第 23 页

“Unless you quarantine the infected lodges in Germe and Kadirler, the Greek community will start leaving the island too—perhaps abandon it altogether,” said the bishop of the Church of Hagia Triada. “Lamentably the exodus of Greeks from our island has already begun.”

CHAPTER 21

As the meeting of the Quarantine Committee drew to a close, travel agents along Istanbul Street and near the port learned through clerks passing information on to those outside that starting at midnight on Sunday, all passengers aboard ships leaving the island would be subject to a five-day quarantine. There were only two ships officially scheduled to depart the island before that deadline. But in the three and a half days left until then, people would attempt to leave the island en masse.

The island’s travel companies had immediately cast about for vessels to rent and sent telegrams calling for more ships. A substantial crowd began to assemble on the shore, composed of people looking for tickets, families who had boarded up their homes as soon as they had heard, those who preferred to see for themselves first what was happening at the docks, and others still (a significant presence) who were determined not to leave the island but had come down anyway, purely out of curiosity. Those who had already closed down their homes and packed their bags and trunks as if they were ending their seasonal sojourn on the island a little earlier than usual were mostly the island’s wealthier Greek families, for instance the Aldonis, who had grown rich during the golden age of the trade in Mingherian marble; the new olive oil magnates the Hristoses; and the owner of the Dafni department store Tomadis Effendi, who imported the choicest embroidered coverlets, petticoats, and cross-stitched tapestries from Thessaloniki. (He had boarded up his shop overnight, smuggling his stock to his home outside the city to save it from disinfection.)

The scions of a handful of the island’s foremost Muslim families had also come to the port, like Fehim Effendi, descendant of Blind Mehmet Pasha, who was a clerk at the customs office, and Celâl son of Ferit, who normally lived in Istanbul but had come to oversee some repairs to the family home on the island. But most of the island’s Muslim population had remained unmoved by this early agitation. We will not suggest, as Orientalist historians often do, that their attitude was a product of Muslim “fatalism” in the face of disease. Rather, compared with the island’s Christian population, the local Muslim community was poorer, less educated, and more disengaged from the rest of the world.

A thunderstorm broke out just as the Quarantine Committee was dispersing, drenching the delegates. Black clouds hung so low in the sky that they brushed against the Castle towers, and each clap of thunder was like an omen of death. A bolt of green lightning fell upon the waters off of the Arab Lighthouse, and seemed, to the inmates who saw it from the prison battlements, like the image of a distant memory. There followed a rainfall which some remember as “the deluge,” and to which they have ascribed a symbolic significance.

As the waters released by the thunderstorm wound their way toward the port, flowing through gutters, down walls, and into sewage drains dug into the middle of the street, municipal clerks delivered the list of quarantine provisions to two newspapers—one published in Turkish and the other in Greek—for typesetting. The words PLAGUE and QUARANTINE ran in large type right through the middle of these announcements, which were printed at the same printing press and affixed to every wall in the city. A handsomely illustrated poster declared that the municipal authorities would pay six silver coins for every dead rat.

Quarantine Master Nikos and the Governor had received intelligence that many shopkeepers had been hiding their goods to prevent them from getting damaged in disinfection operations and that nearly half the shops in the Old Market now lay empty. Doctor Nuri sent his most capable, brawny, and determined spray-pump operators to disinfect two junk shops near the Saddlers’ Gate at the Old Market. These junk dealers stored their stock behind their shops, in empty lots cleared by fire and otherwise used as rubbish dumps, and had been selling all manner of objects—old pocket watches, religious icons, cigarette holders—that had belonged to dead plague victims, as well as victims’ suits, trousers, and bedsheets and plague-infested mattresses and woolen fabrics. There were also cheaper articles available, supplied by thieves who had robbed and ransacked vacant homes until there was nothing left to steal and then injected their loot of contaminated clothing, carpets, quilts, and woolens into a deadly stream of commerce. The Governor had always regarded these junk shops, run by gregarious, sharp-witted Cretian Greeks, as hotbeds of disease, filth, and squalor, and the reason he had not shut them down before was that he had always been wary of the backlash this might cause.

