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, 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.
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 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.”