Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

Stork, afraid that his turn had come, and justifiably so, fled into the blackened rooms within. Holding the lamp aloft, I went after him, but soon grew frightened and turned back. My last gesture was to kiss Butterfly, and saying farewell, to take my leave of him. Since the tang of blood had come between us, I couldn’t kiss him to my heart’s content. But he noticed that tears flowed from my eyes.

I left the lodge within a kind of deathly silence punctuated by Black’s moaning. Nearly running, I fled the wet and muddy garden, the dark neighborhood. The ship that was to take me to Akbar Khan’s workshop would depart after the morning azan ; at that hour the last rowboat would leave for the ship from Galleon Harbor. As I ran, tears poured from my eyes.

As I passed through Aksaray like a thief, I could faintly make out the first light of day on the horizon. Opposite the first neighborhood fountain I encountered, among the side streets, narrow passages and walls, was the stone house in which I’d spent the night of my first day in Istanbul twenty-five years ago. There, through the yawning courtyard gate, I saw once again the well into which I wished to hurl myself in the middle of the night, tormented by guilt for having at the age of eleven wet the mattress that a distant relative spread out for me in a show of kind and generous hospitality. By the time I reached Bayazid, the watchmaker’s shop (where I often came to fix the mechanism of my broken clock), the bottle seller’s shop (where I purchased the empty crystal lamps and sherbet cups I embellished and the little bottles I decorated with floral designs and secretly sold to the gentry) and the public baths (where my feet went out of habit for a time because it was both inexpensive and empty) were all respectfully standing at attention before me and my tearful eyes.

There was nobody in the vicinity of the ravaged and burned coffeehouse, nor anyone at the house of beautiful Shekure and her new husband, who was perhaps in the throes of death at this very moment. I heartily wished them nothing but happiness. While roaming the streets in the days after I’d tainted my hands with blood, all of Istanbul’s dogs, its shadowy trees, shuttered windows, black chimneys, ghosts and hardworking, unhappy early risers hurrying toward mosques to perform their morning prayers always stared at me with animosity; yet, from the moment I confessed my crimes and resolved to abandon the only city I’d ever known, they all regarded me with friendship.

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.