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For a long time mother and son sat side by side on the couch saying nothing at all. The crows flew noisily on and off the trees in the garden. (They had done so ever since Major Kâmil was a child.) When he said again that he was serious about marriage, the Major’s mother explained that the girl she had been thinking of introducing him to was Zeynep, daughter of the prison guard who had died five days previously.

Satiye Hanım tended to describe any eligible young woman as “very pretty,” so at first the Major did not take too seriously his mother’s disquisitions on the merits of this latest among her finds. But every time he came home, his mother greeted him with a new story about Zeynep, and soon he began to feel his interest grow.

He would listen to his mother’s stories, then go back to reading and daydreaming over an old book he had returned to time and time again during his summers on the island, Mizancı Murat’s The French Revolution and Liberty, a volume that had been published in Turkish in Geneva and smuggled from there to Istanbul. He knew that to be caught with such a book in his possession could wreck his whole life, so he never left the island with it, nor did he ever share the ideas it contained with anybody else.

CHAPTER 13

As he sat aboard the Governor Pasha’s armored landau on its way through the city’s narrow streets toward the offices of the Mingherian Quarantine Authority, Doctor Nuri felt as if he were experiencing a perfectly ordinary day at the peripheries of the Empire, rather than the beginnings of an outbreak of plague. He heard birds chirruping over the low walls of the gardens that lined the downhill slope to the sea, caught the fragrance of bay leaves and aniseed in the air, and stared in amazement at the enormous shadows cast by trees so large he had never seen the like in any other Ottoman city.

Doctor Nuri had been working in the Ottoman Quarantine Authority for more than ten years. He had been dispatched to fight epidemics in countless provinces, towns, and small villages, often situated at several weeks’ traveling distance from one another. In these outer states of the Empire, it was the local Quarantine Authority’s responsibility to identify any outbreaks and alert Istanbul. But in practice this pressing and vital duty was likelier to be performed not by quarantine officers but by local Greek doctors, working in their own private practices but also receiving patients in small village hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. After all, the officers of the local quarantine establishments were employees of the imperial government and knew the heavy burden of responsibility that came with sending Istanbul any kind of infelicitous news, so they usually preferred not to rush matters.

But Doctor Nikos, who ran the Mingherian Quarantine Authority and reported to the Governor’s Office and the central quarantine office in Istanbul, possessed the sense of urgency and the determination others in his position lacked, and had been the first to warn of the outbreak on the island. Ignoring the Governor’s initial indifference, Doctor Nikos had also sent a series of insistent telegrams to Istanbul which had resulted in Bonkowski Pasha being posted to Mingheria. The Governor Pasha had found out about these telegrams and decided that the Quarantine Master—who happened to be a Cretian Greek, and was therefore, in the Governor’s view, not to be trusted—was secretly a Greek nationalist who had been purposely overstating the gravity of the island’s outbreaks of summer diarrhea as evidence of Ottoman incompetence.

When the elderly Doctor Nikos, with his goatee and slightly hunched back, came to greet him at the door of the landau, Doctor Nuri recognized him straightaway: “Perhaps you will recall we met nine years ago when all the soldiers in the garrison at Sinope got head lice,” he said, smiling. “You also attended to the cholera outbreak in Üsküdar seven years ago …”

The Quarantine Master returned the Doctor and Prince Consort’s greeting with an elaborate flourish. They went inside and sat for a time inside a white room with a domed ceiling. “Before coming here I worked as a doctor and served as head of quarantine operations in Thessaloniki and Crete. I was not born in Mingheria, and I do not speak Mingherian; try as I might, I have not been able to learn it. But I must say I am rather fond of this place,” said Doctor Nikos.

The Public Health Office of Mingheria was a small four-hundred-year-old Gothic stone building dating from the Venetian era. It had originally been built as an extension to the Venetian Doge’s palace. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during the early Ottoman era, it had also served as a rudimentary military hospital.

“How did you go about trying to learn Mingherian?”

“I couldn’t really do much, in truth … I was never able to find a teacher. The Department of Scrutinia will put anyone who shows an interest in this language under surveillance and considers such an interest to be a sign of nationalist tendencies … Mingherian is an ancient but still primitive language, and a difficult one too.”

