第 54 页

Why? Because, though you’ve spent three years seated at the foot of a hoja

who gives lessons in an out-of-the-way neighborhood religious school for

twenty silver coins a day—today you can buy twenty loaves of bread with that

amount—you still wouldn’t know who the hell Bihzad was. It was obvious

that the twenty-coin Hoja Effendi didn’t know who Bihzad was either. All

right then, let me explain. I said:

“I’ve painted everything, absolutely everything: Our Prophet at the mosque

before the green prayer niche seated together with his four caliphs; in another

book, the Apostle and Prophet of God ascending the seven heavens on the

night of the Ascension; Alexander on his way to China banging on the drum of

a seaside temple to scare off a monster stirring up the ocean with storms; a

masturbating sultan spying on the beauties of his harem swimming naked in

his pool while listening to a lute; a young wrestler sure of victory after

learning all his mentor’s moves, only to be defeated in the presence of the

Sultan at the hands of his mentor who had yet one last trick up his sleeve;

Leyla and Mejnun as children kneeling in a schoolroom with exquisitely

decorated walls, falling in love while reciting the Glorious Koran; the inability

of lovers, from the most embarrassed to the most crass, to look at each other;

the stone by stone construction of palaces; the punishment by torture of the

guilty; the flight of eagles; playful rabbits; treacherous tigers; cypress and plane

trees that held magpies; Death; competing poets; feasts to commemorate

victory; and men like you who see nothing but the soup before them.”

The reserved clerk was no longer afraid, he even found me entertaining and

was smiling.

“Your Hoja Effendi must’ve had you read this, you’ll know it,” I continued.

“There’s a story I love from Sadi’s Garden. You know the one, King Darius

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becomes separated from the crowd during a hunt and goes off to roam the

hills. Unexpectedly, a dangerous-looking stranger with a goatee appears before

him. The king falls into a panic and reaches for the bow on his horse,

whereupon the man begs, ”My king, hold off from shooting your arrow. How

is it that you haven’t recognized me? Am I not the loyal groom to whom

you’ve entrusted a hundred horses and foals? How many times have we seen

each other? I know each of your hundred horses by temperament and

disposition, nay, by color even. So then, how is it you pay no attention to us,

the servants under your command, even those like myself whom you

encounter with such frequency?“”

When I depict this scene, I render the black, chestnut and white horses—so

tenderly cared for by the groom in a heavenly green pasture covered with

flowers of every imaginable color—with such happiness and calm that even

the dullest of readers would understand the moral of Sadi’s story: The beauty

and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest

and compassion; if you want to live in that paradise where happy mares and

stallions live, open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to

its colors, details and irony.

This progeny of the twenty-coin hoja was at once entertained and

frightened by me. He wanted to drop his spoon and flee, but I didn’t give him

the chance.

“This is how the master of masters Bihzad depicted the king, his groom and

the horses in that picture,” I said. “For a hundred years miniaturists haven’t

stopped imitating those horses. Each horse rendered out of Bihzad’s

imagination and heart has become a model of form. Hundreds of miniaturists,

including myself, can draw those horses from memory. Have you ever seen a

picture of a horse?”

“I once saw a winged horse in an enchanting book that a great teacher, a

scholar of scholars, had presented to my late hoja.”

I didn’t know whether I should push the head of this clown into his soup,

who, along with his teacher, had taken Strange Creatures seriously, and drown

him or leave him to describe in glowing terms the only horse picture he’d ever

seen in his life—in who knows how poor a manuscript copy. I came up with a

third alternative, and that was to drop my spoon and quit the shop. After

walking for a long while I entered the abandoned dervish lodge, where I was

overcome with a sense of peace. I tidied up and without doing anything else, I

listened to the silence.

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Later, I removed the mirror from where I kept it hidden and set it upon the

low worktable. Next, I placed the two-page illustration and the drawing board

on my lap. When I could see my face in the mirror from where I sat, I

attempted to draw my portrait in charcoal. I drew for a long time, patiently.

Much later, when I saw that once again the face on the page didn’t resemble

my face in the mirror, I was filled with such misery that tears welled in my

eyes. How did the Venetian painters that Enishte described with such flourish

do it? I then imagined myself to be one of them, thinking that if I illustrated in

that state of mind, I could perhaps make a convincing self-portrait.

Later still, I cursed the European painters and Enishte both, erased what I’d

done and began looking into the mirror anew to begin another drawing.

Ultimately, I found myself wandering the streets again, and then, here, at

this despicable coffeehouse. I wasn’t even sure how I happened to come here.

As I entered, I felt such embarrassment about mingling with these miserable

miniaturists and calligraphers that sweat accumulated on my forehead.

I sensed that they were watching me, alerting each other of my presence

with their elbows, and laughing—all right, I could plainly see them doing it. I

seated myself in the corner, trying to behave naturally. At the same time my

eyes sought the other masters, my dear brethren with whom, at one time, I’d

served as Master Osman’s apprentice. I was certain each of them was also

asked to draw a horse this evening and that they’d each expended great

desperate efforts, taking the contest arranged by these idiots quite seriously.

The storyteller effendi hadn’t yet begun his performance. The picture

hadn’t even been hung up yet. I was forced to socialize with the coffeehouse

crowd.

So be it then, let me be frank with you: Like everyone else I, too, made

jokes, told indecent stories, kissed my companions on the cheeks with

exaggerated gestures, spoke in double entendres, innuendos and puns, asked

how the young assistant masters were doing, and like everybody else,

mercilessly needled our common enemies; and after I really warmed up, I went

so far as to roughhouse and kiss men on the neck. Yet, knowing that a part of

my soul remained mercilessly silent when I involved myself in such behavior

caused me unbearable torment.

