第 51 页

“Take a deep breath, please!”

After peering inside the sheikh’s hairy ears, the doctor pressed his fingers slowly and gently over the glands in his neck to check for any pain or hardness. He examined the patient’s armpits in the same way too, carefully probing them with his fingertips until he was satisfied there was no swelling or hardening there either.

After he had poked and prodded at the naked sheikh’s groin area too, the Doctor and Prince Consort went back to his bag, and as he disinfected his hands, he said: “Everything is fine. You are not ill.”

“Allaahumma innee as’alukal-af wal’aafiyata wal’aakhirati!” the sheikh intoned. “Tell our Governor Pasha and all the consuls that I am in good health, and that our lodge remains clear of disease. The rumors about my supposed illness are being spread by those who seek to sow discord between me and the Governor Pasha. These people want to see our whole lodge quarantined; they want us all taken away and locked up in isolation in the Castle’s courtyards; they wish us nothing but harm.”

“The Governor Pasha would never wish harm upon you or your lodge.”

“I am sure that is true!”

“But there are some whose behavior provides excuses for those who do. The sheikhs of the smaller sects, these people who concoct false prayer sheets and wave them around to hold off the plague demon … That is the kind of thing which erodes the public’s trust in quarantine measures and people’s willingness to submit to restrictions.”

“Not every sheikh will listen to me,” said Sheikh Hamdullah. “Some are mere acquaintances, and most of them wish me ill.”

“Your Holiness, I am also here in the capacity of ambassador for our Governor Pasha. He would like you and the leader of the Greek congregation, Archbishop Constantinos Effendi, to come out onto the State Hall balcony and send a message to the whole island that they must obey quarantine rules. The Pasha has released Ramiz.”

“Archbishop Constantinos Effendi is a poet, like me,” said the sheikh. “I had promised to present him with a copy of Aurora once it is printed in Mingheria too. I would gladly participate in the Governor Pasha’s assembly! But I have one condition.”

“Whatever it is, I shall relay it to the Governor immediately and insist upon its acceptance,” said Doctor Nuri, picking up his bag.

“I must deliver the sermon at the New Mosque this Friday! The Chief of Charitable Trusts and the authorities in Istanbul have already confirmed their approval. But if the Quarantine Committee were to issue a ban, for fear the mosque should become too crowded, that would break many Muslim hearts and turn them against quarantine officials.”

“There is nothing we fear more than Your Holiness and his supporters turning against quarantine.”

“Doctor Nuri, do you know why, more than anything else, I would like to see your quarantine effort succeed?” said Sheikh Hamdullah, frowning. He had put his underwear, shirt, and jacket back on, as well as his sect’s special skullcap. “For the past four hundred years, the introduction of quarantine regulations has been protecting Christians in Europe from disease; if Muslims continue to reject quarantine and refuse to embrace modern methods, they will die in ever-greater numbers, until they are left alone and outnumbered in this world.”

CHAPTER 46

The Governor was delighted to learn that Sheikh Hamdullah had agreed to join the leaders of the island’s Muslim and Christian communities in addressing the public from the State Hall balcony, and immediately began negotiating the timing and other details of this event.

The sheikh was represented in these talks by the dervish with the felt hat, Nimetullah Effendi. The negotiations were intense, with the Governor Pasha noting that Nimetullah Effendi was “more consummate a diplomat” than even the consuls were, and indeed “a tougher nut to crack,” for unlike the consuls, who were motivated purely by greed and self-interest, the dervish with the felt hat was an “idealist.” At the same time the Governor was also busy arguing with the consuls over when the Post Office would open again, and trying to work out whether the Great Powers really were planning on sending their soldiers to the island under the pretext of stopping the outbreak.

Ever since the telegraph lines had gone down, the consuls had lost much of their influence and authority. Every day the Governor saw how the interruption of telegraph services had provided an invaluable opportunity to enforce quarantine properly and bring some form of discipline to the city. Cases of insubordination against the Quarantine Regiment had also diminished since the raid. Even inveterate agitators who normally questioned the authorities’ every decision had since gone quiet, waiting to see what would happen next.

