第 49 页

These children’s fight for survival, hiding in empty homes and living off stolen walnuts and lemons and oranges they plucked off the trees, is a subject as vivid as it is poignant. The elementary-and middle-school textbooks published on the island now tend to describe the touching adventures of these plague orphans in an idealized light influenced by a kind of romantic nationalism, and although most of the kids in these children’s gangs would perish in the outbreak, their stories are told today as if the plague never touched them at all. Schoolbooks in the 1930s would portray these poor children as the oldest, purest, and truest descendants of the Mingherians who had arrived from the environs of the Aral Sea thousands of years ago. They would come to be known colloquially as the “Immortal Children,” a name which was later adopted by the Mingherian Scouts Association until, at the request of the World Organization of the Scout Movement, it was changed to the “Young Roses.”

The children who had attacked the landau were protesting the fate of one of their peers, who, despite having no buboes, had been put into isolation because he had developed a fever and had eventually caught the plague in the isolation facility itself. For these children, the most horrifying aspect of the plague was not even the fact that it could kill their mothers or fathers or both at the same time, leaving them completely alone in the world. Rather, according to the reports the Pasha had received from both Muslim and Christian neighborhoods, it was when they saw the disease transform their sweet, loving mothers into wretched, desperate, selfish animals that these children truly lost their minds. Some of them would give up on the world altogether and run as far away as they could, as if a demon had taken possession of their bodies.

As the landau veered up and to the right into the Turunçlar neighborhood, the coachman did what the soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment always did and pressed a cloth against his nose. The Governor closed the window. The stench had become so bad over the past three days that some local families had left the neighborhood and gone to stay with friends. A soft, tentative breeze blowing from the west had been carrying the smell all over the city and right into people’s nostrils, including the Pasha’s when he sat in the Governor’s Office (and Princess Pakize’s as she busied herself with her letters), and people were getting exasperated. There was even a rumor that the smell was coming from a secret mass grave, though there was no truth in this at all.

The carriages stopped when they spotted a group of municipal officials and soldiers from the Quarantine Regiment gathered in the distance. When Doctor Nuri—who was there too—saw the guards form a ring around one of the carriages, he deduced that the Governor must be inside it and was taken aback, when he hopped on, to find the amiable face and rotund figure of the British consul sitting in there too.

The Governor was aware that they already knew each other, but he made the usual introductions anyway. They listened to Doctor Nuri’s news: they had just searched an old wooden home where they had discovered two people, who must have died in each other’s arms at least twenty days ago, wedged in the beams between two stories. It was hard to tell whether they had been a married couple or lovers or something else. With so many people believing that the disease could spread through smell as well as touch, the task of retrieving the corpses had fallen to a brave young recruit to the Quarantine Regiment named Hayri.

When the news spread through the city that the bodies of two unidentified young people had been found inside an empty house, anyone who had been looking for a missing sibling or a son began to flock to Turunçlar. The Doctor and Prince Consort took the Governor to the house’s back garden, sheltered from the sun by lemon trees. The stench made the lemons with their corrugated skins look like dead fruit hanging among the leaves.

“A sanitary cordon will not be enough to guard this place, Pasha, nor will sentries and soldiers. We need to burn it to the ground!” said Doctor Nuri in a burst of uncontrollable emotion. “There is no amount of phenol that could disinfect it now. Even I think the plague can spread from this kind of place regardless of whether there are rats and fleas around.”

“You said Bonkowski Pasha was murdered because he was planning to have some streets burned down.”

“I was merely speculating about the killer’s possible motive,” said Doctor Nuri. “We have no other choice here if we want to get rid of this contamination swiftly.”

Some historians have since argued that it had been “wrong,” if not even futile, to burn this building down. But when the same pandemic had spread across India, in Bombay, and particularly in the countryside, many of the ramshackle homes, the crumbling buildings, the hovels, and the dumping grounds where the plague had taken hold had been burned to the ground without a moment’s hesitation. Quarantine officials in Kashmir, in Singapore, and in China’s Kansu region would burn down buildings, whole streets, and even entire villages to prevent the outbreak from reaching the bigger cities. Indeed, in these places, the sight of the red and yellow flames and black smoke of a fire rising over wide plains and arid, destitute vastnesses would often signal the approach of plague.

