第 46 页

CHAPTER 41

As of Saturday, the twenty-second of June (a day when twenty-one people died), the Major’s Quarantine Regiment numbered sixty-two trained and active recruits. More than half of these came from the neighborhoods of Turunçlar, Bayırlar, and Arpara. Growing up, most of them would have spoken Mingherian at home with their families or on the street playing with their friends, and some of them still spoke Mingherian in their own homes today. But the soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment believed it was their childhood friendships and neighborhood connections—rather than their ethnic identity—that had secured them these new jobs they felt so fortunate to have been given. Most of them were in their thirties, though the Major had also recruited a father and son from the Bayırlar neighborhood. Thanks to funds especially allocated by the Governor, they had all received their first salary payment upfront.

Every morning after attending the meeting by the map in the Epidemiology Room, the Major would take the Governor’s armored landau to the garrison, where he would lead the Quarantine Regiment through a series of drills and inspect the state of their uniforms. Some of the new recruits loved their uniforms so much that they hardly ever took them off, and wore them—if only for effect—even at home and around their neighborhoods. After their morning drills, the soldiers would be dispatched to various locations to perform their tasks for the day, as decided in consultation with Doctor Nuri and Doctor Nikos. Hamdi Baba and his two men might be sent to pacify the numerous residents of a recently vacated house near the Stone Jetty; if they were not busy manning the quarantine cart, the brothers Majid and Hadid might go to the tent clinic in the gardens of the Hamidiye Hospital to cover a porter who had died and another who’d run away; the father and son who had been recruited to the division might be tasked with evicting two people who had broken into the building site for the new clock tower (a job which would have normally fallen to the gendarmerie, had it not been discovered that the two individuals hiding out at the top of the tower were both infected and already feverish).

In Doctor Nuri’s view, the fact that no one in the Quarantine Regiment had yet fallen sick was clear evidence that the plague microbe was transmitted primarily from rats to humans rather than directly between humans. Upon Doctor Nuri’s advice, the Major had arranged for a dormitory to be set up for the Quarantine Division in the garrison, where they would be more distanced from the disease. Many of these soldiers normally lived in neighborhoods where the outbreak was at its most severe, and where they were at risk of contagion. But they would still have much rather slept in their own homes—with their wives and families, or under their fathers’ roofs—rather than spending the night in that primitive garrison dormitory, and even though the Major had learned that some of them would break ranks and slip away at night, his special troops were otherwise performing so admirably that he had decided not to intervene and dampen their spirits.

That morning, after sending more than half the Quarantine Regiment out to various tasks in different neighborhoods, Major Kâmil gathered his twenty most trusted men and gave them three bullets each from the munitions supplied by the garrison Commander. Then he told them to load their rifles. They were all a little perturbed by this, but they followed his orders and noisily loaded their guns. The Major had put Hamdi Baba in charge of the squad. He had also assigned Mustafa, a recruit from the Bayırlar neighborhood, to assist Majid and Hadid, whom the Major had finally given new desk jobs just a couple of days before. For two days he had been preparing this select team for the task they were about to perform, but feeling the need to say a few more words now, he told them once again that the mission they were embarking on would help to fight this accursed disease, that they had nothing to fear, and that they probably wouldn’t even have to shoot, though they might perhaps have to fire one or two bullets once they got to the Post Office. He had already spoken to them all individually to explain that they were going to protect the Telegraph Office and that this operation was essential to stopping the outbreak. At the last moment, as he was running through what they were each supposed to do one more time, he lied and told them that the Governor Pasha was aware of the plan too.

With the Major leading the way, the quarantine squad marched right out of the garrison’s main entrance (the sentries had opened the gates and saluted them as they passed) and walked in loose but orderly formation down the steep road that would come to be known many years later as Hamdi Baba’s Hill. They were quiet as they walked among Eyoklima neighborhood’s purple bougainvillea and its verdant Lysol-and-honeysuckle-scented gardens, and they could hear bees buzzing. They filed through the back entrance of Hagia Yorgos Church, crossed its main courtyard—that familiar place whose disinfection they had witnessed time and time again, and which now smelled of death and almonds—and continued slowly toward the shore. The front of the church was often thronged with coffins and quarrelsome crowds of mourners and cemetery visitors, but that day there was only a pair of dejected beggars sitting on the stairs, and a handful of dark, shadowy figures watching the soldiers with eyes full of dread.

