My Name is Red

by Orhan Pamuk

  So that my feelings and desires might be rightfully understood, I must presently lay bare the meaning of this distinction between truth and sincerity that I’ve come to know for the first time: How expressing one’s reality in words, as truthful as they might be, goads one to insincerity. Perhaps, the best example might be made of us miniaturists, who’ve grown edgy of late due to the murderer in our midst. Consider a perfect painting — the image of a horse, for instance — no matter how well it represents a real horse, the horse meticulously conceived by Allah or the horses of the great master miniaturists, it might still fail to match the sincerity of the talented miniaturist who drew it. The sincerity of the miniaturist, or of us humble servants of Allah, doesn’t emerge in moments of talent and perfection; on the contrary, it emerges through slips of the tongue, mistakes, fatigue and frustration. I say this for the sake of those young ladies who will become disillusioned when they see that there was no difference between the strong desire I felt for Shekure at that moment — as she too could tell — and, say, the dizzying lust I’d felt for a delicately featured, copper-complexioned, burgundy-mouthed Kazvin beauty during my travels. With her profound God-given savvy and jinnlike intuition, Shekure understood both my being able to withstand twelve years of pure torture for love’s sake as well as my behaving like a miserable thrall of lust who thought of nothing but the quick satisfaction of his dark desires the first time we were alone. Nizami had compared the mouth of that beauty of beauties, Shirin, to an inkwell filled with pearls.

  When the eager dogs began barking with renewed fervor, a restless Shekure said, “I ought to go now.” It was at that moment we both realized that the house of the Jew’s ghost had indeed become quite dark, although there was still time before nightfall. My body sprung up of its own volition, to hug her once again, but like a wounded sparrow, she quickly hopped away.

  “Am I still beautiful? Answer me quickly.”

  I told her. How beautifully she listened to me, believing and agreeing with what I said.

  “And my clothes?”

  I told her.

  “Do I smell nice?”

  Of course, Shekure also knew that what Nizami referred to as “love chess” did not consist of such rhetorical games, but of the hidden emotional maneuvers between lovers.

  “What kind of living do you expect to earn?” she asked. “Will you be able to care for my fatherless children?”

  As I talked about my more than twelve years of governmental and secretarial experience, the vast knowledge I’d acquired in battle and witnessing death and my luminous prospects, I embraced her.

  “How beautifully we embraced each other just now,” she said. “And already everything has lost its primal mystery.”

  To prove how sincere I was, I hugged her even tighter. I asked her why, after having kept it for twelve years, she’d had Esther return the painting I’d made for her. In her eyes I read surprise at my weariness and an affection that welled up within her. We kissed. This time I didn’t find myself immobilized by a staggering yoke of lust; both of us were stunned by the fluttering — like a flock of sparrows — of a powerful love that had entered our hearts, chests and stomachs. Isn’t lovemaking the best antidote to love?

  As I palmed her large breasts, Shekure pushed me away in an even more determined and sweeter way than before. She implied that I wasn’t a mature-enough man to maintain a trustworthy marriage with a woman that I’d sullied beforehand. I was careless enough to forget that the Devil would get involved in any hasty deeds and too inexperienced to know how much patience and quiet suffering underlie happy marriages. She’d escaped my arms and was walking toward the door, her linen veil having fallen around her neck. I caught sight of the snow falling onto the streets, which always succumbed to the darkness first, and forgetting that we’d been whispering here, perhaps to avoid disturbing the spirit of the Hanged Jew, I cried out:

  “What are we to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, minding the rules of “love chess.” Walking through the old garden, she left delicate footprints in the snow — certain to be erased by the whiteness — and disappeared quietly.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I WILL BE CALLED A MURDERER

  Doubtless, you too have experienced what I’m about to describe: At times, while walking through the infinite and winding streets of Istanbul, while spooning a bite of vegetable stew into my mouth at a public kitchen or squinting with fixed attention on the curved design of a reed-style border illumination, I feel I’m living the present as if it were the past. That is, when I’m walking down a street whitewashed with snow, I’ll have the urge to say that I was walking down it.

