450 pages
My Name is Red is a Turkish novel by Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk.
The main characters in the novel are miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire, and the events revolve around the murder of one of the painters, as related in the first chapter. From then on Pamuk, in a postmodern style reminiscent of Borges, plays with and teases the reader and literature in general.
The novel’s narrator changes in every chapter, and in addition to character-narrators, the reader will find unexpected voices such as the corpse of the murdered, a coin, several painting motifs, and the color red. The novel blends mystery, romance, and philosophical puzzles, opening a window on the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III during nine snowy winter days in the Istanbul of 1591.
TEXT:
My Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk
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You slew a man and then fell out with one another concerning him.
—Koran, “The Cow.”
The blind and the seeing are not equal.
—Koran, “The Creator.”
To God belongs the East and the West.
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I AM A CORPSE
I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. Though I drew
my last breath long ago and my heart has stopped beating, no one, apart from
that vile murderer, knows what’s happened to me. As for that wretch, he felt
for my pulse and listened for my breath to be sure I was dead, then kicked me
in the midriff, carried me to the edge of the well, raised me up and dropped
me below. As I fell, my head, which he’d smashed with a stone, broke apart;
my face, my forehead and cheeks, were crushed; my bones shattered, and my
mouth filled with blood.
For nearly four days I have been missing: My wife and children must be
searching for me; my daughter, spent from crying, must be staring fretfully at
the courtyard gate. Yes, I know they’re all at the window, hoping for my
return.
But, are they truly waiting? I can’t even be sure of that. Maybe they’ve
gotten used to my absence—how dismal! For here, on the other side, one gets
the feeling that one’s former life persists. Before my birth there was infinite
time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I’d
been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.
I was happy; I know now that I’d been happy. I made the best illuminations
in Our Sultan’s workshop; no one could rival my mastery. Through the work I
did privately, I earned nine hundred silver coins a month, which, naturally,
only makes all of this even harder to bear.
I was responsible for painting and embellishing books. I illuminated the
edges of pages, coloring their borders with the most lifelike designs of leaves,
branches, roses, flowers and birds. I painted scalloped Chinese-style clouds,
clusters of overlapping vines and forests of color that hid gazelles, galleys,
sultans, trees, palaces, horses and hunters. In my youth, I would decorate a
plate, or the back of a mirror, or a chest, or at times, the ceiling of a mansion
or of a Bosphorus manor, or even, a wooden spoon. In later years, however, I
only worked on manuscript pages because Our Sultan paid well for them. I
can’t say it seems insignificant now. You know the value of money even when
you’re dead.
After hearing the miracle of my voice, you might think, “Who cares what
you earned when you were alive? Tell us what you see. Is there life after death?
Where’s your soul? What about Heaven and Hell? What’s death like? Are you
in pain?” You’re right, the living are extremely curious about the Afterlife.
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Maybe you’ve heard the story of the man who was so driven by this curiosity
that he roamed among soldiers in battlefields. He sought a man who’d died
and returned to life amid the wounded struggling for their lives in pools of
blood, a soldier who could tell him about the secrets of the Otherworld. But
one of Tamerlane’s warriors, taking the seeker for the enemy, cleaved him in
half with a smooth stroke of his scimitar, causing him to conclude that in the
Hereafter man gets split in two.
Nonsense! Quite the opposite, I’d even say that souls divided in life merge
in the Hereafter. Contrary to the claims of sinful infidels who’ve fallen under
the sway of the Devil, there is indeed another world, thank God, and the proof
is that I’m speaking to you from here. I’ve died, but as you can plainly tell, I
haven’t ceased to be. Granted, I must confess, I haven’t encountered the rivers
flowing beside the silver and gold kiosks of Heaven, the broad-leaved trees
bearing plump fruit and the beautiful virgins mentioned in the Glorious
Koran—though I do very well recall how often and enthusiastically I made
pictures of those wide-eyed houris described in the chapter “That Which Is
Coming.” Nor is there a trace of those rivers of milk, wine, fresh water and
honey described with such flourish, not in the Koran, but by visionary
dreamers like Ibn Arabi. But I have no intention of tempting the faith of those
who live rightfully through their hopes and visions of the Otherworld, so let
me declare that all I’ve seen relates specifically to my own very personal
circumstances. Any believer with even a little knowledge of life after death
would know that a malcontent in my state would be hard-pressed to see the
rivers of Heaven.
In short, I, who am known as Master Elegant Effendi, am dead, but I have
not been buried, and therefore my soul has not completely left my body. This
extraordinary situation, although naturally my case isn’t the first, has inflicted
horrible suffering upon the immortal part of me. Though I cannot feel my
crushed skull or my decomposing body covered in wounds, full of broken
bones and partially submerged in ice-cold water, I do feel the deep torment of
my soul struggling desperately to escape its mortal coil. It’s as if the whole
world, along with my body, were contracting into a bolus of anguish.
