Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

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 slaves, 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.

In the third year of Our Sultan’s reign, the Queen of England sent His Excellency a miraculous clock that contained a musical instrument with a bellows. An English delegation assembled this enormous clock after weeks of toil with various pieces, cogs, pictures and statuettes that they brought with them from England, erecting it on a slope of the Royal Private Garden facing the Golden Horn. The crowds that collected on the slopes of the Golden Horn or came in caïques to watch, astonished and awed, saw how the life-size statues and ornaments spun around each other purposefully when the huge clock played its noisy and terrifying music, how they danced elegantly and meaningfully by themselves in time to the melody as if they were creations of God rather than of His servants, and how the clock announced the time to all Istanbul with a chime that resembled the sounding of a bell.

Black and Esther told me on different occasions how the clock, as well as being the focus of endless astonishment on the part of Istanbul ’s riffraff and dull-witted mobs, was understandably a source of discomfort to the pious and to Our Sultan because it symbolized the power of the infidel. In a time when rumors of this sort abounded, Sultan Ahmed, the subsequent sovereign, woke up in the middle of the night under Allah’s instigation, seized His mace and descended from the harem to the Private Garden where He shattered the clock and its statues to pieces. Those who brought us the news and the rumors explained how as Our Sultan slept, He saw the sacred face of Our Exalted Prophet bathed in holy light and how the Apostle of God warned Him: If Our Sultan allowed his subjects to be awed by pictures and, worse yet, by objects that mimicked Mankind and thus competed with Allah’s creations, the sovereign would be diverging from divine will. They also added that Our Sultan had taken up His mace while still dreaming. This was more or less how Our Sultan dictated the event to His faithful historian. He had this book, entitled The Quintessence of Histories , prepared by calligraphers, upon whom He lavished purses full of gold, though He forbade its illustration by miniaturists.

Thus withered the red rose of the joy of painting and illumination that had bloomed for a century in Istanbul, nurtured by inspiration from the lands of Persia. The conflict between the methods of the old masters of Herat and the Frankish masters that paved the way for quarrels among artists and endless quandries was never resolved. For painting itself was abandoned; artists painted neither like Easterners nor Westerners. The miniaturists did not grow angry and revolt, but like old men who quietly succumb to an illness, they gradually accepted the situation with humble grief and resignation. They were neither curious about nor dreamed about the work of the great masters of Herat and Tabriz, whom they once followed with awe, or the Frankish masters, whose innovative methods they aspired to, caught indecisively between envy and hatred. Just as the doors of houses are closed of an evening and the city is left to darkness, painting was also abandoned. It was mercilessly forgotten that we’d once looked upon our world quite differently.