I AM CALLED BLACK
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Silent and unseen, under cover of early m darkness, I left like a guilty houseguest and walked tirelessly through the muddy backstreets. At Bayazid, I performed my ablution in the courtyard, ehe mosque and prayed. Ihere was no o 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 praywith the hopeful anticipation of one who’s mao 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 khat within a week’s time he’d gradually usurped my late Enishte’s pla my thoughts. He was more trary and more distant, but his belief in manuscript illumination was more profound. He resembled an 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 apany old fables.
At the palace, we found the ander 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 m we could, in a trice, determine who among them was the accursed murderer; and so, He’d ordered that the criminal be quickly put to torture without even allowing him to ahe 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 referred for interrogation, torture and strangling.
A youth, who seemed too elegant and polite to be one of the ander’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 maintai a stant distance from the lens, passed ever so slowly over the three marvelous horse illustrations. And like that eagle catg sight of the baby gazelle which would be its prey, he slowed over each of the horses’ noses and focused on it ily and calmly.
“It’s not here,” he said coldly after a time.
“What isn’t here?” asked the ander.
I’d assumed the great master would work with deliberation, scrutinizing every aspect of the horses from mao hoof.
“The damned painter hasn’t left a sirace,” 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 ihree horses resembling the peculiar nostrils of the chestnut horse drawn for my Enishte’s manuscript. Just then, my attention turo 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 ahereal light that illumihe leaden m, His Excellency Our Sultan, the Foundation of the World, ehe room.
Master Osman fessed to Him that he hadn’t been able to determine anything from the illustrations. heless, he couldn’t refrain from drawing Our Sultan’s attention to the horses in these magnifit paintings: the way one reared, the delicate stance of the and, ihird, a dignity and pride matg the tent of a books. Meanwhile, he speculated about which artist had made each picture, and the pageboy who’d gone door to door to the artists’ houses firmed what Master Osman said.
“My Sn, don’t be surprised that I know my painters like the bay hand,” said the master. “What bewilders me is how one of these men, whom I indeed know like the bay hand, could make a pletely unfamiliar mark. For even the flaw of a master miniaturist has its ins.”
“You mean to say?” said Our Sultan.
“Your Excellency, Prosperous Sultan and Refuge of the World, in my opinion, this cealed 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 reato the distant past to other pictures, other teiques, other styles and perhaps even other horses. If we were allowed to examihe marvelous pages of turies-old books that You keep under lod key in the cellars, iros, and ets of the Ireasury, we might be able to identify as teique 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 ehe harem. Just then, I uood 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 insed and offended? Would we, or even the miniaturists as a whole, be punished on at of my master’s impudence?
Looking at the three horses before me, I imagihat I would be killed before seeing Shekure again, without ever sharing her bed. Despite the immediacy of all their beautiful attributes, these magnifit
horses now seemed to have emerged from a quite distant world.
I thhly realized during this horrifying silehat 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 tless pashas had beeed, 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 khat we were being taken further io 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 ing face-to-face with the wonders and creatures that might front me. I couldn’t even look at the chamber where the Sultan held audiences. But my gaze happeo fall momentarily on the walls of the harem near an ordinary plaree, one no different from other trees, and on a tall man in a caftan of shimmering blue silk. We passed among t ns. Finally, we stopped before a portal, larger and more imposing than the rest, framed in oralactite patterns. At its threshold stood Treasury chiefs in glimmering caftans; one of them was bending to open the lock.
Staring directly into our eyes, the Head Treasurer said: “You are truly blessed by fortune, His Excellency Our Sultan has granted you permission to ehe 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 whie the culprit in the miniaturists’ midst; failing that, the matter shall be turned over to the ander of the Imperial Guard to be resolved by torture.”
First, they removed the cloth sheath around the padlock, sealed to ensure no key ehe keyhole without permission. The Doorkeeper of the Treasury and the two chiefs firmed the seal was intact, signaling with a nod. The seal was broken, and when 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 ened, his face was struck by a dark radiahat seemed a remnant of a days.
