My Name is Red

by Orhan Pamuk

  After passing the Bayazid Mosque, I watched the Golden Horn from a promontory: The horizon was brightening, yet the water was still black. Ever so slowly bobbing in invisible waves, two fishermen’s rowboats, freight ships with their sails furled and an abandoned galleon repeatedly insisted that I not leave. Were the tears flowing from my eyes caused by the needle? I told myself to dream of the splendid life I would live in Hindustan off the splendid works my talent would create!

  I left the road, ran through two muddy gardens and took shelter beneath an old stone house surrounded by greenery. This was the house where I came each Tuesday as an apprentice to get Master Osman and followed two paces behind him carrying his bag, portfolio, pen box and writing board on our way to the workshop. Nothing had changed here, except the plane trees in the yard and along the street had grown so large that an aura of grandeur, power and wealth hearkening back to the time of Sultan Süleyman had settled over the house and street.

  Since the road leading to the harbor was near, I succumbed to the Devil’s temptation, and was overcome by the excitement of seeing the arches of the workshop building where I’d spent a quarter century. This was how I ended up tracing the path that I’d take as an apprentice following Master Osman: down Archer’s Street which smelled dizzyingly of linden blossoms in the spring, past the bakery where my master would buy round meat pasties, up the hill lined with beggars and quince and chestnut trees, past the closed shutters of the new market and the barber whom my master greeted each morning, alongside the empty field where acrobats would set up their tents in summer and perform, in front of the foul-smelling rooming houses for bachelors, beneath moldy-smelling Byzantine arches, before Ibrahim Pasha’s palace and the column made up of three coiling snakes, which I’d drawn hundreds of times, past the plane tree, which we depicted a different way each time, emerging into the Hippodrome and under the chestnut and mulberry trees wherein sparrows and magpies alighted and chirped madly in the mornings.

  The heavy door of the workshop was closed. There was nobody at the entrance or under the arched portico above. I was able to look up only momentarily at the shuttered small windows from which, as apprentices stifled by boredom, we used to stare at the trees, before I was accosted.

  He had a shrill voice that clawed at one’s ears. He said that the bloody ruby-handled dagger in my hand belonged to him and that his nephew, Shevket, and Shekure had conspired to steal it from his house. This was apparently proof enough that I was one of Black’s men who raided his house at night to abduct Shekure. This arrogant, shrill-voiced, irate man also knew Black’s artist friends and that they would return to the workshop. He brandished a long sword that shimmered brightly with a strange red and indicated that he had a number of accounts that, for whatever reason, he meant to settle with me. I considered telling him that there was some misunderstanding, but I saw the incredible anger on his face. I could read in his expression that he was about to launch a sudden murderous assault on me. How I would’ve liked to say, “I beg of you, stop.”

  But he’d already acted.

  I wasn’t even able to raise my dagger, I simply lifted the hand in which I held my satchel.

  The satchel dropped. In one smooth motion, without losing speed, the sword cut first through my hand and then clear through my neck, lopping off my head.

  I knew I’d been beheaded from the two odd steps taken by my poor body which had left me behind in its confusion, from the stupid manner in which my hand waved the dagger and from the way my lonely body collapsed, blood spraying from the neck like a fountain. My poor feet, which continued to move as though still walking, kicked uselessly like the legs of a dying horse.

  From the muddy ground upon which my head had fallen, I could neither see my murderer nor my satchel full of gold pieces and pictures, which I still wanted to cling to tightly. These things were behind me, in the direction of the hill leading down to the sea and Galleon Harbor which I would never reach. My head would never again turn and see them, or the rest of the world. I forgot about them and let my thoughts take me away.

  This is what occurred to me the moment before I was beheaded: The ship shall depart from the harbor; this was joined in my mind with a command to hurry; it was the way my mother would say “hurry” when I was a child. Mother, my neck aches and all is still.

  This is what they call death.

  But I knew that I wasn’t dead yet. My punctured pupils were motionless, but I could still see quite well through my open eyes.

  What I saw from ground level filled my thoughts: The road inclining slightly upward, the wall, the arch, the roof of the workshop, the sky…this is how the picture receded.

  It seemed as if this moment of observation went on and on and I realized seeing had become a variety of memory. I was reminded of what I thought when staring for hours at a beautiful picture: If you stare long enough your mind enters the time of the painting.

  All time had now become this time.

  It seemed as if no one would see me, as my thoughts faded away, my mud-covered head would go on staring at this melancholy incline, the stone wall and the nearby yet unattainable mulberry and chestnut trees for years.

  This endless waiting suddenly assumed such bitter and tedious proportions, I wanted nothing more than to quit this time.

  SIXTY

  I, SHEKURE

  Black had hidden us away in the house of a distant relative, where I spent a sleepless night. In the bed where I curled up with Hayriye and the children, I was occasionally able to nod off amid the sounds of snoring and coughing, but in my restless dreams, I saw strange creatures and women whose arms and legs had been severed and randomly reattached; they wouldn’t stop chasing me and continually woke me. Toward morning, the cold roused me and I covered Shevket and Orhan, embracing them, kissing their heads and begging Allah for pleasant dreams, such as I’d enjoyed during the blissful days when I slept in peace under my late father’s roof.

