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“That is quite enough for us too!” said Postmaster Dimitris. “Please do not shoot again in here.”

“I am glad you understand,” said the Major. “We have some proposals you will wish to argue with.”

“I would never argue with the government’s armed infantry,” said Dimitris Effendi. “Do come upstairs to the Postmaster’s office. We shall make note of your commands there.”

The Major thought there was a hint of derision in the Postmaster’s tone. He sent Hamdi Baba outside to handle the people who had gathered there when they’d heard the sound of gunfire. The brothers Majid and Hadid, stationed at the door, told anybody who asked that on the Major’s orders, the Post Office’s telegraph operations had been suspended. Letters and parcels would continue to be mailed out and distributed to their recipients as normal whenever any mail boat arrived. It was only the telegraph service that had been terminated. As nobody seemed to believe this, an announcement in Turkish, Greek, and French was put up on the door. But most of those who turned up through the rest of that day still thought they might be able to send their telegrams out anyway.

CHAPTER 42

The events we have just described came to be known in the history of Mingheria as the Telegraph Raid. This designation was somewhat inexact, as the raid had technically been conducted on the Post Office. The historical and official consensus is that the Telegraph Office Affair, as it was also sometimes known, marked the beginning of a “national awakening” on the island. In the one hundred and sixteen years since, the island has celebrated the twenty-second of June as Telegraph Day, closing schools and government offices for the occasion. During these commemorations, elderly telegraph clerks in flat caps re-create the Quarantine Regiment’s walk from the garrison down the hill to the Post Office. Have those living on the island today really forgotten that the “troops” that came down from the garrison that day were soldiers, not telegraph clerks? Some official “historians” have argued that the reason the event is now remembered as a joyful experiment in “modernity,” rather than a military operation where bullets were fired and force was used, is that the Mingherian people are naturally averse to violence.

Having made sure that the Postmaster would continue to follow his orders for at least some time after the raid, the Major went back to the Hotel Splendid Palace to be with his wife. He did not leave the room for two hours. Much later he would tell journalists that in that brief pocket of time, he had experienced a state of incomparable euphoria.

When the bells of the Hagia Triada Church rang for one o’clock, the Major exited the Hotel Splendid Palace through the kitchen, and walked toward the State Hall. The Hamidiye Square, the area around the unfinished clock tower, and even the environs of the Hamidiye Bridge, usually teeming with idlers, hawkers, and plainclothes policemen disguised as flower or chestnut vendors, were now completely empty. As he passed by the Post Office, the Major saw that the soldiers he had stationed to guard the door were still in position. We can say that during this walk, the Major was edging closer than ever before to that which we would now call history.

The Major entered the State Hall full of confidence and purpose. He felt as satisfied as a chess player who had just made a brilliant and unexpected move. He was immediately shown to the Governor’s Office. Doctor Nuri was there too.

“Please explain why you have done this, what you expected to achieve, and how you propose to rectify the matter,” said the Governor, fuming. “In the midst of an outbreak, we now find ourselves cut off from the world.”

“But, Your Excellency, you yourself have always said that ‘if only they would stop sending telegrams from Istanbul for a couple of days’ you would be able to very quickly end any resistance to quarantine.”

“This is no laughing matter!”

Doctor Nuri intervened. “Your Excellency, if you wish we could have the telegraph line repaired right away and start receiving orders from Istanbul and from the palace again within half a day. Or we might take a more … leisurely approach to repairs. Then nobody would be able to interfere for a few days—just as you wanted …”

“We do not let anybody interfere in our affairs,” said Governor Sami Pasha. “You are under arrest,” he said, turning to the Major.

Two guards entered the room, and the Major did not resist. As they took him to be locked up in a cell on the first floor of the State Hall, the Governor assured him that he would arrange for Zeynep to be looked after by her brothers. He was impressed by the Major’s poised, resolute manner.

The Major’s confidence undoubtedly derived from the feeling that his Telegraph Raid had been a success. Right from the start, and before it had even acquired its official nomenclature, the Telegraph Raid had become a source of hope. Everyone was afraid now—even the “fatalists” whom the Europeans misguidedly belittled, even those who were so hard-hearted and so foolish as to mock other people’s fear. The international blockade and the sinking of the refugee boat had burdened them all with the feeling that they were trapped with the disease. People used to feel grateful, whenever they opened the newspapers to reports of the latest terrible events taking place elsewhere, that God had put them on this remote island, far from all those wars and disasters and global entanglements. But now the sense of distance that their island provided suddenly seemed like a horrible curse.

