第 62 页

He was delighted to receive the next morning a letter from the archaeologist Selim Sahir responding to his question about old Mingherian names for boys. He had been sitting at his desk in his office, gazing out of the second-floor windows of the Splendid Palace at the view through the tops of the acacias and pine trees, and thinking how mournful the empty harbor and docks and the deserted sloping road to the shore all looked.

The contents of the letter—which is now held in the Presidential Archives of Mingheria—troubled Commander Kâmil, who summoned his deputy and former Chief Scrutineer Mazhar and had him carefully read the handwritten missive aloud.

“Have you ever heard any of these names before?” he asked Mazhar Effendi.

After he’d been sent to the island, the former Chief Scrutineer had ended up getting married and staying there, but he was not from a Mingherian family, and he had spent his childhood in Istanbul. Having apologetically explained all this to the Major, he went on to say how much he loved Mingheria, how happy everyone—and especially the island’s Muslims—were about their newfound freedom and independence, and finally confessed that he had never heard a single one of these old Mingherian names before.

“Neither have I!” said the President, without concealing his disappointment.

They summoned the clerk and had him look at the letter too. The clerk stumbled over the pronunciation of a couple of words in French and of the names listed in Mingherian. The letter was mostly written in Turkish using the Arabic script, with the list of Mingherian names and a few flowery expressions in French spelled out in the Roman alphabet. Perhaps it was out of nervousness that the clerk, who had been born and brought up in Mingheria, couldn’t quite work the names out either. The President was also annoyed that the archaeologist had addressed him—somewhat derisively—as commandant, purposely using the French word for “commander.”

“Archaeologist Selim Sahir Bey must study our history better!” he said. “You will work with the post and customs ministers to draw up a series of regulations around this.”

The President had become accustomed to his new office very quickly. He was kept up to date on the number of deaths by a clerk who brought news from the Ministerial Headquarters twice a day, and had stopped going to the Outbreak Room in the mornings. He was no longer in charge of the Quarantine Regiment either. He had handed that duty over to Hamdi Baba, in a modest ceremony during which he had presented the Sergeant with the first military badge ever to be issued in Mingheria.

Most of the island’s best tailors, who were all Greeks, had fled to Smyrna and Thessaloniki on the last ships to leave the island, but the President still managed to have Yakoumi Effendi tracked down, and ordered a set of new civilian suits for the winter and for official functions after the plague, requesting to be shown fabric samples and possible designs in advance. Later that day, Doctor Nuri arrived to discuss the newest death toll and the latest developments on the epidemiology map. Around twelve to fifteen people were dying every day. The death rate was mostly stable now, but things remained far more difficult than they had hoped for. Unfortunately, people were still regularly flouting quarantine measures, some out of stubbornness and defiance, others through thoughtlessness and a kind of misguided courage.

Commander Kâmil addressed the Doctor and Prince Consort—the man whose protection he’d until so recently been assigned to—as respectfully as he had always done. “Her Highness Princess Pakize is under the protection of the new state of Mingheria,” he told him. Doctor Nuri had arrived in Sami Pasha’s landau. He proposed that they use it now for a tour of the city, so that the Commander could assess the situation too.

“I’d rather go out on foot and see for myself, rather than peer out of an armored carriage!” replied Commander Kâmil Pasha.

As they strolled through the streets, Commander Kâmil could tell how loved he was from the way people behaved around him, the way they looked at him, and mostly from the things they said—shouting “Hurrah!” from their windows as he walked past (this had happened seven or eight times in the last three days alone). He wanted to turn their love into an abiding hopefulness, a shared faith that would shield the island not just from the plague but from every other kind of misfortune too. It was his God-given duty to protect all these good people who gave him hopeful smiles when they recognized him on the street, and to ensure they made it through the outbreak alive.

