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and defining the Ottoman style.”

Why did the awe that I’d felt wholeheartedly only a short time ago give way

to hypocrisy as I voiced my feelings? For our praise of a man, whose talent and

mastery genuinely astounds us, to be sincere, must he lose most of his

authority and influence and become slightly pathetic?

“Now then, where’s that dwarf hiding?” he said.

He said this the way powerful men who are pleased by flattery and praise

but recollect vaguely that they ought not be would—as though he wished to

change the subject.

“Despite being a great master of Persian legends and styles, you’ve created a

distinct world of illustration worthy of Ottoman glory and strength,” I

whispered. “You’re the one who brought to art the power of the Ottoman

sword, the optimistic colors of Ottoman victory, the interest in and attention

to objects and implements, and the freedom of a comfortable lifestyle. My

dear master, it’s been the greatest honor of my life to look at these

masterpieces by the old legendary masters with you…”

For a long time I whispered on in this manner. Within the icy darkness and

cluttered disarray of the Treasury, which resembled a recently abandoned

battlefield, our bodies were so close that my whispering became an expression

of intimacy.

Later, as with certain blind men who can’t control their facial expressions,

Master Osman’s eyes assumed the look of an old man lost in pleasure. I

praised the old master at length, now with heartfelt emotion, now shuddering

with the inner revulsion I felt toward the blind.

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He held my hand with his cold fingers, caressed my forearm and touched

my face. His strength and age seemed to pass through his fingers into me. I,

again, thought of Shekure who awaited me at home.

Standing still that way for a time, pages opened before us, it was as if my

lavish praise and his self-admiration and self-pity had so fatigued us that we

were resting. We’d become embarrassed of each other.

“Where’s that dwarf gone to?” he asked again.

I was certain that the wily dwarf was hiding in some niche watching us. As

if I were searching him out, I turned my shoulders right and left, but kept my

eyes trained attentively on Master Osman. Was he truly blind or was he trying

to convince the world, including himself, that he was blind? I’d heard that

some untalented and incompetent old masters from Shiraz feigned blindness

in their old age to curry respect and to prevent others from mentioning their

failures.

“I would like to die here,” he said.

“My great master, my dear sir,” I fawned, “in this age when value is placed

not on painting but on the money one can earn from it, not on the old

masters but on imitators of the Franks, I so well understand what you’re

saying that it brings tears to my eyes. Yet it is also your duty to protect your

master illustrators from their enemies. Please tell me, what conclusions have

you drawn from the ”courtesan method‘? Who is the miniaturist who painted

that horse?“

“Olive.”

He’d said this with such ease that I had no chance to be surprised.

He fell silent.

“But I’m also certain that Olive wasn’t the one who murdered your Enishte

or unfortunate Elegant Effendi,” he said calmly. “I believe that Olive drew the

horse because he’s the one who’s most bound to the old masters, who knows

most intimately the legends and styles of Herat and whose master-apprentice

genealogy stretches back to Samarkand. Now I know you won’t ask me, ”Why

haven’t we encountered these nostrils in the other horses that Olive drew over

the years?“ since I’ve already mentioned how at times a detail—the wing of a

bird, the way a leaf is attached to a tree—can be preserved in memory for

generations, passing from master to apprentice, and yet might not manifest on

the page due to the influence of a moody or rigid master or on account of the

particular tastes and whims of a particular workshop or sultan. So then, this is

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the horse that dear Olive, in his childhood, learned directly from the Persian

masters without ever being able to forget it. The fact that the horse suddenly

appeared for the sake of Enishte’s book is a cruel trick of Allah’s. Hadn’t all of

us taken the old masters of Herat as our models? Just like the Turkmen

illustrators for whom the face of a beautiful woman meant one with Chinese

features, didn’t we think exclusively of the masterpieces of Herat when we

thought of well-executed pictures? We are all their devoted admirers.