Nonetheless, before long, I not only succeeded in using figurative language

to compare my own cock, and those of others that were much-talked about, to

brushes, reeds, coffeehouse pillars, flutes, newel posts, door knockers, leeks,

minarets, lady fingers in heavy syrup, pine trees, and twice, to the world itself,

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I was equally successful in comparing the asses of much-discussed pretty boys

to oranges, figs, small haycocklike pastries, pillows and also to tiny anthills.

Meanwhile, the most conceited of the calligraphers my age was only able to

compare his own tool—quite amateurishly and without any self-confidence I

might add—to a ship’s mast and a porter’s pole. Furthermore, I made

allusions to old miniaturists’ dicks that would no longer rise; the cherry-

colored lips of new apprentices; master calligraphers who hoarded their

money (as did I) in a certain place (“the most disgusting nook”); how perhaps

opium had been put into the wine I was drinking instead of rose petals; the

last great masters of Tabriz and Shiraz; the mixing of coffee and wine in

Aleppo; and the calligraphers and beautiful boys to be found there.

At times it seemed that one of the two spirits within me had, in the end,

emerged victorious, leaving the other behind, and that I’d finally forgotten

that silent and loveless aspect of myself. At these times I remembered the

holiday celebrations of my childhood during which I was able to be myself

along with my kith and kin. Despite all these jokes, kisses and embraces, there

was still a silence within me that left me suffering and isolated in the heart of

the crowd.

Who had endowed me with this silent and merciless spirit—it was not a

spirit but a jinn—which always chided me and cut me off from others? Satan?

But the silence within me was eased, not by the crass mischief instigated by

Satan, on the contrary, by the most pure and simple stories that drove into

one’s soul. Under the influence of wine, I told two stories, hoping that this

would grant me peace. A tall, pale, yet pinkish-complected calligrapher’s

apprentice focused his green eyes onto mine and was listening to me with rapt

attention.

Two Stories on Blindness and Style

the Miniaturist Told to Ease the Loneliness in His Soul

ALIF

Contrary to what is assumed, making drawings of horses by looking at actual

horses wasn’t a discovery of European masters. The original idea belonged to

the great master Jemalettin of Kazvin. After Tall Hasan, the Khan of the

Whitesheep, conquered Kazvin, the old master Jemalettin was not content to

simply join the book-arts workshop of the victorious khan; instead he headed

out on campaign with him, claiming that he wanted to embellish the khan’s

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History with scenes of war he’d witnessed himself. So this great master, who

for sixty-two years had made pictures of horses, cavalry charges and battles

without ever having seen a battle, went to war for the first time. But before he

could even see the thunderous and violent clash of sweating horses, he lost his

hands and his eyesight to enemy cannon-fire. The old master, like all genuine

virtuosos, had in any case been awaiting blindness as though it were Allah’s

blessing, and neither did he treat the loss of his hands as a great deficiency. He

maintained that the memory of a miniaturist was located not in the hand, as

some insisted, but in the intellect and the heart, and furthermore, now that he

was blind, he declared that he could see the true pictures, scenery and essential

and flawless horses that Allah commanded be seen. To share these wonders

with lovers of art, he hired a tall, pale-skinned, pink-complected, green-eyed

calligrapher’s apprentice to whom he dictated exactly how to draw the

marvelous horses that appeared to him in God’s divine darkness—as he

would’ve drawn them had he been able to hold a brush in his hands. After the

master’s death, his account of how to draw 303 horses beginning from the left

foreleg was collected by the handsome calligrapher’s apprentice into three

volumes respectively entitled The Depiction of Horses, The Flow of Horses and The

Love of Horses, which were quite widely liked and sought after for a time in the

regions where the Whitesheep ruled. Though they appeared in a variety of new

editions and copies, were memorized by illustrators, apprentices and their

students and were used as practice books, after Tall Hasan’s Whitesheep

nation was obliterated and the Herat style of illustration overtook all of Persia,

Jemalettin and his manuscripts were forgotten. Doubtless, the logic behind

Kemalettin R?za of Herat’s violent criticism of these three volumes in his book

The Blindman’s Horses, and his conclusion that they ought to be burned, had

figured in this turn of events. Kemalettin R?za claimed that none of the horses

described by Jemalettin of Kazvin in his three volumes could be a horse of

God’s vision—because none of them were “immaculate,” since the old master

had described them after he’d witnessed an actual battle scene, no matter

how briefly. Since the treasures of Tall Hasan of the Whitesheep had been

plundered by Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror and brought to Istanbul, it

should come as no surprise that occasionally certain of these 303 stories

appear in other manuscripts in Istanbul and even that some horses are drawn

as instructed therein.

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LAM

In Herat and Shiraz, when a master miniaturist nearing the end of his days

went blind from a lifetime of excessive labor, it would not only be taken as a

sign of that master’s determination, but would be commended as God’s

acknowledgment of the great master’s work and talent. There was even a time

in Herat when masters who hadn’t gone blind despite having grown old were

regarded with suspicion, a situation that compelled quite a few of them to

actually induce blindness in their old age. There was a long period during

which men reverently recalled artists who blinded themselves, following in the

path of those legendary masters who’d done so rather than work for another

monarch or change their styles. And it was during this age that Abu Said,

Tamerlane’s grandson from the Miran Shah line of descent, introduced a

further twist in his workshop after he’d conquered Tashkent and Samarkand:

The practice of paying greater homage to the imitation of blindness than to

blindness itself. Black Veli, the old artisan who inspired Abu Said, had

confirmed that a blind miniaturist could see the horses of God’s vision from

within the darkness; however, true talent resided in a sighted miniaturist who