第 39 页

The fact that the husbands Abdul Hamid had found for Murad V’s charming and strong-willed daughters were such singularly modest and undistinguished individuals has been extensively remarked upon. (These discussions usually pertain to the two eldest daughters and their husbands.) In later years, many newspapers and their history pages would write of how the chosen husbands were simple palace clerks (and therefore not really wealthy), somewhat “old,” and not even particularly handsome. Even one of the greatest among Turkish novelists, Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, who eventually became assistant to the Sultan’s Chief Secretary, would later comment in his memoirs Kırk Yıl (Forty Years) on the age of the two grooms, and go so far as to point out that they had been educated in the Darüşşafaka school for fatherless children—the implication being that on top of everything else, they were also rather poor. Worst of all was the rumor circulating widely among the people of Istanbul that Princess Hatice supposedly found her husband so repulsive that she wouldn’t even allow him to enter her bedroom after their wedding. “Our uncle has found handsome, wealthy husbands for his own ugly daughters, whereas we, on the other hand …”—these were the kinds of words falsely attributed to the sisters by the Turkish press in the years following the foundation of the republic. But in the letters in our possession, there is not a single indication that Murad V’s daughters had ever called their uncle’s daughter (their cousin) Princess Naime “ugly.” They had been brought up far too well to say such a thing anyway!

We have drawn attention to these matters here to lead us indirectly to another theme we have brought up before: the contention that Princess Pakize was not at all “pretty” when compared with her sisters Hatice and Fehime—or at any rate that she was not as pretty as they were. This perception would ensure that Princess Pakize was insulated from the sharp tongues and barbed remarks of the palace’s many critics in Istanbul. It was their belief that when Abdul Hamid had failed to find his youngest, rather plain-looking niece a husband in the palace, Princess Pakize herself—who was not as ambitious or as striking as her older sisters—must have agreed to settle at the last moment for a doctor of much-lower “ranking” than a palace clerk, and having thus promptly forgotten all about her, they inadvertently shielded her from the worst of the vicious gossip that was to mark the last days of the Ottoman court.

On the three sisters’ wedding day, the carriages streaming with their bejeweled passengers out of the Yıldız and other Istanbul palaces, and from viziers’ and pashas’ residences, had eventually arrived at the waterside mansions that the Sultan had gifted to his nieces along the stretch of coast between Ortaköy and Kuruçeşme. Earlier, the Sultan had taken the opportunity to host princes and foreign ambassadors at a vast diplomatic banquet at the Yıldız Palace’s Main Pavilion. Abdul Hamid deplored all needless expenditure, so he had not spent too much on the day’s celebrations, and contrary to what he had done two years before during his daughter Princess Naime’s wedding, he had not waited at the foot of the great staircase, flanked by his sons-in-law and by palace dignitaries, to welcome the arriving guests.

The Sultan, who—partly in a bid to emulate the celebrations that had taken place for Queen Victoria’s sixtieth-year jubilee—had only recently lavished significant sums on marking the twenty-fifth year of his rule, was no longer able to set aside as much time and money for official ceremonies, receptions, and parties as he used to do in the early years of his reign. Although he was often generous with his nieces, appearing to make no distinction between them and his own daughters, Abdul Hamid had nevertheless been rather slow to equip them with the two-horse carriages their station required. Whether it was the Sultan being excessively parsimonious, or the palace clerks who’d been assigned to the task wanting to spite the two grooms, Princess Pakize’s correspondence tells us that her two older sisters were left wholly unsatisfied with the special carriages they were eventually given. Princess Pakize, who was the least demanding of the three sisters, and whose expectations were the humblest too, was already on her way to China and later in Mingheria in the early days of her marriage, so she had not had the opportunity to evaluate the quality of the carriages she and her husband had been assigned.

