文章简介

 《Nights of Plague/瘟疫之夜》作者：[土]Orhan Pamuk/奥尔罕·帕慕克

Nights of Plague

ORHAN PAMUK

Translated from Turkish

by Ekin Oklap

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

—LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace,

translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

No writer has so far attempted to examine and compare these narratives to write a true history of the calamity of the plague.

—ALESSANDRO MANZONI, The Betrothed

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Map

Preface

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Many Years Later

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

Nights of Plague

PREFACE

This is both a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel. In this story of what took place during the most eventful and momentous six months in the life of the island of Mingheria, pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, I have also included many tales from the history of this country I love so dearly.

When I began to research the events that took place on the island during the outbreak of plague in 1901, I realized that although an understanding of the subjective decisions taken by the protagonists of this brief and dramatic time could not be achieved by historical method alone, the art of the novel could help, and so I set out to bring the two together.

But readers must not think to find my starting point in these complex literary conundrums. It really all began with a series of letters I gained access to, and whose invaluable riches I have sought to reflect in this book. I was asked to annotate and prepare for publication one hundred thirteen letters that Princess Pakize, third daughter of the thirty-third Ottoman sultan Murad V, had written to her older sister Hatice Sultan between 1901 and 1913. The book you are about to read began as an “editor’s introduction” to that correspondence.

The introduction grew longer, and broadened with further research, until it turned into the book you are now holding. I admit that above all else it was Princess Pakize’s writing style and intelligence that captivated me. The charming and profoundly sensitive Princess Pakize possessed a narrative appetite, an awareness of detail, and a descriptive flair that few historians and novelists are blessed with. I have spent many years in British and French archives reading consular dispatches from the Ottoman Empire’s port cities, on the basis of which I have completed a doctorate and published several academic books. But no consul had ever been able to describe these events, those days of cholera and plague, with such elegance and depth of understanding, nor could any of them convey the atmosphere of Ottoman port cities and the colors of their streets and markets, the squawking of seagulls and the sound of carriage wheels, in quite the same way. So perhaps it was Princess Pakize, and her profoundly perceptive approach to people, objects, and events, who inspired me with her lively, vibrant accounts to turn that editor’s introduction into a novel.

As I read the letters, I asked myself: Is it because she was, like me, a “woman” that Princess Pakize was able to describe these events much more vividly and “meticulously” than the average historian or foreign consul could? We must not forget that during the outbreak of plague, the author of these letters rarely left the guesthouse in the State Hall and only found out what was happening in the city through her doctor husband’s tales! Princess Pakize did not just describe this world of male politicians, bureaucrats, and doctors in her letters; she also managed to identify with these men. I too have attempted to bring that world to life in my novel-cum-history. But it is very difficult indeed to be as receptive, bright, and hungry for life as Princess Pakize was.

Of course another reason why I have been so moved by these extraordinary letters, which will span at least six hundred pages when they are published, is that I myself am a daughter of Mingheria. As a little girl, I would come across Princess Pakize in schoolbooks, newspaper columns, and most of all in the pages of national children’s weeklies (Island Lessons, Learning History), which published comic strips and tales of historic figures. I had always felt a particular affinity toward her. Just as other people saw the island of Mingheria as a mythical, fairy-tale land, Princess Pakize was, to me, a fairy-tale heroine. It was a magical experience to find the fairy-tale Princess’s day-to-day troubles, her true emotions, and most important her striking personality and her integrity enshrined in the letters that had suddenly come into my possession. Eventually—as the patient reader will discover by the end of this book—I met her in person too.

I was able to verify the authenticity of the world described in Princess Pakize’s letters by consulting archives in Istanbul, Mingheria, England, and France and by reviewing historical documents and memoirs from the era. But there were moments as I wrote my historical novel when I could not help but identify with Princess Pakize and feel as if I were writing my own personal story.

The art of the novel is based on the craft of telling our own stories as if they belonged to others, and of telling other people’s stories as if they were our own. So whenever I began to feel like a sultan’s daughter, like a princess, I knew deep down that I was doing precisely what a novelist should do. The harder part was empathizing with all the men in positions of power, the pashas and doctors who were in charge of quarantine measures and oversaw the battle against the plague.

If a novel is to reach, in spirit and form, beyond the scope of an individual’s story, and resemble instead a kind of history that embraces everybody’s lives, it is best for it to be narrated from many different points of view. On the other hand, I agree with that most female of all male novelists, the great Henry James, who believed that for a novel to be truly convincing, every detail and every event must be gathered around the perspective of a single character.

But because I have written a history book at the same time, I have often deviated from and indeed broken the rule of the single point of view. I have interrupted emotional scenes to provide the reader with facts and figures and the histories of government institutions. Right after describing a character’s innermost feelings, I have swiftly and boldly moved on to a completely different character’s thoughts, even when the first character couldn’t possibly have known what they might be. Although I firmly believe that the dethroned sultan Abdülaziz was assassinated, I have also noted how some have argued that he committed suicide. In other words, I have tried to look at the dazzling realm Princess Pakize described in her letters through the eyes of its other witnesses too, and thus make my book closer to a history.

