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Chief Minister Sami Pasha was following everything closely from the office he’d occupied for the last five years. The Commander’s deputy, Mazhar Effendi, and the Doctor and Prince Consort joined him there for a meeting that same evening. They did not have enough soldiers or policemen to safeguard the state from all the fugitives and mischief-makers roaming the city’s streets, or against former isolation inmates and sect devotees angling for revenge. After a string of unfortunate clashes and confrontations, the soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment had retreated to their homes, and less than half of them were reporting to the garrison every morning. They’d heard that the Commander’s wife had died of the plague, and this had been a blow to their morale. Sami Pasha himself only had enough security forces and gendarmes at his command to guard the Ministries building and square. It was these gendarmes who had chased away a group of hostile convicts who’d sought to break into the Ministerial Headquarters and spend the night in there. There were also rumors that some gangs had taken up residence in various homes across the city, and were making plans to raid government buildings. It was imperative to make peace between the Quarantine Regiment and the people who’d escaped from the Castle’s isolation facility, but the men assembled in Sami Pasha’s office that evening could not figure out how.

To help secure the ministerial building and the Commander’s quarters at the Splendid Hotel, Sami Pasha had asked the garrison to send a small platoon from the Arab division who could be relied upon to understand and follow orders. But the requested soldiers had yet to come down. Mazhar Effendi, who’d been handling these negotiations, had wanted to update the Commander about the situation on the streets and the expanding influence of the isolation fugitives, and ask for his advice. The Commander, grieving the loss of his wife and son, had locked himself inside his room at the top of the Splendid Palace, and would not come out. But in the meantime, a band of escaped convicts had burned down a house in the Kadirler neighborhood, generating a plume of smoke that had been visible from across the city. The Commander should have been wondering what was going on, and asked to be informed. He must have heard the yelling and shouting and the occasional gunshot coming from the city at night.

This seems a suitable moment in which to make one or two remarks upon the role of the individual in history. Had Commander Kâmil’s wife Zeynep not caught the plague, would the many other events that resulted from this fact never have occurred, and would history have taken a completely different course? Or would the inevitable developments that history had reserved for the island of Mingheria have come to pass regardless? These are complicated questions to answer. But it is true that under the prevailing mood of anarchy and disorder, the Commander’s single-minded preoccupation with his wife and with the Mingherian language only served to worsen the chaotic, disorderly atmosphere that reigned in the city, and more important, it also led to the rapid dissolution of any hope and optimism that the new government had brought with it.

As they assembled before the map of Arkaz the next morning, they saw thirty-two new deaths marked upon it. By now it was almost impossible to keep burying victims individually, but funeral processions were still taking place and breaching quarantine in some of the outer neighborhoods. The new unruly crowd that had taken over the streets of the city had turned defiance of quarantine rules into a matter of course.

Sami Pasha could see better than everybody else that the only way for the government to restore its authority was for the Commander to emerge from the room where he’d been mourning the loss of his wife and take charge of his Quarantine Regiment once more, for nothing else would work now, and if they delayed any further, it might mean the end of everything. The next day, Sami Pasha, Mazhar Effendi, and their guards climbed up the stairs to the third floor of the Splendid Palace, and knocked on the Commander’s door. The thick, white, wooden door stayed shut. They waited for quite a long time, then knocked again. When the door still wouldn’t open, they took out a letter they’d prepared beforehand, describing all the latest political developments and the urgency of the situation, and slipped it halfway through the gap under the door.

They came back an hour later to find that the letter had been retrieved. Mazhar Effendi pointed out that the doorknob seemed to have moved. The Commander must have woken up. The door wasn’t locked. After knocking once more and waiting for a while, they thought it would be appropriate for Prince Consort Nuri to join them too before they went inside, and sent a messenger to the old State Hall building.

Half an hour later, Sami Pasha gently pushed the door open, with Doctor Nuri standing behind him.

Still hearing nothing, Sami Pasha, Doctor Nuri, and Mazhar Effendi walked inside, where they found Commander Kâmil sitting at a walnut writing desk next to one of the hotel’s wide-shuttered windows. The Commander had noticed someone come in, but had not shifted his position. Doctor Nuri could sense, as he approached him, that there was something unusual going on.

