by Orhan Pamuk
As a tree, I need not be part of a book. As the picture of a tree, however, I’m disturbed that I’m not a page within some manuscript. Since I’m not representing something in a book, what comes to mind is that my picture will be nailed to a wall and the likes of pagans and infidels will prostrate themselves before me in worship. May the followers of Erzurumi Hoja not hear that I secretly take pride in this thought — but then I’m overcome with the utmost fear and embarrassment.
The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don’t even know where I belong. I was supposed to be part of a story, but I fell from there like a leaf in autumn. Let me tell you about it:
Falling from My Story Like a Leaf Falls in Fall
Forty years ago, the Persian Shah Tahmasp, who was the archenemy of the Ottomans as well as the world’s greatest patron-king of the art of painting, began to grow senile and lost his enthusiasm for wine, music, poetry and painting; furthermore, he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working. Full of the suspicions of a long-faced, dark-spirited old geezer, he transferred his capital from Tabriz, which was then Persian territory, to Kazvin so it would be farther from the Ottoman armies. One day when he had grown even older, he was possessed by a jinn, had a nervous fit, and begging God’s forgiveness, completely swore off wine, handsome young boys and painting, which is proof enough that after this great shah lost his taste for coffee, he also lost his mind.
This was why the divinely inspired bookbinders, calligraphers, gilders and miniaturists, who created the greatest masterpieces in the world over a twenty-year period in Tabriz, scattered like a covey of partridges to other cities. Shah Tahmasp’s nephew and son-in-law, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza, invited the most gifted among them to Mashhad, where he served as provincial governor, and settled them in his miniaturists’ workshop to copy out a marvelous illuminated and illustrated manuscript of all seven fables of the Seven Thrones of Jami — the greatest poet in Herat during the reign of Tamerlane. Shah Tahmasp, who both admired and envied his intelligent and handsome nephew, and regretted having given his daughter to him, was consumed by jealousy when he heard about this magnificent book and angrily ousted his nephew from the post of Governor of Mashhad, banishing him to the city of Kain, before sending him off to the smaller town of Sebzivar in a renewed fit of anger. The calligraphers and illuminators of Mashhad thereupon dispersed to other cities and regions, to the book-arts workshops of other sultans and princes.
Miraculously, however, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s marvelous volume did not remain unfinished, for in his service he had a devoted librarian. This man would travel on horseback all the way to Shiraz where the best master gilders lived; then he’d take a couple pages to Isfahan seeking the most elegant calligraphers of Nestalik script; afterward he’d cross great mountains till he’d made it all the way to Bukhara where he’d arrange the picture’s composition and have the figures drawn by the great master painter who worked under the Uzbek Khan; next he’d go down to Herat to commission one of its half-blind old masters to paint from memory the sinuous curves of plants and leaves; visiting another calligrapher in Herat, he’d direct him to inscribe, in gold Rika script, the sign above a door within the picture; finally, he’d be off again to the south, to Kain, where displaying the half-page he had finished during his six months of traveling, he’d receive the praises of Sultan Ibrahim Mirza.
At this pace, it was clear that the book would never be completed, so mounted Tatar couriers were hired. In addition to the manuscript leaf, which was to receive artwork and scripted text, each horseman was given a letter describing the desired work in question to the artist. Thus, messengers carrying manuscript pages passed over the roads of Persia, Khorasan, the Uzbek territory and Transoxania. The creation of the book sped up with the fleet messengers. At times, on a snowy night, Chapter 11 and 29, for example, would cross paths in a caravansary wherein the howlings of wolves could be heard, and as they struck up a friendly conversation, they’d discover that they were working on the same book project and would try to determine between themselves where and in which fable the prospective pages, retrieved from their rooms for this purpose, actually belonged.
I was meant to be among the pages of this illustrated manuscript that I sadly heard was completed today. Unfortunately, on a cold winter’s day, the Tatar courier who was carrying me as he crossed a rocky mountain pass was ambushed by thieves. First they beat the poor Tatar, then they robbed him and raped him in a manner befitting thieves before mercilessly killing him. As a result, I know nothing about the page I’ve fallen from. My request is that you look at me and ask: “Were you perhaps meant to provide shade for Mejnun disguised as a shepherd as he visited Leyla in her tent?” or “Were you meant to fade into the night, representing the darkness in the soul of a wretched and hopeless man?” How I would’ve wanted to complement the happiness of two lovers who fled from the whole world, traversing oceans to find solace on an island rich with birds and fruit! I would’ve wanted to shade Alexander during the final moments of his life on his campaign to conquer Hindustan as he died from a persistent nosebleed brought on by sunstroke. Or was I meant to symbolize the strength and wisdom of a father offering advice on love and life to his son? Ah, to which story was I meant to add meaning and grace?