“My Sultan didn’t want the scribal chiefs and the secretaries who keep iory records to enter unnecessarily,” said the Head Treasurer. “The Royal Librarian has passed away and there’s no oo look after the books in his stead. For this reason, My Sultan has ahat Jezmi Agha alone should apany you within.”
Jezmi Agha was a dwarf with bright, shining eyes eared 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 hahe oil lamp and the dlesticks that the palace pages were carrying.
The Head Treasurer annouhat the door would again be locked behind us and sealed with the seventy-year-old sig of Sultan Selim the Grim. After the evening prayers, at suhe 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 upoing.
We entered, passiween chiefs standing at either side. I was ice cold. When the door closed behind us, we were enveloped in blaess. I smelled a bination of mildew, dust and humidity that drove deep into my nasal passages. Everywhere the clutter of objects, chests as intermingled in a huge chaotic jumble. I had the feeling that I was wito 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 sed-floor wooden walkways. This chamber was red, tinged with the color of the velvet cloth, carpets and kilims hanging on the walls. With due reverence, I sidered how the accumulation of all this wealth was the sequence of wars waged, blood spilt and cities and treasuries plundered.
“Frightened?” asked the elderly dwarf, giving voiy feelings. “Everybody is frightened on their first visit. At night the spirits of these objects whisper to each other.”
What was frightening was the silen which this abundance of incredible objects was interred. Behind us we heard the clattering of the seal being affixed to the lo the door, and we looked around in awe, motionless.
I saw swords, elephant tusks, caftans, silver dlesticks and satin banners. I saw mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes, iron trunks, ese vases, belts, long-necked lutes, armor, silk cushions, model globes, boots, furs, rhinoceros horns, ored ostrich eggs, rifles, arrows, maces and ets. There were heaps of carpets, cloth and satin everywhere, seemingly casg over me from the wood-paneled upper floors, from the balustrades, the built-in closets and small ste 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 dles, the wound turbans, 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, as adorned with rubies and turquoise. Th<s></s>is 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 bee palpable and all the objects appeared as if made from the same material. After rehensively experiehe silen the room for a while longer, I k was as much the light as the dust c everything that dimmed the red colning in the cold room, melding all the objects into an are sameness. And as the eye swam over these strange and indistinct items, uo distinguish one from a even the sed or third glahis great profusion 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 aic et sent by the Muscovite Czar.
Jezmi Agha placed the brazier in the fire hat 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 o death, the gift volumes brought by the Veian ambassador to Our Sultan’s grandfather, or the Christian books from the time of Sulta the queror?”
“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 et. Master Osman grew impatient as he opehe 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 a,“” read Master Osman before closing the book and taking up another.
We came across an incredibly beautiful illustratioing the se in which Ferhad, empowered by love, carries his bel<big>?</big>oved Shirin and her horse away on his shoulder. To vey 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-stri hand in such agony that Master Osman and I were instantly affected by the taste of tears and sorrow in the falling leaves. This toug moment had beeed—as the great masters intended—not to signify Ferhad’s muscular strength, but rather to vey how the pain of his love was felt at ohroughout the entire world.
“A Bihzad imitation made in Tabriz eighty years ago,” Master Osman said as he replaced the volume and opened another.
This icture that showed the forced friendship betwee and the mouse from Kelile and Dimne. Out in the fields, a poor mouse, caught betweeacks of a marten on the ground and a hawk in the air, finds his salvation in an unfortu caught in a hunter’s trap. They e to an agreement: The cat, pretending to be the mouse’s friend, licks him, thereby sg away the marten and the hawk. In turn, the mouse cautiously frees the cat from the snare. Even before I could uand the painter’s sensibility, the master had stuffed the book back beside the other volumes and had randomly opened another.
This leasant picture of a mysterious woman and a man: The woman had elegantly opened one hand while asking a question, holding her kh the other over her green cloak, as the man turo her and listened ily. I looked at the picture avidly, jealous of the intimacy, love and friendship between them.
