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Zeynep cried again in silent, pitiful tears. Her husband still couldn’t ask her anything. She went through two more spells of shivering, though her body did not feel unusually warm. The Commander did not know what to do, did not want to get out of bed, and wished that morning would never come, that his wife’s illness would not get any worse, that time would simply stop. But the day dawned as it always did, bringing with it a strange pink-and-yellow-tinted glow. The shouting from the docks was growing louder too …

The crowd assembled at the docks and along the jetty were mostly angry dervishes from the Halifiye lodge. They were furious about the abduction of their sheikh. In an unpremeditated move, they had walked out of the front door of the lodge in the middle of the night to look for the sheikh, marching through the streets of Kadirler and Vavla on their way down to the docks. They had no slogans or resolutions; they weren’t praying or invoking the name of Allah either. All they did was walk silently toward their destination. The tenacious disciples had seemed ready and determined to march all night to find where their sheikh had been taken and bring him back home. Everyone was following the person in front of them. By morning, a large group of people including forty to fifty young acolytes of the Halifiye sect had thus walked from the lodge straight toward Vavla, down to the Old Stone Jetty, along the crescent arc of the bay, and through the port until they reached the Customhouse, at which point, faced with a wall of Quarantine Regiment soldiers lined up at the corner where Istanbul Street meets the docks, they had come to a halt.

This spontaneous rally may have been fueled by the anger of Sheikh Hamdullah’s Halifiye sect devotees. Yet the crowd’s behavior that day also signaled an instinctive desire to leave Arkaz and flee the plague, and if the new government and its new system were to succeed, it would have made sense to funnel the protesters toward the city gates and allow them to go if they wished to. But by this point the city was ruled by miscommunication and suspicion rather than facts and logic, and following the orders they kept receiving from the Ministerial Headquarters, the Quarantine Regiment stopped the angry Halifiye disciples at the docks.

Barred from leaving the city, the crowd of pious disciples, angry troublemakers, and young dervishes from the Halifiye lodge began to raise their voices. It was here, in our view, that the second phase of the Mingherian Revolution began, brought about by this gathering of people for whom the idea of the nation consisted of the daily bowl of soup and loaf of bread they got from their lodge. It was these Halifiye dervishes—and the assorted rabble-rousers who had joined them on their march—who were responsible for initiating the atmosphere of anarchy and cataclysmic chaos that would erupt that day in Arkaz. As the Commander looked out of the window of the Splendid Hotel, the Quarantine Regiment fired several warning shots into the air. Three rounds of gunfire echoed across the city.

When he stepped away from the window and turned toward the bed, Commander Kâmil noticed that his wife was crying again. As he approached her, Zeynep steeled herself, got to her feet, and lifted her dress, showing him the swelling in her groin.

In just a day, the hardness there had turned into a boil. It was not a fully developed bubo yet. But it would become one soon, and before long, his wife would be writhing in agony. The Commander could see it already, right there in his wife’s eyes and in the expression on her face. He knew that Zeynep would soon be delirious from the pain, and he understood that the blissful life they had shared in this room had come to an end.

A blissful life indeed! It was all finished now, all of it! The Commander had reached the end of his own life too. He was so sure of this now that he felt proud of his clear-sightedness, and did not try to trick himself like a coward would do. Yet even this burst of ruthless realism did not last long.

The Commander sat beside his wife and gently touched the boil in her groin. “Does that hurt?” he asked. The boil was not completely swollen yet, and not that painful. But within a day, the pain would increase, and at that point a doctor would have to pierce the bubo to relieve his wife’s agony. When he had still been guarding Doctor Nuri and following him around the city’s hospitals, Commander Kâmil had seen many patients in that state, and felt sorry for them as he watched them thrash about in pain.

Zeynep lay back down. The Commander could see the shock and disappointment on her face, and understood the guilt she was feeling—as if it were her own fault this had happened.

“We should go to Theodoropoulos Hospital!” said the Commander. “It’s better to have the boil pierced and drained early on.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital!” said Zeynep. “I don’t want to leave this room either.”