The Commander had requested two hundred Mingherian flags (even small ones would do) to be procured and paid for with money from the government’s budget, but with most of the island’s tailors, drapers, and cloth merchants having long since fled, and with no possibility of importing linen from abroad, this was no easy task. Perhaps that was why so many of the families who had been hiding from the plague at home did not yet know there was a new flag and a new state. There were plenty of others, too, who were simply indifferent or uninformed … It was hard work bringing this nation to heel. But President-Commander Kâmil did not despair. He was sure that this country would survive for much longer, perhaps for hundreds of years more, than anyone currently living and breathing upon the island. Everyone was saying that the creation of the new state had given people hope, and convinced them that the outbreak could be stopped. It was a hope that came from seeing Major Kâmil out on the streets, from his determination, his enthusiasm, his fervor. The young commander’s connection with Princess Pakize had already associated him in people’s minds with Istanbul, the palace, and the sultanate; his actions during the Telegraph coup had earned him their esteem; and when he had waved that flag in challenge to the whole world, they had happily followed his lead.

Sometimes Commander Kâmil would think that being a Mingherian by birth was a blessing from Allah. When he caught people’s eyes as they looked out of their windows, and they smiled at him as they were doing now, he saw gratitude in their expressions. It was because he reminded them of how blessed they really were. They were fortunate to have been born here.

Those among the island’s poorer population, and who had not taken the outbreak seriously nor prepared for it in any way, were now suffering the most, and slowly beginning to starve. The Commander felt a sense of responsibility toward them. Anyone who didn’t have an orchard, a field, some land, or friends outside the city had soon run out of food. Their plight could be blamed on the previous Ottoman government, which had failed to properly educate them on the seriousness of the outbreak. In fact, at first Governor Sami Pasha had protested that there was no outbreak at all! He really was a fool, that Sami Pasha.

Flanked by a pair of guards, and followed by several more, the Commander emerged onto Hamidiye Avenue (all of these old Ottoman street names would have to be changed too). He ventured into the alleyways between the Hagia Triada Church and the Arkaz Creek, where there was a high concentration of grocery stores. In their fear of the plague and of being fined by the Quarantine Authorities, and exhausted by all the restrictions they faced, more than half the shops that stocked staples like flour and potatoes had stopped opening their doors, and now traded their goods elsewhere, if not directly from their owners’ homes. All food—from olives to cheese (if it could even be found), from walnuts to dried figs (said to be dangerous)—had tripled in price. Even cheaper items like onions, leafy vegetables, and potatoes, which were usually readily available from market stalls, had all but disappeared. The bakeries were producing half their usual quantities of bread and buns. But the Commander was not too worried about that yet, for he had heard from Sami Pasha that there was a reserve of flour in the garrison, set aside at Abdul Hamid’s insistence. Butchers and poultry dealers were selling cuts to customers through their back doors, charging three or four times their usual prices. Deemed to be unsanitary, most poultry dealers, fishmongers, and offal vendors had already been forced to close, and the cats that used to roam around their shopfronts had disappeared.

With so many people fleeing or dying every day, the population of the island kept falling, but the market and the shops were emptying at an even faster rate, and could no longer feed people. Conscious of this problem, Sami Pasha had looked to the food market that had sprung up and developed of its own accord in the Greek Middle School while the island had still been under Ottoman control, and tried to make sure, in his new role as Chief Minister of the state of Mingheria, that it continued to operate as a place where the poor could find something to eat. The Commander and his retinue now turned left toward this market and into a series of alleyways. But it could be dangerous to walk beneath the bay windows that hung over these narrow streets. Most of the men in the city had nothing to do now but to sit at their windows all day and wait for time to pass.

The only way for trade to resume, and for Arkaz to be fed, was to allow a serious breach of quarantine regulations. There were guards stationed around the edges of the city whose task was to stop people from wandering in as they pleased. Anyone wanting to leave the city on foot either had to show the Quarantine Regiment a permit bearing a profusion of stamps and signatures, or do what many people did and wait until nightfall to walk in total darkness through the empty, rocky, windswept fields behind Upper Turunçlar and Hora. If you could avoid the stray dogs, bandits, deranged plague victims, rats, and the plague demon himself, it was perfectly possible to slip out of the city in the middle of the night and flee into the surrounding countryside. But if you wanted to come in and out three times a week to trade your wares, you needed a special permit and protection. The new government hadn’t done anything about any of these issues yet.

