People of the Book (32 page)

“But Hooman will not keep me if I cannot do this work, and yet it is the only skill I have.” On the journey here, after my capture, I had seen other foreign youths my age, clinging terrified to the ship’s rigging in a wild sea, breaking rock in the white-hot glare of the quarries, or coming, hunched and filthy, from the dark mouths of the mines.

“You will not be the first to fail, believe me. He will find some task for you.”

And so he did. He barely glanced at my rice grain before casting it aside. He sent me off to work with the “preparers of the ground”—those painters and calligraphers whose sight had weakened or hands lost their steadiness. All day I sat with those bitter men, rubbing each parchment with mother-of-pearl, perhaps a thousand times, until the page was polished smooth. After a few days of this, the flesh of my fingers puckered and peeled away in shreds. Soon, I could not hold a paintbrush. That was when I gave way to the despair that I had held back since my capture.

I had not allowed myself to think of home, or how we had left it, in celebration, my father’s wives ululating with joy as the hajj caravan departed to the sound of drums and cymbals. I had not allowed myself to think of my father as I saw him last. But now I could not gainsay the images of him, his silvered hair stained with blood and pale gray tissue, a bubble of crimsoned spittle forming on his lips as he tried to mouth the words of his last prayer. His eyes, his desperate eyes, searching my face as the Berber held me, the arm across my throat hard and wide as a tree branch. Somehow, I struggled free of that grip just long enough to shout the words for my father, the words that he no longer had the breath to say: “God is most great! There is no God but God!” I felt a blow and fell to my knees, still crying out for him: “I rely on God!”

There was another, harder blow then. When I came to consciousness, my mouth tasted of iron. I was sprawled facedown in a cart, among our looted goods, moving northward. Painfully, I raised my pounding head to peer through the slatted sides. My father lay there, in the distance, a bundle of rags stirring in the hot desert wind: indigo rags, and atop them, the glossy black feathers of the first vulture.

I lived three months with the preparers of the ground. And now, when I can look back at that time without the fear that attended it—that I would spend my entire life in the tedium of pounding and rubbing and bitter reminiscence—I can accept that I learned a great deal there, especially from Faris. Faris, like me, had been born across the sea in Ifriqiya. Unlike me, he had traveled here voluntarily, to practice his art in the rump state that remained of the once-mighty nation al-Andalus. Unlike the others, he did not boast all the time of the great skill he had once possessed. Nor did he engage in the constant nagging and bickering, as ceaseless as the drone of blowflies.

Faris’s eyes were cloudy as a winter sky. Disease had claimed his sight when he was still quite young. Finally, after I had come to know him, I asked why he had not gone to one of the great doctors of the city. I knew there was an operation that sometimes restored the sight of clouded eyes. I had not seen it myself. My father healed with plants rather than probes, but he had shown me once a fine series of drawings on how such a thing might be done by one who had the skill: a delicate slicing into the eyeball, pushing open the clouded window and tipping it backward into the space behind.

“I had this cutting,” Faris said. “Twice it was tried on me by the emir’s own surgeon. But as you see, the effect was not successful.”

“God put him in the fog and keeps him there in penance for the paintings he made.” The quavering voice came from old Hakim, who had been a calligrapher. He boasted that he had copied twenty Korans in his career, and that the holy words were etched on his heart. If so, they had not softened it. The only gentle words that came from his pursed mouth were his prayers. The rest of his speech was a relentless stream of bile. Now, he rose from his mat, where he had been dozing, shirking his share of toil. Leaning on his stick, he came hobbling to where we sat at our work. He raised the staff and poked it at Faris. “You wanted to create as God creates, and God has punished you for it.”

I touched Faris gently on the arm, questioning, but he shook his head. “Ignorance and superstition,” he muttered. “To celebrate God’s creation is not the same as competing with the Creator.”

The old man raised his voice. “The makers of figured pictures are the worst of men,” he intoned, his speech slipping into the ornamented Arabic of prayer. “Are you so arrogant that you doubt the word of the Prophet?”

