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That day the Doctor and Prince Consort used the map to show the other doctors and the Governor how the outbreak had spread from the harbor to the rest of the city at the same velocity as the advance of the rats. They could see from the map that the path of the disease had taken it over the Army Middle School the Major had attended. The Army Middle School had been temporarily shut two days before quarantine was officially announced, so the quarantine officials hadn’t put any of its students in isolation. Doctor Nuri supposed that the infected students would reveal themselves when some of them gradually began to fall ill. The military command in Istanbul was following matters closely, and upon their instructions, two educated officers who had been coming down from the garrison in the northeastern part of the city to teach classes at the army school, and thus round up their income too, had been immediately ordered to return to their regiments after quarantine was announced. This was interpreted as fresh evidence that despite how extensively the plague had spread, Abdul Hamid remained determined—in the wake of the fiasco that was the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny—not to embroil Ottoman soldiers in Mingheria’s quarantine efforts, and that he continued to put the needs of the Ottoman Empire before those of Mingheria and its inhabitants.

An incident that took place on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of May, in the neighborhood of Germe serves as a useful illustration of the indecision which paralyzed the state and its quarantine officials. The house at the center of the day’s events belonged to a Muslim man who grew barley just outside the edge of the neighborhood. The farmer’s twelve-year-old son had died the day before. That morning the doctors had confirmed that the man’s eldest daughter was also infected and decided that she should be taken to the hospital while the parents were to be sent to the Castle for isolation. They had also found two fresh rat corpses near the house with blood around their snouts. But the mother and father whose blue-eyed son had died the day before simply couldn’t bear to hand over their blue-eyed daughter—who was most probably dying too. The mother’s relentless sobbing had already woken up the whole neighborhood, which was accustomed by now to attending a new funeral every day. The quarantine officials on the scene, unable to scare off the children who kept obstructing their path, had felt compelled to ask Doctor Nikos “What shall we do?” and he in turn had not been able to obtain any clear orders from the Governor. What should have been a swift evacuation procedure had ended up consuming the neighborhood for the whole day and turned into a noisy, tearful, bad-tempered affair.

The French consul had been informed immediately of the episode, and sent a telegram to Istanbul using the phrase les maladroits (the incompetents). The Governor Pasha had been furious with Monsieur Andon for this, but in Doctor Nuri’s opinion, the Governor was definitely to blame.

CHAPTER 37

There was now a growing problem—particularly among the younger population—of people who had been infected or were suspected to be, or even those who were already sick, running away from their homes and families and from quarantine officials. One of the principal reasons for the increase in the number of these fugitives was the deplorable state of the Castle’s isolation area. This special zone within the Castle complex had become a place no one ever came back from. All the latest international statutes stipulated that plague quarantine should last for five days, meaning that if someone was put in isolation, they should be let out after five days as long as they weren’t sick. Yet twenty-eight days after quarantine was announced in Mingheria and people first began to be put in isolation, our calculations indicate that there were one hundred and eighty suspected cases being held in the Castle’s isolation area. More than half of these had been in the Castle longer than five days despite showing no signs of illness.

By this point, the idea of being quarantined, of being singled out by doctors and taken away by the police to be thrown into isolation inside the Castle, had come to be seen by the island’s Muslim population as a fate similar to being sentenced to life imprisonment inside the dungeons. In the old days it was magistrates and traditional kadı judges who would send you to those dank, dark recesses with no hope of return; now it was the doctors. That was really the only difference. To make matters worse, the “isolation” facility was tucked away in the part of the Castle that looked into the harbor, while ordinary prisoners were kept in the windswept Venetian Tower and in Ottoman-era cellblocks that faced south toward the open sea.

