第 8 页

“Is he here? I had no response to the telegrams I sent him,” said Bonkowski Pasha.

The Governor turned toward a corner of the room, where Mazhar Effendi—whose presence had gone hitherto undetected—sat like a nebulous shadow. “Nikiforos is on the island, and I can confirm that he has received both of your telegrams!” said Mazhar Effendi. He had no qualms about making this statement, counting on the fact that Bonkowski Pasha would deem it entirely normal for the Governor’s spies to screen every telegram sent to the province.

“He did not reply to your telegrams because he was afraid you might bring up the business disputes you’ve had with him in the past, and the matter of the royal concession,” said the Governor. “But he is at his pharmacy right now, waiting for his old friend to honor him with a visit. Ever since he left Istanbul and opened a pharmacy here, he has become a rich man.”

Bonkowski Pasha and Doctor Ilias walked to the pharmacy. Shopkeepers all along the little roads that led up to Hrisopolitissa Square had pulled down their blue-and-white-and blue-and-green-striped awnings to protect the wares displayed in their windows—fabrics of every color, lace, ready-to-wear clothes from Thessaloniki and Smyrna, bowler hats, European-style umbrellas, and shoes—from the glare of the morning sun, so that the streets seemed narrower than they were. Here too the chemist and the doctor noticed something they had observed in so many other cities during the early days of an outbreak: none of the people they saw walking around seemed unduly concerned about bumping into one another and catching the disease. The women out doing their morning shopping with their children in tow, the street vendors hawking walnuts, shortbreads, Mingherian rose biscuits, and lemons, the barber quietly shaving his distinguished customer’s cheeks, and the boy selling the Athenian newspapers that had arrived with the latest ship were all signs that life on the island continued as it always had. Bonkowski Pasha surmised from the relative wealth of these streets and neighborhoods, and the variety of goods and services on offer in these shops which served the Greek bourgeoisie of Arkaz, that his old friend Pharmacist Nikiforos’s business must be thriving.

Bonkowski Pasha had met the Mingherian-born Nikiforos twenty-five years before, when Nikiforos owned a small pharmacy in Istanbul’s Karaköy neighborhood. In the back of his shop, which stood on a side street leading to the Ottoman Bank and was adorned with a sign that read PHARMACIE NIKIFOROS, there was a makeshift kitchen—the so-called cauldron room—that he had converted into a workshop. Here, Nikiforos produced rosewater-scented hand lotions and sweet green peppermint-flavored cough pastilles and was able to sell these to some of the Empire’s more distant provinces thanks to Abdul Hamid’s railway expansion policies.

Their acquaintance had deepened in 1879, when—in the wake of the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War, which had resulted in another rout for the Ottomans, and at a time when the sting of the Empire’s latest territorial losses and the plight of its displaced populations were still keenly felt in Istanbul—the two young men had worked together to set up a pharmacists’ guild. Soon the Société de Pharmacie de Constantinople, as it was also known, had gained more than seventy members, most of them Greek. Their organizational success and educational activities had caught Abdul Hamid’s attention too, and soon the youthful sultan was entrusting young Bonkowski—whose father he knew from the army—with a variety of tasks, such as analyzing the quality of Istanbul’s supplies of drinking water and producing reports on microbes.

It was around this time that Abdul Hamid had turned his attentions to the production of rosewater, as part of his broader ambitions for shifting traditional Ottoman cottage industries to workshop and factory-based manufacture. For hundreds of years families in Istanbul had been distilling small quantities of rosewater in their homes from plants grown in their own gardens and using it in jams, in baking, and in their day-to-day lives. With this kind of experience and tradition behind it, might the Ottoman Empire embark on production on a significantly larger scale, in European-style factories, and could it harvest enough roses to adequately supply such an undertaking? Soon Sultan Abdul Hamid II had commissioned the indefatigable young chemist Bonkowski Bey to prepare a report on this question too.

Within a month Bonkowski Bey had drawn up plans and a budget for a factory in Istanbul that could produce industrial quantities of rosewater, explaining to the Sultan that aside from the greenhouses in the Beykoz area, the only location that could house the vast farms that would be needed to supply the tonnes of rose petals such a factory would require was the island of Mingheria, the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire. In gathering this information, Bonkowski Pasha had of course relied upon the ideas and suggestions of his Mingherian friend Nikiforos, who made hand creams from roses grown on the island. The Sultan summoned Bonkowski Bey and Pharmacist Nikiforos for an audience at the palace, where he asked them again whether or not it really was possible—as Bonkowski’s report posited—for Mingheria to supply substantial quantities of the special rose plant known for its particular fragrance, its oiliness, and its heavy yet layered and syrupy aroma, and when the two trembling pharmacists before him, one Catholic and the other Orthodox, had responded in the affirmative, he had finally left the room.