“May peace be upon him, I could never doubt his word.” Faris sighed. He had clearly had this argument too many times. “I doubt those who claim that saying as a true one. The Koran, which is beyond all doubt, is silent on such matters.”

“It is not silent!” The old man was shrieking now, hunched over, his yellowed beard almost resting on Faris’s bowed head. “Does not the Koran use the word
sawwara
to describe how God forms man from a clot? Therefore, God is a
mussawir.
To call yourself one is usurping him who formed us all!”

“Enough!” Faris had raised his voice now. “Why don’t you tell the boy the truth of why you are here? There is no tremor in his hand, and he sees as well as a falcon. He was dismissed for defacing the art of painters.”

“Dismissed for doing God’s work!” the old man cried. “I cut their throats! Beheaded them all! Murdered them to save the soul of the emir!” He was cackling, as if at some private joke.

I was confused. I looked at Faris, but his whole person was trembling. Sweat had formed on his brow. A bead of it dripped onto the polished paper before him, spoiling the hard effort of a morning. When I placed my hand on his arm, he shook it off. Tossing his piece of pearl shell aside, he rose to his feet and pushed the old man harshly out of his way.

Hooman sent for me two days after. I walked through the studio, noticing things that fear had blurred the first time: the bright shards of lapis lazuli waiting to be ground into blue pigment, the flare of light on wafers of silver, and the old man in a screened alcove, shielded from the slightest breeze, as he picked shimmering patches of color from a pile of butterfly wings. Hooman signaled me to kneel where I had knelt before, on a corner of his carpet. He had one of the cats resting across his arms. He lifted it up to his chin and buried his face in the dense fur for a moment, then, unexpectedly, he held it out to me.

“Take her!” he said. “You’re not afraid of cats, are you?” I shook my head and reached for her. My hands—work ravaged and hardened now with calluses—sank into her softness. The cat appeared large, but was in fact a tiny thing encased in a cloud of fur. She mewled once, like an infant, then curled herself on my lap. Hooman held out a sharp knife, hilt toward me. I winced. Surely he didn’t want me to kill his cat? My face registered my dismay. The lines around his eyes tightened for a moment.

“And where did you think we got the fine hairs for our brushes?” he asked. “The cats are kind enough to supply them.” He lifted the second cat into his own lap and stroked under her chin until she rolled over and stretched her neck. He pinched no more than five or six of the long throat hairs and slid the knife under them.

When he looked at me again, the cat in my lap had stretched herself, pulling back my sleeve so that one white paw lay along my forearm.

“Your skin,” said Hooman softly. He stared at me. I tried to pull the sleeve of my robe down over my wrists, but he put out his hand and stopped me. He continued to stare without seeing me. I knew the look. It was the way my father had studied a tumor, forgetting as he examined it that there was a person to whose body the thing attached. When Hooman spoke again, it was to himself and not to me. “It is the color of blue smoke…no…it is like a ripening plum, with the pale down still dusting it.” I fidgeted, misliking this close attention. “Be still!” he ordered. “I must paint this color.”

And so I sat there until the light failed. When that happened, he dismissed me abruptly, and I went to a vacant pallet in a corner of the studio, not knowing why I had been summoned.

The next day, Hooman handed me the new brushes he had ordered to be made, the cat’s hairs secured in a feather shaft. There were brushes of various sizes. A few contained just a single hair, for the making of the very finest of lines. He gave me, also, a piece of polished parchment. “Give me a portrait,” he said. “You may choose for a subject anyone in the studio.”

I chose the boy who assisted the gold beaters, thinking that his smooth, almond-eyed face best resembled the ideal youths pictured in so many of the finest books. Hooman tossed the page aside after barely looking at it. He stood, abruptly, and signed for me to follow him.

Hooman’s private quarters were set at a little distance from the studio, down a high-vaulted passageway. The room was large, the divan covered in brocade and piled with cushions. In a corner stood a set of small coffers, boxes for the keeping of books. Hooman knelt before the finest of them and opened its carved lid. He lifted the little book inside with great reverence and placed it on the reading stand. “This is the work of my master, the pearl of the world, Maulana of the delicate brush,” he said. He opened the book.

