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Ramiz and his coconspirators knew that with Mingheria now an independent country, death sentences no longer required Istanbul’s approval, and that they could therefore be executed at any moment. What might they have been thinking? Sami Pasha had always delighted in hearing stories and reminiscences about “a convict’s last night on earth” from prison wardens across the Empire. Prisoners heading for execution wouldn’t sleep all night, hoping for a pardon from Abdul Hamid, and in most cases their sentences would indeed be commuted to life imprisonment.

There was a moment when Sami Pasha felt the nearly uncontrollable urge to summon the armored landau to take him to the Castle for a nighttime visit to Ramiz. But he could also see that if he succumbed to his instincts and pardoned this spoiled hoodlum, nobody would ever take the new state or its quarantine effort seriously, and not only would he offend the Commander, he might also fall out of his favor, just as he had fallen out of Abdul Hamid’s.

He didn’t sleep all night. At one point, Commander Kâmil’s deputy, Mazhar, charged into his office.

“Sheikh Hamdullah’s regent with the felt hat is here—Nimetullah Effendi!” he said. “The sheikh has sent a letter asking for his brother to be spared, and counts on your mercy!”

“What is your view?”

“The President agrees we will have no peace until we are rid of these scoundrels … But Nimetullah Effendi is a reasonable man … It would be wise to receive him.”

“Where is that felt-head, then?”

It was long after midnight when Sami Pasha stepped out of his office, walked down the wide staircase where a fading gas lamp threw long, eerie shadows, found the Halifiye sect’s second-in-command, Nimetullah, sitting with his felt hat just inside the entrance of the former State Hall and current Ministerial Headquarters, and told him that, as sorry as he was, there was nothing he could do, for the courts in free Mingheria were independent now.

“His Holiness the Sheikh does not defend Ramiz’s actions … But you should know that if you execute him, those who love the sheikh will no longer love you.”

“Love is an affair of the heart …,” said Sami Pasha in a moment of inspiration. “Sheikh Hamdullah, ruler of so many hearts, is right about this, as he is about everything. But do not forget that even Abdul Hamid was unable to prevent Mithat Pasha from being killed. You must also remember that unlike His Holiness the Sheikh, my duty is not to rule over people’s hearts, but to keep the ship of state afloat and guide them through this storm alive. In difficult times, it can be more useful to frighten people than to try and win their hearts.”

As if he were a simple clerk rather than the Chief Minister, Sami Pasha walked Nimetullah Effendi and his felt hat all the way to the door, sending his regards to Sheikh Hamdullah. He was about to climb back up the stairs when Mazhar Effendi informed him that the carriage with the sentenced prisoners had just left the Castle and was on its way to the State Hall Square. Şakir, the executioner, had already arrived that afternoon, drinking his wine in silent resignation. Sami Pasha realized that even if he went back to his quarters and tried going to bed, he would not be able to sleep, so instead he returned to his office. Had he been with Marika, he could at least have sipped on some cognac until dawn.

The three convicts had carefully performed their ablutions and prayed for the last time in the little mosque inside the Castle. Gathered under the trees and by the shopfronts in the State Hall Square were guards and gendarmes sent by Mazhar Effendi on behalf of the new government, and several clerks, some of whom Sami Pasha had summoned so that they would witness the executions and announce them to the public. The drunk hangman’s clumsiness in tying up the prisoners’ hands and dressing them in their white execution gowns (which his own mother had sewn) was such that by the time everything was ready, it was already daytime, and the gendarmes had to block off the roads that led to the square. There were no carriages around anyway since the plague had struck the city’s coachmen, nor anyone with business so urgent as to require one. The dark, ominous clouds hovering low over Arkaz seemed to have driven everyone away, and plague or no plague, the streets were completely empty.

Although Mazhar Effendi had told him Ramiz should “go first,” the hangman insisted with inexplicable obstinacy on leaving him for last. When Ramiz finally realized that he was not going to be pardoned, he let out a cry—“Zeynep!”—that no one in the square that day would ever forget, then tumbled off the stool he had been struggling to balance on, and swung through the air. He writhed and twisted for a time, and only when he died did his dangling body finally fall still.

