I AM CALLED BLACK-3
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The snow began to fall at a late hour and tiill dawn. I spent the night reading Shekure’s letter again and again. I paced in the empty room of the empty house, occasionally leaning toward the dlestick; in the flickering light of the dim dle, I watched the tense quivering of my beloved’s angry letters, the somersaults they turrying to deceive me and their hip-swinging right-to-left progression. Abruptly, those shutters would open before my eyes, and my beloved’s fad her sorrowful smile would appear. And when I saw her real face, I fot all of those other faces whose sour-cherry mouths had increasingly matured and ripened in my imagination.In the middle of the night I lost myself in dreams of marriage: I had no doubts about my love or that it was reciprocated—we were married in a state of great te—but, my imaginary happiness, set in a house with a staircase, was dashed when I couldn’t find appropriate work and began arguing with my wife, uo make her heed my words.
I knew I’d appropriated these ominous images from the se on the ills of marriage in Gazzali’s The Revival ious Sce, which I’d read during my nights as a bachelor in Arabia; at the same time, I recalled that there was actually advi the bes of marriage in that same se, though now I could remember only two of these bes: first, having my household kept in order (there was no such order in my imagined house); sed, being spared the guilt of self-abuse and ing myself—an even deeper sense of guilt—behind pimps leadihrough dark alleyways to the lairs of prostitutes.
The thought of salvation at this late hour brought masturbation to mind.
With a simple-minded desire, and to rid my mind of this irrepressible urge, I retired to a er of the room, as was my wont, but after a while I realized I couldn’t jack off—proof well enough that I’d fallen in love again after twelve years!
This struck such excitement and fear into my heart that I walked around the room<s>.９9lｉb?</s> nearly atremble like the flame of the dle. If Shekure meant to present herself at the window, then why this letter, which put the opposite belief into play? Why did her father call for me? As I paced, I sehat the door, wall and squeaky floor, stuttering as I myself did, were trying to creak their respoo my every question.
I looked at the picture I’d made years ago, which depicted Shirin stri with love upon gazing at Hüsrev’s image hanging from a branch. It didn’t
embarrass me as it would each time it came to mind in subsequent years, nor did it bring back my happy childhood memories. Toward m, my mind had mastered the situation: By returning the picture, Shekure had made a move in an amatory chess game she was masterfully lurio. I sat in the dlelight and wrote her a letter of response.
In the m, after sleeping for a spell, I went out and walked a long way through the streets, carrying the letter upon my breast and my light pen-and-ink holder, as was my , in my sash. The snow widened Istanbul’s narrow streets and freed the city of its crowds. All was quieter and slower, as it’d been in my childhood. Crows seemed to have beset Istanbul’s roofs, domes and gardens just as they had on the snowy winter days of my youth. I walked swiftly, listening to my steps in the snow and watg the fog of my breath. I grew excited, expeg the palace workshop that my Enishte wanted me to visit to be as silent as the streets. Before I ehe Jewish quarter, I sent word by way of a little street ur to Esther, who’d be able to deliver my letter to Shekure, telling her where to meet me before the noontime prayers.
I arrived early at the royal artisans’ workshop located behind the Hagia Sophia. Except for the icicles hanging from t.9９ｌib.he eaves, there was no ge in the building where I’d often visited my Enishte and for a time worked as a child apprentice.
Following a handsome young apprentice, I walked past elderly master binders dazed from the smell of glue and bookbinder’s paste, master miniaturists whose backs had hu an early age and youths who mixed paints without even looking into the bowls perched on their knees, so sorrowfully were they absorbed by the flames of the stove. In a er, I saw an old maiculously painting an ostrich egg on his lap, another elder enthusiastically embellishing a drawer and a young apprentice graciously watg them both. Through an open door, I witnessed young students being reprimanded as they leaned forward, their noses almost toug the pages spread before their reddened faces, as they tried to uand the mistakes they’d made. In another room, a mournful and melancholy apprentice, having fotten momentarily about colors, papers and painting, stared into the street I’d just now eagerly walked down.
We climbed the icy staircase. We walked through the portico, which ed around the inner sed floor of the building. Below, in the inner courtyard covered with snow, two young students, obviously trembling from the cold despite their thick capes of coarse wool, were waiting—perhaps for an immi beating. I recalled my early youth and the beatings given to students
who were lazy or who wasted expensive paints, and the blows of the bastinado, which landed on the soles of their feet until they bled.
We entered a warm room. I saw two novices who’d retly fiheir apprenticeships. Sihe great masters, whom Master Osman had given workshop names, now worked at home, this room, whice aroused excessive reverend delight in me, no longer seemed like the workshop of a great ahy sultan but merely a largish room in some secluded caravansary in the remote mountains of the East.