The Commander gathered his wife in his arms, sensing that it was what she expected. They lay in bed for a long time, quietly hugging each other as tightly as they could. As he listened to her breathing and her thumping heartbeat, and felt the inner movements of her body against his fingertips, the Commander ached with misery, thinking of their two and a half months together, of his wife’s irrepressible personality, and of how much they had laughed.

“Come on, darling, let’s go to the hospital!” he said a little later.

“Aren’t you the Sultan of this place now?” his wife replied. “Let them come here.”

The Commander could see her point. The treatment could just as easily take place in their room, which was the largest in the hotel. He also knew that piercing a partially developed bubo on someone’s groin could not really be considered a treatment. Given that the patient in question was the Commander’s wife, everybody would act as if they were doing something very useful and as if this intervention would save Zeynep’s life, but in reality, piercing a bubo—whether it was still relatively small and not yet hardened, or swollen and protruding visibly from someone’s neck—did not cure the plague, and its only benefit was that it brought (limited) relief from the pain. But even this was a rumor. The more demonstrable fact they had all learned from experience was that a large majority of patients who developed buboes was destined to die. The Commander had often overheard Prince Consort Nuri hastily debating these matters with the island’s Greek doctors in a mixture of Turkish and French.

But now, unless he wanted to go mad, he must forget everything that he had observed or learned from eavesdropping on the doctors and start believing that plague patients with buboes could still be cured. Yet any doctor he summoned to treat his wife would immediately remind him of quarantine regulations and try to separate them from each other. The only way he could prevent this was by quarantining with her.

The Commander could also foresee that any rumors about him having caught the plague too, or being placed under cordon, or shutting himself away in isolation, would not weaken just the quarantine effort but the new government too. People would not mind too much that the Commander’s wife hadn’t gone to the hospital. But if even their mighty commander couldn’t avoid the plague, how was he supposed to save them all, and who was he to teach them the old language and the old Mingherian names they’d forgotten?

At the same time, he did not want the crying and the shaking and the hiccuping wails to begin before he had persuaded Zeynep to leave the room and go to the hospital. His wife did not know what the experience of a plague patient was like. It was his duty to tell her the truth now.

But the only thing Zeynep wanted was for her husband to hold her in his arms and convince her, if only in that moment, that nothing bad was going to happen to her. Every time he hugged her, it also made Zeynep think that he was not afraid of catching the disease from her—which could only mean that he truly loved her. Then she would start weeping again, terrified of what was to come.

They lay like that for a long time, holding each other close. The morning light was seeping into the room through the shutters and between the curtains. The Commander watched the particles of dust floating in the beam of light, listened carefully to his wife as she breathed, and tried to make sense of the noises coming from the street.

The discontent caused by Sheikh Hamdullah’s abduction from his lodge had continued to grow. Sheikhs from other lodges had also begun to declare their support for this “revolt of the sectarians.” There was no organized structure or leadership behind it; it had emerged of its own accord. The Commander was a born Mingherian who knew his people well, and even as he embraced his wife and tried not to succumb to grief and melancholy, he could still guess what was happening in the city from the noises that were drifting in: the combative troops of his own Quarantine Regiment were fighting the rebellious “sectarians” on the streets. No blood had been spilled yet, but both in Vavla and by the docks, the soldiers had already fired a few warning shots in the air—or, according to some, directly at the “sectarians” themselves. While all of this was going on, the Commander was lying in bed with his arms around his wife.

Sometime later, Mazhar Effendi knocked on the door. When the Commander didn’t reply, Mazhar Effendi left him a note and went away. The Commander had understood that there was some kind of revolt taking place against the Quarantine Regiment, and he would have liked to go and lead his soldiers on the field. But he also knew that as soon as he walked out of there, he would not be able to hide his wife’s illness anymore, and they would immediately have to be parted. Besides, if it became known that his wife was sick, it would also be harder for him to lead the regiment directly.

Toward midday, Zeynep threw up twice in quick succession, then fell onto the bed in exhaustion. Her heart was beating fast, she was sweating, and she was in pain. She was convinced that if any doctors came, they would separate her from her husband, so every time he went anywhere near the door, she would start weeping.

In the afternoon, Zeynep’s fever got worse, and she became delirious. “I never got to see Istanbul!” she said, causing the Commander immense distress. He promised her again and again that he would take her there.

