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The representative from Upper Turunçlar, on the other hand, noted that there was hardly anyone left in his neighborhood to complain about the Quarantine Regiment. Those who used to live close to the incineration pit were all gone, driven away by the smell. People in the part of the neighborhood that overlooked the New Muslim Cemetery had become angry and distressed; the sound of funeral processions never seemed to abate. But even more than the constant stream of people coming and going to the cemetery, the locals were upset about the street dogs who were digging up grave sites at night. The dogs would often get into fights, and sometimes they would pick human remains or dead rats up with their fangs and carry them around, spreading the disease. There was also a rumor that a ship with a red sail would come and save everyone. But nothing too unusual had happened in the neighborhood except for the recent death of a quiltmaker who’d lived on his own.

Once the neighborhood representatives from Vavla, Germe, and Çite had also delivered their reports, it became clear to those in charge of the new government and quarantine measures, and indeed to the Commander himself, that any optimism they might still have carried in their hearts was completely misplaced. The increasingly deadly course of the disease through Vavla—in the streets around the Army Middle School, the Hamidiye Hospital, and the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque—was damaging the authority and reputation of the state and of the quarantine effort in their new incarnations as much as it had in the old. Upon Sami Pasha’s insistence, and with the doctors’ agreement, it was ruled that in order to combat the disease in this most prominent of neighborhoods, quarantine soldiers would be deployed to patrol people’s back gardens, some of its streets would be placed behind long-term sanitary cordons, and vacant homes (of which there were only a few) would be boarded shut with the thickest nails to keep thieves, loiterers, and plague sufferers out. The new government had reached the decision early in its reign to burn down any houses and rubbish dumps that were too infected to save, but it had taken a whole week for this policy to be implemented, and the process had drawn the ire of these neighborhoods’ inhabitants. Now Sami Pasha wanted the Commander to issue more incineration orders.

As the debate in the meeting hall continued, the Commander looked out of the window at the Hotel Splendid peeking through the rooftops, and wished he could run back to his waiting wife. He was the only one who knew about the red mark on her groin. If he could just hurry home to her now, if they could just get into bed and hold each other and forget about everything else, then maybe he would also be able to forget that the red spot he had found on her body could be the beginnings of a plague bubo.

If Zeynep got the plague, he would probably get it too. Even if he didn’t, he would still have to be separated from his wife. That was something he could never do. The more he thought about these things, the harder the Commander found it to follow the debate going on around him. Normally, he had as little patience for people whose agitation and fear of death in the face of the plague led them to making misguided decisions as he did for soldiers who panicked under the enemy’s sudden onslaught. Yet here he was behaving just as they did. He must remain calm.

Despite the scale of the outbreak and the prospect of imminent death, there were still large segments of both the Christian and the Muslim population who had maintained their composure, and whose sense of humanity remained intact. While some people thought only of saving themselves, there were many others ready to put their lives at risk to visit neighbors who’d lost their loved ones and bring relief to patients writhing in pain, and a few good-natured souls could even be found trying to console the lunatics who roamed the streets of Arkaz crying, “What has become of us? We have plunged into Hell!” There were still plenty who had not yet lost their sense of community, fellowship, and fraternity.

These people—twenty to twenty-five of whom were dying in the outbreak every day—were constantly paying each other condolence visits. They formed a significant presence in the city. Although they did not go out as much as they used to do before quarantine measures were introduced, their attachment to their families, their neighbors, and the wider community—the fact, in other words, that they were good people—meant that they would often form well-meaning gatherings in mourners’ homes, mosque courtyards, and at funeral processions, and spread the disease even farther. In late July, the streets of the Mingherian capital were not completely deserted as those of Bombay or Hong Kong had been in the throes of the third plague pandemic. For somewhere along one of the city’s sloping roads, there was bound to be a crowd of thoughtful Muslim men rushing from one funeral or house visit to the next.

