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The Major understood straightaway that this blockade arranged by the world’s Great Powers meant that the island had now effectively been left to its fate. But he pretended to believe Lami’s more encouraging conclusion. His wife too was immediately convinced by this statement of unwarranted optimism. But the true reason for their jovial mood was that they had not been separated after all, and that they would soon be alone in their room upstairs, free to make love for as long as they wanted to.

CHAPTER 40

Europe’s foreign powers had taken the decision to cordon the island together with Istanbul—or at any rate they had pressured the Ottoman government into agreeing. Years later, archive researchers studying diplomatic correspondence from this period would discover that the British ambassador in Istanbul had advised that unless the Sublime Porte also sent a ship of its own, the cordon would inevitably be interpreted as an operation targeted at the Ottoman Empire itself. But—argued Sir Philip Curry—if an Ottoman vessel were to join the operation, this would spare the Ottoman Empire a great deal of global embarrassment, as the cordon would be seen to specifically target the Governor of Mingheria and the local Quarantine Authority who had failed to properly preside over the island. The Osmaniye was once again undergoing repairs, so at the navy minister’s suggestion, Abdul Hamid ended up deploying the warship Mahmudiye.

The decision to set up a maritime cordon was communicated to Governor Sami Pasha and to the Mingherian Quarantine Authority by telegraph the next morning. Given that the blockade was framed in these telegrams as a measure the province of Mingheria itself had requested in order to help protect its fellow Ottoman citizens from the plague, the Governor surmised that an official statement must have already been made to the international press.

By midday, the whole of Arkaz knew that the island had been surrounded by British, French, and Russian warships—as well as the battleship Mahmudiye with its star-and-crescent Ottoman banner—to stop people from trying to flee the plague without heed to quarantine rules, isolation measures, or doctors’ instructions. Mingherians understood that their island was being mentioned by name in newspapers across the world, but this knowledge brought them no pleasure. For they were not being spoken of in positive terms. Not only had they failed to stop the plague, they were now also spreading it to the rest of the world.

The island’s local newspapers soon took to listing the characteristics of the foreign warships at every opportunity (and with undisguised satisfaction at their island being deemed worthy of such attentions): the French Amiral Baudin, launched in 1883, was one hundred meters long; the British HMS Prince George, launched in 1895, was excellent in artillery. As for Kaiser Wilhelm, he hadn’t sent a ship at all, concerned about possible diplomatic repercussions and wary of hurting Abdul Hamid’s feelings. The citizens of Arkaz could not see the warships with the naked eye. They were only visible on clear, windy days from the island’s mountain villages, monasteries, and rocky promontories. Whenever the weather turned hazy, the ships would vanish from sight altogether, their mysterious disappearance prompting baseless rumors that they had sailed away, or that they had never really been there in the first place.

As ordered by Istanbul, the municipal authorities prepared a statement explaining the reason for the blockade, and hung it all over the city on posters similar to those that had announced the outbreak of plague and the introduction of quarantine regulations. The statement explained that the maritime cordon was not aimed at ordinary Mingherians, but had been established to stop gangs of lawless criminals from smuggling people away on their boats.

The cordon left everyone on the island feeling heartbroken and dispirited. To the people of Mingheria, this decision was a further sign that quarantine provisions had failed, and that the whole world was telling them: “Fend for yourselves, and stay away from us!” The Orthodox Greeks, who had always felt they could rely on Europe and Russia for protection, now realized that the European nations would always put their own interests first. But the island’s Muslim population too felt that Abdul Hamid had abandoned them. People soon began to invent stories with which to deceive themselves and gloss over the unpalatable truth. The Sultan’s personal ferryboat Suhulet had been converted into a relief ship, and was on its way now with soldiers, supplies, and medicines on board; the number of deaths was actually decreasing; the British in India had discovered a vaccine which could stop the outbreak with a single injection, just like the rabies shot, and the true purpose of the cordon was merely to buy some time until the vaccine could be introduced. As for those who mostly spoke Mingherian at home, and trusted in the island’s lodges and holy men, their anger was limited to the British and French for blockading the island. They assumed sympathetically that Abdul Hamid must have been forced to send the Mahmudiye, and did not hold this against him.