The soldiers marched down the same Lysol-soaked streets they would walk through several times a day, crossed the State Hall Square without slowing their step, and emerged onto Hamidiye Avenue, and within two minutes they had reached the Post Office. Not many people saw them, and those who did assumed they must be on their way to attend to some quarantine dispute.

As planned, the brothers Majid and Hadid and three other soldiers surrounded the courtyard outside the Post Office’s back door. Seven others, including the Major, climbed the steps at the front entrance of the building and onto the landing. Meanwhile, in the little square outside where people used to gather and wait for their parcels back when mail boats came less frequently, the other eight soldiers of the squad stood guard with their backs turned to the Post Office, their stance a signal to curious onlookers that they were there to keep watch over some sort of military operation. There was no crowd outside just yet, but anyone walking along Hamidiye Avenue could see the soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment stationed by the Post Office, and soon people began to gather to try and find out what might be going on.

The Major entered the building. It was still early in the day, and there were only five customers inside. Some were servants dispatched from wealthy households; others were gentlemen in frock coats. They had come to send telegrams to places like Istanbul, Smyrna, and Athens. The Major had seen them many times before when he had come to drop off Princess Pakize’s letters. Most of their telegrams either said “We’re fine” or “Everything is terrible, but we never go outside.” (When someone died, those who lived in the same house wouldn’t even get the chance to send any telegrams, as they would be taken by the Quarantine Regiment and put into isolation right away.) The Major realized that there were no Muslims around that day. This was the kind of detail he had only recently begun to notice.

The Major was just about to approach a frog-faced clerk he had become acquainted with from posting Princess Pakize’s letters, when the Postmaster came down. He had seen from his office upstairs that there was something out of the ordinary going on.

“Have you brought us a new letter from the Princess?” he said with an amiable smile.

Over the course of his frequent visits to the Post Office, the Major had developed a friendship with Postmaster Dimitris Effendi. Dimitris had been sent to the island from Istanbul twelve years ago. He was not from Mingheria. He was a Thessalonikian Greek who had worked in the Ottoman Empire’s oldest telegraph offices, continued his training at the Imperial Academy for Advanced Telegraphy in Istanbul’s Çemberlitaş district, and developed, over the course of many years, a capillary knowledge of the intricacies of wiring telegrams in French and Turkish. In the early days of the plague, as Princess Pakize’s heavy envelopes were weighed to work out postage fees, and Post Office clerks picked out the right stamps, Dimitris Effendi would often start talking to the Major about Istanbul; he would tell the Major about the classes he’d attended with telegraph engineers who had taught in French, describe the way Istanbul used to be back then, and ask him what it was like now.

“I have no letter this time!” the Major replied. “Today I have come to take over the Post Office.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Post Office is closed now.”

“There must be some mistake,” said Dimitris Effendi.

The confidence in his manner—as if he were merely correcting the number of characters and symbols in a telegram, or pointing out some technical error—irritated the Major.

“You must not resist!” he said, as if he were sharing a secret.

“But the circumstances necessitate explanation …”

The Major stepped away from the counter—where someone had placed a precautionary fumigation kit which would not have been out of place forty years earlier—and walked back to the main entrance, bringing in Hamdi Baba and the other two soldiers who had been standing at the threshold. He was deliberately exaggerating every gesture he made, as if to show Dimitris Effendi and the Post Office staff that they had better toe the line when the Major and his men were around. The clerks were already familiar with Hamdi Baba and the other soldiers, whom they crossed paths with in the city streets every day, and knew how eager they could be to pick fights, use force, and even fire their rifles if need be.

