第 48 页

When he saw the expression on George’s face as the consul walked into his office that morning, the Pasha realized that their days of gentle sparring and convivial badinage were definitively over. Speaking in the rudimentary French they always used with each other, the consul, his manner now rather reserved, asked when the Post Office would open again and when normal telegraph services would resume.

“There has been a technical issue,” said the Governor. “The Major overstepped, and he is in prison now.”

“The consuls think you encouraged him.”

“For what purpose and whose benefit would we do such a thing?”

“They are calling him a hero in Çite and Vavla neighborhoods. Everyone is scared of the Quarantine Regiment now. You know better than I do how many people believe that the disease was brought here deliberately to cause harm and wrest the island away from Ottoman rule, just like Crete … These people are pleased about the Telegraph Raid. We are seeing now the one thing Abdul Hamid most wished to prevent in Rumelia and on his islands: Greeks and Muslims turning against each other.”

“That is indeed unfortunate.”

“Your Excellency, in honor of our friendship, I must warn you,” said Monsieur George, his French improving as it always did whenever he became emotional. “Britain and France will no longer tolerate this illness hovering so close to European borders. The Great Powers have never been able to stop the plague in India or China because those places are too far away. These kinds of things can be very onerous there, and the locals are ignorant and intractable. But the outbreak here must be stopped, for it is starting to turn into something that could threaten Europe too. If we do not do it ourselves, they are fully prepared to send their own soldiers to eradicate the disease, and even evacuate the whole island if need be.”

“Our sultan would never allow that,” said the Governor, losing his temper. “If the British came here with their Hindu troops, we would not hesitate to deploy the Arabs from our garrison, and you can be sure we would fight to the last man. I would fight too.”

“My dear Pasha, as you are aware, Abdul Hamid has long since been prepared to give this island up, just as he did with Cyprus and Crete,” said Monsieur George with a smile.

The Governor Pasha shot him a hateful glare. But he knew that all of this was true. After they had helped him take back some of the Balkan territories he had lost to the Russians in the war of 1877–78, Abdul Hamid had practically gifted Cyprus to the British, only asking in return that the Ottoman flag should continue to fly over the island. The Governor Pasha was reminded of the writer Namık Kemal’s famous words: “the state would never give its castles up!” It was a line from the play Vatan yahut Silistre (For the Homeland and Silistria), spoken by the sweet and innocent soldier character Islam Bey. But the Ottoman state had been retreating for one hundred and fifty years now—one castle, island, nation, and province at a time.

With a surge of confidence and vigor even he couldn’t explain, the Governor Pasha coolly and sardonically posed Consul George the following question: “So what would you suggest that we do?”

“Only yesterday I met with His Excellency Constantinos Effendi, leader of the Greek congregation …,” said Consul George. “The most appropriate move would be for the island’s Muslims and Christians, its priests and sheikhs, to issue a joint statement so that we can forget old rivalries and fight side by side against this scourge. Of course the Telegraph Office should immediately open again too …”

“If only everything were as simple as you have so benevolently put it!” said the Governor. “Come and let us go with Coachman Zekeriya to the most infected, malodorous spots, and perhaps you will change your mind.”

“We all know the corpse that was spreading that terrible smell all over the Çite neighborhood has finally been found now,” said the consul. “Whose negligence was that? But of course it would be the greatest honor to join you in your landau for an inspection, dear Pasha.”

Usually when the British consul began to speak to him with the excessive courtesy of a diplomat rather than as a friend would do, the Governor Pasha would begin to worry and suspect that George Bey was secretly scheming against him, but on this occasion he was mostly just pleased that they would embark on this excursion together. Having gone into unnecessarily lengthy detail with the coachman about which route he should take to get to Çite this time, the Governor had Monsieur George sit beside him rather than in the seat across, and opened the landau’s windows.

As they advanced toward the New Mosque, the emptiness of the streets seemed utterly strange to the Pasha. Even without the plague, it would have been dispiriting not to see a single person outside.

