第 79 页

But the next morning brought both the dawn of a clear, sunny day, and the joyful return of Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri, who had finally been graced with the sheikh’s pardon. Doctor Nuri laughed and joked as if nothing had happened. They embraced, holding each other for a long time. Princess Pakize cried tears of happiness. Her husband’s face looked pale, and he had lost weight, but he had managed to avoid the plague that had spread through the Castle by staying in his cell and not getting too close to anyone.

They closed the shutters and lay in bed in their underwear and nightclothes, wrapped in each other’s arms. For a while, Doctor Nuri could not stop shaking, moved by a mixture of excitement, fear, and elation. Princess Pakize and the Prince Consort did not get out of bed all day, and for the first time, they began to plan how they might escape from the island. Now that quarantine had been lifted, the Doctor and Prince Consort was no longer needed. More important, nobody would even be thinking about them now, or even notice they were there. The government was in disarray, and there was nobody left in the Ministerial Headquarters except for Nimetullah Effendi with the felt hat, and a handful of Sheikh Hamdullah’s loyal devotees. This group of five or six people was trying valiantly to keep the ship of state afloat, though they had no experience at all in such matters.

The next day the parlormaid did not turn up. The small loaf of bread and two pieces of dried fish that were periodically delivered to the little table outside their door were no longer enough to feed them, and they were beginning to feel their strength wilting. When a clerk came to their door in the afternoon to announce that Chief Minister Nimetullah was expecting Doctor Nuri in his office, they welcomed what they thought might be a sliver of hope. Princess Pakize was feeling more positive now that she had begun writing her letters again, and eagerly set about telling her sister everything her husband had experienced in prison before she forgot the details.

Doctor Nuri returned before half an hour had passed, and said that he had to go and examine Sheikh Hamdullah, who had caught the plague.

“Has he developed any buboes?” asked Princess Pakize, and understood from her husband’s expression that the answer was yes. “Don’t go; he can’t be saved now. You might catch it too!” said Princess Pakize.

“I cannot bear the thought of all these people suffering and dying in vain because of this pack of fools.”

“I beg you, please do not go out. Let that stupid, villainous sheikh writhe and perish in the grip of the plague he himself has so blithely encouraged.”

“Don’t say that, for that is probably what will happen, and then you will feel sorry about it. I have taken an oath, and as a doctor, I am obliged to attend wherever my help is needed.”

“He’s the one who had the Governor hanged. He’s the one who had Pharmacist Nikiforos hanged too.”

“And Sami Pasha hanged his brother Ramiz!” said Doctor Nuri, before leaving the room.

Since he was going to walk all the way to the Halifiye lodge, he took two guards with him, but as he strode down Hamidiye Avenue—whose name had not yet been changed—he realized there was no need for any protection at all: even on Arkaz’s worst day, he would not have been able to walk the length of its principal thoroughfare without crossing paths with at least eight to ten people, but that day, the avenue was completely deserted. There were no policemen left by the Post Office, and he saw corpses strewn on the stairway that led to the Greek Middle School’s lower entrance. Perhaps the area was empty because of all the executions that had taken place. As he crossed the Hamidiye Bridge, he stopped to lean his elbows on the parapet and look out at the city. All the hotels—including the Splendid, the Majestic, and the Levant—were closed. There wasn’t a single carriage out on the streets, and as there were no boats about either, the surface of the sea was like glass. The Doctor and Prince Consort had been informed by the new Chief Prison Warden that Barber Panagiotis and his whole family had died over the course of three days. He remembered this fact when he saw that the barber’s shop was closed. When he looked up from the foot of Donkey’s Bane Hill, he saw a funeral convoy of around ten people slowly climbing its way to the top.

“Prince Consort, Prince Consort!” cried a wan, frail, white-haired Greek woman sitting nearby, her Turkish accented but fluent. “What does the Sultan’s daughter make of our lot?”

“The Sultan’s daughter writes letters to her sister …”

“Let her write, let the darling girl write! Let her tell the world of our wretched predicament,” the old woman continued in her richly textured Turkish. “I’m from Istanbul too!” she called out to Doctor Nuri as he walked away.