Another problem that had yet to be solved was how to prevent people who had been put in isolation as a precaution from coming into contact with undiagnosed plague carriers and catching the disease from them. In the beginning, there had been plans to divide the isolation area into courtyards, zones, and sections, and grouping its occupants according to how many days they had spent there and how infectious they were, but it had quickly become apparent that this kind of prison discipline and dormitory system would not work here. Even maintaining the heavily shaded women’s enclosure at the back of the facility had become a challenge, as men worried about their wives and children, and were not satisfied unless they could see their loved ones with their own eyes. Eventually it was deemed most beneficial to gather family units together and allow people to congregate in groups. It made it easier for Doctor Nikos to supervise the various courtyards, and quarantined inmates were happier when they could spend their days with their families. But as this solution inevitably accelerated the spread of the plague, the numbers of those held in isolation began to increase conspicuously, until the Castle’s isolation facility, which had started off as a place where the disease would be vanquished, gradually turned into an overcrowded site of infection. With claims that people “were fine when they went in, so they must’ve caught the disease in isolation” and other justified rumors spreading through the city and compromising both the isolation policy and the quarantine effort as a whole, the Castle’s isolation facility was soon on its way to becoming a “prison city.”

The Governor Pasha and the Quarantine Master sent two more telegrams asking for additional doctors to be sent from Istanbul. As the population’s fear of imprisonment gradually took the form of quarantine defiance, the island’s doctors and municipal authorities alike began to think that it would be politically expedient to empty the isolation facility, so long as the necessary medical precautions were not neglected. There weren’t enough rooms, beds, mattresses, chairs, or blankets anyway. For a time, and given the urgency of the situation, the garrison had sent crackers, broad beans, and bread from its own supplies. But garrison Commander Mehmet Pasha of Edirne was not convinced that the disease could only spread when there were rats around, would not send his soldiers and cooks to help in the State Hall and the hospitals, found all sorts of excuses not to make his kitchen’s resources available to the Castle’s quarantine services, and refused to deviate from Abdul Hamid’s politics of keeping the army “out of quarantine matters.” From his office across the bay, the Governor could see the growing congestion in the Castle’s isolation area, and would sometimes sit and watch the men lining up by the water to do some fishing and while away the hours.

Eventually, at the Governor and the garrison Commander’s insistence, it was made easier for people to be “discharged” from the now severely overcrowded isolation premises. But although a lucky few found their families exactly as they had left them, most of those returning to their homes caused all sorts of problems of their own. In some neighborhoods, people newly released from isolation were treated as if they were sick and infectious, and sometimes the fact that they had been allowed to leave while others who had gone into isolation had never resurfaced was enough to mark them as suspicious, or interpreted as evidence that they must be informants conniving with the Governor. The biggest problem was that a significant proportion of those who returned from isolation would find that their homes and families were gone. Most of these people had been forced into isolation in the first place because someone in their house had died or fallen sick. They would thus come home to discover that much of their family had passed away, while others would find that their loved ones had fled, leaving behind an empty house. Some people came back to discover that in their absence, strangers had moved into their homes. Some would challenge these new guests, but others would find some form of compromise, and maybe even feel relieved that they had found a new family to ward off their terror of being left kinless and completely alone.

Among this multitude of sorry tales, the Governor had been saddened most of all to hear that six people who had gone home from isolation to find there was nobody there, and who had no sympathetic relative to turn to nor any money to spend, and couldn’t find anywhere else to go either, had eventually returned to the Castle and requested to be put back into isolation.

Two days later, as the most recent deaths were being recorded on the map of the city, all those present glumly observed that the outbreak—far from slowing down—had now reached the city’s quietest, remotest Christian neighborhoods, and each recognized the truth they had struggled to admit even to themselves: the quarantine effort they had so bravely and selflessly toiled to set up was too slow and too weak to cope with the speed and power of the plague itself, or keep up with the number of people it had infected. There were still many contaminated homes whose doors had not yet been knocked on and whose existence had not yet been discovered, and their numbers were increasing by the day. Of the infected homes that had been visited, only a third had been evacuated so far. This was such a grave and terrifying problem that nobody could bring themselves to identify it as we are doing in this book today, one hundred and sixteen years after the fact. It was like being a believer who couldn’t picture God, and couldn’t even begin to imagine him. The horrifying truth was clear to see from the map in the Epidemiology Room. But people thought that if they put a name to the horror, things would get even worse—just like they did in nightmares—and so they either kept quiet or told themselves lies to allay the gravity of the situation.