Immediately off to the side, before a long ter, I saw the Head Illuminator, Master Osman, for the first time in fifteen years; he seemed like an apparition. Whenever I plated illustrating and painting during my travels, the great master would appear in my mind’s eye as if he were Bihzad himself; now, in his white outfit and in the snow-white light falling through the window fag the Hagia Sophia, he looked as though he’d long bee one of the spirits of the Otherworld. I kissed his hand, which I noticed was mottled, and I introduced myself. I explained how<big></big> my Enishte had enrolled me here as a youth, but that I’d preferred a bureaucratic post a. I reted my years on the road, my time spent iern cities in the service of pashas as a clerk or treasurer’s secretary. I told him how, w with Serhat Pasha and others, I’d met calligraphers and illuminators in Tabriz and produced books; how I’d spent time in Baghdad and Aleppo, in Van and Tiflis, and how I’d seen many battles.
“Ah, Tiflis!” the great master said, as he gazed at the light from the snow-carden filtering through the oilskin c the window. “Is it snowing there now?”
His demeanor befitted those old Persian masters who grew blind perfeg their artistry; who, after a certain age, lived half-saintly, half-senile lives, and about whom endless legends were told. I straightaway saw in his jinnlike eyes that he despised my Enishte vehemently and that he was furthermore suspicious of me. Even so, I explained how in the Arabias snow didn’t simply fall to the Earth, as it was now falling onto the Hagia Sophia, but onto memories as well. I spun a yarn: When it snowed on the fortress of Tiflis, the washerwomen sang songs the color of flowers and children hid ice cream uheir pillows for summer.
“Do tell me what those illuminators and painters illustrate in the tries you’ve visited,” he said. “What do they depict?”
A dreamy-eyed young painter who was ruling out pages in the er, lost in revery, raised his head from his folding work desk along with the others in the room and gave me a look that said, “Let this be your most ho answer.”
Many of these craftsmen didn’t know the er grocer in their own neighborhood, or how mu oke’s worth of bread cost, but they were very curious about the latest gossip East of Persia, where armies clashed, prirangled one another and plundered cities before burning them to the ground, where eace were tested each day, where the best verses were written and the best illustrations and paintings were made for turies.
“Shah Tahmasp reigned for fifty-two years. In the last years of his life, as you know, he abandoned his love of books, illustrating and painting, turned his ba poets, illustrators and calligraphers, and resigning himself to worship, passed away, whereupon his son, Ismail, asded to the throne,” I said. “Shah Tahmasp had been well aware of his son’s disagreeable and antagonistiature, so he kept him, the shah-to-be, behind locked doors for twenty years.
As soon as Ismail assumed the throne, in a mad frenzy, he had his younger brothers strangled—some of whom he’d blinded beforehand. In the end, however, Ismail’s enemies succeeded in plying him with opium and poisoning him, and after being liberated from his worldly presehey placed his half-witted older brother Muhammad Khodabandeh ohrone. During his reign, all the princes, brothers, provincial governors and Uzbeks, in short everyoarted to revolt. They went after each other and our Serhat Pasha with such martial ferocity that all of Persia turo smoke and dust and was left in disarray. Ihe present shah, bereft of money and intelligend half-blind, is not fit to sponsor the writing and illustration of illuminated manuscripts. Thus, th<samp></samp>ese legendary illustrators of Kazvin a, all these elderly masters, along with their apprehese artisans who made masterpieces in Shah Tahmasp’s workshops, painters and colorists whose brushes made horses gallop at full speed and whose butterflies fluttered off the page, all of these master binders and calligraphers, every last one was left without work, penniless aute, homeless a. Some migrated to the North among the Uzbeks, some West to India. Others took up different types of work, wasting themselves and their honor, and still others ehe service of insignifit princes and provincial governors, all sworn enemies of each other, to begin w on palm-size books taining at most a few leaves of illustration. Rapidly transcribed, hastily painted, cheap books appeared everywhere, matg the tastes of on soldiers, boorish pashas and spoiled princes.”
“How much would they go for?” asked Master Osman.
“I hear that the great Sadiki Bey illustrated a copy of Strange Creatures, issioned by an Uzbek spahi cavalryman, for only fold pieces. Ient of a vulgar pasha who was returning from his Eastern campaign to Erzurum, I beheld an album sisting of lewd pictures including paintings by the virtuoso Siyavush. A few great masters who hadn’t abandoned illustrating were making and selling individual pieces, which weren’t part of any story at all. By examining such single leaves, you couldn’t tell which se or which story it represented; rather, you would admire it for its own sake, for the pleasure of beholding alone. For example, you might ent, ”This is the exact likeness of a horse, how beautiful,“ and you’d pay the artist on this basis.
Ses of bat or fug are quite on. The price for a bustling battle has fallen to three hundred silver s, and there are hardly any ied ts. To sell pieces on the cheap and to better lure a buyer, some simply draw in blak on nonsized, unfinished paper with nary a brushstroke of color.”
“There was a gilder of mine who was tent as tent could be and talented as talent would allow,” said Master Osman. “He saw to his work with such elegahat we referred to him as ”Elegant Effendi.“ But he has abandoned us. It’s been six days, and he’s not to be found anywhere. He’s plain disappeared.”
“How could anyone quit such a workshop as this, such a joyous hearth?” I said.
“Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant, the four young masters whom I’ve trained sihey were apprentices, now work at home at Our Sultan’s behest,” said Master Osman.
