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Nevertheless, the Governor Pasha couldn’t tolerate the consuls’ duplicity. On paper, the representative of the Messageries Maritimes Company and his two secretaries were consular employees, so the Governor couldn’t touch them. But one morning he had the agency’s offices raided, locked its other employees up in the dungeons, and had the shop and its ticket stall sealed shut. The agency offices were full of excess ticket stubs and other criminal evidence. When Lazar Effendi, foreman of the Greek rowboats, was sent to the dungeons, the Governor Pasha remembered his early years on the island when he had felt instinctively protective of the Muslim boatmen. You really couldn’t solve a problem in the Ottoman Empire without throwing someone into prison.

But the next day, primarily upon the insistence of the French ambassador in Istanbul the Marquis de Moustier, and after receiving several telegrams from the palace and the Sublime Porte too, the Pasha was forced to release the agency’s clerks. When one of these clerks died soon after—having caught the plague while he was locked up in the dungeons—the Governor Pasha reiterated a point he would often make in those days: if it hadn’t been for all these telegrams coming in, he could have stopped the outbreak of anarchy and disease upon the island within two weeks.

In a telegram whose tone indicated an awareness of all the latest medical and bacteriological advances, the palace had meanwhile reminded Quarantine Master Nikos Bey that the plague could not be transmitted through the exchange of prayer sheets and amulets, and ordered him to avoid any kind of action that would provoke unrest and turn the public against quarantine. As this telegram had come from the palace rather than the Ministry of Public Health, the Governor Pasha soon became convinced that Abdul Hamid’s message had actually been meant for him.

The experience of being constantly interrupted by telegrams from Istanbul had caused a kind of fatigue in the Governor Pasha, who soon began to feel that it was futile to try and implement quarantine measures in a just manner. As a result, the nighttime curfew dictated by Istanbul to stop people smugglers was never fully enforced. Of course there were some areas of the city where it really was forbidden to walk around at night with torches and lanterns, and nobody did go out. It eventually became clear that these same restrictions made it easier for thieves to transport the goods they had been stealing from vacant homes. But didn’t all these objects—these stolen desks and mattresses and household items—only spread the disease farther?

“The Governor Pasha didn’t really mind the Greeks leaving the island by boat to flee the outbreak!” some Greek historians have argued. It meant that the island’s harder to govern Orthodox population, and its wealthy, powerful Greek families, would decrease in number, and Mingheria’s Muslims would become a majority on the island. But there were also some Muslim commentators who pointed out that once the disease had scythed through the Muslim population that had stayed on the island, and significantly reduced their numbers, the Greeks who had left would all return, and having thus established a substantial demographic majority, they would first demand independence, and later request to be taken over by Greece. The truth—as some others have rightly noted—was that Greeks were already a majority on the island, and had no need for such plots anyway.

If there is one veiled emotion we should be aware of for this historical account to be better understood, and that we have attempted to uncover here as a novelist would, it is Governor Sami Pasha’s disenchantment with Abdul Hamid. The Governor simply could not make peace with the idea that the Sultan was less concerned with saving Mingherian lives than he was with preventing the disease from spreading to Istanbul and Europe. This emotion can be interpreted within a traditional Ottoman context as the manifestation of a classic form of heartbreak experienced by the lonely subject who feels forgotten by his own father and insufficiently loved by those in positions of authority. Indeed, Mingheria’s Muslims would periodically convince themselves that the government in Istanbul did not love them enough. But surely the fact that Sultan Abdulmejid had chosen to promote this far-flung island outpost to the status of full province as a diplomatic maneuver against Europe was proof enough of the Ottoman dynasty’s interest in and fondness for the island.

CHAPTER 36

The Major was usually either busy training the Quarantine Regiment, leading it on neighborhood patrols and in dealing with infected, recalcitrant households, or following Doctor Nuri on his patient visits and his strolls across the city, so that during the day he rarely got a chance to stop by the hotel. When he did manage to spend some time with Zeynep in their spacious quarters, the newlyweds talked and laughed and made love, and hardly ever left their room. After making love, they would fall asleep in each other’s arms. There was a tranquility in this that neither of them had ever experienced before. The Major would listen to Zeynep breathing in and out, and marvel at how she could just drift off in his arms, at how comfortable and safe she must feel. They were both a little bashful, and kept the Italian shutters on the room’s two tall windows closed.