Putting that book down, Master Osman opeo a page from another book. The cavalry of Persian and Turanian armies, eternal enemies, had doheir full panoply of armor, helmets, greaves, bows, quivers and arrows and had mouhose magnifit, legendary and fully armored horses. Before they engaged one another in a battle to the death, they were arrayed in orderly ranks fag each other on a dusty yellow steppe holding the tips of their lances upright, bedecked in an array of colors and patiently watg their anders, who’d rushed to the fore and begun 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 depi of war or love, what the artist of absolute faith actually paints and veys 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 heavy tome.
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 painti seeing this world yet depig it as if it were the Otherworld. Master Osman reted how this ese 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 a to Istanbul.
ictures of war ah, each more frightening and more expertly dohan the : Rüstem together with Shah Mazenderan; Rüstem attag Afrasiyab’s army; and Rüstem, disguised in armor, a mysterious and uified 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 Hüsrev spying on Shirin bathing in a
lake by moonlight, upon the lovers Leyla and Mejnun fainting as they beheld each other after aended 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 er of even the worst painting, perhaps having to do with an ht on the part of the illuminator or perhaps with the versation of colors: As might be expected, Hüsrev and Shirin are listening to a charmial 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 firying to peel tasty es while gazing upon the beauty of handsome Joseph?; could the miniaturist who painted ?sfendiyar’s blinding with an arrow foresee that later ooo, would be blinded?
We saw the angels apanying Our Exalted Prophet during his Assion; the dark-skinned, six-armed, long-white-bearded old man symbolizing Saturn; and baby Rüstem sleeping peacefully in his mother-of-pearl-inlaid cradle beh the watchful eyes of his mother and nursemaids. We saw the way Darius died an agonizih in Alexander’s arms, how Behram Gür withdrew 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 Hüsrev, murdered by his own son. As Master Osman rapidly picked out the volumes ahem aside, he would at times reize an artist and show me, or wi an illustrator’s signature humbly hidden among flrowing in the seclusion of a ruined building, or hiding in a black well along with a jinn. By paring signatures and colophons, he could determine who’d taken what from whom. He’d flip through certain books exhaustively in hope of finding 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, uo uand what had excited him. At times he would remihat we’d already entered the page position ement of trees and mounted soldiers of a particular illustration in other books, in different ses of pletely different stories, and he’d point out these pictures again to jog my memory. He pared a picture in a version of Nizami’s Qui 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 hty 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 bee animated with joy before poorly executed pieces (for all miniaturists were brethren!)—and he’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 hi 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 magnifice that Allah beheld ao us. The greatest masters in each geion of
painters, expending their lives and toiling until blind, strove with great effort and inspiration to attain and record the wondrous dream that Allah anded 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 reat miniaturists gone blind from their labors, were only vaguely able to recollect random parts of that magnifit 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 ily the same way despite never having seen each other’s work ae the hundreds of years that separated them.
Long afterward, ohe red light of the Treasury had dimmed and it became evident that the et tained 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 laugh of a woman is preserved for turies by passing from master to disciple and being shown, taught and memorized eions. Having learhis detail from his master, the miniaturist believes it to be a perfe, and is as vinced of its immutability as he is of the glorious Koran’s, and just as he memorizes the Koran, he’ll never fet this detail indelibly painted in his memory. However, never fetting does not mean the master artist will always use this detail. The s of the workshop whereiinguishes the light of his eyes, the habits and taste for color of the ornery master beside him or the whims of his sultan will, at times, 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 acc to the of the workshop where he presently finds himself, just like the others there. Do you uand me?”
From a page in Nizami’s Hüsrev and Shirin, quite a few versions of which we’d thumbed through already, in a picture depig Shiried ohrone, 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 SNTY AND DOMAINS SO HE MAY FOREVER BE TEhe leftmost stone read) AHY (the rightmost stone read).