The Governor Pasha went to speak to Quarantine Master Nikos, ordering him to vacate the surroundings of the wooden building and carefully burn it all down. They decided that the best people for this job would be the valiant firemen and Quarantine Regiment soldiers who were on duty at the incineration pit and had them summoned down to the Turunçlar neighborhood from the hill above it. They kept close to the armored landau, where they could talk more freely. Some among the crowd assembled farther down the street had spotted the Governor and were trying to approach him.

The Governor got back into the landau and sat across from the consul. The smell had seeped into the carriage too. It was impossible for two corpses to be causing such a stench. Just as the carriage was about to set off again, the door opened. They took Doctor Nuri back on board too.

As the armored landau gently swayed toward the State Hall, Consul George, the Governor, and Doctor Nuri were silent for a time. The Governor had crossed his arms over his chest and was looking down at his hands as if to say he had seen enough for the day. The consul was gazing at the streets outside the window, but the expression frozen on his face seemed to exclaim, “I cannot believe the scale of the calamity I have just witnessed!”

The landau was on the stretch of road between the Rifai lodge and the New Mosque when the sea appeared between the streets through the window on the vehicle’s right-hand side, and the Governor briefly squinted at the water as if he might be able to spot one of the warships there. “Your opinion is of exceptional value to us, Monsieur George!” he said. “What must we do here on the island for these European warships to withdraw from our seas and lift the blockade?”

“As I submitted to you in your office earlier, Your Excellency,” the consul began, speaking like an old friend and a humble diplomat, “the passage of plague patients to Europe must stop.”

“We have taken every precaution Istanbul asked for, and even some they didn’t ask for. You should tell your people that we are doing all that needs to be done, and with the utmost integrity and commitment, but still the number of deaths is not slowing,” said the Governor.

“Should you consider opening the Telegraph Office again, the help and support you need will come. But there is another matter I would like to speak of. That purple-robed young man in the Çite neighborhood … Why is he so hostile to you and to us all, Pasha? It is plain to see that if it were up to him, he would flout every quarantine rule, and even destroy us if he could.”

“That is Sheikh Hamdullah’s fiery young disciple Halil!” said the Pasha. “They are the worst of the lot. Everyone is always talking about other charlatan sheikhs and their inconsequential prayer sheets. Why won’t anyone come out and say that it is really Sheikh Hamdullah who is behind all of this? Why do they never speak his name in public? The Quarantine Regiment is displeased that I have put their commander in prison!” This was the first time in the history of Mingheria that someone had used the word “commander” in this way. “But they are the only ones who can subdue the sheikh and his men. That is why I must set the Major free now and let him return to his soldiers,” the Governor continued.

“You will have heard that the sheikh has caught the plague!” said Consul George, not objecting to the plan to release the Major.

“What?” said Governor Sami Pasha. “Sheikh Hamdullah has the plague?”

As soon as he had returned to the State Hall, the Governor freed the Major and had him summoned to his office, where he advised him to be careful not to let the people’s support go to his head, to stay out of sight, and not to stray too far from his soldiers.

CHAPTER 45

The Governor was surprised and even a little shaken to hear that Sheikh Hamdullah had caught the plague. During his early years as governor, he had developed a friendship with the sheikh, whom he held in far greater esteem than the needy, faithful throngs who gathered around him. It is possible that he secretly believed in the sheikh’s wisdom and transcendence too. Having probed around for more information and learned that the sheikh was rumored to be afflicted by some kind of illness but was refusing treatment, saying he had surrendered his life “to fate and divine providence,” the Governor sent the sheikh a letter. He wrote that he had heard about the sheikh’s illness, but that the Sultan’s most esteemed plague doctor was in the city now and could immediately examine and treat him. To act as intermediary, the Governor summoned the old Ottoman Urgancızâde family’s eldest son Tevfik, who owned a ship company, and whom the sheikh and the Governor used to spend time with when they became friends five years ago.

The next morning an old dervish with a round white beard and a tall felt hat (his name was Nimetullah Effendi, but he insisted on being addressed as “Regent”) came down from the lodge and delivered the sheikh’s response to the State Hall clerks. The Governor had come to his desk early that day, and when he read the sheikh’s note informing him in perfectly neat handwriting that he would be glad to accept the offer and honored to receive the Doctor and Prince Consort’s visit, he felt as exhilarated as if he had won the final, decisive victory against the plague.

