I don’t know how much more time we spent examining book after book and illustration after illustration in this manner. It was as if the unchanging, frozen golden time revealed in the pictures and stories we viewed had thoroughly mingled with the damp and moldy time we experienced in the Treasury. It seemed that these illuminated pages, created over the centuries by the lavish expenditure of eyesight in the workshops of countless shahs, khans and sultans, would come to life, as would the objects that seemed to besiege us: The helmets, scimitars, daggers with diamond-studded handles, armor, porcelain cups from China, dusty and delicate lutes, and the pearl-embellished cushions and kilims-the likes of which we’d seen in countless illustrations.

“I now understand that by furtively and gradually re-creating the same pictures for hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of artists had cunningly depicted the gradual transformation of their world into another.”

I’ll be first to admit that I didn’t completely understand what the great master meant. But the close attention my master had shown to the thousands of pictures made over the last two hundred years from Bukhara to Herat, from Tabriz to Baghdad and all the way to Istanbul, had far exceeded the search for a clue in the depiction of some horse’s nostrils. We’d participated in a kind of melancholy elegy to the inspiration, talent and patience of all the masters who’d painted and illuminated in these lands over the years.

For this reason, when the doors of the Treasury were opened at the time of the evening prayer and Master Osman explained to me that he had no desire whatsoever to leave, and that furthermore, only by remaining here until morning examining pictures by the light of oil lamps and candles could he execute properly Our Sultan’s charge, my first response, as I informed him, was to remain here with him and the dwarf.

However, when the door was opened and my master conveyed our wish to the waiting chiefs and asked permission of the Head Treasurer, immediately regretted my decision. I longed for Shekure and our house. I grew increasingly restless as I wondered how she would manage, spending the night alone with the children and how she would batten down the now-repaired shutters of the windows.

Through the opened half of the Treasury portal, I was beckoned to the magnificence of life outside by the large damp plane trees in the courtyard of the Enderun-now under a hint of fog-and by the gestures of two royal pages, speaking to each other in a sign language so as not to disturb the peace of Our Sultan; but I remained where I was, frozen by embarrassment and guilt.

WE TWO DERVISHES

Yea, the rumor that our picture was among the pages from China, Samarkand and Herat comprising an album hidden away in the remotest corner of the Treasury filled with the plunder of hundreds of countries over hundreds of years by the ancestors of His Excellency, Our Sultan, was most probably spread to the miniaturists’ division by the dwarf Jezmi Agha. If we might now recount our own story in our own fashion-the will of God be with us-we hope that none of the crowd in this fine coffeehouse will take offense.

One hundred and ten years have passed since our deaths, forty since the closing of our irredeemable, Persia-partisan dervish lodges, those dens of heresy and nests of devilry, but see for yourselves, here we are before you. How could this be? I’ll tell you how: We were rendered in the Venetian style! As this illustration indicates, one day we two dervishes were tramping through Our Sultan’s domains from one city to the next.

We were barefoot, our heads were shaven, and we were half naked; each of us was wearing a vest and the hide of a deer, a belt around our waists and we were holding our walking sticks, our begging bowls dangling from our necks by a chain; one of us was carrying an axe for cutting wood, and the other a spoon to eat whatever food God had blessed us with.

At that moment, standing before a caravansary beside a fountain, my dear friend, nay, my beloved, nay, my brother and I had given ourselves over to the usual argument: “You first please, no you first,” we were noisily deferring to each other as to who’d be the first to take up the spoon and eat from the bowl, when a Frank traveler, a strange man, stopped us, gave us each a silver Venetian coin and began to draw our picture.

He was a Frank; of course, he was weird. He situated us right in the center of the page as if we were the very tent of the Sultan, and was depicting us in our half-naked state when I shared with my companion a thought that had just then dawned upon me: To appear like a pair of truly impoverished Kalenderi beggar dervishes, we should roll our eyes back so our pupils look inward, the whites of our eyes facing the world like blind men-and that’s exactly what we proceeded to do. In this situation, it’s the nature of a dervish to behold the world in his head rather than the world outside; since our heads were full of hashish, the landscape of our minds was more pleasant than what the Frank painter saw.

Meanwhile, the scene outside had grown even worse; we heard the ranting of a Hoja Effendi.

Pray, let us not give the wrong idea. We’ve now made mention of the respected “Hoja Effendi,” but last week in this fine coffeehouse there was a great misunderstanding: This respected “Hoja Effendi” of whom we speak has nothing whatsoever to do with His Excellency Nusret Hoja the cleric from Erzurum, nor with the bastard Husret Hoja, nor with the hoja from Sivas who made it with the Devil atop a tree. Those who interpret everything negatively have said that if His Excellency Hoja Effendi becomes a target of reproach here once again, they’ll cut out the storyteller’s tongue and lower this coffeehouse about his head.

One hundred and twenty years ago, there being no coffee then, the respected Hoja, whose story we’ve begun, was simply steaming with rage.

“Hey, Frank infidel, why are you drawing these two?” he was saying. “These wretched Kalenderi dervishes wander around thieving and begging, they take hashish, drink wine, bugger each other, and as is evident from the way they look, know nothing of performing or reciting prayers, nothing of house, or home, or family; they’re nothing but the dregs of this good world of ours. And you, why are you painting this picture of disgrace when there’s so much beauty in this great country? Is it to disgrace us?”

“Not at all, it’s simply because illustrations of your bad side bring in more money,” said the infidel. We two dervishes were dumbfounded at the soundness of the painter’s reasoning.

“If it brought you more money, would you paint the Devil in a favorable light?” the Hoja Effendi said, coyly trying to start an argument, but as you can see from this picture, the Venetian was a genuine artist, and he’d focused upon the work before him and the money it’d bring rather than heeding the Hoja’s empty prattle.

He did indeed paint us, and then slid us into the leather portfolio on the back of his horse’s saddle, and returned to his infidel city. Soon afterward, the victorious armies of the Ottomans conquered and plundered that city on the banks of the Danube, and the two of us ended up coming back this way to Istanbul and the Royal Treasury. From there, copied over and over, we moved from one secret book to another, and finally arrived at this joyous coffeehouse where coffee is drunk like a rejuvenating, invigorating elixir. Now then:

A Brief Treatise on Painting, Death and Our Place in the World

The Hoja Effendi from Konya, whom we’ve just mentioned, has made the following claim somewhere in one of his sermons, which are written out and collected in a thick tome: Kalenderi dervishes are the unnecessary dross of the world because they don’t belong to any of the four categories into which men are divided: 1. notables, 2. merchants, 3. farmers and 4. artists; thus, they are superfluous.