The Commander understood from the stories he was hearing that the state and its officials no longer had any status or authority left in the neighborhood of Çite. Yesterday, six people had died there, but rather than focusing on these deaths, the local representative’s report centered on the question of “permit slips.” The hostility between the unemployed Cretian youths who had come from Taşçılar to settle in Çite and engage in all sorts of misdemeanors, and the neighborhood’s original inhabitants, who generally worked as coachmen, farmers, and shopkeepers, showed no signs of subsiding. The neighborhood’s pious and impoverished local families believed that the disease had been brought into Çite by these thuggish, defiant youths, and demanded that the impious migrants be banished from their neighborhood altogether.

While the island was still under Ottoman control, Sami Pasha had set up a system of “permits” to deal with these sorts of problems (which occurred in other neighborhoods too). Under this system, access to certain streets and areas was restricted to people equipped with special permits issued by the Quarantine Authority. With this measure, the Governor Pasha had hoped both to trap the rootless, jobless Cretian migrants within a single neighborhood, and create a register of their presence—a plan which had initially succeeded. But when quarantine clerks and permit slip holders began trading these documents for money, the Pasha’s innovation took on a completely unintended turn. As both government clerks and neighborhood locals stood to profit from this trade, and as it still served, if only in a limited way, as a form of sanitary cordon, neither the Governor Pasha nor the Prince Consort had wished to forgo the permit slips altogether. But at the same time, their ready availability increased the amount of movement within the city. The neighborhood representative reported that the relatives of two permit holders who had died of the plague yesterday had immediately sold their papers to a shop in the Old Market nearby. In theory, whenever people lost a parent or a sibling or any other family member to the plague, and were therefore evacuated from their infected homes and placed in quarantine, any permits they might have held should have been revoked, but in practice their papers were quickly put to use by others. The latest problem, as the Commander could see through the clouds gathering inside his mind, was that after the foundation of the new state, some clerks had been canceling old permits (or stamping them afresh), and demanding a tax to reissue them on behalf of the new government. As these papers were essential for commerce, everyone was willing to pay the tax, but there had been a few complaints already. The neighborhood representative, who also happened to be a treasury clerk, told the Commander that although there wasn’t that much money in it, some people had already begun collecting permit slips in case they might one day be able to sell them for profit.

CHAPTER 61

The Commander soon found he could think of nothing else but the swollen red mark on his wife’s groin. She could well be suffering from headaches and fever right now, all alone in her room upstairs in the Splendid Hotel.

He could not stop the terrible scenes forming in his imagination. He left in the middle of the meeting and returned from the State Hall to the Splendid Hotel, followed by his bodyguards. There were very few people out on the streets. A woman walking with a parcel in her hand and a timid little child carrying a small basket both noticed the Commander, though most of the others they encountered did not recognize him. Only a boy with light brown hair spotted the Commander walking past his house; he called out to someone inside, and his father soon joined him at the window. He had light brown hair too. “Long live the Commander!” the child cried.

The Commander was delighted. He waved at the boy. He wanted nothing more than to be the brown-haired child’s heroic commander, and to save him and his family from this damned plague. But if Zeynep became unwell, he wouldn’t be able to do any of that. If the mark on Zeynep’s groin turned out to be a plague bubo, surely he would fall ill too. But the Commander didn’t feel sick at all.

The guards and quarantine soldiers stationed at the entrance of the Splendid Palace stood to attention when they saw him. By the time he was climbing up the stairs, Commander Kâmil had already decided he would not speak of the mark to Zeynep. First he would study her from a distance. If she had the plague, there would be other signs of it anyway, such as a fever or a headache. But if she didn’t have the plague, mentioning the red mark would only make her worry for no reason. The Commander had seen too many people stricken by misplaced fears and anxieties. They would make life hell for themselves and for everyone around them, at least until it became clear they were not infected after all. But people usually tried to ignore the early symptoms. Everyone knew that if one of their own got sick, they too—as members of the same household—were likely to be infected, or at least be put in isolation, so nobody ever liked to mention the first red marks, the first headaches, or the first signs of fever unless they were sure of what was causing them.

When he walked into their room, the Major found his wife pacing about in a huff, and felt relieved; she did not look like someone whose strength was being sapped by the plague. Should he mention his worries after all, and perhaps make a joke of them?

