第 31 页

“It was only a bee, Zekeriya, but the rascal’s gone now; take us to the garrison!” said the Governor Pasha.

The carriage began its slow ascent up the narrow, stone-paved lane that connected Pebble Cove with the garrison. The horses’ shoes and the landau’s wheels clanged against the cobblestones made from rough-hewn Mingherian marble. This road, which led from the garrison down to the shore, had been built sixty years ago so that reinforcements sent to the island from Istanbul to help quash hypothetical nationalist guerrilla uprisings against the Ottoman Empire would be able to reach the garrison quicker and without having to go via the Castle, but so far it had never been used for that purpose. Lavish mansions and old manor houses were scattered across the verdant hillside. They gazed at green tree branches reaching out beyond the confines of their gardens, with tiny lizards scuttling up and down the length of the wood, they saw strange, thorny, pointed leaves, and they listened intently to the singing of impertinent parrots and the rare chirping of sweet-toned, bashful little birds. They filled their lungs with the moist, fine air that hung over the cool and shaded hill.

“Stop, Coachman, stop!” the Governor Pasha exclaimed as he looked out of his window at a lush, shadowy garden.

The carriage stopped, slipping slightly backward down the hill. As always, the Governor Pasha waited in his seat. Once the guard who sat beside Coachman Zekeriya had come down and opened the door for him, they looked to where the Governor was pointing and saw, peering out at them from between the hanging fronds of a willow tree, two dark-haired children in pale, faded clothes.

One of the children hurled a stone at them, while the other tried to hold him back, his gestures seeming to say, “Don’t do it!” The next moment they had run away, out of sight. They hadn’t made a single sound; it was as if they’d come out of a dream, and perhaps they were imaginary after all.

The Governor told the guards to run after the children. “That house must have been robbed and looted after it was left empty!” he said once they were back inside the carriage. “They’ll soon be coming here from outside the city and from the villages too, you know. Truth be told, there are so many of these criminals and lowlifes around that it is an impossible task to monitor and discipline them all!”

“If Doctor Ilias were here, he would tell us what Bonkowski Pasha would have had to say on the matter.”

“Don’t you think Doctor Ilias is a little too afraid?”

Garrison Commander Mehmet Pasha had organized a small welcome for the guests attending the swearing-in ceremony. A group of forty men selected from among the Arab soldiers of the Fifth Army paraded for the Governor Pasha, saluting him as they marched past. Then the Governor spoke to Sergeant Sadri, commander of the artillery unit that had fired twenty-five blank shells last year to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Abdul Hamid’s ascension to the throne. “I’ve got enough gunpowder to fire a hundred more shots if we need them!” the Sergeant boasted to the Governor. Afterward they sat down to a meal the garrison Commander had especially arranged. The latest issue of the municipality’s newspaper the Arkata Times was on the table, as well as those of the still-circulating Island Star, Neo Nisi, and Adekatos Arkadi. Doctor Ilias was there too, wearing a petrol-green frock coat.

“We missed your analysis while we were studying the map this morning!” the Governor told him. “The death rate is rising, and all the Muslim neighborhoods and half the Greek ones are infected. Is it prudent to be eating these things?”

Doctor Ilias’s eyes followed a soldier who brought an enormous bowl of black fruits picked from the grand old mulberry tree that grew on the grounds of the garrison. Next to the berries was a freshly baked tray of Mingheria’s famous walnut-and-rose biscuits.

“Trust me, Pasha, there’s nothing to worry about,” Doctor Ilias replied cheerily. “I’ll have a taste first before you do. I don’t know about the mulberries, but the biscuits have just come out of the oven.”

There was a sudden clamor. In the same moment a bay horse galloped past them, bit between its teeth. Two soldiers who were running after the horse and had been preparing for the swearing-in ceremony stopped when they saw the Governor and the other dignitaries at the table and gave an unpracticed, embarrassed salute. The Governor, who had grown restless in the heat, stood up to see where the horse was going. He spotted nearby the soldiers of the Major’s new Quarantine Regiment getting ready to be sworn in, and gladdened by the sight, he walked toward them without waiting for the coffee to arrive. Various guards, municipal clerks, and officers who had come for the ceremony followed behind him.