Nourishing all great art is the Herat of Bihzad, and supporting this Herat are

the Mongol horsemen and the Chinese. Why should Olive, thoroughly bound

to the legends of Herat, murder poor Elegant Effendi, who was even more

bound—even blindly devoted—to the same old methods?”

“Who then?” I said. “Butterfly?”

“Stork!” he said. “This is what I know in my heart of hearts, for I am well

acquainted with his greed and fury. Listen, in all probability while gilding for

your Enishte, who foolishly and clumsily imitated Frankish methods, poor

Elegant Effendi came to believe that this venture might somehow be

dangerous. Since he was enough of a dolt to listen earnestly to the drivel of

that foolish preacher from Erzurum—unfortunately, masters of gilding,

though closer to God than painters, are also boring and stupid—and

moreover, because he knew your silly Enishte’s book was an important project

of the Sultan, his fears and doubts clashed: Should he believe in his Sultan or

in the preacher from Erzurum? Any other time this unfortunate child, whom I

knew like the back of my hand, would’ve come to me about a dilemma that

was eating away at him. But even he, with his bird brain, knew very well that

the act of gilding for your Enishte, that mimic of the Franks, amounted to a

betrayal of me and our guild; and so he sought another confidant. He confided

in the wily and ambitious Stork and made the mistake of letting himself be

awed by the intellect and morality of a man whose talent impressed him. I’ve

seen plenty of times how Stork manipulated Elegant Effendi by taking

advantage of the poor gilder’s admiration. Whatever argument took place

between them, it resulted in Elegant Effendi’s murder at Stork’s hands. And

since the deceased long ago confided his worries to the Erzurumis, they, in a

fit of vengeance and to demonstrate their power, went on to kill your

Frankophile Enishte, whom they held responsible for the death of their

companion. I can’t say that I’m all that sorry about the whole matter. Years

ago, your Enishte duped Our Sultan into having a Venetian painter—his name

was Sebastiano—make a portrait of His Excellency in the Frankish style as if He

were an infidel king. Not satisfied with that, in a disgraceful affront to my

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dignity, he had this shameful work given to me as a model to be copied; and

out of dire fear of Our Sultan, I dishonorably copied that picture which was

made using infidel methods. Had I not been forced to do that, perhaps I could

grieve for your Enishte, and today help find the scoundrel who killed him. But

my concern is not for your Enishte, it’s for my workshop. Your Enishte is

responsible for the way my master miniaturists—whom I love more than if

they were my own children, whom I trained with doting attention for twenty-

five years—betrayed me and our entire artistic tradition; he’s to blame for

their enthusiastic imitation of European masters with the justification that ”it

is the will of Our Sultan.“ Each of those disgraceful masters deserves nothing

but torture! If we, the society of miniaturists, learn to serve foremost our own

talent and art instead of Our Sultan who provides us with work, we shall have

earned entry through the Gates of Heaven. Now then, I’d like to study this

book alone.”

Master Osman uttered this last statement like the last wish of a

disconsolate weary pasha who was responsible for military defeat and

condemned to beheading. He opened the book Jezmi Agha placed before him

and in a scolding voice ordered the dwarf to turn to the pages he wanted.

With this accusatory tone, he instantly became the Head Illuminator with

whom the entire workshop was familiar.

I withdrew into a corner among cushions embroidered with pearls, rusty-

barreled rifles with jewel-studded butts and cabinets, and began eyeing Master

Osman. The doubt gnawing away at me spread throughout my entire being: If

he wished to stop the creation of Our Sultan’s book, it made perfect sense

that Master Osman might’ve orchestrated the murders of poor Elegant Effendi

and, afterward, of my Enishte—I reprimanded myself for just now feeling such

awe toward him. On the other hand, I couldn’t restrain myself from feeling

profound respect for this great master who now gave himself over to the

picture before him and, blind or half blind, was peering at it closely as if

looking with the countless wrinkles of his old face. It dawned on me that to

preserve the old style and the regimen of the miniaturists’ workshop, to rid

himself of Enishte’s book and to become again the Sultan’s only favorite, he

would gladly surrender any one of his master miniaturists, and me as well, to

the torturers of the Commander of the Imperial Guard. I furiously began to

think of freeing myself from the love that bound me to him over the last two

days.