I can only compare this contraction to the surprising sense of release I felt
during the unequaled moment of my death. Yes, I instantly understood that
the wretch wanted to kill me when he unexpectedly struck me with a stone
and cracked my skull, but I didn’t believe he’d follow through. I suddenly
realized I was a hopeful man, something I hadn’t been aware of while living
my life in the shadows between workshop and household. I clung passionately
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to life with my nails, my fingers and my teeth, which I sank into his skin. I
won’t bore you with the painful details of the subsequent blows I received.
When in the course of this agony I knew I would die, an incredible feeling
of relief filled me. I felt this relief during the moment of departure; my arrival
to this side was soothing, like the dream of seeing oneself asleep. The snowand
mud-covered shoes of my murderer were the last things I noticed. I closed
my eyes as if I were going to sleep, and I gently passed over.
My present complaint isn’t that my teeth have fallen like nuts into my
bloody mouth, or even that my face has been maimed beyond recognition, or
that I’ve been abandoned in the depths of a well—it’s that everyone assumes
I’m still alive. My troubled soul is anguished that my family and intimates,
who, yes, think of me often, imagine me engaged in trivial dealings somewhere
in Istanbul, or even chasing after another woman. Enough! Find my body
without delay, pray for me and have me buried. Above all, find my murderer!
For even if you bury me in the most magnificent of tombs, so long as that
wretch remains free, I’ll writhe restlessly in my grave, waiting and infecting
you all with faithlessness. Find that son-of-a-whore murderer and I’ll tell you
in detail just what I see in the Afterlife—but know this, after he’s caught, he
must be tortured by slowly splintering eight or ten of his bones, preferably his
ribs, with a vise before piercing his scalp with skewers made especially for the
task by torturers and plucking out his disgusting, oily hair, strand by strand, so
he shrieks each time.
Who is this murderer who vexes me so? Why has he killed me in such a
surprising way? Be curious and mindful of these matters. You say the world is
full of base and worthless criminals? Perhaps this one did it, perhaps that one?
In that case let me caution you: My death conceals an appalling conspiracy
against our religion, our traditions and the way we see the world. Open your
eyes, discover why the enemies of the life in which you believe, of the life
you’re living, and of Islam, have destroyed me. Learn why one day they might
do the same to you. One by one, everything predicted by the great preacher
Nusret Hoja of Erzurum, to whom I’ve tearfully listened, is coming to pass. Let
me say also that if the situation into which we’ve fallen were described in a
book, even the most expert of miniaturists could never hope to illustrate it. As
with the Koran—God forbid I’m misunderstood—the staggering power of
such a book arises from the impossibility of its being depicted. I doubt you’ve
fully comprehended this fact.
Listen to me. When I was an apprentice, I too feared and thus ignored
underlying truths and voices from beyond. I’d joke about such matters. But
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I’ve ended up in the depths of this deplorable well! It could happen to you, be
wary. Now, I’ve nothing left to do but hope for my thorough decay, so they
can find me by tracing my stench. I’ve nothing to do but hope—and imagine
the torture that some benevolent man will inflict upon that beastly murderer
once he’s been caught.
7
I AM CALLED BLACK
After an absence of twelve years I entered Istanbul like a sleepwalker. “The
earth called to him,” they say of men who are about to die, and in my case, it
was death that drew me back to the city where I’d been born and raised.
When I first returned, I thought there was only death; later, I would also
encounter love. Love, however, was a distant and forgotten thing, like my
memories of having lived in the city. It was in Istanbul, twelve years ago, that I
fell helplessly in love with my young cousin.
Four years after I first left Istanbul, while traveling through the endless
steppes, snow-covered mountains and melancholy cities of Persia, carrying
letters and collecting taxes, I admitted to myself that I was slowly forgetting
the face of the childhood love I’d left behind. With growing panic, I tried
desperately to remember her, only to realize that despite love, a face long not
seen finally fades. During the sixth year I spent in the East, traveling or
working as a secretary in the service of pashas, I knew that the face I imagined
was no longer that of my beloved. Later, in the eighth year, I forgot what I’d
mistakenly called to mind in the sixth, and again visualized a completely
different countenance. In this way, by the twelfth year, when I returned to my
city at the age of thirty-six, I was painfully aware that my beloved’s face had
long since escaped me.
Many of my friends and relatives had died during my twelve-year exile. I
visited the cemetery overlooking the Golden Horn and prayed for my mother
and for the uncles who’d passed away in my absence. The earthy smell of mud
mingled with my memories. Someone had broken an earthenware pitcher
beside my mother’s grave. For whatever reason, gazing at the broken pieces, I
began to cry. Was I crying for the dead or because I was, strangely, still only at
the beginning of my life after all these years? Or was it because I’d come to the
end of my life’s journey? A faint snow fell. Entranced by the flakes blowing
here and there, I became so lost in the vagaries of my life that I didn’t notice
the black dog staring at me from a dark corner of the cemetery.
My tears subsided. I wiped my nose. I saw the black dog wagging its tail in
friendship as I left the cemetery. Sometime later, I settled into our
neighborhood, renting one of the houses where a relative on my father’s side
once lived. It seems I reminded the landlady of her son who’d been killed by
Safavid Persian soldiers at the front and so she agreed to clean the house and
cook for me.
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