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assume leadership of the workshop after me. I couldn’t trust Olive, and in the

end Stork would unwittingly become slave to the Venetian style. Butterfly’s

need to be admired—I was upset at the thought that he could take a life—

would be vital in handling both the workshop and the Sultan. Only Butterfly’s

sensitivity and faith in his own palette could resist the Venetian artistry that

duped the viewer by trying to depict reality itself rather than its

representation, in all its detail: pictures, shadows included, of cardinals,

bridges, rowboats, candlesticks, churches and stables, oxen and carriage

wheels, as if all of them were of the same importance to Allah.

“Was there ever a time when you visited him unannounced as you had with

the others?”

“Whosoever looks upon Butterfly’s work will quickly sense that he

understands the value of love as well as the meaning of heartfelt joy and

sorrow. But as with all lovers of color, he gets carried away with his emotions

and is fickle. Because I was so enamored of his God-given and miraculous

talent, of his sensitivity to color, I paid close attention to him in his youth and

know everything there is to know about him. Of course, in such situations, the

other miniaturists quickly become jealous and the master-disciple relationship

becomes strained and damaged. There were many moments of love during

which Butterfly did not fear what others might say. Recently, since he married

the neighborhood fruit seller’s pretty daughter, I’ve neither felt the desire to

go see him, nor have I had the chance.”

“Rumor has it that he’s in league with the followers of the Hoja from

Erzurum,” Black said. “They say he stands to gain a lot if the Hoja and his men

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declare certain works incompatible with religion, and thereby, outlaw our

books—which depict battles, weapons, bloody scenes and routine ceremonies,

not to mention parades including everyone from chefs to magicians, dervishes

to boy dancers, and kebab makers to locksmiths—and confine us to the

subjects and forms of the old Persian masters.”

“Even if we returned skillfully and victoriously to those wondrous paintings

of Tamerlane’s time, even if we returned to that life and vocation in all its

minutia—as bright Stork would best be able to do after me—in the final

analysis, all of it’ll be forgotten,” I said mercilessly, “because everybody will

want to paint like the Europeans.”

Did I actually believe these words of damnation?

“My Enishte believed the same,” Black confessed meekly, “yet it filled him

with hope.”

The Attributes of Stork

I’ve seen him sign his name as the Sinning Painter Mustafa Chelebi. Without

paying any mind to whether he had or ought to have a style, whether it should

be identified with a signature or, like the old masters, remain anonymous, or

whether or not a humble bearing required one to do so, he’d just sign his

name with a smile and a victorious flourish.

He continued bravely down the path I’d set him on and committed to

paper what none before him had been able to. Like myself, he too would

watch master glassblowers turning their rods and blowing glass melted in

ovens to make blue pitchers and green bottles; he saw the leather, needles and

wooden molds of the shoemakers who bent with rapt attention over the shoes

and boots they made; a horse swing tracing a graceful arc during a holiday

festival; a press squeezing oil from seeds; the firing of our cannon at the

enemy; and the screws and the barrels of our guns. He saw these things and

painted them without objecting that the old masters of Tamerlane’s time, or

the legendary illustrators of Tabriz and Kazvin, hadn’t lowered themselves to

do so. He was the first Muslim miniaturist to go to war and return safe and

sound, in preparation for the Book of Victories that he would later illustrate. He

was the first to eagerly study enemy fortresses, cannon, armies, horses with

bleeding wounds, injured soldiers struggling for their lives and corpses—all

with the intent to paint.

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I recognize his work from his subject matter more than his style and from

his attention to obscure details more than his subject matter. I could entrust

him with complete peace of mind to execute all aspects of a painting, from the

arrangement of pages and their composition to the coloring of the most trivial

details. In this regard, he has the right to succeed me as Head Illuminator. But

he’s so ambitious and conceited, and so condescending toward the other

illustrators that he could never manage so many men, and would end up

losing them all. Actually, if it were left to him, with his incredible

industriousness, he’d simply make all the illustrations in the workshop

himself. If he put his mind to such a task, he could in fact succeed. He’s a great

master. He knows his craft. He admires himself. How nice for him.

When I visited him unannounced once, I caught him at work. Resting upon

folding worktables, desks and cushions were all the pages he was working on:

illustrations for Our Sultan’s books, for me, for miserable costume books that

he dashed off for foolish European travelers eager to belittle us, one page of a

triptych he was making for a pasha who thought highly of himself, images to

be pasted in albums, pages made for his own pleasure and even a vulgar

rendition of coitus. Tall, thin Stork was flitting from one illustration to the

next like a bee among flowers, singing folk songs, tweaking the cheek of his

apprentice who was mixing paint and adding a comic twist to the painting he

was working on before showing it to me with a smug chuckle. Unlike my other

miniaturists, he didn’t stop working in a ceremonial show of respect when I

arrived; on the contrary, he happily exhibited the swift exercise of his God-

given talent and the skill he’d acquired through hard work (he could do the

work of seven or eight miniaturists at the same time). Now, I catch myself

secretly thinking that if the vile murderer is one of my three master

miniaturists, I hope to God it’s Stork. During his apprenticeship, the sight of

him at my door on Friday mornings didn’t excite me the way Butterfly did on

his day.

Since he paid equal attention to every odd detail, with no basis of

discrimination except that it be visible, his aesthetic approach resembled that

of the Venetian masters. But unlike them, my ambitious Stork neither saw nor

depicted people’s faces as individual or distinct. I assume, since he either

openly or secretly belittled everyone, that he didn’t consider faces important.

I’m certain deceased Enishte didn’t appoint him to draw Our Sultan’s face.