The light that always spread over the city around the middle of June—sometimes a soft yellow, sometimes pale and colorless—now gave everyone the feeling that they were stuck in their own unique version of hell. It was as if the plague itself were a yellow presence hanging in the sky, constantly stalking the people of Mingheria and casually deciding which life to extinguish next.

A substantial contingent who believed that the disease had been brought in from “outside” were genuinely convinced that the foreign powers that had supposedly snuck the illness in were the same ones who were now shamelessly blockading the island with their warships. These views were held by some Christians too.

The Governor Pasha recognized this strange mood sweeping through his subjects before anyone else did. He soon learned from his informants that the Major, whom the Governor had imprisoned inside the State Hall, was becoming an increasingly well-known figure among Muslim shopkeepers and gangs of angry troublemakers in the Vavla and Kadirler neighborhoods, and even with those in the Greek community who loathed the Governor.

“No one can interfere with you now,” said Doctor Nuri as they sat before the epidemiology map that same day.

Governor Sami Pasha replied by recounting a fond personal memory: “Back when we were young, those of us who worked in the department headed by the dearly departed Fahrettin Pasha (whose villa used to neighbor ours for a while) would sometimes meet in the evenings with our colleagues from across the street in the Translation Bureau after we were done with our tasks for the day and tell each other our dreams for the future of the nation. During one of these nighttime conversations, our friend Necmi from Nazilli challenged us to answer this question: If we were to become grand vizier today, and hold all the power in our hands, what would we do to secure the welfare of the nation?”

“What did you reply, Pasha?”

“There must have been spies and informants among us, so like everyone else, I recited some lengthy prayers for His Highness Sultan Abdülaziz’s health and offered a few banalities. I have always regretted how ordinary my suggestions were! I said, ‘I would give greater precedence to science and education, I would close religious schools, I would establish European-style universities.’ For years afterward, I wondered what I might have said instead, what would have been a more interesting, a more fitting response … One does wonder sometimes if we should just give all these rascals and reprobates out there the punishment they deserve! Sometimes it is the mullahs I am angry at, who do nothing but weaken our quarantine effort, and these charlatan sheikhs who write up prayer sheets against the plague. The consuls here have always infuriated me too. But do you know, I have recently come to think that the best thing for this island now would be to banish every last Christian from it.”

“But why, Pasha? And what if they didn’t want to go? What would you do then—kill them all?”

“Certainly not! We couldn’t do that even if we wanted to. Most of them are good, intelligent, capable, hardworking people. But it is a source of great personal distress to be unable to do anything at all while so many people are dying out of sheer indiscipline, insubordination, stubbornness, and ignorance. Now each and every one of these despicable consuls is going to come up with some complaint, some threat, some lie of his own, and demand that the Post Office is opened once more. Perhaps the time has come to put them in their place.”

“You mustn’t do that, Pasha. They would start opposing quarantine too, out of spite. Perhaps you could say that there is a fault at the Telegraph Office and that our line with Istanbul is broken. You could tell the consuls that you have jailed the Major, and that you couldn’t possibly countenance such an outrageous incident.”

“In fact our connection to Istanbul isn’t broken at all!” said the Governor. “The telegraph line at the Post Office is ticking away. I have asked the municipal code breaker to keep deciphering any messages that might arrive.”

The Pasha had already read the two latest telegrams from Istanbul. One advised that the relief ship Sühandan was on its way, and called for the required arrangements to be made in preparation for its arrival. As for the contents of the second telegram, the Governor Pasha decided to share them then with Doctor Nuri. “The Quarantine Committee in Istanbul has requested that from now on, any medical examinations conducted on the roads that connect Arkaz to the island’s other cities, Zardost and Teselli, should also include checking travelers’ temperatures with the aid of a thermometer. But we do not have enough thermometers. Why are they asking us to do this?”

