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“Perhaps a little, Your Excellency … It is all a matter of degrees, of course.”

“But they knowingly and deliberately favor the Christians. Is it not significant that the Sultan took no notice of any reports against my conduct and kept me as governor here when so many other governors are continually being transferred between provinces? The Sultan must have deemed my refusal to bow to the consuls’ pressure to be entirely appropriate, in the circumstances. The murder of the chemist pasha is manifestly a response to this, and to the unfortunate event known as the Pilgrim Ship Affair.

“It is my belief that Sheikh Hamdullah’s stepbrother Ramiz and his henchman Memo the Albanian, whom he uses to raid the island’s Greek villages, are behind this murder. These people will do anything to paint Christian doctors as the enemy and provoke conflict between Christians and Muslims. Nor does it ever occur to them that such conflict might make the situation for Muslims on this island worse. We will find out soon enough whose idea this murder was, whom they employed to do it, and quite what was going through their witless heads. Mazhar Effendi will have them all talking in no time, down there in the dungeons, and I am sure he will get them to incriminate others too.”

“It seems you have already made your mind up on who the culprits are, Your Excellency!”

“His Serene Highness expects immediate results. It is his belief that if we do not promptly punish the planners and perpetrators of this heinous act, the state will be made to look impotent, and our quarantine measures will fail.”

“It is imperative that those who are apprehended and charged should actually be guilty of having committed the murder, or at any rate planned it!”

“I can deduce through logic alone that the Greek nationalists could have had nothing to do with this murder!” said the Governor. “They would not wish to see the island’s Greek population die of the plague, which means they would have wanted Bonkowski Pasha to succeed in his efforts to contain the epidemic, and it would never have crossed their minds to kill him. You are a brilliant young doctor who has won the confidence of the Sultan. I shall speak plainly, for the good of our country: first His Highness the Sultan sent a Christian chemist. Now he has been murdered. This is a stain upon my conscience. Now they have sent a Muslim doctor. I shall be taking especial care over your safety and introduce all necessary precautions. But you must heed what I say.”

“You have my ear, Your Excellency.”

“It is not just the consuls we must be wary of! Should any journalist, Greek or Muslim, find some excuse to approach you—at the funeral tomorrow, say—you must categorically refuse to give any interviews. Every Greek newspaper here, without exception, takes its orders from the Greek consul anyway. Greece’s ultimate objective is to call upon foreign powers at the first sign of unrest and with their help take this island as their own or at least tear it away from Ottoman rule, just as they did with Crete. They will print fabrications too. If I should say ‘They are peddling lies and publishing libel’ and dare to demand an explanation, their consuls will run to the Telegraph Office and send off a complaint to their ambassadors in Istanbul, who will in turn relay these complaints to the Sublime Porte and to the palace. The Sublime Porte and the palace will hold them off for a little while, then send me an encrypted message along the lines of ‘Set the Greek journalist free.’ So even if I do close a newspaper down, it is never too long before it starts publishing again, perhaps under a different guise, but with the same staff and using the same printing press, and nothing for me to do but look the other way.