  The extraordinary events I will relate occurred at once in the present and in the past. It was evening, the twilight gave way to blackness and a very faint snow fell as I walked down the street where Enishte Effendi lived.

  Unlike other evenings, I’d come here knowing precisely what I wanted. On other evenings, my legs would take me here as I absentmindedly thought about other things: how I’d told my mother I earned seven hundred silver pieces for a single book, about the covers of Herat volumes with ungilded ornamental rosettes dating from the time of Tamerlane, about the continued shock of learning that others still painted under my name or about my tomfoolery and transgressions. This time, however, I’d come here with forethought and intent.

  The large courtyard gate — that I feared no one would open for me — opened on its own when I went to knock, reassuring me that Allah was with me. The shiny stone-paved portion of the courtyard that I walked through on those nights when I came to add new illustrations to Enishte Effendi’s magnificent book was empty. To the right beside the well rested the bucket, and perched on it a sparrow apparently oblivious to the cold; a bit farther on sat the open-air stone stove, which for some reason wasn’t lit even at this late hour; and to the left, the stable for visitors’ horses which made up part of the house’s ground floor. Everything was as I expected it to be. I entered through the unlocked door beside the stable, and as an uninvited guest might do to avoid happening upon an inappropriate scene, I stamped my feet and coughed as I climbed the wooden staircase to the living quarters.

  My coughing elicited no response. Nor did the noise of stamping my muddy shoes, which I removed and left next to those lined up at the entrance of the wide hall which was also used as an anteroom. As had become my custom whenever I visited, I searched for what I assumed to be Shekure’s elegant green pair among the others, but for naught, and the possibility that no one was home crossed my mind.

  I walked to the right into the room — there was one in each corner of the second floor — where I imagined Shekure slept cuddled with her children. I groped for beds and mattresses, and opened a chest in the corner and a tall armoire with a very light door. While I thought the delicate almond scent in the room must be the scent of Shekure’s skin, a pillow, which had been stuffed into the cabinet, fell onto my dim-witted head and then onto a copper pitcher and cups. You hear a noise and suddenly realize the room is dark; well, I realized it was cold.

  “Hayriye?” Enishte Effendi called from within another room, “Shekure? Which of you is it?”

  I swiftly exited the room, walking diagonally across the wide hall, and entered the room with the blue door where I had labored with Enishte Effendi on his book this past winter.

  “It’s me, Enishte Effendi,” I said. “Me.”

  “Who might you be?”

  At that instant, I understood that the workshop names Enishte Effendi had selected had less to do with secrecy then with his subtle mockery of us. As a haughty scribe might write in the colophon on the last leaf of a magnificently illustrated manuscript, I slowly pronounced the syllables of my full name, which included my father’s name, my place of birth and the phrase “your poor sinful servant.”

  “Hah?” he said at first, then added, “Hah!”

  Just like the old man who meets Death in the Assyrian fable I heard as a child, Enishte Effe
ndi sank into a very brief silence that lasted forever. If there are those among you who believe, since I’ve just now mentioned “Death,” that I’ve come here to involve myself in such an affair, you’ve completely misunderstood the book you’re holding. Would someone with such designs knock on the gate? Take off his shoes? Come without a knife?

  “So, you’ve come,” he said, again like the old man in the fable. But then he assumed an entirely different tone: “Welcome, my child. Tell me then, what is it that you want?”

  It had grown quite dark by now. Enough light entered through the narrow beeswax-dipped cloth windowpane — which, when removed in springtime, revealed a pomegranate and plane tree — to distinguish the outlines of objects within the room, enough light to please a humble Chinese illustrator. I could not fully see Enishte Effendi’s face as he sat, as usual, before a low, folding reading desk, so that the light fell to his left side. I tried desperately to recapture the intimacy between us when we’d painted miniatures together, gently and quietly discussing them all night by candlelight amid these burnishing stones, reed pens, inkwells and brushes. I’m not sure if it was out of this sense of alienation or out of embarrassment, but I was ashamed and held back from openly confessing my misgivings; at that moment, I decided to explain myself through a story.

