第 74 页

Sami Pasha was hiding out in an empty cottage in the village of Dumanlı, to which he had brought telegraph lines from Arkaz during his time as governor, and whose wealthier residents—including Ali Talip, owner of the farm the Pasha’s hideout was on—had always been fond of the Pasha. Surrounded on all sides by stone walls, and with Ali Talip’s armed watchmen stationed at the entrance and patrolling its environs, the farm was a safe location. The prison and isolation fugitives, plague sufferers, criminals, hoodlums, and rabble-rousers who had made a habit during those nights of plague of forcing their way into derelict, deserted buildings, and even into homes where people still lived, would never be able to break in here. The guards in this distant village were all recent migrants from Crete, and did not recognize the old governor’s face. Sami Pasha thought they probably had no idea who the Governor of Mingheria was.

Feeling quite safe, Sami Pasha soon began to venture out of the farm for walks across the tall peaks of the Albros Mountains. During one of these excursions, he came across three middle-aged men who had been living in the mountains ever since they’d fled the plague in Arkaz, and one of the men worked out that the weary, animated figure before them was the island’s governor. As they knew nothing of the declaration of freedom and independence, of the foundation of the new state, or of the Commander’s or even Sheikh Hamdullah’s rule, the three plague fugitives wondered what the Governor could possibly be doing there. Afterward, they mentioned their encounter to a few acquaintances. Two days later, they saw Sami Pasha again on a different mountain path with an equally magnificent view.

The next day, under orders from felt-hatted Nimetullah’s government, a group of plainclothes policemen from the capital turned up at the cottage to arrest Sami Pasha, bring him back to Arkaz, and take him to the Castle prison, where they locked him up in the Venetian Tower’s darkest, dankest cell on the side of the building closest to the sea. Ali Talip’s men did not try to stop them.

Sami Pasha was familiar with this cavelike, crab-infested cell, for he had once used it to lock up the bearded lead actor of a Greek theater troupe who had come to Arkaz for a production of Oedipus Rex and visited the prisoner—whom he suspected of being a spy—the next evening. The darkness inside the cell concentrated the darkness of Sami Pasha’s thoughts. He kept blaming himself for how everything had gone wrong. Instead of accepting his removal from the post of governor of Mingheria, and moving on to the new province he had been assigned to, he had acted like a spoiled child and shamelessly clung to his old role, trying and of course failing to carry on as normal. Clearly his refusal to accept his new appointment had been his biggest mistake. Why had he made this error? As the blue glow of the sea flooded into his cell, his answer to this question always seemed to be the same: because he loved Mingheria! A moment later, the thing he loved so much would morph in his mind from Mingheria to Marika. He had never been able to separate the two anyway. Marika had been so brave and resolute the night he’d escaped from Arkaz, putting herself at risk for the sake of her dear Sami Pasha.

Now Sami Pasha couldn’t think of anyone else he could trust and ask for help. Would the Doctor and Prince Consort risk his own life to get Sami Pasha out of prison? Perhaps Princess Pakize might pity him. But with these rampaging sheikhs now in charge of the government, the doctor and the Princess were nothing more than a pair of hostages in the hands of the new regime, no better than all those hapless Turkish bureaucrats being held in the Maiden’s Tower. The Governor Pasha thought his old friend the British consul might be able to put some pressure on Sheikh Hamdullah to set him free and decided to write George Bey a letter. But first he must find a pen and some paper.

Before he’d even had the chance to alert anyone on the island that he was being held prisoner in the Castle, Sami Pasha was carried off to court. By that Monday, the twelfth of August, the plague had spread so thoroughly across the island, and everyone was so preoccupied with their own survival and so indifferent to anything else that might be happening around them, that we must consider the fact this trial could even take place as a triumph for the government administered by Nimetullah Effendi and supervised by Sheikh Hamdullah.

