of all this wealth was the consequence of wars waged, blood spilled and cities and treasures plundered. “Frightened?” asked the elderly dwarf, giving voice to my feelings. “Everybody is frightened on their first visit. At night the spirits of these objects whisper to each other.” What was frightening was the silence in which this abundance of incredible objects was interred. Behind us we heard the clattering of the seal being affixed to the lock on the door, and we looked around in awe, motionless. I saw swords, elephant tusks, caftans, silver candlesticks and satin banners. I saw mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes, iron trunks, Chinese vases, belts, long-necked lutes, armor, silk cushions, model globes, boots, furs, rhinoceros horns, ornamented ostrich eggs, rifles, arrows, maces and cabinets. There were heaps of carpets, cloth and satin everywhere, seemingly cascading over me from the wood-paneled upper floors, from the balustrades, the built-in closets and small storage cells built into the walls. A strange light, the likes of which I'd never seen, shone on the cloth, the boxes, the caftans of sultans, swords, the huge pink candles, the wound turbines, pillows embroidered with pearls, gold filigree saddles, diamond-handled scimitars, ruby-handled maces, quilted turbans, turban plumes, curious clocks, ewers and daggers, ivory statues of horses and elephants, narghiles with diamond-studded tops, mother-of-pearl chests of drawers, horse aigrettes, strands of large prayer beads, and helmets adorned with rubies and turquoise. This light, which filtered faintly down from the high windows , illuminated floating dust particles in the half-darkened room like the summer sunlight that streams in from the glass skylight atop the dome of a mosque—but this wasn't sunlight. In this peculiar light, the air had become palpable and all the objects appeared as if made from the same material. After we apprehensively experienced the silence in the room for a while longer, I knew it was as much the light as the dust covering everything that dimmed the red color reigning in the cold room, melting all the objects into an arcane sameness. And as the eye swam over these strange and indistinct items, unable to distinguish one from another at even the second or third glance, this great fusion of objects became even more terrifying.What I thought was a chest, I later decided was a folding worktable, and later still, some strange Frankish device. I saw that the mother-of-pearl inlaid chest among the caftans and plumes pulled out of their boxes and hastily tossed hither and yon was actually an exotic cabinet sent by the Muscovite Czar. Jezmi Agha placed the brazier in the fire niche that had been cut into the wall. “Where are the books located?” whispered Master Osman. “Which books?” said the dwarf. “The ones from Arabia, the Kufic Korans, those that His Excellency Sultan Selim the Grim, Denizen of Paradise, brought back from Tabriz, the books of pashas whose property was seized when they were condemned to death, the gift volumes brought by the Venetian ambassador to Our Sultan's grandfather, or the Christian books from the time of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror?" “The books that Shah Tahmasp sent His Excellency Sultan Selim, Denizen of Paradise, as a present twenty-five years ago,” said Master Osman. The dwarf brought us to a large wooden cabinet. Master Osman grew impatient as he opened the doors and cast his eyes on the volumes before him. He opened one, read its colophon and leafed through its pages. Together, we gazed in astonishment at the Carefully drawn illustrations of khans with slightly slanted eyes. ""Genghis Khan, Chagatai Khan, Tuluy Khan and Kublai Khan the Ruler of China,"" read Master Osman before closing the book and taking up another. We came across an incredibly beautiful illustration depicting the scene in which Ferhad, empowered by love, carries his beloved Shirin and her horse away on his shoulder. To convey the passion and woe of the lovers, the rocks on the mountain, the clouds and the three noble cypresses witnessing Ferhad's act of love were drawn with a trembling grief-stricken hand in such agony that Master Osman and I were instantly affected by the taste of tears and sorrow in the falling leaves. This touching moment had been depicted—as the great masters intended—not to signify Ferhad's muscular strength, but rather to convey how the pain of his love was felt at once throughout the entire world. “A Bihzad imitation made in Tabriz eighty years ago,” Master Osman said as he replaced the volume and opened another. This was a picture that showed the forced friendship between the cat and the mouse from Kelile and Dimne. Out in the fields, a poor mouse, caught between the attacks of a marten on the ground and a hawk in the air, finds his salvation in an unfortunate cat caught in a hunter's trap. They come to an agreement: The cat, pretending to be the mouse's friend, licks him, thereby scaring away the marten and the hawk. In turn, the mouse cautiously frees the cat from the snare. Even