第 81 页

As the landau passed through the Vavla neighborhood, Doctor Nuri understood that over the course of his eight days locked up in the Castle prison, and the sixteen days he had spent in the guesthouse with his wife, many parts of the Arkaz he had come to love had undergone a profound transformation. Many of these changes he could easily identify: the lifting of quarantine measures, the greater numbers out on the streets, the absence of children, the many faces staring out of the windows, and the haunted look in people’s eyes.

A dark and fathomless dejection ruled the city now, its companion a silent despair. Back in the early days of the outbreak, the city’s prominent Muslims and wealthy Greeks had reacted to the belated introduction of quarantine measures with a mixture of anger, pride, and even indifference. As the late Governor Sami Pasha would often say, people in those kinds of neighborhoods blamed the plague “squarely” on the Governor and the Ottoman state’s incompetence. After quarantine was introduced, they had not only sought to flee the plague, but their “despotic and idiotic” governor too. Their anger had given them hope, and proven restorative enough to allow them to make plans for their escape and survival. But now it seemed to Doctor Nuri that even the hope in people had been extinguished by the plague’s merciless and implacable advance. Personal bonds had weakened, friendships had suffered, and the compulsion to learn more about what was going on, and to find new rumors to rage at, had also begun to fade. People had enough fear, pain, and anguish of their own to contend with. They wouldn’t even notice if their neighbor died anymore.

In the back garden of the Kadiri lodge, they saw white washing hung up to dry. There was a man lying in a corner, naked from the waist up, though they couldn’t immediately tell whether he was ill or not. There were dervishes sitting under trees or in other secluded corners, immersed in solitary prayer or contemplation. A man in his nightclothes lying outside on a carefully made bed was looking up at the sky as if he were in a dream, and they only realized he was dead when they saw all the people weeping around him.

When they passed through Çite, another area where the disease was rampant, Princess Pakize was left profoundly moved by the sight of the neighborhood’s impoverished streets, its wooden houses so crooked they looked like they might topple over at any moment, its crumbling roof tiles, chimneys, and window frames, and its weeping mothers. As the landau climbed up a steep, narrow street in Bayırlar, they saw that a wagon sealed on all four sides and guarded by soldiers was blocking their way, so that they were forced to stop and turn around. Had Coachman Zekeriya not told them this was a “bread van,” they would have never known. The bread vans had been the greatest success of the Sheikh Hamdullah government. They were the main reason the public had never revolted against his regime in spite of all the senseless and misguided policies it had introduced. Every day, six thousand loaves of bread were baked in the garrison kitchens and distributed across the city’s neighborhoods in wagons watched over by guards.

The Bektaşi lodge in Gülerenler, which was being used as a hospital, had fallen into a pitiful state. Its elders had all been moved out under Commander Kâmil’s rule. Some of the younger dervishes had stayed behind to help nurse patients and try to keep an eye on their lodge. But the lodge-cum-hospital had been a victim of the wars between the city’s sects that had continued throughout the Sheikh Hamdullah Era, causing its resources to be stripped under various pretexts, and leading it to receive less assistance and fewer supplies and doctors than anywhere else.

When they reached the end of the lodge’s ivy-covered wall, and looked into its lush, spacious gardens, Princess Pakize was enchanted. Tiny figures of all sorts of colors and sizes were gathered in little groups and scattered over a bright green floor, just like in the Indian miniatures she had seen inside an old book she had found in the palace. The most youthful and most numerous group were those wearing white. The older people wore purple and brown. Who were the people dressed in red? In the farthest background, the small buildings and the hospital beds spilling into the lodge’s garden looked strange and improbable, and once again, Princess Pakize was reminded of ancient miniatures.

The landau did not slow down, and before the Queen and the Chief Minister could work out what might be happening at the lodge, they had reached the leafy streets of Bayırlar. They glanced into people’s backyards and saw women holding each other as they cried, dogs and children running around, corpses laid out on the ground, people hanging their laundry up to dry, and beds, tables, and large jugs of water. In one garden, Princess Pakize saw a patch of blooming pink and purple wildflowers. Someone had brought out an assortment of wooden tables, gold-colored wall clocks, and immaculate white wardrobes. In another garden, there were people standing forlornly in little groups, and yellow and seashell-colored doors that had been removed from their hinges and propped up against tree trunks, but before they could understand what might be going on there, the carriage had already moved on.