There followed a spell of silence. Doctor Nuri was struck by the neatness and cleanliness of the files and cupboards around him. He remarked that it was the tidiest quarantine office he had ever seen.

In response the Quarantine Master took him to the historic mansion’s backyard to show him the little botanic garden that his predecessor, a doctor from Adrianople, had set up there to pass the time. Doctor Nikos smiled as he reminisced of those happy, carefree days before the disease when he and the groundskeeper would use a jug with a beak-shaped lip to water the garden’s potted dwarf palms, date palms, and tamarind trees, and its hyacinth, mimosa, and lily blossoms. Then he brought out some carefully arranged cardboard folders. With the rigor of a true Ottoman bureaucrat, and partly because there had not been much else to do, Doctor Nikos had spent the past two years sorting and classifying by subject matter all the letters and telegrams that had been sent from Mingheria to Istanbul. This evidence of meticulousness and perseverance impressed Doctor Nuri, who had seen the wretched and impecunious state of so many provincial public health departments across the Empire, and soon he found himself reading—as if he were casually skimming the verses of an epic romance—a series of reports detailing in French all the suspicious deaths that had occurred in Arkaz and in the other towns and villages of Mingheria over the past thirty years, any deaths whose nature and cause could not be determined, cases of epidemics among livestock, and the general state of public health in the province.

Quarantine laws had been introduced to the Ottoman Empire seventy years ago, during the first great epidemic of cholera that had devastated Istanbul in 1831. The empire’s Muslim population had resisted the new measures, particularly where they concerned the examination of female patients and the sanitization of corpses with lime before burial, and this had led to the spread of many unfounded rumors, as well as sparking altercations and unrest. In 1838, the westernizing sultan Mahmud II arranged for the Shaykh al-Islam (the Empire’s highest religious authority) to issue a fatwa declaring that quarantine was compatible with Islamic precepts, which was then published in the official state gazette, the Takvim-i Vakayi, along with an article describing the benefits of the precautions being taken against the disease, and the same sultan brought in doctors from Europe too. He also worked with the Western nations’ ambassadors in Istanbul to institute a special committee which would advise on the reforms he was implementing. This committee, based in Istanbul and composed primarily of bureaucrats and Christian doctors, became the Ottoman Empire’s first Quarantine Council, or in other words its first Ministry of Public Health. It oversaw the creation of local quarantine departments across every province of the Empire, particularly in its ports, and in the seventy years since, a whole quarantine bureaucracy had come into existence.

Doctor Nuri was experienced enough to recognize that the venerable Doctor Nikos was the kind of servant this bureaucracy could only be proud of. He went straight to the point: “Who do you think is behind the assassination?”

“Bonkowski Pasha was killed by someone who knew the story of Doctor Jean-Pierre,” the Quarantine Master replied guardedly. It was clear that he had thought about the matter and had prepared for this question. “Whoever did it, they wanted people to think, ‘He must have been murdered by those benighted Muslims who oppose quarantine.’”

Every doctor involved with the Ottoman Quarantine Authority, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, knew the woeful story of Doctor Jean-Pierre. The story, now half a century old, had become something of a cautionary tale warning Christian and Jewish quarantine officers and doctors of what not to do in a Muslim neighborhood during an epidemic. In 1842, following an outbreak of plague in Amasya, the young sultan Abdulmejid had sent to that small backwater town a famous doctor from Paris who could implement the modern quarantine methods that Abdulmejid’s father, Sultan Mahmud II, had brought in from Europe. Doctor Jean-Pierre was a youthful Frenchman who had avidly read his way through Voltaire and Diderot and was somewhat skeptical of religion. Undeterred by their snickers and taunting jibes, he would tell the Muslim clerks accompanying him that if men were to set their prejudices aside and rely on reason alone, they would soon discover that all humans were equal and governed by the same fundamental emotions and beliefs. He was disheartened to hear people shouting “We want a Muslim doctor!” when all the Governor and his municipal officers were trying to do was to implement quarantine measures. But he did not give up. He insisted on personally examining female patients too, preaching and pontificating as he did so that “There is no such thing as Christian or Muslim when it comes to science and medicine!”

