第 20 页

The Governor raised his eyebrows at this comment, for he suspected that deep down, like most of the bureaucrats and civil servants he had encountered in his life, so too the members of this committee took pleasure in banning things. “Don’t you worry, Frangouli Effendi!” he said. “Once we have turned this list into a sign and put copies up all over the city, people will be so terrified that we won’t even need soldiers or gendarmes to secure their compliance.”

There was some debate over a provision dictating that the bodies of the dead were to be disinfected with lime and their burial monitored by municipal authorities. The elderly Greek doctor Tassos Bey pointed out that it would be especially difficult to implement this measure among the poorer and more fanatically religious Muslim population, that there were sure to be altercations, and that it would be wise to deploy soldiers from the Mingherian military garrison to escort Muslim doctors when they ventured into those kinds of areas, rather than relying on the ordinary guards employed by the quarantine office. This was how the possibility of soldiers being called upon to protect doctors first came to be mentioned. For his part, the Governor Pasha felt that a government that couldn’t even sterilize an infected house or exercise enough authority to disinfect a corpse would never be able to stop an epidemic, so he did not raise any objections.

As instructed by Istanbul, it was then agreed that the belongings of those who perished from the disease were to be sterilized immediately. The price of the corrosive sublimate solution that was to be used as a disinfectant would be fixed by the municipal authorities, and its sale on the black market would not be tolerated. It would be forbidden to touch, take, use, or sell victims’ belongings and to visit a house where somebody had died without the prior authorization of a public health official and before the building was disinfected. All junk shops would be sterilized and shut down.

The skeptical, weary consuls and doctors did voice the occasional question—“Do we even have enough firemen, clerks, disinfectant, and Lysol to deal with all this?”—but by now the Governor had more or less stopped paying heed to objections and was simply instructing his clerks to make a formal record of each provision. It was decreed that the public would be encouraged to hunt rats; that traps and rat poison would be brought in from Smyrna, Thessaloniki, and Istanbul; and that there would be a reward of six kuruş paid out for every dead rat handed in to the municipal authorities.

Noting the doubtful expressions on some of the delegates’ faces, Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri reminded them that “the first thing to do is to stop the movement of rats.” He explained in great detail how in India the speed at which the disease had spread inland had not been determined by the movement of people fleeing from it but by the pace at which rats had swarmed from one village to the next. Where there were railway lines, these rats and their fleas would travel on trains too, and the outbreak would spread even faster. But when people took deliberate precautions to avoid rats and worked with the municipal authorities to drive them away, and when incoming ships were cleared of vermin before they were allowed to dock, the spread of plague was seen to slow down until it stopped altogether.

Doctor Nuri next reminded them all of something they already knew: although the microbe that caused the plague had been discovered, there was no effective vaccine against it yet. That year some patients in hospitals in Bombay had been injected with different doses of a plague serum, but this had produced no noticeable improvement in their conditions. In other words, anyone who became infected with the microbe either survived (some never even fell ill) or perished within five days, and the outcome depended solely on the strength of their constitution. It had also occasionally been observed that even where there were no rats, the disease could still spread between humans through saliva, phlegm, and blood. This unexplained and disquieting phenomenon, combined with the absence of a known cure, forced even the most forward-thinking and knowledgeable of quarantine doctors to resort to traditional lazarettos of the kind the Venetians had invented four hundred years ago; quarantine facilities that the Ottomans called shelter stations; isolation wards; and ancestral folk remedies. So it was that even as the British announced, back home in London, that isolating patients and imposing cordons was “pointless,” they still relied on those same methods in Bombay, using the army to enforce them.

By this point, Doctor Nuri could see that his audience was becoming thoroughly confused and thought it wise to introduce a visual aid. The Governor Pasha had just been using an old fumigation stick to disinfect a letter a clerk had brought in from the Post Office. The implement was passed around the table until it reached Doctor Nuri, who demonstrated its usage. He had bought himself a sleeker version of this very same model many years ago in Paris from the famous Galerie Colbert.

