My hands trembled, but I didn’t feel so bad. Did I now feel what so many lunatics felt after committing this strange act whose results I encountered frequently during my fifty-year tenure as a painter? I wanted nothing more than blood to flow onto the pages of this book from the eyes I had blinded.
3. This brings me to the torment and consolation awaiting me at the end of my life. No part of this excellent book, which Shah Tahmasp had completed by spurring Persia ’s most masterful artists for ten years, had seen the touch of the great Bihzad’s pen, and his excellent rendering of hands was nowhere to be found. This fact confirmed that Bihzad was blind in the last years of his life, when he fled from Herat -then a city out of favor-to Tabriz. So, I once again decided happily that after he attained the perfection of the old masters by working his entire life, the great master blinded himself to avoid tainting his painting with the desires of any other workshop or shah.
Just then, Black and the dwarf opened a thick volume they were carrying and placed it before me.
“No, this isn’t it,” I said without being contrary. “This is a Mongol Book of Kings: The iron horses of Alexander’s iron cavalry were filled with naphtha and set aflame like lamps, before being set against the enemy with flames shooting from their nostrils.”
We stared at the flaming army of iron copied from Chinese paintings.
“Jezmi Agha,” I said, “we later depicted in the Chronicle of Sultan Selim the gifts that Shah Tahmasp’s Persian ambassadors, who also presented this book, brought with them twenty-five years ago…”
He swiftly located the Chronicle of Sultan Selim and placed it in front of me. Paired with the vibrantly colored page that showed the ambassadors presenting the Book of Kings along with the other gifts to Sultan Selim, my eyes found, among the gifts which were listed one by one, what I’d long ago read but had forgotten because it was so incredible:
The turquoise-and-mother-of-pearl-handled golden plume needle which the Venerated Talent of Herat, Master of Master Illuminators Bihzad, used in the act of blinding his exalted self.
I asked the dwarf where he found the Chronicle of Sultan Selim. I followed him through the dusty darkness of the Treasury, meandering between chests, piles of cloth and carpet, cabinets and beneath stairways. I noticed how our shadows, now shrinking, now enlarging, slipped over shields, elephant tusks and tiger skins. In one of the adjoining rooms, this one also suffused with the same strange redness of cloth and velvet, beside the iron chest whence emerged the Book of Kings, amid other volumes, cloth sheets embroidered with silver and gold wire, raw and unpolished Ceylon stone, and ruby-studded daggers, I saw some of the other gifts that Shah Tahmasp had sent: silk carpets from Isfahan, an ivory chess set and an object that immediately caught my attention-a pen case decorated with Chinese dragons and branches with a mother-of-pearl-inlaid rosette obviously from the time of Tamerlane. I opened the case and out came the subtle scent of burned paper and rosewater; within rested the turquoise-and mother-of-pearl-handled golden needle used to fasten plumes to turbans. I took up the needle and returned to my spot like a specter.
Alone again, I placed the needle that Master Bihzad had used to blind himself upon the open page of the Book of Kings and gazed at it. It wasn’t the needle he’d blinded himself with that made me shudder, but seeing an object he’d taken into his miraculous hands.
Why did Shah Tahmasp send this terrifying needle with the book he’d presented to Sultan Selim? Was it because this Shah, who as a child was a student of Bihzad’s and a patron of artists in his youth, had changed in his old age, distancing poets and artists from his inner circle and giving himself over entirely to faith and worship? Was this the reason he was willing to relinquish this exquisite book, which the greatest of masters had labored over for ten years? Had he sent this needle so all would know that the great artist was blinded of his own volition or, as was rumored for a time, to make the statement that whosoever beheld the pages of this book even once would no longer wish to see anything else in this world? In any event, this volume was no longer considered a masterpiece by the Shah, who felt poignant regret, afraid that he’d committed a sacrilege through his youthful love of illustrating, as happened with many rulers in their old age.
I was reminded of stories told by spiteful illuminators who’d grown old to find their dreams unfulfilled: As the armies of the Blacksheep ruler, Jihan Shah, were poised to enter Shiraz, Ibn Hüsam, the city’s legendary Head Illuminator, declared, “I refuse to paint in any other way,” and had his apprentice blind him with a hot iron. Among the miniaturists that the armies of Sultan Selim the Grim brought back to Istanbul after the defeat of Shah Ismail, the capture of Tabriz and the plunder of the Seven Heavens Palace was an old Persian master who it was rumored blinded himself with medicines because he believed he could never bring himself to paint in the Ottoman style-not as the result of an illness he’d had on the road as some claimed. To set an example for them, I used to tell my illuminators in their moments of frustration how Bihzad had blinded himself.
Was there no other recourse? If a master miniaturist made use of the new methods here and there in out-of-the-way places, couldn’t he then, if only a little, save the entire workshop and the styles of the old masters?
There was a dark stain on the extremely sharp point of the elegantly tapered plume needle, yet my weary eyes couldn’t determine whether it was blood or not. Lowering the magnifying lens, as if beholding a melancholy depiction of love with a matching sense of melancholy, I looked at the needle for a long time. I tried to imagine how Bihzad could’ve done it. I’d heard that one doesn’t go blind immediately; the velvety darkness descends slowly, sometimes after days, sometimes after months, as with old men who go blind naturally.
I’d caught sight of it while passing into the next room; I stood and looked, yes, there it was: an ivory mirror with a twisted handle and thick ebony frame, its length nicely embellished with script. I sat down again and gazed at my own eyes. How beautifully the flame of the candle danced in my pupils-which had witnessed my hand paint for sixty years.
“How had Master Bihzad done it?” I asked myself once more.
Never once taking my eyes off the mirror, with the practiced movements of a woman applying kohl to her eyelids, my hand found the needle on its own. Without hesitation, as if making a hole at the end of an ostrich egg soon to be embellished, I bravely, calmly and firmly pressed the needle into the pupil of my right eye. My innards sank, not because I felt what I was doing, but because I saw what I was doing. I pushed the needle into my eye to the depth of a quarter the length of a finger, then removed it.
In the couplet worked into the frame of the mirror, the poet had wished the observer eternal beauty and wisdom-and eternal life to the mirror itself.
Smiling, I did the same to my other eye.
For a long while I didn’t move. I stared at the world-at everything.
As I’d surmised, the colors of the world did not darken, but seemed to bleed ever so gently into one another. I could still more or less see.
The pale light of the sun fell over the red and oxblood cloth of the Treasury. In the accustomed ceremony, the Head Treasurer and his men broke the seal and opened the lock and the door. Jezmi Agha changed the chamber pots, lamps and brazier, brought in fresh bread and dried mulberries and announced to the others that we would continue searching for the horses with oddly drawn nostrils within Our Sultan’s books. What could be more exquisite than looking at the world’s most beautiful pictures while trying to recollect God’s vision of the world?