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with, I want you to go there and observe everything. I worry that the others,

that is, the miniaturists, have ended up falling out with and slaying one

another. They go by the workshop names that Head Illuminator Master

Osman gave them years ago: ”Butterfly,“ ”Olive,“ ”Stork‘…You’re also to go

and observe them as they work in their homes.“

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.”

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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,

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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.

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“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.”

35

I AM CALLED BLACK

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.

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“You shall visit Head Illuminator Master Osman,” said my Enishte. “Some

say he’s gone blind, others that he’s lost his senses. I think he’s blind and

senile both.”

Despite the fact that my Enishte didn’t have the standing of a master

illustrator and that this wasn’t his field of artistic expertise at all, he did have

control over an illustrated manuscript. This, in fact, was with the permission

and encouragement of the Sultan, a situation that, of course, strained his

relationship with the elderly Master Osman.

Thinking of my childhood, I allowed my attention to be absorbed by the

furniture and objects within the house. From twelve years ago, I still

remembered the blue kilim from Kula covering the floor, the copper ewer, the

coffee set and tray, the copper pail and the delicate coffee cups that had come

all the way from China by way of Portugal, as my late aunt had boasted

numerous times. These effects, like the low X-shaped reading desk inlaid with

mother-of-pearl, the stand for a turban nailed to the wall, the red velvet pillow

whose smoothness I recalled as soon as I touched it, were from the house in

Aksaray where I’d passed my childhood with Shekure, and they still carried

something of the bliss of my days of painting in that house.

Painting and happiness. I would like my dear readers who have given close

attention to my story and my fate to bear these two things in mind, as they

are the genesis of my world. At one time, I was contented here, among these

books, calligraphy brushes and paintings. Then, I fell in love and was banished

from this Paradise. In the years I endured my amorous exile, I often thought

how I was in fact deeply indebted to Shekure and my love for her, because they

had enabled me to adapt optimistically to life and the world. Since I had, in

my childlike na?veté, no doubt that my love would be reciprocated, I grew

exceedingly assured and came to regard the world as a good place. You see, it

was with this same earnestness that I involved myself with books and came to

love them, to love the reading my Enishte required of me back then, my

religious school lessons and my illustrating and painting. But as much as I

owed the sunny, festive and more fertile first half of my education to the love I

felt for Shekure, I owed the dark knowledge that poisoned the latter time to

being rejected; my desire on icy nights to sputter out and vanish like the dying

flames in the iron stoves of a caravansary, repeatedly dreaming after a night of

love that I was plunging into a desolate abyss along with whichever woman lay

beside me, and the notion that I was simply worthless—all of it was furnished

by Shekure.

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“Were you aware,” my Enishte said much later, “that after death our souls

will be able to meet with the spirits of men and women in this world who are

peacefully asleep in their beds?”

“No, I was not.”

“We take a long journey after death, so I’m not afraid of dying. What I fear

is dying before I finish Our Sultan’s book.”

Part of me felt I was stronger, more reasonable and more reliable than my

Enishte, and part of me was dwelling on the cost of the caftan that I’d

purchased on my way here to meet with this man who’d denied me his

daughter’s hand and on the silver bridle and hand-worked saddle of the horse

which, soon after going downstairs, I’d take out of the stable and ride away.

I told him I’d apprise him of everything I learned during my visits to the

various miniaturists. I kissed his hand and brought it to my forehead. I walked

down the stairs, entered the courtyard, and sensing the snowy cold upon me,

accepted that I was neither a child nor an old man: I joyously felt the world

upon my skin. As I shut the stable door, a breeze began to stir. I led my white

horse by the bridle over the stone walkway to the earthen part of the

courtyard, and we both shuddered: I felt as if his strong, large-veined legs, his

impatience and his stubbornness were my own. As soon as we entered the

street, I was about to swiftly mount my steed and disappear down the narrow

way like a fabled horseman, never to return again, when an enormous woman,

a Jewess dressed all in pink and carrying a bundle, appeared out of nowhere

and accosted me. She was as large and wide as an armoire. Yet she was

boisterous, lively and even coquettish.

“My brave man, my young hero, I see you’re truly as handsome as they say

you are,” she said. “Might you be married? Or might you be a bachelor?

Would you deign to buy a silk handkerchief for your secret lover from Esther,

Istanbul’s premier peddler of fine cloth?”

“Nay.”

“A red sash of Atlas silk?”

“Nay.”

“Don’t go on piping ”nay‘ at me like that! How could a brave heart like you

not have a fiancée or a secret lover? Who knows how many teary-eyed

maidens are burning with desire for you?“

Her body lengthened like the slender form of an acrobat and she leaned

toward me with an elegant gesture. At the same time, with the skill of a

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magician who plucks objects out of thin air, she caused a letter to appear in

her hand. I stealthily grabbed it, and as if I’d been training for this moment for

years, I hastily and artfully placed it into my sash. It was a thick letter and felt