第 38 页

The most famous of these new lunatics wandering around the city’s neighborhoods was Ekrem from Erin. Said to have been educated at a religious institution in Istanbul, this man was a clerk at the Department of Charitable Trusts, and before the outbreak had started, everything about him had been entirely ordinary and unremarkable except for his love of books. But when his two wives with whom he had been so happily married had both suddenly died, he had thrown himself into reading the Koran and immediately concluded that the “apocalypse” was upon them all.

When Ekrem Effendi saw the Major in his army uniform with his medals and badges, he stopped abruptly in the middle of the road as he always did and began, with a series of theatrical gestures, to recite the Resurrection surah, the chapter of the Koran which described Judgment Day. His voice was deep, even guttural at times, sincere, and a little tearful. The Major stood in front of this tall man with a dark frock coat and purple fez and politely listened. When the lunatic reached the sixth verse of the surah and asked, “Yasalu ayyana yawmu al-qiyamah?” (When is this day of judgment?), the look he gave the Major was like a threat. When sight is dazzled, when the moon darkens, and the sun and the moon are joined, that is the day of judgment! Then the madman stretched one long arm and finger toward a point in the heavens. The Major couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary in the spot that Ekrem Effendi was showing him; only a limpid, immaculate Mingherian sky. But he pretended that he could, for he did not wish to quarrel.

The lunatic clerk then recited several other verses to the effect that there was no refuge beyond Allah. These were the same verses that preachers and holy men would inevitably cite whenever any outbreak grew large enough, so all Muslim doctors and quarantine officials were perfectly familiar with the words, always gave them their full and respectful attention, and made sure to demonstrate the knowledge they’d acquired to their patients too.

Once, while quoting these verses, old Ekrem had also openly criticized quarantine measures, and when the Governor had heard about it, he’d briefly considered locking him up—though he had ultimately desisted. As he left the lunatic behind and went on his way, the Major thought again of how happy and how exceptionally fortunate he was. We have remarked on his happiness here because we are telling the story of a very small country where the emotions and decisions of individuals could often change the course of history.

The Major’s wedding was supposed to be held at the Hotel Splendid, but concerns over security (notably the presence of Ramiz’s men in that area) meant that it was moved to the large assembly room in the State Hall. The guests, unsettled by the change of location, were made to wait for a time in a Lysol-soaked corridor on the ground floor of the State Hall, after which they were quickly taken to the second floor and ushered into the large meeting hall for the wedding ceremony. Everybody was elegantly dressed, spotless, and full of cheer. Zeynep was wearing a traditional red Mingherian bridal gown. Her two brothers had put on boots and frock coats. The Major watched the ceremony from the outside, and felt as if he were dreaming. While the imam of the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque, Nurettin Effendi, was busy writing their names in the register, the bride and groom eyed each other from afar.

The Major answered the Imam Effendi’s questions first. As custom dictated, he declared the amount of money he would contribute (except for the bride price and land purchases) when they married. He also stated how much money he would give this woman if they were to separate. Through it all, he kept looking at his bride in her red gown with awe and longing, and couldn’t quite believe that the aching loneliness that had afflicted him for all his life was about to end. The two witnesses were the Major’s friend Lami and Chief Scrutineer Mazhar Effendi—the latter at the insistence of the Governor Pasha, who wished to keep a close watch over the event. The Pasha himself, for reasons unknown, had gone back to his rooms at the last moment, and stayed there throughout the proceedings. Halfway through the ceremony, a little door opened up at the opposite end of the Main Meeting Hall, on the side that faced the docks, and in walked Princess Pakize with the Prince Consort. Though the couple stood far apart from the crowd of families, relatives, neighbors, and children wearing their best clothes and fezzes, everyone was thrilled that the old sultan’s daughter had come to the wedding.

The imam began to say a lengthy prayer, at which point everyone understood that the marriage was now official. The Major presented his wife with a gold bracelet his mother had given him. He shook hands with the witnesses and with some of the guests. But the fear of disease meant that nobody was really greeting and embracing each other properly, and most people were eager to return to their homes as swiftly as possible.

