第 24 页

With its troop of armed, hulking soldiers, its mask-clad spray-pump crew, and its group of clerks carrying the municipality’s gift of ten newly made mousetraps, the delegation made for a rather impressive quarantine patrol. Following closely behind them was the Major, who had been sent by the Doctor and Prince Consort as a kind of observer. We now know every detail of what happened in the lodge that day thanks to what the Major reported to Doctor Nuri, and what Doctor Nuri, in turn, told Princess Pakize:

The disinfection team entered the lodge as if they were staging a raid. By the time the gatekeepers standing in the lodge’s garden, the dervishes, and the disciples scattered about the grounds had even begun to grasp what was going on, the spray-pump operators had already reached the first of their meticulously planned targets, subjecting the wool-carding room, the kitchens, and the entrance of the courtyard that led to the cells to a heavy, pungent shower of Lysol.

The scuffles began when they turned toward the little mosque and the cluster of cells that were among the oldest buildings on the lodge grounds. The guardsmen and gatekeepers tasked with protecting the lodge pushed an elderly fireman to the floor and set upon him with wooden bats that had been cut and prepared in advance. Alerted by the shouting and screaming, the disciples leaped to their feet, the dervishes stepped out of their cells, and all of them ran straight into the garden to join the fight—some of them only half dressed, some with their heads bare, and some holding pickaxes they had grabbed along the way.

Understanding that open battle was about to break out in the lodge’s gardens, the Arab soldiers’ commanding officer disregarded the Governor’s repeated warnings in favor of his military instincts, and ordered his men to fight.

In that same moment, Sheikh Hamdullah spoke, his voice heard by all those present. “Welcome, welcome, we are glad to have you!” he began. His devotees, who had believed their sheikh to be unwell and asleep, stopped fighting as soon as they heard him speak. The sheikh then addressed the soldiers of the Fifth Army with a few words in Arabic. He was reciting the verse from the Koran’s Hujurat surah that said “believers are but one brotherhood,” and although no one understood him at first, the fact that he was talking in Arabic, and the sincerity in his voice, immediately convinced everyone around him that all of this fighting was altogether needless.

But in the meantime, a group of industrious firemen had continued to spray Lysol into the lodge’s cells. Some have argued that what most enraged Sheikh Hamdullah was not that his stepbrother Ramiz had been arrested as a suspect in Bonkowski Pasha’s murder (it was said that the sheikh wholeheartedly believed his stepbrother’s name would soon be cleared), but rather the fact that even though everybody at the lodge that day had stopped fighting when they’d heard his conciliatory speech, these spray-pump operators had unceremoniously broken into the room where the lodge’s secret fortune (its “hidden treasure,” to quote the Hadith)—its wool—was kept, and ruthlessly sprayed reeking Lysol all over it.

The spraying of Lysol onto the “hidden treasure” was an offense so intolerable to the lodge that when they heard about it, some of the island’s elders furrowed their brows as if they had been told a slanderous lie and declared that such an act could not possibly have taken place. The Governor too emphasized the same message for fear that the situation might otherwise escalate. But others were convinced that there had been an affront against the lodge, and that the sacred temple had been defiled with Lysol. Some gossipmongers (particularly the Greek newspapermen) and the foreign consuls, on the other hand, argued the exact opposite, suggesting that the Governor had given the lodge preferential treatment and should really have pushed for more Lysol to be sprayed. These claims were supported by the account of an elderly fireman who had been present on the scene.

This fireman had reported that during the disinfection operations, he had spotted two plague-afflicted disciples lying in a cell, the buboes on their necks and the stupefied, deranged expressions on their feverish faces making the nature of their ailment clear. Some foreign consuls seized upon this story to send telegrams to Istanbul and pressure the Governor into implementing a quarantine cordon, not just around the lodge, but over the whole neighborhood too, but the Governor, predicting that such a measure would incense Sheikh Hamdullah, decided that the best course of action would be to practice patience, let some time pass, and make sure to silence the gossipmongers, just as he had done after the Pilgrim Ship Affair. The other outcome of this episode was the universal consensus that the Arab soldiers from the Fifth Army in Damascus who spoke neither Turkish nor Mingherian could not be used to enforce quarantine.

