Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

The miniaturists of Istanbul recount the legend of Tall Mehmet-known as Muhammad Khorasani in Persia -mostly as an example of long life and blindness. However, the legend of Tall Mehmet is essentially a parable of painting and time. The primary distinction of this master, who, having begun his apprenticeship at the age of nine, illustrated for more or less 110 years without going blind, was his lack of distinction. I’m not being witty here, but expressing my sincere admiration. Tall Mehmet drew everything, as everyone else did, in the style of the great masters of old, but even more so, and for this reason, he was the greatest of all masters. His humbleness and complete devotion to illustration and painting, which he deemed a service to Allah, set him above both the disputes within the book-arts workshops where he worked and the ambition to become head miniaturist, though he was of appropriate age and talent. As a miniaturist, for 110 years, he patiently rendered every trivial detail: grass drawn to fill up the edges of the page, thousands of leaves, curly wisping clouds, horse manes of short repetitive strokes, brick walls, never-ending wall ornamentation and the slant-eyed, delicate-chinned tens of thousands of faces that were each an imitation of one another. Tall Mehmet was quite content and reserved and he never presumed to distinguish himself or insisted about style or individuality. He considered whichever khan’s or prince’s workshop he happened to be working in at the time his house and regarded himself as but a fixture in that home. As khans and shahs strangled one another and miniaturists moved from city to city like the women of the harem to assemble under the auspices of new masters, the style of the new book-arts workshop would first be defined in the leaves Tall Mehmet drew, in his grass, in the curves of his rocks and in the hidden contours of his own patience. When he was eighty years old, people forgot that he was mortal and began to believe that he lived within the legends he illustrated. Perhaps for this reason, some maintained that he existed outside time and would never grow old and die. There were those who attributed his not going blind-despite living without a home of his own, sleeping in the rooms or tents which constituted miniaturists’ workshops and spending most of his time staring at manuscript pages-to the miracle of time having ceased to flow for him. Some claimed that he was actually blind, and no longer had any need to see since he painted from memory. At the age of 119, this legendary master who’d never married and had never even made love, met the flesh-and-blood ideal of the beautiful slant-eyed, sharp-chinned, moon-faced boy he’d depicted for a century: a part-Chinese part-Croatian sixteen-year-old apprentice in Shah Tahmasp’s miniaturists’ workshop, with whom quite abruptly and understandably, he fell in love. In order to seduce this boy-apprentice of unimaginable beauty, as a true lover would do, he schemed and joined in power struggles between miniaturists; he gave himself over to lying, deception and trickery. At first, the master miniaturist of Khorasan was invigorated by his attempts to catch up to the artistic fashions he’d successfully avoided for one hundred years, but this effort also divorced him from the eternal legendary days of old. Late one afternoon, staring dreamily at the beautiful apprentice before an open window, he caught cold in the icy Tabriz wind. The following day, during a fit of sneezing, he went completely blind. Two days later, he fell down the lofty stone workshop stairs and died.

“I’ve heard the name of Tall Mehmet of Khorasan, but I’ve never heard this legend,” Black said.

He delicately offered this comment to show he knew the story was finished and his mind was occupied with what I’d related. I fell silent for a time so he could stare at me to his heart’s content. Since it bothers me when my hands are not occupied, just after beginning the second story, I started to paint again, picking up where I’d left off when Black knocked on the door. My comely apprentice Mahmut, who always sat at my knee and mixed my paints, sharpened my reed pens and sometimes erased my errors, silently sat beside me, listening and staring; from within the house the sounds of my wife’s movements could be heard.

“Aahaa,” said Black, “the Sultan has arisen.”

He stared at the painting with awe, and I pretended the reason for his awe was insignificant, but let me tell you candidly: Our Exalted Sultan appears seated in all two hundred of our circumcision ceremony pictures in the Book of Festivities , watching for fifty-two days the passing of the merchants, guilds, spectators, soldiers and prisoners from the window of the royal enclosure erected for the occasion. Only in one picture of mine is He shown on foot, tossing money from florin-filled pouches to the crowds in the square. My aim was to capture the surprise and excitement of the crowds punching, kicking and strangling one another as they scrambled to grab coins off the ground, their asses jutting toward the sky.

“If love is part of the subject of the painting, the work ought to be rendered with love,” I said. “If there’s pain involved, pain should issue from the painting. Yet the pain ought to emerge from the at first glance invisible yet discernible inner harmony of the picture, not from the figures in the illustration or from their tears. I didn’t depict surprise, as it has been shown for centuries by hundreds of master miniaturists, as a figure with his index finger inserted into the circle of his mouth, but made the whole painting embody surprise. This, I accomplished by inviting the Sovereign to rise to His feet.”

I was intrigued and bothered by how he scrutinized my possessions and illustrating tools, nay my whole life, looking for a clue; and then, I began to see my own house through his eyes.

You know those palace, hamam and castle pictures that were made in Tabriz and Shiraz for a time; so that the picture might replicate the piercing gaze of Exalted Allah, who sees and understands all, the miniaturist would depict the palace in cross-section as though having cut it in half with a huge, magical straight razor, and he’d paint all the interior details-which could otherwise never be seen from outside-down to the pots and pans, drinking glasses, wall ornamentation, curtains, caged parrots, the most private corners, and the pillows on which reclined a lovely maiden such as had never seen the light of day. Like a curious awestruck reader, Black was examining my paints, my papers, my books, my lovely assistant, the pages of a Book of Costumes and the collage album that I’d made for a Frankish traveler, scenes of fucking and other indecent pages I’d secretly dashed off for a pasha, my inkpots of variously colored glass, bronze and ceramic, my ivory penknives, my gold-stemmed brushes, and yes, the glances of my handsome apprentice.

“Unlike the old masters, I’ve seen a lot of battle, a lot,” I said to fill the silence with my presence. “War machines, cannonballs, armies, corpses; it was I who embellished the ceilings of the tents of Our Sultan and our generals. After a military campaign, upon returning to Istanbul, it was I who recorded in pictures the scenes of battle that everyone would otherwise have forgotten, corpses sliced in two, the clash of opposing armies, the soldiers of the miserable infidels quaking before our cannon, the troops defending the crenellated towers of besieged castles, rebels being decapitated and the fury of horses attacking at full gallop. I commit everything I behold to memory: a new coffee grinder, a style of window grating that I’ve never seen before, a cannon, the trigger of a new style of Frankish rifle, who wore what color robe during a feast, who ate what, who placed his hand where and how…”