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Much later, I was still completely confused. I stared randomly at the

illuminated pages of the volumes I extracted from chests solely to appease the

demons that had risen within me and to distract my jinns of indecision.

How many men and women had fingers in their mouths! This was used as

a gesture of surprise in all the workshops from Samarkand to Baghdad over

the last two hundred years. As the hero Keyhüsrev, cornered by his enemies,

safely crossed the rushing Oxus River aided by his black charger and Allah, the

wretched raftsman and his oarsman, who refused to offer him safe passage on

their raft each had a finger in his mouth. An astonished Hüsrev’s finger

remained in his mouth as he saw for the first time the beauty of Shirin, whose

skin was like moonlight as she bathed in the once glimmering lake whose

silver leaf had tarnished. I spent even more time carefully examining the

gorgeous women of the harem who, with fingers in their mouths, stood

behind half-opened palace doors, at the inaccessible windows of castle towers

and peered from behind curtains. As Tejav, defeated by the armies of Persia to

lose his crown, was fleeing the battlefield, Espinuy, a beauty of beauties and

his harem favorite, watched with sorrow and shock from a palace window,

finger in mouth, begging him with her eyes not to abandon her to the enemy.

As Joseph, arrested under Züleyha’s false accusation that he raped her, was

being taken to his cell, she stared from her window, a finger in her beautiful

mouth in a show of devilishness and lust rather than bewilderment. As happy

yet somber lovers who emerged as if from a love poem were carried away by

the force of passion and wine in a garden reminiscent of Paradise, a malicious

lady servant spied on them with an envious finger in her red mouth.

Despite its being a standard image recorded in the notebooks and

memories of all miniaturists, the long finger sliding into a beautiful woman’s

mouth had a different elegance each time.

How much did these illustrations comfort me? As dusk fell, I went to

Master Osman and said the following:

“My dear master, when the portal is opened once again, with your

permission, I shall quit the Treasury.”

“How do you mean!” he said. “We still have one night and one morning.

How quickly your eyes have had their fill of the greatest illustrations the world

has ever known!”

As he said this, he hadn’t turned his face away from the page before him,

yet the paleness in his pupils confirmed he was indeed gradually going blind.

“We’ve learned the secret of the horse’s nostrils,” I said confidently.

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“Ha!” he said. “Yes! The rest is up to Our Sultan and the Head Treasurer.

Perhaps they will pardon us all.”

Would he name Stork as the murderer? I couldn’t even ask out of fear, for I

worried he wouldn’t allow me to leave. Even worse, I had the recurring

thought that he might accuse me.

“The plume needle Bihzad used to blind himself is missing,” he said.

“In all probability the dwarf put it back in its place,” I said. “The page before

you is so magnificent!”

His face lit up like a child’s, and he smiled. “Hüsrev, burning with love, as

he waits astride his horse for Shirin before her palace in the middle of the

night,” he said. “Rendered in the style of the old masters of Herat.”

He was now gazing at the picture as if he could see it, but he hadn’t even

taken the magnifying glass into his hand.

“Can you see the splendor in the leaves of the trees in the nighttime

darkness, appearing one by one as if illuminated from within like stars or

spring flowers, the humble patience implied by the wall ornamentation, the

refinement in the use of gold leaf and the delicate balance in the entire

painting’s composition? Handsome Hüsrev’s horse is as graceful and elegant as

a woman. His beloved Shirin waits at the window above him, her neck bowed,

but her face proud. It’s as if the lovers are to remain here eternally within the

light emanating from the painting’s texture, skin and subtle colors which were

applied lovingly by the miniaturist. You can see how their faces are turned ever