第 19 页

“Bonkowski Pasha firmly believed in the importance of distancing, isolation, and quarantine procedures,” said Doctor Ilias. “It was not enough to just hunt down rats. But he also knew that in places where spraying disinfectant solution would no longer suffice, the best thing to do was to send the army in to vacate the area, and then to burn it to the ground. His Excellency the Sultan himself kept a close watch over what happened during the outbreaks of cholera in Üsküdar and Izmit seven years ago, where the disease was finally defeated when the most infected houses were emptied and burned down, and entire neighborhoods reduced to ashes.”

No one wanted to risk falling prey to an informant now that Abdul Hamid had been mentioned, and when a familiar silence took hold of the room, the meeting came to a close.

CHAPTER 17

The Central Post Office of the province of Mingheria had been inaugurated twenty years ago, when the Major was eleven, with a lavish and rather memorable opening ceremony. (A Greek schoolteacher had fallen into the sea and drowned during the celebrations.) Previously, the Telegraph Office had been housed inside the old State Hall, in a mysterious little room from which issued a constant clicking sound, while the old Post Office, which dealt mostly with parcels, had been situated in a run-down building by the customs office. Little Kâmil had never been to either.

But after the opening of the Central Post Office, he would constantly plead for his father to take him there, or at least to walk past it so they could look at the building’s extravagant entrance. Inside there were framed charts showing postage prices, franked envelopes in different colors, blank postcards, local and foreign stamp series, various noticeboards, and a map of the Ottoman Empire one could consult to determine which rate applied to one’s postage. Unfortunately the map was no longer quite up to date, and on one occasion this had caused a row between a post-office clerk wanting to charge an overseas rate, and a customer insisting on paying the domestic rate.

It had been thirty years since the Ottoman Ministry of Post had been combined with the Telegraph Department, and though the first centralized post offices had begun to be built under the rule of Sultan Abdülaziz (who was said to dislike Mingheria) at a time—the 1870s—when the Empire was much larger than its current size, the island’s turn did not come until after Abdul Hamid took the throne. It would not be an overstatement to say that Mingherians loved Abdul Hamid, under whose patronage there had also been a hospital, a police station, a bridge, and a military school built in their capital.

Even today, every time he spotted the Post Office and its grand entrance in the distance, and every time he climbed up the stairs to its front door, Major Kâmil would feel the same thrill he had experienced as a child. When the Major was still a boy, the most eventful moment of the week was when the sacks of new mail were unloaded off the ferry from Thessaloniki or Smyrna and brought up to the Post Office. Distinguished gentlemen waiting for their letters, shopkeepers expecting the boxes and parcels they’d ordered, servants, housemaids, farmhands, clerks, and municipal officers who’d been sent to “have a look and see if there’s any post” would all gather around the entrance. In theory, any letter that had come in the registered post was supposed to be delivered to its recipient by the Post Office’s letter carriers in accordance with the address indicated on the envelope, but in practice registered post was expensive and the process of individual delivery too time-consuming, and so people preferred to send their attendants to collect their mail from the Post Office instead. (In those days people would often improvise addresses, and some might add a little prayer underneath to make sure their letter reached its destination.)

The rest of the crowd usually consisted of children and curious bystanders. Some would watch raptly as sacks and parcels brought in through the back entrance were examined by customs officers and sent out to be delivered to their respective recipients. Some of the packages might still be making their leisurely way uphill from the port on the back of a horse cart, a gaggle of children running and skipping behind it. During the heyday of the marble trade, there used to be an Italian ferry called the Montebello which made stops in Trieste and at several islands on the way. The Major used to love this ship, which had its own special stamp series, a chart with color-coded postage rates, and a cart for the distribution of mail to distant villages all over the island.

Often the Post Office’s elderly Greek clerk would step onto the porch—where Abdul Hamid’s seal hung—to call out people’s names and hand them their letters and parcels, and once he’d repeated a few more times and in a louder voice the names on the envelopes he was left with, urged the assembled audience to “let those people know they’ve got mail and they should send someone over to pick it up,” and told those who’d been left empty-handed, “There’s nothing here for you today, come back on Thursday morning after the ferry from Thessaloniki arrives,” he would return inside the building.