It could be difficult to go on with daily life when one carried at the forefront of one’s mind the knowledge that the outbreak was only going to grow fiercer, so people would often tell themselves lies they’d made up and find temporary solace in those. Doctor Nikos’s theory from two weeks before that the rats were only dying in the Muslim neighborhoods was one such lie, and for a few days it had even given hope to the Governor, though he did not believe it was true. Some mornings they would take a reduction in the number of deaths in a particular neighborhood, or some mischievous pattern in the figures, as their cue to make up another lie which they themselves would be the first to believe. Another falsehood they were convinced was true was the notion that the ship bringing help from Istanbul was allegedly already on its way, though at least in this case the delusion was sustained by the telegrams coming in from the capital. Whenever something turned out to be untrue, people always made sure they invented some other story with which to give themselves hope.

Doctor Nuri was experienced enough to know that during an outbreak, when matters were really desperate, even the most learned and European-minded of individuals each had their own consolatory fantasies to believe in. These didn’t necessarily have to be religious in nature. “How strange! It’s the third time I’ve seen that carriage driving past today,” the Governor Pasha remarked one day, and it was clear to Doctor Nuri that the Governor believed it must mean something, and saw it as a positive sign.

When a person couldn’t find enough reassurance in these everyday lies and in the interpretation of signs, an overwhelming feeling of resignation would quickly take over. Doctor Nuri, who had discussed this state of mind with his wife too, considered it to be an emotion similar to “fatalism” in nature, but in our view this wasn’t fatalism at all. A fatalist might be cognizant of the danger they faced but wouldn’t take any precautions, relying on Allah for protection. A person who had “lost all hope” and was “completely resigned” to their fate, on the other hand, would behave as if they weren’t even aware of the danger they were in, and would neither trust nor take refuge in anyone. Sometimes, after they had worked all day, Doctor Nuri would see that the Governor Pasha was thinking “There is nothing more we can do.” Or perhaps there was something else that could be done, but the person who was meant to do it did not have enough strength left, or had simply given up. At that point, as the Governor Pasha, the Major, and Doctor Nuri all knew, the only logical thing to do was to lie in the half-light by your beloved’s side, and find a moment’s joy and respite in their arms.

CHAPTER 38

Sami Pasha was already spending his days and nights trying to safeguard the authority of the state and the Ottoman Empire’s presence on the island against the perils of the plague, and he was growing tired of also being questioned, in a steady stream of admonishing telegrams from Istanbul, on why their latest instructions had not yet been fulfilled. He could also see that the power he wielded as a representative of the state was gradually diminishing. Many of the State Hall clerks had fled the city. Others never left their homes anymore, and wouldn’t come in for work. He couldn’t even rely on the soldiers that were stationed in the garrison to help with quarantine measures. Yet despite all this the palace still expected the Governor Pasha to use force.

Istanbul’s first concern was that all attempts at stopping people from leaving the island in defiance of quarantine rules—that is to say without undergoing a medical examination and a period of isolation first—had so far been unsuccessful. The Governor had put certain measures in place near the Stone Jetty and by the docks, deploying some of his limited numbers of gendarmes and clerks to those spots from where the smugglers’ rowboats were likely to set sail. The authorities in Istanbul had sent word that boatmen and smugglers were also operating from coves situated farther north on the island, so the Pasha had asked the garrison Commander for assistance. The Commander had replied that his soldiers, who were already fighting guerrillas in those northern battlegrounds, would only intervene in quarantine-related matters if they were explicitly ordered to do so by a telegram from Istanbul.