Among the brigands who’d killed the messenger and taken me with them, dragging me headlong from mountain to mountain and city to city, there was a thief who occasionally understood my worth, and had the refinement to realize that looking at the drawing of a tree is more pleasant than looking at a tree; but because he didn’t know to which story I belonged, he quickly tired of me. After dragging me from city to city, this rogue didn’t tear me apart and dispose of me as I’d feared he might, but sold me to a cultivated man in a caravansary for a jug of wine. Sometimes at night this unfortunate delicate-spirited man would stare at me by candlelight and cry. In time, he died of grief and they sold his belongings. Thanks to the master storyteller who purchased me, I’ve come all the way to Istanbul. Now, I’m most happy, and honored to be here tonight among you, the Ottoman Sultan’s miraculously inspired, eagle-eyed, iron-willed, elegant-wristed, sensitive-spirited miniaturists and calligraphers — and for Heaven’s sake, I beg of you not to believe those who claim I’ve been hastily sketched onto coarse paper by some master miniaturist as a wall prop.
But hear yet what other lies, slander and brazen untruths are being spread! You might remember how last night my master nailed the picture of a dog here on the wall and recounted the adventures of this crass beast; and how at the same time he told of the adventures of Husret Hoja of Erzurum! Well now, the admirers of His Excellency Nusret Hoja have completely misunderstood this story; they think he was the target of our account. Could we have possibly said that the great preacher, His Esteemed Excellency, was of uncertain birth? God forbid! Would it have even crossed our minds? What mischief, what a crude lie! Clearly, Husret of Erzurum is being confused with Nusret of Erzurum, so let me proceed to tell you the story of Cross-Eyed Nedret Hoja of Sivas and the Tree.
Besides denouncing the wooing of pretty boys and the art of painting, this Cross-Eyed Nedret Hoja of Sivas maintained that coffee was the Devil’s work and that coffee drinkers would go to Hell. Hey, you from Sivas, have you forgotten how this enormous branch of mine was bent? Let me tell you about it, then, but swear you won’t tell anyone, and may Allah protect you from baseless slander. One morning, I awoke to find that a giant of a man — God protect him, he was as tall as a minaret with hands like a lion’s claws — had climbed up onto this branch of mine and hidden beneath my lush leaves together with the aforementioned Hoja and, excuse the expression, they were going at it like dogs in heat. While the giant, whom I later realized was the Devil, attended to his business with our hero, he was compassionately kissing his lovely ear and whispering into it, “Coffee is a sin, coffee is a vice…” Accordingly, those who believe in the harmful effects of coffee, believe not in the commandments of our good religion, but in the Devil himself.
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And finally, I shall make mention of Frank painters, so if there are degenerates among you who have pretensions to be like them, may you heed my warning and be deterred. Now, these Frank painters depict the faces of kings, priests, noblemen and even women in such a manner that after gazing upon the portrait, you’d be able to identify that person on the street. Their wives roam freely on the streets anyway — now, just imagine the rest. As if this weren’t enough, they’ve taken matters even further. I don’t mean in regard to pimping, but in regard to painting.
A great European master miniaturist and another great master artist are walking through a Frank meadow discussing virtuosity and art. As they stroll, a forest comes into view before them. The more expert of the two says to the other: “Painting in the new style demands such talent that if you depicted one of the trees in this forest, a man who looked upon that painting could come here, and if he so desired, correctly select that tree from among the others.”
I thank Allah that I, the humble tree before you, have not been drawn with such intent. And not because I fear that if I’d been thus depicted all the dogs in Istanbul would assume I was a real tree and piss on me: I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.