Sami Pasha had no doubt that he was going be punished in exemplary fashion for the hanging of Sheikh Hamdullah’s brother and knew that the sheikh would arrange this through the courts on some completely unrelated pretext. The Pasha had assumed the trial would be based on cases brought by people who had been cruelly and unfairly put into isolation during the quarantine era despite not being infected, or by those whose homes had been taken from them on the pretext that they had caught the plague. He might even be accused of spying for Abdul Hamid or of acting as his puppet. What had never crossed his mind was the possibility that the case of the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny would be opened again three years after the fact, so that when he sat in his freshly varnished chair inside the courtroom, he was astonished to see the families of the slain pilgrims gathered before him, along with the quarantine officials who had been on duty back then.

The villagers of Nebiler and Çifteler, who had been involved in the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny and were allied with Ramiz and his men, had rejoiced when the news reached their village that Sheikh Hamdullah and his felt-hatted regent had taken over the government of the island, and within two days, unaware of how grievous the outbreak of plague in Arkaz had become (not that they would have cared even if they had known), they had descended upon the capital to meet with Chief Minister Nimetullah Effendi and demand a fresh trial after the courts had unjustly thwarted their previous attempt three years ago to obtain compensation for the deaths of their fathers and brothers killed by the quarantine-enforcing gendarmes.

The new government’s judge, who was close to the Halifiye lodge, could have easily thrown the case out on the grounds that the incident took place under Ottoman rule and the new state had no jurisdiction over the matter, but instead he agreed to try it, and since most of the gendarmes who had opened fire on the pilgrims had long since left for other parts of the Ottoman Empire, the trial began—most probably at Sheikh Hamdullah’s suggestion—with Sami Pasha charged as the sole individual responsible for the massacre in question.

All the scenes that had haunted Sami Pasha’s worst nightmares for the past few years now came to life before his eyes: the dead pilgrims’ sons and daughters tearfully blamed him for everything that had happened. Governor Sami Pasha’s telegrams to Mazhar Effendi (whom the new government had also put in prison), retrieved from the latter’s files and recommending that there should be no mercy for those who had hijacked the ship, were read out in court. An old man with a white beard stood up and shouted accusingly, “Where’s your conscience, mighty Governor?” The father and son from Nebiler who had led the mutiny and whom the Governor had so doggedly pursued had come to the trial after being released from prison and were denouncing the actions of the “cruel governor” to his face. The two daughters, two sons, and twelve grandchildren of another pilgrim who’d been shot by the gendarmes were all in the courtroom too, ignoring the outbreak. It frightened Sami Pasha to see how meticulously every aspect of the trial had been staged, and he began to lose hope. At one point he even feared that the father and son might try to take a swing at him right there in court.

Having anticipated that the trial would attract notice in Istanbul and Europe, the new rulers of the state of Mingheria had furnished the courtroom with a bench for the judge to sit on, a desk, and separate chairs for the prosecutor, lawyers, members of the press, and other spectators, and had even hurriedly arranged for robes to be sewn for the judge and lawyers from lengths of fabric in Islamic green embroidered with Mingherian roses the same color as the one which adorned the flag of the nation. (One hundred and sixteen years later, these unsightly robes have regrettably established themselves as a particularly gaudy fixture of the Mingherian justice system and are still proudly and solemnly worn today by all practitioners of the legal profession, including the members of the island’s Constitutional Court and other high courts.)

“Yes, I was the Governor back then—however …,” Sami Pasha began as he sought to counter the allegations against him, explaining that he had not personally given the order to shoot at the pilgrims and had only found out several days after the fact that the gendarmes had used their weapons in this way, but in the midst of all the accusations, the shouting, and the tears in the courtroom that day, the only part of his statement anyone would remember were the words “I was the Governor back then,” if only because they could be interpreted to mean “I am culpable; I am to blame.”

As the trial hastened to its conclusion, another fact that compounded Sami Pasha’s despair was the impossibility of arguing for the necessity of quarantine provisions inside a courtroom run by a government (some might say a gang) that was so firmly opposed to those measures in the first place. It was with this difficulty in mind that Sami Pasha had declared that the only reason he had put those venerable pilgrims in quarantine was to keep the people of Mingheria safe from disease, and certainly not to submit to the brazen demands of the Great Powers. In spite of this, the consensus among the island’s four newspapers and all its inhabitants soon became that Sami Pasha was a man who’d had innocent pilgrims murdered so that the tyrant Abdul Hamid could continue to rule undisturbed from his Yıldız Palace, and the European powers would have no excuse to trouble the Sultan’s peace.

