My Name is Red Read Online Free PDF

perhaps my brother gilder, Elegant, had with sly intent used these facts to buttress his false accusations. To what degree was he being honest?
    I had him repeat the claims that pitted us against each other, and as he spoke, he didn’t mince his words. He seemed to be provoking me to cover up a mistake, as during our apprentice years, when the goal was to avoid a beating by Master Osman. Back then, I found his sincerity convincing. As an apprentice, his eyes would widen as they did now, but back then they hadn’t yet dimmed from the labor of embellishing. But finally I hardened my heart; he was prepared to confess everything to everyone.
    “Do listen to me,” I said with forced exasperation. “We make illuminations, create border designs, draw frames onto pages, we brightly ornament page after page with lovely tones of gold, we make the greatest of paintings, we adorn armoires and boxes. We’ve done nothing else for years. It is our calling. They commission paintings from us, ordering us to arrange a ship, an antelope or a sultan within the borders of a particular frame, demanding a certain style of bird, a certain type of figure, take this particular scene from the story, forget about such-and-such. Whatever it is they demand, we do it. ”Listen,“ Enishte Effendi said to me, ”here, draw a horse of your own imagining, right here.“ For three days, like the great artists of old, I sketched hundreds of horses so I might come to know exactly what ”a horse of my own imagining“ was. To accustom my hand, I drew a series of horses on a coarse sheet of Samarkand paper.”
    I took these sketches out and showed them to Elegant. He looked at them with interest and, leaning close to the paper, began to study the black and white horses in the faint moonlight. “The old masters of Shiraz and Herat,” I said, “claimed that a miniaturist would have to sketch horses unceasingly for fifty years to be able to truly depict the horse that Allah envisioned and desired. They claimed that the best picture of a horse should be drawn in the dark, since a true miniaturist would go blind working over that fifty-year period, but in the process, his hand would memorize the horse.”
    The innocent expression on his face, the one I’d also seen long ago, when we were children, told me that he’d become completely absorbed in my horses.
    “They hire us, and we try to make the most mysterious, the most unattainable horse, just as the old masters did. There’s nothing more to it. It’s unjust of them to hold us responsible for anything more than the illustration.”
    “I’m not sure that’s correct,” he said. “We, too, have responsibilities and our own will. I fear no one but Allah. It was He who provided us with reason that we might distinguish Good from Evil.”
    It was an appropriate response.
    “
Allah sees and knows all
…
”
I said in Arabic. “He’ll know that you and I, we’ve done this work without being aware of what we were doing. Who will you notify about Enishte Effendi? Aren’t you aware that behind this affair rests the will of His Excellency Our Sultan?”
    Silence.
    I wondered whether he was really such a buffoon or whether his loss of composure and ranting had sprung out of a sincere fear of Allah.
    We stopped at the mouth of the well. In the darkness, I vaguely caught sight of his eyes and could see that he was scared. I pitied him. But it was too late for that. I prayed to God to give me one more sign that the man standing before me was not only a dim-witted coward, but an unredeemable disgrace.
    “Count off twelve steps and dig,” I said.
    “Then, what will you do?”
    “I’ll explain it all to Enishte Effendi, and he’ll burn the pictures. What other recourse is there? If one of Nusret Hoja’s followers hears of such an allegation, nothing will remain of us or the book-arts workshop. Are you familiar with any of the Erzurumis? Accept this money so that we can be certain you won’t inform on