“We’ll go and see the palace in Beşiktaş where Princess Pakize was imprisoned, we’ll visit the Sublime Porte where the government sits, and I’ll take you to the Imperial Bacteriology Institute in Nişantaşı!” said the Commander. His wife cried again—and yes, the Commander’s eyes filled with tears too.

Eight hours later, Zeynep would die of the plague in their room in the Splendid Hotel. Death had come even faster for her than it had for her father, prison guard Bayram Effendi, who had been killed by the same disease ninety-five days earlier.

CHAPTER 63

At first, the anger displayed by the disciples of the Halifiye sect and by their supporters from other rebellious lodges after the kidnapping of Sheikh Hamdullah did not seem serious enough to cause any great concern. Some of the protesters had been carrying sticks, but most of them were unarmed, and to demonstrate that they had no intention of fighting, they hadn’t even picked up any loose branches on the way. Sami Pasha had no doubt that the Quarantine Regiment could easily overpower this aimless mob.

Most historians agree, on the other hand, that the revolt which began in the prisons that evening would dramatically alter the course of Mingheria’s history. That said, we do not share some commentators’ view that if the Commander had left his sick wife’s bedside and immediately taken charge of his troops, events would have taken a completely different turn, and many deaths could have been avoided. For by the time the riot in the Castle’s prison had grown to the unexpectedly significant proportions it would soon acquire, and reached a degree of severity that required the Commander’s military and political genius, the horse had long since bolted, and the state was already far too weak to intervene.

Furious with the rough treatment they had been receiving from the wardens, and about the spread of the plague through the prison, the inmates of Dormitory Three, also known as the novices’ dormitory, had been biding their time for an opportunity to revolt. The atmosphere of “anarchy” that seemed to have taken over the streets of the city after Sheikh Hamdullah’s abduction, as well as the animosity that sect leaders, some shopkeepers, and a number of habitual agitators were encouraging against the Quarantine Regiment, provided the prisoners with the excuse and the inspiration they had been waiting for. The whole city was enveloped in an aura of catastrophe, and the angry convicts could sense that their time had come.

But what had most inflamed everyone’s tempers was what had happened after the arrival of the plague in Dormitory Three ten days ago. The prison management’s only response had been to put the entire dormitory in isolation. With prisoners no longer being allowed to go outside for their daily exercise, their rage had only accumulated. Those who broke out in plague buboes were sent to the Hamidiye Hospital (whose name hadn’t changed yet). But no one who went there was ever heard from again, so nobody ever wanted to go. Every day the dormitory doors would open and two spray-pump operators would walk in, flanked by guards, to spray the frightened and subdued prisoners and every corner of their dormitory with disinfectant, but the next day two more would wake up with buboes on their bodies and get sent to their deaths in the Hamidiye Hospital.

It was during one such disinfection operation that one of the prisoners threw himself off the bed pretending to be struck by a bout of feverish plague delirium, and in the ensuing commotion, the other inmates managed to seize one of the guards and take his key. After a brief scuffle, the other guards also surrendered. Very soon, before the Chief Warden had even realized there was a riot going on, the rebels had taken over the whole building. The effects of the plague had also played their part in enabling this easy victory; for a variety of reasons, including fear and funerals, the number of prison clerks and guards turning up for work every day had greatly diminished. Some guards had stopped coming altogether after the first rumors that the plague had spread to the prison too.

By that same evening, the rioters had taken over the rest of the Castle, meeting very little resistance. They had neither planned nor dreamed of such a thing. In fact there wasn’t anything particularly organized about their insurrection. But as soon as he saw that the central building, dating back to the Byzantine era, had fallen into the rebels’ hands too, the Chief Warden withdrew his men from the Venetian Tower and the administrative offices. For those who argue that the warden acted with excessive caution, we will note the following: whenever they had come across anyone they deemed to be suspicious, or didn’t like, or who tried to stand in their way, the delinquent inmates of Dormitory Three had beaten them to a pulp and left them for dead. Three of the convicts had burned down the same kitchen building where they had been tortured, had their feet whipped, and been branded with hot coals. Other fires too would burn in Arkaz that night. The warden had been right to abandon the prison.