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“Then I suppose we are prisoners here …,” she said.

“You were a prisoner in Istanbul too …”

“Why are you even getting involved in these people’s political intrigues? My uncle sent you here to stop the plague, not to set up a new state.”

“But why did your uncle send you to China with me? Why did he send you and the Major from Alexandria to this plague-infested island?”

This had been their favorite topic of conversation ever since the day they had found out they would both be sent to China with the Guidance Committee, and they discussed it again now, managing not to hurt each other’s feelings. When Doctor Nuri pointed out that the other reason her uncle had sent him to the island was to find out who had committed the murders there, Princess Pakize replied: “The real murderer here is the person who had those men hanged!”

After noting in response that it was really her old bodyguard who had been behind the executions, and that Ramiz had not exactly been an angel either, Doctor Nuri reminded his wife that her uncle had issued his first death sentences after the journalist Ali Suavi and his entourage had stormed the palace one night in a failed attempt to restore her father Murad V to the throne. Princess Pakize hadn’t even been born then. Earlier that same year, a group of Freemasons had been caught plotting to break into Dolmabahçe Palace through underground passageways and put Murad V back in power. Having brazenly announced in his own newspaper that he was planning some kind of operation the next day, Ali Suavi (whose every move was being shadowed by Abdul Hamid’s spies) had sailed to the Çırağan Palace with more than a hundred armed, stick-wielding men, breached its defenses, and managed to get all the way to Murad V, who had been informed of the rebels’ plans and already changed his clothes in readiness for the moment when he would finally take back his throne. But in the end, Abdul Hamid’s guards had responded to the attack with a counterattack of their own, and Ali Suavi and most of his men had been killed. Ali Suavi’s body had been beaten with sticks and filled with bullet holes. Almost all of the raiders had been destitute Balkan refugees from Plovdiv who had lost their homes and land in the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War and been forced to flee to Istanbul. If Princess Pakize’s father were to regain the throne, the Ottomans would declare war on Russia and Europe again, and when they took back all the territories they had lost due to Abdul Hamid’s incompetence, the Balkan Muslims who now filled the streets of Istanbul would be able to return to their ancestral homes.

“My poor father knew nothing of that plot!” said Princess Pakize. “But it is because of those raiders that we were all banished to the mansion where I was born, and the restrictions on our lives tightened enough to prevent my dear father and my brother the Prince from ever meeting with anyone outside.”

In truth it annoyed Princess Pakize when her husband criticized the Ottoman dynasty and spoke of them in the same derisive tone she herself used whenever she talked about Abdul Hamid, and she felt the urge now to put the Prince Consort in his place—for, after all, those same Ottomans had allowed him to marry into their family, and matched him with a sultan’s daughter.

“If it is going to be that difficult for us to return to Istanbul, then I suppose it no longer matters whether we follow my uncle’s bidding and find out who killed Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant, so we might as well stop trying to mimic Sherlock Holmes and his frivolities once and for all!” she said, managing at last to break Doctor Nuri’s heart.

One positive outcome of their lengthening discussion was that, in keeping with the promise he had made his wife, Mingheria’s new Quarantine Minister requested an audience with Chief Minister Sami Pasha in which he argued that it would be beneficial to their attempts to stop the outbreak if the gallows and corpses were cleared from the State Hall Square.

“Is that the conclusion you have come to?” said Sami Pasha.

The number of people visiting the Halifiye lodge to offer their condolences to Sheikh Hamdullah for the death of his brother had been growing. These pious believers were not afraid of catching the plague, and would queue up for hours outside the lodge, most of them returning to their homes without having caught so much as a distant glimpse of the sheikh. Sami Pasha suspected that all the people who had refused to come to the State Hall Square to see the corpses displayed there for their benefit were making a point of going to Sheikh Hamdullah’s lodge instead.

“Commander Kâmil Pasha often speaks—and rightly so—of the honor and dignity of the Mingherian people, and of the respect they deserve from every other nation,” said Doctor Nuri. “But if we continue to parade these hangings to the world, Mingherians will come to be seen as a wicked lot, and far too fond of the noose.”

“So when a hundred years ago the French guillotined their kings, the rich, and anyone they happened to pick up off the street, that was all fine, but when we start punishing inveterate murderers and treasonous separatists who seek to sabotage our quarantine, somehow we’re in the wrong …,” said Sami Pasha.

