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Yet within the hour, they had agreed with Mazhar Effendi that it might be helpful for Sami Pasha to pay a visit to the Maiden’s Tower, if only as a “last resort.” At noon that day, a little rowboat that used to belong to the Governor’s Office, and that—readers might recall—had also picked Bonkowski Pasha up from the Aziziye one morning at the start of our book, sailed out toward the Maiden’s Tower with Sami Pasha on board. Given all the political turmoil and the rising number of deaths, there were no more ferries coming and going from the island anymore, scheduled or otherwise, so by this point the only people still in the Maiden’s Tower were that group of government officials who had remained “loyal to Istanbul.” Sami Pasha was somewhat hesitant to talk to them, lest they should start making veiled remarks about treason. So he only met with Hadi, deputy to the new governor who had been killed before he could even take office, and after pointing out that everything he’d done had been for the health of the citizens and subjects of the Sultan, the Pasha moved on to the main subject, explaining that the situation on the island was dire, and that he was considering putting Hadi and the other Turkish bureaucrats on a ship to Crete so that they could make their way back from there to Istanbul. But in return, he carefully noted, the Commander asked for Istanbul to lift the blockade and send military reinforcements to help stop the plague.

Hadi would later wryly recount in his memoirs, From the Islands to the Motherland, that this had felt less like a meeting between two Ottoman officials than an encounter between a hostage and the pirate holding him to ransom. In any event, Sami Pasha’s demands were not realistic; even if they did manage to find a boat willing to make the journey from the Maiden’s Tower to Crete, and even if the boat successfully slipped through the blockade, there was no reason why anybody in Istanbul would take instructions from a band of dubious Ottoman officials from Mingheria. Besides, it would take them at least a week to reach Istanbul. Eventually, Sami Pasha himself seemed to realize the absurdity of his proposal, and hastily terminated the meeting (as if he’d suddenly thought of something else he had to do), sailing back to the port in his rowboat.

As Sami Pasha approached the docks, he found the sight of Arkaz unbearably bleak. There was no one around, and not even a hint of activity. It was a cloudy day, the city had taken on a leaden hue, and there seemed to be no life left in it at all. Two columns of blue smoke rising into the sky—nothing more! The boatman was pulling at his oars with resignation. The sea was dark and frightening. One day this outbreak would of course be over, and life, color, and beauty would return to the island. Until then, Sami Pasha thought, he would rather not look at the city at all than see it in this funereal guise.

Sami Pasha was still on the boat when Commander Kâmil Pasha, founder of the state of Mingheria, died of the plague in his room on the top floor of the Splendid Palace, four days after his wife. There was nobody else in the room except for the young clerk who had been recording the Commander’s words. Doctor Nuri had been waiting on the second floor of the hotel.

The clerk reported that during the last two hours of his life, Commander Kâmil had uttered a total of two thousand words in Turkish and one hundred and twenty-nine words in Mingherian. Identified as the Commander’s words, these Mingherian terms have since been widely reproduced in both Turkish and Mingherian, and utilized in a variety of contexts, including on signs on the walls of government offices, on posters and postage stamps, in the teaching of telegraph systems and the alphabet, and in works of literature. The first Mingherian dictionary even set the Commander’s one hundred and twenty-nine words in a different font from the rest. To this day, they are still so prominently displayed in the capital that a visitor to Arkaz who has never heard a word of Mingherian before could probably learn them all within three days, and without even having to try too hard.

Among the words the Commander spoke during his last hours, some (fire, dream, mother) reveal his poetic sensitivities; others (dark, sorrow, lock) point to the great man’s emotions; others still (door, towel, glass) suggest that he was lucid throughout this time, but might have occasionally needed some practical assistance.

As for the Commander’s mentions of boots and warships, some biographers, historians, and politicians have interpreted them as proof that during the last moments of his life, when he barely had any strength left to speak, the founder of the nation was thinking of summoning his preferred boatman and sailing out with the Quarantine Regiment to attack the Great Powers’ warships.

When he returned to his office with Coachman Zekeriya, who’d come to pick him up at the Old Stone Jetty, Sami Pasha found the ministers in a state of agitation. Mazhar Effendi, who’d left the Commander in Doctor Nuri’s care, was also present, and the news was startling: it seemed Sheikh Hamdullah had escaped from the Constanz Hotel the night before.