Over the last two days the Major had recruited another seventeen soldiers to his quarantine unit. His primary “adviser” in the selection of these recruits had been Hamdi Baba. Nobody knew how old the bearded and mustachioed Hamdi Baba was. Having completed his period of compulsory military service, he had decided to stay in the army, and despite being hardly able to read and write, he had risen to the middle ranks of the Ottoman army and fought in numerous battles. Being of Mingherian origins, Hamdi Baba had eventually been deployed to the island and managed to stay there ever since. From Arabs to Greeks, from Mingherian-speaking native islanders to Turkish-speaking families and civil servants, Hamdi Baba knew the most proper way to address them all and could charm and cajole anyone into doing anything.

The Governor watched solemnly as Hamdi Baba led his men through elaborate drills and lined them up in rows of four. Hamdi Baba had found his first “volunteers” for this unit, whose recruits were paid upfront, among his acquaintances in the Bayırlar and Gülerenler neighborhoods where he’d grown up—people he loved and that he could trust. As many historians of Mingheria have noted, this meant that the quarantine unit was effectively enlisted from among those who spoke Mingherian in their homes. But contrary to the general misconception, this decision was not one initially made by the Major.

For three days now the Major had been coming to the garrison in the afternoons to “train” the new soldiers. But more than advancing their military training, he was teaching them to observe quarantine rules, to be magnanimous, to always wear their protective gear, to make sure they disinfected themselves, and to listen to what the doctors said, though ultimately they must of course always defer to their commander. Doctor Nuri had attended one of these sessions once, where he had been introduced to the soldiers and later accompanied them and the Major on an expedition to the neighborhoods of Kadirler and Upper Turunçlar. There they had successfully deterred two different households that had come out in open defiance of the new rules and cordons. They had also managed, through a combination of gentle reasoning and veiled threats about “the Sultan’s orders,” to suppress a minor revolt instigated by a young man who was insisting on being buried with his wife, who had died while pregnant.

The Governor thought that the Major had chosen his “quarantine troops” expertly and trained them well in the little time he’d had at his disposal. These new soldiers understood the character of the streets that had been most blighted by the plague and knew, of any given person who lived there, if they would turn out to be hostile and whether they were more or less inclined to follow instructions. It was mostly thanks to their efforts that some of the island’s Muslim population (though admittedly still a minuscule number), and particularly those among them who could not read or write, had been persuaded over the past two days to begin following quarantine protocols. Whenever a new case was reported by a quarantine officer overseeing a particular neighborhood or by one of the municipality’s ubiquitous informants, the first to arrive on the scene was always Hamdi Baba. People were likelier to submit to the rules when confronted with a man who wore a soldier’s uniform but styled his beard like they did and spoke their language too.

Thus heartened to see how adeptly the Major’s soldiers and this ceremony had been organized in just five days, the Governor Pasha was moved to deliver a personal address to the troops. The Ottoman army, he said, was the sword of Islam, but this time, the sword would not be used to behead infidels, but for the far-holier and more humane purpose of cutting the plague demon into pieces.

The sky above was blue and flecked with thick white clouds. The Governor Pasha was just in the middle of reminding the soldiers that they must be careful not to fall ill themselves, and of how lucky they were to be serving under such a brilliant commander, when the Chief Scrutineer came up to him and unceremoniously whispered into his ear. Everyone understood at once that the matter must be serious if it warranted interrupting Governor Sami Pasha and collectively held their breaths.

“Doctor Ilias has been taken ill, Your Excellency,” Mazhar Effendi had whispered to the Governor.

If the outbreak had reached the garrison, it would no longer be possible to contain it. The Governor wanted to finish his speech, though much of his mind was now occupied with considering the ramifications of this latest development. Doctor Ilias might have caught the disease at the hospital down in the city and brought it here with him; it had been a mistake to put him in the garrison. But it also occurred to the Governor, with a strange twinge of guilt, that he might have brought the plague himself in his landau. He continued with his speech anyway, explaining to the recruits watching him exactly why there could be no greater fortune or happiness in life than to serve as a soldier in the army of His Highness the Sultan, pillar of the world. But at the same time he was thinking to himself, “Doctor Ilias can’t have died of the plague, can he? For wasn’t he standing right here behind me only a minute ago?”

CHAPTER 28

A few moments earlier, Doctor Ilias had been observing proceedings with a benevolent smile and the feeling of security that came with being inside the garrison and among the scattered crowd standing behind the Governor. At the same time he had been nibbling on a warm Mingherian biscuit he had surreptitiously tucked into his pocket. Now he was just a hundred meters away, lying on his bed in the garrison guesthouse, writhing in unbearable agony. The pain in his stomach was so piercing that he thought he was going to faint, and yet he couldn’t faint. At first he had tried with all his strength to resist the nausea, for he had been looking forward to watching the Governor’s inspection of the troops, but moments after scrambling back to his room and throwing himself onto the camp bed therein, he had begun to vomit uncontrollably. He felt as if it wasn’t him but someone else who was throwing up. Soon everything he had eaten for breakfast that morning had come back out in white and yellow chunks.

