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The representatives of the major shipping companies all held seats on the Quarantine Committee through their role as consuls, and by engineering—supposedly on humane considerations—for quarantine to begin a day later, they had secured precious additional hours in which to schedule more ferries and make more money. The agents of the Messageries Maritimes, Lloyd, Hidiviye, the Russian Steam Navigation Company, and every other ferry service that operated on the island had sent telegrams to all nearby ports requesting additional vessels for those who wished to leave the island, and in many cases they had begun selling tickets for these services before they’d even received a response to confirm they could be arranged. In truth no ferry company wanted its ships to be quarantined on a plague-infested island and have its name associated in the newspapers with that kind of story.

Some families had decided to wait at home for their ships to arrive. Others had camped out at the port and refused to budge. Two Greek Orthodox families had been so sure of the tickets they had bought for the ferry that would take them to their relatives in Thessaloniki that they had closed down their respective homes in Flizvos and Ora and loaded every household item and piece of furniture they would need for the summer, as well as mattresses, curtains, and several sacks of walnuts, onto a cart bound for the docks, and when they had later learned that the ferry they were supposed to take had been “delayed,” they had decided to wait in the new park the Governor had opened next to the Customhouse rather than go back to their closed-up homes.

Others were queuing up with their trunks and suitcases where the boatmen who carried passengers out to anchored ships had set up their booths. Porters and boat crews angling for tips compounded these people’s agitation with all sorts of blithe assurances that any minute now the ships that had been sent to ferry customers off the island would come into view from behind the Castle. Some waited in the cafés that lined the wharf; others kept thinking of the homes they were leaving behind, sending the maidservant back to fetch a teapot they might have forgotten to pack. Amid all this confusion, a few people were still foolishly doing the rounds of the travel agencies in search of a ticket. Others despairingly bought tickets from every company there was, just to be on the safe side.

But apart from wealthy, educated Greeks, the overwhelming majority of the island’s population made no attempt to leave. Most Muslims were staying—even the few among them who understood how contagious the plague could be. Would it be fair to look back upon their behavior today, one hundred and sixteen years after the fact, and explain it as a function of factors such as poverty, lack of opportunity, indifference, fatalism, recklessness, religion, and culture? It is not the purpose of this book to try to “interpret” this peculiar phenomenon, but it must be said that the few Muslims who did leave the island during this time were those who happened to have jobs, homes, and families to go to in Istanbul and Smyrna. One of the main reasons why so many people stayed on the island is that they were not expecting and could not even imagine the horrors that they were about to face and that we will faithfully describe in this book. Their failure to foresee the disaster that would soon befall them ensured, in turn, the inevitability of that same disaster, and caused history to take the turn it did.

The landau passed through the narrow lanes of the Old Market, where they saw that the junk dealers and fruit sellers had dismantled their stalls. In the Tatlısu neighborhood, children were still playing outside at dusk; in the alleyway behind the Bektaşi lodge, the smell of linden trees mixed with the stench of carrion; out on the streets, the patrols that had been created by special order of the Governor to protect vacant homes from looters were already doing their rounds; and as the landau passed the Greek Middle School on its way down to the wharf, the Major told the Governor that he had begun to arm the Quarantine Regiment. There was much to do still, but the Governor felt he ought to pay a visit to the garrison anyway, to inspect the Major’s recruits firsthand and show his wholehearted support for this newly formed division.

It was still possible to convince oneself that this was as bad as things were likely to get, that this outbreak too, like every outbreak before it, would eventually fade away, and that one could get through it all unscathed by hiding out in some quiet, private corner, and avoid going out for a while.

We know from several published memoirs from this era that a number of people who fled Arkaz despite not having any homes, friends, or acquaintances to go to in the island’s rural regions were quickly driven away by locals who accused them of having the plague, and ended up—along with a few others who hadn’t even attempted to seek refuge in the villages—living on hills and mountains and in forests, a little like Robinson Crusoe.