They saw that most of the shops along the creek were closed. In the market quarter, there were two barbers still open (nobody came in for shaves anymore except for a handful of “fatalistic” old men; as for Panagiotis, his shop was closed that morning), and a few blacksmiths who would have probably starved if they stopped working. The Quarantine Regiment had harassed so many shopkeepers—Greek and Muslim—for resisting their authority and breaking quarantine prohibitions, and locked so many of them up in the Castle prison, that most of these shop owners had stopped opening their stores altogether, and never came down to the market anymore either. The Pasha had been against this at first, insisting that there should be some semblance of order to how the shops were closed, but by the time any system could be put in place, the shopping district was already empty and completely silent.

With the collaboration of Doctor Nikos and the local Greek community, and the help of the municipal authorities and the gendarmerie, a food market had now been set up in the Greek Middle School, stretching across its playground and up to the first floor (where mousetraps lay at every corner). Supervised by quarantine doctors and regularly spritzed with Lysol by a team of spray-pump operators, this market sold eggs, walnuts, pomegranates, herb-flavored cheeses, figs, raisins, and other similarly “safe” products brought in from the countryside. The Governor had started this quarantine bazaar to help people who had been slowly starving because they wouldn’t leave their homes and couldn’t find food, and he was eager for Consul George to see how well it was working and how useful it was. But as the consul pointed out, he had been coming here himself every day, for there was nowhere better than this market to give one a sense of how people were coping. These brave market vendors who came down once a week and underwent medical examinations before they entered the city to confirm they did not have a fever would also inform Monsieur George of all the latest developments, not only in the northern parts of the island, but also in the villages just outside Arkaz. (At this, the naturally suspicious Sami Pasha couldn’t help but wonder if the consul was secretly gathering intelligence in preparation for a military landing in the north of the island.)

CHAPTER 44

The armored landau turned into Istanbul Street. Two months ago, this sloping road had been the island’s most vibrant, boisterous spot, but now it was completely empty. The agents of the travel companies (Messageries Maritimes, Lloyd, Thomas Cook, Pantaleon, Fraissinet), the notary Xenopoulos’s office, and photographer Vanyas’s shop were still open, but there was nobody around. The landau rounded a corner, and they saw a young Greek boy holding his mother’s hand and staring at the place where the street vendor Luka—who had died of the plague—used to sell the dried-chickpea snack leblebi. When she saw the Governor’s landau, the wan-faced, black-robed mother (whose name was Galatia) froze for a moment, then hurriedly covered her son’s eyes so that he wouldn’t look at the Governor’s carriage. The eleven-year-old boy was Yannis Kisannis, who would become Greece’s foreign affairs minister forty-two years later, be accused of treason and collaboration with the Nazis, and pen his memoirs, entitled Ta Viomata Mu (What I Saw), where he wrote wistfully of his childhood days and with frank intensity about the horrors of the plague of 1901.

By now both the Governor and Monsieur George had so often witnessed how the plague could drive people to think and behave in strange and inexplicable ways that they did not take much notice of the black-clad mother’s actions. On the other hand, they were later quite startled by a man who threw himself onto the dirt road in front of the armored landau and demanded—undeterred by the guards’ batons—to be told where his wife and sons had disappeared to. The Governor was determined that anyone who openly defied the doctors’ and Quarantine Regiment’s instructions, and did the opposite of what they were told to do, should be punished for it. There should be no mercy shown to people who protested when their homes were being disinfected, evacuated, or boarded up, nor to anyone who attempted to attack the doctors or purposely infect them.

Suddenly, they were shaken by a deafening bang. They quickly surmised that someone must have thrown a large rock or a block of wood at the roof of the landau. The experienced coachman Zekeriya sped the horses up before turning left into Rose Fountain Road and coming to a stop. There was a silence. They listened to the horses’ rapid breathing. The Governor did not step out of the carriage this time. A few days earlier, they had been passing near the Rifai lodge in the Vavla neighborhood when some children had thrown rocks at the carriage and run away before the guards in the carriage behind the landau could catch them. In his five years as governor, it was the first time anything like this had ever happened.

“That is what you get when you associate with sheikhs and holy men,” said Consul George knowingly.

When the patients and doctors in the gardens of the Hamidiye Hospital spotted the Governor Pasha’s landau, with his guards riding in the carriage behind it, they waited expectantly for it to stop, but instead the horses hastened past, as if to escape from that most ravaged and contaminated area of the city. At the fork in the road approaching the Germe neighborhood, Coachman Zekeriya chose the wider upper road.