The Governor eventually settled on a mutually acceptable plan for the public events and gatherings set to take place two days later: on Friday, the twenty-eighth of June, after Friday prayers and Sheikh Hamdullah’s sermon, the sheikh and his congregation would convene at the State Hall Square, whereupon the sheikh would join the Governor and the other community leaders on the balcony to address the crowds, urging them to respect quarantine measures and making statements of fellowship and unity. Once these two assemblies were concluded, there would be a further ceremony at the Post Office, after which the telegraph line would be restored.

Not once in his five years as governor had Sami Pasha ever spoken to the public from the State Hall balcony, though there had been moments when he would have liked to. Abdul Hamid did not approve of governors who felt they were important enough to put themselves between the Sultan and his subjects. The public address was not a political convention the Ottomans were particularly familiar with either. The Governor instructed the registry clerk to make posters announcing the assembly, with the same format and font size they had used in their notices informing the public of quarantine regulations. As they feverishly planned the details of how the crowds should gather when he addressed them from the balcony on Friday, and where and how far apart the consuls, the journalists, and the photographers should stand, the exhilarated Governor stepped out onto the terrace.

By the time he had walked back inside, there was a new telegram waiting on his desk. The municipal code breaker had deciphered it and, realizing that it was important, had immediately placed it on the Governor’s desk.

The Governor couldn’t help but notice that the telegram was from the palace. His heart sped up. It could be bad news. Perhaps he shouldn’t even look at it! But he couldn’t stop himself and read the telegram’s deciphered contents anyway.

The first thing he learned was that he had been relieved of his duties as governor of Mingheria. He held his breath. He had been given a new position as governor of Aleppo. A sudden pain took hold of his chest. They were giving him just ten days to go directly to Aleppo without passing by Istanbul. He read the telegram again, his heart beating even faster. The message implied that there was some kind of unrest taking place in Aleppo.

It was only when he read the telegram for the third time that the Governor realized he was being punished. His new salary was to be two-thirds of his current one. This despite the fact that Aleppo was a much-larger and more populous state, with the provinces of Urfa and Maraş tied to it too.

What would become of Marika? He had thought about this so many times; even if she agreed to convert to Islam and marry him, it would cause a diplomatic scandal, with all the ambassadors and consuls protesting that even after the Tanzimat reforms, Ottoman pashas were still forcing the prettiest Christian women in the states they governed to convert to Islam so that they could take them as their second and third wives and lock them away in their harems. In any case, Marika couldn’t possibly come with him to that distant, scorpion-infested land!

The more he read the telegram, the more Sami Pasha (we are not sure whether to call him Governor anymore) realized that he could not accept the truth. Istanbul must have made some kind of mistake! It was impossible for him to get to Aleppo that quickly anyway. That alone was proof that this transfer (and dismissal) was an error. Did those who expected him to travel to Aleppo within ten days not know that nobody was allowed off the island without quarantining for five days first? What would become of Marika?

He tried to look positively at the decision: yes, he had been removed from his current post, but he had also been given a new one at the same time. At his most aggrieved and mistrustful, Abdul Hamid had been known to teach dismissed governors a lesson by leaving them in limbo and without salary for a time, only announcing much later where they were to be posted next. This had not happened now. Tyrannical though he might be, Abdul Hamid had refrained from putting Sami Pasha through that. He remembered how ruthlessly everyone in the Sublime Porte had laughed at the story of poor Mustafa Hayri Pasha, whose very heart had stopped beating the day he had finally received the telegram he had been expecting for years, dismissing him from his post. At least Sami Pasha’s situation was not quite as bad.

Sami Pasha soon concluded that the best course of action was to accept the new appointment but delay its execution. One day, when they realized that he had heroically stayed behind to continue his fight against the plague, they would reward him with a First-Class Order of Mecidiye. As an avid reader of journals like the Ottoman Malûmat or even the French Moniteur des Consulats which arrived on ships from Istanbul and published the details of every diplomatic posting, he was aware that new appointments could sometimes be canceled, that such a miracle was in fact possible. People with special connections to Abdul Hamid and the palace, and friends in the highest places, could arrange this kind of thing. Sometimes a governor would turn up at his new post only to find that the old governor had already been reinstated, and never left at all. With some luck, he might manage to do that too.

