The Architect's Apprentice

by Elif Shafak

  The meeting having reached an end, Jahan was being ushered out, walking backwards, when the Shah said, ‘You never married, I heard. Why is that?’

  Jahan stopped, his eyes cast down. Silence thicker than honey covered the hall. It was as though the entire court was waiting to hear what he had to say.

  ‘I had pledged my heart to someone, your Highness –’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jahan said. Those who grew up with stories of love that inevitably ended in rapture, revelry, chivalry or calamity could not fathom why for many people love amounted to naught, eventually. ‘She was beyond my reach and did not love me. It was not meant to be.’

  ‘There’re plenty of women,’ the Shah said.

  Jahan would have liked to say the same thing to him. Why did he still mourn his wife? What he could not put into words, the Shah understood. A thin smile etched on his lips as he said, ‘Maybe not.’

  The next afternoon, Jahan received a letter from the palace nominating him as one of the two Chief Royal Architects for the Illuminated Tomb – the rauza-i-munavvara. He would be paid generously in rupees and ashrafis, and every six months rewarded accordingly. But it was one line, in particular, that stayed with him: I hereby ask you, Jahan Khan Rumi, the builder of memories, the descendant of the respectable Master Sinan, who was second to none, and was followed worldwide, to contribute to the raising of this most glorious tomb, which will invoke the admiration of generations after generations, until the Day of Judgement, when no stone will stand upon another under the vault of heaven.

  Jahan accepted, despite himself. He joined the team of builders and, even though he was in a foreign land where he knew not a single soul and had no past to recall should the present prove too gruelling, he felt strangely at home.

  The project was massive. Expensive. Fraught with difficulties. Thousands of labourers, masons, stone-cutters, quarries, bricklayers, tile-setters and carpenters were toiling at full tilt. It was possible to hear a babel of languages moving from one place to another. There were sculptors from Bukhara, quarrymen from Isfahan, carvers from Tabriz, calligraphers from Kashmir, painters from Samarkand, decorators from Florence and jewellers from Venice. It was almost as if the Shah, in his determination to see the building completed as quickly as possible, had called on every craftsman on earth who might be of use to him. Implacable, stubborn, he held sway over everyone to the point just short of drawing the designs himself. That he had some knowledge in the craft made life harder for his architects. Jahan had never met a monarch so involved in a construction. Every two days the Shah would hold a conference with them, asking questions, stating opinions and coming up with new impossible demands, as crowned heads often tended to do.

  Shah Jahan was a man who pledged his wrath in steel, his love in diamonds and his grief in white marble. Under his auspices Jahan wrote to a number of masons in Istanbul, inviting them over. He was delighted when Isa, his favourite student, agreed to come. He felt compassion and admiration for him and for all that he could achieve with his talents and his youth. He wondered if Master Sinan had regarded them with similar feelings. If so, it was a pity that Jahan had not understood.

  There were elephants on the site. Restlessly, they carried the heaviest marbles and planks. Sometimes in the afternoons, under the setting sun, Jahan would watch them wallow in puddles, a thrill of affection running through him. He could not help but think if human beings could only live more like animals, without a thought to the past or the future, and without rounds of lies and deceit, this world would be a more peaceful place, and perhaps a happier one.

  I got married. The Shah, having remembered our exchange, had given orders to find me a good-hearted bride. They did. My wife, sixty-six years younger than me, was a woman of a kind disposition and wise words. When she was two months with child, she had lost all her family in a flood. As Mirabai the poetess had once done, she declined to join her husband on his funeral pyre. Her eyes were darker than all my secrets, her smile was always ready to blossom; her black, lustrous hair flew between my fingers like perfumed waters. Many a night, admiring her profile in the candlelight, I told her what she already knew: ‘I’m too old for you, Amina. When I die, you must marry a young man.’

  ‘Don’t put a curse on us, husband,’ she would say each time. ‘Hush, now.’

  The next autumn Amina’s baby was born, a boy with dimpled cheeks. I loved him as if he were my own. I named him Sinan; and, remembering my master’s first appellation, I added Joseph; and, out of respect for my wife’s family, I named him Mutamid, after my father-in-law. Here he was, our son, Sinan Joseph Mutamid; no other like him in this vast expanse of countless souls and even more gods, thriving under the Agra sky, each day growing taller, stronger; an Ottoman lad in India, although I had been a fake Indian in the Ottoman lands.

  He has his mother’s radiant complexion and hazel eyes. The occasional frowns on the broad sweep of his forehead hint at his impatience and curiosity about the inner workings of each thing he observes. When he began cutting teeth, his mother and his many aunts placed several objects in front of him to divine the path he would follow in life – a silvered mirror, a plume, a golden bracelet and sealing wax. If he chose the mirror, he would be keen on beauty, a painter or a poet. The plume: he would be a scribe. The bracelet: a merchant. The wax: a high official.