“You should know that we are not so strict here as in Thessaloniki or Smyrna or Istanbul. I am on friendly terms with these journalists, and if we run into each other on the street after they are released, I might jokingly wish them a ‘speedy recovery.’ Of course we have spies in all of the newspapers, including the ones that publish in Turkish. Nevertheless, if the subject should arise and you should hear some consul or other claim that Orthodox Christians are in the majority here, do please demur! The Christian and Muslim populations on our island are nearly equal in size. Indeed, it is for this very reason that your wife’s late grandfather Sultan Abdulmejid decreed, shortly after the Tanzimat Edict was issued, that our island of Mingheria should go from being merely a humble district of the province of the Archipelago to a separate province of its own. While the Muslim population on every other island is outnumbered ten to one, here the numbers are almost equal. The reason for this is that our forefathers would often load the Empire’s rebellious tribes and insubordinate sectarians onto ships and send them here, banishing them to the valleys and the mountains in the north. This practice of forced settlement, which persisted for over two centuries, and was frequently and periodically revived with new communities, has made its mark on our island. But with the British and the French demanding an end to this Ottoman policy of forced resettlement, Sultan Abdulmejid surprised them all in 1852 with a decree that suddenly changed the island’s status. The island’s population is pleased, of course, that their little outpost is now officially a province. There are slightly more Orthodox Christians than there are Muslims, but this is immaterial, for the Orthodox and Catholic communities here are native to Mingheria and spoke Mingherian until the Byzantine conquest. Many still do. It is our island’s good fortune that most of its people speak Mingherian at home and out on the streets, and that they are—in the words of the archaeologist Selim Sahir Bey who once came here to extract statues from a cave—direct descendants of the ancient tribe of Mingherians who broke away thousands of years ago from their original homelands north of the modern-day Aral Sea and came to settle here. I am convinced that the instinct to turn to Greece is weak among this Orthodox community, which speaks a different language anyway. I am more concerned about those families who have clung to their Greek and Balkan identities since the Byzantine era and speak Greek at home, as well as this new generation of modern Greeks who have recently come to the island from Athens. These two groups are aligned in their views now. There are also gangs of agitators from Crete and even Greece itself who have been emboldened over the past few months by their success in Crete. They have infiltrated the Greek villages in the north of the island and have been stirring trouble there, demanding that taxes be paid to them rather than to the Sultan’s tax collectors. I shall point them out to you all one by one at the funeral tomorrow.”

“Your Excellency, is it true that you have sent Bonkowski Pasha’s equally esteemed assistant, Doctor Ilias, to the dungeons too?”

“We have arrested both Doctor Ilias and Pharmacist Nikiforos Bey!” said the Governor. “I am thoroughly convinced of their innocence. But Bonkowski Pasha had a long conversation with the pharmacist the day before his death. That alone is reason enough to arrest him.”

“If you alienate the Greeks, we will have trouble even just announcing the quarantine.”

“Doctor Ilias was with other witnesses when Bonkowski Pasha disappeared from the Post Office. He cannot be guilty. Yet he has had such a fright that if I were to release him now he would flee to Istanbul immediately. But he is a key witness. If they could get their hands on him, they would kill him too to stop him from testifying. Already they have been threatening him to try to stop him from talking.”

“And who is doing that?”

The Governor Pasha exchanged a meaningful look with the Chief Scrutineer. Then he told the Doctor and Prince Consort that because the consuls had been dragging their feet, the Quarantine Committee would not be able to meet until the next day. “Of course Ottoman citizens cannot act as consuls for other nations, so really they are all vice-consuls—though they don’t like it when I call them that. In truth they are a meddlesome, impertinent gaggle of ignorant shopkeepers who are making a fuss of this outbreak nonsense purely to spite me.”

The unfinished and still mostly unfurnished Hamidiye Hospital, whose completion had been planned to coincide with last year’s celebrations for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sultan’s accession to the throne, had now been declared open by order of the Governor. He also noted in passing, as if it were a matter of little import, that Pharmacist Nikiforos and Doctor Ilias would be released in the morning. The Doctor and Prince Consort would then be able to take Doctor Ilias with him on patient visits if he wished.

CHAPTER 12

Princess Pakize was among the first to resign herself to the fact that the epidemic might make it dangerous to go outside. Since she never left the State Hall anyway, the Princess asked her bodyguard, Major Kâmil, to make sure he was always by her husband’s side. As we account for the Major’s ascent to the Hegelian “stage of history” on the island of Mingheria, we will sometimes repeat and sometimes correct his story as it is told in Mingherian schoolbooks.

The Major was born in 1870, and his rank was sadly lower than what his age would have warranted. He had attended the city’s military middle school, whose pale pink roof tiles could be seen from the port. Having graduated third in his class of fifty-four, he had been admitted to the military academy in Smyrna. One summer he had come home to discover that his father had died. (As always the first thing he did when he arrived on the island now was to pay a visit to his father’s grave.) On another visit two years later, he had discovered that his mother had married again, and he had found her new husband, the fat and shallow Hazım Bey, so irksome that he had spent the next two summers in Istanbul and not returned until Hazım Bey’s death, whereupon his mother had made him swear that he would henceforth come back home every year. Until the war with Greece, for which he had received a medal four years ago, he had not done anything in particular to distinguish himself in the army. His mother had been expecting him at the start of summer as usual, so when she saw him suddenly walk across the garden and in through the kitchen door, she was startled at first, then noticed the medal on his chest and started crying.