Princess Pakize’s letters do contain several derisive remarks on four of the princes who had weaved in and out of the crowds that had gathered at the Yıldız Palace and in the mansions in Ortaköy on the three sisters’ wedding day. Abdul Hamid’s son Mehmet Abdülkadir Effendi, who was known for his improprieties and for noisily playing his violin at every gathering, was described as “witless”; Prince Abid Effendi, meanwhile, was termed “a fool.” Another of Abdul Hamid’s sons, Seyfettin Effendi, whom the Sultan had wanted to marry to Abdülaziz’s youngest daughter Princess Emine, was a “rake,” which explained why the Princess had rejected him. As for “squat little Burhanettin Effendi,” whose “Naval March” (which he had composed at the age of seven) the passengers of the Aziziye had heard as they alighted in Mingheria, Princess Pakize had found him a “spoiled brat.”

Princess Pakize began to read her letters aloud to her husband, starting—before she sealed the envelope—from that seventh letter to her sister. This way, she would not only participate in her husband’s investigations in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, but also indirectly acquaint him with palace life, the only existence she had ever known.

CHAPTER 34

Doctor Nuri listened attentively to his wife’s descriptions of the ceremonies she had attended, the schemes she had watched unfold, and her moments of anger and wistfulness, but did not comment on what she told him, and replied with his own disconcerting quarantine stories instead. He also told her about the scenes he had witnessed while looking after patients in Arkaz’s hospitals every day.

Not only was he constantly toing-and-froing between homes and hospitals to examine the sick, he would also always turn up wherever there were problems with quarantine measures to see if he might understand why, and perhaps help in some way. People who’d been told to evacuate their homes would often try to resist, arguing and fighting with officials, and it was not easy to find an appropriate and sensible-enough solution that could work in every situation. Some would demand one last day to spend with their families; others would lock themselves up inside; some would go completely mad after losing their wife and daughter in the space of three days; others would feign insanity and attack the guards and the soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment who had come to lock them up in the Castle. As the outbreak deepened—there were more than fifteen deaths every day now—people either withdrew even further into themselves, or became angrier than ever before, if not outright belligerent. All the stories and rumors going around and the endless funeral convoys had drained everyone of any logic or composure they might have had left. Over the last three days, more and more people had come forward to collect their reward of five golden liras in exchange for information on families who were hiding their sick. Three out of every five such cases reported turned out not to be related to the plague at all. But even so, the Muslim population’s response to the plague still consisted largely of fear and finger-pointing, with little instinct for self-preservation.

By this point there seemed to be only one thing left that the whole city agreed on: whether they believed the disease was spread by rats or caught from other people, no one really went out onto the street anymore unless they had to. The city’s eastern neighborhoods and the port were already nearly empty anyway, as much of the Greek population had left. Others had stocked up on crackers, flour, raisins, and grape molasses, stored them in their homes and courtyards in sacks, baskets, barrels, and empty olive oil jugs, then sealed every lock they had—as if in preparation for a horde of foreign invaders—and began to wait for the epidemic to pass. But the rats and the fleas they carried simply slipped under people’s walls and snuck right into their homes.

The emptiness of the streets was eerie, but even more frightening was the novel experience of looking over a wall to see a group of people gathered in a garden. For that could only mean that someone else must have died, and that behind that door over there was another corpse. Quarantine officials could arrive to evacuate the house at any moment, and the mourners huddled inside would soon start arguing and falling out over whether “to tell them now or wait a little while.” Some people got so caught up in their terror that they would dream up all sorts of improbable rescue scenarios and detail their plans to anyone who would listen, while others did the opposite, turning away from the world and sinking into a wordless “fatalistic” resignation.

Most of the men who had shut themselves inside their homes quickly grew bored, and in their restless curiosity they propped their bay windows ajar to peer at their surroundings and call out to anyone and anything they saw. Others opened their windows as wide as they would go, like Christian households did, and spent all day staring at the people who happened to walk past. In the afternoons and anytime he was not with the Quarantine Regiment, the Major would do as Princess Pakize had asked him to, watching over the Doctor and Prince Consort and keeping him company. People looking out at the street from their windows were often impressed by the sight of the Major walking past in his uniform, and felt that they could trust him. “Excuse me, young soldier!” an old man—who was Greek and couldn’t make out the Major’s rank—had called out to him from a shuttered house one morning as he was accompanying the Doctor and Prince Consort through the hilly, sweetly fragrant streets of the Eyoklima neighborhood. “Can you tell me whether the Maritimes ferry has arrived?”