CHAPTER 58

The gallows had been erected in the center of the old State Hall Square. (Today, the spot is home to a park where Mingherian roses bloom in many different colors, and most people with an interest in the island’s more recent history are not aware that men had once been hanged there, their corpses displayed for all to see.) If you stood by the unfinished clock tower or even as far back as the New Mosque or Barber Panagiotis’s shop, and looked straight down Hamidiye Avenue, lining your gaze up with its row of linden trees, you would see the three bodies hanging like pale blots in the State Hall Square.

The bodies in their white gowns were left to swing for three days. As a southerly wind blowing from the Castle spun them slowly around the thick, oiled hemp nooses tied to their necks and ruffled the hems of the black trousers they had worn under their white shirts, people were as affected by the sight as Sami Pasha had hoped they would be, and told themselves they would definitely pay more attention to quarantine regulations now. The only description we have of this grisly scene is in Yannis Kisannis’s book What I Saw. We learn from this account that although little Yannis couldn’t actually see the white smudges in the distance, they became even larger and more terrifying in his imagination. There is a lot of useful information in Kisannis’s book, though regrettably it is also replete with anti-Turkish and anti-Islamic sentiment, with numerous observations to the effect that the island’s new government had taken on the mantle of Ottoman oppression, and that the only thing the Ottomans knew was how to hang people.

On windless days, the capital smelled even more intensely of death, corpses, and honeysuckle, and soon the hush of plague had also taken over, its presence even more noticeable in the dark of night. People hiding inside their homes and sitting all day behind locked doors spoke only in whispers now. Gone were the sounds of horns and engines echoing among the jagged peaks by the harbor as steamboats came and went from the city, the noise of anchors splashing in and out of the water, the clattering of carriages and of horses’ hooves. It had been a long time since any of the torches around the docks and in the hotels nearby, along the jetty, and on Istanbul Street had last been lit. As smugglers preferred to use Mingheria’s secluded rocky coves for their activities, even the island’s boatmen and adventure-seekers had stopped frequenting the port. Nighttime raids conducted on the homes of various sect members had left people feeling scared and intimidated. Most of them no longer left their homes after dark. The melodious groaning of carriages, ox carts, and phaetons as they strained over bridges and around the corners of steep sloping roads had also disappeared. So had the rushed, merry chatter of people closing their doors and going home for the evening. The sound of children could still be heard every now and then, but even their joyful racket seemed muted. It was a silence too deep to be explained solely by the absence of church bells and calls to prayer.

The only people to be found on the streets after dark now were solitary hooligans, roving burglars, quarantine breakers, people running away from doctors and hospitals, and all sorts of lunatics and madmen, so the city’s guards and sentries would usually arrest—and sometimes beat up—anyone they came across at night, and those they locked up wouldn’t be let back out until at least a couple of days had passed.

Princess Pakize’s husband did not wish to scare her, so he had not told her about the executions or mentioned the three dead bodies hanging from the gallows outside their door. The guesthouse windows did not face the square, looking out instead at a view of the Castle, the port, and the sparkling blue sea. Even so, Princess Pakize could tell from the stillness around her that something extraordinary must have happened. From her room in the guesthouse, she could hear the sound of drunken wails punctuating those otherwise silent nights of plague. During one of her sleepless nights, she wrote of how even the cry of the nearby rooster that usually woke her up in the morning seemed to have gone quiet. This was two days after the executions. Princess Pakize had noticed that even on the calmest days when there was no breeze at all, the soft, soothing splash of water on fine sand would continue unabated. The night’s other sounds came from the city’s dogs, crows, and seagulls. As she dozed through the night, Princess Pakize too, like so many others in Arkaz, could feel the presence of hedgehogs, snakes, and frogs moving in the dark from one garden to the next.

Through the years she had spent confined to the palace harem, the Princess had learned how important it was to observe every object, plant, cloud, insect, and bird she saw. During her stay at the guesthouse of the Mingherian State Hall, she had taken “especial” notice of a crow that had been coming “regularly” to her window. When they were children, Princess Pakize and her sisters used to divide people into “crow lovers” and “seagull lovers.” Princess Pakize preferred seagulls—admiring their freedom and their white, elegant forms—and disliked crows, which might have been more intelligent, but were also noisy, impertinent, and ill tempered. Yet she had quickly grown fond of this “solemn, majestic creature” that had been appearing at her window in the evenings, and liked to sit and watch it perch. The crow would come to Princess Pakize’s window every day, and stare right back at her.