before I could understand the painter's sensibility, the master had stuffed the book back beside the other volumes and had randomly opened another. This was a pleasant picture of a mysterious woman and a man: The woman had elegantly opened one hand while asking a question, holding her knee with the other over her green cloak, as the man turned to her and listened intently. I looked at the picture avidly, jealous of the intimacy, love and friendship between them. Putting that book down, Master Osman opened to a page from another book. The cavalry of Persian and Turanian armies, eternal enemies, had donned their full panoply of armor, helmets, greaves, bows, quivers and arrows and had mounted those magnificent, legendary and fully armored horses. Before they engaged one another in a battle to the death, they were arrayed in orderly ranks facing each other on a dusty yellow steppe holding the tips of their lances upright, bedecked in an array of colors and patiently watching their commanders , who'd rushed to the fore and began to fight. I was about to tell myself that regardless of whether the illustration was made today or a hundred years ago, whether it's a depiction of war or love, what the artist of absolute faith actually paints and conveys is a battle with his will and his love for painting; I was going to declare further that the miniaturist actually paints his own patience, when Master Osman said: “It's not here either,” and shut the heavytome. In the pages of an album we saw high mountains interwoven with curling clouds in a landscape illustration that seemed to go on forever. I thought how painting meant seeing this world yet depicting it as if it were the Otherworld. Master Osman recounted how this Chinese illustration might've traveled from Bukhara to Herat, from Herat to Tabriz, and at last, from Tabriz to Our Sultan's palace, moving from book to book along the way, bound and unbound, finally to be rebound with other paintings at the end of the journey from China to Istanbul. We saw pictures of war and death, each more frightening and more expertly done than the next: Rustem together with Shah Mazenderan; Rustem attacking Afrasiyab's army; and Rustem, disguised in armor, a mysterious and unidentified hero warrior…In another album we saw dismembered Corpses, daggers drenched in red blood, sorrowful soldiers in whose eyes the light of death gleamed and warriors cutting each other down like reeds, as fabled armies, which we could not name, clashed mercilessly. Master Osman—for who knows how many thousandth time —looked upon Husrev spying on Shirin bathing in a lake by moonlight, upon the lovers Leyla and Mejnun fainting as they beheld each other after an extended separation, and a spirited picture, all aflutter with birds, trees and flowers, of Salaman and Absal as they fled the entire world and lived together on an isle of bliss. Like a true great master, he couldn't help drawing my attention to some oddity in a corner of even the worst painting, perhaps having to do with an oversight on the part of the illuminator or perhaps with the conversation of colors : As might be expected, Husrev and Shirin are listening to a charming recital by her ladies-in-waiting, but see there, what kind of sad and spiteful painter had needlessly perched that ominous owl on a tree branch?; who had included that lovely boy dressed in woman's garb among the Egyptian women who cut their fingers trying to peel tasty oranges while gazing upon the beauty of handsome Joseph?; could the miniaturist who painted ?sfendiyar's blinding with an arrow foresee that later on he , too, would be blinded? We saw the angels accompanying Our Exalted Prophet during his Ascension; the dark-skinned, six-armed, long-white-bearded old man symbolizing Saturn; and baby Rustem sleeping peacefully in his mother-of-pearl-inlaid cradle beneath the watchful eyes of his mother and nursemaids. We saw the way Darius died an agonizing death in Alexander's arms, how Behram Gur withdrawn to the red room with his Russian princess, how Siyavush passed through fire mounted on a black horse whose nostrils bore no peculiarity, and the woeful funeral procession of Husrev, murdered by his own son. As Master Osman rapidly picked out the volumes and set them aside, he would at times recognize an artist and show me, or winkle out an illustrator's signature humbly hidden among flowers growing in the s of a ruined building, or hiding in a black well along with a jinn. By comparing signatures and colophons, he could determine who'd taken what from whom. He'd flip through certain books exhaustively in hope of fin Ding a series of pictures. Long silences passed wherein nothing but the faint susurrus of turning pages could be heard. Occasionally, Master Osman would cry out “Aha!” but I kept my peace, unable to understand what had excited him. At times he would remind me that we'd already encountered the page composition or arrangement of trees and mounted soldiers of a particular illustration in other books, in different scenes of completely different stories, and he'd point out these pictures again to jog my memory. He compared a picture in a version of Nizami's Quintet from the time of Tamerlane's son Shah R 1za—that is, from nearly two hundred years ago—with another picture he said was made in Tabriz seventy or eighty years earlier, and then go on to ask me what we could learn from the fact that two miniaturists had created the same picture without having seen each other's work. He answered the question himself: “To paint is to remember.” Opening and shutting old illuminated manuscripts, Master Osman would sink his face with sorrow into the wondrous artwork (because nobody could paint this way anymore) and then become animated with joy before poorly executed pieces (for all miniaturists were brethren'!)