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a woman. Only my eyes and cheeks were exposed, but I was an extraordinarily

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attractive woman and this made me very happy. My manliness, which took

note of this fact before even I had, was erect. Naturally, this upset me.

In the hand mirror I held, I watched a teardrop slide from my lovely eye and

just then, a poem painfully came to mind. I’ve never been able to forget it,

because at that same moment, inspired by the Almighty, I sang that poem

rhythmically like a song, trying to forget my woes:

My fickle heart longs for the West when I’m in the East and for the East when

I’m in the West.

My other parts insist I be a woman when I’m a man and a man when I’m a

woman.

How difficult it is being human, even worse is living a human’s life.

I only want to amuse myself frontside and backside, to be Eastern and Western

both.

I was going to say, “Let’s hope our Erzurumi brethren don’t hear the song

issuing from my heart,” for they’ll be cross. But why should I be afraid?

Perhaps they won’t be angry at all. Listen, I’m not saying this for the sake of

gossip, but I’ve learned how that famous preacher the Exalted Not-Husret-by-

a-Longshot Effendi, despite being married, prefers handsome boys to us

women just as you sensitive painters do. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.

But I pay no mind to any of this because I find him repulsive besides, and he’s

so old. His teeth have fallen out and as the young boys who get close to him

say, his mouth stinks, excuse the expression, like a bear’s ass.

All right then, I’m holding off on the hearsay to return to the real issue at

hand: As soon as I saw how beautiful I was, I no longer wanted to wash clothes

and dishes and parade about the streets like a slave. Poverty, tears, sorrow,

gazing forlornly at a mirror of disappointment and crying are the lot of sad

and ugly women. I must find a husband who’ll put me on a pedestal, but who

might that be?

That was why I began spying through a peephole on the sons of pashas and

notables, whom my late father had invited to our house under various

pretexts. I wanted my predicament to resemble that of the petite-mouthed

beauty with two children whom all the miniaturists love. Perhaps it’d be best

for me to describe to you poor Shekure’s story. But wait a minute, I’d

promised to recount the following story tonight:

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The Love Story Told by a Woman Prompted by the Devil

It’s quite simple actually. The story takes place in Kemerüstü, one of the poorer

neighborhoods of Istanbul. A prominent inhabitant of the neighborhood,

Chelebi Ahmet, secretary to Vas?f Pasha, was a married gentleman with two

children who kept to himself. One day, through an open window, he catches

sight of a black-haired, black-eyed, silver-skinned, tall and thin Bosnian beauty,

and is smitten. But, the woman is married, has no interest whatsoever in the

Chelebi, and is devoted to her handsome husband. The hapless Chelebi refuses

to confide his woes to anybody, and reduced by love to skin and bone, takes to

wine he’s bought from a Greek, yet ultimately he cannot hide his love from the

neighborhood. At first, because the neighbors adore such love stories and

admire and respect the Chelebi, they honor his love, making a passing joke or

two about it and letting life take its course. But the Chelebi, who can’t control

his incurable agony, begins to get drunk each night and sit at the doorstep of

the house wherein the silver-skinned beauty lives happily with her husband,

crying for hours on end like a child. In the end this alarms the neighbors. Each

night as the lover cries in agony, they are able neither to beat him and drive

him away nor to comfort him. The Chelebi, as suited a gentleman, learns to

cry inwardly without lashing out or annoying anybody. But gradually, his

hopeless grief works its way into the neighborhood, becoming the sorrow and

grief of all; the residents lose their sense of well-being, and like the fountain

which flows mournfully in the square, the Chelebi himself became a font of

sorrow. Initially, the talk of misery spreads throughout the neighborhood,

becoming in turn the rumor of ill-fortune and later the certainty of doom.

Some move away, some experience a spate of bad luck and some are unable to

practice their craft, because they’ve lost the will to work. After the

neighborhood empties out, one day the lovelorn Chelebi also moves away with

his wife and children, leaving the silver-skinned beauty and her husband all

alone. This misfortune, of which they are the focus, douses the flames of their

love and causes them to drift apart. Though they live together for the rest of

their lives, they’re never again able to be happy.

I was on the verge of saying how much I liked this story because it showed

the pitfulls of love and women, when for Heaven’s sake, I’d forgotten that I’d

lost my capacity to reason. Since I’m now a woman, I’m going to say

something else entirely. All right then, it’s something like this:

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Oh, how wonderful love is!

Now then, who are those strangers bursting through the door?

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I AM CALLED “BUTTERFLY”

I saw the mob and knew the Erzurumis had begun slaying us witty

miniaturists.

Black was also in the crowd watching the attack. I saw him holding a dagger

accompanied by a group of odd-looking men, the well-known Esther the

clothier and other women carrying cloth sacks. I had an urge to flee after

seeing the establishment cruelly wrecked and the coffeehouse-goers beaten

mercilessly as they tried to leave. Later, another mob, perhaps the Janissaries,

arrived. The Erzurumis snuffed out their torches and fled.

There was nobody at the dark entrance of the coffeehouse, and no one was

looking. I walked inside. Everything was in shambles. I stepped on the

shattered cups, plates, glasses and bowls. An oil lamp hanging from a nail high

on the wall hadn’t died out during the turmoil but only illuminated the soot

marks on the ceiling, leaving in darkness the floor strewn with the boards of

wrecked wood benches, broken low tables and other debris.

Stacking long cushions atop one another, I reached up and grabbed hold of

the oil lamp. Within its circle of light, I noticed bodies lying on the floor.

When I saw that one face was covered in blood, I turned away, and went to the

next. The second body was moaning, and upon seeing my lamp, made a

childlike noise.