  Sinan Joseph Mutamid was still for a moment, scowling at the items scattered at his feet, as if they contained a riddle to solve. The women, in the meantime, kept cooing and calling him, so that he would pick what they had in mind for him. He ignored them. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he reached out and grabbed the amulet on my neck, Daki dey’s protection against the evil eye.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Amina said, looking worried.

  I chuckled, pulling her close to me, regardless of what her sisters might think. I said, ‘Nothing bad, trust me.’ It just meant that he would make his own decisions, no matter what they laid out in front of him.

  When we go out, the three of us, the whole town gawks at us. At times I come across men who, with their lewd jokes and jarring laughs, insinuate what a lucky rotter I am for having such a wife; or they ask how I manage to satisfy her at my age. So we find another way of walking on the streets. My wife, with the child in her arms, saunters ahead of me. I fall behind, trudging slowly, contemplating them – her tenderness as she caresses the boy’s head; his trusting, winsome smile; their murmurs like the distant soughing of waves from a city now far away. I take it all in, conjuring another moment in time, knowing that after I am gone they will still be strolling; nothing will change. And the knowledge of this, instead of filling me with sorrow, fills me with hope, yes, tremendous hope.

  There is nothing about my wife that reminds me of Mihrimah. Neither her voice, nor her mien, nor her temperament. On starry nights when she lies on top of me, her warmth covering my skin like a mantle, when I am ashamed of my age and aroused by her softness, she slides on to me like a sheath on to a sword, her beauty swallowing my ugliness, whispering into my ear, ‘God sent you to me.’ I know that I would have never heard such words from Mihrimah, even if we had been destined to be together. No, my wife could not have been more different from her. And I could not have been more content. Yet … not a single day has passed since I left Istanbul without Mihrimah crossing my mind. I still remember her. I still ache. A travelling pain that moves so fast from one limb to another that I cannot say whether it exists. She is the shadow that follows me everywhere, towering above me when I feel low, draining the light from my soul.

  A year after I started working for the great Shah, I was asked to design the dome of the Illuminated Tomb, which they now name the Taj Mahal. I, too, have had a change of name. Though they still call me Jahan Khan Rumi, everyone, even little children, knows me as the Dome Maker.

  I inspect the site every morning. It is a long walk and takes me a while. The other day, a novice turned up with an elephant by his side. ‘Why don’t you let the
beast carry you, master?’

  They helped me to climb up. I sat inside the howdah and looked at the workers toiling endlessly, building for God, building for the sovereign, building for their ancestors, building for a noble cause, building without knowing why, and I was so glad I was up there alone and not down there with them, because I could not stop the tears from streaming down my face and I sobbed like the frail old man I have become.

  I am aware that I won’t be around to see the completion of the Taj Mahal. If I don’t die soon, it could only mean dada’s curse still holds. Then I should abandon this land on my own. I have left instructions for Isa and my pupils, should they wish to follow my advice – after all, with apprentices you never know who will continue your legacy, and who will let you down. It doesn’t matter. With or without me, the building will be raised. What my master did inside the dome of the Shehzade Mosque, our first major construction – where there were no accidents, no betrayals, and we were as one – I shall do inside the dome of the Taj Mahal. I will hide somewhere a detail for Mihrimah, which only the knowing eye will recognize. A moon and a sun, locked together in a fatal embrace – such is the meaning of her name.

  We have been told to inscribe on pure marble: In this world this edifice has been made/To display thereby the glory of the Creator. I would have liked to add underneath: And the love of another human being …

  The four borders of the Taj Mahal are designed to be identical, as if there were a mirror situated on one side, though one can never tell on which one. Stone reflected in the water. God reflected in human beings. Love reflected in heartbreak. Truth reflected in stories. We live, toil and die under the same invisible dome. Rich and poor, Mohammedan and baptized, free and slave, man and woman, Sultan and mahout, master and apprentice … I have come to believe that if there is one shape that reaches out to all of us, it is the dome. That is where all the distinctions disappear and every single sound, whether of joy or sorrow, merges into one huge silence of all-encompassing love. When I think of this world in such a way, I feel dazed and disoriented, and cannot tell any longer where the future begins and the past ends; where the West falls and the East rises.