It was the first time in her life that Zeynep had given herself fully to a lover, and within three days she had grown to trust the Major as if they’d known each other for twenty years, talking to him as fast—and sometimes just as loudly too—as she did with her brothers. So far the only trait the Major didn’t like in his wife was the volume of her voice. Zeynep loved to talk noisily about going away to Istanbul.

In the afternoons, when the light filtering through the shutters threw a shadow like a grille on the floor, the Major would hold his wife close and know that he would never forget the bliss he felt in that moment, nor the shape of that shadow. They were going to be happy together for fifty years. Sometimes they lay side by side in bed without talking. The Major would hold her and cradle her pear-shaped breast. Sometimes his wife would put his hand in the palm of her own, and they would lie still. From their bed they would listen to the soft sounds of the docks, of Istanbul Street, and of the surrounding alleys trickling through the gaps in the shutters. The city was quieter than usual; apart from the distant din of the docks and the passing of the occasional carriage, there were no other sounds. When the city and everything in it was shrouded in the heavy hush of plague, they could hear sparrows chirping on the pine trees in the hotel’s back garden.

To Major Kâmil, it was a kind of happiness that was nearly impossible to believe. But their euphoria had also reminded the couple of the significance of their fears and of their lives. They could see that because they were happier than everyone else, they could sometimes be more afraid than everyone else too.

But despite this fear, their marital joy did occasionally induce them to act “imprudently.” The trousseau that Zeynep’s mother had assembled over the years in preparation for her daughter’s wedding, and the gifts that the Major’s family had presented to the bride, were all being kept in Zeynep’s family home. Zeynep liked going there to look at her wedding gifts and at her trousseau, the hand-embroidered tablecloths, the porcelain coffee set from Italy, the lamps, and the (now-slightly-blackened) silver sugar bowls. One day the Major went with her to his mother-in-law’s house. On their way back they came across a plague lunatic to rival Ekrem from Erin. “Walking together is banned, haven’t you heard?” shouted this heavy, stocky figure neither of them had ever seen before. The Major wanted to forbid his wife from going outside unless it was strictly necessary, but Zeynep kept reminding him that he was the one who was out on the streets all day, in and out of sick people’s homes.

“I’m not that worried,” Zeynep said one day. “If it’s meant to happen, it will.”

The Major was surprised to hear his own wife so candidly express the same fatalism that quarantine officials were always fighting against, but he was so happy with Zeynep that he did not take issue with it, and soon forgot. He was more preoccupied with how he would keep his wife on the island once the ferries started working again.

The Major had begun to intuit that life on the island would never allow him to leave again. As he went to and from the State Hall, the hospitals, and people’s homes, he would roam the streets of Arkaz. He would distinctly perceive on these walks the discrepancy between the atmosphere in the city and his own state of mind, but he was too joyful to feel guilty about it. The little Quarantine Division (sometimes he called them his Quarantine Regiment) he had established, the fatherly warmth the Governor had shown him, and his friendship with the Doctor and Prince Consort also gave him confidence. The Major would have liked to tell the Governor Pasha that he need not be so apprehensive about the sheikhs. Every sheikh and every Muslim in Mingheria was perfectly aware that if ever there should erupt one final, bloody battle with the Christians, the only force that would protect them was the Ottoman army, as indeed was the case on every other Ottoman island too.

Every time the Major walked from the hospital to the State Hall in his Ottoman army uniform, people would taunt him, or tease him, or pretend to be respectful only to sneer at him the next moment, and when he got home later, he would always tell his wife about these amusing encounters.

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me here!” a terrified stranger said one day when the Major, out on one of his strolls, came across him in the outhouse of an empty garden.

Another time a man the same age as the Major called out to him from a second-floor window: “Soldier!” The man was a Muslim, and spoke with a Mingherian accent. “What do you think is going to happen?”

“Whatever God wills,” the Major replied. “You must obey quarantine restrictions.”

“We do, we do, but then what? We’re like prisoners here! What’s happening down by the docks, what’s going on in the squares?”

“Nothing’s going on! You stay at home!” said the Major imperiously. In his urge to reprimand people for their foolish, simpleminded behavior, he would often end up bickering with them and raising his voice in confrontation. Princess Pakize had very clearly diagnosed this feeling of “modern loneliness” he was saddled with.