A team of masked and gloved quarantine officers had soon cleared out the two junk shops and the smaller stores a few streets down, loading every object and item of clothing they had seized onto a wagon. They drove the wagon along the creek and slowly up Dikili Hill, where municipal authorities had been excavating two vast pits in which all the filthy, infected, disease-ridden cloths, woolens, and linens they gathered, and any other object that carried the plague microbe, were to be incinerated and sterilized with lime.

This policy, reminiscent of epidemics from bygone eras, was one that could be reasonably justified. Rather than use up the island’s already limited supplies of carbolic acid and Lysol to painstakingly disinfect dead people’s belongings handed over by the victims’ fearful relatives, it was much easier and cheaper for quarantine officers to simply destroy them.

The island’s quarantine officers were mostly unmoved by the tearful pleas of miserly shopkeepers, though we know today through the many letters of complaint from this time that some tradesmen were given preferential treatment. Some shopkeepers made no trouble at all when their shops were emptied out and whitewashed, for the treasury clerks sent by the municipality’s damages committee to accompany these operations could sometimes decide on unexpectedly generous compensation payments. But elsewhere, such as among the shoemakers and leather dealers near the Old Bridge, there was more resistance, though there was not much these merchants could do other than complain vociferously. Everywhere, the general refrain was as follows: “This quarantine is being used to mistreat the island’s Christian population; it’s the Muslim pilgrims who brought the disease here in the first place.”

In their bulky masks, their oilskin ponchos, and with their spray tanks strapped to their backs, the decontamination crews made for a rather unnerving sight. Destined to become fixtures of local children’s dreams and nightmares for years to come, the first nine men recruited into these crews were in fact ordinary firemen who had received special training to operate the disinfection pumps. Years ago, when sprayable disinfectants were first introduced to the island and required people capable of operating the apposite pumps, the obvious solution had been to enlist Mingheria’s firefighter crews, who were already affectionately nicknamed “siphon-men,” and who had thereafter become the first to be called upon whenever there was a decontamination operation to be undertaken, or a job that required disinfectant solution to be sprayed. Ever since the discovery of the existence of bacteria, known in the popular parlance as microbes, there had been a vogue for haphazardly spritzing and sprinkling things with antiseptic solution and for inventing stylish implements commonly referred to as “sprinklers.” Kiryakos Effendi, owner of the luxury store Bazaar du Île, had already placed an order in Thessaloniki for two separate models of disinfection pumps for domestic use.

Since the start of the outbreak, government clerks had been dispatched to stand outside municipal buildings to spray disinfectant carbolic acid solution, Lysol, or some other mixture into the air, just as the valets outside the Hotels Splendid and Levant were also doing. These initial precautions, which we now know to be largely ineffective, encouraged the public to remain cautious and mindful of hygiene but also fostered the illusion among those constantly reassuring one another with cries of “Don’t worry, we’ll be just fine!” that the epidemic was a minor threat easily defeated with spray pumps and remedies that could be sprinkled into the air like perfume.

In Arkaz too, during the outbreaks of diarrhea that erupted every summer, particularly in Germe and Çite and in the hovels near the port, people had become accustomed to seeing an elderly siphon-man trudging through their neighborhoods, disinfecting lavatories and filthy, mosquito-infested puddles with a dark green liquid. Children were not afraid of this endearing old man who’d been sent to stave off diarrhea and would follow him up and down the street. If the elderly siphon-man asked them to open up a door or show him some hidden spot or hole in the ground, local residents and shopkeepers immediately obliged, and everyone gladly helped out with disinfection operations.

But now nobody seemed to want to go anywhere near the spray-pump wielding firefighters. Could this changed disposition have been due to the new, larger cut of their black masks, or to the blinding gleam of their oilskin uniforms when they caught the evening sun, or to the fact that they never seemed to travel to any part of the city in groups of fewer than five? This time around, children didn’t even think of playing with these mask-wearing officers but ran from them in sheer terror, as if they’d come face-to-face with the cyclops who was known to carry the plague and smear it all over drinking fountains and doorknobs. The city’s grocers, butchers, snack vendors, sherbet makers, and café owners, meanwhile, did not even consider collaborating, but thought only about how best to protect their shops and their stock.