The camaraderie that had developed between Sami Pasha and Doctor Nuri over the past two and a half months prevented their disagreement from turning into an argument. Doctor Nuri explained to Sami Pasha that crows and seagulls that picked at abandoned corpses and dead rats could spread the disease without getting sick themselves. Sami Pasha had indeed seen his own crow nibbling at the eyes, noses, and ears of dead bodies; but what he did not understand was how it was possible for these birds to fear scarecrows without being afraid of human corpses too.

CHAPTER 59

At different times during the day, Commander Kâmil Pasha would walk around the streets of Arkaz with his bodyguards in tow. Apart from these excursions, he never left the Splendid Palace anymore, and had also stopped attending the quarantine meetings in the old State Hall. After each daily conclave in the Outbreak Room, Doctor Nuri—also followed by bodyguards—would walk from the Ministerial Headquarters to the Splendid Hotel to discuss all the latest news with Commander Kâmil. Two weeks on from the declaration of freedom and independence, the number of deaths was still not falling; if anything, it kept increasing.

Just as they’d done in times of Ottoman rule, Doctor Nuri and the Commander conducted their daily assessments over a map of the city. But this was a different map. They had obtained a copy of the one in the Outbreak Room and spread it over an elegant walnut desk in the Commander’s office. The other item on the desk was a candlestick they’d taken from the hotel’s “clubhouse.” Before they started marking up the homes where new plague victims had been found, Doctor Nuri would briefly explain where the outbreak was at its worst. But since a glum-faced clerk had already been coming by twice a day to inform the Commander of the latest and constantly rising mortality figures, the President wouldn’t really learn anything from his meetings with Doctor Nuri that he didn’t already know, nor would he ever offer any suggestions or advice on how the outbreak might be stopped.

The consuls and bureaucrats who had been observing events from afar thought it perfectly appropriate that the Commander—unlike Sami Pasha before him—should leave the job of battling the plague to the island’s doctors and quarantine officials. Doctor Nuri would later disapprovingly report to his wife of how, as his own small hand skimmed over the map and hovered over the Germe neighborhood or Hamidiye Avenue, the Commander would seem more interested in fantasizing about all the new names he was going to give these places. He had thought at first of changing the name of the State Hall Square into Freedom Square, but after Ramiz and his accomplices had been left out for the crows to peck at, and people had stopped going there altogether, he’d thought of naming it Independence Square instead, until finally, he had decided on Mingheria Square. As for Hamidiye Avenue, Commander Kâmil wanted to rechristen it Boulevard Mingheria. He had rejected his deputy Mazhar Effendi’s suggestion to go with Commander Kâmil Pasha Boulevard, saying that he would always remain a man of the people, and insisting that he would never allow for such a thing to happen—“certainly not while I’m still alive …”

Official chronicles of the early period of the Mingherian state will boast of the two hundred and seventy-nine streets, squares, avenues, and bridges that Commander Kâmil renamed during those days and nights of plague. The Commander also gave new appellations to all manner of tiny squares and narrow alleyways that had never had a name before the island’s declaration of freedom and independence. Post Minister Dimitris Effendi had been telling everyone how useful it would be for registered mail services and in the delivery of letters and packages for these previously nameless places to finally be called something, and how wonderful it was that although this had never been done under Ottoman rule, it was finally happening under the new regime, when first his wife and then the Postmaster himself had ended up in Theodoropoulos Hospital with the plague, forcing these activities to be put on hold for a time (during which several old Greek street names were also changed) and prompting the Commander to form a new committee to deal with the matter. Upon Dimitris Effendi’s death, the Commander requested that a large photograph of the old postmaster be put up next to his own portrait in the Post Office’s cavernous central hall. The fact that this photograph, shot by Vanyas, remains in precisely the same spot where it was first hung up in the Post Office building one hundred and sixteen years ago is further proof of how attached Mingherians are to their history and identity.

Readers of Princess Pakize’s letters will note that contrary to what Mingheria’s official historians would later do, it would be wrong to overemphasize the Commander’s supposed “republicanism” during this period. Commander Kâmil experienced the great revolution and transformation he had brought to Mingheria as a highly personal source of joy, and as he continued in his efforts to remodel his country in the spirit of modernity and nationalism, he would earnestly and perhaps even a little naïvely tell everyone around him that he was doing it all for his son (he was sure the child would be a boy). He was going to give his son a pure, authentic Mingherian name. The choice of this name was extremely important, for it would play a central part in Mingherian history even after the Commander’s death, and serve as a perfect example of sentimental nationalism.