Even those parts of the city that would have normally been the busiest were steeped in the kind of melancholy typical of small towns where everyone leaves at the end of summer or during harvest season. The city’s cats, who had been the first to sense this mood, trotted all the way out to front doors and garden gates to meow at Doctor Nuri as he walked by. Two stray dogs, one male and one female, followed behind him for a while, before disappearing into the thriving, leafy garden of the big house next to Zofiri’s bakery, sniffing at each other as they went.

As he approached the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque, it seemed to Doctor Nuri that the city’s entire population had amassed here. Muslims had been banned from burying their dead until they’d had the body washed in this mosque in accordance with Islamic ritual, and could present a signed and stamped certificate to prove it. But afraid of catching the plague in one of the queues building up around the mosque courtyard and mortuary, people had begun to leave corpses by the side of the road for the corpse cart to pick up at night, or even to conduct their burials themselves in whatever spot they could find.

The rising number of deaths had effectively forced even the most conservative and reckless of the island’s Muslims to start embracing some quarantine regulations of their own accord, avoiding crowds and not leaving their homes unless they had to. While a few old men still regularly attended prayers five times a day, the crowd of worshippers turning up for Friday prayers had shrunk to less than half its usual size. Within a fortnight, the new government’s anti-quarantine policies had made the devastation two and a half to three times worse than it had been before, and after all these deaths, Sheikh Hamdullah’s stance against quarantine was being rejected by his own most devoted followers.

The gardens of the Hamidiye Hospital were crammed all the way to the wall with beds (a gap of four or five meters separating each patient). Adjoining the hospital wall was the equally crowded backyard of the Rifai lodge. Sometimes there weren’t enough bed frames and mattresses to go round, so people would be laid out on bedsheets, kilims, and straw mats. As he walked past the lodges, Doctor Nuri peered over the walls and saw that the scene was the same wherever he looked. Those with the most faith and confidence in Sheikh Hamdullah were also those who had suffered the greatest loss and pain.

As he was about to reach the Halifiye lodge, a window swung open on the second floor of someone’s house.

“So, Doctor Effendi! What do you think? Are you pleased with your handiwork?” asked a man with a low forehead.

Doctor Nuri wasn’t sure whether it was quarantine itself that was being denounced, or its unsuccessful implementation in Mingheria. Soon the critic with the low forehead spotted his guards. “You doctors wouldn’t be able to set foot on these streets if it wasn’t for your sentries and bodyguards!” he spat.

But what happened was the exact opposite: two youthful dervishes waiting for Doctor Nuri at the entrance to the Halifiye lodge greeted his arrival with respectful and elaborately choreographed salutations. If this place he had first visited two months ago had then been a haven of sorts, Doctor Nuri could see that it had now turned into a kind of hell, and that life at the lodge was falling apart. Dead bodies were piled up outside the various buildings, dormitories, and cells on its grounds, ready to be loaded onto the corpse wagon and taken to the mortuary. Doctor Nuri was walking with his head bowed, as if the scale of the suffering all around him were too mortifying to witness, but he could still see that the whole courtyard was packed with beds, just as much if not more than all the other lodges’ grounds.

The door of a little building close to the garden wall opened up, and Doctor Nuri looked inside to see a half-conscious Sheikh Hamdullah lying on a mattress on the floor. He understood immediately that the sheikh’s condition was desperate, and that he would not recover.

He pierced the enormous and thoroughly hardened bubo on the sheikh’s neck, and drained out the pus. Doctor Nuri wasn’t even sure whether the same sheikh whom he’d heard dispensing all those quips and double entendres two months ago had even noticed he was there this time. During that first visit, he had felt as if everyone were looking at him, as if every pair of eyes in the lodge had been fixed upon him. Yet now, even though his patient was technically the “President” of the state, nobody seemed to be paying Doctor Nuri any attention. There was still plenty of activity in the lodge, with people walking or running past and even stopping to look sometimes, but it was as if any sense of spiritual solidarity had dissolved, and everyone was concentrating on saving themselves.

“I have not forgotten my promise to read to you from my poetry collection Aurora,” said Sheikh Hamdullah when he became fleetingly aware of the Prince Consort’s presence. A bout of coughing and copious perspiration left him shivering and convulsing where he lay. Doctor Nuri had taken a few steps back to avoid becoming infected. After a little rest, the sheikh spoke again, but rather than reciting any lines from Aurora, he began doing what everyone else seemed to be doing those days and started quoting from the Koran’s Resurrection surah until finally he passed out once more.

