Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

One hundred and twenty years ago, there being no coffee then, the respected Hoja, whose story we’ve begun, was simply steaming with rage.

“Hey, Frank infidel, why are you drawing these two?” he was saying. “These wretched Kalenderi dervishes wander around thieving and begging, they take hashish, drink wine, bugger each other, and as is evident from the way they look, know nothing of performing or reciting prayers, nothing of house, or home, or family; they’re nothing but the dregs of this good world of ours. And you, why are you painting this picture of disgrace when there’s so much beauty in this great country? Is it to disgrace us?”

“Not at all, it’s simply because illustrations of your bad side bring in more money,” said the infidel. We two dervishes were dumbfounded at the soundness of the painter’s reasoning.

“If it brought you more money, would you paint the Devil in a favorable light?” the Hoja Effendi said, coyly trying to start an argument, but as you can see from this picture, the Venetian was a genuine artist, and he’d focused upon the work before him and the money it’d bring rather than heeding the Hoja’s empty prattle.

He did indeed paint us, and then slid us into the leather portfolio on the back of his horse’s saddle, and returned to his infidel city. Soon afterward, the victorious armies of the Ottomans conquered and plundered that city on the banks of the Danube, and the two of us ended up coming back this way to Istanbul and the Royal Treasury. From there, copied over and over, we moved from one secret book to another, and finally arrived at this joyous coffeehouse where coffee is drunk like a rejuvenating, invigorating elixir. Now then:

A Brief Treatise on Painting, Death and Our Place in the World

The Hoja Effendi from Konya, whom we’ve just mentioned, has made the following claim somewhere in one of his sermons, which are written out and collected in a thick tome: Kalenderi dervishes are the unnecessary dross of the world because they don’t belong to any of the four categories into which men are divided: 1. notables, 2. merchants, 3. farmers and 4. artists; thus, they are superfluous.

Additionally, he said the following: “These two always tramp about as a pair and always argue about which of them will be the first to eat with their only spoon, and those who don’t know that this is a sly allusion to their true concern-who’ll be the first to bugger the other-find it amusing and laugh. His Excellency Please-Don’t-Take-It-Wrong Hoja has uncovered our secret because he, along with us, the pretty young boys, apprentices and miniaturists, are all fellow travelers on the same path.”

However, the real secret is this: While the Frank infidel was making our picture, he gazed at us so sweetly and with such attention to detail that we took a liking to him and enjoyed being depicted by him. But, he was committing the error of looking at the world with his naked eye and rendering what he saw. Thus, he drew us as if we were blind although we could see just fine, but we didn’t mind. Now, we’re quite content, indeed. According to the Hoja, we’re in Hell; according to some unbelievers we’re nothing but decayed corpses and according to you, the intelligent society of miniaturists gathered here, we’re a picture, and because we’re a picture, we stand here before you as though we were alive and well. After our run-in with the respected Hoja Effendi and after walking from Konya to Sivas in three nights, through eight villages, begging all the way, one night we were beset by such cold and snow that we two dervishes, hugging each other tightly, fell asleep and froze to death. Just before dying I had a dream: I was the subject of a painting that entered Heaven after thousands and thousands of years.

They tell a story in Bukhara that dates back to the time of Abdullah Khan. This Uzbek Khan was a suspicious ruler, and though he didn’t object to more than one artist’s brush contributing to the same illustration, he was opposed to painters copying from one another’s pages-because this made it impossible to determine which of the artists brazenly copying from one another was to blame for an error. More importantly, after a time, instead of pushing themselves to seek out God’s memories within the darkness, pilfering miniaturists would lazily seek out whatever they saw over the shoulder of the artist beside them. For this reason, the Uzbek Khan joyously welcomed two great masters, one from Shiraz in the South, the other from Samarkand in the East, who’d fled from war and cruel shahs to the shelter of his court; however, he forbade the two celebrated talents to look at each other’s work, and separated them by giving them small workrooms on opposite ends of his palace, as far from each other as possible. Thus, for exactly thirty-seven years and four months, as if listening to a legend, these two great masters each listened to Abdullah Khan recount the magnificence of the other’s never-to-be-seen work, how it differed from or was oddly similar to the other’s. Meanwhile, they both lived dying of curiosity about each other’s paintings. After the Uzbek Khan’s life had run its long tortoiselike course, the two old artists ran to each other’s rooms to see the paintings. Later still, sitting upon either edge of a large cushion, holding each other’s books on their laps and looking at the pictures that they recognized from Abdullah Khan’s fables, both the miniaturists were overcome with great disappointment because the illustrations they saw weren’t nearly as spectacular as those they’d anticipated from the stories they’d heard, but instead appeared, much like all the pictures they’d seen in recent years, rather ordinary, pale and hazy. The two great masters didn’t then realize that the reason for this haziness was the blindness that had begun to descend upon them, nor did they realize it after both had gone completely blind, rather they attributed the haziness to having been duped by the Khan, and hence they died believing dreams were more beautiful than pictures.

In the dead of night in the cold Treasury room, as I turned pages with frozen fingers and gazed upon the pictures in books that I’d dreamed of for forty years, I knew I was much happier than the artists in this pitiless story from Bukhara. It gave me such a thrill to know, before going blind and passing into the Hereafter, that I was handling the very books whose legends I’d heard about my whole life, and at times I would murmur, “Thank you, God, thank you” when I saw that one of pages I was turning was even more marvelous than its legend.

For instance, eighty years ago Shah Ismail crossed the river and by the sword reconquered Herat and all of Khorasan from the Uzbeks, whereupon he appointed his brother Sam Mirza governor of Herat; to celebrate this joyous occasion, his brother, in turn, had a manuscript prepared, an illuminated version of a book entitled The Convergence of the Stars , which recounted a story as witnessed by Emir Hüsrev in the palace of Delhi. According to legend, one illustration in this book showed the two rulers meeting on the banks of a river where they celebrated their victory. Their faces resembled the Sultan of Delhi, Keykubad, and his father, Bughra Khan, the Ruler of Bengal, who were the subjects of the book; but they also resembled the faces of Shah Ismail and his brother Sam Mirza, the men responsible for the book’s creation. I was absolutely certain that the heroes of whichever story I conjured while looking at the page would appear there in the sultan’s tent, and I thanked God for giving me the chance to see this miraculous page.

In an illustration by Sheikh Muhammad, one of the great masters of the same legendary era, a poor subject whose awe and affection for his sultan had reached the level of pure love was desperately hoping, as he watched the sultan play polo, that the ball would roll toward him so he could grab it and present it to his sovereign. After he’d waited long and patiently, the ball did indeed come to him, and he was depicted handing it to the sultan. As had been described to me thousands of times, the love, awe and submission that a poor subject aptly feels toward a great khan or an exalted monarch, or that a handsome young apprentice feels toward his master, was rendered here with such delicacy and deep compassion, from the extension of the subject’s fingers holding the ball to his inability to summon the courage to look at the sovereign’s face, that while looking at this page, I knew there was no greater joy in the world than to be apprentice to a great master, and that such submissiveness verging on servility was no less a pleasure than being master to a young, pretty and intelligent apprentice-and I grieved for those who would never know this truth.