We were silent for a while, as if patiently waiting for something.

“When will that miracle happen?” he asked. “When will all those paintings we’ve worked on until we could no longer see straight truly be appreciated? When will they give me, give us, the respect we deserve?”

“Never!”

“How so?”

“They’ll never give you what you want,” I said. “In the future, you’ll be even less appreciated.”

“Books last for centuries,” he said proudly but without confidence.

“Believe me, none of the Venetian masters have your poetic sensibility, your conviction, your sensitivity, the purity and brightness of your colors, yet their paintings are more compelling because they more closely resemble life itself. They don’t paint the world as seen from the balcony of a minaret, ignoring what they call perspective; they depict what’s seen at street level, or from the inside of a prince’s room, taking in his bed, quilt, desk, mirror, his tiger, his daughter and his coins. They include it all, as you know. I’m not persuaded by everything they do. Attempting to imitate the world directly through painting seems dishonorable to me. I resent it. But there’s an undeniable allure to the paintings they make by those new methods. They depict what the eye sees just as the eye sees it. Indeed, they paint what they see, whereas we paint what we look at. Beholding their work, one comes to realize that the only way to have one’s face immortalized is through the Frankish style. And it’s not only the inhabitants of Venice who are captured by this notion, but all the tailors, butchers, soldiers, priests and grocers in all the Frankish lands…They all have their portraits made this way. Just a glance at those paintings and you too would want to see yourself this way, you’d want to believe that you’re different from all others, a unique, special and particuliar human being. Painting people, not as they are perceived by the mind, but as they are actually seen by the naked eye, painting in the new method, allows for this possibility. One day everyone will paint as they do. When ”painting“ is mentioned, the world will think of their work! Even a poor foolish tailor who understands nothing of illustrating will want such a portrait so he might be convinced, upon seeing the unique curve of his nose, that he’s not an ordinary simpleton, but an extraordinary man.”

“So? We can make that portrait, as well,” quipped the witty assassin.

“We won’t!” I replied. “Haven’t you learned from your victim, the late Elegant Effendi, how afraid we are of being labeled imitators of the Franks? Even if we venture bravely to paint like them, it’ll amount to the same thing. In the end, our methods will die out, our colors will fade. No one will care about our books and our paintings, and those who do express interest will ask with a sneer, with no understanding whatsoever, why there’s no perspective-or else they won’t be able to find the manuscripts at all. Indifference, time and disaster will destroy our art. The Arabian glue used in the bindings contains fish, honey and bone, and the pages are sized and polished with a finish made from egg white and starch. Greedy, shameless mice will nibble these pages away; termites, worms and a thousand varieties of insect will gnaw our manuscripts out of existence. Bindings will fall apart and pages will drop out. Women lighting their stoves, thieves, indifferent servants and children will thoughtlessly tear out the pages and pictures. Child princes will scrawl over the illustrations with toy pens. They’ll blacken people’s eyes, wipe their runny noses on the pages, doodle in the margins with black ink. And religious censors will blacken out whatever is left. They’ll tear and cut up our paintings, perhaps use them to make other pictures or for games and such entertainment. While mothers destroy the illustrations they consider obscene, fathers and older brothers will jack off onto the pictures of women and the pages will stick together, not only because of this, but also due to being smeared with mud, water, bad glue, spit and all manner of filth and food. Stains of mold and dirt will blossom like flowers where the pages have stuck together. Rain, leaky roofs, floods and dirt will ruin our books. Of course, together with the tattered, faded and unreadable pages, which water, humidity, bugs and neglect will have reduced to pulp, the one last volume to emerge intact, like a miracle, from the bottom of a bone-dry chest will also one day disappear, swallowed up in the flames of a merciless fire. Is there a neighborhood in Istanbul that hasn’t been burned to the ground at least once every twenty years that we might expect such a book to survive? In this city, where every three years more books and libraries disappear than those the Mongols burned and plundered in Baghdad, what painter could possibly imagine that his masterpiece might last more than a century, or that one day his pictures might be seen, and he revered like Bihzad? Not only our own art, but every single work made in this world over the years will vanish in fires, be destroyed by worms or be lost out of neglect: Shirin proudly watching Hüsrev from a window; Hüsrev delightfully spying on Shirin as she bathes by moonlight; lovers gazing at each other with grace and subtlety; Rüstem’s wrestling a white demon to death at the bottom of a well; the anguished state of a lovelorn Mejnun befriending a white tiger and a mountain goat in the desert; the capture and hanging of a deceitful shepherd dog who presents a sheep from his flock to the she-wolf he mates with each night; the flower, angel, leafy twig, bird and teardrop border illuminations; the lute players that embellish Hafiz’s enigmatic poems; the wall ornamentations that have ruined the eyes of thousands, nay tens of thousands of miniaturist apprentices; the small plaques hung above doors and on walls; the couplets secretly written between the embedded borders of illustrations; the humble signatures hidden at the bases of walls, in corners, in facade embellishments, under the soles of feet, beneath shrubbery and between rocks; the flower-covered quilts covering lovers; the severed infidel heads patiently awaiting Our Sultan’s late grandfather as he victoriously marches upon an enemy fortress; the cannon, guns and tents that even in your youth you helped illustrate and that appeared in the background as the ambassador of the infidels kissed the feet of Our Sultan’s great-grandfather; the devils, with and without horns, with and without tails, with pointed teeth and with pointed nails; the thousands of varieties of birds including Solomon’s wise hoopoe, the jumping swallow, the dodo and the singing nightingale; the serene cats and restless dogs; fast-moving clouds; the small charming blades of grass reproduced in thousands of pictures; the amateurish shadows falling across rocks and tens of thousands of cypress, plane and pomegranate trees whose leaves were drawn one after another with the patience of Job; the palaces-and their hundreds of thousands of bricks-which were modeled on palaces from the time of Tamerlane or Shah Tahmasp but accompanied stories from much earlier eras; the tens of thousands of melancholy princes listening to music played by beautiful women and boys sitting on magnificent carpets in fields of flowers and beneath flowering trees; the extraordinary pictures of ceramics and carpets that owe their perfection to the thousands of apprentice illustrators from Samarkand to Islambol beaten to the point of tears over the last one hundred fifty years; the sublime gardens and the soaring black kites that you still depict with your old enthusiasm, your astounding scenes of death and war, your graceful hunting sultans, and with the same finesse, your startled fleeing gazelles, your dying shahs, your prisoners of war, your infidel galleons and your rival cities, your shiny dark nights that glimmer as if night itself had flowed from your pen, your stars, your ghostlike cypresses, your red-tinted pictures of love and death, yours and all the rest, all of it will vanish…”