第 12 页

“Very well, then I shall not say it again!” said Princess Pakize. “But you can tell me all your darkest and most terrible cholera stories.”

“I worry that if I do, you will be afraid of me, and not love me anymore.”

“On the contrary! I love you all the more for how you have toiled in the bleakest corners of the Empire. Now tell me your most dreadful story.”

They walked out onto the deck together, and that was where Doctor Nuri told his aristocratic wife about the ramshackle toilets that would be constructed around the bulwarks of pilgrim ships sailing across the Arabian Sea. The few toilets that were available on these cataclysmically overcrowded vessels were either all broken to begin with or became blocked after a day’s sailing due to misuse and excessive demand. Crafty European ship captains would attend to the problem by building latrines out of rickety gangways suspended over the sea, hanging from ropes down either side of the main deck. Long queues for these toilets would form on every ship sailing from India to the Hejaz, and sometimes fights would break out. On stormy nights, pilgrims doing their business on these suspended latrines would fall off and plunge straight into the Arabian Sea, there to be feasted upon by ferocious sharks. The more prudent and experienced pilgrims among those traveling in the hold would relieve themselves in buckets and chamber pots they had brought for the journey, then empty their filth out of a porthole and into the ocean. But when the sea was choppy and the windows couldn’t be opened, these buckets and chamber pots would rock slowly back and forth until they spilled over. After he’d described how the stink of excrement from these pots would mix with the stench of the corpses of pilgrims who had silently perished of cholera in the darkness of the hold, Doctor Nuri fell into a long silence.

“Please continue your story!” said Princess Pakize after much time had passed.

They returned to their cabin, and Doctor Nuri began to tell his wife about the hajjis from North Africa, a subject he suspected would prove less distressing to her. Seen off with elaborate ceremonies and prayers as they set sail from ports such as Alexandria and Tripoli, these pilgrims would arrive in the holy lands via the Suez Canal and travel in greater comfort and tranquility. But Doctor Nuri had also seen how pleasure-seeking and a flippant approach to regulations could cause diseases to spread even in these pilgrim ships sailing toward the Hejaz from the north. On these relatively wealthy ships that came from west of the holy land, Doctor Nuri had watched Arab pilgrims and their coterie of attendants lay out meals of olives, cheese, and pita bread on deck, with the occasional bon vivant going so far as to have his servants set up a barbecue in a corner of the crowded deck and cook him kebabs. One time, in Alexandria, he had watched as a British quarantine officer who was inspecting a ship had ordered his soldiers to throw one such barbecue grill and other paraphernalia into the sea, and he described to his wife the riot that had ensued.

“Now tell me, my lady, who is to blame in this situation, and who has behaved inappropriately?”

“One should certainly not be consuming food and drink aboard a quarantined ship!” said Princess Pakize, who had immediately grasped where the question was leading.

“That is so, but the British officer has no right to throw anybody’s possessions overboard either!” said Doctor Nuri, speaking as deliberately as a schoolteacher. “A quarantine officer cannot just introduce restrictions and rely on the threat of military force to implement them; he must also seek to persuade people to adhere to those restrictions of their own volition. The pilgrim whose barbecue is thrown into the sea shall come to view that harsh and discourteous Englishman as the enemy. He will flout the officer’s rules on principle until slowly but surely quarantine will fail. In Bombay there have been riots caused by British officers’ draconian and degrading methods. Rocks have been thrown at vehicles transporting the sick, and doctors have been attacked. British government officials have been killed on the streets. Now the British have even stopped saying that cholera spreads via the Ganges, lest the claim should encourage even more rebellion.”

“If things are that bad over there, then once we have left Mingheria we should not stop in Bombay, but go straight to China,” said Princess Pakize.

CHAPTER 10

They fell asleep in each other’s arms. Toward morning, as the steady sound of the pistons pumping inside the steamship grew softer, they went out on deck together. As the first light of day rose to the right of the ship, the black shadow of Mingheria materialized upon the blue horizon. A gentle breeze picked up and made their eyes water. The island’s tall dark silhouette was becoming clearer now.

The sun was rising, bringing a soft pink glow onto the row of precipitous cliffs and sharp, rugged mountains that began with the White Mountain and followed the eastern shore of the island, while the slopes that faced toward the west looked as if they had been painted a dark purple, in parts an almost crepuscular hue. As the Aziziye moved closer to the island, this view—the very same view which all those painters who had visited the island since the 1840s had so enthusiastically depicted, and which had been so poetically described in many a travel journal—acquired an increasingly otherworldly quality.

