Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

I looked through quite a few very mediocre books: As the dwarf confirmed, these were among the effects of pashas whose properties and belongings were confiscated after they were beheaded. So many pashas had been executed that these volumes were without number. With a pitiless joy, the dwarf declared that any pasha so intoxicated by his own wealth and power as to forget he was a subject of the Sultan and to have a book made in his own honor, illuminated with gold leaf as if he were a monarch or a shah, well deserved to be executed and have his possessions expropriated. Even in these volumes, some of which were albums, illuminated manuscripts or illustrated collections of poetry, whenever I came across a version of Shirin falling in love with Hüsrev’s picture, I stopped and stared.

The picture within a picture, that is, the picture of Hüsrev which Shirin encountered during her countryside outing, was never rendered in detail, not because miniaturists couldn’t adequately depict something so small-many had the dexterity and finesse to paint upon fingernails, grains of rice or even strands of hair. Why then hadn’t they drawn the face and features of Hüsrev-the object of Shirin’s love-in enough detail so that he might be recognized? Sometime in the afternoon, perhaps to forget my hopelessness, and thinking, as I leafed through a disorderly album I’d chanced upon, that I’d broach such questions to Master Osman, I was struck by the image of a horse in a picture of a bridal procession painted on cloth. My heart skipped a beat.

There before me was a horse with peculiar nostrils carrying a coquettish bride. The beast was looking at me out of the picture. It was as though the magical horse were on the verge of whispering a secret to me. As if in a dream, I wanted to shout, but my voice was silent.

In one continuous movement, I collected up the volume and ran among the objects and chests to Master Osman, laying the page open before him.

He looked down at the picture.

When no spark of recognition appeared on his face, I grew impatient. “The nostrils of the horse are exactly like those made for my Enishte’s book,” I exclaimed.

He lowered his magnifying lens over the horse. He bent down so far, bringing his eye to the lens and picture, that his nose nearly touched the page.

I couldn’t stand the silence. “As you can see, this isn’t a horse made in the style and method of the horse drawn for my Enishte’s book,” I said, “but the nose is the same. The artist attempted to see the world the way the Chinese do.” I fell quiet. “It’s a wedding procession. It resembles a Chinese picture, but the figures aren’t Chinese, they’re our people.”

The master’s lens seemed to be flat against the page, and his nose was flat against the lens. In order to see, he made use of not only his eyes, but his head, the muscles of his neck, his aged back and his shoulders with all his might. Silence.

“The nostrils of the horse are cut open,” he said later, breathless.

I leaned my head against his. Cheek to cheek we stared at the nostrils for a long long time. I sadly realized that not only were the horse’s nostrils cut, but Master Osman was having difficulty seeing them.

“You do see it, don’t you?”

“Only very little,” he said. “Describe the picture.”

“If you ask me, this is a melancholy bride,” I said mournfully. “She’s mounted on a gray horse with its nostrils cut open, she’s on her way to be wed, with her companions and an escort of guards who are strangers to her. The faces of the guards, their harsh expressions, intimidating black beards, furrowed eyebrows, long thick mustaches, heavy frames, robes of simple thin cloth, thin shoes, headdresses of bear fur, their battle-axes and scimitars indicate that they belong to the Whitesheep Turkmen of Transoxiana. Perhaps the pretty bride-who appears to be on a long journey to judge by the fact she’s traveling with her bridesmaid at night by the light of oil lamps and torches-is a melancholy Chinese princess.”

“Or perhaps we only think the bride is Chinese now, because the miniaturist, to emphasize her flawless beauty, whitened her face as the Chinese do and painted her with slanted eyes,” said Master Osman.

“Whoever she might be, my heart aches for this sad beauty, traveling the steppe in the middle of the night accompanied by grim-faced foreign guards, heading to a strange land and a husband she’s never seen,” I said. Then I immediately added, “How shall we determine who our miniaturist is from the clipped nostrils of the horse she rides?”

“Turn the pages of the album and tell me what you see,” said Master Osman.

Just then, we were joined by the dwarf whom I’d seen sitting on the chamber pot as I was running to bring the volume to Master Osman; the three of us looked at the pages together.

We saw strikingly beautiful Chinese maidens depicted in the style of our melancholy bride gathered together in a garden playing a peculiar-looking lute. We saw Chinese houses, morose-looking caravans heading out on long journeys, vistas of the steppes as beautiful as old memories. We saw gnarled trees rendered in the Chinese style, their spring blossoms in full bloom, and nightingales tipsy with elation perched on their branches. We saw princes in the Khorasan style seated in their tents holding forth on poetry, wine and love; spectacular gardens; and handsome nobles, with magnificent falcons clutching their forearms, hunting bolt upright astride their exquisite horses. Then, it was as if the Devil had passed into the pages; we could sense that the evil in the illustrations was most often reason itself. Had the miniaturist added an ironic touch to the actions of the heroic prince who slew the dragon with his gigantic lance? Had he gloated at the poverty of the unfortunate peasants expecting comfort from the sheikh in their midst? Was it more pleasurable for him to draw the sad, empty eyes of dogs locked in coitus or to apply a devilish red to the open mouths of the women laughing scornfully at the poor beasts? Then we saw the miniaturist’s devils themselves: These weird creatures resembled the jinns and giants the old masters of Herat and the artists of the Book of Kings drew frequently; yet the sardonic talent of the miniaturist made them more sinister, aggressive and human in form. We laughed watching these terrifying devils, the size of a man yet with misshapen bodies, branching horns and feline tails. As I turned the pages, these naked devils with bushy brows, round faces, bulging eyes, pointed teeth, sharp nails and the dark wrinkled skin of old men began to beat each other and wrestle, to steal a great horse and sacrifice it to their gods, to leap and play, to cut down trees, to spirit away beautiful princesses in their palanquins and to capture dragons and sack treasuries. I mentioned that in this volume, which had seen the touch of many different brushes, the miniaturist known as Black Pen, who’d made the devils, also drew Kalenderi dervishes with shaved heads, ragged clothes, iron chains and staffs, and Master Osman had me one by one repeat their similarities, listening closely to what I said.

“Cutting open the nostrils of horses so they might breathe easier and travel farther is a centuries-old Mongol custom,” he said later. “Hulagu Khan’s armies conquered all of Arabia, Persia and China with their horses. When they entered Baghdad, put its inhabitants to the sword, plundered it and tossed all its books into the Tigris, as we know, the famous calligrapher, and later, illuminator Ibn Shakir fled the city and the slaughter, heading north on the road by which the Mongol horsemen had come, instead of south along with everyone else. At that time, no one made illustrations because the Koran forbade them, and painters weren’t taken seriously. We owe the greatest secrets of our noble occupation to Ibn Shakir, the patron saint and master of all miniaturists: the vision of the world from a minaret, the persistence of a horizon line visible or invisible, and the depiction of all things from clouds to insects the way the Chinese envisaged them, in curling, lively and optimistic colors. I’ve heard that he studied the nostrils of horses in order to keep himself moving northward during that legendary journey into the heartland of the Mongol hordes. However, as far as I’ve seen and heard, none of the horses he drew in Samarkand, which he reached after a year’s travel on foot undaunted by snow and severe weather, had clipped nostrils. For him, perfect dream horses were not the sturdy, powerful, victorious horses of the Mongols that he came to know in his adulthood; they were the elegant Arab horses that he’d sorrowfully left behind in his happy youth. This is why for me the strange nose of the horse made for Enishte’s book brought to mind neither Mongol horses nor this custom the Mongols spread to Khorasan and Samarkand.”