第 66 页

Armed with an official permit from Abdul Hamid, Selim Sahir had arrived on the island aboard the army cargo ship Fazilet (Virtue) two years ago and had begun digging around an archaeological site that stretched all the way to the sea in one of the coves just northeast of Arkaz. This location had been suggested to him by his friends on the island. The object he was looking for was the statue of a woman, a milky-white sculpture hidden in the depths of a vast, tenebrous cave, which could be accessed only by water. He would have liked to extract this statue, transport it to the Imperial Museum in Istanbul, and make it famous, just as the museum’s director Osman Hamdi Bey had done fifteen years ago with the sarcophagus he had discovered in another ancient cave in Sidon and immediately (and erroneously) declared to be the tomb of Alexander the Great. The Ottomans still considered themselves a global power and were regarded as such by the rest of the world too. But given how quickly our archaeologist’s plans for this statue “fell through,” we might conclude that “the sick man of Europe” was no longer capable of setting up any kind of museum.

Maybe the necessary funds hadn’t arrived from Istanbul, or maybe someone had said something to arouse Abdul Hamid’s suspicions, but for whatever reason, the cranes and rail systems needed to pull the statue out from its underwater cave had been greatly delayed, and the whole operation had soon come to a standstill. The Governor, who had followed these developments through his network of informants, had always been eager to get along with Sahir Bey and would join the consuls and the island’s wealthy notables at the parties the archaeologist periodically threw in his rented villa. (It was at one of these parties that Sami Pasha first tried Mingheria’s famous panfried freshwater mullet.) The Governor could tell from the generous and punctual salary the Ottoman Bank wired him every month that the archaeologist must have been sent to the island to spy for Abdul Hamid.

Having learned all this from Chief Minister Sami Pasha, the Commander invited him to join his meeting with archaeologist Sahir Bey too.

“We haven’t been able to pick a name for our son yet, but I did like the names you proposed this time and have decided to use them for our city’s streets!” said the Commander, speaking like an overlord who has quickly learned that part of his job consisted of rewarding his subordinates and encouraging them with praise. “But sadly, I must say we were not quite satisfied with what you wrote about the history of the Mingherian people.”

“In what sense?”

“You have looked to Asia and all the way to the Aral Sea to find the roots of the Mingherian nation. There was no such lake in the fairy tales I used to hear a child, nor were Asians ever mentioned. In these difficult times, when Mingherians have been abandoned by the world and left to deal with the plague on their own, when they have nothing to rely on but their own sense of self-worth, you at least might spare us the story of how we supposedly ‘came to this island from somewhere else.’”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way!” Sahir Bey replied. “Though I’m afraid such is the consensus among France and Germany’s most celebrated archaeologists and specialists in ancient languages.”

“But right now the people of Mingheria will not want to hear that their true home is somewhere far away, or that there was someone else living here on this island before them, and they will especially not want to hear it from scholars like you.”

“No one admires your extraordinary achievements more than I do, commandant. But no amount of historical scholarship can alter the truth about the origins of the Mingherian people.”

“The people of Mingheria are not children. They like to address me as their ‘commander’ now. This is the greatest honor of my life! Yet here you are, saying the word in French as if to make a mockery of it all.”

Sami Pasha could tell from the way the Commander was haranguing the archaeologist and refusing to let the matter go that this young man was filled with an immeasurable anger, and that without that anger, there could have been no nationalist fervor either.

“You must know that the age of kings and sultans is over now,” the Commander continued. “Why would you seek to take a statue that belongs to the Mingherian people and put it in the Sultan’s museum in Istanbul?”

“The sunken sculpture is a statue of the Queen of the Batanis, one of the oldest of all the ancient Mingherian tribes. Taking it to Istanbul would be a wonderful opportunity to introduce the world to Mingherian culture.”

“On the contrary, the moment it got to Istanbul, they would attribute it to Alexander the Great or to some other empire. They’d find some other civilization more favored by the French. Besides, why should the statue of a Mingherian queen go to Istanbul anymore? You will extract the sculpture using whatever resources we have here, and place it on top of the clock tower. You have a month.”