Or perhaps he had been kidnapped (though that part was not yet clear), but in any case there had been no signs of a struggle. Could the sheikh simply have strolled out of the place? That was impossible, and besides, Sami Pasha was sure the sheikh would never do anything like that. For the time being, this was all the information they had. Nobody had yet come out and claimed responsibility for the sheikh’s abduction. But the kidnappers could easily beat, torture, and kill the sheikh just as they’d done with Bonkowski Pasha, and in that case the blame might well end up falling on Chief Minister Sami Pasha.

The other problem the authorities faced was the growing popularity of a new gang of isolation fugitives based around the shops and shopkeepers’ neighborhoods north of Hamidiye Avenue. Using their extensive network of friends, family, and shopkeepers from the local community to establish themselves as “quarantine victims” and secure the shopkeepers’ support against the escaped prisoners roaming the city, most of the forty-odd members of this gang had since settled down in the neighborhood of Hagia Triada. Now they were spreading the disease in this area too. They could see that the Quarantine Regiment was in no state to challenge them, and as their main motivation was revenge, they were constantly looking for ways to draw the soldiers into a fight. Sami Pasha’s spies also reported that the gang were inflaming anti-quarantine (and not just anti-isolation) sentiments among the general populace, and that they had encouraged a grocer from their own village to open his shop behind the Customhouse again, exhorting him to stock and sell whatever he wished.

Sami Pasha had just been thinking of sharing all this new information with Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri when the doctor himself showed up at the Pasha’s office just before sunset to announce that Commander Kâmil had passed away. Sami Pasha was not surprised to hear this; he had only expected the bad news to arrive a little later than it did.

Upon learning that the Commander and founder of the nation had died, some people began to weep. Sami Pasha considered going to the hotel to look at the corpse, but decided not to, so as to avoid news of the Commander’s death spreading any further. He was thinking now that he would surely be expected to take charge of the new state at this difficult time. With all these emotions and yearnings and dreams coursing through him, he knew he would find it difficult to sleep that night, so he had already sent word to Marika. He took the landau to Petalis, then walked the rest of the way to her house through the neighborhood’s empty, misty streets. He was surprised to see a flag of Mingheria (if only a small one) hanging at the door of a hotel on the way.

As he entered the house, he had the feeling he always experienced of having walked into some kind of dangerous dream. Like all his favorite dreams, Marika’s home was also “forbidden.” A nearby torch which had been illuminating the street, the walls, the trees, and their leaves suddenly went out, and all the shadows and happy memories vanished with its light, leaving nothing behind but a feeling of loneliness and dread that made the hollowness of the world seem palpable.

Marika told him a long story about how the plague had spread all over the city, and about the neighbors who had been hiding their dead. Sami Pasha was still on his feet and finding it difficult to concentrate on her account, a fact which Marika soon noticed.

“You look half dead yourself,” she said.

Sami Pasha felt grateful to her for knowing how he felt just by looking at his face. He sat down to rest for a while, then made love to Marika, hoping to disappear into his passion and forget everything else, but nothing seemed to alleviate the pangs of horror and despair piercing his stomach.

Marika was still taking some of the new government’s pronouncements seriously. “You must get rid of this ban on mosques and churches!” she said. “Otherwise it will only cause you and the quarantine trouble. The people, the nation will turn their backs on you if they are not allowed inside their mosques and churches.”

“What exactly is this nation you speak of? We are responsible for everyone’s safety here—the whole population’s.”

“A people without their mosques, their churches, and their faith is no nation at all, Pasha.”

“It isn’t mosques or churches that make this nation, but the fact that we live here. We are the people of this island.”

“But Pasha, even if the Greek community were to accept this idea of a nation, would the Muslims do so too? The ringing of our church bells doesn’t just remind us that we must pray and that Christ will save us all; it also brings us comfort in the knowledge that there are many others like us all over the city, suffering, fearful, and just as desperate as we are. Death looms larger where there are no bells or calls to prayer, my Pasha.”