For several days now, the mess inside the Post Office—the tables covered in clutter, the envelopes piling up on top of mailbags, desks, and boxes—had been bothering the Major. When he was a child, the Post Office was as spotless as the framed postcard samples on its walls, and as tidy as an industrious housewife’s kitchen. The reason for its current state of disarray could not have been the introduction of quarantine measures, for after the latest international public health conference, the practice of disinfecting mail and newspaper deliveries had been abandoned, and there were no impediments to sending or receiving post. If the Post Office’s activities had slowed down, it was because visits from mail boats had become more infrequent, and some clerks, fearing they might catch the disease, had renounced their positions and run away. When the Major barred access to the second floor and sent one of his soldiers to stand guard at the foot of the stairs, everyone in the Post Office understood that he had planned this move in advance.

In that same moment the Postmaster was approached by a man whose embroidered waistcoat identified him as a Mingherian of old stock. This man had sent out a valuable package to Istanbul through registered mail a month ago on the Messageries Maritimes Guadalquivir, but he had not yet received any “proof of delivery.” The Postmaster had already twice explained on each of the man’s last two visits what procedure he should follow if he wished to find out definitively whether his package had arrived. In the past week, the old man had been coming by every other day, arguing with the clerks and brandishing a new document he’d had ratified by the State Hall which stipulated that any sealed bags of returned mail should be opened up and searched through until his valuable package was found and given back to him.

With the Postmaster and the old man’s exchange in Greek turning into another prolonged quarrel, the Major thought this would be a good opportunity to declare his intentions.

“That’s enough; let us put an end to this discussion now,” he said in Turkish. “From this moment on, all Post Office operations shall cease!”

He had addressed the whole room with this pronouncement, and spoken loud enough for everyone to hear. The Postmaster told the man with the embroidered waistcoat something in Greek and sent him away. The other customers, disquieted by the presence of the soldiers, had also begun making their way toward the door.

“Exactly which ‘operations’ are you referring to?”

“You will halt all transactions. You will neither send nor accept any telegrams,” said the Major.

The Postmaster signaled with his eyes at the notice hanging on the wall. Drawn up in consultation with the Quarantine Master and with the Governor’s approval a week after quarantine was officially declared, the notice detailed in Turkish, French, and Greek the new rules that Post Office customers would now have to follow: they would only be let in one at a time, and no two people would be allowed to stand next to each other. Post Office clerks were not to be touched; clerks were authorized to use fumigation sticks, and no objections would be tolerated to disinfection spray operators. The proportion of literate Mingherians, particularly among the Muslims, was no more than one in ten, but even so the Governor and the Quarantine Master had insisted on posters like this one being put up in many of Arkaz’s shops, hotels, and restaurants, and even in open spaces and on the walls of certain buildings.

“Are telegrams being banned too?” said Dimitris Effendi. “What do they have to do with the disease?”

“They will not be banned. They will be subject to structure and scrutiny.”

“This kind of measure can only be taken under the Governor Pasha’s orders. Do you have an official decree with you? You are a bright young man, and your future is even brighter. But you must be careful.”

“Hamdi Baba!” the Major called out to the older quarantine soldier whose face everyone knew.

Hamdi Baba lowered his Mauser infantry rifle from his shoulder. Though he knew that everyone was looking at him as he released the safety catch and pushed the bullet into the barrel, his gestures remained composed. The clatter of his rifle silenced the Post Office. Everyone watched as Hamdi Baba rested the rifle against his shoulder and slowly, carefully took aim.

“That will be sufficient. I understand now,” said Postmaster Dimitris.

Hamdi Baba opened the eye he’d screwed shut for better aim, glanced at the Major, and understood that he must continue as they had planned in advance.

A telegraph delivery clerk who had been standing near the barrel of the gun now stepped away. A man with a hat and a secretary who had been close to the door quickly walked out.

Hamdi Baba pulled the trigger. There was a loud explosion. Several people threw themselves to the floor. Some tried to hide under tables and behind desks.

Hamdi Baba fired two more shots, as if he had got carried away for a moment.

“Cease fire!” said the Major. “Slope arms!”

The first two shots had hit the Swiss-made Theta clock on the wall, shattering its glass cover. The last bullet had struck the clock’s wooden casing and disappeared inside, so that the witnesses in the Post Office assumed it must have magically vanished. The Post Office’s spacious entrance hall smelled of gunpowder now.