The armored landau had been sent to take Doctor Nuri back. As he looked out of the carriage window at the desolate view of Arkaz Castle beneath a cloak of leaden clouds, the Prince Consort’s mind was on how he and his wife might be able to escape this place. Back at the Chief Minister’s office, he was honest with Nimetullah Effendi—who, for whatever reason, had not joined Doctor Nuri on his trip to the lodge—and told him that there was no hope for the sheikh. Chief Minister Nimetullah Effendi turned his palms up and uttered a quick prayer.

The next day Princess Pakize and her husband did not leave their room. They both agreed that the most sensible thing to do would be to find some excuse to get in the armored landau, then flee to the north of the island. They could hide out there for a while until they found a boat and smugglers who could guide them on to Crete.

CHAPTER 72

On the morning of Monday, the twenty-sixth of August, after a long spell of pounding headaches and feverish delirium, Sheikh Hamdullah fell asleep. Or perhaps he fainted from the pain and fatigue. The young disciples and other sheikhs who had tearfully clustered at his bedside, unafraid of catching the disease, now assumed—in keeping with their instinctively optimistic interpretation of most events—that their sheikh was simply resting. Indeed when the sheikh woke up from his sleep just before midday prayers, he seemed revived and reinvigorated. He looked energized; he was cheerful; he dispensed witticisms to his audience, recited a little poetry he happened to recall, laughed about the recently drained but already scabbing boil on his neck with those who had been eyeing it in fear, and asked whether the ships that were blockading the island were still there.

But before long, the pain was back, so agonizing that he fell unconscious again, and died soon after. The Greek doctor Tassos, who was a friend of the lodge, confirmed the sheikh’s passing, and as he carefully disinfected his hands with Lysol, the group gathered inside the room began to weep. Sheikh Hamdullah had already decided three years ago, persuading everyone then, that he would be succeeded as the leader of the lodge by his dear and faithful regent with the felt hat, the man he had recently appointed as the nation’s Chief Minister.

Princess Pakize and her husband learned of Sheikh Hamdullah’s death from Doctor Nikos, who came to visit them that same afternoon. Health Minister Doctor Nikos gave the impression that he knew a whole lot of other things too, and perhaps that was why he rushed out of the room so fast, so that he would not let anything slip. Soon after that, a clerk came to the guesthouse to inform them that Chief Minister Nimetullah wished to see both the Doctor and Prince Consort and the Princess and had asked to be received in their quarters.

The couple looked at each other, wondering what was going to happen next. It was of course more appropriate that they should meet with the Chief Minister in his office, rather than see him in their own rooms. Princess Pakize got dressed and covered her head. When they walked together into the room that used to belong to the Governor and was now the Chief Minister’s office, they both realized how much they hated this man whose influence had led to the execution of Governor Sami Pasha.

Chief Minister Nimetullah could sense their hatred, but he ignored it. Once he had settled them in the room’s most comfortable seats, his manner thoroughly deferential, he told them quickly and without further ado that the sheikh had died of the plague. As the sheikh had technically been her husband, if only on paper, the Chief Minister offered the Princess his condolences. But he said this casually and did not labor the point. They had been hiding the unhappy news from the city, the journalists, and the rest of the world because the situation in Arkaz, in the nation, and among the people was already catastrophic enough, and now this man whom everyone had placed their faith in, and who had, in essence, been acting as the head of state, had also died. Unless they put the necessary contingencies in place, the rupture caused by this kind of news could easily lead to despair, panic, and anarchy.

So before the news was announced, several Mingherian notables had convened to confer and discuss what might be done next to guide the island through this disaster, and made several important decisions, constituting a road map of sorts. On behalf of the Mingherian people, the Chief Minister now wished to bring these decisions to the Princess and Prince Consort’s attention, and solicit their views.

But first the Chief Minister explained who these “Mingherian notables” were: the committee was composed of Bishop Constantinos Effendi, head of the Greek congregation; Nimetullah Effendi himself; the former Chief Scrutineer, currently under house arrest; several wealthy Greek and Muslim elders; two aging journalists, one of whom was Greek; Nikos Bey; a few doctors; and three foreign consuls, including the British consul George Bey.