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“But that is nonsense; why should they not come?”

“There have been rumors that clerks and gendarmes have been too afraid for their lives to turn up for work, and that there have been cases of insubordination.”

“What else?”

“It is said that there are several ships ready to come and pick up those who want to leave the island, but that you will not allow them to do so.”

“And why would that be?”

“To make the disease spread farther so that all the Greeks will run away … Twice now I’ve heard stories of British and French soldiers landing in the north, near Kefeli.”

“There is no reason why they would go north to Kefeli when they could come straight here.”

“What do you mean, Pasha?”

“Seven people have died today!” said the Governor.

“Pasha, my brother’s business partner has not been able to find any tickets on the Messageries Baghdad, nor on the next Persepolis ship. He holds you in the highest regard, and truly admires you. He is a proud man too, and he would never have come to me if it had not been a matter of vital importance.”

“Will that Pantaleon ferry with the red chimney actually turn up, I wonder? These greedy agencies have been selling three tickets for every seat, and even so I’ve not said a word against them.”

“There is another rumor going around, but I did not want to speak of it in case it should anger you. Perhaps it is not a rumor at all.”

“What is it?”

“They say that the siphon-men who went to disinfect Sheikh Hamdullah’s lodge got into a fight with the dervishes. With the rumor out that the Muslim sects will not follow quarantine procedures, and that the outbreak will never be controlled, it seems that some Greeks have begun to leave the island. But, Pasha, this island cannot be without its Greeks—just as it cannot be without its Muslims!”

“Of course,” said the Governor. “But don’t you worry, we will soon put that sheikh in his place. Though truthfully, he is a gentle soul.”

When he convened with Doctor Nuri and Doctor Ilias the next morning to mark on their map the location of the homes of the previous day’s seven victims, as well as any spots where they might have been exposed to the microbe, the Governor went straight and unhesitatingly to the point. “As long as Istanbul keeps protecting and pandering to Sheikh Hamdullah, we will have a hard time enforcing a serious quarantine here and ensuring that Muslims abide by its provisions,” he began. “And when they see Muslims repeatedly violating quarantine protocols, Christians will stop respecting them too, and this plague will continue to kill and deplete us for years to come, just like in India. My dear doctor, how would you explain the fact that everything and everyone seems suddenly to have turned so dismally against us?”

Doctor Nuri noted that the first day of quarantine had in fact been relatively successful. The only unsavory incident had been the arrest of the owner of the large hay barn that served the island’s coachmen; though regrettable as the whole episode had been, the man had left the authorities with little choice. Having spent several agonizing days howling in pain as he battled the plague, the hay dealer’s young apprentice had finally died, to the anguish of all those present, at which point the quarantine doctors had decided that it would not be sufficient to disinfect the haystacks, and that they would have to be burned instead. When the wagons that were supposed to carry the confiscated hay arrived, the owner of the barn had seen fit, in a moment of rage, to throw himself over his contaminated goods and bales of hay, and had attempted—with some success—to set himself on fire. He had subsequently been arrested for attacking the quarantine officers and trying to infect them with the disease.

But in the Governor’s view, the real problem lay in getting people to “submit” to quarantine measures. Sheikh Hamdullah’s brother Ramiz would be put on trial that same afternoon. “When Ramiz and his two murderous coconspirators are hanging from their necks in the State Hall Square, even the most unruly and impertinent will understand who really holds the reins of power on this island.”

“Gentlemen, none of us are consuls here, and we need not argue about whether the state treats all its subjects equally, Christians and Muslims alike!” said Quarantine Master Nikos. “But our charming island has never seen anybody hanged in its State Hall Square in warning, as they do sometimes in Europe, so although I am sure that it would prove an effective deterrent for misbehaving children, I am less sure that it would be of any benefit to quarantine operations.”

“It would be of no benefit at all, Your Excellency,” said Doctor Ilias, addressing the Governor. “Bonkowski Pasha always used to say that hanging, beating, or locking people up is never the way to secure a successful quarantine or to modernize and westernize a nation.”

“You are so scared you hardly leave the garrison anymore, and yet here you are defending the very people, these fanatics, who threaten you.”

