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“What everybody agrees on is that the lifting of quarantine measures has been calamitous for the Mingherian nation,” said Chief Minister Nimetullah Effendi, beginning with the most important point of all. “If this disaster continues unabated, we shall all be destroyed … and those warships will keep us imprisoned here until we are all dead. There will be no Mingherian nation left to speak of. Mingheria’s notables would like Doctor Nuri to return to the helm of our quarantine campaign, and solve this problem once and for all.”

Meanwhile, Hamdi Baba would rally the Quarantine Regiment. Curfews, martial law, and all sorts of severe punishments were essential. Nobody knew that better than Doctor Nuri!

“It’s too late now,” said Doctor Nuri. “Besides, you yourself were opposing quarantine until yesterday.”

“It would be unbecoming to speak of ourselves at such a parlous turning point, and with the fate of an entire nation at stake,” said Chief Minister Nimetullah Effendi. “I regret the mistakes that have been made, and I will resign my position to return to the lodge.”

He pointed at the chair and desk where the late Governor Sami Pasha used to sit. “This will be yours now! You will be the Chief Minister. You will decide the fate of the Mingherian people, and what needs to be done to battle the plague. I assure you that this is what the whole island wants—Greeks and Muslims, doctors and shopkeepers. According to the official count, there were forty-eight deaths yesterday.”

Prince Consort Nuri and Princess Pakize had understood what was being proposed, but as they couldn’t quite believe it at first, and wanted to make sure, they went through the details of the offer in greater detail.

Nimetullah Effendi would give up his post “in the provincial government”—those were the words he used to refer to the position of Chief Minister—as he had only assumed the role in his capacity as steward and regent to the sheikh anyway. His seat would be taken by Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri, should he wish to accept the offer. The committee of notables was also particularly hopeful that Princess Pakize—already known among the people as the Queen—might take on the symbolic position of head of state that had just been left vacant by the death of His Holiness Sheikh Hamdullah.

“Just as Mingheria’s notables wish to see the harshest quarantine measures established once more,” said Nimetullah Effendi, “they have also unanimously concluded that it is essential for Princess Pakize to step forward as a true queen in the eyes of the world.”

According to Nimetullah Effendi, if Princess Pakize was officially made queen, international public opinion would start paying attention to what was happening in Mingheria, and the nations of Europe would wish to find a just solution to the political turbulence on the island. Faced with the fact of the Queen’s presence, and seeing her determination, Abdul Hamid might even withdraw his Mahmudiye warship so as not to strengthen the Western powers’ hand, and the blockade would thus be broken.

Once they had overcome their initial shock, Princess Pakize and her husband received only positive responses to their questions. The death of the sheikh marked the end of their enforced sojourn on the island; if they wished, they could get on a smuggler’s boat and leave whenever they wanted. Both “Queen” Pakize and the Doctor and Prince Consort had been living a life of captivity for twenty-four days now, ever since Sheikh Hamdullah had first taken power.

Noticing Princess Pakize’s hesitation, and wishing accordingly to emphasize the symbolic nature of the position of queen, Chief Minister Nimetullah said: “You would not have to leave the guesthouse at all, if you preferred!”

Princess Pakize’s response was a memorable one: “On the contrary, good sir, I shall take the throne as queen so that nobody may ever lock me up in a room again, and so that I may go out and walk upon the streets whenever I wish to do so.”

“And I would be glad to make this my office!” said Doctor Nuri.

Like Sami Pasha before him, the regent with the felt hat had made no changes at all to this office Doctor Nuri used to visit daily for his meetings with Sami Pasha until just twenty-five days ago. Yet now the Governor’s old office looked to Doctor Nuri like a completely different place.

Nimetullah Effendi had also had some boxes and envelopes brought in; he now proceeded to hand Doctor Nuri various official seals and several sets of keys dangling from gold and silver chains, all of which the former Ottoman Governor Sami Pasha had ordered in his excitement at being made the country’s first-ever Chief Minister. Finally, and with all the solemnity of an Ottoman bureaucrat, the departing Chief Minister began to list the foremost concerns afflicting the state of Mingheria, starting with the disappearance of most government employees. In our view the most urgent and alarming of these matters was the prospect of famine, which would have been addressed under the category of the supply of food provisions to Arkaz. But the old and the new Chief Minister spent more time discussing Sheikh Hamdullah’s funeral arrangements, the future of the Halifiye sect and lodge, and the emblems of the Queen.