Afterward a messenger sent to Bonkowski Bey from the government had announced that the Sultan would issue Bonkowski Bey and Nikiforos Bey with a royal concession to cultivate roses in the province of Mingheria and sell their crop to the rosewater factory the Sultan intended to set up in Istanbul. The recipients of this royal charter would not have to pay any tax on this activity.

Nikiforos took this privilege the Sultan had granted them more seriously than Bonkowski did. A year later he had set up a company to produce rosewater on the island. Bonkowski, who had invested ten golden liras of his own money in the business, managed the company’s relations with the Ministry for Commerce and Agriculture in Istanbul and handled its publicity activities, and in that first year they enjoyed some success in systematizing the island’s cultivated rose production. Bonkowski had even found a farmer familiar with the intricacies of rose cultivation who had fled to Istanbul from the Balkans after the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War and had sent him and his family to the island.

But these efforts and endeavors were interrupted when Bonkowski Bey suddenly fell from Abdul Hamid’s good graces. His offense, it seemed, was to have pompously informed two doctors and a pharmacist in the waiting room of Istanbul’s Apéry Pharmacy about the Sultan’s trouble with his left kidney, and this in the presence of two dissident journalists—one of whom was a spy. (Abdul Hamid would die thirty-eight years later of renal disease affecting his left kidney.) What had wounded the Sultan was not so much that his illness should be revealed, but rather the fact that Bonkowski had spoken so casually of his kidneys.

Stanislaw Bonkowski’s real crime, though, was the unforeseen success of the modern Pharmacists’ Guild he had helped set up. In those days, old-fashioned herbalists selling folk remedies, spices, herbs, roots, and poisons, as well as opium and other drugs, were still able to compete with pharmacies run according to modern medical principles. Upon Bonkowski Bey’s suggestion, and initially with Abdul Hamid’s support, a new pharmacists’ charter was drawn up which forbade herbalists from supplying poisonous, mind-altering, or otherwise noxious substances, even by prescription.

Seeing their income thus reduced, traditional herbalists, most of whom were Muslim, soon began to protest. They wrote to Abdul Hamid claiming that Muslim businesses were being persecuted and sent countless letters to the Sultan, signed and anonymous, denouncing this or that injustice. It was all part of those Greek pharmacists’ wicked scheme to ensure they alone became the sole purveyors of poisons and narcotics! Abdul Hamid stopped handing young Bonkowski Bey any new assignments for a while, probably—we would argue—because he was displeased with Bonkowski’s lapse in discretion, but after five years and much pleading from various go-betweens, the Sultan was finally mollified into trusting Bonkowski again and began once more to commission various reports from him, such as on the water quality in Lake Terkos or on the causes of the recurring summer epidemics of cholera in the city of Adapazarı. The chemist, now forgiven, would go on to write numerous treatises on subjects ranging from a list of which plants from among those grown in the gardens of the Yıldız Palace could be used in the production of poisons to the cheap new substances discovered in the West that could be used in disinfecting holy Zamzam water.

In the intervening five years, Bonkowski had lost touch with his old pharmacist friend in Karaköy, while Nikiforos had closed his shop and gone back to live in his native Mingheria.

As he studied the abundance and variety of wares on offer at the enormous pharmacy on Hrisopolitissa Square now, Bonkowski Pasha felt glad for his old friend. In the window, adorned with the sign NIKIFOROS LUDEMIS—PHARMACIEN, the pharmacist had placed in prominent view his fez decorated with an image of a rose. This was the same symbol he had used in his shop in Istanbul to make himself known to illiterate customers with prescriptions that needed filling. Next to the fez, they saw dainty bowls and bottles of Nikiforos’s own rosewater creations, as well as jars of fish oil, camphor, and glycerin. Boxes of medicines, Swiss chocolates, bottles of Evian and Vittel mineral water imported from France, canned goods, Hunyadi Janos branded items from Hungary, English Atkinsons cologne, boxes of aspirin imported from Germany, and many more items brought in from Athens all filled the window with color.

The owner stepped out to greet the two distinguished newcomers admiring his window. Taking care not to come too close, Pharmacist Nikiforos showed his guests inside and ordered some coffee. The reunited friends paid each other many compliments as if it had not been years since their last encounter, and shared a few reminiscences.

“Governor Sami Pasha said you did not wish to see me?”

“Governor Sami Pasha is not fond of me.”