“Ah, Pasha! If only I could be so sure that they were the ones threatening me!” said Doctor Ilias.

“I am sure. I am also sure that if anything were to happen to any of us, it would undoubtedly be the work of that Ramiz and his men.”

“If you are perceived as making unfounded accusations or perpetuating injustice of any kind, it will only encourage rebellion and disobedience among the populace!” said the Quarantine Master.

“It amazes me to see how many supporters this shameless, impertinent gangster seems to have gained just by virtue of his older brother being a sheikh,” said the Governor, glancing at the Major.

But the Major did not say a word. When the Doctor and Prince Consort found the Governor alone in his office an hour later, he immediately addressed the matter that had been weighing on his mind.

“As you are aware, His Excellency the Sultan did not just send me to the island to institute quarantine provisions, but to find Bonkowski Pasha’s killer too.”

“Of course.”

“Neither I nor the inquiry committee I head possess any evidence to suggest that Ramiz is the guilty party. In the time that passed between the moment Bonkowski Pasha walked out of the back door of the Telegraph Office to when his body was found in Hrisopolitissa Square, numerous witnesses saw Ramiz in the park behind the fishermen’s jetty, then at Barber Panagiotis’s (where he got a shave), and later with his friends in the garden of the clubhouse at the Levant Hotel.”

“You would not be in such a hurry to come to these conclusions if you stopped to think for a moment why a man like Ramiz, who is normally so rarely seen, should be at such pains to parade himself in the city’s best-known and most crowded areas precisely around the time that Bonkowski was killed,” said the Governor with a derisory smile. “You’ll see, when the gallows go up in the State Hall Square, nobody will dare take our quarantine lightly!”

CHAPTER 23

The Major always listened closely when the Governor mentioned Ramiz, but never said anything himself, lest he should reveal his own emotions. For under the effect of the stories his mother told him every time he came home, he had begun to develop an interest in Ramiz’s former fiancée, Zeynep. More than all his mother’s praise for the girl, the Major had been most impressed in those early days by how headstrong Zeynep seemed to be, and by the fact that she had broken off her engagement with Ramiz.

Zeynep’s father the prison guard had already negotiated a marriage settlement with Ramiz, promptly sharing some of the ensuing payment between his two sons, and arranged every detail surrounding the nuptials—down to preparations for the wedding party itself—when all of a sudden he had died of the plague, and within two days his daughter Zeynep had called the wedding off. There was a possibility now that the matter might escalate, for Ramiz was related (if not by blood) to Sheikh Hamdullah, head of the island’s most powerful religious sect and Ramiz’s stepbrother.

According to the Major’s mother, Zeynep might find a way out of the situation she was in by quickly marrying someone else and leaving the island altogether. The thought of this possibility and potential opportunity had entered the Major’s mother’s mind the moment she had seen her son, who had seemed to her—despite his good looks and officer’s rank—so lonely and dejected.

We too shall now devote a few pages of this book to what is perhaps the most controversial—and consequently also the most fondly remembered and most frequently embellished and misrepresented—romantic love story in the history of Mingheria. In doing so we shall attempt to separate the historical facts of the Major and Zeynep’s love from its romantic details. For the more romantic a historical account is, the less accurate it tends to be, and—unfortunately—the more accurate it is, the less romantic.

The varying interpretations of this love story rest on the possible reasons behind Zeynep’s decision to call off her wedding to Ramiz. The account the Major’s mother gave her son was that Zeynep had changed her mind about the wedding when she had discovered at the last moment that Ramiz already had another wife (some even said he had two) in Nebiler village in the north of the island. The Major really wanted to believe this explanation, but there were also those of a more polemical bent who claimed that Zeynep had known about this other wife from the start, and had been too afraid of her father and her brothers to oppose the match. When her father died, she had simply used something she had known all along as an excuse to break off the engagement. The real reason for her decision was that her father had bequeathed her bride price to his twin sons, Hadid and Mecid, but the two brothers had not shared any of it with their sister Zeynep. This had inflamed the young woman’s rage, and she had become obsessed with the idea of leaving the island and going to Istanbul (a place she had never even seen before). We should point out, at this juncture, that it was a sign of remarkable temerity for a seventeen-year-old Muslim girl from a provincial town to even dream, in 1901, of doing such a thing, and this too proved irresistibly alluring to the Major.

