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Chemist and pharmacist Bonkowski Pasha had often represented the Ottoman Empire at international quarantine conventions, and had written Sultan Abdul Hamid a treatise four years ago on the precautions that the Ottoman Empire should take against the plague pandemic that had begun in the East. He had also been specially appointed to combat the outbreak of plague in the Greek neighborhoods of Smyrna. After several cholera epidemics over the years, the new plague microbe from the East—whose infectivity (what medical experts termed “virulence”) had waxed and waned in time—had, alas, finally entered the Ottoman Empire too.

Bonkowski Pasha had taken six weeks to halt the outbreak of plague in Smyrna, the largest Ottoman port in the Levant. The local population had obeyed orders to stay indoors, respected sanitary cordons, and acquiesced to the various restrictions that had been introduced. They had also joined forces with the municipal authorities and the police to hunt down rats. Disinfection crews—composed mostly of firemen—had been deployed, the whole city soon reeking of the solution that issued from their spray pumps. The success of the Ottoman Quarantine Authority in Smyrna had been reported not just in the columns of local newspapers like the Harmony and the Amalthea, and in Istanbul dailies like the Voice of Truth and the Endeavor, but also in various French and British newspapers that had already been tracking this plague from the East from port to port; and so to the average European too, Bonkowski Pasha, born in Istanbul of Polish parentage, was an esteemed and well-known figure. The plague in Smyrna had been successfully curbed after just seventeen deaths; the port, the docks, the customhouses, the shops, and the markets had opened again, and in all the schools, classes had resumed once more.

The distinguished passengers of the Aziziye who watched through their cabin portholes and from the deck as the chemist pasha and his assistant boarded the ship were aware of this recent triumph in quarantine and public health policy. Five years ago, the former Royal Chemist had been conferred the honorific title of Pasha by Abdul Hamid himself. Today Stanislaw Bonkowski was wearing a raincoat whose color could not be discerned in the dark, and a jacket which accentuated his long neck and the light stoop of his shoulders, and he was carrying his ever-present gunpowder-gray briefcase that even his students from thirty years ago would have instantly recognized. His assistant, Doctor Ilias, was hauling the portable laboratory which enabled the chemist pasha to isolate cholera or plague bacteria and tell contaminated and potable water apart, which was also an excuse for him to taste and test every source of water in the Empire. Once on board, Bonkowski and his assistant immediately retired to their cabins without greeting any of the Aziziye’s curious passengers.

The two new passengers’ silence and guardedness only heightened the Guidance Committee delegates’ curiosity. What could be the purpose of all this secrecy? Why would the Sultan send the Ottoman Empire’s two foremost plague and epidemic disease experts (the second being Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Effendi) to China on the same ship? When it became apparent that Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant were not bound for China at all, but were due to disembark on the island of Mingheria on the way to Alexandria, the committee delegates were able to turn their attention back to the task at hand. Ahead of them now were three weeks in which to debate how best to explain Islam to the Muslims of China.

Prince Consort Doctor Nuri—the other quarantine expert on the Aziziye—found out from his wife that Bonkowski Pasha had boarded the ship in Smyrna and was due to disembark on Mingheria. The newlyweds were pleased to discover they had both met the amiable chemist pasha before. The Doctor and Prince Consort had recently attended the International Sanitary Conference in Venice with the Royal Chemist, who was more than twenty years his senior. Bonkowski Pasha had also been his chemistry professor when young Nuri was still a student at the Imperial School of Medicine, attending classes at the Demirkapı Garrison in Sirkeci. Like many of his fellow medical students, young Nuri had been captivated by the applied chemistry classes that Paris-trained Bonkowski Bey had taught in his laboratory, and by his lectures on organic and inorganic chemistry. The students had been enthralled by the professor’s jokes, by his wide-ranging Renaissance man’s curiosity, and by his easy command of the Turkish vernacular and of three other European languages which he spoke as fluently as his mother tongue. Stanislaw Bonkowski was the Istanbul-born son of one of the many Polish army officers who had gone into exile following defeat in their nation’s war against Russia and ended up joining the Ottoman army.

The Doctor and Prince Consort’s wife, Princess Pakize, gaily recounted her memories of Bonkowski from her childhood and youth. One summer eleven years ago, when her mother and the other women of the harem in the palace where she and her family were kept confined had been infected with a disease which had left them in the throes of a terrible fever, Sultan Abdul Hamid had declared that the outbreak must have been caused by a microbe and had sent his own Royal Chemist to the palace to collect samples. Another time, her uncle Abdul Hamid had sent Bonkowski Pasha to the Çırağan Palace to test the water Princess Pakize and her family drank every day. Abdul Hamid may have been holding his older brother the former sultan Murad V captive in the Çırağan Palace, watching his every move, but whenever anyone fell ill, he would always send his best doctors. As a child, the Princess had often seen the black-bearded Greek doctor Marko Pasha, who had been Royal Physician to her father’s uncle the assassinated sultan Abdülaziz, in the palace and inside the rooms of the harem, as well as Abdul Hamid’s own Royal Physician Mavroyeni Pasha.