But from time to time, the Muslim population’s hostility against Christians could also turn into a kind of rage against the Ottoman bureaucracy, the Governor, and the army. There was one fundamental sentiment nearly everyone on the island shared: after fifty years of reforms brought in to curry favor with the European powers, after all the adjustments and reorganizations that had been carried out—partly under pressure from Europe, and partly with genuine conviction—in the name of equality between the Empire’s Christian and Muslim subjects, here was Europe turning its back on the island in its hour of greatest need. As there were many people who felt this way, and as their feelings were provoking a growing disregard for quarantine regulations, the Governor Pasha was more worried about them than he was about the Greek population. In a way, given how much the quarantine effort relied upon collaboration between the island’s doctors (most of whom were Greeks), the Quarantine Authority, and the Governor, the outbreak of plague had brought Mingheria’s well-educated Greeks and its well-educated Muslims closer together, when they had previously had no interest in each other’s lives beyond the realms of commerce and bureaucracy. The Governor did not think there was any kind of political plot beneath this newfound closeness either, as the Greek government was genuinely concerned about the health of the island’s Greek-speaking population.

It rained for three days. Every spring, these downpours would not only revive the island’s abundant flora and its population of slugs and magpies but also cause floods, and that year too the Arkaz Creek burst its banks, sending mud flowing through the city’s alleyways and turning the water by the docks a yellowish color and a consistency similar to that of the fermented wheat drink boza. The Governor Pasha sat at the bay window in his office watching the sea become a greenish blue off the Castle and a deeper blue beside the Arab Lighthouse, observing the Castle vanish from view under another sudden spell of rain and whiling away the hours as he tried, perhaps for the hundredth time, to think his way through the main problem they were facing.

“If we send more soldiers out on the streets and throw more people into the dungeons or in isolation, we’ll soon have a revolt on our hands,” the Governor had told Doctor Nuri one day. “Already we’re locking up fifteen to twenty people in the Castle every day, between suspected plague cases and all these delinquent, opportunistic thieves, looters, and hoodlums breaking quarantine left and right!”

After the rains stopped, the Governor Pasha and Doctor Nuri began going on daily walks in the neighborhoods of Çite, Germe, and Kadirler, where the disease had spread the most. They were joined by the Pasha’s own guards as well as by the Major and the soldiers of the Quarantine Division, and these twenty-to twenty-five-minute excursions quickly became an occasion to assess the latest conditions in the city and witness firsthand the troubling arguments and disagreements that had been breaking out in its most infected streets.

The city was calm and smelled of Lysol. The army had limewashed tree trunks, stone and wooden walls, and the first floors of people’s houses, and at times the Governor Pasha thought the city looked like some other place altogether. This strange sensation was complemented by the emptiness of the streets. No one walked side by side or in groups of more than two anymore. Looking out at the market from the Hamidiye Bridge, which he had crossed at least two or three times a day for the past five years, the Governor Pasha would see that half the stores were shut now, and he would shudder at the sight every time.

Whenever he saw people standing around by the docks or on the boulders along the edge of the creek with nothing else to do but stare into the water, or came across shopkeepers who’d had to close their stores, or spotted someone sitting and waiting in some secret cranny as if they were hiding from the world, the Governor’s unease would grow. Even a stranger to the city would have realized that most of the population had taken shelter inside their homes, protected by thick walls and closed shutters, and ensconced in their turrets, bay windows, and courtyards. The rains had ended now, and on Wednesday, the nineteenth of June, a day in which seventeen deaths were recorded, the Governor Pasha noticed that many of the shops that were closed had also been boarded up. Some of these barriers had been erected by the authorities themselves to prevent shopkeepers from returning to the premises after they had been disinfected—and to stop thieves and microbes. But a month and a half on from the introduction of quarantine provisions, many of the measures that had been so eagerly adopted at first were no longer being implemented, and every day brought new challenges and incongruities to deal with.