When they reached the Zaimler lodge and began to crawl up the rocky, potholed road that came down from the Stone Quarry, the wheels of their carriage shaking with every spin, they stared in wonder at a purple railing covered in myriads of perching crows. They saw red cherries growing on the trees. As the landau wound its way through the quiet, sleepy streets of Upper Turunçlar, they came across a corpse wagon.

According to a measure introduced toward the end of Commander Kâmil’s reign and maintained throughout the Sheikh Hamdullah Era, corpses were meant to be collected at night, as doing so during the day damaged the public’s morale. While there had only been one corpse wagon in operation under Commander Kâmil’s rule, their number—with help from the garrison’s carpenters—had since risen to four. But with daily deaths increasing, and the drivers and three-person corpse collection teams assigned to each cart constantly having to be replaced because they had either caught and died of the plague themselves, or had abandoned their duties and fled, even four corpse wagons were no longer enough to keep up with the task at hand. Many bodies were still being hidden from the collection carts—to avoid revealing the location of an infected home, perhaps, if not out of laziness, spite, or wickedness. As they climbed one of the sloping roads leading toward Upper Turunçlar, the passengers of the landau spotted a plume of smoke rising from a fire behind a cluster of trees and houses in the distance, and when they reached the top of the hill, their sweat-drenched horses huffing and puffing along the way, they saw that a barn and a small chicken coop were aflame. At the opposite end of the same field, two Muslim men in long white robes and a man in a frock coat and fez were arguing about something, apparently oblivious or otherwise completely indifferent to the growing fire. Both the Princess and Prince Consort had noticed the strangeness of the situation, and Princess Pakize asked her husband if Coachman Zekeriya might call out to the men. But they were also aware that the three men in the distance seemed not to have noticed the landau at all, and to have no intention of doing so either. As if in a dream, the sensitive Princess was seized in that moment by an overwhelming feeling of abandonment.

Afterward the landau entered the twisting streets of the Arpara neighborhood and passed behind the house (now a museum) where Commander Kâmil’s mother, Satiye Hanım, lived with a housekeeper paid for by the state. When the spectacular view from the top of Donkey’s Bane Hill appeared at the carriage window, “Queen” Pakize realized that the sense of loneliness and abandonment she had perceived had come from the city, from the Castle of Mingheria, and from the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean itself. The city and the plague frightened her now, and all she wanted to do was go back to her desk and describe her impressions to Hatice. They returned immediately to the Ministerial Headquarters. On the eve of her coronation, Princess Pakize wrote her sister another letter.

CHAPTER 74

After a thorough disinfection at the Theodoropoulos Hospital, Sheikh Hamdullah’s corpse was hastily buried at dawn in a small graveyard on the grounds of the lodge. The grave had been quietly dug the night before in a spot shaded by a grand old linden tree in a part of the cemetery reserved for paupers and undistinguished commoners, rather than in the section where former sheikhs were normally laid to rest. Mazhar Effendi, whose advice was frequently solicited in this new era, had arranged for the disinfection procedure to be photographed, both to ensure there was a historical record of the fact that Sheikh Hamdullah’s corpse had been washed with lime before burial, and to have something to use against the Halifiye lodge should they ever need to be humiliated into submission. The dark clouds hanging over the city, the colors of the dawning day, and the mysterious aura of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea are a tangible presence in this set of black-and-white photographs. The images also convey a sense of dread and of the loneliness of death during an outbreak of plague.

What is even more interesting about these photographs is that they show Doctor Nikos and two soldiers of the Quarantine Regiment wearing masks. This measure had been swiftly introduced by Chief Minister Doctor Nuri in response to some observations he had made during the long carriage ride he had taken with his wife the previous afternoon. Doctor Nuri had begun to suspect that the plague must have reached the pneumonic stage, so that it could spread not only through rats, but also through particles suspended in the air. He believed that the cause of the exponential increase in the death rate was not just the abolition of quarantine, but also a change in the manner and speed of the microbe’s spread. Former Quarantine Master Doctor Nikos, whom Doctor Nuri had met again for the first time in twenty-five days, also agreed with this assessment. What this meant was that the disease could spread much more easily now, and was almost impossible to control.

But Chief Minister Doctor Nuri’s instincts told him that before he and Doctor Nikos began to discuss how to reinstate quarantine measures in these dire circumstances and ensure that they were respected, everyone would be heartened—however briefly—by the coronation of the new queen.

