When the eager dogs began barking with renewed fervor, a restless Shekure said, “I ought to go now.” It was at that moment we both realized that the house of the Jew’s ghost had indeed become quite dark, although there was still time before nightfall. My body sprung up of its own volition, to hug her once again, but like a wounded sparrow, she quickly hopped away.
“Am I still beautiful? Answer me quickly.”
I told her. How beautifully she listened to me, believing and agreeing with what I said.
“And my clothes?”
I told her.
“Do I smell nice?”
Of course, Shekure also knew that what Nizami referred to as “love chess” did not consist of such rhetorical games, but of the hidden emotional maneuvers between lovers.
“What kind of living do you expect to earn?” she asked. “Will you be able to care for my fatherless children?”
As I talked about my more than twelve years of governmental and secretarial experience, the vast knowledge I’d acquired in battle and witnessing death and my luminous prospects, I embraced her.
“How beautifully we embraced each other just now,” she said. “And already everything has lost its primal mystery.”
To prove how sincere I was, I hugged her even tighter. I asked her why, after having kept it for twelve years, she’d had Esther return the painting I’d made for her. In her eyes I read surprise at my weariness and an affection that welled up within her. We kissed. This time I didn’t find myself immobilized by a staggering yoke of lust; both of us were stunned by the fluttering-like a flock of sparrows-of a powerful love that had entered our hearts, chests and stomachs. Isn’t lovemaking the best antidote to love?
As I palmed her large breasts, Shekure pushed me away in an even more determined and sweeter way than before. She implied that I wasn’t a mature-enough man to maintain a trustworthy marriage with a woman that I’d sullied beforehand. I was careless enough to forget that the Devil would get involved in any hasty deeds and too inexperienced to know how much patience and quiet suffering underlie happy marriages. She’d escaped my arms and was walking toward the door, her linen veil having fallen around her neck. I caught sight of the snow falling onto the streets, which always succumbed to the darkness first, and forgetting that we’d been whispering here, perhaps to avoid disturbing the spirit of the Hanged Jew, I cried out:
“What are we to do now?”
“I don’t know,” she said, minding the rules of “love chess.” Walking through the old garden, she left delicate footprints in the snow-certain to be erased by the whiteness-and disappeared quietly.
I WILL BE CALLED A MURDERER
Doubtless, you too have experienced what I’m about to describe: At times, while walking through the infinite and winding streets of Istanbul, while spooning a bite of vegetable stew into my mouth at a public kitchen or squinting with fixed attention on the curved design of a reed-style border illumination, I feel I’m living the present as if it were the past. That is, when I’m walking down a street whitewashed with snow, I’ll have the urge to say that I was walking down it.
The extraordinary events I will relate occurred at once in the present and in the past. It was evening, the twilight gave way to blackness and a very faint snow fell as I walked down the street where Enishte Effendi lived.
Unlike other evenings, I’d come here knowing precisely what I wanted. On other evenings, my legs would take me here as I absentmindedly thought about other things: how I’d told my mother I earned seven hundred silver pieces for a single book, about the covers of Herat volumes with ungilded ornamental rosettes dating from the time of Tamerlane, about the continued shock of learning that others still painted under my name or about my tomfoolery and transgressions. This time, however, I’d come here with forethought and intent.
The large courtyard gate-that I feared no one would open for me-opened on its own when I went to knock, reassuring me that Allah was with me. The shiny stone-paved portion of the courtyard that I walked through on those nights when I came to add new illustrations to Enishte Effendi’s magnificent book was empty. To the right beside the well rested the bucket, and perched on it a sparrow apparently oblivious to the cold; a bit farther on sat the open-air stone stove, which for some reason wasn’t lit even at this late hour; and to the left, the stable for visitors’ horses which made up part of the house’s ground floor. Everything was as I expected it to be. I entered through the unlocked door beside the stable, and as an uninvited guest might do to avoid happening upon an inappropriate scene, I stamped my feet and coughed as I climbed the wooden staircase to the living quarters.
My coughing elicited no response. Nor did the noise of stamping my muddy shoes, which I removed and left next to those lined up at the entrance of the wide hall which was also used as an anteroom. As had become my custom whenever I visited, I searched for what I assumed to be Shekure’s elegant green pair among the others, but for naught, and the possibility that no one was home crossed my mind.
I walked to the right into the room-there was one in each corner of the second floor-where I imagined Shekure slept cuddled with her children. I groped for beds and mattresses, and opened a chest in the corner and a tall armoire with a very light door. While I thought the delicate almond scent in the room must be the scent of Shekure’s skin, a pillow, which had been stuffed into the cabinet, fell onto my dim-witted head and then onto a copper pitcher and cups. You hear a noise and suddenly realize the room is dark; well, I realized it was cold.
“Hayriye?” Enishte Effendi called from within another room, “Shekure? Which of you is it?”
I swiftly exited the room, walking diagonally across the wide hall, and entered the room with the blue door where I had labored with Enishte Effendi on his book this past winter.
“It’s me, Enishte Effendi,” I said. “Me.”
“Who might you be?”
At that instant, I understood that the workshop names Enishte Effendi had selected had less to do with secrecy then with his subtle mockery of us. As a haughty scribe might write in the colophon on the last leaf of a magnificently illustrated manuscript, I slowly pronounced the syllables of my full name, which included my father’s name, my place of birth and the phrase “your poor sinful servant.”
“Hah?” he said at first, then added, “Hah!”
Just like the old man who meets Death in the Assyrian fable I heard as a child, Enishte Effendi sank into a very brief silence that lasted forever. If there are those among you who believe, since I’ve just now mentioned “Death,” that I’ve come here to involve myself in such an affair, you’ve completely misunderstood the book you’re holding. Would someone with such designs knock on the gate? Take off his shoes? Come without a knife?
“So, you’ve come,” he said, again like the old man in the fable. But then he assumed an entirely different tone: “Welcome, my child. Tell me then, what is it that you want?”
It had grown quite dark by now. Enough light entered through the narrow beeswax-dipped cloth windowpane-which, when removed in springtime, revealed a pomegranate and plane tree-to distinguish the outlines of objects within the room, enough light to please a humble Chinese illustrator. I could not fully see Enishte Effendi’s face as he sat, as usual, before a low, folding reading desk, so that the light fell to his left side. I tried desperately to recapture the intimacy between us when we’d painted miniatures together, gently and quietly discussing them all night by candlelight amid these burnishing stones, reed pens, inkwells and brushes. I’m not sure if it was out of this sense of alienation or out of embarrassment, but I was ashamed and held back from openly confessing my misgivings; at that moment, I decided to explain myself through a story.