Later, I asked, “Where might we find illustrations wherein 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 fr eyes. I grew so 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 ets, other chests shown us by the aged dwarf, to examihe pictures therein. Periodically, I’d get fed up with the pictures, which all looked alike, and wish never again to watch Hüsrev visit Shirin uhe castle window; I’d leave the master’s side—without even a gla the nostrils of the horse Hüsrev rode—and try to warm myself at the brazier or I’d walk respectfully and awestruck among the heaps of cloth, gold, ons, armor and plunder in the adjat rooms of the Treasury. At times, prompted by an abrupt cry and haure by Master Osman, I’d imagihat 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 queror, only to enter an illustration, the likes of which I’d never before seeing, say, Satan slyly b 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 Tamerlao Sultan Süleyman the Magnifit—happily aedly 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 e by way of Baghdad, we watched the flight of the mert who g to the feet of a mythical bird as he spahe seas. In the volume, which opened by itself to the first page, we saw the se that Shekure and I loved the most, in which Shirin beheld Hüsrev’s picture hanging from a brand fell in love with him. Then, looking at an illustration that brought to life the inner ws of a plicated ade from bobbins aal 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 unging, frozen golden time revealed in the pictures and stories we viewed had thhly mingled with the damp and moldy time we experienced ireasury. It seemed that these illuminated pages, created over the turies by the lavish expenditure of eyesight in the workshops of tless shahs, khans and sultans, would e to life, as would the objects that seemed to besiege us: The helmets, scimitars, daggers with diamond-studded handles, armor, porcelain cups from a, dusty and delicate lutes, and the pearl-embellished cushions and kilims—the likes of which we’d seen in tless illustrations.
“I now uand that by furtively and gradually re-creating the same pictures for hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of artists had ingly depicted the gradual transformation of their world into another.”
I’ll be first to admit that I didn’t pletely uand 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 depi 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 ope the time of the evening prayer and Master Osman explaio me that he had no desire whatsoever to leave, and that furthermore, only by remaining here until m examining pictures by the light of oil lamps and dles 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 ened and my master veyed 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 aloh 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 beed to the magnifice of life outside by the large damp plarees 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 a, Samarkand a prising an album hidden away in the remotest er of the Treasury filled with the plunder of hundreds of tries over hundreds of years by the aors of His Excellency, Our Sultan, was most probably spread to the miniaturists’ division by the dwarf Jezmi Agha. If we might now ret 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 sihe closing of our irredeemable, Persia-partisan dervish lodges, those dens of heresy as of devilry, but see for yourselves, here we are before you. How could this be? I’ll tell you hoere rendered in the Veian style! As this illustration indicates, one day we two dervishes were tramping through Our Sultan’s domains from oy to the .
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, ging bowls dangling from our necks by a ; 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 a from the bowl, when a Frank traveler, a strange man, stopped us, gave us each a silver Veian and began to draw our picture.
He was a Frank; of course, he was weird. He situated us right in the ter of the page as if we were the very tent of the Sultan, and was depig us in our half-ate when I shared with my panion a thought that had just then dawned upoo 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 fag 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 se 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 Eff<var></var>endi,” but last week in this fine coffeehouse there was a great misuanding: This respected “Hoja Effendi” of whom we speak has nothing whatsoever to do with His Excellenusret Hoja the cleri 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 everythiively have said that if His Excellency Hoja Effendi bees 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 perf or reg 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 try? 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 dumbfou 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 see from this picture, the Veian was a geist, and he’d focused upon the work before him and the mo’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
returo his infidel city. Soon afterward, the victorious armies of the Ottomans quered and pluhat city on the banks of the Danube, and the two of us ended up ing back this way to Istanbul and the Royal Treasury. From there, copied over and over, we moved from o 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 Pla 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 thie: 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. merts, 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 —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 beied by him. But, he was itting 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 tent, indeed. Acc to the Hoja, we’re in Hell; acc to some unbelievers we’re nothing but decayed corpses and acc 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 htly, 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 OSMAell 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 objeore thaist’s brush tributing to the same illustration, he posed 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 weled 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 listeo Abdullah Khan ret the magnifice of the other’s o-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 upoher edge of a large cushion, holding each other’s books on their laps and looking at the pictures that they reized from Abdullah Khan’s fables, both the miniaturists were overe with great disappoi 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 i years, rather ordinary, pale and hazy. The two great masters didn’t then realize that the reason for this haziness was the blihat had begun to desd upon them, nor did they realize it after both had gone pletely blind, rather they attributed the hazio having been duped by the Khan, and hehey 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 thaists in this pitiless story from Bukhara. It gave me such a thrill to know, befoing 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 requered 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 vergence of the Stars, which reted a story as witnessed by Emir Hüsrev in the palace of Delhi. Acc 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 jured while looking at the page would appear there in the sultan’s tent, and I thanked God fivihe ce 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 affe 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 sn. After he’d waited long and patiently, the ball did indeed e 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 aed monarch, or that a handsome young apprentice feels toward his master, was rendered here with such delicad deep passion,
from the extension of the subject’s fingers holding the ball to his inability to summon the ce to look at the sn’s face, that while looking at this page, I khere was no greater joy in the world than to be appreo a great master, and that such submissiveness verging on servility was no less a pleasure than being master to a young, pretty and intelligent apprentid I grieved for those who would never know this truth.