“I saw Bonkowski Pasha again at the Yıldız Palace many years later,” said the Princess. “He was inspecting the palace’s water supplies and preparing a new report. But by then he could only smile at me and my sisters from a distance. It would not have been proper for him to play little jokes on us or tell us funny stories as he used to do when we were children.”

The Doctor and Prince Consort’s memories of the Sultan’s Royal Chemist were more official in nature. The diligence and experience he had displayed at the Venice Conference where they had jointly represented the Ottoman Empire had earned him the Royal Chemist’s respect. It might even have been Bonkowski Pasha himself, as the Doctor and Prince Consort excitedly told his wife, Princess Pakize, that first brought his abilities as quarantine doctor to Sultan Abdul Hamid’s attention, for his path had crossed the chemist and pharmacist pasha’s not just in medical school but also after he had graduated. Once, at the request of the Mayor of Beyoğlu, Eduard Blacque Bey, they had reviewed the sanitary conditions of Istanbul’s roadside abattoirs together. On another occasion, he and a few other students and doctors had gone to Lake Terkos where Bonkowski was preparing a report on the lake’s topographical and geological features and a microscopic analysis of its waters, and once again he had been impressed by Bonkowski’s intelligence, dedication, and discipline. Filled with the excitement and warmth of these recollections, the newlyweds were eager now to meet the chemist and Chief Inspector of Public Health again.

CHAPTER 2

The Doctor and Prince Consort sent a cabin boy with a note for Bonkowski Pasha. Later the captain hosted them all for dinner in what was known as the guest hall. This dinner, where no alcohol was served, was also attended by Princess Pakize, who had hitherto stayed out of sight of the mullahs on the ship and taken all her meals in her cabin. We should note that in those days it was still very rare for a woman to sit at the same table as men, even if she happened to be a princess. But today we know everything about this historic dinner thanks to Princess Pakize, who later wrote her sister a letter in which she described all that she saw and heard that night from her seat at the end of the table.

Bonkowski Pasha had a pale face, a small nose, and large blue eyes that no one who met him ever forgot. When he saw the Doctor and Prince Consort, he immediately embraced his former student. He then turned to Princess Pakize with an elaborate bow, greeting her as he would a princess in some European palace, though he was careful not to touch her bare hand lest he should embarrass her.

The Royal Chemist, who nurtured a particular interest in the intricacies of European etiquette, was wearing the insignia of the Order of Saint Stanislas, Second Class, which he had received from the latest Russian czar, and his Ottoman-issue gold Imtiaz Medal, which he was also particularly fond of.

“Most esteemed professor,” began the Doctor and Prince Consort, “allow me to express my deepest admiration for the prodigious triumph you have achieved in Smyrna.”

Ever since the newspapers had begun to report that the epidemic in Smyrna was dying down, Bonkowski Pasha had perfected a modest smile with which he received these kinds of compliments. “I should congratulate you!” he responded now, peering into Doctor Nuri’s eyes. Although he recognized that he was not being congratulated as a former student who had been working for years in the Quarantine Authority of the Hejaz (the Muslim holy land), but as someone who had married a princess, a member of the Ottoman dynasty, and a sultan’s daughter, Doctor Nuri smiled anyway. Abdul Hamid had arranged for him to marry his niece because he was a brilliant and accomplished doctor; following this match, Doctor Nuri’s brilliance and his accomplishments had largely been forgotten, and people were now far likelier to remember his status as husband to the Princess.

Nevertheless Prince Consort Doctor Nuri had quickly adjusted to this new state of affairs. He was so happy with his wife that he could not even feel resentful. Besides, he idolized his old professor Bonkowski Pasha, who was—to use two words that had recently entered the Turkish language from French and become extremely popular with the Ottoman intellectual elites—as “disciplined” and “methodical” as the Europeans. He decided to say something to flatter him:

“Your victory over the plague in Smyrna has shown the world the true might of the Ottoman Quarantine Authority!” he began. “You have delivered a fitting riposte to those who would call the Ottoman Empire a ‘sick man.’ We may have yet to eradicate cholera, but there has not been a serious outbreak of plague in Ottoman lands in eighty years. They used to say, ‘The dividing line of civilization that sets Europe and the Ottomans two hundred years apart is not the Danube, but the plague!’ But now, thanks to you, that line has disappeared, at least in the fields of medicine and quarantine studies.”