Even when depicting a subject of the utmost importance, he couldn’t keep

from situating a skeptical dog somewhere at some distance from the event, or

drawing a disgraceful beggar whose misery demeaned the wealth and

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extravagance of a ceremony. He had enough self-confidence to mock whatever

illustration he made, its subject and himself.

“Elegant Effendi’s murder resembles the way Joseph’s brothers tossed him

into a well out of jealousy,” said Black. “And my Enishte’s death resembles the

unforeseen murder of Hüsrev at the hands of his son who had his heart set on

Hüsrev’s wife, Shirin. Everyone says that Stork loved to paint scenes of war and

gruesome depictions of death.”

“Anyone who thinks an illuminator resembles the subject of the picture he

paints doesn’t understand me or my master miniaturists. What exposes us is

not the subject, which others have commissioned from us—these are always

the same anyway—but the hidden sensibilities we include in the painting as

we render that subject: A light that seems to radiate from within the picture, a

palpable hesitancy or anger one notices in the composition of figures, horses

and trees, the desire and sorrow emanating from a cypress as it reaches to the

heavens, the pious resignation and patience that we introduce into the

illustration when we ornament wall tiles with a fervor that tempts

blindness…Yes, these are our hidden traces, not those identical horses all in a

row. When a painter renders the fury and speed of a horse, he doesn’t paint

his own fury and speed; by trying to make the perfect horse, he reveals his love

for the richness of this world and its creator, displaying the colors of a passion

for life—only that and nothing more.”

287

I AM CALLED BLACK

Various manuscript pages lay before me and the great Master Osman—some

with calligraphed texts and ready to be bound, some not yet colored or

otherwise unfinished for whatever reason—as we spent an entire afternoon

evaluating the master miniaturists and the pages of my Enishte’s book,

keeping charts of our assessments. We thought we’d seen the last of the

Commander’s respectful but crude men, who’d brought us the pages collected

from the miniaturists and calligraphers whose homes they raided and searched

(some pieces had nothing whatsoever to do with either of our two books and

some pages confirmed that the calligraphers, as well, were secretly accepting

work from outside the palace for the sake of a few extra coins), when the most

brash of them stepped over to the exalted master and removed a piece of

paper from his sash.

I paid no mind at first, thinking it was one of those petitions from a father

seeking an apprenticeship for his son by approaching as many division heads

and group captains as possible. I could tell that the morning sun had vanished

by the pale light that filtered inside. To rest my eyes, I was doing an exercise

the old masters of Shiraz recommended miniaturists do to stave off premature

blindness, that is, I was trying to look emptily into the distance without

focusing. That’s when I recognized with a thrill the sweet color and heart-

stopping folds of the paper which my master held and stared at with an

expression of disbelief. This matched exactly the letters that Shekure had sent

me via Esther. I was about to say, “What a coincidence” like an idiot, when I

noticed that, like Shekure’s first letter, it was accompanied by a painting on

coarse paper!

Master Osman kept the painting to himself. He handed me the letter that I

just then embarrassingly realized was from Shekure.

My Dear Husband Black. I sent Esther to sound out late Elegant Effendi’s

widow, Kalbiye. While there, Kalbiye showed Esther this illustrated page, which

I’m sending to you. Later, I went to Kalbiye’s house, doing everything within my

power to persuade her that it was in her best interest to give me the picture. This

page was on poor Elegant Effendi’s body when he was removed from the well.

Kalbiye swears that nobody had commissioned her husband, may he rest in divine

light, to draw horses. So then, who made them? The Commander’s men searched

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the house. I’m sending this note because this matter must have significance to the

investigation. The children kiss your hands respectfully. Your wife, Shekure.

I carefully read the last three words of this beautiful note thrice as if staring

at three wondrous red roses in a garden. I leaned over the page that Master

Osman was scrutinizing, magnifying lens in hand. I straightaway noticed that

the shapes whose ink had bled were horses sketched in a single motion as the

old masters would do to accustom the hand.

Master Osman, who read Shekure’s note without comment, voiced a

question: “Who drew this?” He then answered himself, “Of course, the same

miniaturist who drew the late Enishte’s horse.”

Could he be so certain? Moreover, we weren’t at all sure who’d drawn the

horse for the book. We removed the horse from among the nine pages and

began to examine it.

It was a handsome, simple, chestnut horse that you couldn’t take your eyes

off of. Was I being truthful when I said this? I had plenty of time to look at

this horse with my Enishte, and later, when I was left alone with these

illustrations, but I hadn’t given it much thought then. It was a beautiful, but

ordinary horse: It was so ordinary that we weren’t even able to determine

who’d drawn it. It wasn’t a true chestnut, but more bay-colored; there was a

faint hint of red in its coat as well. It was a horse that I’d seen so often in

other books and other illustrations that I knew it’d been drawn by rote

without the miniaturist’s stopping to give it any consideration at all.

We stared at the horse this way until we discovered it concealed a secret.

Now, however, I could see a beauty in the horse that shimmered like heat

rising before my eyes and within it a force that roused a zest for life, learning

and embracing the world. I asked myself, “Who’s the miniaturist with the

magic touch that depicted this horse the way Allah would see it?” as if having

forgotten suddenly that he was also nothing but a base murderer. The horse

stood before me as if it were a real horse, but somewhere in my mind I also

knew it was an illustration; being caught between these two thoughts was

enchanting and aroused in me a sense of wholeness and perfection.

For a time, we compared the blurred horses drawn for practice with the

horse made for my Enishte’s book, determining finally that they’d been made

by the same hand. The proud stances of those strong and elegant studs

bespoke stillness rather than motion. I was in awe of the horse of Enishte’s

book.