—and d show me what the artist had remembered, that is, old pictures of trees, angels, parasols, tigers, tents, dragons and melancholy princes, and in the process, what he hinted at was this: There was a time when Allah looked upon the world in all its uniqueness, and believing in the beauty of what he saw, bequeathed his creation to us, his servants. The duty of illustrators and of those who, loving art, gaze upon the world, is to remember the magnificence that Allah beheld and left to us. The greatest masters in each generation of painters, expending their lives and toiling until blind, strove with great effort and inspiration to attain and record the wondrous dream that Allah commanded us to see. Their work resembled Mankind recalling his own golden memories from the very beginning. Unfortunately, even the greatest masters , just like tired old men or great miniaturists gone blind from their labors, were only vaguely able to recollect random parts of that magnificent vision. This was the mysterious wisdom behind the phenomenon of old masters who miraculously drew a tree, a bird, the pose of a prince washing himself in the public baths or a sad young woman at a window in exactly the same way despite never having seen each other's work and despite the hundreds of years that separated them. Long afterward, once the red light of the Treasury had dimmed and it became evident that the cabinet contained none of the gift books that Shah Tahmasp had sent to Our Sultan's grandfather, Master Osman revisited the same logic: "At times, a bird's wing, the way a leaf holds to a tree, the curves of eaves, the way a cloud floats or the laughter of a woman is preserved for centuries by passing from master to discipline and being shown, taught and memorized over generations. Having learned this detail from his master, the miniaturist believes it to be a perfect form, and is as convinced of its immutability as he is of the glorious Koran's, and just as he memorizes the Koran, he'll never forget this detail indelibly painted in his memory. However , never forgetting does not mean the master artist will always use this detail. The customs of the workshop wherein he extinguishes the light of his eyes, the habits and taste for color of the ornery master beside him or the whims of his sultan will, attimes, prevent him from painting that detail, and he'll draw a bird's wing, or the way a woman laughs—" "Or the nostrils of a horse." “—or the nostrils of a horse,” said a stone-faced Master Osman, “not the way it’s been ingrained in the depths of his soul, but according to the custom of the workshop where he presently finds himself, just like the others there. Do you understand me?” From a page in Nizami's Husrev and Shirin, quite a few versions of which we'd thumbed through already, in a picture depicting Shirin seated on her throne, Master Osman read aloud an inscription engraved on two stone plates above the palace walls: EXALTED ALLAH PRESERVE THE POWER OF THE VICTORIOUS SON OF TAMERLANE KHAN, OUR NOBLE SULTAN, OUR JUST KHAN, PROTECT HIS SOVEREIGNTY AND DOMAINS SO HE MAY FOREVER BE CONTENTED (the leftmost stone read) AND WEALTHY (the rightmost stone read). Later, I asked, “Where might we find illustrations where in the miniaturist has rendered a horse's nostrils in the same way they were etched upon his memory?” “We must locate the legendary Book of Kings volume that Shah Tahmasp sent as a gift,” said Master Osman. “We must revisit those glorious old days of legend, when Allah had a hand in the painting of miniatures. We have many more books yet to examine." It crossed my mind that, just perhaps, Master Osman's main goal was not to find horses with peculiarly drawn noses, but to scrutinize as much as possible these spectacular pictures that had slept quietly for years in this Treasury safe from prying eyes. Impatient to find the clues that would unite me with Shekure, who awaited me at the house, that I'd been loath to believe that the great master might want to stay in the icy Treasury as long as possible. Thus did we persist in opening other cabinets, other chests shown us by the aged dwarf, to examine the pictures therein. Periodically, I'd get fed up with the pictures, which all looked alike, and wish never again to watch Husrev visit Shirin under the castle window; I'd leave the master's side—without even a glance at the nostrils of the horse