“Who was this miniaturist who fell into a panic like you and the illustrator from Isfahan? Who killed him?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Yet I wanted him to infer from my expression that I was lying. I realized that I’d made a grave error in coming here, but I wasn’t going to succumb to feelings of guilt and regret. I could see that Enishte Effendi was growing suspicious of me and this pleased and fortified me. If he became convinced that I was a murderer and this knowledge struck terror throughout his soul, then he wouldn’t dare refuse to show me the final painting. I was so curious about that picture, not because of any sin I’d committed on its account-I genuinely wanted to see how it’d turned out.
“Is it important who killed that miscreant?” I said. “Is it not possible that whoever rid us of him has done a good deed?”
I was encouraged when I saw he could no longer look me directly in the eye. Magnanimous men, who think themselves better and morally superior to others, cannot look you in the eye when they are embarrassed on your behalf, perhaps because they are contemplating reporting you and abandoning you to a fate of torture and execution.
Outside, just in front of the courtyard gate, the dogs began a frenzied howling.
“It’s begun to snow again,” I said. “Where has everyone gone at this late hour? Why have they left you here all alone? They haven’t even lit a candle for you.”
“It’s quite strange, indeed,” he said. “I don’t understand it myself.”
He was so sincere that I believed him completely, and despite ridiculing him just as the other miniaturists did, I once again knew that I actually loved him profoundly. But how had he so quickly sensed my sudden and great flood of respect and affection, to which he responded by stroking my hair with irresistible fatherly concern? I began to see that Master Osman’s style of painting, and the legacy of the old masters of Herat, had no future whatsoever. And this abominable thought frightened me yet again. After some tragedy, we all feel the same way: In one last desperate hope, and without caring how comic and foolish we might appear, we pray that everything might continue as it always has.
“Let’s continue to illustrate our book,” I said. “Let everything continue as it always has.”
“There’s a murderer among the miniaturists. I am continuing my work with Black Effendi.”
Was he provoking me to kill him?
“Where is Black now?” I asked. “Where is your daughter and her children?”
I sensed that some other power had placed these words into my mouth, yet I couldn’t restrain myself. There was no longer any way for me to be happy and hopeful. I could only be smart and sarcastic. Behind these two always entertaining jinns-intelligence and sarcasm-I sensed the presence of the Devil, who controlled them, overcoming me. At the same moment, the accursed dogs beyond the gate began to howl madly as if they’d tracked the scent of blood.
Had I lived this exact moment long ago? In a distant city, at a time which now seemed far from me, as a snow that I couldn’t see fell, by the light of a candle, I was attempting to explain through tears that I was entirely innocent to a crotchety old dotard, who’d accused me of stealing paint. Back then, just as now, dogs began to howl as if they’d smelled blood. And I understood from Enishte Effendi’s great chin, befitting an evil old man, and from his eyes, which he was finally able to fix mercilessly into mine, that he intended to crush me. I recalled this tattered memory from when I was a ten-year-old miniaturist’s apprentice like a picture whose outlines are clear but whose colors have faded. Thus was I living the present as though it were a distinct but faded memory.
So, as I arose and circled behind Enishte Effendi, lifting that new, huge and heavy bronze inkpot from among the familiar glass, porcelain and crystal ones that rested on his worktable, the hardworking miniaturist within me-that Master Osman had instilled in us all-was illustrating what I did and what I saw in distinct yet faded colors, not as something I was experiencing now but as if it were a memory from long ago. You know how in dreams we shudder to see ourselves as if from the outside, with the same sensation, holding the large yet small-mouthed bronze inkpot, I said:
“When I was a ten-year-old apprentice, I saw just such an inkpot.”
“It’s a three-hundred-year-old Mongol inkpot,” said Enishte Effendi. “Black brought it all the way from Tabriz. It’s for red.”
At that very moment, it was of course the Devil prodding me to drive that inkpot down with all my might onto this conceited old man’s faulty brain. But I didn’t give in to the Devil, and with false hope, I said, “It is I, I’m the one who murdered Elegant Effendi.”
You understand why I said this hopefully, don’t you? I trusted that Enishte would understand, and in turn, forgive me-that he would fear and help me.
I AM YOUR BELOVED UNCLE
A silence filled the room when he confessed he’d murdered Elegant Effendi. I assumed he’d kill me as well. My heart quickened. Had he come here to end my life or to confess and terrify me? Did he himself know what he wanted? I was afraid, realizing how absolutely unacquainted I was with the inner world of this magnificent artist whose splendid lines and magical use of color had been familiar to me for years. I could sense him standing stiffly behind me, there at the nape of my neck, holding that large inkpot reserved for red, but I didn’t turn to face him. I knew my silence would make him uneasy. “The dogs haven’t yet quieted down,” I said.
We fell silent again. This time, I knew that my death, or my somehow avoiding this misfortune, would depend on what I told him. All I knew aside from his work was that he was quite intelligent, and if you grant that an illustrator must never reveal his soul in his work, intelligence is, of course, an asset. How had he cornered me at home when no one else was here? My aged mind was furiously preoccupied with this question, but I was too confused to see myself out of this game. Where was Shekure?
“You knew it was me, didn’t you?” he asked.
I hadn’t known at all, not until he told me. In the back of my mind, I was even wondering whether he hadn’t done well by killing Elegant Effendi, and that the late miniaturist might’ve actually succumbed to his anxieties and made trouble for the rest of us.
I was ever so slightly grateful to this murderer, with whom I was alone in the empty house.
“I’m not surprised you killed him,” I said. Men like us who live with books and dream eternally of their pages fear only one thing in this world. What’s more, we’re struggling with something more forbidden and dangerous; that is, we’re struggling to make pictures in a Muslim city. As with Sheikh Muhammad of Isfahan, we miniaturists are inclined to feel guilty and regretful, we’re the first to blame ourselves before others do, to be ashamed and beg pardon of God and the community. We make our books in secret like shameful sinners. I know too well how submission to the endless attacks of hojas, preachers, judges and mystics who accuse us of blasphemy, how the endless guilt both deadens and nourishes the artist’s imagination.“
“You don’t fault me for murdering that idiotic miniaturist, do you then?”
“What attracts us to writing, illustrating and painting is bound up in this fear of retribution. It’s not only for money and favor that we kneel before our work from morning to evening, continuing by candlelight through the night to the point of blindness and sacrifice ourselves for pictures and books, it’s to escape the prattle of others, to escape the community, but in contrast to this passion to create, we also want those we’ve forsaken to see and appreciate the inspired pictures we’ve made-and if they should call us sinners? Oh, the suffering this brings upon the illustrator of genuine talent! Yet, genuine painting is hidden in the agony no one sees and no one creates. It’s contained in the picture, which on first sight, they’ll say is bad, incomplete, blasphemous or heretical. A genuine miniaturist knows he must reach that point, yet at the same time, he fears the loneliness that awaits him there. Who would accede to such a frightful, nerve-wracking existence? By blaming himself before anyone else does, the artist believes he’ll be spared what he’s feared for years. Others listen to him and believe him only when he admits his guilt, for which he is then condemned to burn in Hell-the illustrator of Isfahan lit these hellfires himself.”