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Two kids who had gone out in Bayırlar had to hurry back inside when they heard the sound of warning shots. A lunatic who had been walking around Donkey’s Bane Hill as if there were no curfew at all was quickly seized after a couple of rounds of shooting, and the walls and shutters of a house in Taşçılar were left covered in bullet holes after the people who lived there had pelted the Arab soldiers with rocks. Later that day, the Quarantine Regiment pushed the door down and arrested the three young Cretian migrants who were living there, sending them to the Castle prison. In all three episodes, the sound of gunfire had echoed through the preternatural silence that had descended upon the city ever since the beginning of curfew, and realizing that the soldiers were taking a firmer stance this time, most people gladly concluded that quarantine would finally take hold.

CHAPTER 75

Princess Pakize kept going back and forth between the guesthouse and the Chief Minister’s office to follow the hourly progress of Arkaz’s “disciplined” submission to the curfew. Every time a sentry or a clerk came in to report that people were still staying at home, that only the Arab soldiers and the Quarantine Regiment had been seen out on the streets, and that there had been no incidents of note, the Queen would feel even more elated than the men around her, though rather than expressing her emotions in the Chief Minister’s office itself, she would return to her guesthouse room and put them in a letter to her sister instead.

When the state had first started distributing bread loaves (in what was at the time a one-horse cart), the bread van would stop at one or two locations in each neighborhood, and people would queue up to pick up their rations under the supervision of their neighborhood representatives and the quarantine soldiers. The bread would be handed out to each male head of household in accordance with the size of his family. This simple system depended on everyone in these neighborhoods knowing each other. But with the plague causing some homes to be evacuated and others to be taken over by new occupants, arguments had soon begun to erupt. People would often turn up in groups, browbeat the rest of the queue into submission, and leave with everyone else’s allowance too. This kind of hostile and objectionable behavior occurred mostly at the hands of those who were still demanding that Ramiz’s death be avenged, or felt that the island’s Rumelian Greeks who remained loyal to Greece, and its Turks who maintained their allegiance to the Ottomans, should all be collectively punished.

Now that they had suffered the humiliation of seeing Sheikh Hamdullah’s corpse disinfected with lime, this collection of religious fanatics, sect acolytes, and Mingherian nationalists would have no choice but to moderate their aggression. But in the end this shift would not even be necessary, for Queen Pakize had already come up with a new method of bread distribution which would ensure no one could bully their way to the front of the queue, and had managed to persuade her husband the Chief Minister and the rest of the government to adopt it. From then on, where possible, the bread vans and the guards who protected them would deliver their loaves to each individual household, leaving them in people’s back gardens or at their kitchen windows and front doors. The return of the Quarantine Regiment would help ensure it was safe for the bread vans to deliver their cargo door to door.

The Queen provided a detailed and earnest—if slightly overblown—account of her small contribution to this simple matter in a letter to her sister. Right from the start, and moved by a growing sense of responsibility, Queen Pakize had taken what might have been expected to be a symbolic, ceremonial role very seriously indeed. She would join the meetings that took place every morning in the Outbreak Room, which had been given a fresh coat of paint and had the bullet holes in its walls and furniture covered up. She would wear clothes that might have seemed a little too European for a Muslim lady but were nevertheless wholly demure, wrap a shawl around her like a headscarf, and sit at the back of the room.

Once the ministers were gone and she was left alone with her husband, she would start questioning him about everything she had heard, and ask him to explain why he had taken a particular decision. The lengthy descriptions and discussions of the government’s policies readers will find in Princess Pakize’s letters show that just as the Mingherian constitution intended, the head of state was scrutinizing her husband’s work with the utmost care.

Doctor Nuri greeted all of his wife’s ideas with unfeigned respect, and most of the Queen’s arguments ended up being with the Minister of Scrutinia. After the first two days of the successful curfew (with fifty-nine and fifty-one deaths respectively), Mazhar Effendi told the Queen that for the garrison’s bread vans to be able to visit every street and knock on every door, all of Arkaz’s streets and houses would have to be named and numbered, and the requisite signs would need to be put up. Everybody knew how important this issue had been to Commander Kâmil, who would always turn up whenever the Committee for Street Names was meeting in the State Hall to show them his own poetic suggestions listed for their perusal in his neat and elegant handwriting. Thirty-five days later, some of Commander Kâmil’s street names had already been embraced and adopted by the public, and many of them—such as Dwarf’s Fountain Street, Blind Judge Road, Lion’s Den Street, and Cross-Eyed Cat Road, among others—are still remembered and in some cases still used by the people of Arkaz today, one hundred and sixteen years on. But this ambitious and poetic project, which the city’s postmen were especially eager to see concluded, had been interrupted by the death of Commander Kâmil, the increasing severity of the plague outbreak, and by everyone’s terror of dying.