Chief Minister Sami Pasha listened sullenly. Marika then began to list all the newest rumors. A headless skeleton had been found inside a haunted house in Flizvos which children’s gangs used as their nighttime hiding place. The medicines, canned goods, quilt covers, and bedsheets that had arrived with the relief ship Sühandan were being sold in secret in Pharmacist Kotzias’s store and by some Muslim shopkeepers in the Old Market. One of the soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment had taken a bribe in exchange for hiding a plague-infected mother and son from the quarantine doctors.

“Well, it’s good to know there are still some quarantine soldiers around!” said Sami Pasha, then abruptly decided to leave and return to the Ministerial Headquarters.

The building from which he had governed the island he had been living on for the past five years was completely empty. He saw a couple of lone sentries standing guard on the staircases and in the corridors, but no one else. Most of the torches weren’t lit. Sami Pasha gave orders for more sentries to be sent before making his way to the living quarters at the back of the building, and it was only half an hour later that he finally managed to retreat to his room, sealing both locks and pulling the latch shut before settling down for a night of fitful, broken sleep.

CHAPTER 66

The next morning, Sami Pasha, the Prince Consort, and Doctor Nikos congregated as usual before the map of the city, where they found out that more than forty people had died the previous day. Wary of possible encounters with bands of fugitives from the Castle’s isolation facility or with angry sect disciples, the Quarantine Regiment had stopped sending men to help enforce isolation measures and evacuations even in neighborhoods like Bayırlar and Tuzla, where death rates had been soaring. Meanwhile, Sami Pasha—whose primary instinct was to protect the Ministerial Headquarters—had been rounding up any new recruits and unoccupied quarantine soldiers he could find, and keeping them firmly by his side in the Ministries building.

It has not escaped the notice of cultural historians that even in that moment of calamity and hopelessness, several hours were spent debating and permanently settling the details of how the father of the nation should be entombed. The grave of the founder of the state of Mingheria was to be situated in an elevated plot of land in the neighborhood of Turunçlar, halfway between the New Muslim Cemetery (set aside for plague victims) and the house where the Major had been born and raised. This spot was clearly visible from all over the city and from the Castle, as well as from any ships approaching the island from the south and east. At the suggestion of the elderly Doctor Tassos, who dabbled in cultural and archaeological studies and had happened to leave his house that day, it was also decreed that the design of the mausoleum would show traces of Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Arab architectural influences. Thirty-two years later, his vision would finally be realized.

Sami Pasha and his clerks spent nearly the whole day trying to come up with a way of transporting the Commander’s corpse—currently still in his room in the Splendid Palace—to the grave site without drawing attention to the fact or anyone realizing whom the body belonged to, but it was no use. The streets of the city were rife with gangs who had made a habit of stopping and questioning anyone who crossed their paths, including funeral processions, villagers coming to sell their wares, and escaped prisoners. But even if these hoodlums could somehow be avoided, there would inevitably be a great deal of speculation about the identity of the individual who was being buried on the hill.

But what most unnerved Sami Pasha and the Mingherian government, and weakened their resolve, was a letter brought in by Mazhar Effendi. Composed by a clerk on behalf of the former inmates of the isolation facility, this missive respectfully announced that a group of forty-two people who had unjustly been put in isolation by the Quarantine Regiment and had since been freed now wished to visit the Chief Minister in person to deliver a letter of complaint listing the names and misdeeds—including coercion and corruption—of various members of that same regiment. According to Mazhar Effendi, these people had also rather audaciously requested to conduct a search of the Ministerial Headquarters, on the basis of information they had received suggesting that a number of soldiers who had grievously mistreated the public were now hiding out in there.

It was clear to Sami Pasha that these people were looking for an excuse to start some kind of trouble. He sent Mazhar Effendi to the garrison to request that a detachment of forty to fifty men be sent down in case of a possible attack. Every now and then he would look out of the window at the Splendid Palace, whose upper floors he could see from where he stood, and recall with tearful sorrow that the body of the founder of the state of Mingheria lay there still. But by now he had realized that there was no way they could bury the Commander in the daylight without attracting notice, and without risking or indeed provoking a clash with any of the gangs that had sprung up all over the city. He therefore decided, in consultation with Minister for Public Health Doctor Nikos, that the body of their heroic commander should be taken from his room in the Splendid Hotel after midnight and buried under cover of darkness and in accordance with quarantine regulations.