第 50 页

The people of Mingheria had become accustomed to seeing plumes of blue smoke rising periodically from the incineration pit on the hill, but these new yellow and orange flames—glowing to the west this time—with their dark shadow of smoke indicated that things had taken a turn for the worse. Finding it difficult to believe that a single house could generate so much smoke as to cover the sun and darken the sky, the Governor concluded that the fire must have spread, and stepped out of his office and onto the terrace. He was sure the smoke must also be visible from the warships the Great Powers had sent to besiege the island. The whole world must be looking at them now with the same pity and condescension it reserved to the rest of the Ottoman Empire—these poor Mingherians who couldn’t reply to telegrams, couldn’t stop the outbreak, and couldn’t even put a fire out.

As a historian we should like to note that in this case Governor Sami Pasha’s intuition was correct: thanks to a journalist stationed on the Amiral Baudin, the ship the French had sent to join the blockade, the news that the island of Mingheria—already surrounded by a maritime cordon and trapped in the jaws of the plague—was now also aflame was reported in the following week’s edition of the Parisian publication Le Petit Parisien, accompanied by a romantic and fantastical full-page illustration.

When he arrived at the Halifiye lodge, Doctor Nuri was greeted at the entrance by the regent with the felt hat and led to a two-story wooden construction near the edge of the compound. There were no scholars or disciples around. The door to the wooden building opened up, revealing a stocky man with a distracted look on his face. There was something he was trying to remember, but he couldn’t, and so he wore an odd smile instead. Doctor Nuri understood that this must be the sheikh. He looked pale and tired, but there was no bubo on his neck.

“I should like to kiss your blessed hand, Sheikh Effendi, but I must desist in light of quarantine regulations.”

“That is as it should be!” said the sheikh. “Like His Royal Highness Sultan Mahmud, your wife the Princess’s great-grandfather, I too have great faith in quarantines. I shudder at the mere thought that I should be responsible for passing the disease on to anyone, let alone a royal consort such as yourself. Three days ago I was sitting in this very room—just like this, Your Excellency—when I fell down and fainted. I myself was quite delighted with what I saw of the spiritual realm while I remained unconscious, but my dear dervishes were worried, overcome with anguish at the thought that their sheikh might be ill, and so the rumors began to spread, and people started saying, ‘The sheikh has caught the plague.’ But I did not alert the doctors. Though I am currently in the midst of a solitary contemplation exercise I began ten days ago, I must say I am nevertheless profoundly moved by His Excellency the Governor Pasha’s insistence that you should visit me. I have offered many grateful prayers to the almighty Allah, our holy Prophet Muhammad, the Sultan, and our governor for sending the Ottoman Empire’s most renowned quarantine doctor—and a Muslim too!—right to my doorstep. But I have one question, and one condition.”

“Certainly, Your Excellency.”

“What is the meaning of having a house only two streets away from our lodge burned down like kindling, ostensibly for quarantine purposes, with so much smoke that even the sun is obscured, and all of this happening just before you come to visit me here?”

“That is a coincidence.”

“Was this place not burned down by the same Quarantine Regiment who sprayed Lysol on us, and the army major who commands them all? If the purpose was to say ‘You have the plague too, so you’ll be next,’ I am sure the Governor Pasha’s clerks could have told us as much.”

“Of course not … The Governor Pasha’s regard for you knows no bounds.”

“Be that as it may, before you begin your medical examination I should like to acquaint you with our lodge’s one-hundred-year history, so that you may understand why we will never be infected with this monstrous pestilence, and why you will never have reason to burn us to the ground,” said Sheikh Hamdullah. “The Halifiye lodge in Mingheria was founded by my grandfather Sheikh Nurullah Effendi, who was sent here from the Kadiri lodge in Istanbul’s Tophane district,” he declared, starting at the very beginning. The people who had invited the sheikh’s grandfather to the island had intended for him to take charge of the Kadiri dervishes in the Kadirler neighborhood and push out those devotees who were flouting the sect’s teachings by sticking spikes and skewers all over their bodies in accordance with Rifai rituals. But when the Rifais, backed by the Governor at the time, refused to give up their rituals, Nurullah Effendi and the dissenters who had brought him to Mingheria decided to leave the lodge altogether and established a new sect of their own in nearby Germe.