The decision to keep the market in the Greek Middle School open had reminded Doctor Nuri, as well as Sami Pasha and Commander Kâmil, of the fundamental contradiction (as in the Pilgrim Ship Affair) that afflicted any quarantine effort. Of course it was necessary to be strict for quarantine to succeed. But if you took that strictness too far, the same people who were looking at the Commander now with smiles full of hope could just as quickly turn their backs on the revolution, and on freedom and independence too.

No one in the city was dying of hunger yet, but the poorest and most bereft—those who’d lost everything and everyone they had in the outbreak—had turned to begging. At first Sami Pasha had sent gendarmes and police to scare these guileless, inexperienced beggars off the streets, and even locked a few of them up on some pretext with the petty criminals in the Castle prison, but when he realized that many of these desperate, destitute people actually preferred the prison dormitories and the free soup they would get there to the hunger and death they’d have to face out on the streets, he decided the best thing to do would be to let the quarantine soldiers deal with the matter. Hamdi Baba and two of his men were now limiting themselves to moving these beggars off the main roads, citing quarantine laws. This measure had already been introduced two weeks ago when the island had still been under Ottoman control, but the same policy continued to be applied now.

The Commander soon made a habit of going out at least once a day on long walks through the streets of Arkaz, so that he could see for himself what was happening in the city. He would turn up where quarantine measures were causing quarrels and clashes and disagreements, and encourage people to submit to the Quarantine Regiment. Sometimes he would go somewhere in order to learn as much as he could about a particular problem. In these cases, someone already familiar with the matter in question might be invited to join the Commander on his walk.

It was in this context that on Saturday, the sixth of July, the President took the baker brothers Hadid and Majid to visit a new “villagers’ market” on the banks of the Arkaz Creek, and discuss possible solutions to Arkaz’s growing food shortage. When they arrived at their destination, they saw fresh-faced village youths selling mullet and trout, and old Greek women in headscarves offering mallow, nettle, and other similar plants.

Ever since two children who’d been driven mad by dread and loneliness had decided to run away from home, then come back and reported that they had survived on the mallow they had found in the highlands outside the city, this strange plant that grew on the mountains and could be eaten raw or in soups had begun to be sold in the few shops that were still open, and especially in these new street markets.

We should note that even by this point, most Mingherians were still managing to feed themselves, one way or another. In a bid to stop people smugglers, Chief Minister Sami Pasha had banned fishing boats for a time, but he had since lifted that ban, for he could see that the island subsisted on fish. The daughter of Constantinos Effendi, bishop of the Greek congregation, wrote in her memoirs about those days of plague that in neighborhoods like Çite, Germe, and Kadirler, where the outbreak was at its strongest, children would go on fishing expeditions to feed their families. Creeping through people’s back gardens, they would slip out of the city and move in groups across fields, secret paths, and hidden passageways, picking blackberries, wild strawberries, and mallow on their way, and within two hours they would reach the tall, rocky cliffs of the Damıtaş Valley, where the Damıtaş Creek flowed into the Mediterranean Sea. I would like to reassure those readers who might be feeling overwhelmed by our novel’s somber mood that as they stood in those shallow waters, their trousers rolled up as they hunted for fish with baskets and nets tied to sticks, these children were really quite content. In her abovementioned memoirs, Constantinos Effendi’s daughter writes in a “nostalgic” vein of how these children had heard the cannons announcing the révolution and the news of the Commander’s presidency while they were wading in the mouth of the creek, nets in hand and trouser hems folded up to their knees as they looked for green-scaled mullet fish to catch.

I should point out here that I have always been greatly affected by a drawing I once saw in one of the old Mingherian magazines I used to leaf through as a little girl, where a group of these heroic children—who would effectively feed and sustain their families and neighborhoods—is shown with nets and traps in hand, fishing for green trout. Had I lived one hundred and sixteen years ago, and been born a boy instead of a girl, I could have been among those children too. With this in mind, and as we approach the end of our novel-cum-history, I suppose I should finally reveal that I am a direct descendant of one of this novel’s principal characters.