Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

How many men and women had fingers in their mouths! This was used as a gesture of surprise in all the workshops from Samarkand to Baghdad over the last two hundred years. As the hero Keyhüsrev, cornered by his enemies, safely crossed the rushing Oxus River aided by his black charger and Allah, the wretched raftsman and his oarsman, who refused to offer him safe passage on their raft each had a finger in his mouth. An astonished Hüsrev’s finger remained in his mouth as he saw for the first time the beauty of Shirin, whose skin was like moonlight as she bathed in the once glimmering lake whose silver leaf had tarnished. I spent even more time carefully examining the gorgeous women of the harem who, with fingers in their mouths, stood behind half-opened palace doors, at the inaccessible windows of castle towers and peered from behind curtains. As Tejav, defeated by the armies of Persia to lose his crown, was fleeing the battlefield, Espinuy, a beauty of beauties and his harem favorite, watched with sorrow and shock from a palace window, finger in mouth, begging him with her eyes not to abandon her to the enemy. As Joseph, arrested under Züleyha’s false accusation that he raped her, was being taken to his cell, she stared from her window, a finger in her beautiful mouth in a show of devilishness and lust rather than bewilderment. As happy yet somber lovers who emerged as if from a love poem were carried away by the force of passion and wine in a garden reminiscent of Paradise, a malicious lady servant spied on them with an envious finger in her red mouth.

Despite its being a standard image recorded in the notebooks and memories of all miniaturists, the long finger sliding into a beautiful woman’s mouth had a different elegance each time.

How much did these illustrations comfort me? As dusk fell, I went to Master Osman and said the following:

“My dear master, when the portal is opened once again, with your permission, I shall quit the Treasury.”

“How do you mean!” he said. “We still have one night and one morning. How quickly your eyes have had their fill of the greatest illustrations the world has ever known!”

As he said this, he hadn’t turned his face away from the page before him, yet the paleness in his pupils confirmed he was indeed gradually going blind.

“We’ve learned the secret of the horse’s nostrils,” I said confidently.

“Ha!” he said. “Yes! The rest is up to Our Sultan and the Head Treasurer. Perhaps they will pardon us all.”

Would he name Stork as the murderer? I couldn’t even ask out of fear, for I worried he wouldn’t allow me to leave. Even worse, I had the recurring thought that he might accuse me.

“The plume needle Bihzad used to blind himself is missing,” he said.

“In all probability the dwarf put it back in its place,” I said. “The page before you is so magnificent!”

His face lit up like a child’s, and he smiled. “Hüsrev, burning with love, as he waits astride his horse for Shirin before her palace in the middle of the night,” he said. “Rendered in the style of the old masters of Herat.”

He was now gazing at the picture as if he could see it, but he hadn’t even taken the magnifying glass into his hand.

“Can you see the splendor in the leaves of the trees in the nighttime darkness, appearing one by one as if illuminated from within like stars or spring flowers, the humble patience implied by the wall ornamentation, the refinement in the use of gold leaf and the delicate balance in the entire painting’s composition? Handsome Hüsrev’s horse is as graceful and elegant as a woman. His beloved Shirin waits at the window above him, her neck bowed, but her face proud. It’s as if the lovers are to remain here eternally within the light emanating from the painting’s texture, skin and subtle colors which were applied lovingly by the miniaturist. You can see how their faces are turned ever so slightly toward one another while their bodies are half-turned toward us-for they know they’re in a painting and thus visible to us. This is why they don’t try to resemble exactly those figures which we see around us. Quite to the contrary, they signify that they’ve emerged from Allah’s memory. This is why time has stopped for them within that picture. No matter how fast the pace of the story they tell in the picture, they themselves will remain for all eternity there, like well-bred, polite, shy young maidens, without making any sudden gestures with their hands, arms, slight bodies or even eyes. For them, everything within the navy-blue night is frozen: The bird flies through the darkness, among the stars, with a fluttering like the racing hearts of the lovers themselves, and at the same time, remains fixed for all eternity as if nailed to the sky in this matchless moment. The old masters of Herat, who knew that God’s velvet blackness was lowering over their eyes like a curtain, also knew that if they went blind while staring motionless at such an illustration for days and weeks on end, their souls would at last mingle with the eternity of the picture.”

At the time of the evening prayer, when the portal of the Treasury was opened with the same ceremony and under the gaze of the same throng, Master Osman was still staring intently at the page before him, at the bird that floated motionless in the sky. But if you noticed the paleness in his pupils you’d also realize that he stared at the page quite oddly, as blind men sometimes incorrectly orient themselves to the food before them.

The officers of the Treasury detail, learning that Master Osman would stay inside and that Jezmi Agha was at the door, neglected to search me thoroughly and never found the plume needle I hid in my undergarment. When I emerged onto the streets of Istanbul from the palace courtyard, I slipped into a passageway and removed the terrifying object, with which the legendary Bihzad had blinded himself, from where it was, and stuck it into my sash. I practically ran through the streets.

The cold of the Treasury chambers had so penetrated my bones that it seemed as though the gentle weather of an early spring had settled over the city streets. As I passed the grocer, barber, herbalist, fruit and vegetable shop and firewood shop of the Old Caravansary Bazaar, which were shutting down one by one for the night, I slowed my pace and carefully examined the casks, cloth sheets, carrots and jars in the warm shops lit by oil lamps.

My Enishte’s street (I still couldn’t say “Shekure’s street” let alone “my street”) appeared even stranger and more distant after my two-day absence. But the joy of being reunited safe and sound with my Shekure, and the thought that I’d be able to enter my beloved’s bed tonight-since the murderer was as good as caught-made me feel so intimate with the whole world that upon seeing the pomegranate tree and the repaired and closed shutters, I had to restrain myself from shouting like a farmer hollering to someone across a stream. When I saw Shekure, I wanted the first words out of my mouth to be, “We know who the wretched murderer is!”

I opened the courtyard gate. I’m not sure if it was from the squeak of the gate, the carefree way the sparrow drank water from the well bucket, or the darkness of the house, but with the wolflike prescience of a man who’d lived alone for twelve years, I understood at once that nobody was home. Even bitterly realizing that one’s been left to his own devices, one will still open and close all of the doors, the cabinets and even lift the lids of pots, and that’s just what I did. I even looked inside the chests.

In this silence, the only sound I heard was the thudding of my own racing heart. Like an old man who’s done everything he will ever do, I felt consoled when I abruptly girded my sword, which I’d kept hidden at the bottom of the most out of the way chest. It was this ivory-handled sword which always provided me with inner peace and balance during all those years I worked with the pen. Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.