At one point during the meeting, the former Chief Minister began, with all the confidence of a man who was sure everyone would want to know, to describe a dream he’d had the week before, and which explained why he had “suddenly” decided to resign from as prestigious a post as that of the Chief Minister of Mingheria. His true aim in telling them about this dream was to give the impression that it had been his decision to step down. But in our view, given the catastrophic situation on the island, and his government’s many administrative failures, it would have been rather difficult for Nimetullah Effendi to remain in power. He had taken over the government so that he could abolish quarantine. But by now everyone on the island had grasped that the only thing left to do was to bring back those early quarantine regulations.

By the end of this handover ceremony, which had lasted less than ten minutes in total, the new Chief Minister, Doctor Nuri, agreed that the old Chief Minister, Nimetullah Effendi, should receive financial support from the government for the running of the Halifiye sect and lodge, but firmly refused his request for Sheikh Hamdullah to be given a state funeral, with the funeral prayers recited in the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque.

CHAPTER 73

As soon as the departing Chief Minister had left the room, Doctor Nuri gave orders for the armored landau and the guards’ carriage to be readied. During their confinement in the guesthouse, the Prince Consort and Princess Pakize had received very limited information on what was happening in the city, and even that had come in dribs and drabs. Now they would be able to see everything with their own eyes.

Chief Minister Doctor Nuri sat beside his wife and directed Coachman Zekeriya toward Hrisopolitissa. To their right, in an area shaded by pine and palm trees and rising into a rocky slope toward the back of the park the old governor Sami Pasha had built, they noticed several people who had sat around blankets and kilims and appeared to be waiting for something. They saw more of these people again near the dusty, copper-colored road that sloped down toward Saint Anthony’s Church. They all looked like they were dressed the same, in red and blue. There were also a few men and families sitting and waiting in the shade of the pine trees that lined the dusty road. Doctor Nuri rightly surmised that these—like the people they had seen in the Parc du Levant earlier—must be villagers who had just arrived in Arkaz.

After quarantine was lifted, and travel to and from the city allowed to resume, many villagers who had been trying to survive by herding goats in the island’s mountainous north had decided to come down to Arkaz. Some were fleeing the lawlessness that had taken over since the plague had spread to their villages; others had been driven away by hunger and unemployment; others still had come to sell walnuts, cheese, dried figs, and pine honey at inflated prices. Villagers had already been called to the capital during the late Sami Pasha’s reign as Chief Minister, and the invitation had continued to be issued under Nimetullah Effendi’s regime too, always with the same aim of securing new employees for rapidly emptying government offices or for the craftsmen in the Old Market whose apprentices had run away. Thanks to their acquaintances in the city, the individuals or families who embarked on these journeys were usually able to find somewhere to stay within a couple of days of their arrival, particularly in the Christian neighborhoods, so Doctor Nuri and Princess Pakize concluded that the people they had seen today must still be searching for some kind of shelter or hiding place.

Princess Pakize saw closed doors, crooked, crumbling walls, lush green trees, flat yellow plains, and pink and purple flowers. Everything was charming, beautiful, and fascinating to her. She saw a broken chimney, a child in a garden running away from his mother, and a woman wiping tears from her eyes with the edge of her headscarf, and she knew that she would write to her sister about it all, describing everything in her own words. There was a man with dark clothes and a hat walking alone in purposeful strides, a pair of lazy cats—one black, the other a tabby—drowsing in a corner, a bearded grandfather and his grandson (she would not have realized that they were beggars if her husband hadn’t told her) sitting cross-legged in a narrow alleyway, and an old man sleeping on a hammock. She saw an endless procession of faces peering out from behind bay windows whose frames had fallen off, glancing curiously at the passing landau.