Husrev rode—and try to warm myself at the brazier or I'd walk respectfully and awestruck among the heaps of cloth, gold, weapons, armor and plunder in the adjacent rooms of the Treasury. At times, prompted by an abrupt cry and hand gesture by Master Osman, I'd imagine that a new masterpiece had been found or, yes, at last a horse with a curious nose, and running to his side, I'd look at the picture the master was holding with his hand slightly atremble as he sat curled up on an Ushak carpet dating from the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, only to encounter an illustration, the likes of which I'd never before seen, depicting, say, Satan slylyboarding Noah's ark. We watched as hundreds of shahs, kings, sultans and khans—who'd ruled from the thrones of various kingdoms and empires from the time of Tamerlane to Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent—happily and excitedly hunted gazelles, lions and rabbits. We saw how even the Devil bit his finger and recoiled in embarrassment at the shameless man who stood upon scraps of wood tied to the back legs of a camel so he could violate the poor animal. In an Arabic book that had come by way of Baghdad, we watched the flight of the merchant who clung to the feet of a mythical bird as he spanned the seas. In the next volume, which opened by itself to the first page, we saw the scene that Shekure and I loved the most, in which Shirin beheld Husrev's picture hanging from a branch and fell in love with him. Then, looking at an illustration that brought to life the inner workings of a complicated clock made from bobbins and metal balls, birds and Arabic statuettes seated on the back of an elephant, we remembered time . I don't know how much more time we spent examining book after book and illustration after illustration in this manner. It was as if the unchanged, frozen golden time revealed in the pictures and stories we viewed had thoroughly mingled with the damp and moldy time we experienced in the Treasury. It seemed that these illuminated pages, created over the centuries by the lavish expenditure of eyesight in the workshops of countless shahs, khans and sultans, would come to life, as would the objects that seemed to besiege us: The helmets, scimitars, daggers with diamond-studded handles, armor, porcelain cups from China, dusty and delicate lutes, and the pearl-embellished cushions and kilims—the likes of which we'd seen in countless illustrations. “I now understand that by furtively and gradually re-creating the same pictures for hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of artists had cunningly depicted the gradual transformation of their world into another.” I'll be first to admit that I didn't completely understand what the great master meant. But the close attention my master had shown to the thousands of pictures made over the last two hundred years from Bukhara to Herat, from Tabriz to Baghdad and all the way to Istanbul, had far exceeded the search for a clue in the depiction of some horse's nostrils. We 'd participated in a kind of melancholy elegy to the inspiration, talent and patience of all the masters who'd painted and illuminated in these lands over the years. For this reason, when the doors of the Treasury were opened at the time of the evening prayer and Master Osman explained to me that he had no desire whatever to leave, and that further, only by remaining here until morning examining pictures by the light of oil lamps and candles could he execute properly Our Sultan's charge, my first response, as I informed him, was to remain here with him and the dwarf. However, when the door was opened and my master conveyed our wish to the waiting chiefs and asked permission of the Head Treasurer, immediately regretted my decision. I longed for Shekure and our house. I grew increasingly restless as I wondered how she would manage, spending the night alone with the children and how she would batten down the now-repaired shutters of the windows. Through the opened half of the Treasury portal, I was beckoned to the magnificence of life outside by the large damp plane trees in the courtyard of the Enderun—now under a hint of fog—and by the gestures of two royal pages, speaking to each other in a sign language so as not to disturb the peace of Our Sultan; but I remained where I was, frozen by embarrassment and guilt. WE TWO DERVISHESYea, the rumor that our picture was among the pages from China, Samarkand and Herat comprising an album hidden away in the remotest corner of the Treasury filled with the plunder of hundreds of countries over hundreds of years by the ancestors of His Excellency, Our Sultan, was most probably spread to the miniaturists' division by the dwarf Jezmi Agha. If we might now recount our own story in our own fashion—the will of God be with us—we hope that none of the crowd in this fine coffeehouse will take offense. One hundred and ten years have passed since our deaths, forty since the closing of our irredeemable, Persia-partisan dervish lodges, those dens of heresy and nests of devilry, but see for yourselves, here we are