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inward, the whites of our eyes facing the world like blind men—and that’s

exactly what we proceeded to do. In this situation, it’s the nature of a dervish

to behold the world in his head rather than the world outside; since our heads

were full of hashish, the landscape of our minds was more pleasant than what

the Frank painter saw.

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Meanwhile, the scene outside had grown even worse; we heard the ranting

of a Hoja Effendi.

Pray, let us not give the wrong idea. We’ve now made mention of the

respected “Hoja Effendi,” but last week in this fine coffeehouse there was a

great misunderstanding: This respected “Hoja Effendi” of whom we speak has

nothing whatsoever to do with His Excellency Nusret Hoja the cleric from

Erzurum, nor with the bastard Husret Hoja, nor with the hoja from Sivas who

made it with the Devil atop a tree. Those who interpret everything negatively

have said that if His Excellency Hoja Effendi becomes a target of reproach here

once again, they’ll cut out the storyteller’s tongue and lower this coffeehouse

about his head.

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:

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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.”

The Real Secret

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.

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IT IS I, MASTER OSMAN

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

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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.

I turned the pages, gazing hurriedly but with rapt attention upon

thousands of birds, horses, soldiers, lovers, camels, trees and clouds, while the

Treasury’s happy dwarf, like a shah of elder days given the opportunity to

exhibit his riches and wealth, proudly and undauntedly removed volume after

volume from chests and placed them before me. From two separate corners of

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an iron chest stuffed with amazing tomes, common books and disorderly

albums, there emerged two extraordinary volumes—one bound in the Shiraz

style with a burgundy cover, the other bound in Herat and finished with a

dark lacquer in the Chinese fashion—which contained pages so resembling

each other that at first I thought they were copies. While I was trying to

determine which book was the original and which the copy, I examined the

names of the calligraphers on the colophons, looked for hidden signatures, and

finally came to the realization, with a shudder, that these two volumes of

Nizami were the legendary books that Master Sheikh Ali of Tabriz had made,

one for the Khan of the Blacksheep, Jihan Shah, and the other for the Khan of

the Whitesheep, Tall Hasan. After he was blinded by the Blacksheep shah to

prevent him from making another version of the first volume, the great master

artist took refuge with the Whitesheep khan and created a superior copy from

memory. To see that the pictures in the second of the legendary books, made

when he was blind, were simpler and purer, while the colors in the first

volume were more lively and invigorating, reminded me that the memory of

the blind exposes the merciless simplicity of life but also deadens its vigor.

Since I myself am a genuine great master, so acknowledged by Almighty

Allah, who sees and knows all, I knew that one day I would go blind, but is this

what I wanted now? Since His presence could be sensed quite nearby in the

exquisite and terrifying darkness of the cluttered Treasury, like a condemned

man who wishes to look upon the world one last time before he is beheaded, I

asked Him: “Allow me to see all these illustrations and have my fill of them.”

As I turned the pages, by the force of God’s inscrutable wisdom, I

frequently came across legends and matters of blindness. In the famous scene

showing Shirin on a countryside outing falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing

his picture on the branch of a plane tree, Sheikh Ali R?za from Shiraz had

drawn distinctly all the leaves of the tree one by one so they filled the entire

sky. In answer to a fool who saw the work and commented that the true

subject of the illustration wasn’t the plane tree, Sheikh Ali replied that the true

subject wasn’t the passion of the beautiful young maiden either, it was the

passion of the artist, and to proudly prove his point he attempted to paint the

same plane tree with all its leaves on a grain of rice. If the signature hidden

beneath the beautiful feet of Shirin’s darling lady attendants hadn’t misled

me, I was of course seeing the magnificent tree made by the blind master on

paper—not the tree made on a grain of rice, which he left half finished, having

gone blind seven years and three months after he started the task. On another

page, Rüstem blinding Alexander with his forked arrow was depicted in the

manner of artists who knew the Indian style, so vivaciously and colorfully, that