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from Isfahan, an ivory chess set and an object that immediately caught my

attention—a pen case decorated with Chinese dragons and branches with a

mother-of-pearl-inlaid rosette obviously from the time of Tamerlane. I opened

the case and out came the subtle scent of burned paper and rosewater; within

rested the turquoise-and mother-of-pearl-handled golden needle used to

fasten plumes to turbans. I took up the needle and returned to my spot like a

specter.

Alone again, I placed the needle that Master Bihzad had used to blind

himself upon the open page of the Book of Kings and gazed at it. It wasn’t the

needle he’d blinded himself with that made me shudder, but seeing an object

he’d taken into his miraculous hands.

Why did Shah Tahmasp send this terrifying needle with the book he’d

presented to Sultan Selim? Was it because this Shah, who as a child was a

student of Bihzad’s and a patron of artists in his youth, had changed in his old

age, distancing poets and artists from his inner circle and giving himself over

entirely to faith and worship? Was this the reason he was willing to relinquish

this exquisite book, which the greatest of masters had labored over for ten

years? Had he sent this needle so all would know that the great artist was

blinded of his own volition or, as was rumored for a time, to make the

statement that whosoever beheld the pages of this book even once would no

longer wish to see anything else in this world? In any event, this volume was

no longer considered a masterpiece by the Shah, who felt poignant regret,

afraid that he’d committed a sacrilege through his youthful love of illustrating,

as happened with many rulers in their old age.

I was reminded of stories told by spiteful illuminators who’d grown old to

find their dreams unfulfilled: As the armies of the Blacksheep ruler, Jihan

Shah, were poised to enter Shiraz, Ibn Hüsam, the city’s legendary Head

Illuminator, declared, “I refuse to paint in any other way,” and had his

apprentice blind him with a hot iron. Among the miniaturists that the armies

of Sultan Selim the Grim brought back to Istanbul after the defeat of Shah

Ismail, the capture of Tabriz and the plunder of the Seven Heavens Palace was

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an old Persian master who it was rumored blinded himself with medicines

because he believed he could never bring himself to paint in the Ottoman

style—not as the result of an illness he’d had on the road as some claimed. To

set an example for them, I used to tell my illuminators in their moments of

frustration how Bihzad had blinded himself.

Was there no other recourse? If a master miniaturist made use of the new

methods here and there in out-of-the-way places, couldn’t he then, if only a

little, save the entire workshop and the styles of the old masters?

There was a dark stain on the extremely sharp point of the elegantly tapered

plume needle, yet my weary eyes couldn’t determine whether it was blood or

not. Lowering the magnifying lens, as if beholding a melancholy depiction of

love with a matching sense of melancholy, I looked at the needle for a long

time. I tried to imagine how Bihzad could’ve done it. I’d heard that one

doesn’t go blind immediately; the velvety darkness descends slowly, sometimes

after days, sometimes after months, as with old men who go blind naturally.

I’d caught sight of it while passing into the next room; I stood and looked,

yes, there it was: an ivory mirror with a twisted handle and thick ebony frame,

its length nicely embellished with script. I sat down again and gazed at my

own eyes. How beautifully the flame of the candle danced in my pupils—

which had witnessed my hand paint for sixty years.

“How had Master Bihzad done it?” I asked myself once more.

Never once taking my eyes off the mirror, with the practiced movements of

a woman applying kohl to her eyelids, my hand found the needle on its own.

Without hesitation, as if making a hole at the end of an ostrich egg soon to be

embellished, I bravely, calmly and firmly pressed the needle into the pupil of

my right eye. My innards sank, not because I felt what I was doing, but because

I saw what I was doing. I pushed the needle into my eye to the depth of a

quarter the length of a finger, then removed it.

In the couplet worked into the frame of the mirror, the poet had wished

the observer eternal beauty and wisdom—and eternal life to the mirror itself.

Smiling, I did the same to my other eye.

For a long while I didn’t move. I stared at the world—at everything.

As I’d surmised, the colors of the world did not darken, but seemed to

bleed ever so gently into one another. I could still more or less see.

The pale light of the sun fell over the red and oxblood cloth of the Treasury.

In the accustomed ceremony, the Head Treasurer and his men broke the seal

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and opened the lock and the door. Jezmi Agha changed the chamber pots,

lamps and brazier, brought in fresh bread and dried mulberries and

announced to the others that we would continue searching for the horses with

oddly drawn nostrils within Our Sultan’s books. What could be more

exquisite than looking at the world’s most beautiful pictures while trying to

recollect God’s vision of the world?

351

I AM CALLED BLACK

When the Head Treasurer and the chief officers opened the portal with great

ceremony my eyes were so accustomed to the velvety red aura of the Treasury

rooms that the early morning winter sunlight filtering in from the courtyard

of the Royal Private Quarters of the Enderun seemed terrifying. I stood dead

still, as did Master Osman himself: If I moved, it seemed, the clues we sought

in the moldy, dusty and tangible air of the Treasury might escape.

With curious amazement, as if seeing some magnificent object for the first

time, Master Osman stared at the light cascading toward us between the

heads of the Treasury chiefs lined up in rows on either side of the open portal.

The night before, I watched him as he turned the pages of the Book of Kings.

I noticed this same expression of astonishment pass over his face as his

shadow, cast upon the wall, trembled faintly, his head carefully sank down

toward his magnifying lens, and his lips first contorted delicately, as if

preparing to reveal a pleasant secret, then twitched as he gazed in awe at an

illustration.

After the portal was shut again, I wandered impatiently between rooms

ever more restless; I thought nervously that we wouldn’t have time to cull

enough information from the books in the Treasury. I sensed that Master

Osman couldn’t focus adequately on his task, and I confessed my misgivings

to him.