ELEVEN
I AM CALLED BLACK
The snow began to fall at a late hour and continued till dawn. I spent the night reading Shekure’s letter again and again. I paced in the empty room of the empty house, occasionally leaning toward the candlestick; in the flickering light of the dim candle, I watched the tense quivering of my beloved’s angry letters, the somersaults they turned trying to deceive me and their hip-swinging right-to-left progression. Abruptly, those shutters would open before my eyes, and my beloved’s face and her sorrowful smile would appear. And when I saw her real face, I forgot all of those other faces whose sour-cherry mouths had increasingly matured and ripened in my imagination.
In the middle of the night I lost myself in dreams of marriage: I had no doubts about my love or that it was reciprocated — we were married in a state of great contentment — but, my imaginary happiness, set in a house with a staircase, was dashed when I couldn’t find appropriate work and began arguing with my wife, unable to make her heed my words.
I knew I’d appropriated these ominous images from the section on the ills of marriage in Gazzali’s The Revival of Religious Science, which I’d read during my nights as a bachelor in Arabia; at the same time, I recalled that there was actually advice on the benefits of marriage in that same section, though now I could remember only two of these benefits: first, having my household kept in order (there was no such order in my imagined house); second, being spared the guilt of self-abuse and of dragging myself — an even deeper sense of guilt — behind pimps leading me through dark alleyways to the lairs of prostitutes.
The thought of salvation at this late hour brought masturbation to mind. With a simple-minded desire, and to rid my mind of this irrepressible urge, I retired to a corner of the room, as was my wont, but after a while I realized I couldn’t jack off — proof well enough that I’d fallen in love again after twelve years!
This struck such excitement and fear into my heart that I walked around the room nearly atremble like the flame of the candle. If Shekure meant to present herself at the window, then why this letter, which put the opposite belief into play? Why did her father call for me? As I paced, I sensed that the door, wall and squeaky floor, stuttering as I myself did, were trying to creak their responses to my every question.
I looked at the picture I’d made years ago, which depicted Shirin stricken with love upon gazing at Hüsrev’s image hanging from a branch. It didn’t embarrass me as it would each time it came to mind in subsequent years, nor did it bring back my happy childhood memories. Toward morning, my mind had mastered the situation: By returning the picture, Shekure had made a move in an amatory chess game she was masterfully luring me into. I sat in the candlelight and wrote her a letter of response.
In the morning, after sleeping for a spell, I went out and walked a long way through the streets, carrying the letter upon my breast and my light pen-and-ink holder, as was my custom, in my sash. The snow widened Istanbul’s narrow streets and freed the city of its crowds. All was quieter and slower, as it’d been in my childhood. Crows seemed to have beset Istanbul’s roofs, domes and gardens just as they had on the snowy winter days of my youth. I walked swiftly, listening to my steps in the snow and watching the fog of my breath. I grew excited, expecting the palace workshop that my Enishte wanted me to visit to be as silent as the streets. Before I entered the Jewish quarter, I sent word by way of a little street urchin to Esther, who’d be able to deliver my letter to Shekure, telling her where to meet me before the noontime prayers.
I arrived early at the royal artisans’ workshop located behind the Hagia Sophia. Except for the icicles hanging from the eaves, there was no change in the building where I’d often visited my Enishte and for a time worked as a child apprentice.
Following a handsome young apprentice, I walked past elderly master binders dazed from the smell of glue and bookbinder’s paste, master miniaturists whose backs had hunched at an early age and youths who mixed paints without even looking into the bowls perched on their knees, so sorrowfully were they absorbed by the flames of the stove. In a corner, I saw an old man meticulously painting an ostrich egg on his lap, another elder enthusiastically embellishing a drawer and a young apprentice graciously watching them both. Through an open door, I witnessed young students being reprimanded as they leaned forward, their noses almost touching the pages spread before their reddened faces, as they tried to understand the mistakes they’d made. In another room, a mournful and melancholy apprentice, having forgotten momentarily about colors, papers and painting, stared into the street I’d just now eagerly walked down.
We climbed the icy staircase. We walked through the portico, which wrapped around the inner second floor of the building. Below, in the inner courtyard covered with snow, two young students, obviously trembling from the cold despite their thick capes of coarse wool, were waiting — perhaps for an imminent beating. I recalled my early youth and the beatings given to students who were lazy or who wasted expensive paints, and the blows of the bastinado, which landed on the soles of their feet until they bled.