During this time, Doctor Nuri witnessed things he had never seen or heard before in any cholera outbreak. Gangs of thieves were breaking into homes where elderly people lived on their own and stealing anything they could carry. Sometimes they would enter what they thought was a vacant house only to stumble upon the corpse of someone who had died of the plague, and when they tried to hide the body so that the quarantine officials wouldn’t turn up, they would catch the disease themselves and end up in the hospital, where they would finally confess everything to Doctor Nuri. Other gangs were taking advantage of the general atmosphere of chaos and lawlessness to squat in the homes they broke into. This kind of thing was more likely to happen in the Greek neighborhoods at the edges of the city, like Dantela and Kofunya, where the Quarantine Division and the police weren’t always present.

Doctor Nuri, assisted by a younger Greek doctor, spent nearly two hours tending to patients at the Theodoropoulos Hospital. He gave them pills to alleviate their pain and strengthen their constitution, dressed their wounds, and tried to soothe them by making incisions on their buboes. Again and again he patiently instructed them to keep their windows open and make sure that their rooms were properly ventilated.

When he returned to the State Hall and walked into the guesthouse, he saw that his wife was writing a letter. There was also a message informing him of an encrypted “royal decree” that had arrived for his attention.

The news electrified Doctor Nuri, so much so that his uncommonly perceptive wife, realizing that her husband was wondering about the possible contents of this telegram even as they were still embracing, couldn’t quite hold her tongue. “Go on then,” she said, her eyes full of reproach. “Go and see what it says!” (A “royal decree” was an order issued directly by the Sultan—by Abdul Hamid himself.)

“It saddens me to see that your loyalty to the Sultan far surpasses your commitment to me,” said Princess Pakize.

“They are two entirely different kinds of loyalty. One is a bond that comes from the heart,” said Doctor Nuri with an innocence that even he immediately felt to be excessive. “The other is a bond that runs in the blood.”

“I suppose it is me your heart is bound to. But what has your loyalty to Abdul Hamid got to do with blood? The Sultan is my uncle, not yours.”

“My loyalty is not just to your uncle, our great lord and ruler Sultan Abdul Hamid. It also extends to the exalted institutions that his illustrious position represents—the state, the Ottoman dynasty, the Sublime Porte, our whole nation, and the Quarantine Authority too.”

“I am astonished that you still believe there is a Sublime Porte, a state, a nation beyond Abdul Hamid,” said the Princess. “The pashas and the clerks who make up that thing which you call the ‘state’ are merely there to do my uncle’s bidding, and his idea of justice is that everything should be done precisely as he wishes. If there had been any other kind of justice, how could they have imprisoned me, my father, my brother, and my sisters in the Çırağan Palace for twenty-four years, caged like birds? If there really was a ‘nation’ quietly watching over the state, over justice, over what the pashas say and do, how could it have been so easy to call my father insane and push him off his throne? And what exactly is this ‘nation’ you speak of anyway?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“It is serious, yes, so tell me please.”

“Those people that your cousins and all those other foolish princelings you have told me about would watch from their palace windows, those crowds walking from Kabataş to Beşiktaş—that is the nation.”

“You are right. You should go and read your telegram now,” said Princess Pakize tetchily. There was an odd expression on her face that her husband had never seen before. She had been trying to look condescending.

The Prince Consort was not quite sure how to respond. “You must not go out until we have fully grasped the extent of the outbreak, and understood how and where it is spreading,” he declared, purely for the sake of saying something that sounded strict.

“Don’t worry, I am quite used to not being allowed outside!” the Princess proudly replied.

Doctor Nuri took out his codebook and withdrew to a corner of the guesthouse to decipher the contents of the special telegram. Eventually he worked it out: it was merely a message confirming receipt of his own telegram to the palace asking them to expedite the ship with the support and supplies they had requested.

CHAPTER 35

On Thursday, the sixteenth of May, ten days after the last ship departed the island at midnight on Monday, the sixth of May, nineteen people died. As they recorded these new deaths on the epidemiological map the next day, the Governor and the Major concluded that the quarantine campaign was proving “ineffectual,” and expressed their doubts during that morning’s meeting.