The landau moved slowly onward while they looked out of its windows at empty lots, burned-down homes, and Mingheria’s famous verdant gardens. They saw people swaying and swerving like drunks as they walked, women calling out to each other in Greek, and a couple arguing as they searched for something they’d lost. They could not figure out who the three masked men they saw walking out of the back entrance of Hagia Yorgos Church might be. A hunchbacked man was banging furiously against someone’s front door while being yelled at with equal fury from the floor above. As the landau advanced along the alleyways below the hilly neighborhoods of Hora and Kofunya, Princess Pakize looked through people’s open windows to see their families gathered inside, their men dozing on daybeds in the corner, and every single trinket, table, lamp, vase, and mirror they owned, and hoped the landau would stay on these kinds of backstreets for the rest of its journey.

In an empty lot between the Greek Middle School and the Old Bridge, they came across one of the small markets that had emerged in various neighborhoods of Arkaz over the past three weeks ever since people had been allowed to travel in and out of the city again. Noticing the curiosity in his wife’s eyes as she looked out of the window, Doctor Nuri told Coachman Zekeriya to stop. Once the carriage with the guards had caught up with them, the Princess and Prince Consort stepped out, intrigued by the scene before them. There were eleven vendors in total, all men, and all dressed in traditional rural garments. Two of the men were father and son. The villagers had laid out their wares on boxes or upturned baskets, which they were using as makeshift tables. The visitors saw cheeses, walnuts, dried figs, jugs of olive oil, and basketfuls of fresh strawberries, plums, and cherries. One vendor was selling a rusty lamp, a vase, and a ceramic dog figurine. Another man, who smiled at them as they walked past, had put out a broken table clock, a pair of long-handled pincers, two funnels (one small and the other large), and a jar full of dried pink and orange fruits. Everyone was being cautious, and no one was getting too close to anyone else.

As the landau advanced along the Arkaz Creek, they saw people dangling fishing rods into the water from the windows of their houses on the bank. Inspired by the children’s gangs that had formed during the outbreak, Mingherians had now discovered that they could eat the fish that lived in the island’s freshwater streams. The landau veered left before they reached the Old Bridge and passed a row of gardens enclosed by squat walls. Suddenly a small barefoot child leaped out of the bushes like a monkey and hopped onto the landau’s mudguard, bringing his face right against the Queen’s window. Queen Pakize screamed. But before the guards could get there, the child had already flittered out of sight like a butterfly. The people in these neighborhoods recognized their old Governor Pasha’s armored landau. As the carriage weaved through the cramped backstreets, its passengers smelled the scent of roses and linden from people’s gardens, and wherever they went, they heard the sound of someone crying.

Hamidiye Avenue, that special place that was at once the most European and the most Ottoman part of the city, was quiet now. Doctor Nuri stopped the carriage on the Hamidiye Bridge so that his wife could step out and admire the city’s most beautiful vista. The moment when Princess Pakize—who would be announced as queen the following day with a gun salute to mark the occasion—stepped out of the armored landau to look at the view with her husband would be described many years later by the son of the Bazaar du Île’s Kiryakos Effendi in an interview he gave the newspaper Acropolis on the fortieth anniversary of the plague. Every two days Kiryakos Effendi’s son would set off from the Dantela neighborhood with a small basket of food his mother had cooked and drop it off on the ground-floor windowsill of his grandfather’s little house on Donkey’s Bane Hill, which the old man refused to leave.

As they approached the side streets leading to the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque, the Princess and Prince Consort began to see more and more people outside. “Within a month of the outbreak, nearly one out of every three houses around here was already infected; how bad must things be now?” thought Doctor Nuri.

He told Princess Pakize that all the people inside the mosque courtyard were waiting to have their dead washed in accordance with the prescribed rituals. Doctor Nuri was deeply troubled by this practice, which had so clearly hastened the spread of the outbreak.

When they entered the poor Muslim neighborhoods between the Army Middle School and the Old Stone Jetty, the locals who recognized the Governor Pasha’s armored landau—which had not been seen in those parts for some time—were intrigued by its arrival. Some people cursed and shouted as it passed by, but the Cretian migrants who lived here knew that there was another carriage behind it, full of guards. Probably every house in Vavla, Taşçılar, and near the old jetty was contaminated now. Around fifteen people were dying every day in this part of the city, yet the Princess and Prince Consort were surprised to see so many people outside, walking down the street in groups of two or three.