“My mother gave me a comb from my niece, with pearls on it …,” said Zeynep. “It’s been right here for the past three days …”

“Did your mother come three days ago?”

“No, I went home to her,” Zeynep replied. “With the bodyguards, of course!” She glanced at her husband with the smile of someone expecting to be forgiven for their little transgression.

“If even the Commander’s own wife won’t follow quarantine rules, how can we expect the people to?” said Commander Kâmil, stalking out of the room.

The shock and anger he felt at his wife’s failure to obey his instructions far surpassed any fear of dying. His first wife Aysha had not been like this, so whenever Zeynep went against his wishes, the Commander never knew what to do, and would usually just leave the room and wait until his rage had waned.

Downstairs, an informant sent by Sami Pasha was updating Mazhar Effendi on the latest news regarding Sheikh Hamdullah and his condolence visitors. For the first three days, and to avoid antagonizing the Halifiye sect more than it already had, the government had refrained from dispersing the crowds gathering at the lodge to pay their respects in the wake of Ramiz’s hanging. But when long queues began to form outside the main door of the lodge, Sami Pasha had suggested that entry into the street itself should be regulated, ostensibly as a quarantine measure. This had resulted in visitors trying to sneak into the lodge through one of the entrances to its back garden. When soldiers from the Quarantine Regiment were deployed to stand guard at these entryways, people started climbing the garden wall where it was low enough, or using secret passages hidden behind briars and blackberry bushes and known to the sect’s younger disciples. Even after waiting patiently for their turn, most of the visitors who made it inside the lodge never got to see the sheikh anyway, and once they had dropped off the gifts or the food they had brought, they would hang around for a little longer before eventually going home. Of the nearly two hundred people who lived on the grounds of the lodge, only Nimetullah Effendi with the felt hat and a handful of others knew the location to which His Holiness the Sheikh had retreated. Mazhar Effendi’s spies had been working assiduously to locate where exactly the sheikh might be hiding. Sami Pasha planned to extract the sheikh from the lodge and take him somewhere else.

At first the Commander had felt this move would be unnecessarily disrespectful, but after hearing one of their informants report on how people had been rejecting quarantine measures and sympathizing with Ramiz, he too had agreed that the sheikh should be removed. The informant was not exactly sure where the sheikh had gone to hide, but he did have a theory. He believed the sheikh must be in one of two buildings concealed by linden and pine trees on the side of the lodge near Çite, where disciples would stay when they wished to “withdraw” or when it was felt that they needed “moral edification.” Both these buildings were usually empty, but for the past few days, they had been surrounded by a detachment of burly, truculent disciples.

The long-planned raid was a complete success. Ten soldiers selected from among the Quarantine Regiment’s brawniest recruits and from a particularly tough contingent who was known to mistrust all sheikhs and holy men, as well as a team of six policemen sent by the Chief Minister, formed two separate squads and used two separate ladders to quickly climb over the wall and reach the two houses. Based on intelligence received from another informant, they broke into the first house and found a room with an empty sofa and three more doors. Behind the first door, a dervish who’d been keeping watch woke up when they arrived and was quickly detained. When they opened the second door, they saw Sheikh Hamdullah lying on a bed on the floor. The third room was empty.

As previously planned, an officer disguised as a scribe, wearing a frock coat and a new pair of expensive shoes from the Dafni store, stepped forward to greet the sheikh and kiss his hand. The sheikh’s loose white robe hung over him like a ghost. His hair and beard seemed even whiter than usual, and he looked like he wasn’t quite awake yet. His vast, dark, eaglelike shadow flickering on the empty wall in the yellow light of the candlelit room was ten times more terrifying than the man himself.

The clerk with the expensive shoes told the sheikh—who was still struggling to wake up (or at any rate pretending to)—that they had been sent by the office of the Chief Minister to secure the sheikh’s safety against a probable and imminent assassination attempt. The sheikh had seen the other soldiers standing behind the clerk. It was then that he spoke those famous words that would be used against him for many years to come.