My Name is Red

by Orhan Pamuk

  He began to beat me angrily, as if I’d enraged him by answering his kiss with a kiss. But the others restrained him. They experienced a moment of indecision. Black was upset that there was a scuffle among them. It was as if they weren’t angry with me, but with the direction in which their lives were headed, and as a result, they wanted to take their revenge against the entire world.

  Black removed an object from his sash: a needle with a sharpened point. In an instant, he brought it to my face and made a gesture as if to plunge it into my eyes.

  “Eighty years ago, the great Bihzad, master of masters, understood that everything was coming to an end with the fall of Herat, and honorably blinded himself so nobody would force him to paint in another way,” he said. “A short while after he deliberately inserted this plume needle into his own eye and removed it, God’s exquisite darkness slowly descended over His beloved servant, this artist with the miraculous hand. This needle which came from Herat to Tabriz with the now drunk and blind Bihzad, was sent as a present by Shah Tahmasp to Our Sultan’s father, along with that legendary Book of Kings. At first, Master Osman was unable to determine why this object was sent. But today, he was able to see the ill will and just logic behind this cruel present. After Master Osman understood that Our Sultan wanted to have His own portrait made in the style of the European masters and that you all, whom he loved more than his own children, had betrayed him, he stuck this needle into each of his eyes last night in the Treasury — in imitation of Bihzad. Now, if I were to blind you, the accursed man responsible for bringing to ruin the workshop Master Osman established at the expense of his entire life, what of it?”

  “Whether or not you blind me, in the end, we’ll no longer be able to find a place for ourselves here,” I said. “If Master Osman truly goes blind, or passes away, and we paint the way we feel like painting, embracing our faults and individuality under the influence of the Franks so we might possess a style, we might resemble ourselves, but we won’t be ourselves. No, even if we were to agree to paint like the old masters, reasoning that only in this way could we be ourselves, Our Sultan, who’s turned His back even on Master Osman, will find others to replace us. No one will look at us anymore, we shall only incur pity. The raiding of the coffeehouse merely rubs salt into our wounds, because half the blame for this incident will fall to us miniaturists, who’ve slandered the respected preacher.”

  Although I tried at length to persuade them that it would work quite against us to quarrel, it was to no avail. They had no intention of listening to me. They were panicked. If they could only decide quickly, before morning, right or wrong, which of their lot was guilty, they were convinced they could save themselves, be delivered from torture and that everything having to do with the workshop would persist for years to come as it always had.

  Nevertheless, what Black threatened to do didn’t please the other two. What if it became evident that somebody else was guilty and Our Sultan learned they blinded me for no reason whatsoever? They were terrified both of Black’s closeness to Master Osman and his insolence toward him. They tried to pull back the needle which Black, in blind rage, persisted in holding before my eyes.

  Black fell into a panic, as if they were taking the plume needle from his hand, as if we’d taken sides against him. There was another scuffle. All I could do was tilt my head upward to escape the struggle over the needle, which was happening perilously close to my eyes.

  Everything occurred so fast that I couldn’t make out what happened at first. I felt a sharp but limited pain in my right eye; a passing numbness seized my forehead. Then everything was as it had been, yet a horror had already taken root within me. The oil lamp had been withdrawn, but I could still clearly see the figure before me decisively thrust the needle, this time into my left eye. He’d taken the needle from Black only moments before, and was more careful and meticulous now. When I understood that the needle effortlessly penetrated my eye, I lay dead still, though I felt the same burning sensation. The numbness in my forehead seemed to spread over my entire head, but ceased when the needle was removed. They were looking at the needle and then at my eyes in turn. It was as if they weren’t certain what had transpired. When everybody fully understood the misfortune that had befallen me, the commotion stopped and the weight upon my arms eased.

  I began to scream, nearly howling. Not from the pain, but from the terror of comprehending fully what had been done to me.

  At first, I sensed that my wailing put not only me at ease, but them as well. My voice brought us together.