“I have not been involved in the royal concession His Supreme Highness granted us all those years ago to encourage our work,” said Bonkowski Pasha.

“I invite you to inspect the products of the company we established together.”

Nikiforos first showed them the delicate, tasteful bottles of rosewater he arranged to have manufactured in Istanbul. Then they inspected his range of rosewater-scented hand lotions, ointments, rose-flavored soaps of various colors, and rose-scented perfume sprays.

“Our brand of ointments is second only to Edhem Pertev’s products in popularity. There is much demand for our hand lotion, not just in Istanbul’s Greek pharmacies, but also among Muslim housewives.”

Today we know what was discussed during this encounter at the Nikiforos Pharmacy because the conversation was transcribed word for word by a spy hiding in the next room, where he had been sent by the Chief Scrutineer. Having first described his success in distributing his rosewater preparations across the port cities of the Levant, Nikiforos began to speak proudly of where most of the money he made from Abdul Hamid’s concession really came from: more than half the rose farmers on the island of Mingheria sold their harvest to Nikiforos and his sons. Todoris, the elder of two sons from his Mingherian Greek wife Mariantis (whom he’d married while he still lived in Istanbul), now ran the farm in the village of Pergalo in the north of the island. His younger, Apostol, managed the Mingherian Rose company’s shop in Athens.

“It is a worthy cause to be promoting Mingheria’s fruits abroad and bringing wealth back into the island,” said Bonkowski Pasha. “How come Governor Sami Pasha doesn’t like you?”

“The rival Greek and Muslim gangs that roam around Pergalo village in the north are always fighting and battling and ambushing each other. The Greek outlaw Pavlo is very popular with the inhabitants of that mountainous region, and if he comes down to our rose farm and demands payment, my son cannot refuse him. If he tried, our farm wouldn’t last three days before it got burned down or someone got killed. Everyone knows that dastardly Pavlo won’t think twice about murdering Ottoman government employees, raiding Muslim villages and running off with their daughters—he claims, ‘They’re all Greeks that were forced to convert’—and poking people’s eyes out or cutting their ears off when he really loses his temper.”

“Can’t Governor Sami Pasha catch Pavlo?”

“His Excellency the Governor has thought it best to fight the wicked Pavlo by backing the leader of the pious Terkapçılar lodge in the nearby Muslim village of Nebiler, and their protégé Memo the outlaw,” said Pharmacist Nikiforos, with a jaunty wink to signal to his guests that he knew his words were being listened to by someone next door. “But Memo is just as bad as Pavlo, and a fanatic too, who won’t hesitate to punish any restaurant that dares open its doors during Ramadan.”

“Good heavens!” said Bonkowski Pasha, glancing smilingly at Doctor Ilias. “So what sort of thing does this Memo do, then?”

“Last Ramadan he horsewhipped the owner of a diner in Dumanlı village for serving food during the day, both to make an example of him and to make a name for himself.”

“But what about Mingheria’s own Muslim community, the government clerks, the old families—do they tolerate these kinds of abominations?”

“And what if they didn’t?” the pharmacist replied indifferently. “As good, dutiful Muslims, they might disapprove … But it is only Memo who protects them from Pavlo, for it always takes rather a long time for the Governor Pasha to send soldiers over from the capital. The one thing the Governor does know how to do is to identify the names and locations of the insurgent Greek villages that support Pavlo’s atrocities, so that in the summer he can invite the Ottoman navy’s battleships Mahmudiye and Orhaniye to bomb them all. Luckily, the ships usually never come.”

“It sounds like you really do have your work cut out for you!” said Bonkowski Pasha. “But at least your shop seems to be thriving!”

“You will have heard that around thirty or forty years ago there was a period of about a quarter of a century when Mingherian marble—known around the world as Mingherian stone—was very much in demand,” said Pharmacist Nikiforos. “From the stone jetties we would put load after load of pink Mingherian marble onto ships headed for America and Germany. In the 1880s, the pavements lining the boulevards of many cities known for their cold winters—Chicago, Hamburg, Berlin—were all made with stone we had carved off of our mountains, and which was said to be resistant to cold and ice. In those days, trade with Europe was conducted over Smyrna. But over the past twenty years, between the decline in the popularity of Mingherian stone and the support we have been receiving from Greece, our products are increasingly going to Athens instead. Athenian and European ladies like to use our rose-scented cream on their hands, and treat it almost as if it were some kind of expensive perfume. In Istanbul, meanwhile, rosewater is merely a drink you sip on at the patisserie, and not an especially expensive one either. But I gather you are not really interested in our rosewater concession. So it must be true what they say, that you are here to fight the plague.”