第 10 页

“I shall quickly drop by Vavla and Germe before the quarantine meeting begins!” said Bonkowski Pasha. “A quarantine official must make sure to see everything with his own eyes.”

Doctor Ilias saw that, just to their right, the door to the parcel storage room behind the telegraph counter had been left open. The door that led out of the storage room itself was also ajar, and they could see the dark green of the garden at the back of the building.

Bonkowski Pasha noticed the surprise in Doctor Ilias’s expression, but paid it no heed. He stepped behind a counter to their left. He wandered around undisturbed (Postmaster Dimitris and a clerk were looking at a document and had their backs turned to him) and entered the empty storage room in the back. He kept going without slowing down, pushed the half-open door that led to the back garden, and walked right out of the Post Office building.

Doctor Ilias would not normally have left his superior alone in such circumstances. But everything had happened at once, and he had watched him as if in a trance, thinking that the Chief Inspector would come back the way he had gone.

As he stepped out into the back garden, Bonkowski Pasha basked in the gleeful knowledge that he was momentarily free of the spies and bodyguards employed by the Department of Scrutinia. He walked out onto the street and up a sloping road. Soon they would send all their men to look for him, and it would not be long before they found him. But the venerable sixty-year-old chemist was enjoying his little escapade and was delighted to have evaded everyone’s attention.

Two hours later, Bonkowski Pasha’s bloodied corpse was found in the corner of an empty plot diagonally across the street from the Pelagos Pharmacy in Hrisopolitissa Square. To this day, historians of Mingheria still sometimes argue, if reluctantly, over what the Sultan and the Ottoman Empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health (and head chemist of Abdul Hamid II’s personal pharmacy) did during those two hours, and over the mystery of when, how, and by whom he was abducted and killed.

The narrow, sloping road Bonkowski Pasha had wandered into and climbed in slow, unhurried steps was flanked on one side by an old wall whose plaster had long since fallen off, and whose surface was overhung with vines, weeping willows, and hackberries, and on the other by a stretch of empty land, where a group of laughing, boisterous women were hanging their laundry up to dry among the trees as their half-naked toddlers scampered around them. Farther ahead, Bonkowski Pasha saw two lizards coupling energetically among the vines. The Greek community’s Marianna Theodoropoulos Girls’ Secondary School had not yet closed, but only half its students were still turning up for classes. Walking along the wall and peering into the school’s back garden as if he were looking between the black railings of a prison yard, the Chief Inspector of Public Health observed—as he had so often witnessed in his extensive experience of epidemics—that here too, despite the news of the outbreak, many Greek children whose mothers and fathers could not stay at home to look after them and did not have the resources to feed them were still being sent to school so that they might at least have a bowl of soup or a slice of bread to eat, and as he watched those children now, whiling the hours away as their school’s population steadily dwindled, he could see the apprehension in their faces.

Bonkowski Pasha then walked into the courtyard of the Hagia Triada Church. Two funeral processions had just set off for the Orthodox cemetery behind the Hora neighborhood, and a relative calm had descended on the churchyard following the commotion of their departure. Bonkowski Pasha remembered the controversy that had accompanied the construction of this new Greek Orthodox church twenty years ago, and whose echoes had reached all the way to Istanbul. The site of the church had previously been a cemetery built hastily to house the victims of a cholera epidemic that had ravaged Arkaz in 1834. Those among the Greek community who had most prospered from the island’s marble trade wanted to exorcise the memory of those terrible days of cholera by erecting a church on this same site. The Governor at the time had stalled under the pretext that constructing a new building on land where cholera victims were buried would have adverse effects on public health, until one day, during a discussion of Istanbul’s supplies of drinking water, Abdul Hamid had asked the young chemist for his views on the matter, following which a permit had finally been issued for the church to be built over the cemetery. Like all Ottoman churches constructed over the previous sixty years, in the wake of Tanzimat-era reforms allowing for domes to be used in Christian architecture too, the Hagia Triada possessed an enormous dome. Mingheria’s governors resented the fact that the proportions of this dome and the view of the church’s belfry would give visitors approaching the harbor the impression that this was a Greek island. The dome of the New Mosque, the largest Ottoman-made building on the island, may well have been bigger, but its location was not perhaps quite as striking!

