My Name is Red 精彩片段：
I AM CALLED BLACK
Silent and unseen, under cover of early morning darkness, I left like a guilty houseguest and walked tirelessly through the muddy backstreets. At Bayazid, I performed my ablution in the courtyard, entered the mosque and prayed. Inside, there was no one but the Imam Effendi and an old man who could sleep as he prayed—a talent only rarely achieved after a lifetime of practice. You know how there are moments in our sleepy dreams and sad memories when we feel Allah has taken notice of us and we pray
with the hopeful anticipation of one who’s managed to thrust a petition into the Sultan’s hand: Thus did I beg Allah to grant me a cheerful home filled with loving people.
When I’d reached Master Osman’s house, I knew that within a week’s time he’d gradually usurped my late Enishte’s place in my thoughts. He was more contrary and more distant, but his belief in manuscript illumination was more profound. He resembled an introspective elderly dervish more than the great master who’d kicked up tempests of fear, awe and love among the miniaturists for so many years.
As we traveled from the master’s house to the palace—he mounted on a horse and hunched slightly, I on foot and likewise hunched forward—we must’ve recalled the elderly dervish and aspiring disciple in those cheap illustrations that accompany old fables.
At the palace, we found the Commander of the Imperial Guard and his men even more eager and ready than we. Our Sultan was certain that once we’d looked at the three masters’ horse drawings this morning we could, in a trice, determine who among them was the accursed murderer; and so, He’d ordered that the criminal be quickly put to torture without even allowing him to answer the accusation. We were taken not to the executioners’ fountain where everyone could see and take warning, but to that small slapdash house in the sheltered seclusion of the Sultan’s Private Garden, which was preferred for interrogation, torture and strangling.
A youth, who seemed too elegant and polite to be one of the Commander’s men, authoritatively placed three sheets of paper on a worktable.
Master Osman took out his magnifying lens and my heart began to pound. Like an eagle gliding elegantly over a tract of land, his eye, which he maintained at a constant distance from the lens, passed ever so slowly over the three marvelous horse illustrations. And like that eagle catching sight of the baby gazelle which would be its prey, he slowed over each of the horses’ noses and focused on it intently and calmly.
“It’s not here,” he said coldly after a time.
“What isn’t here?” asked the Commander.
I’d assumed the great master would work with deliberation, scrutinizing every aspect of the horses from mane to hoof.
“The damned painter hasn’t left a single trace,” said Master Osman. “We won’t be able to determine who illustrated the chestnut horse from these pictures.”
Taking up the magnifying lens he’d put aside, I looked at the horses’ nostrils: The master was correct; there was nothing in the three horses resembling the peculiar nostrils of the chestnut horse drawn for my Enishte’s manuscript. Just then, my attention turned to the torturers waiting outside with an implement
whose purpose I couldn’t fathom. As I was trying to observe them through the half-opened door, I saw somebody scuttle quickly backward as if possessed by a jinn, seeking shelter behind one of the mulberry trees.
At that moment, like an ethereal light that illuminated the leaden morning, His Excellency Our Sultan, the Foundation of the World, entered the room.