  Even so, as my screaming persisted, their nervousness increased. I could no longer feel any pain. All I could think was that my eyes had been pierced with a needle.

  I was not yet blind. Thank goodness I could still see them watching me in terror and sorrow, I could still see their shadows moving aimlessly on the ceiling of the lodge. This at once pleased and alarmed me. “Unhand me,” I screamed. “Unhand me so I can see everything once more, I implore you.”

  “Quickly, tell us,” said Black. “How did you meet up with Elegant Effendi that night? Then we’ll unhand you.”

  “I was returning home from the coffeehouse. Poor Elegant Effendi accosted me. He was frenzied and very agitated. I pitied him at first. But leave me be now and I shall later recount it all. My eyes are fading.”

  “They won’t fade right away,” said Black with determination. “Believe me, Master Osman could still identify the horses with cut-open nostrils after his eyes had been pierced.”

  “Hapless Elegant Effendi said he wanted to talk to me and that I was the only person he could trust.”

  Yet it wasn’t him I pitied, but myself now.

  “If you tell us before the blood clots in your eyes, in the morning you can look upon the world to your heart’s content one last time,” said Black. “See, the rain has eased.”

  “ “Let’s go back to the coffeehouse,” I said to Elegant, but sensed at once that he didn’t like it there, and even that it frightened him. This was how I first knew Elegant Effendi had broken from us completely and had gone his separate way after painting with us for twenty-five years. In the last eight or ten years, after he married, I’d see him at the workshop, but I didn’t even know what he was occupied with…He told me he saw the last picture, how it contained a sin so grave we’d never live it down. As a consequence, he maintained, we’d all burn in Hell. He was agitated and possessed by fear, overcome with the sense of devastation felt by a man who’d unwittingly committed heresy.”

  “What heresy?”

  “When I asked him this very question, he opened his eyes wide in surprise as if to say, You mean you don’t know? It was then I thought how our friend had aged, as have we all. He said unfortunate Enishte had brazenly used the perspectival method in the last picture. In this picture, objects weren’t depicted according to their importance in Allah’s mind, but as they appeared to the naked eye — the way the Franks painted. This was the first transgression. The second was depicting Our Sultan, the Caliph of Islam, the same size as a dog. The third transgression also involved rendering Satan the same size, and in an endearing light. But what surpassed them all — a natural result of introducing this Frankish understanding into our painting — was drawing Our Sultan’s picture as large as life and his face in all its detail! Just like the idolators do…Or just like the “portraits’ that Christians, who couldn’t save themselves from their inherent idolatrous tendencies, painted upon their church walls and worshiped. Elegant Effendi, who learned of portraits from your Enishte, knew this quite well, and believed correctly that portraiture was the greatest of sins, and would be the downfall of Muslim painting. As we hadn’t gone to the coffeehouse, where, he claimed, our exalted Preacher Effendi and our religion were being maligned, he explained all this to me while we walked down the street. Occasionally, he’d stop, as though seeking help, ask me whether all of this was indeed correct, whether there wasn’t any recourse and whether we’d truly burn in Hell. He suffered fits of regre
t and beat his breast in remorse, but I was unpersuaded. He was an imposter who feigned regret.”

  “How did you know this?”

  “We’ve known Elegant Effendi since childhood. He’s very orderly, quiet, ordinary and colorless, like his gilding. It was as if the man standing before me then was dumber, more naive, more devout, yet more superficial than the Elegant we knew.”

  “I hear he’d also become quite close to the Erzurumis,” said Black.

  “No Muslim would ever feel such torment and regret for inadvertently committing a sin,” I said. “A good Muslim knows God is just and reasonable enough to consider the intent of His servants. Only pea-brained ignoramuses believe they’ll go to Hell for eating pork unawares. Anyway, a genuine Muslim knows the fear of damnation serves to frighten others, not himself. This is what Elegant Effendi was doing, you see, he wanted to scare me. It was your Enishte who taught him that he might do such a thing; and it was then I knew that this was indeed the case. Now, tell me in complete honesty, my dear illuminator brethren, has the blood begun to clot in my eyes, have my eyes lost their color?”