When he was not at the State Hall or accompanying the Doctor and Prince Consort, Major Kâmil spent most of his time at home with his mother or roaming the streets of his childhood. On his first day back in the city, his mother filled him in on the past year’s gossip and updated him on who was to be married off to whom, and why. As she told him these stories, every now and then she would ask her son whether he had made his mind up to get married too.

“I have made my mind up,” the Major admitted eventually. “The question is, are there any suitable girls?”

“There is one!” she replied. “But of course she will need to meet you and see whether she likes you too.”

“Of course! Who is she?”

“Oh darling, how lonely you must be!” said Satiye Hanım, sensing his eagerness from his questions and kissing his cheek as she sat down next to him.

Had someone asked the Major for his views on arranged marriage ten years ago, he would have declared himself firmly against the idea. Like many of his officer friends, he had graduated from the Harbiye academy an idealist and was opposed to women covering their heads and faces excessively (in the Arab way). He was repulsed by landowning hajjis with four wives and rich old men who took young women for brides. In common with many young army officers, he felt that the explanation for how rapidly the Ottoman Empire was falling behind the West after centuries of military dominance was to be found in its harmful and regressive traditions. This relatively European way of thinking was no doubt influenced by his Mingherian, Mediterranean background, and by his familiarity with Orthodox Christian culture. At the Harbiye academy the Major had also seen the declarations that revolutionary student groups had issued against the Sultan. He had read in one night the famous biography of Napoleon everyone else was reading, and he had understood—and at times sincerely agreed with—what the heroes of the French Revolution had meant when they had called for Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

But after so many drunken, solitary nights spent in whichever backwater town his latest posting was, full of despair and blazing with a helpless, agonizing longing to make love, he had set some of these lofty ideals aside. Like many other officers, he too had not yet turned twenty-five before he’d started to take notice when people told him, “There is a widow who would be just right for you, very respectable.”

It had been on the back of one such suggestion that, at the age of twenty-three, he had married without his mother’s knowledge an Arab widow in Mosul who spoke broken Turkish and was twelve years older than him. This was one of those marriages army officers and civil servants sometimes entered into knowing that all they had to do when they left the city was to say “I divorce you” thrice, and they could forget the arrangement had ever existed. The older, experienced woman the Major had married knew this too. Consequently he had not felt too guilty divorcing her when the news came that he was to be transferred to Istanbul, though in the years that followed, he had found himself pining for Aysha’s big eyes, her tender, inquisitive gaze, and the pleasure of holding her lithe and vigorous form in his arms.

In those years, any lonely, unmarried civil servant or army officer transferred to a provincial town or sent to join a new garrison would make sure to learn where the available women lived, avoid potential sources of syphilis and gonorrhea, and quickly befriend the local doctors. Army officers, local government officials, and civil servants who had been posted to the provinces and whose only wish was to return to Istanbul as swiftly as possible could always immediately identify one another. The Ottoman bureaucracy was like an autonomous nation of itinerant clerks, and marriage was one remedy for that universe of solitude. Discussions of marriage aside, the Major’s sense of loneliness was also sharpened with every demoralizing instance of wrongdoing, negligence, and depravity he witnessed (and there were many) across the far-flung possessions of the Ottoman Empire. His job and that of his peers was to man the ship of state, but the ship was sinking, and it was almost impossible to stop it from doing so. Of the Empire’s countless subjects, people like the Major were destined to suffer the most when the vessel finally succumbed to the waves. So it was that many government and army officers couldn’t even imagine the end of the Ottoman Empire, just as they couldn’t bring themselves to look at the map of its former territories.

One solution was for soldiers to cultivate some source of private joy, but the Major had met very few army officers who had managed to find happiness in marriage while having to dash east to west, continent to continent, and war to war. Yet he frequently found himself yearning for someone he could share his life with (even if they weren’t happy together) and make love to, and with whom he could talk openly and companionably about anything at all, just as his mother and father used to do.