When the Arab Lighthouse became visible to the naked eye, the captain veered toward the port, and the view which has variously been described as “worthy of a fairy tale” and “mythical, maybe even eerie” became more clearly defined.

Now the sight of the magnificent Castle with its quaint spired towers, and the buildings and bridges behind it, all built out of the same pale pink-and-white Mingherian stone, generated an even-more-intense and more beguiling effect upon the beholder. They saw the vegetation growing over the island’s rugged cliffs, and the colors of the city’s red roof tiles and white walls, and felt the presence of an unearthly light hanging over it all.

Major Kâmil, the Princess’s bodyguard, had also climbed on deck and was watching the view with them.

“I must say, sir, that I am quite excited, for I am Arkazian born and bred!” he said all of a sudden.

“What a wonderful coincidence!” said Doctor Nuri.

“Perhaps it is not a coincidence,” said the Major, taking care to address the Doctor and Prince Consort only, in case the Prince Consort should be displeased to see another man speaking directly to his wife. “Perhaps our most compassionate sultan knows that I am a Mingherian, and maybe that is why he included me in the delegation in the first place.”

“Our sultan’s interests are manifold, and he never forgets what he discovers!” said Doctor Nuri.

“What do you like best about the island?” asked Princess Pakize.

“I like everything about it,” said the Major diplomatically. “My lady, the best thing about Mingheria is that it is exactly as I know it and exactly as I would want it!”

They sailed south of a rocky islet housing a graceful white Venetian-era building, which was known among locals as the Maiden’s Tower and had been used in the past as a quarantine zone. By now they could distinguish the hills and rooftops and pink walls of Arkaz, Mingheria’s biggest and best-known city, and even see splashes of color, the green of the island’s palm trees, the blue shutters of people’s homes. The three domes that signaled the city’s Venetian, Byzantine, and Ottoman history were also gradually coming into view, all aligned on the same plane: those of the Catholic Saint Anthony’s and Orthodox Hagia Triada Churches on the eastern side of the island, and that of the New Mosque—the island’s largest mosque, situated on the first hill on the island’s relatively flatter western end. As our travelers approached the island, their eyes were trained on the sinuous contours of these three domes, whose silhouettes had, in recent years, frequently been portrayed by European painters. But after the White Mountain, it was the Crusaders’ colossal Castle that dominated the city and its landscape. Looming across the path of any ship that happened to sail by this corner of the Levant, the pink-hued Castle reminded those who looked upon it that there had been people living and working on this island, waging war and slaughtering one another, since time immemorial, a time even older than fairy tales.

They were close enough now that they could pick out smaller structures, people’s homes, individual trees, and feel life coursing through the charming streets and squares of Arkaz. They could see distinctly the colonnaded balcony of the Governor’s Residence and State Hall, the new Post Office just down the road, the Greek High School, and the walls of the new clock tower still under construction. The captain turned the engines down, and in the ensuing hush, the passengers of the Aziziye recognized that the brightness of the sun, the green of the palm and fig trees, and the blue of the sea were of a different texture here. As she breathed in the scent of orange blossoms, Princess Pakize did not feel that they were sailing toward a city on the verge of a plague epidemic and an outbreak of bloody political strife, but rather that they were heading toward a small seaside town that had been drowsing uneventfully under the sun for hundreds of years.

There did not seem to be much activity in town in the early morning light. The mansions and houses made of pale pink stone that lined the wooded hills rising straight up from the shore had all their windows and shutters still closed. There were no vessels of note in the dock apart from two freighters, one French and the other Italian, and a handful of small sailboats. Doctor Nuri saw no quarantine flags on any of the ships, nor any traces onshore of precautions being taken to stop the disease from spreading. But on the western side of the port, to the left of the Aziziye as it approached the island, he did notice—and privately identified as potential epicenters of the outbreak—various abandoned and dilapidated jetties, ruined buildings, old and new customhouses, and dormitories and decaying houses where the poorer population lived.