I turhe 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 ah, proudly and undauntedly removed volume after volume from chests and placed them before me. From two separate ers of an iro stuffed with amazing tomes, on books and disorderly albums, there emerged two extraordinary volumes—one bound in the Shiraz style with a burgundy cover, the other bound i and finished with a dark lacquer in the ese fashion—which tained pages so resembling each other that at first I thought they were copies. While I was trying to determine which book was the inal and which the copy, I examihe 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 te with the Whitesheep khan and created a superior copy from memory. To see that the pictures in the sed 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 aowledged by Almighty Allah, who sees and knows all, I khat 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 ned 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 turhe pages, by the force of God’s inscrutable wisdom, I frequently came across legends and matters of blindness. In the famous se showing Shirin on a tryside outing falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture on the branch of a plaree, 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 ao a fool who saw the work and ehat the true subject of the illustration wasn’t the plaree, Sheikh Ali replied that the true subject wasn’t the passion of the beautiful young maideher, it was the passion of the artist, and to proudly prove his poiempted to paint the same plaree with all its leaves on a grain of rice. If the signature hiddeh the beautiful feet of Shirin’s darling lady attendants hadn’t misled me, I was of course seeing the magnifit 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 ane, Rüstem blinding Alexander with his forked arrow was depicted in the manner of artists who khe Indian style, so vivaciously and colorfully, that blindness, the ageless sorrow a 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 wao 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 dles—I would occasionally cry out in admiration, whereupon Blad the dwarf would rush to my side and look over my shoulder at the magnifit page before me. Uo 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 allegian 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 whe 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, sign its secret to the rarest of is livih 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 uo refrain from showing them a masterpiece—this one could’ve belonged in any colle 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 remi of Heaven and the elation of the beloveds reing in that garden as they drank wine aed poetry; it was as if we in the moldy, dusty and icy Treasury could also smell those spring blossoms and the delicately sted skin of the joyous revelers. “Notice how the same artist who rehe 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 siy, 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 uood nothing of painting, and he never remained iy 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 insequential 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 khat this insequential lord was blind remains, even today, a subject of jecture 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, dlesticks 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 er of the colophon page, piogether, between and on top of each other: “This volume was pleted i, 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, theo his son Yakup Bey, and theo 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 owhey added the faces of their beautiful wives to the illustrations and appeheir names proudly to the colophon page; afterward, it passed to Sam Mirza who’d quered 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 pluhe Seven Heavens Pala 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 i aement did Blad the dwarf share? As I opened new volumes and turheir pages, I sehe profound sorrow of thousands of illustrators from hundreds of cities large and small, each with a distinctive temperament, each painting uhe 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 ioman Treasury: Instead of seeing torture as a necessary practice administered before the supervision of a judge to ensure Allah’s justi the world, iravelers would viheir cionists of our cruelty and evil-heartedness by having dishonorable miniaturists abase themselves and dash off these pictures in exge 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 on, nailings, stranglings, the cutting of throats, feedings to hungry dogs, whippings, baggings, pressings, soakings in cold water, the plug 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 depig bastinados and tortures, only we could color these implements with the gaiety of c a child’s kite.