Of the ferries scheduled for that evening, only the Baghdad arrived on time, and took on board one thousand two hundred and fifty passengers—exactly two and a half times its capacity of five hundred. None of the next five ships that had been previously announced turned up at the expected time, though supposedly they were on their way. Meanwhile, an unidentified vessel had approached the port, dropping anchor at some distance from the shore. The Governor instructed the landau to turn onto Hamidiye Avenue and stop at the corner of the square. He peered through the small carriage window, trying to follow the action at the docks. A heavily loaded rowboat was making its way swiftly toward the anchored ship, loaded with passengers and luggage. The crowds on the shore were shouting and jeering. The boatmen ignored the spectators’ protests and slowed their oars down to stop just past the Arab Lighthouse, where the boat, swaying in the waves, began to wait. Shortly thereafter, a carriage loaded with trunks, baskets, and suitcases hurtled from the direction of the Castle toward the port carrying various hat-clad members of a Greek Orthodox family with their many children (girls and boys), servants, and maids in tow, all of whom moved with such leisurely calm upon disembarking from the carriage that one might think they had only just found out that there was a plague on the island. An approaching siphon-man sprayed disinfectant all over them. Soon a row broke out, with coachmen and porters also involved.

“Doctor Ilias has been very insistent about his wish to leave the island,” said the Governor, his eyes still fixed on what he could see through the window. “He cannot seem to accept that the peril we face goes far beyond securing ferry tickets or managing quarantines. His Supreme Highness wants him to stay, of course. But Doctor Ilias is too afraid to even step out of the garrison. We must make sure to give him some encouragement at your men’s swearing-in ceremony tomorrow morning.”

“We are still a little short on numbers and equipment, so we might not be quite ready for an inspection yet,” said the Major sheepishly. The swearing-in ceremony—to which he himself had invited the Governor—had been his idea; he had thought it might help to motivate the inexperienced Quarantine Regiment.

“Didn’t I send you Sergeant Hamdi Baba yesterday?” the Governor replied. “That man alone is worth a whole army.”

The landau turned toward the city’s almost wholly deserted backstreets and threaded its way through narrow sloping alleyways. In some streets there was not a single person in sight, and in two others they spotted two fresh rat corpses, one at the foot of a garden wall, and the other lying in the middle of the dusty road. How had they been overlooked by the same children who were usually so efficient in gathering and selling to the municipal government all the rats that died from eating poisoned bait?

“How would you explain this?” the Governor asked Doctor Nuri.

“If the rats and the plague return with a renewed vigor, then who knows what could happen!”

They made their way through the empty streets back to the State Hall. The uproar in the port continued until midnight. Doctor Nuri and Princess Pakize could easily hear from their guesthouse, as could the Governor from his office, the scuffles that broke out every time a rowboat set off from the shore toward one of the last ferries, and the shouting and swearing among the boatmen. When the Lloyd ferry failed to materialize, a group of furious ticketholders marched over to the company’s offices to shout at the clerks who worked there and demand an explanation. The gendarmes eventually intervened, after one of the Lloyd’s employees was beaten up and his new spectacles from the Essel store in Thessaloniki were broken.

There was also a disturbance at the ticket stall for Messageries Maritimes, whose ferries were the island’s most regular visitors, and whose orange-and-red booth displayed black-and-white photographs of distant exotic realms all over its walls. The agency’s owner, Monsieur Andon, an ambitious tradesman who belonged to one of Arkaz’s oldest Greek families and was also the island’s French consul, arrived on the scene and bravely addressed the angry, restless mob. What he told them, in French, was something along the lines of: “The ship is on its way; it’s the Governor’s Office that won’t let it dock!”

It is difficult to describe here the emotional collapse some of these families experienced that evening, having spent the past two days making plans to flee to Crete, Thessaloniki, Smyrna, or Istanbul with their trunks and boxes. Nobody wanted to go back in the middle of the night to homes whose doors they’d locked up and whose windows they’d nailed shut the day before. To make matters worse, having assumed they would be leaving the island, they had not made any of the preparations other people had made, such as filling their kitchens as well as their linen closets and any other storage areas the rats couldn’t reach with biscuits, dried noodles, pasta, cured trout, and salted sardines.