But not everyone was quite so “wily.” A fruit seller at the bazaar had imagined that he would be spared if he just swore on the crucifix around his neck that the lettuce and cucumbers arranged upon his stall had come directly from his own garden. At the sight of two firemen clad in black oilskins pouring disinfectant all over his wares, the fruit seller had become so incensed that he had fainted. (He would later be revealed, through torture and interrogation, to have links to the Greek nationalists.) The amiable Kostis Effendi, who ran Arkaz’s favorite sherbet stall, had also thought that a similar display of good faith might suffice. When the quarantine officers in their dark masks and the doctors turned up at his famous shop, much revered by children too, Sherbet Master Kostis theatrically poured himself four glasses in four colors of each of his rosewater-, orange-, bitter orange–, and sour cherry–flavored sherbets and drank them all in succession, as if to announce “My sherbet is clean!” But within moments quarantine officers and the crew of firemen had emptied the sherbet out of every jug on the shelves and thoroughly disinfected the shop with carbolic acid. A second team had followed in their wake to whitewash the place, have the door nailed and sealed shut, and declare the shop debarred from doing any further trade until the epidemic had passed.

“Let every drop you have spilled be my gift to you! But tell me, how will we put food on the table now, how will we survive?” said Sherbet Master Kostis.

When the Governor Pasha, who was following every development from his office (just as Abdul Hamid ruled his whole empire from the Yıldız Palace), heard what the sherbet maker had said, he sent another telegram to Istanbul to plead for assistance. Since all of the Governor’s telegrams tended to say the same things in the same tone and wording every time, his code breakers hardly even needed to consult their codebooks to find the numerical equivalent of a given phrase and would often compose the message from memory. The terms most commonly used in these telegrams to Istanbul were “disinfectant solution,” “tent,” “sterilizing oven,” “cash,” “doctor,” and “volunteer.”

The Doctor and Prince Consort knew from his experience of epidemics in other cities how quickly the firefighter crews could slip from the tactful, solicitous manner of Istanbul’s historic siphon-men into a brutish ruthlessness. Some firemen sprayed disinfectant solution with gentle, delicate gestures, as if watering a flower. Some looked almost apologetic when approaching shopkeepers. A plea to sprinkle “anywhere but there, sir, for the love of God!” could soften the heart of even the most seasoned siphon-man and persuade him to shift his target. But the opposite could also happen. Standing at a side entrance to the Old Market, Doctor Nuri had watched a quarrel unfold between a quarantine officer and a local tradesman: drawn into a shouting match with the shopkeeper, the officer, holding his hose almost as if it were the barrel of a gun, had proceeded to vindictively drizzle disinfectant over rows of plucked and singed chickens and quails, their skins all pink and yellow, stacks of chicken thighs, bits of offal, and bloodstained chopping boards, as well as on the butcher himself and his apprentice. Having frequently had to settle quarrels between Ottoman soldiers and Arab grocers and camel drivers across the cities of Arabia, Doctor Nuri knew that for quarantine to succeed and for the city to be saved, it was imperative for these kinds of rows to be managed before they became too serious.

The Governor Pasha took particular care over the disinfection of Sheikh Hamdullah’s lodge, and began the operation by having his spies draw up a map of the premises. The spray-pump crew was briefed in advance by the Governor’s clerks on where Sheikh Hamdullah slept and where he delivered his sermons (both locations to be assiduously avoided), where the guest rooms and wool-carding stations were situated, which room the lodge’s treasured wool was stored in, and where the kitchens, the privies in the garden, and the dervishes’ cells were.

“Do not request permission to enter,” said the Governor Pasha, “but simply present them with the list of quarantine measures and proceed immediately to your target and initiate the decontamination procedure. Should anybody grab you or try to use force against you, do not fight back, but retreat immediately to the garden. Whatever may happen, do not allow yourselves to be drawn into arguments and recriminations.”

Twelve burly-looking infantrymen from the Fifth Army were also standing at the ready, their rifles resting against their shoulders as they waited in the courtyard at the back of the State Hall. Their uniforms were old and faded, but clean. They had been selected from among the rare soldiers on the island who spoke at least a few words of Turkish, and placed under the command of an officer from Sinope who was, like his men, illiterate.