Without the bowing and curtsying and hand-kissing that usually took place on these occasions, the wedding turned out to be a brief affair, and soon the ecstatic bride and groom were on their way to the Hotel Splendid with Coachman Zekeriya driving them in the Governor Pasha’s landau. The Governor, on the other hand, remained perturbed, expecting Ramiz and his men to attack at any moment. In a highly personal and candid letter to her sister Hatice dated the fourteenth of May 1901, Princess Pakize, who had watched the newlyweds leaving the State Hall that day, drew particular attention to the fact that “despite the sense of calamity all around them, the couple could not keep the soft smiles and the expressions of utter felicity from their faces.”

CHAPTER 33

The Major and Zeynep’s bliss had reminded Princess Pakize of her own and her sisters’ wedding in Istanbul, the derisive looks and allusions they’d endured, and the rancor she still felt.

“Instead of considering the injustice we have suffered, locked up in harems like caged birds, they mocked us and dared to laugh at us for knowing nothing of the world outside!” Princess Pakize had lamented in one of her letters. “But perhaps all of these people are right to find satisfaction in our misery and invent all kinds of tales and drolleries about us!” she’d continued in the same passage. (When they were relocating from the Çırağan to the Yıldız Palace, from their father’s side to the uncle—Sultan Abdul Hamid—who was going to arrange their marriages, Princess Pakize’s sisters had been appalled by the sight of the filthy, ugly buttocks of the horses drawing the carriage they’d been sent from the Yıldız Palace.)

“To those who ridicule us, I should like to say one thing,” Princess Pakize had written in another letter. “When his father died, our great-great-grandfather Mehmed III (a contemporary of William Shakespeare’s), wishing to avoid a war of succession, had his own brothers executed—nineteen hapless, blameless princes, five of whom were still children—but as our darling father has pointed out, he left the princesses (for he must have had just as many sisters too) unscathed, and not only that, he arranged for the daughters of a previous sultan, Selim II, to be married off with small dowries to low-ranking palace attendants—just as Abdul Hamid has done with us. As Father says, the fact that the Royal Biographer Mehmet Süreyya’s Sicill-i Osmânî does not even mention these sisters’ names, the fact, in other words, that even the daughters of a sultan are not considered worthy of notice in the Ottoman dynasty, may have saved our lives at times. These sultans’ daughters would have daughters of their own, princesses of royal blood, and because such great care was taken to match them with worthy husbands, their lineage would survive, and they would lead relatively untroubled lives. If they were able to make particularly strong matches, these princesses and princesses’ daughters would follow their husbands in their postings to various states and provinces and end up learning that way about the outer edges of their ‘homeland,’ those regions which used to be known as the ‘periphery.’ That is why our uncle Abdul Hamid has always treated princesses Seniye and Feride as if they were Sultan Mahmud II’s daughters rather than his granddaughters, showing them the greatest regard, inviting them to functions at the Yıldız Palace, gifting them waterside mansions in Arnavutköy, and viewing them—given their age—as equals to any sultan’s daughters. As princesses, we often end up married off to some vizier or pasha, so the fact that we know nothing of the world outside is neither significant nor relevant. But when a prince is expected to inherit the Ottoman throne and rule over the nations and lands and islands and mountains of an empire too vast for any map, and yet that same prince, constrained by Abdul Hamid’s suspicions, has never seen anything or been anywhere beyond a handful of palaces surrounded by soldiers and spies, so that when he looks out of the harem window one day and sees a sheep for the very first time in his life he mistakes it for a monster and summons the palace guards, then surely—and with the continuance of the Ottoman Empire at stake—that prince’s condition is a far-more-pressing concern than the situation we Ottoman princesses are in?”

Princess Pakize’s sisters Hatice and Fehime had moved to the Yıldız Palace first. Their uncle Abdul Hamid had treated his two nieces well, inviting them as if they were his own daughters to many of the ceremonies and gatherings—some significant, others minor—that took place in the Ottoman court during this period, not only to keep them from getting too disheartened, but also to ensure that they could be seen and approved by potential suitors or by these men’s mothers and aunts, and thus be able to marry. In the two years that Princesses Hatice and Fehime spent at the Yıldız Palace, they attended a great number of functions and entertainments, and made many different female acquaintances. But unfortunately there seemed to be not a single suitor interested in marrying either of these exceptional sisters. The truth was that any potential grooms and their families were terrified of Abdul Hamid. Given the intricacies of the situation, the fact that no son of any wealthy pasha had emerged as suitor to Abdul Hamid’s nieces, whose father’s daily movements were spied upon by the Sultan, was perhaps understandable, regardless of how beautiful and cultured they were. Even so, the sisters were left feeling profoundly dismayed.