Sheikh Hamdullah continued with his story: Just like his father before him, he had grown up right here, in this lodge and on these streets. He had gone to Istanbul to study at the Rumelian Mehmet Pasha Mosque madrasa, which was where he had first developed an interest in religious matters, poetry, and history. Despite his father the sheikh’s exhortations, he did not return to the island for many years. In Istanbul he married the daughter of a poor family of migrants from Rumelia, taught at a small madrasa, published a poetry collection entitled Aurora, and worked for a time at the Karaköy customs office. He even caught a distant glimpse of Abdul Hamid at the Yıldız Palace once, during one of those public processions that were held every time sultans attended Friday prayers. (At this point the sheikh paused in his account to recite several lengthy prayers for the Sultan’s health.) When he returned to Mingheria seventeen years ago to settle his late father’s estate, he sensed on his first night back that he was there to stay, and having had his books and other possessions sent down from Istanbul, he had since devoted himself to worship, spiritual contemplation, and the affairs of the lodge he had come to lead.

It had been an animated account, and now the sheikh was tired. “Come, let me show you our most secret treasures!” he said.

Doctor Nuri followed the sheikh—who could only walk if he was leaning on one of his disciples—out into the garden, which had darkened in the shadow of the smoke. As they approached the lodge’s main building, the doctor saw that his visit was being meticulously observed by the whole lodge, from its newest acolytes to its oldest dervishes, with the same suspicion with which they were watching the fire burn a few streets away. The sheikh showed his illustrious guest the sleeping chamber (which he’d requested be painted blue) to the left of the sitting room, where the lodge’s sacred one-winged Mingherian beetle was held captive. Just like those Mingherians who could never leave their island, this beetle would not escape even if you left the door open. After this they went to view the seclusion chamber. The sheikh told the story of a dervish who had dreamed, on the last night of his forty-day solitary retreat there, of a ship that had sunk to the floor of the ocean, only for the same ship to appear the next day in the waters off the Arab Lighthouse to take the dervish to China, where he would go on to establish the newest branch of the Halifiye sect.

The sheikh showed off his grandfather’s staff made out of date palm, which looked “just like our holy Prophet’s staff,” and his father’s staff, “as hard as steel” and decorated with mother-of-pearl inlays along the handle.

As they crossed a row of cells, each with its own young dervish—some bald, some with very pink lips, some rather pale, some looking stern and others more gentle—standing like a sentry at the door, Doctor Nuri realized that the plague would spread quickly around here.

They walked underneath a walnut tree as tall as four men would be and entered the lodge’s newest building, which smelled of timber and varnish. The sheikh opened a wooden trunk in a corner of the room and showed Doctor Nuri the green, purple, and gray hats—also known as crowns—his predecessors had worn, their yellow-and-blue-striped ceremonial tanoura skirts, the “submission” stones they had broken off Mount Sacrifice in the north of the island for the dervishes and the sect’s disciples to carry as badges around their necks, and the twelve-knotted belt every sheikh could wear as he wished. These were the sect’s most sacred heirlooms, and if even so much as a drop of black Lysol and quarantine poison were to touch them, they would die. Everyone else would die with them too—down to the last dervish and disciple.

As he described each object, the sheikh spoke in constant overstatements and double meanings, and even though it was obvious that he was not really upset or particularly angry, he made such an elaborate show of being upset and angry that Doctor Nuri began to feel that same hopelessness and guilt he usually experienced when faced with uneducated patients in rural villages who did not even know how to explain their symptoms.

They entered a room full of books and smelling of lemon blossoms, where the sheikh spread out a few volumes, some handwritten scrolls, several pages of old, yellowing papers, and various pamphlets, and introduced the main topic he wished to discuss, informing the doctor that he had begun to compose a poem in rhyming couplets wherein he hoped to address the most commonly asked questions about the plague, and to discuss and explain what the most appropriate Islamic approach to the disease should be.