“Alas, the plague has now been detected on the island of Mingheria,” said Bonkowski Pasha. “And with exceptional virulence too.”

“Really?”

“The plague has spread to Mingheria’s Muslim neighborhoods, my dear Pasha. You have been absorbed by wedding preparations, of course, so it is only natural that you should not have been aware, and that you should marvel at the news, for they are keeping it secret. I regret that I was not able to attend your wedding celebrations; I was in Smyrna!”

“I have been following the effects of the epidemic in Hong Kong and Bombay, and reading the latest reports.”

“The situation is much graver than what is being written,” said Bonkowski Pasha with an air of authority. “It is the same microbe, the same strain that has killed thousands in India and China, and it is the one we saw in Smyrna too.”

“Yet the Indian populace is being decimated … while in Smyrna you beat the disease.”

“The people of Smyrna and their newspapers were a great help in that!” said Bonkowski Pasha, then paused for a moment, as if to signal that he was about to say something important. “In Smyrna, the disease affected the Greek neighborhoods,” he continued, “and the people of Smyrna are known for their culture and civility. On the island of Mingheria, the outbreak has mostly affected the Muslim areas, and already fifteen people have died! Our task there will be rather more onerous.”

Doctor Nuri knew from experience that when it came to respecting quarantine measures, Muslims were harder to persuade than Christians, but he had also grown exasperated of hearing these truths exaggerated by Christian experts like Bonkowski Pasha. He decided not to argue. But the silence lengthened, so for the sake of breaking it, he turned to the Princess and the captain and said: “This is the eternal debate, of course!”

“You must be familiar with the story of what happened to poor Doctor Jean-Pierre!” said Bonkowski Pasha with the smiling mien of a jovial schoolteacher. “I have been told repeatedly by the palace and by Governor Sami Pasha that His Highness the Sultan regards claims of a plague outbreak in Mingheria as a political trap, and that I must therefore keep hidden from all the true purpose of my visit to the island. I have known the island’s governor Sami Pasha for a very long time, of course, ever since his earlier postings to other provinces and districts!”

“Fifteen deaths are a significant number for a small island!” said Doctor Nuri.

“I have been forbidden to speak even with you on this subject, Your Excellency!” said Bonkowski Pasha, gesturing humorously toward the end of the table—as if to say “Beware the spy in our midst!”—at Princess Pakize. Then, as he used to do when the royal family’s westernized princesses were still little girls whom he would meet at the theater in the Yıldız Palace, or observe from afar during the various ceremonies that marked Kaiser Wilhelm’s visit, he addressed the Princess with the playful air of a friendly uncle.

“It is the first time in my life that I have seen the daughter of a sultan, a princess, being allowed to travel beyond Istanbul!” he said with a show of incredulity. “Such freedom bestowed upon its women must be a sign that the Ottoman Empire is Europeanizing!”

Those who shall read, once we have published them, Princess Pakize’s letters from this time will see that she had intuited the “ironic,” perhaps even derisory, tone in which these words had been uttered. Like her father Murad V, Princess Pakize was an intelligent and sensitive person. “In truth, Excellency, I would have rather gone to Venice than China,” she told the Royal Chemist, and thus the conversation turned to the city of Venice, where the two men had attended international public health conferences. “Is it true what they say, sir—that in Venice one travels from one waterside mansion to the next by boat, just as we do along the Bosphorus, and that these boats can sail all the way into one’s home?” asked Princess Pakize. From there the discussion moved to the speed and power and comfortable cabins of the Aziziye. Thirty years and two sultans ago, Sultan Abdülaziz (for whom the ship was named) had spent enormous sums on strengthening the Ottoman navy—unlike his nephew today—and having thus thrust the state into debt, he had then ordered the construction of this extravagant ship for his own use. The gilded, mahogany-paneled Sultan’s Cabin—its walls covered in framed paintings and mirrors—was a replica of the Sultan’s Cabin in the battleship Mahmudiye. Their Russian captain explained the ship’s superior specifications: capable of carrying as many as one hundred and fifty passengers, it could reach a maximum speed of up to fourteen miles per hour, but unfortunately the Sultan had not had the time in many years for even a Bosphorus cruise with his Aziziye. The truth was that Sultan Abdul Hamid feared an attempt on his life and thus took especial care to avoid ships and boats, but although everybody at the table knew this, they discreetly avoided the subject.