Like a genuine master grown accustomed to caressing his apprentices, he

held my hand in a pleasing way. “Men like us have no choice but to try to see

the world the way God does and to resign ourselves to His justice,” he said.

“And here, among these pictures and possessions, I have the strong sensation

that these two things are beginning to converge: As we approach God’s vision

of the world, His justice approaches us. See here, the needle Master Bihzad

blinded himself with…”

Master Osman callously told the story of the needle, and I scrutinized the

extremely sharp point of this disagreeable object beneath the magnifying glass

which he lowered so I might better see; a pinkish film covered its tip.

“The old masters,” Master Osman said, “would suffer pangs of conscience

about changing their talent, colors and methods. They’d consider it

dishonorable to see the world one day as an Eastern shah commanded, the

next, as a Western ruler did—which is what the artists of our day do.”

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His eyes were neither trained on mine nor upon the pages in front of him.

It seemed as though he were gazing at a distant unattainable whiteness. In a

page of the Book of Kings lying open before him, Persian and Turanian armies

clashed with all their force. As horses fought shoulder to shoulder, enraged

heroic warriors drew their swords and slaughtered one another with the color

and joy of a festival, their armor pierced by the lances of the cavalry, their

heads and arms severed, their bodies hacked apart or cloven in two, strewn all

over the field.

“When the great masters of old were forced to adopt the styles of victors

and imitate their miniaturists, they preserved their honor by using a needle to

heroically bring on the blindness that the labors of painting would’ve caused

in time. Yes, before the pureness of God’s darkness fell over their eyes like a

divine reward, they’d stare at a masterpiece ceaselessly for hours or even days,

and because they stubbornly stared out of bowed heads, the meaning and

world of those pictures—spotted with blood dripping from their eyes—would

take the place of all the evil they suffered, and as their eyes ever so slowly

clouded over they’d approach blindness in peace. Do you have any idea which

illustration I’d want to stare at till I’d attained the divine blackness of the

blind?”

Like a man trying to recall a childhood memory, he fixed his eyes, whose

pupils seemed to shrink as their whites expanded, on a distant place beyond

the walls of the Treasury.

“The scene, rendered in the style of the old masters of Herat, wherein

Hüsrev, burning madly with love, rides his horse to the foot of Shirin’s

summer palace and waits!”

Perhaps he’d now go on to describe that picture as if reciting a melancholy

poem eulogizing the blindness of the old masters. “My great master, my dear

sire,” on a strange impulse, I interrupted him, “what I want to stare at for all

eternity is my beloved’s delicate face. It’s been three days since we wed. I’ve

thought of her longingly for twelve years. The scene wherein Shirin falls in love

with Hüsrev after seeing his picture reminds me of none other than her.”

There was a wealth of expression on Master Osman’s face, curiosity

perhaps, but it had to do neither with my story nor with the bloody battle

scene before him. He seemed to be expecting good news in which he could

gradually take comfort. When I was sure he wasn’t looking at me, I abruptly

grabbed the plume needle and walked away.

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In a dark part of the third of the Treasury rooms, the one abutting the

baths, there was a corner cluttered with hundreds of strange clocks sent as

presents from Frankish kings and sovereigns; when they stopped working, as

they usually did within a short time, they were set aside here. Withdrawing to

this room, I carefully scrutinized the needle that Master Osman claimed

Bihzad had used to blind himself.

By the red daylight filtering inside, reflecting off the casings, crystal faces

and diamonds of the dusty and broken clocks, the golden tip of the needle,

coated with a pinkish liquid, occasionally shimmered. Had the legendary

Master Bihzad actually blinded himself with this implement? Had Master

Osman done the same terrible thing to himself? The expression of an impish

Moroccan, the size of a finger and colorfully painted, attached to the

mechanism of one of the large clocks seemed to say “Yes!” Evidently, when the

clock was working, this man in the Ottoman turban would merrily nod his

head as the hour tolled—a small joke on the part of the Hapsburg king who

sent it, and his skillful clock-maker, for the amusement of Our Sultan and the

women of His harem.

I looked through quite a few very mediocre books: As the dwarf confirmed,

these were among the effects of pashas whose properties and belongings were

confiscated after they were beheaded. So many pashas had been executed that

these volumes were without number. With a pitiless joy, the dwarf declared

that any pasha so intoxicated by his own wealth and power as to forget he was

a subject of the Sultan and to have a book made in his own honor, illuminated

with gold leaf as if he were a monarch or a shah, well deserved to be executed

and have his possessions expropriated. Even in these volumes, some of which

were albums, illuminated manuscripts or illustrated collections of poetry,

whenever I came across a version of Shirin falling in love with Hüsrev’s picture,

I stopped and stared.

The picture within a picture, that is, the picture of Hüsrev which Shirin

encountered during her countryside outing, was never rendered in detail, not

because miniaturists couldn’t adequately depict something so small—many

had the dexterity and finesse to paint upon fingernails, grains of rice or even

strands of hair. Why then hadn’t they drawn the face and features of Hüsrev—

the object of Shirin’s love—in enough detail so that he might be recognized?

Sometime in the afternoon, perhaps to forget my hopelessness, and thinking,

as I leafed through a disorderly album I’d chanced upon, that I’d broach such

questions to Master Osman, I was struck by the image of a horse in a picture

of a bridal procession painted on cloth. My heart skipped a beat.

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There before me was a horse with peculiar nostrils carrying a coquettish

bride. The beast was looking at me out of the picture. It was as though the

magical horse were on the verge of whispering a secret to me. As if in a dream,

I wanted to shout, but my voice was silent.

In one continuous movement, I collected up the volume and ran among the

objects and chests to Master Osman, laying the page open before him.

He looked down at the picture.