  They brought the lamp toward my face and gazed at it, displaying the care and compassion of surgeons.

  “Nothing seems to have changed.”

  Were these three, staring into my eyes, the last sight I’d see in this world? I knew I’d never forget these moments until the end of my life, and I related what follows, because despite my regret, I also felt hope:

  “Your Enishte taught Elegant Effendi that he was involved in some forbidden project by covering up the final picture, by revealing only a specific spot to each of us and having us draw something there — by giving the picture an air of mystery and secrecy, it was Enishte himself who instilled the fear of heresy. He, not the Erzurumis who’ve never seen an illuminated manuscript in their lives, was the first to spread the frenzy and panic about sin that infected us. Meanwhile, what would an artist with a clear conscience have to fear?”

  “There’s much that an artist with a clear conscience has to fear in our day,” said Black smugly. “Indeed, no one has anything to say against decoration, but pictures are forbidden by our faith. Because the illustrations of the Persian masters and even the masterpieces of the greatest masters of Herat are ultimately seen as an extension of border ornamentation, no one would take issue with them, reasoning that they enhanced the beauty of writing and the magnificence of calligraphy. And who sees our painting anyway? However, as we make use of the methods of the Franks, our painting is becoming less focused on ornamentation and intricate design and more on straightforward representation. This is what the Glorious Koran forbids and what displeased Our Prophet. Both Our Sultan and my Enishte knew this quite well. This was the reason for my Enishte’s murder.”

  “Your Enishte was murdered because he was afraid,” I said. “Just like you, he’d begun to claim that illustration, which he was doing himself, wasn’t contrary to the religion or the sacred book…This was exactly the pretext sought by the Erzurumis, who were desperate to find an aspect contrary to the religion. Elegant Effendi and your Enishte were a perfect match for each other.”

  “And you’re the one who killed them both, isn’t that so?” said Black.

  I thought for a moment that he would hit me, and in that instant, I also knew beautiful Shekure’s new husband really had nothing to complain about in the murder of his Enishte. He wouldn’t strike me, and even if he did, it made no difference to me any longer.

  “In actuality, as much as Our Sultan wanted to have a book prepared under the influence of the Frankish artists,” I continued stubbornly, “your Enishte wanted to prepare a provocative book whose taint of illicitness would feed his own pride. He felt a slavish awe toward the pictures of the Frankish masters he’d seen during his travels, and he’d fallen completely for the artistry that he regaled us about for days on end — you too must have heard that nonsense about perspective and portraiture. If you ask me, there was nothing damaging or sacrilegious in the book we were preparing…Since he was well aware of this, he pretended that he was preparing a forbidden book and this gave him great satisfaction…Being involved in such a dangerous venture with the Sultan’s personal permission was as important to him as the pictures of the Frankish masters. True, if we’d made a painting with the intent of exhibiting it, that would’ve been sacrilege. Yet in none of those pieces could I sense anything contrary to religion, any faithlessness, impiety or even the vaguest illicitness. Did you sense anything of the sort?”

  My eyes had almost imperceptibly lost strength, but thank God, I could see enough to know that my question gave them pause.