Ever since the outbreak had grown, there had been an attendant stationed at the door to the Post Office to squirt Lysol over any visitors. The moment he stepped into the building that day, the Major was transfixed by the sight of the giant Theta wall clock hanging in its usual place.

As he listened to the echo of his footsteps in the cavernous hall, his eyes roamed over the counters where documents, letters, and parcels were being exchanged. Along the high tables where tall customers leaned their elbows, someone had placed bowls of vinegar that were now spreading a pleasant aroma throughout the hall. The Major had heard from the Doctor and Prince Consort that this was a precaution usually taken against the spread of cholera. It appeared to be the single most important provision in place here. (We should like to point out to our readers that as he reflected upon this matter, the Major happened to be standing in precisely the spot where Bonkowski Pasha himself had stood before he’d slipped out through the back door and disappeared.)

Like everyone else in the capital, Postmaster Dimitris Effendi knew that the Major had arrived on the Aziziye, and he was familiar with all the gossip concerning Murad V’s three newly married daughters. He was particularly careful as he weighed the heavy, sealed envelope, for he could tell from the writing upon it that it must contain a letter from a sultan’s daughter, from one Princess to another.

The Major had frequently posted letters to Istanbul from port cities across the Empire. To send an ordinary letter from one port to another, it was enough to stick a stamp worth twenty para on the envelope. The tiny, one-room post offices found in the train stations of more distant provinces (places like Athos, Veroia, Elassona) might not have twenty-para stamps available, in which case the attendant clerk would dutifully cut a stamp worth one kuruş down the middle and stick that onto the envelope instead. Having consulted the table of postage rates and made his calculations for Princess Pakize’s letter, Dimitris Effendi requested, in addition to the usual fee, one kuruş each in additional fees for registered mail and proof of delivery.

The Major sincerely believed that the epidemic would soon be under control, and that they would quickly be back on the Aziziye and on their way to China. He later shared these thoughts with Princess Pakize in explaining to her why he had decided against paying the additional proof of delivery fee. The Major’s admission shall prove to anyone who will have the pleasure of reading the Princess’s letters that, in that moment, the young officer had not even an inkling of the decisive role that history would soon thrust upon him.

Major Kâmil took a brush from inside a bowl of glue, holding it near the bristles, and used it to affix the one kuruş stamps—each decorated with the seal of Abdul Hamid, exquisite blue engravings and a star and crescent—onto the envelope. Once Dimitris Effendi had stamped the Mingherian postmark twice onto the envelope, the Major turned away and looked at the clock hanging on the wall.

The Major silently conceded, as he walked toward the enormous Theta wall clock, that it had always been the object that had most drawn him to the Post Office, and that when he was far away in some distant city and reminiscing about Mingheria, it was always the first thing he thought of. Even he was not entirely sure why. The first time his father had brought the Major here twenty years ago, he had respectfully shown his son the seal of Abdul Hamid hanging near the entrance and then taken him to examine the Theta clock, pointing out with similar feelings of gratitude and reverence that it too had been a gift from the Sultan, and showing Kâmil how it was marked with both Arabic and European numerals, just like Ottoman postage stamps were. That day his father had explained to him that unlike Muslims, Europeans did not refer to the hours of dawn and sunset as “twelve,” but that instead their clocks pointed to the number twelve at noon, when the sun was at its highest in the sky. This was a fact little Kâmil already knew from hearing church bells ring, but he did not know that he knew it, and perhaps this was why it brought out in him what we might describe as a kind of “metaphysical apprehension.” Could two different clocks both mark the same moment in time but use different numbers? If the Sultan, who’d had clock towers built in every provincial capital of the Ottoman Empire since taking the throne, wanted all of his clocks to show the same time no matter where they were, then why did they bear both Arabic and Western numerals?