CHAPTER 60

One way in which Commander Kâmil liked to test the names people (including his own mother) had been suggesting for his unborn son was by whispering them three times toward the baby in Zeynep’s womb. As soon as his son recognized one of the names as his own, he was bound to kick out or do a somersault. The Commander could not stop looking at his wife’s pregnant belly (though it was still completely flat), her beautiful round breasts, and her strawberry-colored nipples, and kept finding excuses to “examine” her. He would rest his nose somewhere on her sweet-smelling skin—on her stomach, for instance—and move his head around like a bird trying to dig out buried treasure with its beak. Zeynep would contribute to these childish amusements with jokes and inventive games of her own, and afterward they would happily make love.

One afternoon two days later, the President went up to their rooms to see his wife. The death rate still wasn’t falling, and he was feeling troubled. Wanting to cheer him up, Zeynep pulled her husband toward the bed, and the Commander followed her lead. He kissed her for a little while, then began as usual to “examine” her beautiful body. After a joyful inspection of her back, her neck, and her armpits, he looked below her stomach and found a suspicious, slightly hardened redness in her groin. There had been so many mosquito stings, weird insect bites, and numerous other unexplained blemishes that had appeared and disappeared overnight on his wife’s healthy, lustrous skin, that there was probably no need to dwell too much on this latest discovery, yet the moment he saw the mark, his heart gave two heavy thumps, like when a person tries to look away from something they’re not supposed to see. It did not resemble all the other red marks he had found on her before.

But since his wife never left their rooms, and there were no rats in the hotel either, Commander Kâmil told himself it couldn’t be the plague. He touched the hardness with the tip of his finger, pressing gently at first, and then more firmly. When Zeynep did not react, he concluded that it must be an insect bite. A plague bubo would have hurt when he had prodded it. Not wishing to ruin his wife’s mood with his misgivings, the Commander decided to forget about the mark.

The British consul George had sent a letter requesting a meeting with the Commander and with his old friend Chief Minister Sami Pasha. With all the other consuls still in hiding, Sami Pasha interpreted the British consul’s overture as a positive sign. The British, in their typically wily way, were probably planning to pre-empt everyone else by making the newly created state some kind of offer, but Sami Pasha could not figure out what that offer might consist of, and once he had shared his thoughts with the Commander, they spent some time going over all the topics they might discuss with the consul.

After all this preparation, they were rather surprised to realize that the consul had actually come to tell them that the archaeologist Selim was a kindhearted, well-meaning man who loved the island and all Mingherians. Consul George also noted that the archaeologist and his wife were less afraid of being sent to the Castle’s isolation facility as plague suspects than they were of being made to “quarantine” in the Maiden’s Tower with those Turkish officials who had sided with the Ottomans. Selim Sahir Bey feared that these officials who had been confined to the Maiden’s Tower because of their loyalty to Istanbul would never be sent back to the capital, but be used for political leverage instead. There was no way the ancient Mingherian queen’s statue could be retrieved under these circumstances. All that Selim and his wife wanted now was to be allowed to remain on the island.

“Did he send you here?”

“He told me you have been researching old Mingherian names. He thought I might have some suggestions too.”

“The consul is very fond of Mingheria,” Sami Pasha interjected. “He’s been collecting books about our island for years, and using them to research his own.”

“Since you feel our island is important enough to write a book about it, please tell us this,” said the Commander. “Do you think the home of the Mingherian people is on this island, or elsewhere?”

“It is here that Mingherians have become Mingherians.”

“You shall write our history better than anyone else will!” said the Commander. But he did not go on. He was looking at a strange light that had appeared over the sea. There was a silence …

“The government of Mingheria would like to ask the representative of the United Kingdom: what must we do for you to lift this blockade?” Sami Pasha boldly resumed.

“I have no idea what my government or the British ambassador in Istanbul might be saying about the current situation. But when the outbreak stops, the blockade will be lifted.”

“The outbreak will not slow no matter what we do!” said Sami Pasha.

“Picking fights with the lodges as if they were the enemy has made matters worse,” said the consul.

“It breaks my heart to hear such words from a true friend like you. What does the British government suggest we do to stop the plague?”

“The telegraph lines are down, there is a blockade, and we are under quarantine. From where I stand, I can only speculate as to what the British government might say.”

“So what do you think?”