One hour later, the island’s customary twenty-five-gun salute of blank but earth-shattering shells fired from the garrison by Sergeant Sadri’s artillery squad announced Princess Pakize as the Queen and third head of state of independent Mingheria. As the shots were slowly being fired, the news spread like a spell across the shopping district’s open stores, through the city’s makeshift markets, among the fishermen, and from one household to the next. Apart from the adherents of the Halifiye sect and the followers of its deceased sheikh, everyone was pleased.

But those within the Halifiye lodge who couldn’t believe the sheikh was dead, or abide the thought that his corpse had been defiled with lime solution, were ready to revolt. The former Chief Minister had not yet been formally installed as the new sheikh, but he was keeping the lodge’s angry young devotees in check. Historians have spent a great deal of time discussing the enduring outrage nursed by these disciples and by the members of their allies in other sects about the disinfection of the sheikh’s body before burial. They have argued that the Halifiye sect were being goaded by Ottoman and Turkish factions who wished to see riots break out and for Abdul Hamid to send his warships to bomb the island and its capital, but these are all exaggerations. As the more accurate and entertaining historical facts we are about to reveal will show, things were not quite as bleak as that.

As the cannon announcing Princess Pakize’s coronation was being fired from the garrison hill on the morning of Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of August, a day when fifty-three people died of the plague, Doctor Nuri stepped out of the Chief Minister’s office, walked over to the guesthouse on the same floor, and kissed his wife’s cheeks in congratulations.

“I am full of gladness,” the Queen told her husband. “I wonder if my father will find out?”

“The news is bound to soon be heard all over the world!” her husband replied.

Unlike most of their predecessors, and especially Commander Kâmil, neither Queen Pakize nor Doctor Nuri were particularly interested in the impressive ranks and titles which they had now acquired. Doctor Nuri asked Doctor Nikos what needed to be done to establish a new and effective Quarantine Committee. Doctor Nikos pointed out that it would not be easy to restore order to the island, his anger and frustration evident from his tone. “If Sheikh Hamdullah hadn’t succumbed to the plague, nobody would have been able to say let’s bring quarantine back, put new restrictions in place, and get the isolation facility running again. And if Nimetullah Effendi’s so-called ministers—that rabble of shopkeepers who could never understand what it means to serve one’s country—hadn’t been threatened into submission, Nimetullah Effendi would never have agreed to retreat to his lodge in the first place.”

Doctor Nuri and Doctor Nikos sat side by side on the edge of the long meeting table and began to nominate the new Council of Ministers. “We are not an Ottoman province’s ordinary Quarantine Committee anymore!” said Doctor Nikos. “As we are all aware, matters of intelligence and national security are of paramount importance in a sovereign state, so someone like Mazhar Effendi would be indispensable in any Quarantine Committee.”

“Then you should be quarantine minister again!” said Doctor Nuri. “Mazhar Effendi should be made minister too and resume his activities as Chief Scrutineer.”

Doctor Nuri instructed his clerks to summon Mazhar Effendi for a meeting. In the early days of Commander Kâmil’s presidency, Mazhar Effendi, soon to be appointed the Commander’s deputy, had been at the center of the late Sami Pasha’s intelligence operation against the growing influence of those lodges, big and small, that opposed quarantine measures, and the “holy men” giving out consecrated prayer sheets against the plague. Of course the final decision on which lodges should be turned into hospitals and which sheikhs should be targeted and coerced into compliance had rested with the Great Commander Kâmil and Chief Minister Sami Pasha. But it was thanks to the Chief Scrutineer’s web of spies and his meticulously well-organized files of information that they had even known what was happening inside those sects and lodges. All those sheikhs who had been banished into exile, whose lodges had been emptied, whose pride and income had been dented, knew perfectly well that it was the Chief Scrutineer who had denounced them to the government’s upper echelons, and therefore hated Mazhar Effendi as much as they hated Governor Sami Pasha. The trial that had resulted in Sami Pasha’s execution had thus been expected to result in the same fate for Mazhar Effendi too, but at the last moment, his sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. In our view this relatively lenient treatment resulted from Mazhar Effendi’s ingenious gambit of using falsified documents to present himself to the island’s public opinion as being Mingherian by birth. Of the three Ottoman bureaucrats on the island who, like Sami Pasha, had decided to support the island’s struggle for freedom and independence at the expense of their ties with Istanbul, Mazhar Effendi was the only one who’d had the foresight to do something like this. The fact that his wife was Mingherian had no doubt played its part.