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“So summon him to the Castle tomorrow and lock him up before it gets dark!” said the Pasha. “You can give him his wine after midnight. Which shop does he buy it from anyway?” It was in that moment that they heard the whistle of the Persepolis, and all three walked up to the wide window overlooking the port. Though its lights were only faintly visible, everyone could see that the ship was sailing away from the island and feel the fateful significance of that moment.

“So it is just us and the plague now!” said Governor Sami Pasha. “We had better continue tomorrow morning.”

To those present at this meeting, the Governor’s sudden decision to adjourn to the next day did not come as a surprise, so they quickly put the matter in question out of their minds, as they knew the Governor would want them to do, and locked the door of his office behind them, making sure to leave the gas lamp on inside. In times of crisis the Governor liked to think that if the lamps inside the State Hall and his own office burned until the morning, people looking up at the building’s windows would be left with the impression that the state never slept, and any assassin planning an attempt on the Governor’s life would never be able to find him.

When they heard the Persepolis blow its horn, Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri, like many others who were on the island that night but had not gone down to the port, went to the windows of their guesthouse bedroom to look outside, but while so many others contemplated the same view with the fear of death in their minds, a feeling of abandonment, and an odd sensation of regret, the couple’s emotions took a rather more romantic turn. Everywhere was dark; only the Castle was visible. To Princess Pakize, the vision of the lights of the Persepolis gliding away into the velvet night seemed a sign that she and her husband were truly alone for the first time. Doctor Nuri did not consider himself a potentially “infected” person, for like all doctors he was constantly washing his hands, neck, and arms with disinfectant. It is with a historian’s eye for accuracy, then, that we shall note now that the couple joyfully made love that night.

Doctor Nuri woke up before dawn. As he got dressed, he watched his sweetly sleeping wife and at the same time kept thinking that the rumors must be true, that the Governor Pasha must be planning to do what governors usually did in emergencies, and execute Ramiz and his two henchmen without waiting for approval from the high court in Istanbul.

He walked down the stairs followed by the respectful glances of the guards on night shift and made instinctively for the inner courtyard; most executions were carried out in the inner courtyards of government buildings. But there was nobody there. The overgrown sheepdog that was always tethered to the railings on the kitchen windows, and barked relentlessly every night, had vanished at the start of the plague outbreak.

In the darkness, there was not even a single shadow to be seen. He walked past the columns of the domed gallery and felt like a ghost. As he slowly circled the square, he kept thinking that any moment now he would run into someone, but the night was like a dark, two-dimensional room; no matter how many steps he took, he could not find his way out of that black box, but sometimes the shadow of a tree or a faded color would drift silently past him. He passed the quarantine notices and the shuttered shops, then turned into an alleyway and walked in the dark for a long time across the never-ending streets of the plague-ridden city.

He was greeted in every neighborhood by a different pack of dogs howling frenetically as he neared the center of their territories, but none of them ever came close enough for him to hear their panting or their low growls. Sometimes when he entered a narrow street or walked down a sloping road he would smell the scent of seaweed coming from the shore and hear the squawking of seagulls, then instinctively take a right turn and find himself climbing up another slope, surrounded this time by the scent of roses. He heard a man and a woman giggling and whispering to each other in Greek inside a garden; he listened to an owl hooting persistently at unseen clouds, and later he found he could no longer even hear the sound of his own footsteps. What street was this with sand scattered all over the ground? He walked down a stairway and passed the Hotel Mingher, then got lost again. When the shuttered windows of a dark stone house appeared before him, he realized that he was not walking on a street, but inside someone’s garden. He followed the sound of frogs in the distance, their croaking like the ripple of a waterfall, and as he approached them the frogs hopped one by one into the water, though in the darkness he could discern neither the gleam nor the coolness of the pond.

At one point he thought he heard a burglar and backed away into a corner, but he couldn’t see anyone in the darkness that cloaked the world like a heavy, coal-black fog. He walked up a hill he thought would lead him back toward the State Hall Square, but soon realized he was moving farther away, and it took him longer than he expected to return to his wife’s side.

When morning finally came, Doctor Nuri told his wife about how he had gone out in the night to the State Hall Square because he had been worried about the executions.