Of the questions I have been asked so frequently over the years, such as how these letters came into my possession, how seriously I take the murder mystery therein, and why did I not publish the letters first, I will only address here the second of the above. This idea for a novel found support among fellow academics to whom I spoke of the murders described in the letters, and of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s literary preferences. I was also encouraged by the fact that a prestigious publisher like Cambridge University Press was interested in the murder mystery angle, and in the history of the little island of Mingheria. Of course the meanings and enigmas of this wondrous world, which I have been recording with unfaltering enjoyment for so many years, go much deeper and further than the mere question of who the killer was. The identity of the killer is, at most, a sign. But a proclivity for murder mysteries may transform every page of this book—starting from the words of Tolstoy, the greatest historical novelist of all, and of this preface—into an ocean of symbols.

Some have accused me of disagreeing too much (though I never name names) with certain popular and official historians. They may be right. But if we have done so, it is only because we have given their much-loved works due consideration.

Introductions to history books about the Orient and the Levant, or the East and the Eastern Mediterranean, will always touch upon problems of transliteration and seek to explain how ancient local scripts have been rendered into the Latin alphabet. I am glad not to have written yet another of those dreary books. There is no match for the Mingherian alphabet and language anyway! In some cases I have used the original spelling of local names, and in others I have written them as they are pronounced. The existence of a city in Georgia with a similar spelling is a simple coincidence. But it is entirely intentional, and certainly no coincidence, that many things in this book will seem as familiar to the reader as old and nearly forgotten memories.

—Mîna Mingher, Istanbul, 2017

CHAPTER 1

In the year 1901, if a steamer with black coal-smoke pouring from its chimney were to sail south from Istanbul for four days until it passed the island of Rhodes, then continue south through dangerous, stormy waters toward Alexandria for another half day, its passengers would eventually come to see in the distance the delicate towers of Arkaz Castle upon the island of Mingheria. Due to Mingheria’s location on the route between Istanbul and Alexandria, the Castle’s enigmatic shadow and silhouette were gazed upon in awe and fascination by many a passing traveler. As soon as this magnificent image—which Homer described in the Iliad as “an emerald built of pink stone”—appeared on the horizon, ship captains of a finer spiritual disposition would invite their passengers on deck so that they could savor the views, and artists on their way to the East would avidly paint the romantic vista, adding black storm clouds for effect.

But few of these ships would stop at Mingheria, for in those days there were only three ferries that made regular weekly trips to the island: the Messageries Maritimes Saghalien (whose high-pitched whistle everyone in Arkaz recognized) and Equateur (with its deeper horn), and the Cretian company Pantaleon’s dainty vessel the Zeus (which only rarely sounded its horn, and always in brief bursts). So the fact that an unscheduled ferry was approaching the island of Mingheria two hours before midnight on the twenty-second of April 1901—the day our story begins—signaled that something unusual was afoot.

The ship with pointed bow and slender white chimneys closing in on the island from the north, stealthy as a spy vessel, and bearing the Ottoman flag, was the Aziziye. It had been tasked by Sultan Abdul Hamid II with transporting a distinguished Ottoman delegation from Istanbul on a special mission to China. To this delegation of seventeen fez-, turban-, and hat-clad religious scholars, army officers, translators, and bureaucrats, Abdul Hamid had added at the last moment his niece Princess Pakize, whose marriage he had recently arranged, and her husband, Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey. The joyous, eager, and slightly dazed newlyweds had not been able to fathom the reason for their inclusion in the delegation to China, and had puzzled over the matter at great length.

Princess Pakize—who, like her older sisters, was not fond of her uncle the Sultan—was sure that Abdul Hamid had meant her and her husband some kind of harm by putting them in the delegation, but she had not yet been able to work out what the reason might be. Some palace gossips had suggested that the Sultan’s intention must be to drive the newlyweds out of Istanbul and send them to die in yellow fever–infested Asian lands and cholera-ridden African deserts, while others pointed out that Abdul Hamid’s games tended to be revealed only once he had finished playing them. But Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey was more optimistic. An eminently successful and hardworking thirty-eight-year-old quarantine doctor, he had represented the Ottoman Empire at international public health conferences. His achievements had caught the Sultan’s attention, and when they had been introduced, Doctor Nuri had discovered what many quarantine doctors already knew: that the Sultan’s fascination with murder mysteries was matched by his interest in European medical advances. The Sultan wanted to keep up with developments concerning microbes, laboratories, and vaccinations and introduce the latest medical findings to Istanbul and across Ottoman lands. He was also concerned about the new infectious diseases that were making their way toward the West from Asia and China.

There was no wind in the Levant that night, so the Sultan’s Aziziye cruise ship was making swifter progress than expected. Earlier it had made a stop at the port of Smyrna, though no such stop had been declared in the official itinerary. As the ship had neared the misty Smyrna docks, one by one the committee’s delegates had climbed up the narrow stairwell that led to the captain’s quarters to request an explanation and had learned that a mysterious new passenger was to come on board. Even the captain (who was Russian) had claimed not to know who this passenger was.

The Aziziye’s mysterious passenger was the Ottoman Empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health and Sanitation, the renowned chemist and pharmacist Bonkowski Pasha. Tired but still sprightly at the age of sixty, Bonkowski Pasha was the Sultan’s Royal Chemist and the founder of modern Ottoman pharmacology. He was also a semisuccessful businessman who had once owned a number of different companies producing rosewater and perfumes, bottled mineral water, and pharmaceuticals. But for the past ten years he had worked exclusively as the Ottoman Empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health, sending the Sultan reports on cholera and plague outbreaks, as well as rushing from one outbreak to the next, from port to port and city to city, to oversee quarantine and public health provisions on behalf of the Sultan.