“You have a distinguished guest here,” George Bey began delicately. “Princess Pakize is an important personage within the Ottoman royal family. As the daughter of a sultan, she is of some diplomatic value.”

“In the Ottoman tradition, descendants from the female line of the dynasty have no connection to the throne, and the people would never accept such a claim.”

“Thanks to you, Commander, this is no longer an Ottoman island!” George Bey replied, weighing his words. “And its people are a different people now.”

Once George Bey had left, the Commander—taking the consul’s warnings as seriously as Sami Pasha always did—decided he would attend a quarantine meeting and take an interest not only in what was going on with the lodges, but also in the various problems the city’s neighborhood representatives were reporting from the capital’s outermost reaches.

Vangelis Effendi from Flizvos told them that a Muslim “outlaw” who had been squatting in one of the neighborhood’s empty homes had died there two days ago, after which his corpse had begun to smell. The Quarantine Regiment had received a tip-off about this particular house—which belonged to the Seferidis family from Thessaloniki—only a week ago, and having broken in through the back door to check, they had nailed every door and shutter closed from the inside and sprayed the whole house with Lysol again before exiting from the same door they’d walked through. The corpse whose smell had revealed its whereabouts yesterday must therefore have belonged to someone who’d hidden there after the Quarantine Regiment’s inspection. These people who broke into vacant homes with the excuse of fleeing the plague posed a serious threat to the authority of the state, as they would often use the empty buildings they occupied as bases and meeting points for criminal activities.

This was the first quarantine meeting Apostolos Effendi—representing the steep hills, rocky cliffs, and beautiful views of Dantela neighborhood—had attended since the foundation of the new state, and his first request was to be paid his overdue wages from when the island had still been under Ottoman control. He did not want to be a neighborhood representative anymore. Dantela was a calm, remote, and by now nearly empty Greek neighborhood. Apostolos Effendi was suffering from loneliness. He had told them once that he had encountered the plague demon roaming around empty gardens at night—though according to Sami Pasha, it wasn’t plague demons he had seen, but smugglers and boatmen working together in the darkness to sneak people off the island. With so many policemen and government clerks having abandoned their duties, the presence of the state in the city’s smaller and more secluded neighborhoods had become almost nonexistent. These zones of dangerous lawlessness, situated predominantly around large, wealthy mansions in semideserted Greek neighborhoods, attracted all kinds of destitute drifters and opportunistic criminals from the Muslim neighborhoods on the other side of the creek. People had also been coming down from the north of the island to rob and loot the capital. Among the different types of gangs proliferating in these areas, there was also a band of orphaned children everyone kept talking about but which very few people had seen. Based on stories about the lives of these gangs of runaway children during the plague, the Mingherian national poet Salih Riza’s romantic children’s novel Mother Is in the Forest of the Night would convert me, at the age of ten, into a fanatical Mingherian nationalist.

The neighborhood representative bringing news from Hrisopolitissa Square reported that over the last two days, fresh rat corpses had begun to appear again along the walls and inside people’s gardens. Little by little, these neighborhood representatives, whose primary duties were to ensure restrictions were obeyed, reveal where plague patients were being hidden from the authorities, point out which homes needed to be evacuated, and show the Lysol pump crews which houses and streets they should disinfect, had also taken on the role of intermediaries conveying people’s frustrations with the quarantine to those in government. But that day the Commander rebuked a foolish and irresponsible “representative” who complained that a farrier from the Kofunya neighborhood had been sent to the Castle’s isolation area even though he wasn’t sick. “Where were you when the mistake was made?” the Commander told him. “Your job is to stop people breaking quarantine—not to come here and criticize us.”

But if the neighborhood representatives had been spared any widespread rage, it was largely thanks to the presence of the Quarantine Regiment, who were themselves familiar figures, native to the island, and far more prominently involved in the quarantine effort. As a result, people tended to direct their anger at them first. Ever since the new state had been set up, the Quarantine Regiment had become even stricter, drawing increasingly inflamed reactions from the public. The fact that the number of deaths wasn’t falling had also exacerbated people’s fury. “Everything we have been put through, all that torment and browbeating, it was all for nothing,” residents of the city’s Muslim neighborhoods could often be heard saying.