“My uncle prefers it when his exiled enemies are executed by his loyal and efficient governors of their own initiative and volition. He would never issue a death sentence himself, especially not against a Muslim; he is far too cunning and cautious for that.”

Princess Pakize listened to her husband’s account of his metaphysical experience of getting lost in the dark streets of Arkaz, and later that day she sat down at her desk to begin writing it all down word by word upon a fresh sheet of paper, under the heading “Nights of Plague.” Earlier, they had spoken about how this new letter would not reach her sister Hatice in Istanbul anytime soon, since the last ship off the island had already left the port. “I cannot explain why, but I have this yearning to describe it all in even-greater detail,” said Princess Pakize now. “Please, tell me everything you saw!”

Afterward, as a clerk used a green pen to mark the epidemiology map with the locations where yesterday’s eight victims had died, the Governor told the Doctor and Prince Consort that it would be just the two of them that morning, as Doctor Ilias and the Major had remained at the garrison for the swearing-in ceremony. Having then expressed his great admiration for the Major’s diligence, competence, and discipline, the Governor added that it would be very good for the island if the Major married Zeynep.

The Governor knew every one of the eight people who had died the day before. A clerk at the Department of Charitable Trusts who had announced as soon as the outbreak had started that he would be returning to his village had, in fact, not gone anywhere at all, but shut himself and his family up in their villa in the Çite neighborhood. The house had since been vacated and disinfected after two people had died there yesterday. A farrier who lived in the Stone Quarry neighborhood, and the Turunçlar neighborhood’s popular, loquacious barber, Zaim, had both died in their homes without even making it to the hospital. The Governor had also been informed of the deaths of an old farmer who had been brought to the Hamidiye Hospital yesterday, an elderly mother who had wept for her children as she died, a victim who had been found in the morning lying in the garden of the Theodoropoulos Hospital, and a Greek waiter who worked at the Petalis restaurant. The waiter’s demise had reignited the debate among the island’s doctors on whether the plague could be passed on through food. Banning the sale of watermelons and cantaloupes, as well as other fruits and vegetables, was usually a precaution taken against the spread of cholera.

“Doctor Ilias always says—like our dearly departed Bonkowski Pasha used to—that the plague does not spread through food,” said Doctor Nuri. “We can ask him again when we see him at the garrison later.”

“How would you assess the current situation on the island?” said the Governor.

“It is still too early to see the results of quarantine provisions.”

“It had better be!” said the Governor. “Otherwise we would already have had to conclude that they are of no use at all.”

“Your Excellency, quarantine provisions are usually rendered ineffective by the same people who refuse to take them seriously. And in the end, those people die too.”

“Well said!” exclaimed the Governor Pasha in a burst of inspiration. “But we will not die! I keep hearing that the Major’s Quarantine Regiment is exceptionally capable and determined, a force to be reckoned with.”

As they boarded the landau, the Governor Pasha told Coachman Zekeriya not to take the hilly road through Kofunya, but to go instead by the slower route along the shore. They passed Saint Anthony’s Church, followed the wall that abutted Marika’s back garden and her chicken coops (how lovely to see her shutters wide open now!), and meandered at a leisurely pace all the way down to the coast. Beyond the clatter of horses’ hooves, the creaking of the landau’s wheels, and Zekeriya’s voice calling “Brrrr” as he pulled on the bridles so that the carriage would not go too fast down the hill, there was not a single sound to be heard. The Governor realized that they couldn’t even hear the seagulls and the crows. The silence seemed to have even dimmed the color of the sea, which they could glimpse in the gaps between the seaside hotels and tavernas.

“Everyone went away with that last Maritimes ship, and now there’s no one left!” said the Governor with a childlike sorrow. An expression of wide-eyed innocence came over his face; Doctor Nuri found it endearing.

Once it had passed the row of hotels and restaurants, the landau continued on its way, following the steep cliff to the right-hand side of the road. How close and how white the sea looked below them now! This route, which went down and back up and then down again as it turned and twisted northward along the coast where the Ora neighborhood met the sea, was one of the Governor Pasha’s favorites. Tracing the edge of every cove, and lined with palm trees on either side, it would always fill the Pasha with a sense of peace. He liked the smell of roses wafting from the rose gardens of the rich, the new beach resort and its cabins with their white-and-blue-striped umbrellas, the little dock, and the rose farms. Lately the island’s newest rich had been moving here; the Governor had kept close watch on the construction of their homes.