  I couldn’t sleep, however. After the morning prayers, looking out on the street through the shutters of the window in the small, dark room, I saw what I’d always seen in my happy dreams: A ghostly man, exhausted from warring and the wounds he’d received, brandishing a stick as if it were a sword, longingly approach me with familiar steps. In my dream, whenever I was on the verge of embracing this man, I’d awake in tears. When I saw the man in the street was Black, the scream that would never leave my throat in dreams sounded.

  I ran and opened the door.

  His face was swollen and bruised purple from fighting. His nose was mangled and covered in blood. He had a large gash from his shoulder to his neck. His shirt had turned bright red from the blood. Like the husband of my dreams, Black smiled at me faintly because he had, in the end, successfully returned.

  “Get inside,” I said.

  “Call for the children,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  “You’re in no condition to return home.”

  “There’s no reason to fear him anymore,” he said. “The murderer is Velijan Effendi, the Persian.”

  “Olive…” I said. “Did you kill that miserable rogue?”

  “He’s fled to India on the ship that departed from Galleon Harbor,” he said and avoided my eyes, knowing that he hadn’t properly accomplished his task.

  “Will you be able to walk back to our house?” I said. “Shall we have them bring a horse for you?”

  I sensed that he would die upon arriving home and I pitied him. Not because he would die alone, but because he’d never known any true happiness. I could see from the sorrow and determination in his eyes that he wished not to be in this strange house, and that he actually wanted to disappear without being seen by anybody in this horrible state. With some difficulty, they mounted him on a horse.

  During our trip back, as we passed through side streets clinging to our bundles, the children were at first too frightened to look Black in the face. But from astride the slowly ambling horse, Black was still able to describe how he foiled the schem
es of the wretched murderer who’d killed their grandfather and how he challenged him to a sword fight. I could see that the children had warmed up to him somewhat, and I prayed to Allah: Please, don’t let him die!

  When we reached the house, Orhan shouted, “We’re home!” with such joy I had the intuition that Azrael, the Angel of Death, pitied us and Allah would grant Black more time. But I knew from experience that one could never tell when exalted Allah would take one’s soul, and I wasn’t overly hopeful.

  We helped Black down from the horse. We brought him upstairs, and settled him into the bed in my father’s room, the one with the blue door. Hayriye boiled water and brought it upstairs. Hayriye and I undressed him, tearing his clothes and cutting them with scissors, removing the bloodied shirt stuck to his flesh, his sash, his shoes and his underclothes. When we opened the shutters, the soft winter sunlight playing on the branches in the garden filled the room, reflected off the ewers, pots, glue boxes, inkwells, pieces of glass and penknives, and illuminated Black’s deathly pale skin, and his flesh- and sour-cherry-colored wounds.

  I soaked pieces of bedding in hot water and rubbed them with soap. Then I wiped clean Black’s body, carefully as though cleaning a valuable antique carpet, and affectionately and eagerly as though caring for one of my boys. Without pressing on the bruises that covered his face, without jarring the cut in his nostril, I cleansed the horrible wound on his shoulder as a doctor might. As I’d do when bathing the children when they were babies, I cooed to him in a singsong voice. There were cuts on his chest and arms as well. The fingers of his left hand were purple from being bitten. The rags I used to wipe his body were soon bloodsoaked. I touched his chest; I felt the softness of his abdomen with my hand; I looked at his cock for a long time. The sounds of the children were coming from the courtyard below. Why did some poets call this thing a “reed pen?”

  I could hear Esther enter the kitchen with that joyous voice and mysterious air she adopted when she brought news, and I went down to greet her.

  She was so excited she began without embracing or kissing me: Olive’s severed head was found in front of the workshop; the pictures proving his guilt in the crimes and his satchel had also been recovered. He was intending to flee to Hindustan, but had decided first to call at the workshop one last time.

  There were witnesses to the ordeal: Hasan, encountering Olive, had drawn his red sword and cut off Olive’s head in a single stroke.

  As she recounted, I thought about where my unfortunate father was. Learning that the murderer had received his due punishment at first put my fears to rest. And revenge lent me a feeling of comfort and justice. At that instant, I wondered intensely whether my now-dead father could experience this feeling; suddenly, it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.

  “Don’t cry, my dear,” said Esther. “You see, in the end everything has turned out fine.”

  I gave her four gold coins. She took them, one at a time, into her mouth and bit down upon them crudely with eagerness and longing.

  “Coins counterfeited by the Venetians are everywhere,” she said, smiling.

  As soon as she’d left, I warned Hayriye not to let the children upstairs. I went up to the room where Black lay, locked the door behind me and cuddled up eagerly next to Black’s naked body. Then, more out of curiosity than desire, more out of care than fear, I did what Black wanted me to do in the house of the Hanged Jew the night my poor father was killed.