At the end of the two-hour trial, Sami Pasha learned from the judge that he had been sentenced to death. Even as one part of his mind reasoned that this was the outcome he had been expecting all along, the other part couldn’t believe what he had heard and could not accept what was happening. An intensely sharp pain that felt as if he were being pierced with pins began to spread from the bottom-right corner of his stomach all the way through the rest of his body.

Sami Pasha realized right away that he would not be able to sleep at all until the decision was reversed. He worried for a moment that his eyes might be watering, but not a single teardrop had appeared, and no one else had noticed a thing.

Sami Pasha still remembered the pleasant, sunny, bright yellow June morning three years ago when he’d appointed the “judge” who had now sentenced him to death. Claiming to be well versed in the Holy Koran and in Sharia law, the man had secured this government job through the intercession of the wealthy and highly regarded Hajji Fehmi Effendi, a great supporter of the construction of new telegraph lines on the island, and the Governor had taken the fact that the new judge was a regular at the Halifiye lodge as a positive sign, for it must mean he was “an honorable and God-fearing individual.” Sami Pasha couldn’t comprehend how that same unassuming, unremarkable figure had now decided that the Pasha should be executed. He went to see the judge, who had summoned him to his office.

The judge could see that the soon-to-be-executed Sami Pasha was looking at him with the bewildered expression of a man who could scarcely understand what was happening around him. “You have been sentenced to death, Your Excellency!” he said, as if he were offering words of consolation. “In olden days, these kinds of decisions used to be referred to the Istanbul courts for review. Too sentimental to stomach the thought of an execution, Abdul Hamid would commute them to exile or life imprisonment, never hanging anyone at all in fear of what the foreign ambassadors might say. But we are in sovereign Mingheria now, and your death sentence will not be sent to the high courts in Istanbul, nor would it be sensible to expect a pardon from Sultan Abdul Hamid.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

“This might be your last night on earth, Governor Pasha,” the judge replied. “Neither Istanbul nor the Great Powers have the authority to change the Mingherian government’s mind.”

Realizing that he was going to be executed to show the world that nobody could interfere in the affairs of independent Mingheria, Sami Pasha shivered.

Just as he could not believe the judge’s ruling, Sami Pasha was also aware that the tingle spreading from the pins in his stomach to his back and all the way down to his legs had paralyzed his mind and soul, that he could no longer think clearly, and that his fear had grown so great that he could neither see the world around him nor hear and understand what people were saying. In a further blow to his pride and morale, he was transported back to his cell like an animal, locked in a windowless prison wagon that was bolted shut from the outside. But worst of all were the curious glances he kept receiving now that he had been condemned to death, the pitiful looks, the people staring at him as if he were some strange creature. His sentence had only just been issued, but Sami Pasha assumed everyone must know about it already.

As the prison wagon passed through the Castle’s main entrance and slowly made its way toward the Venetian Tower, Sami Pasha peered out of an air vent and saw several rows of bodies in front of the west-facing Ottoman-era building where the largest and wealthiest dormitories were situated, and where the prison riot had first begun. After counting twenty-six corpses and feeling no emotion at all, he saw the mattresses, blankets, and other belongings of dead prisoners and former inmates of the isolation facility burning in a corner, the fire smothering the courtyard in a thick, blue, foul-smelling smoke. Since the clerks and soldiers who used to man the city’s incineration pit had been dismissed from their posts after Sheikh Hamdullah’s supporters had lifted quarantine, anyone who wanted to burn infected materials had been handling the matter themselves, just as the prison management seemed to be doing now.

A little farther on from the neat rows of dead bodies waiting to be picked up by the wagon that evening lay several people who were still alive but clearly on the verge of death. The Pasha saw seven or eight of these suffering, vomiting, wailing plague victims curled up on mattresses or bedsheets, or stretched out on the Castle’s stone floor. The thing everyone had been most afraid of had finally come to pass, and the outbreak had spread through the whole prison and every building in the Castle. Sami Pasha was experienced enough to realize that these dying patients must have been brought down to the courtyard now to save time in the evening, when the corpse wagon would come to take all the other dead bodies away too.