Those on Ramiz’s side, on the other hand, claimed that Ramiz and Zeynep had been madly in love but had been forced apart by Governor Sami Pasha for political reasons. The Governor Pasha’s objective was to humiliate Ramiz so as to show Sheikh Hamdullah who was really in charge, and—as one male historian has put it—to use the Major’s “charisma and authority” to strengthen his own political position.

Zeynep’s mother, Emine Hanım, and the Major’s mother lived in different neighborhoods, but had been friends for five years. Satiye Hanım had known Emine Hanım’s fetching daughter since she was just a twelve-year-old girl. Even back then she had already been beautiful, but would the Major like her, and would Zeynep warm to the Major? After all, they hadn’t even met each other yet.

But Zeynep and her family were still in mourning, and the threat of contagion loomed—if still somewhat vaguely—over the city; it was not perhaps the most appropriate moment to be discussing marriages and suitors again. Accordingly, the Major’s mother had determined that the best course of action was for her son to call upon the bereaved family for a belated condolence visit. Zeynep’s mother, Emine Hanım, believed that the only way for her daughter to salvage her own and her family’s honor was to flee the island. It had been her idea, even before Zeynep had thought of it, that her daughter might find a route to Istanbul by marrying the handsome, decorated army officer and hero of the Greek War sent to their island by the Sultan himself, and she was the one to sow the first seeds of doubt and possibility in her daughter’s mind.

But Ramiz really was madly in love with Zeynep, and the Major knew that, which was why he was feeling a little uneasy that day as he went, clad in his Ottoman officer’s uniform, to meet Zeynep. It was not the first time the Major had gone to see a girl at his mother’s suggestion. No sooner had her son graduated from the academy in Harbiye than Satiye Hanım had arranged a meeting with a girl whose family she referred to as “our relatives from the island” and who lived in a crumbling wooden house in the Vefa neighborhood. That girl had not been pretty. Hanging on one of the walls of her family home there had been a framed painting of the sea, something Kâmil had never come across in any house in Istanbul and which he would not forget for many years.

Zeynep’s family lived just past the Muslim cemetery in the western edge of the Bayırlar neighborhood. When he was a boy, children from this neighborhood would fight turf wars with the kids from the Arpara neighborhood, where the Major lived. They would use slingshots to fire stones and unripe figs at one another, and sometimes they would pick up sticks and fight at close quarters like soldiers in the trenches. Sometimes the kids from the two neighborhoods would join forces to form a united Muslim front and descend like raiders upon the Orthodox neighborhoods of Hora and Hagia Triada across the Arkaz Creek, stealing plums and cherries from the enemy’s gardens. In winter, when it became harder to ford the creek, everyone would retreat to their own streets and neighborhoods.

The Major watched a funeral convoy climbing up from the Bayırlar neighborhood toward the cemetery. It was a group of fifteen to twenty men, all walking in silence. Half of them wore fezzes and the other half were children; there was also a dog trailing behind them. Near the entrance to someone’s garden, a child wept quietly, looking mortified. The Major caught the guarded, fearful glances of people peering out at the street from behind their garden walls. But the fantasy of marrying a beautiful girl seemed to shield him from their fear.

Major Kâmil and his mother had come up with a simple plan, in accordance with which the Major would begin to walk up the hill as soon as the tinny bells of Hagia Triada Church rang for noon.

At the same moment, his mother—who would, by then, already be in Zeynep and her mother’s sitting room—would remark on “how terribly hot” it was, open the small bay window, call the girl and her mother over on some pretext, and show them her son walking along the street below the window. At that point she might even call out to the Major to come upstairs.

The Major had proudly convinced himself that he would not allow his heart to break even if he was rejected. He was wearing his uniform—which always had an effect on women—with its buttons polished to a shine, and his medals and badges were on display. But as he climbed the hill, he was astonished to feel his heart beating faster. There was his mother standing at the window where the sunlight shone. She saw her son and turned to speak to someone inside. The Major slowed his steps.

Just then the front door opened and the Major looked hopefully inside, thinking he was about to see beautiful Zeynep.