before you. How could this be? I'll tell you how: We were rendered in the Venetian style! As this illustration indicates, one day we two dervishes were tramping through Our Sultan's domains from one city to the next. We were barefoot, our heads were shaven, and we were half naked; each of us was wearing a vest and the hide of a deer, a belt around our waists and we were holding our walking sticks, our begging bowls dangling from our necks by a chain; one of us was carrying an axe for cutting wood, and the other a spoon to eat whatever food God had blessed us with. At that moment, standing before a caravansary beside a fountain, my dear friend, nay, my beloved, nay, my brother and I had given ourselves over to the usual argument: “You first please, no you first,” we were noisily deferring to each other as to who'd be the first to take up the spoon and eat from the bowl, when a Frank traveler, a strange man, stopped us, gave us each a silver Venetian coin and began to draw our picture. He was a Frank; of course, he was weird. He situated us right in the center of the page as if we were the very tent of the Sultan, and was depicting us in our half-naked state when I shared with my companion a thought that had just then dawned upon me: To appear like a pair of truly impoverished Kalenderi beggar dervishes, we should roll our eyes back so our pupils look inward, the whites of our eyes facing the world like blind men—and that's exactly what we proceeded to do. In this situation, it's the nature of a dervish to behold the world in his head rather than the world outside; since our heads were full of hashish, the landscape of our minds was more pleasant than what the Frank painter saw. Meanwhile, the scene outside had grown even worse; we heard the ranting of a Hoja Effendi. Pray, let us not give the wrong idea. We've now made mention of the respected “Hoja Effendi,” but last week in this fine coffeehouse there was a great misunderstanding: This respected “Hoja Effendi” of whom we speak has nothing whatsoever to do with His Excellency Nusret Hoja the cleric from Erzurum, nor with the bastard Husret Hoja, nor with the hoja from Sivas who made it with the Devil atop a tree. Those who interpret everything negatively have said that if His Excellency Hoja Effendi becomes a target of reproach here once again, they'll cut out the storyteller's tongue and lower this coffeehouse about his head. One hundred and twenty years ago, there being no coffee then, the respected Hoja, whose story we've begun, was simply steaming with rage. “Hey, Frank infidel, why are you drawing these two?” he was saying. “These wretched Kalenderi dervishes wander around thieving and begging, they take hashish, drink wine, bugger each other, and as is evident from the way they look, know nothing of performing or reciting prayers, nothing of house, or home, or family; they're nothing but the dregs of this good world of ours. And you, why are you painting this picture of disgrace when there's so much beauty in this great country? Is it to disgrace us?” “Not at all, it's simply because illustrations of your bad side bring in more money,” said the infidel. We two dervishes were dumbfounded at the soundness of the painter's reasoning. “If it brought you more money, would you paint the Devil in a favorable light?” the Hoja Effendi said, coyly trying to start an argument, but as you can see from this picture, the Venetian was a genuine artist, and he'd focused upon the work before him and the money it'd bring rather than heeding the Hoja's empty prattle. He did indeed paint us, and then slid us into the leather portfolio on the back of his horse's saddle, and returned to his infidel city. Soon afterward, the victorious armies of the Ottomans conquered and plundered that city on the banks of the Danube, and the two of us ended up coming back this way to Istanbul and the Royal Treasury. From there, copied over and over, we moved from one secret book to another, and finally arrived at this joyous coffeehouse where coffee is drunk like a rejuvenating, invigorating elixir. Now then:A Brief Treatise on Painting, Death and Our Place in the WorldThe Hoja Effendi from Konya, whom we've just mentioned, has made the following claim somewhere in one of his sermons, which are written out and collected in a thick tome: Kalenderi dervishes are the unnecessary dross of the world because they don't belong to any of the four categories into which men are divided: 1. notables, 2. merchants, 3. farmers and 4. artists; thus, they are superfluous. Additionally, he said the following: “These two always tramp about as a pair and always argue about which of them will be the first to eat with their only spoon, and those who don't know that this is a sly allusion to their true concern—who'll be the first to bugger the other—find it amusing and laugh. His Excellency Please-Don't-Take-It-Wrong Hoja has uncovered our secret because he, along with us, the pretty young boys, apprentices and miniaturists, are all fellow travelers on the same path.” The Real SecretHowever, the real secret is this: While the Frank