“I heard that Chef Fotiadi of the Hotel Regard à l’Ouest died after running away to his village,” said the consul, as if he were speaking of an old friend.

The news saddened the Governor. The consul and the Governor used to have lunch once a month at Fotiadi’s hotel restaurant on a rocky cliff past the Stone Quarry, amicably talking their way through the island’s various afflictions. They would discuss all kinds of issues together, from the city’s lampposts to its limited and constantly overflowing sewage system (which seemed to do as much harm as it did good), from the illegalities taking place at the docks to the Greek consul Leonidis’s minor swindles, from the trade in Mingherian stone to the complexities of rose cultivation. During this time, the Governor’s admiration for the British consul had grown enormously.

That had been three years ago. Back then, the island—so far removed from wars, epidemics, and nationalist struggles of any sort—was such a peaceful place that the kinds of friendships and political discussions we wouldn’t even dream of having today were perfectly possible there.

On their way to the Çite neighborhood, a young man whose purple gown identified him as a disciple of the Halifiye sect stepped to the side of the road when he saw the landau approaching, and held the amulet he wore around his neck toward the carriage, tweezered between his middle and index finger just as the sheikhs always instructed. As the landau drove past, the consul and the Governor saw the young man’s lips twitching, and understood that he must be reciting some kind of prayer.

They first noticed the smell just after the landau had overtaken the young man in the purple gown. It was the smell of corpses, which even after nine weeks the citizens of Arkaz had not yet become accustomed to. It wasn’t always there. Sometimes it could be so pungent that it would burn in people’s throats. Other times all they could smell was the scent of roses. Only when someone died inside a house or a garden or somewhere unexpected, and their body lay undiscovered for a time, would the smell of the corpse waft through the air, and even then it depended on what direction the wind was blowing from. The doctors who examined those corpses that were found only because of the stench they had been emitting would sometimes find that the person had died somewhere else before their body was moved there, or that they hadn’t died of plague at all but had been beaten or stabbed to death. People would die alone while hiding from the plague and the world in some invisible, untraceable recess they had so proudly made their own, and only be discovered when their corpses began to reek. Cooks, maids, watchmen, and married couples would break into empty homes that had been boarded up and abandoned after their owners had fled the outbreak, and die in there with no one finding out for days.

As they entered Çite, they saw a boy sobbing his heart out. He seemed completely disinterested in everything around him, including the Governor’s landau. It was such a heartrending scene that the Pasha was tempted to stop the carriage and console the child. The consul felt the same sorrow too. The Greek community had recently converted an empty neoclassical building behind the Marianna Theodoropoulos Girls’ Secondary School into a kind of orphanage housing seventeen children (according to the latest numbers the Governor had learned) whose parents had died of the disease. In the Muslim neighborhoods of Çite, Germe, and Bayırlar, more than eighty children had already been orphaned. They were usually taken in by uncles and aunts and any other family and relatives they might have in the city, or even by neighbors and acquaintances.

But there were also some children from the Muslim community with no relatives who could foster them after their own families were locked up in the Castle’s isolation facility as confirmed or suspected cases, and so the Governor had ended up placing nearly twenty Muslim children in the care of the Greek orphanage too. A week later, the Governor had been enraged to learn from his informants stationed near the Kadiri lodge that the disciples of that sect had drawn up a petition protesting the Christianization of Muslim children in the Greek school. The Governor ordered the Kadiri dervish who had authored the petition—a strange, bespectacled young man—to be put in prison for infringing quarantine regulations. But in the meantime, the bespectacled dervish had disappeared, and upon suggestion from the Chief of Charitable Trusts, Doctor Nuri had proposed that the old Venetian-era building on Sapling Street in the Camiönü neighborhood be converted into a home reserved for orphaned Muslim children. This had left the Pasha feeling even more unsure about what to do, for like all Ottoman bureaucrats, and especially all Ottoman governors, he had always stood by the “unquestionable axiom” that the moment the state began to make distinctions between Christians and Muslims when providing the services and protection it owed all its citizens, it would be the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. With preparations for the Muslim orphanage taking longer than expected, the Pasha ended up sending even more children to the Greek orphanage.