“You see, just like everyone else, I too sometimes fumigate documents I’ve received in the post, or the newspaper I’ve bought, or the loose change in my pocket,” he said. “Yet at the last Quarantine Conference in Venice it was agreed that even if they have come from a contaminated source, there is no need to disinfect or sanitize things like paper, letters, and books. Even so, you will never hear me telling plague patients and those poor souls who gather in hospital corridors, desperate for a glimmer of hope, that fumigation is useless. I urge you not to do so either, gentlemen! Otherwise they will no longer bother with sanitization measures either.” (“These people only believe in prayer sheets and amulets anyway!” someone muttered in French.)

To elucidate how frighteningly vague the medical community’s understanding of the plague was, Doctor Nuri told the delegates a striking anecdote from Hong Kong: a Chinese doctor in Hong Kong’s Tung Wah Hospital, declaring his hospital to be “perfectly clean,” had spent the night sleeping in the same ward as his plague patients as a demonstration of how firmly he believed that the plague could only ever be spread by rats and fleas, yet despite there being no sign of any such vermin in the building, he had died of the plague three days later.

Doctor Nuri noticed the fear and despair this story had instilled in his audience. “I do not believe there is any benefit to washing metal coins in diluted vinegar,” he continued. “But I have heard that some doctors in Hong Kong will still dip their fingertips in vinegar before taking a new patient’s pulse. These precautions are not altogether ineffective, and indeed they can give hope to doctors and patients alike. Where there is no hope left, you may draft in as many soldiers as you wish, but you will still not be able to implement any restrictions, and once you have failed to persuade people of the benefits of such restrictions, you will find that you are unable to enforce quarantine at all. Quarantine is the art of educating the public in spite of itself, and of teaching it the skill of self-preservation.”

“Do you mean to say, sir, that there might as well be no soldiers at all?” said the German consul in a derisory tone. “Do you really expect the masses to obey without soldiers to make them?”

“If it weren’t for their fear of the army, these people would never comply with any restrictions,” said the French consul. “Forget about cordons and regulations; any Christian doctor who sets foot in neighborhoods like Çite, Germe, and Kadirler is likely to be attacked on sight, unless he’s remembered to hide his doctor’s briefcase first. You did well to lock Ramiz up in the dungeons. Don’t ever let him out.”

The Governor exhorted the assembled dignitaries not to entertain preconceived notions (he spoke the words “preconceived notions” in French) regarding any lodge, sect, or individual, and assured them there was no cause for alarm, as all necessary precautions would be taken.

“Then we must immediately ban all movement in and out of the Kadirler, Çite, and Germe neighborhoods,” said the French consul. “There are still people there who will visit a home where someone has died and come out wearing the victim’s clothes, sauntering up and down Hamidiye Avenue, back and forth across the bridge, into the markets, the shops, the docks, and anywhere else where there’s a crowd. Unless we immediately institute a cordon to stop these people, within a week there will not be anyone left on this island who has not been exposed to the plague microbe.”

“Perhaps we are all infected already,” said Bishop Stavrakis, then pulled out a crucifix and began to pray.

“We know for a fact that Sheikh Hamdullah does not hand out amulets and consecrated prayer sheets, nor is he one of these charlatans who will paint incantations onto the hands and chests of sick and desperate people,” said the Governor Pasha.

The consuls were momentarily pacified to thus learn that the Governor, by his own admission, was secretly monitoring the sheikh. “You will soon see for yourselves that tomorrow, once these measures are officially announced, our people shall be more than willing to observe them,” the Governor declared when the debate resumed. “Six people died yesterday, five of them Muslims and one of them Greek. But our policies shall bring these numbers down. So it was in Smyrna too.”

“What will you do if the people do not yield and submit to the decrees, Your Excellency? Will your soldiers shoot them like they did the pilgrims?” said the French consul.

In slow, deliberate gestures, Governor Sami Pasha finished fumigating a message he had just been handed, and although he would have much preferred to keep its distressing contents secret, he announced with a note of heartfelt sorrow:

“Gentlemen, it is with great sadness that I must inform you that our popular and well-respected young Thessalonikian doctor Alexandros Bey has fallen ill and died. The cause of death is—”

“Plague, of course,” interjected Quarantine Master Nikos.

