Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

Instead of heading downstairs, I spun around. There was a noise coming from the next room with the built-in closet where Hayriye slept. I went in. Inside there was no Hayriye, just my mother. She was embarrassed to see me. She stood half in the closet.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

But she knew where I’d been. In the back of the closet there was a peephole through which you could see my grandfather’s workshop, and if its door were open, the wide hallway and my grandfather’s bedroom across the hall by the staircase-if, of course, his bedroom door were open.

“I was with grandfather,” I said. “Mother, what are you doing in here?”

“Didn’t I tell you that your grandfather had a guest and that you weren’t to bother them?” She scolded me, but not very loud, because she didn’t want the guest to hear. “What were they doing?” she asked afterward, in a sweet voice.

“They were seated. Not with the paints though. Grandfather spoke, the other listened.”

“In what manner was he seated?”

I dropped to the floor and imitated the guest: “I’m a very serious man now, Mother, look. I’m listening to my grandfather with knit eyebrows, as if I were listening to the birth epic being recited. I’m nodding my head in time now, very seriously like that guest.”

“Go downstairs,” my mother said, “call for Hayriye at once.”

She sat down and began writing on a small piece of paper on the writing board she’d taken up.

“Mother, what are you writing?”

“Be quick, now. Didn’t I tell you to go downstairs and call for Hayriye?”

I went down to the kitchen. My brother, Shevket, was back. Hayriye had put before him a plate of the pilaf meant for the guest.

“Traitor,” my brother said. “You just went off and left me with the Master. I did all the folding for the bindings myself. My fingers are bruised purple.”

“Hayriye, my mother wants to see you.”

“When I’m done here, I’m going to give you such a beating,” my brother said. “You’ll pay for your laziness and treachery.”

When Hayriye left, my brother stood and came after me threateningly, even before he’d finished his pilaf. I couldn’t get away in time. He grabbed my arm at the wrist and began twisting it.

“Stop, Shevket, don’t, you’re hurting me.”

“Are you ever going to shirk your duties again and leave?”

“No, I won’t ever leave.”

“Swear to it.”

“I swear.”

“Swear on the Koran.”

“…on the Koran.”

He didn’t let go of my arm. He dragged me to the large copper tray that we used as a table for eating and forced me to my knees. He was strong enough to eat his pilaf as he continued to twist my arm.

“Quit torturing your brother, tyrant,” said Hayriye. She covered herself and was heading outside. “Leave him be.”

“Mind your own affairs, slave girl,” my brother said. He was still twisting my arm. “Where are you off to?”

“To buy lemons,” Hayriye said.

“You’re a liar,” my brother said. “The cupboard is full of lemons.”

As he had eased up on my arm, I was suddenly able to free myself. I kicked him and grabbed a candleholder by its base, but he pounced on me, smothering me. He knocked the candleholder away, and the copper tray fell over.

“You two scourges of God!” my mother said. She kept her voice lowered so the guest wouldn’t hear. How had she passed before the open door of the workshop, through the hallway, and come downstairs without being seen by Black?

She separated us. “You two just continue to disgrace me, don’t you?”

“Orhan lied to the master binder,” Shevket said. “He left me there to do all the work.”

“Hush!” my mother said, slapping him.

She’d hit him softly. My brother didn’t cry. “I want my father,” he said. “When he returns he’s going to take up Uncle Hasan’s ruby-handled sword, and we’re going to move back with Uncle Hasan.”

“Shut up!” said my mother. She suddenly became so angry that she grabbed Shevket by the arm and dragged him through the kitchen, passed the stairs to the room that faced the far shady side of the courtyard. I followed them. My mother opened the door. When she saw me, she said, “Inside, the both of you.”

“But I haven’t done anything,” I said. I entered anyway. Mother closed the door behind us. Though it wasn’t pitch-black inside-a faint light fell through the space between the shutters facing the pomegranate tree in the courtyard-I was scared.

“Open the door, Mother,” I said. “I’m cold.”

“Quit whimpering, you coward,” Shevket said. “She’ll open it soon enough.”

Mother opened the door. “Are you going to behave until the visitor leaves?” she said. “All right then, you’ll sit in the kitchen by the stove until Black takes his leave, and you’re not to go upstairs, do you understand?”

“We’ll get bored in there,” Shevket said. “Where has Hayriye gone?”

“Quit butting into everyone’s affairs,” my mother said.

We heard a soft whinnying from one of the horses in the stable. The horse whinnied again. It wasn’t our grandfather’s horse, but Black’s. We were overcome with mirth, as if it were a fair day. Mother smiled, wanting us to smile as well. Taking two steps forward, she opened the stable door that faced us off the stairwell outside the kitchen.

“Drrsss,” she said into the stable.

She turned around and guided us into Hayriye’s greasy-smelling and mice-ridden kitchen. She forced us to sit down. “Don’t even consider standing until our guest leaves. And don’t fight with each other or else people will think you’re spoiled.”

“Mother,” I said to her before she closed the kitchen door. “I want to say something, Mother: They’ve done our grandfather’s gilder in.”

When I first laid eyes on her child, I knew at once what I’d long and mistakenly recalled about Shekure’s face. Like Orhan’s face, hers was thin, though her chin was longer than what I remembered. So, then the mouth of my beloved was surely smaller and narrower than I imagined it to be. For a dozen years, as I ventured from city to city, I’d widened Shekure’s mouth out of desire and had imagined her lips to be more pert, fleshy and irresistible, like a large, shiny cherry.

Had I taken Shekure’s portrait with me, rendered in the style of the Venetian masters, I wouldn’t have felt such loss during my long travels when I could scarcely remember my beloved, whose face I’d left somewhere behind me. For if a lover’s face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Meeting Shekure’s youngest son and speaking with him, seeing his face up close and kissing him, aroused in me a restlessness peculiar to the luckless, to murderers and to sinners. An inner voice urged me on, “Be quick now, go and see her.”

For a while, I considered silently quitting my Enishte’s presence and opening each of the doors along the wide hallway-I’d counted them out of the corner of my eye, five dark doors, one of which, naturally, opened onto the staircase-until I found Shekure. But, I’d been separated from my beloved for twelve years because I recklessly revealed what lay in my heart. I decided to wait discreetly, listening to my Enishte while admiring the objects that Shekure had touched and the large pillow upon which she’d reclined who knows how many times.

He recounted to me that the Sultan wanted to have the book completed in time for the thousandth-year anniversary of the Hegira. Our Sultan, Refuge of the World, wanted to demonstrate that in the thousandth year of the Muslim calendar He and His state could make use of the styles of the Franks as well as the Franks themselves. Because He was also having a Book of Festivities made, the Sultan granted that the master miniaturists, whom He knew were quite busy, be permitted to sequester themselves at home to work in peace instead of among the crowds at the workshop. He was, of course, also aware that they all regularly paid clandestine visits to my Enishte.