Sometimes the feathers on its enormous head glimmered in the sunlight. It never cried out in that hideous, shrewish way all the other crows had; most of the time, it was silent. Its feathers were pitch-black in places and ashlike in others, and its dark pink feet were so ugly they made Princess Pakize uncomfortable. As the Princess wrote her letters, the crow would stand with its head completely still, staring in apparent wonder at the tip of her pen, at the ink seeping letter by letter into the paper and leaving words and sentences in its wake. Perhaps Princess Pakize had fallen in love with the black crow. Every time Doctor Nuri walked into the room, the big, dark bird would vanish.

But one day it stayed behind, “almost as if” it wanted to show itself to the Prince Consort. When he noticed the amorous glances the crow kept giving his wife, Doctor Nuri coolly remarked: “This is the same crow that always comes to Sami Pasha’s window!”

“That must be some other crow!” Princess Pakize replied, bursting with jealousy.

Our readers should know that the Princess told her sister the rest of the story of this crow in a letter she wrote much later. For by now, Princess Pakize had understood that even though her husband was a minister in the island’s new, makeshift government, every letter she wrote to her sister would still be intercepted and read by someone else first.

The next time she was alone in the guesthouse, Sultan Murad V’s third daughter got dressed, covered her head, and left the room, walked down the State Hall’s wide staircase, followed the second-floor colonnade that encircled the inner courtyard, and stopped at a window that gave out onto the State Hall Square, peering outside in the hope that she might spot Sami Pasha’s crow.

But rather than the solemn, majestic bird she had been expecting to find, she saw instead three gallows with three corpses hanging in their white gowns, and although she had never seen anything like it before, she knew immediately who those people were.

As soon as she was back in the guesthouse where she had been sequestered for the past two and a half months, Princess Pakize threw up, and briefly wondered whether she might be pregnant, but when she realized that her body must be reacting to death rather than to any child in her womb, she sat down and cried. Later, she understood that it wasn’t just the corpses that had caused her so much sorrow, but also the feeling of having spent so much time away from her father and sisters, and from Istanbul.

“Shame on you!” she told her husband when he returned to their quarters. “Here is this terrible thing right outside our door, and you have been hiding it from me all this time. Even my uncle wouldn’t have gone so far.”

“Indeed, your uncle very rarely agrees to executions in any of his territories. He even commuted Mithat Pasha’s death sentence to life in prison. Though strangely he did then give the order for the imprisoned Pasha to be assassinated in Ta’if fortress.”

“I’d rather be in Istanbul and live in fear of my uncle than stay here under the rule of a governor capable of such horrors.”

“I understand why you miss Istanbul so much, my dear Princess!” said her husband respectfully. “But even supposing the plague ends soon and quarantine is lifted, I wonder if we would be able to return to Istanbul whenever we wished to do so? Surely we would first have to obtain permission from your old bodyguard—our new president. For it is not the Governor you mentioned earlier who holds power here now; it is Zeynep’s husband.”

“Then let us escape from this place together. Take me away from here.”

“You know how keenly my sense of responsibility binds me to this island and its people,” said Doctor Nuri. “I know you feel the same way too. You are fond of the Turks and Muslims who live here—and not just them, but the Greeks and all the others too—and you want to help them in some way, just as I do. Besides, even if we didn’t have a humane obligation to these people, it would be rather difficult for us to return to Istanbul now. After all, I myself have been collaborating—if only with humanitarian and medical considerations in mind—with a sovereign state that has seceded from the great Ottoman Empire. I do not think your situation would be too different either. When this is all over, your uncle the Sultan will have to forgive us first before we can even think of returning to Istanbul.”

Now that the subjects of “treason” and of their own helplessness had been broached, Princess Pakize began to cry. Doctor Nuri hugged her, kissed the astonishingly soft skin behind her ears, and breathed in the sweet scent of her hair.

This made the Princess cry even harder. She looked in her bag for the handkerchief that one of the old ladies in her father’s harem had intricately embroidered with flowers, and used it to wipe the tears from her plump cheeks and girlish eyes.