The Commander had put on his military uniform and was wearing his boots too, though there was no need for those in summer. For a moment, Doctor Nuri thought he must have finally resolved to go out and lead his soldiers into battle, but it appeared the opposite was true: Commander Kâmil looked like he hardly had the strength to breathe, let alone fight anyone. His forehead was slick with sweat, and he was panting.

Doctor Nuri realized that the Commander was following them with his eyes, as if he were sitting in a barber’s chair and couldn’t move his head. Then his own gaze fell onto the Commander’s neck. A huge and extremely conspicuous plague bubo had emerged on the right-hand side of the Commander’s neck.

In that historic moment, the three men realized that the founder of the new state and revolutionary hero Commander Kâmil Pasha had caught the plague. They recognized that he had been acting this way because he couldn’t bring himself to complain about being sick, or felt that he shouldn’t. Sami Pasha also sensed that the Commander would refuse to talk, like a sulking child. Doctor Nuri, on the other hand, remembered that in some cases the plague could affect patients’ ability to speak, and cause others to shiver and stammer.

What would happen now? The three men could tell that the Commander was thinking of the fate of the nation and of the island above all else, and that he too, like them, did not wish for news of his illness to be made public. But the Commander was able to see only to the end of his own life. The other three were thinking anxiously of what might happen after that.

CHAPTER 65

Shortly after showing the island’s three other political leaders the boil on his neck, Commander Kâmil Pasha abandoned the pose he’d taken, slowly pushed himself off the wicker chair he’d been sitting on, and fell shakily onto the bed he and his late wife had happily shared for two and a half months.

It still amazes us today, as we try to make sense of all these events, that the other three men in the room—Sami Pasha, Mazhar Effendi, and Doctor Nuri—should have been able to think of anything other than fleeing that hotel room right away, returning to the former State Hall and current Ministerial Headquarters, and doing everything they could to save their own and their wives and children’s lives. But in their attempt to keep the ship of state afloat, Sami Pasha and Mazhar Effendi were trying to behave as if there were a platoon of soldiers with them, waiting to do their government’s bidding.

Some historians have suggested that Commander Kâmil’s illness marked the beginning of a Mingherian counterrevolution, and a return to the previous order. If the revolution is understood as a movement for independence and the rejection of Ottoman rule, then that is incorrect; for the island continued on the path of independence even after the Commander was struck by the plague. But if we consider the revolution as a force for secularism and modernization, then these historians’ observations might be accurate. What we can definitely agree on is that within two days, it became clear that no matter how hard the doctors and bureaucrats worked, the new government was going to struggle to cling to power. Sami Pasha’s web of spies and informants had gone quiet too, as if even they were still trying to understand what was going on. The city was in the grips of indiscipline, disorder, and mayhem now, in a state of what the West might have termed “chaos” and “anarchy.” There was not a single person inside the Ministerial Headquarters who had fully understood what was happening outside their door.

In the afternoon, Doctor Nuri and Doctor Nikos made an incision in the Commander’s bubo. They gave him an injection to reduce his fever, and to help cool him further, they arranged for a male nurse to gently wipe his body down under their supervision. They did not get too close to the ailing commander. Doctor Nuri would later tell his wife that on the first day, the Commander had hidden his illness like everyone else did, and on the second day he’d begun to behave like a child. Mingherian schoolbooks tell us that despite his illness, the Commander was not “afraid,” and persisted in his efforts to fight the outbreak and establish a modern quarantine system. At times he would descend into lengthy silences, grappling with headaches that battered his forehead like sledgehammers, suffering extended bouts of shivering, and withdrawing from the world. But in other moments he would look like he had overcome his fever, try to get out of bed as soon as he woke up, and behave as if there were some other place he had to rush to.