“On the subject of plague and infectious diseases, there are two views within the Islamic tradition that to this day remain vehemently at odds,” said the sheikh. “The first of these postulates that the plague is brought about by Allah, and not only is it futile to try and escape it, it is as difficult and dangerous as trying to escape one’s fate. Indeed our Prophet Muhammad did say, as do the Hurufis, that ‘those who proclaim that the plague is contagious are no better than people who look for signs in the movements of birds and owls and snakes and hope to find some kind of meaning.’ When the plague arrives, the best thing you can do is to meekly withdraw and wait for it to pass, without showing yourself to anyone, and without letting your soul be tainted. Europeans will misguidedly call these people fatalists. The second view accepts that the plague is contagious. If they wish to survive, Muslims and Christians alike must escape from that disease-ridden place, get away from that air and from those people. This conclusion is supported by our Prophet’s words as reported in the Hadith: ‘One should run from the leper as one would run from a lion.’ But once the plague is among us, it is no good locking doors or trying to flee. At that point there is nothing else to do but to seek refuge in the mercy of Allah.”

There were six or seven people hanging around the door and listening to their conversation. The Doctor and Prince Consort could see that every word that was said here would soon be repeated—accurately or otherwise—among shopkeepers in the Old and New Markets, between consuls, clerks, and journalists, and in the reports the Sultan’s informants sent to Istanbul.

“Come and look at this room, now!” said the sheikh, pushing another door ajar.

The Doctor and Prince Consort saw three young disciples sitting at a weaving loom, surrounded by different-colored skeins of spun wool and several types of fabric.

“As instructed by my grandfather Sheikh Nurullah, founder of this lodge, we make all our own underwear, shirts, jackets, cardigans, and skullcaps using wool we spin ourselves and our own fabrics and linens, all cut and sewn the way our forefathers did, and dyed using roots and Mingherian herbs and powders from China.”

A young disciple who had been listening to their exchange opened various wardrobes and linen cupboards where the Doctor and Prince Consort saw shirts, jackets, pillows, heaps of raw wool, and fabrics in many colors. Struggling to catch his breath, the sheikh continued:

“Now tell me, what conscience is this that could countenance coming here, pouring Lysol all over our precious wool, and turning our most sacred patrimony into a pile of mud?”

Doctor Nuri did not reply, for he could tell that these words had been spoken mostly for the benefit of those who had gathered around to listen, and that the sheikh made it a habit of half jokingly and half seriously scolding everyone around him.

“Even the Muscovites in the War of Ninety-Three wouldn’t stoop so low as to come at us with Lysol!” he added in a burst of genuine fury, then suddenly doubled over and cried “Oh, God!” He would have fallen to the floor if not for the two disciples who had immediately rushed to his side.

“I’m all right!” he snapped at the men who had linked their arms with his, but although he had spoken again in his sternest voice, it did not escape Doctor Nuri’s notice that the sheikh was clearly used to walking with a pair of dervishes he could lean on.

They returned to the first door, and as Doctor Nuri prepared for the medical examination, the sheikh readily removed his gown, shirt, and undergarments, and began to wait.

“Did you experience any vomiting before or after your fall?”

“No, Doctor.”

“Any fever?”

“No.”

Doctor Nuri took the pharmacist Edhem Pertev’s bubo ointment from his bag and pulled it out of its box, then fingered the metal container where he kept his syringes. He picked up a small green bottle to check that the purple opium pills were still there. He aimlessly opened and closed the jar of tincture he’d sourced from the Istikamet Pharmacy and a box of Bayer aspirin (first introduced ten years before) he had bought in France and only used if it was really necessary, then took out the concentrated Lysol he kept in a purple bottle like some kind of elixir, rubbed it meticulously over his fingers with sterilized cotton balls, and finally approached the sheikh.

He could see that the sheikh was uneasy lying there naked. His bare arms, narrow chest, and slender neck were startlingly white and childlike.

Doctor Nuri examined the sheikh from head to toe as if he were an old man who couldn’t articulate his woes. His bright, pink tongue showed no signs of the discoloration often seen in plague patients. Using a spoon to push the restless muscle down, he checked the sheikh’s tonsils. (The plague always “struck” the tonsils in some way, and at first many doctors who could not recognize the disease would mistake it for diphtheria.) There was no redness in his eyes. Doctor Nuri checked his pulse twice; it was normal. He did not have a fever; there was no sweating nor any sign of confusion. Doctor Nuri used his stethoscope to listen carefully to the sheikh’s tired chest. His heartbeat was erratic; his lungs were full. Every time the cold, metallic surface of the stethoscope touched the sheikh’s pale skin, Doctor Nuri noticed that he would shiver a little.