This apparently came about so they could work more fortably on the Book of Festivities with which the entire workshop was involved. This time, the Sultan hadn’t arranged for a special wo<q></q>rkspace for His master miniaturists in the palace courtyard; rather, He decreed that they work on this special book at home. When it occurred to me that this order robably issued for the sake of my Enishte’s book, I fell silent. To what degree was Master Osman making insinuations?
“Nuri Effendi,” he called to a pale and hunched painter, “present Our Master Black with a ”survey‘ of the workshop!“ The “survey” was a regular ritual of Our Sultan’s bimonthly visits to the miniaturists’ atelier during that exg time when His Excellency had ily followed what transpired at the workshop. Uhe auspices of Haz?m, the
Head Treasurer; Lokman, the Head Poetic icler and Master Osman, the Head Illuminator, Our Sultan would be apprised of which pages in which books the masters were w on at any given moment: who did which gilding, who colored which picture, and one by one, how the colorists, the page rulers, the gilders and the master miniaturists, whose talent allowed them to aplish miracles, were engaged. It saddened me that they were holding a fake ceremony in place of the ohat was no longer performed because age and ill health bound the Head Poetic icler Lokman Effendi, who wrote most of the books which were illustrated, to his home; because Master Osman often disappeared in a cloud of indignation and wrath; because the four masters known as Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant worked at home; and because Our Sultan no longer waxed enthusiastic like a child in the workshop. As happeo many miniaturists, Nuri Effendi had grown old in vain, without having fully experienced life or bee a master of his art. Not in vain, however, did he spend those years over his worktable being hunchbacked: He alaid close attention to what happened in the workshop, to who made which exquisite page.
And so I eagerly beheld for the first time the legendary pages of the Book of Festivities, which reted the circumcision ceremonies of Our Sultan’s prince. When I was still in Persia, I heard stories about this fifty-two-day circumcision ceremony wherein people from all occupations and all guilds, all of Istanbul, had participated, i a time when the book that memorialized the great event was yet being prepared.
In the first picture placed before me, fixed in the royal enclosure of late Ibrahim Pasha’s palace, Our Sultan, the Refuge of the World, gazed upon the festivities in the Hippodrome below with a look that bespoke His satisfa.
His face, even though not so detailed as to permit oo distinguish Him from others by features alone, was dratly and with reverence. As for the right side of the double-leaf picture showing Our Sultan on the left, there were viziers, pashas, Persian, Tatar, Frankish aian ambassadors standing in the arched nades and windows. Because they were not sultans, their eyes were drawn hastily and carelessly and focused on nothing in particular besides the general otion in the square. Later, I noticed in other pictures that the same arra and page positioed—even though the wall orion, the trees and terra-cotta shingles were depicted in different styles and colors. Ohe text was written out by scribes, the illustrations pleted and the book bound; the reader, turning pages, would each time see pletely different activities in pletely different colors in the Hippodrome which remained uhe same watchful gazes of the Sultan and
His crowd of guests—who always stood identically, forever gazing at the same area below.
There before me I saw people scrambling for hundreds of bowls of pilaf that were placed in the Hippodrome; I saw the live rabbits and birds emerge out of the roast ox and startle the crowd that had desded upon it. I saw the master coppersmiths’ guild riding in a wheeled cart before Our Sultan, its members hammering away at copper but riking the one among them lying in the cart with the anvil balanced on his bare chest. I saw glaziers embellishing glass with ations and cypresses as they paraded before Our Sultan in a wagon; feers reg sweet poems as they drove camels laden with sacks of sugar and displayed cages holding sugar-parrots; and aged locksmiths who showed off a variety of hanging locks, padlocks, dead bolts and gearlocks as they plained of the evils of imes and new doors.
Butterfly, Stork and Olive had worked on the picture that depicted the magis: One of them was causing eggs to march doole without dropping them—as if on a broad slab of marble—to the beat of a tambourine played by another. In one wagon I saw precisely hotain K?l?? Ali Pasha had forced the infidels he’d captured at sea to make an “infidels’ mountain” out of clay; he’d then loaded all the slaves into the cart, and when he was right before the Sultan, he exploded the powder within the “mountain” to demonstrate how he’d made infidel lands wail and moan with on fire. I saw -shaven butchers wielding cleavers, wearing rose- and purple-colored uniforms and smiling at the pink carcasses of skinned sheep hanging from hooks. The spectators applauded lion tamers who’d brought a ed lion before Our Sultan, provoking and enraging it until its eyes shone bloodred with rage; and on the page, I saw the lion, representing Islam, chase away a gray-and-pink pig, symbolizing the ing Christian infidel. I indulged my eyes at length on a picture of a barber suspended upside down from the ceiling of a shop built onto a cart, as he shaved a er while his assistant, dressed in red, held a mirror and a silver bowl taining fragrant soap, waiting for baksheesh; I inquired after the identity of the magnifit miniaturist responsible for the piece.
“It is indeed important that a painting, through its beauty, summon us toward life’s abundaoward passion, toward respect for the colors of the realm which God created, and toward refle and faith. The identity of the miniaturist is not important.”
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