For the island’s illiterate poor, these were comparatively calmer days, for they were either oblivious to what was happening or had not yet experienced fear and the presence of death with sufficient intensity. Let no one criticize us, then, for devoting so much attention to the island’s wealthier families who owned most of its land and property (and many of whom usually left their Mingherian possessions in the care of a housekeeper and spent most of the year living in Istanbul or Smyrna). Of the families that had been left with no other choice after the events at the port that evening but to trudge dolefully back to their homes in the early morning, the argumentative Pangirises and the Sifiropoulouses had lost most of their members to the disease, and there had been several deaths among the Cypriot Faroses too.

As the night wore on, the allegation that the Governor was not allowing the additional ferries for which tickets had been sold to enter the harbor transformed into a rumor that quarantine measures would be postponed by a day so that the delayed ships could dock. Around this time, a quiet, unassuming man who had been standing on his own watching what went on, and whose lack of any trunks or baskets, a ticket, or any clothes appropriate for travel suggested that he was unlikely to be a passenger, had caused a small commotion when, having sat on the ground in a spot between the Customhouse and the area where carriages waited, he had nearly fainted from the effects of a headache. The lantern lights were dim, and it was hard to see properly. The siphon-men who had been wandering among the throngs rushed to the sick man’s aid, and the crowd briefly dispersed. Others thought that the man who had brought the plague to the city and scattered dead rats around at night must have finally been caught, and rushed over to watch the lynching.

When he heard that a small group had gathered at the Austral Coffeehouse on Istanbul Street to draft a petition demanding that the quarantine be pushed back until the last ships had arrived, after which they planned to go around collecting signatures in the middle of the night from the heads of the island’s leading families, the owners of its travel agencies, its consuls, and ultimately anyone who was hoping to leave the island, before finally marching to the Governor’s Residence to deliver the petition to the Governor himself or perhaps even to the Doctor and Prince Consort, the Governor had dispatched a group of siphon-men to the café to disperse the meeting with a pungent dose of Lysol. The enterprising young man who had acted as the group’s ringleader was later arrested, along with his uncle, and thrown into the Castle dungeons.

Around eleven o’clock, as the ferment in the port—influenced in part by this incident—continued to intensify, something happened that raised everybody’s spirits: the Persepolis, the last ferry which the Messageries Maritimes had been officially authorized to send to the island, came into view in the waters off of the Castle. It wasn’t possible to see the ship clearly from the port, but the quivering light of its lamps was just about visible if one looked hard enough. Everyone ran to fetch their boxes, their trunks, and their families. Before long the first of Foreman Lazar’s rowboats had set off toward the ship, loaded with passengers and their belongings. Whoever else wanted to escape the island then charged toward the second boat, leading to struggles and scraps between those who were particularly vociferous and insistent in their efforts and the customs officers, policemen, and siphon-men who were present on the scene. But soon, Foreman Lazar’s second boat was also gone, swallowed into the darkness.

It was a moment of petrifying loneliness. Everyone at the docks—we estimate around five hundred people in total—understood with piercing clarity that the last ferry would soon be gone, and that they had been left behind, alone with the plague. Some families, having come to believe the rumors they themselves had concocted, waited until dawn for more ships to arrive. Others waited because they thought it would be too difficult to go back home in the middle of the night. But most people loaded their belongings onto wagons and quietly returned home, and if there was no carriage available, they walked instead. (Strangely, nobody that night seemed to encounter the man with the sack who was said to throw rats around and spread the plague across the city.) It was a cold, shivery night, for the start of May. The wind whistled through the city’s empty homes.

CHAPTER 27

As it sailed away from the island after midnight, the Messageries Maritimes Persepolis blew its horn twice, producing a mournful, muffled sound that echoed against Mingheria’s rocky peaks. The Governor Pasha was still in his office, meeting with the Chief Prison Warden and the Chief Scrutineer to discuss in greater detail how the death sentences that had been issued against the gang of murderers should be carried out. He was still hesitant about hanging Ramiz, as executing him without waiting for Istanbul’s explicit authorization could easily lead to even-greater political complications. The warden and the Chief Scrutineer reminded him that the man who had agreed to carry out all three executions, Tuzla neighborhood’s resident burglar Şakir, might not be entirely trustworthy, was always drunk, would perhaps not even show up at the prison at the appointed time, and was even demanding to be paid for his services upfront.