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.”

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.

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.

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.