By then Amasya’s Christian population and its wealthier citizens had already fled the city; shops and bakeries had shut down; and the starving, furious Muslims left behind refused to let the doctor into their homes or show him their ailing relatives. As the plague continued to spread, Doctor Jean-Pierre reluctantly began to call upon soldiers to knock people’s doors down by force, separate children from their mothers, post guards outside homes suspected of infection and isolate the families therein, carelessly pour lime over the bodies of the dead, and have anybody who did not adhere to the regulations immediately arrested. He ignored the Muslim population’s growing protests, noting only that he was acting under the orders and express authorization of Sultan Abdulmejid. In the end, as he was walking through an outer neighborhood of Amasya one rainy evening, he suddenly disappeared, as if he had “vanished off the face of the earth.”

All quarantine doctors knew that Doctor Jean-Pierre had been killed that night, but still they would give one another bitter, rueful smiles every time they told his story, as if there were still a chance that this idealistic quarantine expert might someday resurface.

“These days, no Christian quarantine doctor in Ottoman lands would dare visit patients in a Muslim neighborhood without a revolver in his belt,” said the Quarantine Master.

“Are there any Muslim doctors on the island?” asked the Doctor and Prince Consort.

“There used to be two. One of them returned to Istanbul two years ago when he became convinced that the Hamidiye Hospital would never be finished. Had they found him a wife here, he would have stayed. The other one, Ferit Bey, must be at the Hamidiye Hospital now.”

Like many of the well-intentioned, European-inspired institutions that the Ottoman Empire had set up over the past century to address any given issue, only to find that they seemed incapable of solving anything at all, the Quarantine Authority too had soon itself become part of the problem. Its individual branches in the Empire’s provinces were responsible for hiring the required clerks, guards, and janitors, but soon these state employees and even the local quarantine doctors would find that their salaries were not being paid in a timely fashion, and in turn the doctors would begin to bend the rules to make ends meet, seeing patients privately in pharmacies and apothecaries, and holding all kinds of other jobs too.

In the year 1901, there were 273 qualified civilian doctors in the Ottoman Empire, and most of these were of Greek Orthodox background. This meant that particularly in the predominantly Muslim provinces there never were enough doctors, and the few that were present were disinclined to battle with epidemics—the kind of task which called for unusual courage, self-sacrifice, and even a dose of heroism. As for experienced Muslim doctors who might be able to enter impoverished neighborhoods and convince pious Muslims suspicious of quarantine measures to let the bodies of their dead be disinfected and allow their wives and daughters to be examined, those were nearly impossible to find. Anyone who joined the Empire’s sixty-five-year-old quarantine establishment would quickly realize that their first and most important duty to the Sultan and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was not so much to stop outbreaks of cholera, as to stop the news of those outbreaks from spreading. It was precisely because of this geopolitical dimension that the Quarantine Authority had initially reported directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“There have been three major outbreaks of cholera in Mingheria!” said the Quarantine Master as if to change the subject: “One in 1838, one in 1867, and a smaller one in the summer of 1886. As our island has fallen increasingly farther from the most common trade routes, the last decade’s pandemics have largely passed us by, but this has also caused Istanbul to forget us. Despite all the letters we send, the Department of Public Health will not replenish our depleted supplies. Then one day they’ll send a telegram announcing the imminent arrival of ‘the bright young Muslim doctor so-and-so,’ and we will run gaily down to the docks to greet him, only to discover the passenger we were expecting is not going to step off the Messageries ferry after all; the doctor assigned to our island has either resigned and stayed in Istanbul or leaned on his contacts at the palace and his friends at the court to have his transfer revoked at the last minute.”

“You are right,” said Doctor Nuri. “But as you can see, the Sultan has finally sent your island its Muslim doctor, and here I am now, off the ship and at your service.”

“You may find this hard to believe, but we do not even have enough funds to buy milk of lime,” said Doctor Nikos. “I have to beg the Governor Pasha to intercede with the Commander of the military garrison for some of their supplies, or we keep our quarantine tax high and try to source the equipment and medication we need ourselves, from our own budget.”