Hundreds of years hence, men looking at our world through the illustrations we’ve made won’t uand anything. Desiring to take a closer look, yet lag the patiehey 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 ruly know. As I turhe 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 astoo see hings. 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 patrohe thing we now call “style” first took shape, which fabled master had worked for whom, and how, for example,
the curling ese clouds I kneread throughout Persia from Herat under ese influence were also used in Kazvin. I would occasionally allow myself an exhausted “Aha!”; but an agony lurked deeper within me, a melancholy a I scarcely share with you for the belittled, tormented, pretty, moon-faced, gazelle-eyed, sapling-thin painters—battered by m<s></s>asters—who suffered for their art, yet remained full of excitement and hope, enjoying the affe 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 a that I ehis world of fine and delicate feelings, the possibility of whose depiy soul had quietly fotten 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 o that moment, and it reminded me of what shahs with a weakness fold and power always fet: 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 apprentiourished for painting. A tiny-footed, transparent-skinned, weak and girlish youth had bared a delicate forearm, which aroused ihe 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—upohree 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 attat to her.
Oddly, my heart began to qui and pound. As had happened sixty years ago in my early apprenticeship, while I was looking at some rather i illustrations of handsome marble-skinned boys and slim small-breasted maidens drawn in the blak 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 didate. For a moment, I had the strong feeling that painting was not about melancholy a 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; s 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 c blihrough 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 dlesticks slowly floating through the Treasury roag me, I put the album away and randomly opened one of the volumes the dwarf had retly set beside me. This ecial album prepared for shahs: I saw two deer at the edge of a green copse enamored of each other, with jackals watg them in hostile envy. I turhe 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 turhe page: A fidently seated goveral 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 reized the execution of the magnifit hand in t99ｌｉｂ?he 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 certaiher it was ihe work of the great Bihzad, I hadn’t been as taken as I was now.
The heavy moldy darkness of the Treasury chamber seemed thten. This beautifully drawn hand merged in my mind with that thin, magnifit 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 sehat I could share this intuition of mih Black, who’d sidled up to me holding a dle 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 ha 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 affe into his sweet, frightened eyes. That’s how I looked at Black. Reflected in his pupils, I saw the flame of the dle he held aloft. “We miniaturists are brethren,” I said, “but now everything is ing to an end.”
“How do you mean?”
I said, “Everything is ing to an end” like a great master who longs for blindness, havied his years to a lord or a prince, having created masterpieces in his workshop iyle of the as, having even ehat this workshop had its own style, a great master who knows, whenever his patron lord loses his last battle, that new lords will e in the wake of the plundering enemy, disband the workshop, tear apart bound volumes leaving the pages in disarray ale aroy what remains, including the fiails that he long believed in, that were of his own discovery and that he loved like his own children. But I o 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 oskirts of the city to see him. We know this is Hatifi, not from Bihzad’s rendering of Hatifi’s face, but from the writih the illustration, don’t we?”
Black looked at me, indig “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 tnize him from the fa this picture. However, we could do so relying on the illustration in its ey: There’s something in the manner of the position, in Hatifi’s pose, in the colors, the gilding and the stunning hand rendered by Master Bihzad that at ondicates 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 aian masters, as in the book that Our Sultan had issioned from your Enishte, the domain of meaning ends and the domain of form begins. However, with the Veiahods…”
“My Enishte, may he rest iernal 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 nothing to them,” I said, and turned back to the previous page so he might see for himself: There was nothiraordinary about the nostrils of the horses.
“When shall we find the horses with peculiar noses?” Black asked like a child.
But, in the middle of the night, toward m, when we found Shah Tahmasp’s legendary Book of Kings in an iro beh piles of various shades of green watered silk and drew it forth, Black was curled up fast asleep on a red Ushak carpet, with his well-formed head lying on a velvet pillow embroidered with pearls. Meanwhile, as soon as I laid eyes upon the legendary tome again after so many years, I quickly uood that the day had only just begun for me.