The anger that the three sisters harbored against some of these sons of pashas and potentially suitable princes was no doubt also determined by how rude, uncouth, philandering, and superficial so many of them were. We have reported all of this here to note that, regrettably, the exquisitely beautiful thirty-year-old elder sister Princess Hatice’s prediction that they might be able to find worthy husbands if they moved to the Yıldız Palace was never realized. Since nobody was asking for their hand in marriage, it ultimately fell to the Sultan himself to find them the best and most suitable husbands available.

Abdul Hamid thus began to select his favorites from among the palace’s brightest and most obedient officials. Around the same time, there also came the news of another outbreak of illness in the palace in Çırağan to which Murad V was confined. So the Sultan decided to send the expert quarantine doctor he’d heard spoken of so highly to survey the sanitary condition of this residence (a stone-built construction which, for many years after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, housed the Beşiktaş High School for Girls). But there are many who claim that Abdul Hamid purposely sent Doctor Nuri to this building—which was, at the time, still part of the Çırağan Palace complex—so that the doctor would be able to see the youngest of the three sisters, Princess Pakize, who had refused to get married and still lived in Çırağan with her father. Some have even claimed that in his eagerness to find a suitable match for his third daughter, Murad V himself had agreed to this plan with his “little brother” Abdul Hamid, communicating through secret intermediaries.

At the age of sixty, Murad V had long since abandoned the fantasies he had nurtured in the early years following his overthrow, when he had thought he might yet get his throne back if there was a coup or if he were smuggled out of his confinement, and had come to accept that “perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be.” He spent his time in the afternoons conversing with his son and best friend, Prince Mehmet Selahattin (the age gap between them was twenty years), and with each of his four daughters (one of whom would die of consumption), reading books, and playing and composing music for the pianoforte, and in the evenings he drank vigorously. Father and son were both hearty drinkers.

Every morning the former sultan would go to “pay his respects” to his mother, Şevkefza (who, as mother to a sultan, had been given the official title of Valide), visiting her in her rooms whose entrance was right across from the door to his own quarters in the middle floor of the palace. In earlier years, his mother—an ambitious woman of Circassian birth who was set on her son taking back his throne—would concoct all kinds of plans (dressing him up in women’s clothing, smuggling him off to Europe) and plots (including one that would involve using the palace’s water supplies), and mother and son would sit alone together, furtively discussing them all. After his mother’s death, some of her now-vacant rooms were taken over by the more favored of the harem girls who were fed up with living on the palace’s overcrowded ground floor and had developed rheumatisms from their rooms being so close to the sea.

Living on the ground floor were forty-five female servants of varying rank and authority attending to Murad V and his forty-year-old son, Prince Mehmet Selahattin (who had six daughters and two sons of his own). When a group of rebels led by the political activist Ali Suavi had stormed the Çırağan Palace in 1878 to try and free the former sultan and put him back on the throne, Abdul Hamid had sent his trusted general Mehmet Pasha to fend them off, and it was the quarters of these servant “girls” that Mehmet Pasha had famously barged into by mistake, finding himself face-to-face with nearly forty beauties—some older, others in the prime of youth—in various stages of undress against the summer heat, a sight which had left him momentarily paralyzed and leaning on his sword for support. Murad V’s beloved concubine Filizten, who had endured twenty-eight years of captivity beside him, witnessed every facet of life in the last of the Ottoman harems, and described it all with her own incomparable candor, noted in her memoirs—as compiled by the popular historian Ziya Șakir—that the harem girls would often reenact Mehmet Pasha’s statuelike pose and laughed about it for many years after the event.

Doctor Nuri was taken through these same chambers, usually thronged with women and girls, “without encountering anyone,” and led to the floors above. In one of the sea-facing rooms of the palace’s middle-floor living quarters, he was examining the strange red rashes that had appeared on an elderly female servant and on one of Murad V’s granddaughters, Princess Celile, when the door opened up and he briefly came face-to-face with Princess Pakize. When another elderly attendant told Princess Pakize that her father wasn’t here, the Princess left. But for a long moment, the harem’s youthful princess and the doctor had looked “straight into each other’s eyes,” as might have been described in an early Muslim novel. When she was asked the question two days later, Princess Pakize agreed to marry this handsome doctor and to move to her uncle’s court in the Yıldız Palace as her sisters had already done.