infidel was making our picture, he gazed at us so sweetly and with such attention to detail that we took a liking to him and enjoyed being depicted by him. But, he was committing the error of looking at the world with his naked eye and rendering what he saw. Thus, he drew us as if we were blind although we could see just fine, but we didn't mind. Now, we're quite content, indeed. According to the Hoja, we're in Hell; according to some unbelievers we're nothing but decayed corpses and according to you, the intelligent society of miniaturists gathered here, we're a picture, and because we're a picture, we stand here before you as though we were alive and well. After our run-in with the respected Hoja Effendi and after walking from Konya to Sivas in three nights, through eight villages, begging all the way, one night we were beset by such cold and snow that we two dervishes, hugging each other tightly, fell asleep and froze to death. Just before dying I had a dream: I was the subject of a painting that entered Heaven after thousands and thousands of years. IT IS I, MASTER OSMANThey tell a story in Bukhara that dates back to the time of Abdullah Khan. This Uzbek Khan was a suspicious ruler, and though he didn't object to more than one artist's brush contributing to the same illustration, he was opposed to painters copying from one another's pages—because this made it impossible to determine which of the artists brazenly copying from one another was to blame for an error. More importantly, after a time, instead of pushing themselves to seek out God's memories within the darkness, pilfering miniaturists would lazily seek out whatever they saw over the shoulder of the artist beside them. For this reason, the Uzbek Khan joyously welcomed two great masters, one from Shiraz in the South, the other from Samarkand in the East, who'd fled from war and cruel shahs to the shelter of his court; however, he forbade the two celebrated talents to look at each other's work, and separated them by giving them small workrooms on opposite ends of his palace, as far from each other as possible. Thus, for exactly thirty-seven years and four months, as if listening to a legend, these two great masters each listened to Abdullah Khan recount the magnificence of the other's never-to-be-seen work, how it differed from or was oddly similar to the other's. Meanwhile, they both lived dying of curiosity about each other's paintings. After the Uzbek Khan's life had run its long tortoiselike course, the two old artists ran to each other's rooms to see the paintings. Later still, sitting upon either edge of a large cushion, holding each other's books on their laps and looking at the pictures that they recognized from Abdullah Khan's fables, both the miniaturists were overcome with great disappointment because the illustrations they saw weren't nearly as spectacular as those they'd anticipated from the stories they'd heard, but instead appeared, much like all the pictures they'd seen in recent years, rather ordinary, pale and hazy. The two great masters didn't then realize that the reason for this haziness was the blindness that had begun to descend upon them, nor did they realize it after both had gone completely blind, rather they attributed the haziness to having been duped by the Khan, and hence they died believing dreams were more beautiful than pictures. 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 Husrev 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 Husrev after seeing his picture on the branch of a plane tree, Sheikh Ali R 1za 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, Rustem 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 Lutfi 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-ud Dunya, 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?” Black looked at me, indicating “yes” with his pretty eyes. “When we look at the face of the poet in the painting,” I said, “we see that it could be a face like any other face. If Abdullah Hatifi were here, God rest his soul, we could never hope to recognize him from the face in this picture. However, we could do so relying on the illustration in its entirety: There's something in the manner of the composition, in Hatifi's pose, in the colors, the gilding and the stunning hand rendered by Master Bihzad that at once indicates the picture is of a poet. Meaning precedes form in the world of our art. As we begin to paint in imitation of the Frankish and Venetian masters, as in the book that Our Sultan had commissioned from your Enishte, the domain of meaning ends and the domain of form begins. However, with the Venetian methods…” “My Enishte, may he rest in eternal peace, was murdered,” Black said rudely. I caressed Black's hand, which rested within my own, as if respectfully stroking the tiny hand of a young apprentice who might one day indeed illustrate masterpieces. Quietly and reverently we looked at Bihzad's masterpiece for a time. Later, Black withdrew his hand from mine. “We passed quickly over the chestnut horses on the previous page without examining their noses,” he said. “There's noth