The legendary volume I’d seen only from afar twenty-five years ago was se and heavy that Jezmi Agha and I had difficulty lifting and carrying it. When I touched the binding, I khere was wood within the leather. Twenty-five years ago, upon the death of Sultan Süleyman the Magnifit, Shah Tahmasp was so elated to be finally rid of this sultan who’d occupied Tabriz three times, that along with the gift-laden camels he sent to Süleyman’s successor, Sultan Selim, he included a spectacular Koran and this volume, the most beautiful of the books in his treasury. First, a Persian ambassadorial delegation three hurong took the tome to Edirne where the new sultahe winter hunting; after it arrived here in Istanbul along with the other presents carried on camels and mules, Head Illuminator Black Memi ahree young masters went to see the book before it was locked up ireasury. Just like the Istanbulites who would rush to see an elephant brought from Hindustan iraffe from Africa, we hurried to the palace where I learned from Master Black Memi that the great Master Bihzad, who’d left Herat for Tabriz in his old age, hadn’t tributed to this book because he’d gone blind.
For Ottoman miniaturists like us who were astonished by ordinary books with seven ht illustrations, looking through this volume, which tained 25e 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 ireasury.
I silently opehe thick cover of the Book of Kings as if opening a huge palace door. As I turhe pages, each of which made a pleasant rustle, I was overe by melanore 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 ce upon a hand drawn by Bihzad in some er, 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 Blad the drevented me from surrendering myself to what I saw.
Naturally, I was disappoio find myself more with my mind than with my heart, despite the great luck of having Allah, in His munifice, grahe ce to have my fill of this legendary book before the velvet curtain of darkness desded 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 ib, 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 ied 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 entered 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 watg Tur’s treachery in beheading his younger brother Iraj, of whom he was jealous because their father, while doling out his territave the best try, Persia, and far away a to Iraj, while leaving only the western lands to Tur; not among the horses of the heroic armies of Alexahat included Khazars, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs, all equipped with armor, iron shields, iructible swords and glimmeris; 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 affli; and not among the hundreds of mythical and perfect horses all drawn by six or seven miniaturists. Yet, there was still more thaire day ahead of me in which to examihe other books ireasury.
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 ehis forbidden Treasury, found this spectacular book, ope and by dlelight copied into his sketchbook examples of a number of exquisite horses, trees, clouds, flowers, birds, gardens and ses 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 Ottomaory. 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 owenty-five years ago ingrais images into our memories, and sihen, we’ve recalled, transformed, altered and paihem 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, thaomans.
Like a lightning flash, it occurred to me horopriate 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 beh my hand in the picture that lay open before me. It was the at 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 watg 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 magnifit armor and of severed heads lying on the ground. After doing the same to three pages, I slid my penknife bato my sash.
My hands trembled, but I didn’t feel so bad. Did I now feel what so many lunatics felt after itting this stra whose results I entered 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 solation awaiti the end of my life. No part of this excellent book, which Shah Tahmasp had pleted by spurring Persia’s most masterful artists for ten years, had seeouch of the great Bihzad’s pen, and his excellent rendering of hands was o be found. This fact firmed 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 attaihe perfe of the old masters by w his entire life, the great master blinded himself to avoid tainting his painting with the desires of any other workshop or shah.
Just then, Blad the dwarf opened a thie they were carrying and placed it before me.
“No, this isn’t it,” I said without being trary. “This is a Mongol Book of Kings: The iron horses of
Alexander’s iron cavalry were filled with naphtha a aflame like lamps, before bei against the enemy with flames shooting from their nostrils.”
We stared at the flaming army of iron copied from ese paintings.
“Jezmi Agha,” I said, “we later depicted in the icle of Sultan Selim the gifts that Shah Tahmasp’s Persian ambassadors, who also presehis book, brought with them twenty-five years ago…”
He swiftly located the icle of Sultan Selim and placed it in front of me. Paired with the vibrantly colored page that showed the ambassadors presenting the Book of Kings along with the ifts to Sultan Selim, my eyes found, among the gifts which were listed one by one, what I’d long ago read but had fotten because it was so incredible:The turquoise-and-mother-of-pearl-handled golden plume needle which the Veed Talent of Herat, Master of Master Illuminators Bihzad, used i of blinding his exalted self.