Standing beside him on deck and looking at the turquoise waters around them, his wife was staring into the sea as if she were surveying her own memories—entranced by the rocks on the seabed, the darting, spiky, fist-sized fish, and the delicate green and dark blue flowerlike seaweed. The flat mirror of the sea returned a gleaming reflection of the city’s mostly pink-and-white and occasionally orange-brown houses, its trees in their many shades of green, the Castle’s spired towers, and the pewter domes of churches and mosques. The Doctor and Prince Consort and Princess Pakize could hear the ripple of the Aziziye’s sharp bow carving its way through the water. Then there was an interval of silence so perfect that all the way from the deck they could hear the sound of cocks crowing in the city, dogs barking at nothing, and even the braying of a donkey.

The captain tooted the ship’s horn twice. Accustomed as they were to receiving one ferry a week from Istanbul and two via Smyrna, Alexandria, and Thessaloniki, the Mingherians of Arkaz were surprised and intrigued to hear the whistle of an unscheduled ferry. As always the sound of the horn echoed between the capital’s two hills. The Major sensed a quickening on the streets where he had spent his childhood. A horse cart was trundling past the row of hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, nightclubs, and coffeehouses that lined the Pier Road, while farther up on Hamidiye Avenue, the street where the Post Office and the State Hall were located, an Ottoman flag billowed behind a row of trees. These two roads running parallel to the seafront were connected by the very short and steep Istanbul Street, currently peopled by the odd pedestrian. The Major was glad to see he could pick out their hats and fezzes already, even if from a distance. The signs for the Ottoman Bank and for Thomas Cook which he had seen on his last trip to the island were still there. Now the words splendid palace had also been spelled out in giant letters on the roof of the eponymous hotel. From the port he could not see his family home where he had spent his entire childhood, but he could make out the stumpy minaret of the little mosque of Saim Pasha the Pious at the top of the sloping road that led to the market.

The port of Arkaz was a natural harbor shaped like a near-perfect crescent. The colossal Castle the Crusaders had built on the imposing promontory at the southeastern tip of the crescent had once been a town and barracks in its own right, like the castles of Malta and Bodrum. But despite the size of the Castle and the availability of a natural port, it had proven impossible to construct a dock that could accommodate the modern era’s new and larger ships. The improvised jetties that had been erected thirty years before at the peak of the trade in Mingherian marble, and which had allowed the stone to be loaded onto merchant vessels that left daily for Smyrna, Marseille, and Hamburg, were not equipped to deal with the size of modern passenger liners. In any case passenger steamboats, which were growing increasingly larger in those years, had been banned from entering the port altogether seven years ago, after a small Russian vessel that had been trying to moor in one of these old jetties had ended up crashing into the rocks.

Thus, like all passenger ships that came to Arkaz, the Aziziye noisily dropped anchor in the waters off the port and began to wait. When he was a child, this would have been the Major’s favorite moment. Every new steamship—every “ferry,” in other words—that came to the island would bring with it new post, new travelers, new stories, new stock for the shops, and a sense of anticipation. As soon as an incoming ship had anchored, a bevy of boatmen and porters, each operating under the instructions of a specific foreman, would set off immediately to retrieve its passengers and their luggage and ferry them to shore. Every foreman had his own team of porters and oarsmen who were constantly competing to bring as many passengers and as much luggage ashore—and earn as many tips—as possible.

As soon as they heard the whistle of a passenger liner, Kâmil son of Mahmut, his classmates from the Army Middle School, and many other children and adults would rush to the docks to watch the ensuing commotion. The kids knew about the competition among the boat crews and would run bets among one another on which rowboat would reach the big ship first, with almond biscuits or the island’s famous walnut-and-rose biscuits from Zofiri’s shop for prizes. Sometimes the waves of the sea would swell to towering proportions and the little boats would disappear among them, only to resurface, to everyone’s relief, on the crest of the next wave and continue on their way to the passenger ship. Back on the shore, the relatives and families of the arriving passengers, their servants and porters, and anyone else milling about would mix in a great crowd with all the people who were waiting to board the same ship and leave the island. Upon disembarking, the new arrivals would immediately be hounded by hotel clerks, tour guides, porters, and swindlers, their luggage would be picked up without their permission, and swarms of coachmen, pickpockets, and beggars would descend upon them in search of opportunity, so that, by order of Governor Sami Pasha himself, gendarmes were now also deployed to the docks whenever a passenger ship was due. But even they had been unable to instill any kind of order to proceedings, and the scuffles and havoc on the docks continued.