  I can’t say I completely understood why Persian poets, who for centuries had likened that male tool to a reed pen, also compared the mouths of us women to inkwells, or what lay behind such comparisons whose origins had been forgotten through rote repetition — was it the smallness of the mouth? The arcane silence of the inkwell? Was it that God Himself was an illuminator? Love, however, must be understood, not through the logic of a woman like me who continually racks her brain to protect herself, but through its illogic.

  So, let me tell you a secret: There, in that room that smelled of death, it wasn’t the object in my mouth that delighted me. What delighted me then, lying there with the entire world throbbing between my lips, was the happy twittering of my sons cursing and roughhousing with each other in the courtyard.

  While my mouth was thus occupied, my eyes could make out Black looking at me in a completely different way. He said he’d never again forget my face and my mouth. As with some of my father’s old books, his skin smelled of moldy paper, and the scent of the Treasury’s dust and cloth had saturated his hair. As I let myself go and caressed his wounds, his cuts and swellings, he groaned like a child, moving further and further away from death, and it was then I understood I would become even more attached to him. Like a solemn ship that gains speed as its sails swell with wind, our gradually quickening lovemaking took us boldly into unfamiliar seas.

  I could tell by the way he was able to navigate these waters, even on his deathbed, that Black had plied these seas many times before with who knows what manner of indecent women. While I was confused as to whether the forearm I kissed was my own or his, whether I was sucking my own finger or an entire life, he stared out of one half-opened eye, nearly intoxicated by his wounds and pleasure, checking where the world was taking him, and from time to time, he would hold my head delicately in his hands, and stare at my face astounded, now looking as if at a picture, now as if at a Mingerian whore.

  At the peak of pleasure, he cried out like the legendary heroes cut clear in half with a single stroke of the sword in fabled pictures that immortalized the clash of Persian and Turanian armies; the fact that this cry could be heard throughout the neighborhood frightened me. Like a genuine master miniaturist at the moment of greatest inspiration, holding his reed under the direct guidance of Allah, yet still able to take into consideration the form and composition of the entire page, Black continued to direct our place in the world from a corner of his mind even through his highest excitement.

  “You can tell them you were spreading salve onto my wounds,” he said breathlessly.

  These words not only constituted the color of our love — which settled into a bottleneck between life and death, prohibition and paradise, hopelessness and shame — they also were the excuse for our love. For the next twenty-six years, until my beloved husband Black collapsed next to the well one morning to die of a bad heart, each afternoon, as the sunlight filtered into the room through the slats of the shutters, and for the first few years, to the sounds of Shevket and Orhan playing, we made love, always referring to it as “spreading salve onto wounds.” This was how my jealous sons, whom I didn’t want to suffer beatings at the jealous whims of a rough and melancholy father, were able to continue sleeping in the same bed with me for years. All sensible women know how it’s much nicer to sleep curled up with one’s children than with a melancholy husband who’s been beaten down by life.

  We, my children and I, were happy, but Black couldn’t be. The most obvious reason for this was the wound on his shoulder and neck that never completely healed; my beloved husband was left “crippled,” as I heard him described by others. But this didn’t disrupt his life, other than in its appearance. There were even times when I heard other women, who’d seen my husband from a distance, describe him as handsome. But Black’s right shoulder was lower than the left and his neck remained oddly cocked. I also heard gossip to the effect that a woman like myself could only marry a husband whom she felt was beneath her, and how as much as Black’s wound was the cause of his discontent, it was also the secret source of our shared happiness.

  As with all gossip, there is perhaps an element of truth in this as well. However deprived and destitute I felt at not being able to pass down the streets of Istanbul mounted tall on an exceptionally beautiful horse, surrounded by slav
es, lady servants and attendants — what Esther always thought I deserved — I also occasionally longed for a brave and spirited husband who held his head high and looked at the world with a sense of victory.

  Whatever the cause, Black always remained melancholy. Because I knew that his sadness had nothing to do with his shoulder, I believed that somewhere in a secret corner of his soul he was possessed by a jinn of sorrow that dampened his mood even during our most exhilarating moments of lovemaking. To appease that jinn, at times he’d drink wine, at times stare at illustrations in books and take an interest in art, at times he’d even spend his days and nights with miniaturists chasing after pretty boys. There were periods when he entertained himself in the company of painters, calligraphers and poets in orgies of puns, double entendres, innuendos, metaphors and games of flattery, and there were periods when he forgot everything and surrendered himself to secretarial duties and a governmental clerkship under Hunched Süleyman Pasha, into whose service he’d managed to enter. Four years later, when Our Sultan died, and with the ascension of Sultan Mehmed, who turned his back entirely on all artistry, Black’s enthusiasm for illumination and painting turned from an openly celebrated pleasure into a private secret pursued behind closed doors. There were times when he’d open one of the books left to us by my father, and stare, guilty and sad, at an illustration made during the era of Tamerlane’s sons in Herat — yes, Shirin falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture — not as if it were part of a happy game of talent still being played in palace circles, but as if he were dwelling upon a sweet secret long surrendered to memory.