My Name is Red

by Orhan Pamuk

  I know women quite well; in fact, I’ve known four personally, seen their faces and spoken with them: 1. my mother, may she rest in eternal peace; 2. my beloved aunt; 3. the wife of my brother (he always beat me), who said “Get out!” on one of those rare occasions when I saw her — she was the first woman I fell in love with; and 4. a lady I saw suddenly at an open window in Konya during my travels. Despite never having spoken with her, I’ve nursed feelings of lust toward her for years and still do. Perhaps, by now, she’s passed away.

  Seeing a woman’s bare face, speaking to her, and witnessing her humanity opens the way to both pangs of lust and deep spiritual pain in us men, and thus the best of all alternatives is not to lay eyes on women, especially pretty women, without first being lawfully wed, as our noble faith dictates. The sole remedy for carnal desires is to seek out the friendship of beautiful boys, a satisfactory surrogate for females, and in due time, this, too, becomes a sweet habit. In the cities of the European Franks, women roam about exposing not only their faces, but also their brightly shining hair (after their necks, their most attractive feature), their arms, their beautiful throats, and even, if what I’ve heard is true, a portion of their gorgeous legs; as a result, the men of those cities walk about with great difficulty, embarrassed and in extreme pain, because, you see, their front sides are always erect and this fact naturally leads to the paralysis of their society. Undoubtedly, this is why each day the Frank infidel surrenders another fortress to us Ottomans.

  After realizing, while still a youth, that the best recipe for my spiritual happiness and contentment was to live far from beautiful women, I grew increasingly curious about these creatures. At that time, since I hadn’t seen any women besides my mother and my aunt, my curiosity assumed a mystical quality, my head seemed to tingle, and I knew that I could only learn how women felt if I did what they did, ate what they ate, said what they said, imitated their behavior and, yes, only if I wore their clothes. Therefore, one Friday, when my mother, father, older brother and aunt went to my grandfather’s rose garden on the shores of the Fahreng, I told them I was feeling ill and stayed at home.

  “Come along. Look, you’ll entertain us by mimicking the dogs, trees and horses in the country. What’ll you do here all alone, anyway?” said my mother, may she rest in peace.

  “I’m going to put on your dresses and become a woman, dear mother,” was an impossible answer. So I said, “My stomach hurts.”

  “Don’t be such a coward,” said my father. “Come along and we’ll wrestle.”

  I shall now describe to you, my painter and calligrapher brethren, exactly what I felt once they’d left and I donned the underclothes and dresses belonging to my now dearly departed mother and aunt, as well as the secrets I learned that day about being a woman. Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we’ve often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don’t feel like the Devil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  That was why I began spying through a peephole on the sons of pashas and notables, whom my late father had invited to our house under various pretexts. I wanted my predicament to resemble that of the petite-mouthed beauty with two children whom all the miniaturists love. Perhaps it’d be best for me to describe to you poor Shekure’s story. But wait a minute, I’d promised to recount the following story tonight:

  The Love Story Told by a Woman Prompted by the Devil

  It’s quite simple actually. The story takes place in Kemerüstü, one of the poorer neighborhoods of Istanbul. A prominent inhabitant of the neighborhood, Chelebi Ahmet, secretary to Vasif Pasha, was a married gentleman with two children who kept to himself. One day, through an open window, he catches sight of a black-haired, black-eyed, silver-skinned, tall and thin Bosnian beauty, and is smitten. But, the woman is married, has no interest whatsoever in the Chelebi, and is devoted to her handsome husband. The hapless Chelebi refuses to confide his woes to anybody, and reduced by love to skin and bone, takes to wine he’s bought from a Greek, yet ultimately he cannot hide his love from the neighborhood. At first, because the neighbors adore such love stories and admire and respect the Chelebi, they honor his love, making a passing joke or two about it and letting life take its course. But the Chelebi, who can’t control his incurable agony, begins to get drunk each night and sit at the doorstep of the house wherein the silver-skinned beauty lives happily with her husband, crying for hours on end like a child. In the end this alarms the neighbors. Each night as the lover cries in agony, they are able neither to beat him and drive him away nor to comfort him. The Chelebi, as suited a gentleman, learns to cry inwardly without lashing out or annoying anybody. Bu
t gradually, his hopeless grief works its way into the neighborhood, becoming the sorrow and grief of all; the residents lose their sense of well-being, and like the fountain which flows mournfully in the square, the Chelebi himself became a font of sorrow. Initially, the talk of misery spreads throughout the neighborhood, becoming in turn the rumor of ill-fortune and later the certainty of doom. Some move away, some experience a spate of bad luck and some are unable to practice their craft, because they’ve lost the will to work. After the neighborhood empties out, one day the lovelorn Chelebi also moves away with his wife and children, leaving the silver-skinned beauty and her husband all alone. This misfortune, of which they are the focus, douses the flames of their love and causes them to drift apart. Though they live together for the rest of their lives, they’re never again able to be happy.

  I was on the verge of saying how much I liked this story because it showed the pitfulls of love and women, when for Heaven’s sake, I’d forgotten that I’d lost my capacity to reason. Since I’m now a woman, I’m going to say something else entirely. All right then, it’s something like this:

  Oh, how wonderful love is!

  Now then, who are those strangers bursting through the door?

  FIFTY-SIX

  I AM CALLED “BUTTERFLY”

  I saw the mob and knew the Erzurumis had begun slaying us witty miniaturists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It’s already been searched.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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