Someone else entered. At first I was alarmed, though I could sense it was

Black. The both of us leaned over the third body sprawled on the floor. As I

lowered the lamp to his head, we saw what we’d suspected: They’d killed the

storyteller.

There was no trace of blood on his face, which was made up like a woman’s,

but his chin, brow and rouge-covered mouth were battered, and judging by his

neck, covered in bruises, he’d been throttled. His hands were cast backward

over his head on either side. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that one of them

held the old man’s arms behind his back while the others beat him in the face

before strangling him. I wonder, had they said, “Cut out his tongue so he never

again slanders his Excellency the Preacher Hoja Effendi,” and then set about

doing so?

“Bring the lamp here,” said Black. Near the stove, the light of the lamp

struck broken coffee grinders, sieves, scales and pieces of broken coffee cups

lying in the mud of spilled coffee. In the corner where the storyteller hung his

pictures each night, Black was searching for the performer’s props, sash,

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magician’s handkerchief and popping stick. Black said he was after the pictures

and held the lamp he’d taken from me to my face: Yes, of course I’d drawn

two of them out of a sense of fraternity. We could find nothing but the Persian

skullcap that the deceased wore over his perfectly shaved head.

Seeing no one else, we exited into the blackness of night through a narrow

passageway that led away from the back door. During the raid much of the

crowd and the artists within probably escaped through this door, but the

knocked-over planters and bags of coffee strewn everywhere indicated that

there was a struggle here as well.

The fact that the coffeehouse was raided and the master storyteller

murdered, coupled with the terrifying blackness of night, brought Black and I

closer together. This was also what caused the silence between us. We passed

two more streets. Black handed the lamp back to me, then he drew his dagger

and pressed it to my throat.

“We’re going to your house,” he said. “I want to search it so I can put my

mind at ease.”

“It’s already been searched.”

Rather than be offended by him, I had the urge to tease him. Didn’t Black’s

belief in the disgraceful rumors about me simply prove he was also jealous of

me? He held the dagger without much confidence.

My house was opposite the direction we were heading along the road

leading away from the coffeehouse. We tacked right and left down

neighborhood streets and passed through empty gardens that bore the

depressing scent of damp and lonely trees as we traced a wide arc back toward

my house. We’d covered more than half the route, when Black stopped and

said:

“For two days, Master Osman and I examined the masterpieces of the

legendary masters in the Treasury.”

Much later, nearly screaming, I said, “After a certain age, even if a painter

shares a worktable with Bihzad, what he sees may please his eyes and bring

contentment and excitement to his soul, but it won’t enhance his talent,

because one paints with the hand, not the eyes, and the hand at my age, let

alone at Master Osman’s, does not easily learn new things.”

Assured my beautiful wife was waiting for me, I spoke at the top of my

voice to let her know I wasn’t alone so she might hide herself from Black—not

that I took this pathetic dagger-wielding fool seriously.

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We passed through the courtyard gate, and I thought I saw the light of a

lamp moving in the house, but thank God all was in darkness now. It was such

a merciless rape of my privacy for this knife-wielding beast to force his way

into my heavenly home, where I spent my days, indeed all my time, seeking

out and painting Allah’s memories until my eyes tired—whereupon I’d make

love to my beloved, the most beautiful woman in the world—that I swore to

take revenge upon him.

Lowering the lamp, he examined my papers, a page I was in the midst of

completing—condemned prisoners pleading to the Sultan to be relieved of

their chains of debt and receiving His benevolence—my paints, my worktables,

my knives, my reed-cutting boards, my brushes, everything around my writing

table, my papers again, my burnishing stones, my penknives and the spaces

between my pen and paper boxes; he looked in cabinets, chests, beneath

cushions, at one of my paper scissors, and beneath a soft red cushion and a

carpet before going back, bringing the lamp closer and closer to each object

and examining the same places once again. As he said when he first drew his

weapon, he wouldn’t search my entire house, only my atelier. Indeed, couldn’t

I conceal my wife—the only thing I wanted to hide—in the room from which

she was now spying on us?

“There’s a final picture that belonged to the book my Enishte was having

made,” he said. “Whoever killed him also stole that picture.”

“It was different from the others,” I said immediately. “Your Enishte, may

he rest in peace, made me draw a tree in one corner of the page. In the

background somewhere…and in the middle of the page, in the foreground,

was to be someone’s picture, probably a portrait of Our Sultan. That space,

quite large if I might add, was awaiting its picture. Because the objects in the

background were to be smaller, as in the European style, he wanted me to

make the tree smaller. As the picture developed, it gave the impression of being

a view of this world from a window, nothing like an illustration at all. It was

then I comprehended that in a picture made with the perspectival methods of

the Franks, the borders and gilding took the place of a window frame.”

“Elegant Effendi was responsible for the borders and the gilding.”

“If that’s what you’re asking, I already told you I didn’t murder him.”

“A murderer never admits to his crime,” he said quickly, then asked me

what I was doing at the coffeehouse during the raid.

He placed the oil lamp just beside the cushion upon which I was seated, in

a way that would illuminate my face along with my papers and the pages I was

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illuminating. He himself was scurrying about the room like a shadow in the

dark.

Besides telling him what I’ve told you, that I actually was an infrequent

visitor to the coffeehouse and just happened to be passing by, I also repeated

that I made two of the pictures which were hung on the wall there—although

I actually disapproved of the goings-on at the coffeehouse. “Because,” I added,

“the art of painting only ends up condemning and punishing itself when it

derives its strength from the desire to condemn and punish the evils of life

rather than from the painter’s own skill, love of his art and desire to embrace

Allah…regardless of whether it’s the preacher from Erzurum or Satan himself

that’s denounced. More importantly, if that coffeehouse crowd hadn’t

targeted the Erzurumis, it might not have been raided tonight.”

“Even so, you would go there,” said the wretch.