He pondered for a time whether Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri might telegraph Abdul Hamid or even the palace about him. But we know from Princess Pakize’s letters that Sami Pasha never did manage to set his pride aside and make this request of Doctor Nuri.

Sami Pasha understood then that if he acted for a while as if nothing had happened, everything could remain exactly as it was. The only person on the island who knew he had been dismissed from his post was the municipal code breaker. If this clerk saw the Pasha’s collected, unruffled demeanor, he might even think the order had been rescinded. Maybe the best thing to do in the two days until Friday was to pretend everything was normal. But immediately thereafter, Sami Pasha did the opposite of what he had been thinking and summoned the municipal code breaker to his office, where he told him that the encrypted telegram he had deciphered contained state secrets, and that if he were to betray those secrets, both Istanbul and Sami Pasha would see to it that he received the harshest possible punishment.

That day Sami Pasha saw neither Doctor Nuri nor Major Kâmil. Doctor Nikos came by, but the Pasha refused to meet him, and shut himself in his office. He felt that as long as he didn’t see anyone, nobody would know that he had been dismissed. As a wedding present, his wife Esma’s father Bahattin Pasha had given his promising son-in-law a pocket watch with two dials, one showing the time the European way and the other the Ottoman way. Whenever he felt lonely or dejected, Sami Pasha would hold this Belgian-made watch and feel in the palm of his hand that the world was a more bearable place. But as he sat in his office that day, he couldn’t even muster the strength to do that.

The moment he’d read the telegram, he knew that he would only find serenity again by Marika’s side. As Coachman Zekeriya drove him across the city, Sami Pasha looked at the dark, gloomy streets outside the carriage window and was nearly moved to tears, but managed to collect himself by reasoning that giving in to melancholy would be the same as conceding defeat. He stepped off the carriage and walked with a dignified stride up to Marika’s back door.

Inside her house, he was as poised and judicious as usual, behaving with what he liked to think of in its melodious French form as autorité. How beautiful Marika was; and not only was she beautiful, she was honest too. The Pasha immediately forgot about his dismissal.

Everyone was still talking about the two young people who had been found dead in each other’s arms and the black smoke that had risen when the house had been burned down. “They’re saying there must have been other bodies in there for so much dark smoke to come out,” said Marika.

“People are always so quick to come up with these inventions.”

“They say the fat in corpses will release black fumes.”

“It does not befit you to speak of such horrors, and it afflicts me to hear it,” said the Pasha. But seeing that Marika had become upset, he thought to make amends by telling her about a strange story he had read a year ago in a translated article published in the journal Servet-i Fünun (Wealth of Knowledge), and which he had miraculously recalled in that very moment: “I heard that in some Asian faiths, they can judge how sinful or innocent a person was, how virtuous or diabolical, by examining the color and thickness of the smoke from their burning corpse.”

“You know so many things, my Pasha.”

“But the things you know are more important! What else?”

“Ramiz is back in the city, Pasha. You must have heard about it too. He has sworn an oath to exact revenge against those who have taken Zeynep from him. It seems he is still madly in love with her. He did not take this oath with his brother the sheikh, but in Sheikh Rıfkı Melul’s Rifai lodge instead.”

“The Rifai lodge has had a peculiar resurgence during this plague … But I suspect nobody else knows about this gathering.”

“It seems that people are not being allowed into the Çite neighborhood unless they are carrying one of those rose-pink prayer sheets that cross-eyed Şevket, sheikh of the Zaim lodge, has been issuing against the plague. Migrant youths from Crete will stop you on the street and ask to see your prayer sheet, and if you don’t have one, they won’t let you in.”

“All very sensible!” said Sami Pasha. “Though that kind of thing could only happen if we were not present in the area. There have been one or two unlawful incidents of this sort, but we have nipped them in the bud. My spies and gendarmes would never let those curs get away with it.”

“Darling Pasha, please don’t be angry at me for telling you about these rumors. I am not the one who started them, and I don’t believe most of them either.”

“But there are a few that you do believe!”

“I always tell you when I do … Sometimes you believe them too, but you never say so because you’re ashamed that you believe them, yet continue to do so anyway. Every time I report these rumors to you, I can tell which ones you believe just from the look on your face. They have begun smuggling people to Crete from the bays farther north of Pebble Cove.”