“If you had been willing to admit from the start that it is plague we are dealing with, perhaps Doctor Alexandros, whose death you’re mourning now, might have survived after all,” said the French consul.

“Let us be clear, gentlemen, that the plague is not to be blamed on the state!” said the Governor.

But among the members of the committee, the argument continued, and so the Governor Pasha, thinking it best to bring proceedings to a close before the agitation could settle, declared the meeting adjourned until the morning, “given the circumstances,” then sprang to his feet and walked out through the main door with his characteristic short, brisk stride.

CHAPTER 19

As he walked out of the meeting hall, the Governor Pasha first turned his attention to the activity in the adjacent room. Having anticipated that the meeting would run late into the night, the municipality’s footmen had lit gas lamps and were now setting out petite, pear-shaped watermelons they’d carved with decorative flower and leaf motifs and preparing to serve olive-and-thyme-flavored bread that the garrison Commander had ordered in from the army kitchens. Clerks, gendarmes, consular staff, guards, journalists, soldiers, and young priests had gathered in the inner courtyard at the foot of the stairs. Some were sitting on chairs and benches along the walls, most of them were standing, but all of them reeked of the carbon chloride solution that had been liberally sprayed over them by a team of overzealous firemen.

Sitting in his office and reading the messages his clerks had left on his desk, the Governor soon learned that the island’s wealthier Muslim and Christian residents were expecting him to secure them places aboard the ships scheduled to leave the city. He realized with some degree of consternation that all the tickets must have already sold out, and there was an exodus underway from the island. A bevy of footmen, servants, doormen, and other supplicants were waiting in the courtyard and outside his door, sent by their wealthy employers to petition the Governor for tickets on their behalf.

The Governor looked at the telegram on his desk and divined its contents without having to resort to the services of the municipal code breaker: it was a message from his wife informing him that she was on her way to the island again. Had news of Bonkowski Pasha’s assassination and of the epidemic on the island perhaps not reached the family home in Üsküdar yet? Or was his selfless wife suggesting that she would not leave her husband alone in his hour of need? Her tender, forbearing expression briefly flashed in the Governor’s mind.

Sami Pasha had been appointed governor of Mingheria five years ago. Born of an Albanian family, in his youth he had by chance landed in Egypt, where he had distinguished himself at the Khedive’s court with his competence in a variety of roles, including as clerk, aide-de-camp, and translator (he spoke French), and having risen through the ranks there he had traveled on to Istanbul and entered directly into the service of the Ottoman state as district and county chief, and later state governor, of various imperial outposts, such as Aleppo, Skopje, and Beirut. His acquaintance with Kâmil Pasha of Cyprus had won him a government role during Kâmil Pasha’s first stint as grand vizier fifteen years ago, but he had been relieved of his ministerial duties for reasons he had never been able to fathom and dispatched as governor to various far-flung provinces of the Empire. The Governor Pasha believed that whatever fault had caused his dismissal would eventually be forgotten by Abdul Hamid and that he would soon be recalled to Istanbul for a more prestigious role, and every time he was relieved of one duty and sent to another part of the Empire on a new assignment, he—like many Ottoman governors who were frequently shuffled from post to post—would interpret it as a sign that Abdul Hamid had not forgotten about him, rather than an indication of any kind of dissatisfaction with his performance in his previous role.

When he was appointed governor of Mingheria, Sami Pasha’s wife, Esma, did not go with him. Their lives had been made miserable in recent years by his frequent transfers, and by all the times they had gone through the expensive trouble of moving their home to his latest posting only to find as soon as they had settled down that he was to be dispatched elsewhere after all. The strain of relocating, of furnishing a home, and of having to live—often in isolation—in some faraway town where people hardly even spoke Turkish had eventually worn Esma Hanım down, and rather than go to Mingheria, she had decided to stay behind in Istanbul, thinking, “By the time we get there they’ll probably decide to send him somewhere else anyway.” But with the Pasha’s posting in Mingheria lasting an unprecedented five years, the distance between husband and wife had grown deeper, and finding himself unable to cope with the loneliness, the Pasha had begun a “secret” affair (which many on the island speculated and gossiped about) with the widow Marika, who taught history at the Greek High School.