Bonkowski Pasha knew that if he stepped inside the church, he would be hounded by the fireman with the disinfectant pump and by the congregation, so he remained outside in the courtyard, walking close to the walls. One of the walls was lined with shops. In the same corner on the opposite edge there was a boys’ high school funded by the church’s charitable trust. It reminded Bonkowski Pasha of his days going around high schools in Istanbul thirty years ago delivering chemistry lectures to the pupils there. He would have enjoyed doing the same now, teaching these bewildered, idling students about chemistry, microbes, and the plague.

As he walked out of the courtyard, he came across an elderly, well-dressed Greek man and asked him in French if he could point him in the direction of Vavla. The stuttering old man (who happened to be distantly related to the island’s wealthy Aldoni family) showed him the way, and afterward, having reported this encounter and the Chief Inspector’s question to the police just two hours after Bonkowski Pasha’s body was discovered, he was treated for a time as if he too were a suspect, an unpleasant experience which he would recount to an Athenian newspaper ten years later.

Once he had left the church, Bonkowski Pasha walked by several convenience stores and greengrocers—some open, others closed—and past Zofiri’s almond biscuit shop, which remains in business to this day (2017 at the time of writing). As he climbed down Donkey’s Bane Hill, Bonkowski Pasha stepped to one side to make way for a small gathering of mourners pulling an enormous coffin up the same slope. He was seen doing so by Barber Panagiotis, whose shop stood in the corner where the slope met Hamidiye Avenue. A series of funerals had just taken place, and in the time before the next batch was due to begin, the mosque commissioned in 1776 by former grand vizier and renowned Mingherian Ahmet Ferit Pasha stood empty and quiet. Bonkowski Pasha passed this comparatively smaller-domed mosque, stepped through the gate on the side of its courtyard that faced the sea, and walked along the threadlike, linden-scented streets nearby. When he saw the Hamidiye Hospital, which had not yet been completed but had already begun admitting patients that morning, he realized that the Chief Scrutineer might send his men to look for him there, and so he turned around and made his way first into the Kadirler neighborhood, and later into Germe.

When he entered these streets that had already lost so many lives to the disease, Bonkowski Pasha stood for a time looking at the ditches that carried sewage down the middle of the road, at the children running around barefoot, and at two boys—brothers—tussling over some indeterminate disagreement. He walked past the lodge led by the sheikh who had blessed the amulet he carried in his pocket, and which had belonged to Bayram Effendi. We know all this because it was reported by a plainclothes policeman who was permanently stationed in this area.

This policeman did not know Bonkowski Pasha. But he would later witness an encounter near the lodge between Bonkowski Pasha and a young man, and the beginnings of the conversation that took place between them, which went more or less as follows:

“Doctor Effendi, we have a patient at home, please come.”

“I am not a doctor …”

They continued to talk for a time, but the policeman was not able to hear the rest of their conversation. Then, all of a sudden, they vanished.

The Chief Inspector of Public Health and the agitated young man walked briskly for a while until they reached a garden with a low wall and no gate. Bonkowski Pasha felt as if he were in a dream, pushing vainly against the wrong door. He kept pushing despite knowing that even if he did manage to open the door, it would be of no use.

Then the house door opened, and they stepped inside. The air was heavy with the smell of sweat, vomit, and stale breath that was the mark of plague-infested homes. Fearing that he might catch the disease too unless someone opened the windows soon, Bonkowski Pasha stopped breathing. But nobody opened the windows. Where was the plague patient? Instead of taking him there, they all stood staring at him with accusatory looks, and Bonkowski Pasha became so distressed that for a moment he thought he might suffocate.

Then, a figure with fair hair and green eyes stepped forward and said: “You have brought sickness and quarantine here again to blight us. But this time, you will not prevail!”

CHAPTER 9

Two days after dropping Bonkowski Pasha off on Mingheria in the middle of the night, the Aziziye reached Alexandria, where the Sultan’s Guidance Committee received an enthusiastic welcome from the Consulate of the German Empire. The German consul in Alexandria, troubled and angered by the assassination of the German ambassador to China, had organized a reception and press conference to which the other Western consuls had also been invited. The aim was to get English-language papers in Egypt like Les Pyramids and the Egyptian Gazette to report on the Guidance Committee’s mission, and for newspapers in India and China (particularly those serving the Muslim communities there) to pick up on these reports. In this way, Kaiser Wilhelm—who regarded the suppression of the revolt in China as an opportunity for Germany to show the world its might—could announce to the world before the committee had even reached Peking that the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the caliph of Islam, was not siding with the rebellious Muslims in China, but joining forces with the Western powers instead.