We entered a warm room. I saw two novices who’d recently finished their apprenticeships. Since the great masters, whom Master Osman had given workshop names, now worked at home, this room, which once aroused excessive reverence and delight in me, no longer seemed like the workshop of a great and wealthy sultan but merely a largish room in some secluded caravansary in the remote mountains of the East.
Immediately off to the side, before a long counter, I saw the Head Illuminator, Master Osman, for the first time in fifteen years; he seemed like an apparition. Whenever I contemplated illustrating and painting during my travels, the great master would appear in my mind’s eye as if he were Bihzad himself; now, in his white outfit and in the snow-white light falling through the window facing the Hagia Sophia, he looked as though he’d long become one of the spirits of the Otherworld. I kissed his hand, which I noticed was mottled, and I introduced myself. I explained how my Enishte had enrolled me here as a youth, but that I’d preferred a bureaucratic post and left. I recounted my years on the road, my time spent in Eastern cities in the service of pashas as a clerk or treasurer’s secretary. I told him how, working with Serhat Pasha and others, I’d met calligraphers and illuminators in Tabriz and produced books; how I’d spent time in Baghdad and Aleppo, in Van and Tiflis, and how I’d seen many battles.
“Ah, Tiflis!” the great master said, as he gazed at the light from the snow-covered garden filtering through the oilskin covering the window. “Is it snowing there now?”
His demeanor befitted those old Persian masters who grew blind perfecting their artistry; who, after a certain age, lived half-saintly, half-senile lives, and about whom endless legends were told. I straightaway saw in his jinnlike eye
s that he despised my Enishte vehemently and that he was furthermore suspicious of me. Even so, I explained how in the Arabian deserts snow didn’t simply fall to the Earth, as it was now falling onto the Hagia Sophia, but onto memories as well. I spun a yarn: When it snowed on the fortress of Tiflis, the washerwomen sang songs the color of flowers and children hid ice cream under their pillows for summer.
“Do tell me what those illuminators and painters illustrate in the countries you’ve visited,” he said. “What do they depict?”
A dreamy-eyed young painter who was ruling out pages in the corner, lost in revery, raised his head from his folding work desk along with the others in the room and gave me a look that said, “Let this be your most honest answer.” Many of these craftsmen didn’t know the corner grocer in their own neighborhood, or how much an oke’s worth of bread cost, but they were very curious about the latest gossip East of Persia, where armies clashed, princes strangled one another and plundered cities before burning them to the ground, where war and peace were contested each day, where the best verses were written and the best illustrations and paintings were made for centuries.
“Shah Tahmasp reigned for fifty-two years. In the last years of his life, as you know, he abandoned his love of books, illustrating and painting, turned his back on poets, illustrators and calligraphers, and resigning himself to worship, passed away, whereupon his son, Ismail, ascended to the throne,” I said. “Shah Tahmasp had been well aware of his son’s disagreeable and antagonistic nature, so he kept him, the shah-to-be, behind locked doors for twenty years. As soon as Ismail assumed the throne, in a mad frenzy, he had his younger brothers strangled — some of whom he’d blinded beforehand. In the end, however, Ismail’s enemies succeeded in plying him with opium and poisoning him, and after being liberated from his worldly presence, they placed his half-witted older brother Muhammad Khodabandeh on the throne. During his reign, all the princes, brothers, provincial governors and Uzbeks, in short everyone, started to revolt. They went after each other and our Serhat Pasha with such martial ferocity that all of Persia turned to smoke and dust and was left in disarray. Indeed, the present shah, bereft of money and intelligence and half-blind, is not fit to sponsor the writing and illustration of illuminated manuscripts. Thus, these legendary illustrators of Kazvin and Herat, all these elderly masters, along with their apprentices, these artisans who made masterpieces in Shah Tahmasp’s workshops, painters and colorists whose brushes made horses gallop at full speed and whose butterflies fluttered off the page, all of these master binders and calligraphers, every last one was left without work, penniless and destitute, homeless and bereft. Some migrated to the North among the Uzbeks, some West to India. Others took up different types of work, wasting themselves and their honor, and still others entered the service of insignificant princes and provincial governors, all sworn enemies of each other, to begin working on palm-size books containing at most a few leaves of illustration. Rapidly transcribed, hastily painted, cheap books appeared everywhere, matching the tastes of common soldiers, boorish pashas and spoiled princes.”