But there were also times when the Major would spot someone peering out—more or less unobserved—from their window at the street below, and even if he happened to catch their eye, he would say nothing at all. There was a strange, almost mesmerizing quality to these protracted stares.

“What the hell are you looking at!” somebody had yelled at him once.

By now the fear of death, which even in the staunchest Muslims had rapidly turned into panic, had begun drawing people out of their existing patterns and dispositions, and molding them into something different. The outbreak had made everyone more cowardly, more stupid, and more selfish than they really were, thought the Major.

In the terraced homes near the center, most doors had been pulled shut and back doors bolted up as if they would never open again, but still the neighborhood children and anybody who was in a hurry to get somewhere would slip through into the neighbor’s garden and through the cordon, telling themselves it was “just this once.” Neither Doctor Nuri nor the Greek quarantine doctors knew how habitually the rules were being broken in this way. They also had no idea that people had been returning to evacuated homes, or escaping in rowboats at night from the Castle’s isolation facility. “It’s because they weren’t born and raised on this island like I was!” the Major concluded. If the island were being looked after by quarantine doctors and soldiers who were actually from there, the outbreak would never have grown so much.

Every morning before he went to the garrison, the Major dutifully attended the meetings that took place by the map inside the Epidemiology Room. Through Doctor Nuri’s efforts, this alcove where the map of Arkaz was displayed had been turned into a sort of command center where all the information on the outbreak was being collected. Over the past twenty-five days, many of Arkaz’s mansions, wealthy homes, empty lots, lodges, mosques, churches, fountains, bridges, squares, schools, hospitals, police stations, and shops had been marked on the map. Even after so many people had fled, abandoning the city and the island, the number of deaths had still not fallen. There was no doubt that the disease was continuing to spread, and with it a growing sense of collective agitation.

The disease had entered Arkaz through the Old Stone Jetty. Using the map, Quarantine Master Nikos had tracked the advance of the microbe and established that the ship that had brought the plague must have been the Greek cargo barge Pilotos which had come from Alexandria. (These flat-bottomed cargo vessels could come all the way into the harbor and moor on the wooden jetties there.) Having arrived to the island upon this ship, the disease had then nestled in the nearby Muslim neighborhoods, particularly in Vavla, Kadirler, Germe, and Çite. The deaths that had occurred here had been the first to be recorded on the map. The fact that the still-unfinished Hamidiye Hospital was being built in Vavla could be regarded as a blessed coincidence. Maybe it was, but we will choose not to dwell on this particular coincidence, for this was a time when people were more inclined than usual to see signs, meanings, prophecies, and omens everywhere they looked.

Yet matters had indeed come to this: analyzing coincidences and the disposition of the stars in the sky, seeing portents and signs in the shapes of the clouds and the direction of the wind—and these were things that everybody was doing. Even young doctors with an unerringly positivist faith in science, even Governor Sami Pasha and Doctor Nuri, would notice these kinds of details sometimes, and perhaps believe in them too. If anyone asked, they would smile and say, “I don’t believe it means anything—though it is certainly strange,” and they wouldn’t hesitate to enact the necessary measures that science and medicine dictated, but at the same time, in some other corner of their minds, they would readily accept all kinds of nonsense (such as the idea that if a purple cloud appeared on the horizon at sunset and if the storks had migrated earlier than usual—as indeed they had done that year—there would be fewer deaths the following day).

Even the most “enlightened,” when gripped by despair, were known to fixate on these kinds of signs. Princess Pakize gave them enough credence to still disappoint us today. We have made room in this book for some of these inventions and falsehoods because they could sometimes shape the course of history. But it is also our view that the public’s inclination to look for the future in the stars and in their coffee grounds, or even Sheikh Hamdullah’s search for answers and signs about the plague in his ancestors’ writings and in the Hurufis’ Lettrist manuscripts, did not greatly influence how people reacted to the plague. None of these rumors had as much of an effect on the course of the Mingherian plague epidemic as nationalist prejudices did. Even though everyone present at the quarantine meeting would talk (some laughingly) of this kind of fortune-telling, it was really the map and all the notes upon it that they anxiously consulted as they tried to work out how the disease kept spreading and how they could survive it. The rats that had arrived from Alexandria on the ship named Pilotos had first infected a porter who lived in a small wooden house behind the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque. Since no one had been thinking of plague when the porter died, his death had gone largely unnoticed. Diphtheria, pneumonia, and many other diseases had similar symptoms too.