I asked the dwarf where he found the icle of Sultan Selim. I followed him through the dusty darkness of the Treasury, meanderiwees, piles of cloth and carpet, ets ah stairways. I noticed how our shadows, now shrinking, now enlarging, slipped over shields, elephant tusks and tiger skins. In one of the adjoining rooms, this one also suffused with the same strange redness of cloth a, beside the iro whence emerged the Book of Kings, amid other volumes, cloth sheets embroidered with silver and gold wire, raw and unpolished Ceylon stone, and ruby-studded daggers, I saw some of the ifts that Shah Tahmasp had sent: silk carpets from Isfahan, an ivory chess set and an object that immediately caught my attention—a pen case decorated with ese dragons and branches with a mother-of-pearl-inlaid rosette obviously from the time of Tamerlane. I opehe case and out came the subtle st of burned paper and rosewater; withied the turquoise-and mother-of-pearl-handled golden needle used to fasten plumes to turbans. I took up the needle auro my spot like a specter.
Alone again, I placed the needle that Master Bihzad had used to blind himself upon the open page of the Book of Kings and gazed at it. It wasn’t the needle he’d blinded himself with that made me shudder, but seeing an object he’d taken into his miraculous hands.
Why did Shah Tahmasp send this terrifying needle with the book he’d preseo Sultan Selim? Was it because this Shah, who as a child was a student of Bihzad’s and a patron of artists in his youth, had ged in his old age, distang poets and artists from his inner circle and giving himself over eo faith and worship? Was this the reason he was willing to relinquish this exquisite book, which the greatest of masters had labored over for ten years? Had he sent this needle so all would know that the great artist was blinded of his own volition or, as was rumored for a time, to make the statement that whosoever beheld the pages of this book even once would no longer wish to see anything else in this world? In a, this volume was no longer sidered a masterpiece by the Shah, who felt poigna, afraid that he’d itted a sacrilege through his youthful love of illustrating, as happened with
many rulers in their old age.
I was reminded of stories told by spiteful illuminators who’d grown old to find their dreams unfulfilled: As the armies of the Blacksheep ruler, Jihan Shah, were poised to enter Shiraz, Ibn Hüsam, the city’s legendary Head Illuminator, declared, “I refuse to paint in any other way,” and had his apprentice blind him with a hot iron. Among the miniaturists that the armies of Sultan Selim the Grim brought back to Istanbul after the defeat of Shah Ismail, the capture of Tabriz and the plunder of the Seven Heavens Palace was an old Persian master who it was rumored blinded himself with medies because he believed he could never bring himself to paint ioman style—not as the result of an illness he’d had on the road as some claimed. To set an example for them, I used to tell my illuminators in their moments of frustration how Bihzad had blinded himself.
Was there no other recourse? If a master miniaturist made use of the new methods here and there in out-of-the-laces, couldn’t he then, if only a little, save the entire workshop and the styles of the old masters?
There was a dark stain oremely sharp point of the elegantly tapered plume needle, yet my weary eyes couldn’t determine whether it was blood or not. L the magnifying lens, as if beholding a melancholy depi of love with a matg sense of melancholy, I looked at the needle for a long time. I tried to imagine how Bihzad could’ve do. I’d heard that one doesn’t go blind immediately; the velvety darkness desds slowly, sometimes after days, sometimes after months, as with old men who go blind naturally.
I’d caught sight of it while passing into the 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 dle danced in my pupils—which had witnessed my hand paint for sixty years.
“How had Master Bihzad do?” I asked myself once more.
Never oaking my eyes off the mirror, with the practiced movements of a plying 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 fihen removed it.
In the couplet worked into the frame of the mirror, the poet had wished the observer eternal beauty and wisdom—aernal 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 aced ceremony, the Head Treasurer and his men broke the seal and opehe lod the door. Jezmi Agha ged the chamber pots, lamps and brazier, brought in fresh bread and dried mulberries and annouo the others that we would tinue searg 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?
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