第 56 页

Everyone was trying to work out what to do next, when the green door of the Outbreak Room finally opened, and out stepped one of Ramiz’s associates, a man from Nebiler with a bald head and a handlebar mustache. He was pointing his rifle toward the petrified guests still left inside the meeting hall, though he wasn’t aiming at anyone in particular.

From the corner of the room where the Greek journalists and notables were hiding, Kiryakos Effendi—owner of the Bazaar du Île—called out “Please keep calm!,” his Greek-accented Turkish giving voice to the emotions and fears of every single person in the room. They were all thinking the same thing: “For God’s sake hold fire!” But most of them could also sense that this would not be possible.

Someone else cried, “Don’t shoot!”

Ramiz then stepped forward and came to the door. His manner, his pink face, his expression, were all perfectly calm. It might even be said that he looked inexplicably confident.

“It would be more appropriate for this ceremony to take place after the new governor Ibrahim Hakkı Pasha has taken office!” said Ramiz.

As Sheikh Hamdullah was surrounded both by his own men and by the new governor’s entourage, neither Sami Pasha nor the consuls were able to see how he reacted to his stepbrother’s audacious outburst. Perhaps he would have put him in his place if he’d had the chance, as some would later argue. As if it weren’t enough that this hoodlum whose fame rested solely on the fact that his brother was the sheikh of the island’s most popular lodge, and who had no official role or qualifications, had nevertheless taken it upon himself to smuggle the new governor out of quarantine, here he was adopting this imperious tone in the presence of the old governor.

Ottoman and Turkish commentators, Mingherian nationalist historians, and the rest of the world all have different theories on where the first shot had come from. In these kinds of situations, it is sometimes possible to identify the willing instigator who fired the first bullet or the terrified fool who pulled the first trigger. But this was not the case at noon that day in the Main Assembly Room of the State Hall. Instead, everyone seemed to start firing at one another at the same time, as if they had all been simultaneously ordered to shoot. Their fingers had already been poised on the triggers of their guns and their rifles. Ibrahim Hakkı Pasha’s deputy would later write in his memoirs that he had realized there was going to be a skirmish the moment the door had opened, and so he had immediately pulled his Nagant revolver from his waist and opened fire himself.

There was also a “second front” formed by a group of Sami Pasha’s men who had forced their way into the Epidemiology Room through a door that opened onto a back corridor. Based on the last-minute intelligence he had received from the informant and provocateur Nusret, Sami Pasha had stationed armed guards along the State Hall staircase and around his own office. When the skirmish began, Governor Sami Pasha had eighteen armed men inside and around the entrances of the meeting hall. Some of these men were municipal guards who carried their weapons openly. Others had come to the hall in disguise, dressed as clerks, servants, or shopkeepers. (Yusuf, who had taken cover behind the same column as the Major, was one of these men.) The moment they heard the first shot—and in accordance with the instructions they had already received from Sami Pasha—they picked up their own weapons and immediately started firing at the enemy.

Sami Pasha had warned the men he had summoned to the State Hall and to the State Hall Square that a handful of reprobates might seek to “sabotage” the historic quarantine meeting planned for that day, or even mount an assassination attempt, so they must be ready to shoot these traitors down without hesitation. (In other words, when the shooting began, Sami Pasha’s men were firing in the Sultan’s name, rather than for an independent Mingheria.)

When he had first found out about the planned attack, Sami Pasha had imagined—perhaps naïvely—that he would be able to catch Ramiz’s men one at a time, and quietly arrest them all without compromising the security of the balcony ceremony. This plan rested on ambushing the ambushers themselves at the door of the Epidemiology Room.

But in our view it was precisely this aspect of the plan which caused the shooting to begin in the first place, and led to the mad “skirmish” that ensued. Within moments, everyone was firing at the “enemy,” using tables, columns, armchairs, and potted plants for cover.

For the first eight to ten seconds after the first shot was fired, the battle was not too fierce. The guests inside the meeting hall and all the people who had assembled for the ceremony did not quite understand what was going on. Their attention had been elsewhere, for His Holiness the Sheikh and Sami Pasha had both just walked into the room. This might explain why the first gunshot initially caused such havoc and bewilderment. Then, shortly after that first bullet, almost everyone began shooting at once. The sound of gunshots bounced between the thick curtains and wood-paneled walls of the cavernous meeting hall, but even outside people could hear their eerie, powerful, intermittent din.