Doctor Nuri explained that this kind of measure had been adopted in India, where the disease spread through rural areas, in Kashmir, and in inner Bombay. “All Istanbul cares about is whether the disease will spread to the rest of the island,” they muttered to each other. The next day the Governor silenced the consuls’ furious protests by telling them that he had arrested the Major, but he did not restore the telegraph line.

CHAPTER 43

On the morning of Monday, the twenty-fourth of June, the Governor dispatched a municipal clerk to the British consul George Bey’s residence—a house with famously magnificent views—in the neighborhood of Ora and invited the consul to his office. The British consul, whom Sami Pasha had purposely placed on the Quarantine Committee, was not currently well disposed toward the Governor.

The Governor was very fond of George Bey, and favored him over all the other consuls. George Bey wasn’t there to represent a ferry company or any British commercial interests, but purely out of love for the island, and given that he was British by birth, he was a proper consul too, rather than a mere vice-consul. Fifteen years ago, he had gone to Cyprus as a young engineer to work on the British protectorate’s public infrastructure projects, and having married a Mingherian Orthodox girl he’d met there, he had left Cyprus and moved to Mingheria nine years ago. Unlike the consuls who were native Mingherians, he did not brazenly exploit consular privileges and customs exemptions for his own personal gain.

The Pasha also nurtured a heartfelt respect toward George Bey for the way he treated his wife as an equal: George and Helen were often spotted together, they traveled and took picnics together, they were always discovering the island’s best panoramic spots, and they confided in each other all the time. They had introduced the Governor Pasha to Marika’s husband (who would later pass away) even before the Governor had met Marika herself. In those early years, whenever he sat in the consul’s house having a glass of wine and enjoying the spectacular views, the Governor would boast to George and his wife Helen of how he would rather die than give in to those cowards who wanted to take this beautiful island of Mingheria, pearl of the Levant, away from the Ottoman Empire, and he would vow to fight them all until his dying breath. Though he could sense that they regarded his views on love, marriage, and life as somewhat rough and high-handed, and though he sometimes suspected (perhaps unfoundedly) that they might be secretly making fun of him, the Governor Pasha still treasured George Bey’s conversation and friendship.

It was, sadly, a dispute over books that had now driven them apart, as well as an argument over freedom of speech that had turned unexpectedly fraught. Under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, any book mailed to Mingheria from abroad was first sent from the Post Office to the State Hall, where it would have to be reviewed and deemed “suitable” before it could be released and delivered to its intended recipient. George Bey, who was writing a history of Mingheria in his spare time, would often find that the monographs and memoirs he would order from London and Paris were confiscated for dangerous content, or handed over to him only after many months had passed. These difficulties were caused by the three-person committee tasked with evaluating incoming books. (The members of this committee were ordinary municipal clerks who happened to speak a little French.) George Bey had finally asked his friend the Governor if he might intercede with the Review Committee to speed things up, and for a while, this approach had proven effective. But soon the time it took to retrieve his books had begun to lengthen once more, and George Bey had started using the French Post Office of Mingheria—that is to say the Messageries Maritimes offices on Istanbul Street—as his mailing address.

To the Governor Pasha, Monsieur George’s solution felt like a political conspiracy as well as a sly and devious personal affront, but he was also afraid of what might happen if the palace’s informants on the island started reporting to Abdul Hamid that dangerous books were circulating freely in Mingheria, and it was in this state of heightened agitation that he had managed two months ago to impound a trunk containing a new shipment of books for George Bey.

This operation had mobilized considerable investigative resources. It began with the Governor Pasha’s spies reporting that Consul George had been boasting to his friends about a new shipment of books he was expecting from Europe, whereupon the Governor instructed his informants in the docks and post offices to be on the alert for this delivery so that he could have the trunk tracked all the way to the so-called French Post Office. Later, as the books were being transported to the consul’s house, the police stopped the cart and confiscated the trunk on the pretext that the Muslim coachman was wanted by the authorities for theft. Once the trunk was opened and its contents revealed, the Governor Pasha had the books sent to the State Hall’s censorship committee for evaluation. Behind the Governor’s actions that day lay a long-standing argument he and George had been embroiled in: the question of “how to shield the state and the public from dangerous books” was one the Pasha had always enjoyed debating, though he now regretted having let this particular discussion go on for as long as it had.