“When I first arrived here, I told the senior members of the island’s oldest Muslim families and all the wealthy Muslims who live near Hamidiye Square over and over again: ‘Do what the Greeks are doing, start from the Kadirler neighborhood and build your way north with villas and palaces and mansions and move your families there, for it is the future of this city to grow northward along its two shores!’ Maybe it is because I told them to ‘Do what the Greeks are doing’ that they chose not to listen. It turns out these patriarchs, these doddering grandfathers who pray five times a day, wanted nothing more than to live somewhere close to the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque or to one of the other historic mosques! So the areas around the Old Stone Jetty, the stone merchants’ offices, and their workers’ dormitories remained empty and were, for a time, the domain of wastrels and spiders. Then the migrants from Crete arrived and settled there. I must confess I was initially in favor of having these impoverished refugees, these idle, unemployed youths going to live there—in fact I encouraged it. Not only would they find shelter there; they might also bring new life to the neighborhood. But all they did was loaf around, make mischief, and plot revenge against the Greeks. If we used the plague now as an excuse to drive them all out of there, that would mean burning the whole neighborhood down. But we can’t even do that, because the stone merchants’ offices were all built out of the best Mingherian stone, and they would never catch fire. But listen to me, talking about burning things! To think that I had started off wanting to tell you about the island’s idyllic seaside road …”

Once they had passed the empty beach, the road sloped uphill again. To their left was the Flizvos neighborhood, home to many wealthy Greek families whose immaculate mansions the Governor Pasha had always regarded with respectful, even admiring, approval. With their overhanging roofs, spired towers, and panoramic sitting rooms (all influenced by the architecture of the Castle) facing the empty, boundless waters of the Levant, the view from these homes of the morning sun rising from the sea was truly a spectacle to behold. The Governor Pasha knew some of these wealthy, westernized families personally and had occasionally been invited to the receptions they held in their palatial homes. He had even turned a blind eye to the gambling that took place at their members’ club, the Circle du Levant, which the Governor had helped them set up and which Muslims never frequented (except by special invitation), but when he had found out that the games of tombola and the raffles that the club organized around Christmas were being used to raise money for the outlaw Pavlo, who was known to raid Muslim villages, or for the Greek nationalists locked up in the Castle dungeons, the Governor had arrested the foppish dandy who organized the club’s fundraising activities, and whose father owned the Bazaar du Île, under the pretense that his family’s shop was selling contraband goods, put him in the prison’s worst cell, and terrorized him for a couple of days with the screams of other inmates being tortured. That was how the Circle du Levant stopped supporting anarchist insurrectionists through games of tombola—without the club ever needing to be shut down or a single diplomatic telegram having to be sent. Chief Scrutineer Mazhar Bey was very adept at silencing these kinds of troublemakers without provoking political scandal.

As their carriage followed the curve of the bays that dotted the shore of the elegant Dantela neighborhood, the Governor Pasha looked up toward the garrison at a little white house on top of a hill and surrounded by fields. Once he’d relinquished all his duties—that is to say, once Abdul Hamid had removed him from his post—the Governor did not intend to return to Istanbul, but to settle here, where he could spend his life cultivating Mingherian roses and befriending the Greek fishermen who moored in the bay below.

Outside the window of the landau, the line of the horizon had disappeared into the misty sea, and to the Governor it seemed as if the island had come undone from the rest of the world and was now entirely alone in the firmament. The silence and the sunlight evoked a strange feeling of loneliness and insignificance. Through the open window on the right-hand side, whose leather sunshade Doctor Nuri had pulled down against the heat, a noisy, irascible bee flew in, growing even more incensed when it banged into the opposite window, and flustering the two men. The bee finally escaped from the same window it had come through in the first place, but in the meantime the passengers had made such a ruckus that Coachman Zekeriya had grown concerned and slowed the horses down.