The infernal cacophony they were forced to endure during those few minutes of incessant fighting nearly drove the guests in the meeting hall mad. They would remember the things they saw and heard during that brief interval of time, and the terrifying sound of those gunshots, for the rest of their lives. They might even have been more frightened of the deafening noise than of the sight of soldiers, clerks, and bandits being struck down before their eyes.

Some guests crawled under the wide wooden table where the Quarantine Committee had held its endless meetings; others ducked behind cupboards, chairs, and writing desks; the majority threw themselves onto the floor.

Most of them had already realized that they were not the targets here—but what did that matter when there were so many guns being brandished? There was a kind of fury in the air; anyone could be its victim, and everyone could understand where it came from. It was as if the bullets were being fired at the plague itself. According to eyewitness accounts and historians’ investigations, nearly one hundred and fifty shots were exchanged over those next few minutes.

Against Sami Pasha’s team of eighteen well-drilled men, Ramiz had ten shooters with him, most of whom were more concerned with protecting themselves than they were with killing anybody else.

Some of Ramiz’s men—even those who’d already been wounded—had tried to return fire during the early moments of the battle, taking cover behind anything they could find. Thanks to their grit and determination, their attempts were briefly successful, and they were able to hit many in the crowd around them. But soon their guns fell quiet. They had been quelled by the relentless volley of bullets from Sami Pasha’s men, coming particularly from the main entrance of the meeting hall, and one by one, they’d begun to die.

Two bullets had hit Ramiz in the arm and shoulder mere moments after his presumptuous outburst, and forced him to retreat. But he had quickly realized that he would not be able to escape through the back door of the Outbreak Room either. Sami Pasha had sent three guards over to that side too, and they had been shooting without pause. Realizing that any attempts to break the siege were bound to end in failure, Ramiz returned to the green door and started shooting at the guards who were firing at him from the meeting hall. Within minutes, he was the only one left still returning fire from the Outbreak Room.

“Everyone hold your positions!” said the old governor Sami Pasha.

There was a prolonged silence. Two seagulls shrieked and bickered furiously as they flew over the square. Though all the shooting had happened inside, the noise had reached the farthest edges of the city and echoed against the mountains.

The silence that followed was even more eerie. While some of the guests snuck out through the door, others stayed put, lying on the floor or cowering in their hiding places. They could hear the wounded groaning and whimpering around them.

The Major emerged from behind the column he had been using for shelter and walked into the devastated Outbreak Room. He saw straightaway that four of Ramiz’s men and the caretaker-provocateur Nusret had all died. There was blood everywhere, taking an unusual crimson hue on the slabs of Mingherian stone. Ramiz had fallen over, but he was still alive, twitching and moaning where he lay.

The Major spotted one of the municipal guards writhing in pain, and thought that at least he might survive. Among the attackers was a young man with a white, childlike face whom the Major had never seen before and who had made it through the whole encounter without a scratch. The youth was quaking with fear, but the realization that he was still alive had also brought a peculiar tinge of elation to his face. When he saw the Major walking toward him with his gun, he put his hands up in surrender.

The fighters clustered around the other door of the Outbreak Room hadn’t faced quite as much fire. The new governor, Ibrahim Hakkı Pasha, had been killed by a bullet to the forehead. The Major saw the new governor’s deputy, Hadi, sighing over his master’s dead body, and watched as the rest of Ramiz’s team handed themselves in to the municipal guards.

Four bullets had struck the map where every morning for the past two months the Governor Pasha and Doctor Nuri had placed green marks to signal plague deaths and infected homes and locations. Another bullet had made a hole in the window panel of a large black display cupboard whose paint was flaking off, though the rest of the glass remained intact.

But the glass windows of the walnut cabinet right beside it had shattered in the commotion. When the Major saw Sami Pasha’s men and the gendarmes approaching the Outbreak Room, he eased out the trunk that was stored in the walnut cabinet’s bottom compartment, prized open its unlocked lid, and retrieved from beneath two folded kilims the old crimson-and-pink banner embroidered with the emblem of La Rose du Levant, featuring the distinctive spires of Mingheria’s Castle, the White Mountain, and the Mingherian rose, and so reminiscent of a flag.