The image shimmered. I had never seen a painting like it. Within the bounds of a small page, the painter had made a world of life and movement. The script, in Persian, I could not read, but the illumination was eloquent enough. The scene depicted a princely wedding. There were hundreds of figures, yet no two of them were alike: every turban was of a different fabric, variously tied. Every robe was of a diverse design, embroidered or appliquéd with a hundred kinds of arabesques. Looking at the painting, you could hear the rustle of silk and the swish of damask as the crowd swirled around the royal bridegroom. I had been used to see the people in pictures depicted face-on or in profile, but this painter had not restricted himself so. The heads he drew were caught in every aspect—some three-quarter profile, some tilted downward, others chin raised. One man’s head was turned completely from the painter, so that all we saw was the back of an ear. But more striking still: every face was unique, as in life. There was such expression in the eyes that I felt as though I could read the thoughts of these men. One beamed, prideful at his inclusion at the feast. Another smirked, perhaps contemptuous of the ostentatious display. A third gazed awestruck at his prince. A fourth grimaced slightly, as though his new sash pinched him.

“You see, now, what makes a master?” Hooman said at last.

I nodded, unable to take my eyes from the image. “I feel…that is, it seems…” I gulped a nervous breath and tried to collect my thoughts. “That which he paints has mass to it, as in life. It is as if any of these men could walk off the page and live.”

Hooman drew his own breath sharply. “Exactly,” he said. “And now I will show you why I have this book, and why it is not any longer the treasured property of the prince for whom it was made.”

He reached down then and turned the page. The next picture was just as dazzling, just as vivid. It depicted the procession bringing the bridegroom to the house of the bride. But this time my gasp of appreciation turned to one of dismay. The difference between this image and the last was that every one of the revelers had a rough red line slashed across his neck.

“Those who did this call themselves iconoclasts—smashers of idols—and they believe they do the work of God.” He closed the book, unable to bear looking at the desecration. “They paint the red line to symbolize the cutting of the throat, you see. The images, thus robbed of life, no longer compete with God’s living creation. Five years ago, a band of these fanatics sacked the pavilion of the book and destroyed many notable works. It is for that reason that you see no portraits produced here. But now a request has come that may not be refused. I want you to try your hand again at this.” He dropped his voice then. “I seek a
likeness.
Do you understand?”

Determined not to fail this second test, I scanned the faces in the studio. In the end, I chose the old man at work with the butterfly wings. There was an intensity to his expression that I thought I might be able to capture. As well, his composure, and the economy of his movements, would be a help to me.

It took me three days. I had stared at the old man, trying to see him as I had learned to see an unfamiliar plant, emptying my mind not just of all other plants I had painted before, but of all my assumptions about what a plant is—that it has a stem, that leaves come off at such and so an angle, that leaves, in fact, are green. Just so, I looked at the face of the butterfly man. I tried to see it as a pattern of light and dark, void and solid. I made a grid on the page in my mind and divided up his face as if each square of the grid was a separate thing, containing its unique information.

I had to ask for several more pages before I found the way to something that looked alive. My hand shook as I passed my work to Hooman. He said nothing, and his expression did not change, but he did not cast the work aside. When he looked up at me, he scanned my face, and then ran his hand across my chin, as he had at our first meeting.

“An unexpected opportunity has presented itself, and I believe you may be suitable. The emir wishes to appoint a
mussawir
to the harem. Since such a person must, of course, be cut, it is better if he is a youth not yet come to manhood, just such as yourself.”

I felt the blood run out of my face. I had been too nervous to eat more than a bite or two since my return to the pavilion. Now there was a sound like surf in my head. From far away I could hear Hooman’s voice: “…a life of utmost ease and who knows what ultimate influence…a small price, in the long run…future uncertain otherwise…many others here who paint at least as well as you will ever do…”

I must have tried to stand; perhaps I got to my feet. In any case, just before I fell, I saw my own arm sweeping across Hooman’s table, bowls tipping, and a tide of lapis blue flowing across the floor.