  Perhaps you’ve also heard of the artist Sheikh Muhammad of Isfahan? There was no painter who could surpass him in choice of color, in his sense of symmetry, in depicting human figures, animals and faces, in painting with an effusiveness bespeaking poetry, and in the application of an arcane logic reserved for geometry. After achieving the status of master painter at a young age, this virtuoso with a divine touch spent a full thirty years in pursuit of the most fearless innovation of subject matter, composition and style. Working in the Chinese black-ink style — brought to us by the Mongols — with skill and an elegant sense of symmetry, he was the one who introduced the terrifying demons, horned jinns, horses with large testicles, half-human monsters and giants into the devilishly subtle and sensitive Herat style of painting; he was the first to take an interest in and be influenced by the portraiture that had come by Western ships from Portugal and Flanders; he reintroduced forgotten techniques dating back to the time of Genghis Khan and hidden in decaying old volumes; before anybody else, he dared to paint cock-raising scenes like Alexander’s peeping at naked beauties swimming on the island of women and Shirin bathing by moonlight; he depicted Our Glorious Prophet ascending on the back of his winged steed Burak, shahs scratching themselves, dogs copulating and sheikhs drunk with wine and made them acceptable to the entire community of book lovers. He’d done it, at times secretly, at times openly, drinking large quantities of wine and taking opium, with an enthusiasm that lasted for thirty years. Later, in his old age, he became the disciple of a pious sheikh, and within a short time, changed completely. Coming to the conclusion that every painting he’d made over the previous thirty years was profane and ungodly, he rejected them all. What’s more, he devoted the remaining thirty years of his life to going from palace to palace, from city to city, searching through the libraries and the treasuries of sultans and kings, in order to find and destroy the manuscripts he’d illuminated. In whichever shah’s, prince’s or nobleman’s library he found a painting he’d made in previous years, he’d stop at nothing to destroy it; gaining access by flattery or by ruse, and precisely when no one was paying attention, he’d either tear out the page on which his illustration appeared, or, seizing an opportunity, he’d spill water on the piece, ruining it. I recounted this tale as an example of how a miniaturist could suffer great agony for unwittingly forsaking his faith under the spell of his art. This was why I mentioned how Sheikh Muhammad had burned down Prince Ismail Mirza’s immense library containing hundreds of books that the sheikh himself had illustrated; so many books that he couldn’t cull his own from the others. With great exaggeration, as if I’d experienced it myself, I told how the painter, in profound sorrow and regret, had burned to death in that terrible conflagration.

  “Are you afraid, my child?” said Enishte Effendi compassionately, “of the paintings we’ve made?”

  The room was black now, I couldn’t see for myself, but I sensed that he’d said this with a smile.

  “Our book is no longer a secret,” I answered. “Perhaps this isn’t important. But rumors are spreading. They say we’ve underhandedly committed blasphemy. They say that, here, we’ve made a book — not as Our Sultan had commissioned and hoped for — but one meant to entertain our own whims; one that ridicules even Our Prophet and mimics infidel masters. There are those who believe it even depicts Satan as amiable. They say we’ve committed an unforgivable sin by daring to draw, from the perspective of a mangy street dog, a horsefly and a mosque as if they were the same size — with the excuse that the mosque was in the background — thereby mocking the faithful who attend prayers. I cannot sleep for thinking about such things.”

  “We made the illustrations together,” said Enishte Effendi. “Could we have even considered such ideas, let alone committed such an offense?”

  “Not at all,” I said expansively. “But they’ve heard about it somehow. They say there’s one final painting in which, according to the gossip, there’s open defiance of our religion and what we hold sacred.”

  “You yourself have seen the final painting.”