In the dimly lit room around it, the red flag with its pink rose seemed to be reaching for a place where it might come alive. The Major took a couple of steps toward the balcony, and as the guests in the hall looked on, still shocked by the terrifying tumult they’d had to endure, the cloth seemed to find the gleam it had been searching for, and in the next moment, the whole meeting hall was bathed in a brilliant red glow.

The newspapers of Mingheria and future history books too would produce many eloquent accounts of how the apprehensive guests gathered in the meeting hall that day were left spellbound by the radiance of the flag in the Major’s hand. We are now at a point when nationalist fervor blurs the lines between history and literature, myth and reality, colors and their significance. Let us therefore proceed to take a closer and more pondered look at events.

CHAPTER 52

There have been many oil paintings depicting the Major as he walked from the Outbreak Room to the balcony across the meeting hall with his Nagant revolver in one hand and the red linen flag in the other. Most of these are based on an illustration that the Greek painter Alexandros Satsos—a relative of Lami’s from his mother’s side—would later prepare for the newspaper Adekatos Arkadi in celebration of the first anniversary of the “revolution.” This image was in turn clearly influenced by Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, a painting to which every freedom-loving revolutionary in the world has always harbored a somewhat-romantic attachment. Indeed, as we have penned this history, it has been impossible to ignore the feeling that similar events to those we have described had already unfolded before in a place not too far away. Decorative trinkets, lamps, and other objects inspired by Delacroix and Satsos’s revolutionary Liberty would be sold in the island’s shops all the way through to the late 1930s.

The Major was about to cross the threshold of the balcony when Doctor Nuri reached out to stop him. In a heartfelt, instinctive gesture, he placed his hand on Major Kâmil’s shoulder. He had seen him shooting at the attackers, and now felt the urge to embrace him. He couldn’t do so, as the Major was still holding the flag in one hand and a gun in the other. But Doctor Nuri did spot something that neither our readers nor the Major himself had noticed yet.

“Are you hurt?”

“No!” said the Major. Then he looked down at the hand in which he was holding the flag and saw blood and a gunshot wound near his wrist. Though he did not feel any pain, it was true that he had been hit, and that he was bleeding heavily. “I hadn’t even noticed, Pasha,” he said, addressing Sami Pasha who had just walked up to him too. “But no bullet can stop us now from doing what we must do for our people.”

The Major had made sure everyone could hear him, his voice growing louder as he spoke. The assembled guests had been listening attentively to every word, and now waited to see how the Pasha would respond. But Sami Pasha was uncertain, and remained quiet.

“Pasha, unless we all go out there together and declare that mosques and churches are to be shut, it will be impossible to make quarantine work. If we do not reach out to the people now, especially in the wake of this ambush, never again will they listen to anything you or the Quarantine Regiment tell them to do.”

Even the Major was surprised to find himself speaking so forcefully to the Pasha. A photograph taken in that moment shows him pointing his gun toward the Pasha. Sami Pasha had dispatched some of the island’s photographers to the square so that they could photograph him as he addressed the public from the State Hall balcony, and so that he could later have those images published in newspapers and magazines. The photographer assigned to the meeting hall itself was Vanyas, Mingheria’s first-ever professional photographer. In his painting inspired by Delacroix’s Liberty, the artist Alexandros Satsos would copy some of the details of the Major’s uniform and pose from that first photograph Vanyas took.

Near the edge of Vanyas’s second photograph, we find Sheikh Hamdullah standing, his back straight and his demeanor solemn. We do not know if he was aware that his stepbrother had just been shot and wounded in the raid (not to mention that everyone assumed Ramiz was dead). But he was experienced enough to understand that from a political perspective, they had no choice but to go ahead with the ceremony. By now the guests had regained some measure of composure and reached a collective consensus that Ramiz’s attack had been an attempt to sabotage the quarantine measures that were about to be announced. Everyone gathered in the State Hall—Muslims and Christians alike—agreed that the thing to do was to proceed with the ceremony as intended, send out a message of unity and solidarity, and tell the public that mosques and churches would henceforth be shut.