Boarding up vacant homes and shops may not have been strictly necessary in the age of microbes and epidemiology, but for a time these measures had also served to counter the growing problems of theft, squatting, and looting. To cover timber and labor costs, a tax was levied from people whose property was being boarded up. This ill-advised provision was later abandoned, and eventually, fewer and fewer homes were boarded up at all. The gradual loosening of certain quarantine provisions was a subject of frequent discussion between the Governor and Doctor Nuri. Most of the time, the Major would listen quietly to their deliberations, impressed by how they would weigh up the “intensity of quarantine” in making their strategic calculations. Readers of Princess Pakize’s letters will find that the Governor was particularly disgruntled about having to constantly ease quarantine regulations in the wake of misconceived telegrams from Istanbul.

In the five days after the cordon was established, eighty-two people died. It is interesting to note that despite these numbers, people were still shocked when garrison Commander Mehmet Pasha himself died of the plague. Only a poet—not a novelist, and certainly not a historian—would be able to describe the despair that began to seep through the city toward the middle of June. It was a hopelessness that hindered people from acting with prudence, exercising their common sense, and taking the required precautions. It was a feeling that seemed to say, “We’re done for, anyway.” They might not all be dead just yet, but everyone felt that they were trapped on the island, and no matter what they did, one day death would inevitably come for them too.

It wasn’t just the Greeks now, but a significant proportion of Muslims too who regretted not fleeing the island before quarantine measures were introduced. With all official routes suspended under the international blockade, small cargo ships and large fishing boats had returned to linger in the waters around the island, and the island’s boat crews had once again started smuggling people out to these vessels in the middle of the night. The foremen of these crews, who were making huge profits from this new phase of smuggling, soon began to spread all sorts of lies and rumors, alleging, for example, that the British HMS Prince George and the French Amiral Baudin had withdrawn from the cordon completely, or that they were retreating to the port of Chania in Crete every night—making a crossing by sea possible after all. It was true, however, that one boatman, helped along by a fair wind and favorable currents, had managed to row a family of three all the way to the shores of Crete in just two days, though this news never did reach the island. Anyone interested in finding out more about this adventure may wish to read the extraordinary memoirs later penned by the child who had made the crossing on that boat, published in Athens in 1962 under the title The Wind Was in Our Oars.

In the beginning, these new smuggling methods were carried out in total secrecy. But when neither the Governor nor the Quarantine Regiment intervened, it seemed everything could continue as it had before, and soon the frequency of these attempts increased. It was during this period of heightened activity that a boat with too many passengers on board sank in the choppy seas one night. Or perhaps it was quietly, deliberately sunk—drowning more than fifteen Mingherian Greeks with it.

The incident was initially described as an accident, but right from the start, the people of the island sensed an element of “malicious intent” in the sinking of the refugee vessel. Having come to the realization that they had been abandoned to their fate, Mingherians were looking for someone to blame for their predicament. In the 1970s, Soviet historians would eventually find a series of documents proving that the boat—which was named Topikos—and the seventeen refugees on board had been hit that night by a shell fired from the Russian warship Ivanov. Seeing that attempts to illegally escape the island were not diminishing, the foreign powers, encouraged by Britain, had decided they should set an example by sinking one of the refugee boats. The plan had been to rescue its shipwrecked passengers from the sea and return them to the island, but instead, there had been some kind of disturbance. The refugee boat had advanced of its own accord toward the Russian warship in the middle of the night. The Russian foreign ministry refrained at the last moment from issuing a statement purporting that the Ivanov had been forced to defend itself when it had been attacked by a vessel “with infected people on board.” Many aspects of this disaster, which had such a profound impact on Mingherians’ emotions, remain obscure to this day. In the days that followed, the sight of the victims’ corpses washing up on Mingheria’s shores instilled a different kind of terror in its inhabitants, and left them with the inescapable sensation that they had become like prisoners shackled to their island.