  “Nay, I made pictures of whatever you requested in various places on a large sheet, which was to be a double-leaf illustration,” I said with a caution and precision that I hoped would please Enishte Effendi. “But I never saw the completed illustration. If I had seen the entire painting, I’d have a clear conscience about denying all this foul slander.”

  “Why is it that you feel guilty?” he asked. “What’s gnawing at your soul? Who has caused you to doubt yourself?”

  “…to worry that one has attacked what he knows to be sacred, after spending months merrily illustrating a book…to suffer the torments of Hell while living…if I could only see that last painting in its entirety.”

  “Is this what troubles you?” he said. “Is this why you’ve come?”

  Suddenly panic seized me. Could he be thinking something horrendous, like I was the one who’d killed the ill-fated Elegant Effendi?

  “Those who want Our Sultan dethroned and replaced by the prince,” I said, “are furthering this insidious gossip, saying that He secretly supports the book.”

  “How many really believe that?” he asked wearily. “Every cleric with any ambition who’s met with some favor and whose head has swollen as a result will preach that religion is being ignored and disrespected. This is the most reliable way to ensure one’s living.”

  Did he suppose I’d come solely to inform him of a rumor?

  “Poor old Elegant Effendi, God rest his soul,” I said, my voice quavering. “Supposedly, we killed him because he saw the whole of the last painting and was convinced that it reviled our faith. A division head I know at the palace workshop told me this. You know how junior and senior apprentices are, everyone gossips.”

  Maintaining this line of reasoning and growing increasingly impassioned, I went on for quite some time. I didn’t know how much of what I said I myself had indeed heard, how much I fabricated out of fear after doing away with that wicked slanderer, or how much I improvised. Having devoted much of the conversation to flattery, I was anticipating that Enishte Effendi would show me the two-page illustration and put me at ease. Why didn’t he realize this was the only way I might overcome my fears about being mired in sin?

  Intending to startle him, I defiantly asked, “Might one be capable of making blasphemous art without being aware of it?”

  In place of an answer, he gestured very delicately and elegantly with his hand — as if to warn me there was a child sleeping in the room — and I fell completely silent. “It has become very dark,” he said, almost in a whisper, “let’s light the candle.”

  After lighting the candlestick from the hot coals of the brazier which
heated the room, I noticed in his face an expression of pride, one to which I was unaccustomed, and this displeased me greatly. Or was it an expression of pity? Had he figured everything out? Was he thinking that I was some sort of a base murderer or was he frightened by me? I remember how suddenly my thoughts spiraled out of control and I was stupidly listening to what I thought as if somebody else was thinking. The carpet beneath me, for example: There was a kind of wolflike design in one corner, but why hadn’t I noticed it before?

  “The love all khans, shahs and sultans feel for paintings, illustrations and fine books can be divided into three seasons,” said Enishte Effendi. “At first they are bold, eager and curious. Rulers want paintings for the sake of respect, to influence how others see them. During this period, they educate themselves. During the second phase, they commission books to satisfy their own tastes. Because they’ve learned sincerely to enjoy paintings, they amass prestige while at the same time amassing books, which, after their deaths, ensure the persistence of their renown in this world. However, in the autumn of a sultan’s life, he no longer concerns himself with the persistence of his worldly immortality. By “worldly immortality” I mean the desire to be remembered by future generations, by our grandchildren. Rulers who admire miniatures and books have already acquired an immortality through the manuscripts they’ve commissioned from us — upon whose pages they’ve had their names inserted, and, at times, their histories written. Later, each of them comes to the conclusion that painting is an obstacle to securing a place in the Otherworld, naturally something they all desire. This is what bothers and intimidates me the most. Shah Tahmasp, who was himself a master miniaturist and spent his youth in his own workshop, closed down his magnificent atelier as his death approached, chased his divinely inspired painters from Tabriz, destroyed the books he had produced and suffered interminable crises of regret. Why did they all believe that painting would bar them from the gates of Heaven?”