  Author’s Note

  I am not sure whether writers choose their subjects or whether their subjects somehow come to find them. For me, at least, it felt like the latter with The Architect’s Apprentice. The idea for this novel emerged for the first time on one sunny afternoon in Istanbul, while I was inside a cab that was stuck in traffic. I was looking out of the window and frowning, already late for an appointment, when my eyes moved across the road to a mosque by the seaside. It was Molla Celebi, one of Sinan’s lesser known beauties. A Gypsy boy was sitting on the wall next to it, pounding on a tin box that was turned upside down. I thought to myself that if the traffic did not clear any time soon, I might as well begin to imagine a story with the architect Sinan and Gypsies in it. Then the car moved on and I totally forgot the idea, until a week later a book arrived by post. It was Gülru Necipoğlu’s The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, sent by a dear friend. Inside the book, one particular drawing caught my eye: it was a painting of Sultan Suleiman, tall and sleek in his kaftan. But it was the figures in the background that intrigued me. There was an elephant and a mahout in front of the Suleimaniye Mosque; they were hovering on the edge of the picture, as if ready to run away, unsure as to what they were doing in the same frame as the Sultan and the monument dedicated to him. I could not take my eyes off this image. The story had found me.

  While writing this book I wanted to understand not only Sinan’s world but also those of the chief apprentices, workers, slaves and animals who were there alongside him. However, when one is writing about an artist who has lived as long ago, and produced as much, as Sinan, the biggest challenge is the reconstruction of time. It took from seven to nine years to finish a mosque, and Sinan constructed more than 365 buildings of various sizes. So, in the interests of narrative pace, I decided to jettison a strict chronological order and to create my own timeframe, with actual historical events absorbed into the new timeline. For instance, in reality, Mihrimah got married at the age of seventeen, but I wanted her to marry later, to give her and Jahan more time together. Her husband, Rustem Pasha, died in 1561; yet, for the sake of the story, I wanted him around a bit longer. Captain Gareth is an entirely fictional character, but he is based both on European sailors who had joined the Ottoman navy, and on Ottoman sailors who had switched sides. Their stories have not yet been told.

  It was a conscious decision to bring Takiyuddin into the story at an earlier point in history. In fact, he became the Chief Royal Astronomer at the time of Sultan Murad. But the trajectory of the observatory was important to me, so I shifted the date of Grand Vizier Sokollu’s death. The painter Melchior and the ambassador Busbecq were historical characters who arrived in Istanbul around 1555, but I have fictionalized the moments of their arrival and departure. In several books I have come across allusions to a group of Ottoman architects in Rome, but what exactly they were doing there remains obscure. I imagined them as Sinan’s apprentices, Jahan and Davud. And there really was an elephant named Suleiman in Vienna, whose story has been beautifully narrated by José Saramago in The Elephant’s Journey.

  Finally, this novel is a product of the imagination. Yet historical events and real people have guided and inspired me. I benefited enormously from a great many sources in English and Turkish, from Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq’s Turkish Letters to Metin And’s Istanbul in the Sixteenth Century: The City, the Palace, Daily Life.

  ‘May the world flow like water,’ Sinan used to say. I can only hope that this story, too, will flow like water in the hearts of its readers.

  Elif Shafak

  www.elifshafak.com

  twitter.com/Elif_Safak

  Acknowledgements

  My heartfelt thanks to the following beautiful people: Lorna Owen for reading an earlier version of this novel and her wonderful comments; Donna Poppy for her clear-sighted suggestions and unique contribution; Keith Taylor for his wisdom and patience; Anna Ridley for her support and her smile; Hermione Thompson for her generosity; and the wonderful team at Penguin UK.

  I am particularly obliged to my two main editors on both sides of the Atlantic: Venetia Butterfield and Paul Slovak. Working with you, feeling connected in mind and spirit, sharing the same passion for stories and storytelling, have all been a pleasure, privilege and enrichment for me. A good editor is a true blessing for a novelist and I am blessed with two great editors.

  My principal agent, Jonny Geller, is surely every author’s dream. He listens, he understands, he encourages, he knows. Daisy Meyrick, Kirsten Foster and the World Rights team at the Curtis Brown Agency have been amazing. I also wish to thank Pankaj Mishra and Tim Stanley for their comments and conversations during the earlier phases of the novel, and Kamila Shamsie for helping me find the name of the white elephant. My gratitude to Gulru Necipoglu, who has been of tremendous assistance both with her personal views on history and with her magnificent opus on Sinan’s architecture. My special thanks to Ugur Canbilen (aka Igor) and Meric Mekik, who is like no other!

  It is hard for me to express my gratitude to Eyup, who knows what a terrible wife I am and most probably harbours no hopes for any improvement, and for reasons I can never comprehend is still by my side. Biggest thanks, of course, to Zelda and Zahir.

  This novel was first published in Turkey, though it was written in English first. I owe a huge thank-you to readers from all walks of life who have commented on the story and the characters and, to my surprise, have embraced Chota like a long-lost face from the past.

  Elif Shafak

  November 2014

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  First published 2014

  Copyright © Elif Shafak, 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-241-97095-9

  * The chief servant of a house.

  * Praise to Allah.

  * In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful.

  * Infidel.