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Some believed that this unreasonable behavior resulted from the excessive attention and indulgence shown to the island’s sheikhs and holy men. Eventually the Governor Pasha assigned two of his most intimidating guards to escort the wagon. This ruthless pair was equipped with whips and wouldn’t let anyone—not even children—anywhere near the cart. Soon, the curses, shouts, and profanities that used to be heard every time the cart drove past began to fade, to be replaced by the gloomy silence the island had slowly grown accustomed to during those days of plague. Sometimes the wagon would go unnoticed in the quiet, empty roads. As it inched forward through the streets, elderly onlookers would mistake it for the junk dealer Foti’s cart. But sometimes bands of bold, unruly, impertinent kids would evade the whips and clamber on top of the wagon anyway to clown around with their friends and see if they could steal something. In later days, whenever the wagon passed through neighborhoods like Bayırlar, Kadirler, and Germe, the locals would flinch as if they’d seen a funeral hearse; people would jeer and shout, “Get out,” children would throw stones, and the neighborhood dogs would bark with a rage more frenzied than usual—their protests undeterred even as they leaped to avoid the guards’ whips.

Doctor Nuri was the first to notice that these skirmishes between the whip-wielding guards and the populace were turning into a kind of obduracy against quarantine, and the first person he warned was the Governor, not the Major. Perhaps the wagon shouldn’t be out in the streets at all in the daytime.

As the outbreak continued, unidentified corpses began to appear in the wagon’s path. These bodies, which had to be removed immediately, were usually put there by people who had taken up residence in vacant homes. They worried that their new homes might start to smell and that the quarantine officials might come along to disinfect everything and board all the doors up. The most sensible thing to do when the wagon carrying items confiscated for incineration encountered one of these corpses was to take them to the cemetery on the opposite hill, decide what faith they must have followed based on the neighborhood they’d been found in, and bury them accordingly, with a coating of disinfectant lime and without too much ceremony or prayer. But this too required tact, expertise, and experience.

The Governor had been following matters closely, and proposed that the brothers Majid and Hadid should be put in charge of burying the abandoned corpses that were being left for the Major’s wagon to collect. The Major had been unsure, but the Governor had insisted, noting how well liked and even well respected the two brothers were, particularly in those areas of the city where people still spoke the old Mingherian tongue. Known to be a little ingenuous, the brothers Majid and Hadid, who had once run their own shop and had some savings and land of their own, were popular within their community, and everyone agreed that this kind of work was, in fact, inappropriate for men of their social standing. Dragging corpses off the street and loading them onto the quarantine cart was the kind of job better suited to destitute, foolhardy youths and oafish hoodlums from Crete, who would be willing to perform this duty, and with enthusiasm too, in exchange for a large enough payment.

Nevertheless, the brothers Majid and Hadid agreed at first to take on the task, recruiting assistants to help. Perhaps they thought that the Major, now married to their sister, was bound to reward them with gifts, money, or compensation of some other sort. But instead they quickly became the main targets of the fury people harbored toward the cart that carried plague victims’ belongings to the incineration pit. Unlike their predecessors, the brothers did not carry whips. Their conciliatory remarks went uncomprehended, even though (or, some say, precisely because) they were spoken in Mingherian. The Governor, who could foresee that the work of guarding the cart would soon wear the twin brothers out, quickly issued a new directive: from then on, any items removed from vacated homes, shops, and barns were to be piled up outside the building’s front door or garden with a pair of sentries stationed to make sure nobody stole anything, until Majid and Hadid’s wagon could come at nightfall to quietly pick everything up and take it to the incineration pit in the dark.

At night the city was even more deserted, with an eerie, deathly darkness enveloping the streets as if a strange blue fog had descended upon them. The gas lamps that had been used for a time to illuminate the docks and Hamidiye Avenue at night were no longer lit as they used to be in happier days. Some homes were still occupied, but no torches burned in their gardens, nor were there any lights or shadows at the windows. There may or may not have been people hiding inside. In some houses, Mingheria’s wise, surly owls had begun to roost on the roofs and in the trees in the gardens. Sometimes people would burn oil lamps at the door to give the impression that an empty house still had people living in it, and keep bandits and thieves away.