Every now and then the Commander would go upstairs to see Zeynep, elaborating on his dreams and ambitions, and anxiously asking if she was well and whether everything was going smoothly with the baby. Pregnancy had tempered Zeynep’s anger at the world, made her skin brighter, her smile more luminous, and her face even prettier than before.

Having rejected archaeologist Selim Sahir’s initial list of traditional Mingherian names, the Commander had organized a meeting with several individuals known to have nurtured an interest in the old Mingherian language. Some of them were neighborhood friends from his boyhood, while others were people the Chief Scrutineer had kept tabs on during his time at the head of the island’s intelligence department, treating them as Mingherian separatists, and bringing them to heel with threats of imprisonment. (The Chief Scrutineer had always been much more ruthless in his treatment of Greek separatists.) Afraid of being inculpated and of having their collections confiscated, these people who had spent years of their lives assembling old Mingherian words and objects with a childlike, folkloristic enthusiasm were somewhat timid at first, but soon they had come up with a lengthy list of words, names, and potential street names. With Hamdi Baba’s help, the President also gathered suggestions from the Quarantine Regiment, and that was how, for the first time in its history, one of Mingheria’s streets came to be named after someone who lived on the island—Hamdi Baba himself.

The President also set up a series of meetings with the island’s Muslim herbalists and Christian pharmacists (including Nikiforos), its Greek fishermen, and with the owners of its diners and restaurants to create a written record of the Mingherian names for the island’s medicinal herbs and pharmaceutical preparations; its seafood, mussel species, and rowing and seafaring terms; and all its local dishes. These discussions would later serve as the basis for future Mingherian-Turkish, Mingherian-Greek, and Mingherian-Mingherian dictionaries, the first of which would be published thirty years later, and for the Encyclopaedia Mingheriana, the world’s first and only encyclopedia devoted entirely to the culture of a single Mediterranean island.

The designated venue for these meetings on Mingherian language, history, and culture was the London Club, a room on the ground floor of the Splendid Hotel where consuls and journalists used to drop by in the evening for a bit of gossip, and whose grand back door opened onto a garden covered in pink Mingherian roses. Another idea Commander Kâmil had during this time was to use the Quarantine Regiment to find young people who spoke Mingherian at home, and bring them together with scholars of Mingherian language and culture. As is widely known among those who have sought to revive the spoken Mingherian language, the Commander also tasked his men with locating the gangs of orphaned children that had formed during the plague, all so that their language could be studied. It is also true that he made plans for the Quarantine Regiment to “rescue” these children from their new homes in the hidden valleys behind the island’s steep peaks and nearly impassable crags, and thus ensure their unspoiled language was preserved for posterity, but the uncanny rise in the number of daily deaths eventually made it impossible for these impassioned schemes to ever be fully realized.

During the most arduous days of Sami Pasha and Deputy Mazhar’s battle with the lodges, the President asked the minister and former registry clerk Faik Bey to help him find a name for his son from old Mingherian legends and fairy tales by organizing two poetry competitions, and had the Chief Minister set aside seventy Mecidiye liras of prize money. The first competition would be for a poem about freedom, independence, and the island, and the winning entry would be set to music and turned into the Mingherian National Anthem. The winner of the second competition would be read out during the celebrations set to take place on the day the Commander’s son was born.

Regrettably, his meetings with the archaeologist and expert on ancient Mingherian history Selim Sahir were overshadowed by the young commander’s dislike of snobs and sons of pashas. Selim Sahir and his French wife had moved to Mingheria two years before. The archaeologist’s father and grandfather had both been pashas in Abdul Hamid’s court, and he constantly said things like “as my late father and my late grandfather used to say …” He had studied law and history of art in France, worked at the Imperial Museum in Istanbul, and taught at the university there, and recently his late father’s friends had persuaded the Grand Vizier in Istanbul to entrust him with the task of bringing Ottoman museums back “to the level of national museums elsewhere.” In other words, he was one of a new generation of advisers recruited by Abdul Hamid and the Ottoman Empire in their quest to use museums to present a more modern, Europeanized image of themselves to the world. At first Abdul Hamid had not quite understood the value of the ancient Greek and Roman ruins scattered across the Ottoman Empire and would often give them away for free to his friends in Europe. Only later had palace bureaucrats and well-educated sons of pashas like Selim Sahir managed to convince him of how important those rocks and stones really were.