But the sheikh did set one condition. The soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment who had sullied the Halifiye sect’s sacred (the sheikh had used the word “pristine”) treasure of wool and felt must never set foot inside the lodge again.

The Governor accepted this condition. He discussed the matter with Quarantine Master Nikos and Doctor Nuri, who had just arrived.

“Now that he realizes he might die, the sheikh has understood how foolish it is to avoid doctors,” said the Governor.

“Not everyone who becomes infected is bound to die!” replied Doctor Nuri.

“If that’s the case, then why did he write back to us?”

“Pasha, I have witnessed all kinds of self-proclaimed sheikhs troubling governors and local chiefs in our provincial towns only to make a name for themselves. These people will actively provoke confrontations with the authorities, make a great fuss, then make a ceremonious show of reconciliation, all for the sake of showing their benighted disciples how exceptional and important they are. There are many sheikhs, many lodges and sects around. It is essential for them to make sure their names are heard and their presence is known.”

There were twenty-eight Muslim sects in Arkaz alone. This was a lot for a city with a population of only twenty-five thousand—half of whom were Christian. In the years following the Ottoman conquest of the island, these religious sects could be effective in converting Christians to Islam, and so the imperial government in Istanbul had provided nearly all of them with some measure of support.

From venerable scholars to utter scoundrels, there were all sorts of sheikhs in Mingheria now, some pious, some book-loving, some unerringly dour, and all wearing a different color of robe. When a Mingherian-born soldier managed to rise through the ranks in Istanbul and become a pasha or even a vizier, he would often endow the proceeds from his holdings across the Ottoman Empire to one of the sects on the island (as the Mingherian Mahmut Pasha—who had financed the construction of Arkaz’s New Mosque—had also done). Sometimes people who happened to harbor a fondness for the island, and who had managed to distinguish themselves in a particular field until they became quite wealthy, would send gifts and gold from Istanbul to Mingheria for the sheikh of whichever lodge the government felt most aligned to, or perhaps donate the income from an olive oil press or two Greek fishing villages or the rent from a couple of shops in the city to fund the construction of a new lodge or the conversion of a disused mansion into new dervishes’ quarters. But when the Ottoman Empire began to lose its possessions in Europe, the Balkans, and around the Mediterranean Sea, these sources of income from beyond the confines of the island dried up. Left to fend for themselves, some of these lodges became impoverished and soon turned into sanctuaries for homeless people, paupers, and even thieves and ruffians, until eventually the Governor and the Chief of Charitable Trusts would have to step in to ensure they did not fall into a state of total disrepair.

Shortly after taking the throne, Abdul Hamid—who knew how influential the religious sects and dervish lodges scattered all over the Empire could be, and monitored their activities closely—had presented the Mevlevi lodge, the island’s wealthiest, oldest, and most powerful sect, with a Theta wall clock, but not long after that, he fell out with the Mevlevis’ leader in Istanbul (guilty, in the Sultan’s eyes, of being too friendly with the reformist statesman Mithat Pasha), and sought to assuage his anxieties by endorsing other sects too, such as the Kadiri and the Halifiye.

It was thanks to this support that the sheikh of the Halifiye sect now had enough power and popularity to either bolster or undermine the quarantine effort. Before Doctor Nuri went to see the sheikh, there was a meeting held in the Governor Pasha’s office. The Major, whose confidence had only increased after the raid on the Telegraph Office and his spell in prison, eagerly supplied an account of how the lodge—which he had so frequently visited as a child—had come to be established. He told Doctor Nuri a long story of how thirty years ago he had sat on a previous sheikh’s lap and pulled at the old man’s thick white beard.

In that moment, the Governor, who had been watching the view of the city from his window, pointed out that there were clouds of black smoke rising from the hills in the distance, near the New Mosque as well as the Bektaşi and other lodges. They all gathered around the window to try and work out what might be happening. A clerk then informed them that this was the house in Turunçlar which they had decided to burn the day before—the one where the pair of welded corpses had gone to hide. There was so much smoke that it looked like the whole neighborhood was burning rather than just one small building (even if it was made of timber). The wood was so dry that it had burned up quickly, making crunching sounds, sending flames towering into the sky, and issuing an expanding cloud of black smoke that everyone would later interpret as a bad omen.