One week later, on the second Friday of June, the twins told their sister that they wished to be relieved of their current duties. The brothers’ protests heightened the Major’s uncertainty on the matter. Within a week of their wedding, Major Kâmil had fallen ardently and irremediably in love with his wife; he was sure that they would be tremendously happy together. But meanwhile, every day Zeynep spoke loudly and with growing insistence of how she wanted to go away to Istanbul at the first opportunity, reminding her husband of the promise he’d made her and talking as if there were no plague or quarantine to think of. The Major didn’t quite know what to do. When he heard from Zeynep that her brothers had asked to be transferred from their duties with the cart and at the cemetery and given new jobs as office clerks instead, he reacted sternly and told his wife that until replacements were found, her brothers and their assistants must continue to guard the cart.

As for Istanbul, the Major had twice promised his wife that they would indeed go “at the first opportunity.” Through the clouds of indecision now gathering in his mind, he could sense that the true problem was something else: the Major’s word did not seem to hold enough sway over his wife and her two brothers. This thing called marriage he’d so often heard his mother praise had generated at least one unforeseen outcome: the fear of failing to satisfy his wife’s demands and losing her forever!

It was around this time that as they sat in their room in the Splendid Palace one day, looking out at the magnificent view, the Castle, and the dark blue of the Mediterranean Sea, Zeynep told her husband about the important news she had just heard from her brother Majid, and which, despite her excitement, she now relayed in slow, methodical fashion. Majid had informed his sister that for the past two days Foreman Seyit and his men had been ferrying passengers to ships waiting in the waters off the island at night, and that if one made the right arrangements, it was possible to reach Smyrna within two days, as vessels flying the Ottoman flag were taking fugitives directly to the port of Chania in Crete, from which they could then proceed to Thessaloniki or to Smyrna. This route had only just been established, and it could close at any time. They must hurry up.

We will remind our readers that Foreman Seyit, who was now also smuggling people off the island, was the Muslim foreman that Governor Sami Pasha had been protecting against the Greek boat crews. The Major suspected that Governor Sami Pasha’s spies would quickly find out about this new route, and sensing that his wife did not have much patience, he decided that Zeynep should flee to join her relatives in Smyrna that very same evening.

These events—which do not feature in any history of Mingheria—are described in Princess Pakize’s letters through the eyes and words of those most closely involved. Yet even we have not been able to understand what the Major might have been thinking in that moment, and perhaps it is here most of all that we have sought to take a novelist’s approach. We know, as does the whole Mingherian nation, that Major Kâmil did not envisage a life outside the island and that he had decided to devote himself to serving his people. The only logical conclusion we are left with is that Major Kâmil did not really wish to smuggle his wife off the island.

“My brothers told me that if we want to go, Foreman Seyit can row us out to a ship to Crete which will be waiting tonight,” said Zeynep, staring right into her husband’s eyes.

Was his wife suggesting that the Major should leave with her? The moment they had decided that she should go, they had also realized how happy they were together. Lovemaking and conjugal companionship had entranced them with pleasures neither of them had ever experienced before. They loved each other, and they would smile and giggle “like children,” talking in a childhood language they had invented together. They were not—as some official historians and greedy journalists have claimed—discovering “the enchanting, all-embracing beauty of Mingherian.” It is true that the history of the Mingherian language dates back to the ancient Mingherian people, with roots among those tribes that originally lived in the hidden valleys south of the Aral Sea. But by 1901, under pressure from Crusaders, Venetians, Byzantines, and now the Ottomans, the Mingherian language had largely been confined to a handful of neighborhoods in Arkaz and to the villages in the island’s mountainous north, without ever having the opportunity to develop the depth, the tools, the spirit, and the conceptual range of the contemporary world in which it existed, and of Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic cultures.