So the Governor and Doctor Nuri told the Major he must redouble his efforts to turn the recruits that had been selected to support the quarantine effort into a new force—a little army of its own, perhaps. Over the past three days, and despite all the complications he’d had to deal with, the Major had managed to accomplish two weeks’ worth of work and successfully recruited fourteen “soldiers” to the small Quarantine Army whose command he’d been assigned by the Quarantine Committee. It was decided then that this army should be headquartered in a small building near the garrison bakery, and operations to clear this space—which had hitherto been used as a depot—began that same morning. The main room at the entrance of the Mingherian Army Recruitment Office’s small building by the docks was also provisionally handed over to the Quarantine Division. The Major would be given his own desk here, and this would be where volunteers were registered. Quarantine Master Nikos remarked that the people of the island were fond of this charming Venetian-era building, and that many among them—Greek and Muslim alike—were sure to volunteer for this temporary army, so long as their wages were paid and they were allowed to return to their own homes at night.

“Given that its Headquarters are to be housed within our garrison, the recruitment of soldiers to this Quarantine Army must follow Ottoman military conventions and be conducted solely from among the island’s Muslim population,” declared the Governor Pasha. “The Sultan has already introduced all of the reforms he promised to the Great Powers, starting from the French and the British, and just like his uncle and grandfather before him, he has been so earnest and determined in his efforts to remove all inequalities between his Christian and Muslim subjects that today the Ottoman Empire’s Christian population has surpassed its Muslim community in terms of wealth, education levels, and craftsmanship skills, as indeed is the case on the island of Mingheria too. The only matter on which our sultan will not yield to the wishes of the Great Powers is allowing Christians into the ranks of the army. We’ve gathered here informally today to discuss and deliberate the most effective way to enforce quarantine measures; let us not start arguing among ourselves now as if we were having to deal with the foreign consuls too.”

CHAPTER 22

As the editor of the Adekatos Arkadi was currently locked up in the Castle prison, the Governor summoned the editor of the island’s other Greek-language newspaper, the Neo Nisi, to tell him word for word how he was to report on the decontamination of Sheikh Hamdullah’s lodge. The Governor offered the young and idealistic journalist—whom he’d arrested in the past, and whose newspaper he’d withdrawn from circulation a few times—a plate of dried figs and walnuts, and some coffee, claiming both falsely and needlessly that everything had “just been disinfected in the sterilizing oven,” as if it were an epidemic of cholera that they were dealing with. Later, as he saw the journalist out, the Governor spoke of the scale of the turmoil and calamity they were facing and of how anxiously Istanbul and the rest of the world were following events, and explained with a menacing smile that it was the duty of the press to support the state, so he had better make sure he didn’t print the wrong thing lest he should get himself in trouble.

The next day the registry clerk brought in a copy of the new issue of Neo Nisi fresh from the printing press. The municipal translator read out to the Governor the column he had carefully translated from Greek to Turkish.

The report made explicit references to what Sami Pasha had told the journalist he must not “under any circumstances!” write about, describing in overblown terms and for the whole island to read how the siphon-men and the dervishes residing in the lodge had gone at one another with wooden bats and with their fists, and how the lodge’s secret treasure—its store of wool—had been soiled and covered in noxious fumes. The Governor knew that the rumors generated by this report would spread thoroughly among the Muslim community. The charlatan sheikhs who’d been handing out amulets and the rural folk who believed in their powers, the angry young migrants from Crete, and indeed every Muslim on the island, including the more “enlightened” ones, would be moved to resist quarantine measures and grow resentful of the Governor.

The Governor and Manolis, the journalist responsible for the story, had had disagreements before. There had been a period three or four years ago when the courageous Manolis had sought to undermine the Governor and the Ottoman bureaucracy with his reporting on problems in the municipal government, the filthy state of the city’s streets, allegations of corruption, and the laziness and ignorance of the local government clerks. The Governor, whose patience had long since run out but who had nevertheless been putting up with the situation lest he should be accused of intolerance, had eventually sent his intermediaries to threaten to shut the newspaper down unless it changed its position, and for a while the journalist had softened his tone.