Then the diarrhea began, sharp as a corkscrew. He walked out into the high-ceilinged corridor in search of a toilet. On his way back, he nearly fell over, dazed with pain. A soldier spotted him and helped him to his room. Soon a small crowd had gathered at his door. Doctor Ilias thought that they would see him now as the person who had brought the plague, the devil among them, and even he wasn’t sure what sickness it was that ailed him.

When the tremors started, he began to imagine he was falling into a well. The garrison doctor was trying to unbutton Doctor Ilias’s shirt, taking care to touch it only around the edges. Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri, who had meanwhile rushed over to the guesthouse, noticed that Doctor Ilias’s face had taken on a cold, bluish hue and wondered if this might not be the plague at all but something else altogether. The patient was shaking, vomiting continuously, and seemed to be approaching a state of delirium, but with the plague, these symptoms tended to appear at a later stage of the illness. Doctor Nuri checked for buboes on the neck and armpits. But he was unable to look inside the patient’s malodorous mouth, for Doctor Ilias would not stop vomiting. The plague could easily spread through particles suspended in the air.

The patient tried to say something, but his mouth couldn’t seem to produce proper words, and all that came out was a series of peculiar noises. Doctor Nuri stared into his stricken eyes, willing him to speak. Then Doctor Ilias took a piece of biscuit out of his pocket, and suddenly everything fell into place.

Doctor Nuri bolted out of the room and ran toward the table that had been laid out for the ceremony.

The army officers, the municipal clerks, and the garrison Commander were about to sit back down. For the Governor Pasha, having swiftly decided that the news of the plague reaching the garrison must be kept secret, had ordered everyone in his firmest voice to not do anything rash, and to return to the table where they had been sitting earlier. In the meantime, the Major had led his soldiers away. The Governor had sat down first, to set an example. The others had joined him too now, if somewhat disconcertedly. One of the experienced soldiers who worked in the kitchens brought out a beaked coffee jug made of brass and began pouring out cups of richly aromatic coffee, serving the Governor first, then everybody else, and the garrison Commander’s aide-de-camp bit into a walnut-and-rose-flavored biscuit.

“Stop! It’s poisoned!” Doctor Nuri called out in that very moment. “Don’t eat or drink a thing. The coffee and the biscuits are poisoned!” he said, trying to catch his breath.

Tests would later show that the coffee itself was of the finest Yemeni kind, and the water had been sourced from the island’s own Pınarlar spring just north of Arkaz, and that it was, therefore, perfectly clean.

As for the walnut-and-rose biscuits, it was decided there and then that they must have been laced with arsenic, which was often used in rat poison, and was known colloquially as ratsbane. In 1901, there was of course no laboratory in this distant province of the Ottoman Empire equipped to test a person’s blood or their gastric juices for signs of arsenic poisoning, but over the past fifty years many on the island had perished under the effects of rat poison, and these old ancestral methods were as vividly familiar to people as their own most private memories could be.

The Chief Scrutineer and Doctor Nikos watched garrison Commander Mehmet Pasha’s aide-de-camp throw one of the biscuits at a short-tempered shepherd dog chained to an oak tree just past the guesthouse, and within a few minutes the dog was dead.

Gripped now by a strange fury and fear of death, and having thus dispatched the rowdy, unruly dog he had long been wondering how to get rid of, garrison Commander Mehmet Pasha proceeded to feed another biscuit to the same bay horse that had taken the bit between its teeth earlier and apparently nearly caused a soldier’s death, but as the creature’s front legs buckled beneath its weight, and as it twisted and writhed on the ground in the throes of death, the Commander couldn’t bring himself to watch, and fled the scene. We should clarify for our readers that the garrison Commander’s actions were not motivated by any particular hostility toward animals (though it could not be said that he was a friend to them either), but rather by the need to measure the severity of this plot to poison the entire upper echelons of Mingheria’s governing classes. Half the flour in the Mingherian biscuits had been replaced with ratsbane. This substance, which indeed closely resembled flour, could be found in some herbalists’ shops sold out of sacks like those used for flour and was a scentless poison whose taste was almost impossible to detect—just like flour.