As she packed her bags in their room at the Splendid Palace, Zeynep cried a little. Ever since she was a child, she had always carried with her a comb with a mother-of-pearl handle—made on the island and gifted to her by her aunt—which she had just realized she must have left at her mother’s house. It saddened her to think that she would be parted from this object—one she believed to be a source of good luck—for so long. The Major offered to quickly send one of the sentries, who constantly kept watch at the hotel door for signs of Ramiz, to pick up the comb from his mother-in-law’s house, but in the end, husband and wife just stood there and embraced each other in silence. They were worried that this separation would be a long one.

They made love one last time, feeling more sorrow and melancholy than passion or pleasure. His wife’s tearful eyes troubled the Major’s resolve. What should he do? He tried to tell himself that at least this way they could be sure his wife survived, that he could pick her up from Smyrna as soon as the outbreak was over, that it was a good thing she would be able to escape the plague and the deranged Ramiz’s threats. But he knew that as soon as Zeynep was gone, he would remember these days and hours, and the look in her eyes, and fall back into the loneliness he’d experienced in the Hejaz and in the backwater towns of the Empire. He looked at his wife now so that he could store up the sight of her and never forget what she looked like. Yet readers of the Princess’s correspondence may suspect that the Major’s feelings in that moment were not perhaps entirely truthful.

Once darkness had fallen, the Major put on civilian clothes and a hat he had borrowed from Lami. Both Majid, who had organized the boat, and Foreman Seyit had specifically requested the hat. Zeynep handed the Major the bag in which she had packed everything she needed. They walked through the Hotel Splendid’s modern kitchen and left through the back door. It seemed the plague had blackened the night as thoroughly as it had emptied the streets. They moved like ghosts through alleyways and dark, deserted streets, listening to the soft rustle of trees in the wind. They saw that many people had locked up their garden gates, that there were no gas lamps or candles burning in people’s homes, that there was no light at all. Yet the dominant thought in both their minds was not the plague, but the fear of being apart. Even as they made their way toward the place where Foreman Seyit’s boat was supposed to pick Zeynep up, it was as if they could both somehow sense that in the end they would not have to part after all. Otherwise they might never have set out to begin with.

The fishermen’s hut at the edge of Pebble Cove, three bays to the north of the little cove with the tavernas, had been there since they were children. It took them longer than they’d expected to walk there. The improvised jetty just behind the hut was barely discernible in the light of a half-moon. The sound of waves gently breaking on the rocks and the whisper of leaves in the faint breeze gave the impression that there was somebody else there, but there was not a single person nearby. Husband and wife withdrew to a secluded corner, held each other, and began a long, silent wait. Below them the foam from the waves lapping at the pebbles shone like a white smudge.

“I will telegraph you in Smyrna every day,” said the Major.

Zeynep began to quietly cry. The sea before them was like a dark wall. Majid and Hadid were going to meet them there, after which they would all walk together to the jetty where Seyit himself (not one of his men) was supposed to pick them up in his boat, but a long time went by and nothing happened. Much later, when they realized nobody was coming, the mountains seemed for a moment to be bathed in a soft light. Red, orange, pinkish flames flickered strangely over the pit where people’s old belongings were being burned. The Major saw tears rolling down Zeynep’s cheeks.

“Nobody’s coming; we won’t be parted!” said the Major.

They could see in each other’s expressions that they were both secretly relieved. After their long wait, they walked out of sight through the city’s backstreets and returned to the Hotel Splendid. As he held his wife’s hand on the way, the Major sensed that deep down Zeynep was pleased.

As a historian, we have no proof or documentary evidence of this attempted escape beyond the account we have found in Princess Pakize’s correspondence. Mingheria’s nationalist historians deem the whole incident to be a taboo subject, and never even mention it. For that night, the man whose actions would soon alter the destiny of the whole island had briefly considered sending his wife away and separating his own family’s fate from that of the wider population.

Lami found them shortly after they reached the hotel. “There are warships cordoning the island,” he told them tensely. It was almost as if he’d just announced, “The Sultan has died!”—such was the shock in his voice. “Now that the whole world is getting involved, they’ll definitely stop the outbreak. In fact Robert Effendi, who’d checked out of the hotel yesterday, has asked for his favorite room thirty-three again.”