These feelings of metaphysical disquiet he had experienced as a child returned now while he distractedly leafed—as he did every summer—through the frayed, loosened pages of the old volume on the French Revolution and liberty. On his way from the Post Office to the State Hall, where he was due to join the meeting of the Quarantine Committee, Major Kâmil passed the clock tower that had been built to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sultan’s reign but had not yet been completed, and wandered through the streets around it as if he had lost his way, unconscious of where he was going, and mesmerized by his surroundings.

CHAPTER 18

The inaugural meeting of the Mingherian Quarantine Committee, attended by its president and nineteen other members, began at two o’clock on the first day of May. As there had not been any serious epidemics on the island for twenty-five years, this was the first time that this committee, which had hitherto existed only on paper, had convened for a formal meeting. Bushy-bearded Constantinos Laneras, head of the Greek Orthodox congregation and bishop of Hagia Triada, and the permanently breathless Stavrakis Effendi, bishop of Hagia Yorgos, were both present, wearing their lushest cassocks and miters and bedecked with their ceremonial stoles and enormous crucifix pendants.

All of the delegates except Doctor Ilias and Doctor Nuri already knew and recognized one another from their involvement in the life of the island. Whenever disputes arose between different communities over the marriage of one of their girls, the Governor would summon their representatives to this same room, listen to everyone’s side of the story, deliver a few rebukes, and resolve the matter amicably without having to put anyone in jail. Or if he felt it was essential for the whole island to contribute to the expense of sourcing timber for new telegraph lines to the villages in the interior, he would gather them around the meeting room’s ancient wooden table and treat them to a poignant panegyric on the subject of loyalty toward the Sultan.

The leaders of every religious community, the pharmacists, the consuls, the army men from the garrison, the Governor Pasha, and every other delegate present that day believed that the disease had spread widely through the Muslim neighborhoods on the hills that rose to the west of the port and spoke openly of their conviction that in order to stop it spreading even faster, the neighborhoods of Germe, Çite, and Kadirler would have to be cordoned. Death rates in these neighborhoods had reached around five or six a day by now, yet people who were potentially infected were still being allowed to roam freely around the city.

Another topic that the delegates softly confabulating before the start of the meeting generally agreed upon was that Bonkowski Pasha had fallen victim to a political murder. This was certainly what was being implied in most of their exchanges, though nobody was openly pointing the finger at any particular group. The exception was the French consul Monsieur Andon, who had shared with the other consuls, the clerks, and the religious leaders waiting for the meeting to begin his view that the killing must have been the work of crazed fanatics hostile to science, medicine, and the West. The Governor Pasha, the outspoken French consul had added, must act fast to apprehend the planners and perpetrators of this murder, and any delay in doing so could only be interpreted as a direct challenge to the nations of Europe.

The Ottoman Ministry of Public Health in Istanbul had already sent a telegram overnight to the Quarantine Committee of the province of Mingheria with an itemized summary of the measures they were supposed to introduce. Istanbul itself received these ever-changing lists (to which new measures were added every day) by telegram directly from the International Quarantine Agency. The Mingherian Quarantine Committee’s task was to discuss how to adapt these directives to the island’s specific circumstances and then to formally announce and implement them.

It was agreed that all schools would be closed. This measure was not even put up for debate. Most parents had already stopped sending their kids to school anyway. The only children left roaming the playgrounds and schoolyards now were the delinquent offspring of indifferent and unhappy families. As far as government offices were concerned, it was left to the heads of each individual department to decide whether they should operate as normal or cut back. It was further decided that, starting first thing in the morning two days after the date of this quarantine meeting, all vessels arriving from Alexandria, the northern shores of Africa, the Suez Canal, nearby islands, and the East would be subject to quarantine. These ships would be considered “fully contaminated,” and all their passengers would be quarantined for five days before being allowed to enter Mingheria. It was also agreed that any ships departing the island would be quarantined for five days too.

The process of drawing up and voting on the list of substances that were to be banned from the island and its shops took a long time. “We are pulling out all the stops with these bans, Your Excellency,” said the normally taciturn German consul Frangouli, “as if we believed that the more things we ban, the sooner the epidemic will end.”