  “You cannot be certain, can you?” I said, gloating. “Even if you secretly believe that the blemish of blasphemy or the shadow of sacrilege exists in the pictures we’ve made, you could never accept this belief and express it, because this would be equivalent to giving credence to the zealots and Erzurumis who oppose and accuse you. On the other hand, you cannot claim with any conviction that you’re as innocent as freshly fallen snow, because this would mean giving up both the dizzying pride and refined self-congratulation of engaging in a secretive, mysterious and forbidden act. Do you know how I became aware that I was behaving pretentiously in this way? By bringing poor Elegant Effendi to this dervish lodge in the middle of the night! I brought him here with the excuse that we’d nearly frozen walking the streets so long. In actuality, it pleased me to show him I was a free-thinking Kalenderi throwback, or worse yet, that I aspired to be a Kalenderi. When Elegant understood I was the last of the followers of a dervish order based on pederasty, hashish consumption, vagrancy and all manner of aberrant behavior, I thought he’d fear and respect me even more, and in turn, be intimidated into silence. As fate would have it, the exact opposite happened. Our dim-witted boyhood friend disliked it here, and he quickly decided the accusations of blasphemy he’d learned from your Enishte were quite on the mark. So, our beloved apprenticeship companion, who’d at first implored, “Help me, convince me that we won’t go to Hell so I might sleep in peace tonight,” in a newfound, threatening tone, began to insist that “this will end in nothing but evil.” He was convinced the preacher hoja from Erzurum would hear the rumors that in the final picture we’d veered from the orders of Our Sultan, who’d never forgive this transgression. Convincing him everything was clear skies and sunshine was nearly impossible. He’d tell all to the preacher’s dull congregation, exaggerating Enishte’s absurdities, the anxieties about affronts to the religion and rendering the Devil in a favorable light, and they’d naturally believe every slanderous word. I don’t have to tell you how, not only the artisans, but the entire society of craftsmen have grown jealous of us since we’ve become the intense focus of Our Sultan’s attention. Now all of them will gleefully declare in unison “the miniaturists are mired in heresy.” Furthermore, the cooperation between Enishte and Elegant Effendi would prove this slander true. I say “slander” because I don’t believe in what my brother Elegant said about the book and the last picture. Even then, I would hear nothing against your late Enishte. I found it quite appropriate that Our Sultan turn his favors from Master Osman to Enishte Effendi, and I even believed, if not to the same degree, what Enishte described to me at length about the Frankish masters and their artistry. I used to believe quite sincerely that we Ottoman artists could comfortably take from this or that aspect of the Frankish methods as much as our hearts desired or as much as could be seen during a visit abroad — without bartering with the Devil or bringing any great harm upon us. Life was easy; your Enishte, may he rest in peace, had succeeded Master Osman, and was a new father to me in this new life.”

  “Let’s not discuss that point yet,” said Black. “First describe how you murdered Elegant.”

  “This deed,” I said, recognizing that I couldn’t use the word “murder,” “I committed this deed not only for us, to save us, but for the salvation of the entire workshop. Elegant Effendi knew he posed a powerful threat. I prayed to Almighty
God, begging him to give me a sign showing me how despicable this scoundrel really was. My prayers were answered when I offered Elegant money. God had shown me how wretched he really was. These gold pieces came to mind, but by divine inspiration, I lied. I said the gold pieces weren’t here in the lodge, but I’d hidden them elsewhere. We went out. I walked him through empty streets and out-of-the-way neighborhoods without any consideration for where we were going. I had no idea what I would do, and in short, I was afraid. At the end of our wandering, after we’d come to a street we’d passed earlier, our brother Elegant Effendi the gilder, who devoted his entire life to form and repetition, grew suspicious. But God provided me with an empty lot ravaged by fire, and nearby, a dry well.”

  At this point I knew I couldn’t go on and I told them so. “If you were in my shoes, you would’ve considered the salvation of your artist brethren and done the same thing,” I said confidently.

  When I heard them agree with me, I felt like crying. I was going to say it was because their compassion, which I hardly deserved, softened my heart, but no. I was going to say it was because I again heard the thud of his body hitting the bottom of the well wherein I dropped him after killing him, but no. I was going to say it was because I remembered how happy I was before becoming a murderer, how I’d been like everybody else, but no. The blind man who used to pass through our neighborhood in my childhood appeared in my mind’s eye: He’d take a dirty metal water dipper out of his even dirtier clothes, and would call out to us neighborhood kids who watched him from a distance, there by the local water fountain, “My children, which of you will fill this blind old man’s drinking cup with water from the fountain?” When no one went to his aid, he’d say, “It’d be a good turn, my children, a pious deed!” The color of his irises had faded and they were nearly the same color as the whites of his eyes.