Princess Pakize and her husband spent their days and nights in their cabin aboard the Aziziye. At the sight of the barefoot, kaftan-wearing Bedouin porters who had all but stormed the deck of their ship as it docked at Alexandria’s newly built wharf and begun unloading suitcases and cargo unbidden, Princess Pakize had declared herself relieved that her royal rank meant she had been forbidden from leaving the ship. The Princess was aware that the officer the palace had sent to guard the delegation, Major Kâmil, had been ordered never to leave her side in any of the ports and cities the ship happened to stop by on its journey.

As they stood on the Aziziye and watched the sun setting over Alexandria on their first evening there, Princess Pakize spoke to her husband about her father, the former sultan who now lived like a prisoner in the Çırağan Palace. She told him that even though the palace was small and overcrowded, there had been times during their confinement when she and her father and sisters had been able to spend some time alone, playing the piano together; that her father was a man of gentle, delicate sensibilities; that he had secretly joined the Freemasons, a fact which, despite his best intentions, had been used against him. One day they had been looking at a map of Africa in an atlas when their father had walked into the room and started telling his daughters of the time he had visited Egypt as a young prince twenty years before. Both his uncle Abdülaziz, who was the Sultan at the time, and his little brother Prince Hamid Effendi, who would eventually succeed him on the throne, had also made the trip. (Later they would also travel together to Paris, London, and Vienna.) In Egypt, the one current and two future Ottoman sultans, Abdülaziz, Murad V, and Abdul Hamid II, had journeyed by camel to see the Pyramids and had also boarded a train for the first time; “One day,” they had concurred, “there will be railways in Ottoman lands too, God willing.” As his daughters looked at Africa in their atlas, their father recalled how fondly the Egyptian people had received the Ottoman sultans’ visit. Nineteen years ago, upon hearing the news that the British had invaded Egypt, the deposed sultan had wept with grief inside the palace where he was imprisoned.

Princess Pakize was the third daughter of the previous Ottoman sultan, Murad V. Three months after Murad V took the throne in the year 1876, some of the more influential pashas of the Sublime Porte had deposed him, claiming he was too volatile and maybe even mad, and had installed in his place his younger brother Abdul Hamid, the current sultan. Three months before Murad V was deposed, his uncle Sultan Abdülaziz—Princess Pakize’s great-uncle—had also been removed from the throne in a plot led by bureaucrat pashas, and a week later he had been assassinated, with his death made to look like a suicide. Considering this horrifying precedent, Princess Pakize felt it was only natural that her father Murad V should have had some difficulty controlling his nerves. It was in the wake of all these unexpected developments that Prince Abdul Hamid Effendi—who had been second in line to the throne, and was not as well known or liked as his older brother Murad—had suddenly become sultan, and gripped by the fear that he might end up deposed and imprisoned or killed like his uncle and older brother had been, he had imposed upon his brother and predecessor Murad V a lifetime of strict incarceration.

Princess Pakize had been born four years into the captivity of her father, Sultan Murad V, which would last for twenty-eight years, and for her entire life she had seen nothing but the palace to which she had been confined. (Her beloved older sister Hatice, on the other hand, was born in the Kurbağalıdere Mansion before their father took the throne, and after her father became the Sultan, she had sat on his and her uncle Prince Abdul Hamid’s laps in the Dolmabahçe Palace.) To prevent Murad V from taking back the throne or conspiring with opposition factions, Abdul Hamid had given him the same treatment he reserved for the Ottoman princes, isolating him and his family from the world outside the palace.

With the three sisters spending their lives confined to a minor palace, the question of whether they would be able to get married had long been a source of woe and concern for their father, the former sultan Murad V. Abdul Hamid declared that if his three nieces wished to be married, they must leave their father and come and live with him instead, in the Yıldız Palace; the nervous, cruel sultan did not want people to come and go from the little palace in which he kept his brother imprisoned even with the reasonable excuse of wedding preparations. Princess Pakize’s father was dismayed to hear of this stipulation from his younger brother, with whom they had got on so well as children. But even as he complained to his daughters of Abdul Hamid’s cruelty and spoke of separating a father from his daughters as the greatest sin of all, he also told them time and time again that getting married and having children was life’s foremost joy. So it was decided that the best thing to do would be for the princesses to leave their father’s side for a while, demonstrate their good faith and their improved relations with their uncle, and move into the Yıldız Palace to find grooms befitting their beauty and status.