An hour after the bubo in his neck was drained, the Commander gathered his remaining strength and got up to look out of the main window at the city and the docks below. Suffused in its characteristic blue, pink, and white-tinted glow, the bay looked glorious. As if the sight of that glow had confirmed some kind of knowledge he’d been imparted from above and that he’d been pondering ever since, the Commander then declared that the people of Mingheria were the noblest, truest, and most regal in the world, and would remain forever so. A jewel was still a jewel even if it had only ever graced the fingers of greedy, wicked, grasping people, and lost none of its worth for being abused and mistreated by Italians, Greeks, and Turks. Mingheria too was just as valuable as ever. No one could understand or advance Mingheria better than Mingherians themselves. This was what they would use their Mingherian language for. Anyone who said “I am Mingherian” was Mingherian. For centuries, Mingherians had been forbidden from saying “I am Mingherian,” but from now on, embracing this most beautiful of declarations would be deemed as sacred as an act of prayer, and be all that was ever asked of a person.

Those same words, he argued, were not just the beginning of their brotherhood with the rest of humanity; they were the beginning of everything. The look on the Commander’s face was that of a man out on the streets, walking among his people. In describing these moments to his wife, the Doctor and Prince Consort would say that “it was as if an outpouring of love, passion, and enthusiasm were rushing out of the Commander and spreading all over the city!” Someday the Mingherian people would achieve great things, and change the history of the world! Sadly, these bursts of energy were followed by long periods of exhaustion, during which the Commander would lie in bed raving incoherently and drifting in and out of sleep.

Mazhar Effendi had dispatched a young clerk to the Commander’s sickbed to record everything he said. Doctor Nuri’s accounts to his wife and the clerk’s notes tend to corroborate each other. In his final spells of delirium, the Commander spoke about seeing the warships in the naval blockade, the importance of ensuring his wife did not leave their quarters, and of how his son must go to a Mingherian school to learn how to read and write. At one point, the Commander also pointed out a cloud in the sky that looked exactly like the rose on the flag of Mingheria. This incident would acquire a particular significance in Mingherian culture, and especially in its schoolbooks, so that children would often be taught about it in their drawing classes, and each year at the start of August, the day after the anniversary of the Commander’s death, the whole island would celebrate the Rose and Cloud holiday.

Aware of how desperate the situation had become, Sami Pasha and Deputy Mazhar Effendi thought they might try to form an alliance with Sheikh Hamdullah—if only, they reasoned, to prevent any more unnecessary deaths. They sent a messenger to the Constanz Hotel, but received no response from the sheikh.

When he woke up again at midnight, the feverish commander told the young clerk sitting in his room the tale of the Mingherian fox who had gone looking for its mate. This was a story his grandmother had told him once when he was a little boy. Later that same night, the Commander remembered another of his grandmother’s old Mingherian stories. Long before the city of Arkaz even existed, there was a boat that crashed onto some rocks out in the bay, and the people who came out of that boat were the forefathers of today’s Mingherians. They liked this island, and soon came to see its cliffs, springs, forests, and sea as their new home. Back then Mingheria’s rivers teemed with green mullet fish and ancient, red-spotted crabs, its forests were populated by garrulous parrots and stealthy tigers, and its skies were full of pink storks and blue swallows that migrated to Europe in the summer. Zeynep had found each and every one of these creatures its own home on the island, a nest upon a tree, a cave to shelter in. This little Mingherian girl had befriended them all. Her father had been an official in the court of the king. The Commander told the clerk that someone should write a book about Zeynep’s friendship with these animals in ancient Mingheria for primary-school children to learn how to read, then started dictating in Turkish what would become the first chapter of Zeynep’s Book. As he spoke, the Commander walked up to the window, asked through labored breaths for the shutters to be opened, and looked out at the nighttime view of Arkaz. It was as if his grandmother’s fairy tales were coming to life in the dark and silent streets below. The Commander’s expression was alight with the exhilarating pleasure of mixing memories with the future, and ancient myths with things that were happening today. He understood in that moment, before collapsing onto the bed in agony, that seeing the present in the past was the same thing as imagining the future.

The next morning, after learning that the Commander’s condition had deteriorated even further, and that the number of deaths had risen to forty-eight, Sami Pasha exclaimed: “We can only turn to God now!”