But after some time, the same newspaper had undertaken a “planned and systematic” attack upon the Governor and the Quarantine Authorities, publishing a series of articles blaming them for the Pilgrim Ship Affair and compelling the Governor to find some pretext to lock Manolis up in the dungeons—although he had been forced to set the prisoner free eventually, under pressure from British and French consuls and from the telegrams he kept receiving from the palace.

What pained the Governor most now was to discover that all the warmth he had shown Manolis in their meetings after he’d had him released from prison seemed to have been for nothing! Once, when they had run into each other at the Hotel Splendid, the Governor had praised Manolis for his reporting on the war between the coachmen and the porters, congratulated him on his sources, and offered to pay him upfront with cash from the municipal purse to publish the piece and two future columns in the municipality’s own Turkish-language newspaper, the Arkata Times. Another night, when they both happened to be dining at the Dégustation restaurant, the Governor had behaved very amicably toward Manolis in front of all the other patrons, inviting the journalist to his table, offering him some onion-and-mullet soup, and telling him openly and loud enough for everyone else to hear that his newspaper was by far the finest in the Levant.

Reflecting on these antecedents, the Governor now resolved to have the ungrateful Manolis thrown back into the dungeons, treating him to a fresh dose of its freezing, damp cells to find out under whose orders he had written his latest article and all those older pieces on the incident with the pilgrim ship. The plainclothes officers who’d been dispatched to capture Manolis did not find him at the offices of the newspaper whose copies they’d taken from circulation, nor at his home in the Hora neighborhood, but hiding at his uncle’s house, where they caught him reading a book (Hobbes’s Leviathan) in the garden, and hauled him straight to prison. Following a last-minute twinge of conscience on the Governor’s part, the journalist was put in the more comfortable western wing of the jailhouse, which was also farther away from the areas worst affected by the plague.

When he went to see Marika that night, the Governor Pasha made love to her more out of habit than of any real desire, and afterward he listened to her account of all the latest gossip. This time Marika began by recounting the most improbable rumor of them all:

“They say there is a gang of Greek and Muslim orphans who go around at night knocking on honest, kindhearted people’s doors. If you hear them knocking at your door, you are supposed to give them food, for it is said that those whose doors they knock upon and who give out food will not die of the plague.”

“I’d heard this story before, but the knocking on doors is new!” said the Governor.

“It is said that the plague has no effect on these children. They will not fall sick, not even if they’ve been sleeping curled up with their dead mothers and fathers.”

“And what about that man you said you saw from your window, the one who walks around at night carrying a bag of dead rats and scattering them about; has anyone else come across him?”

“I really did see that demon, my Pasha, but upon your advice I no longer believe that such a creature exists. In any case there has been less talk of him now that the masked disinfection crews have appeared.”

“I see how it is: our siphon-men must have driven the demon away!”

“This will upset you, I know, but people are more and more convinced now that the plague arrived on the ship that brought the old sultan’s daughter here.”

“And you choose to believe this flagrant lie just to hurt me,” said Sami Pasha with a degree of rancor even he was surprised to feel.

“Can a person really deceive themselves into believing something they know to be untrue?”

“So are you saying that you actually believe this lie?”

“Everyone believes it!”

“They believe it out of spite,” said the Pasha. “The Sultan turned his own China-bound ship around to bring his most valued quarantine doctor here and save the people of this island, and in response these Greek nationalists think it fair to insult His Supreme Highness and the Ottoman Empire by saying it was that ship which brought the disease here. You must not allow them to manipulate you in this way!”

“Forgive me, Pasha … There are also those who say it was the rebel pilgrims who broke quarantine that brought the plague.”

“It was cholera that those pilgrims carried three years ago, not plague!” the Pasha replied.

“It seems some of the State Hall clerks have been telling shopkeepers that ‘for just five gold liras’ they can issue them permits to keep their shops open.”

“Those bastards!”

“Some children in the Kofunya neighborhood have seen people squatting in vacant homes. The children’s fathers reported this to the authorities, but nobody came to check, no government clerks, no gendarmes nor guards.”