So it was that her attempts as queen of the island to solve the problem of bread distribution made it immediately clear to Princess Pakize just how formidable a figure the Minister of Scrutinia could be.

“You must not indulge that toad!” she told her husband when they were alone one day.

“Our job here is to stop the plague,” the Chief Minister replied. “Let him deal with the politics!”

Readers of her correspondence with her sister will note that Murad V’s daughter and Abdul Hamid II’s niece Queen Pakize was possessed of much finer and more wide-ranging political instincts than both her witless father, who had inexplicably chosen to become a Freemason while he was next in line to the throne, and her husband, whose only political criterion seemed to be “tolerance.”

The Queen took great pleasure in joining her husband in the armored landau every day for reconnaissance trips around the empty streets of Arkaz, and considered this an important task. Ever since their first excursion, this activity had become both a habit and a vital opportunity to monitor the efficacy of quarantine measures. As she often wrote to her sister, Princess Pakize was enthralled by the sight of the city’s streets, squares, and bridges emptied out by the curfew.

The experience had reminded Princess Pakize of the way she used to feel when she was still imprisoned in the palace in Çırağan with her father and sisters, and would look out at its empty gardens nobody was ever allowed to enter. Gazing at the deserted Hrisopolitissa Square, she had felt as if time were flowing backward. When Coachman Zekeriya had driven the landau past the boatmen’s jetties in the empty port, she’d thought despairingly that no ferry would ever come to this island again. As the landau had neared the edges of the city, passing through the vacant lots and collapsing houses near the abandoned Stone Quarry, she’d shivered, and for the first time, she had been afraid. When they had come across a five-year-old girl crying alone in the unpeopled streets of the Tatlısu neighborhood, she too had cried, and would have climbed out of the carriage if her husband hadn’t restrained her.

The emotions aroused by these early expeditions would mingle in Princess Pakize’s letters with the satisfaction of witnessing the public complying with the curfew. The people of Arkaz did not leave their homes for the next three days either. The only exception was an attempt by a group of Rifai dervishes, whose lodge (where they still lived) had been partially converted into a small field hospital, to sprint to the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque down the road for Friday prayers. Forewarned by his spies, the Minister of Scrutinia had sent guards to the scene, and the faithful, wrathful dervishes—who presented a rather striking picture in their strange purple gowns—were all arrested and sent away to the Castle’s isolation facility.

To illustrate the magnitude of the calamity the city and its people were facing, we shall now outline the situation at the Hamidiye Hospital on the thirtieth of August, three days after the coronation of the Queen: According to our calculations, there were approximately one hundred and seventy-five patients in the Hamidiye Hospital and the makeshift sick wards (they could hardly be called hospitals) which had been set up on the grounds of various lodges nearby—including the Rifai and the Kadiri. The main buildings, their surroundings, and the gardens were crammed with tents and beds. There was only a meter separating each patient, and sometimes even less than that. The only treatment they received was when the doctors, male nurses, and white-aproned janitors gave them injections to reduce their fever or hurriedly lanced their buboes and cleaned them out. These procedures didn’t even serve the purpose of prolonging patients’ lives. Time and time again, the Queen had heard her husband describe the heroic and futile efforts of these doctors marching from bed to bed to deliver the same “treatment” to forty or fifty patients at a time, all while trying to shield their faces from the coughing, sneezing, vomiting mouths of the sick.

The Queen had been intensely affected by the sense of doom conveyed by the contrast between the emptiness of the city’s streets and the many-hued throngs spread across the green and yellow ground in the gardens of the Hamidiye Hospital. The bodies of the patients who died in the hospital would also be collected at night by the corpse wagons. Five days after the introduction of curfew, Queen Pakize’s heart filled with an equally intense joy at the first notable decrease (to thirty-nine deaths) in the daily mortality rate.

The next day the armored landau carrying the Queen and the Chief Minister concluded its journey through the city in the neighborhood of Flizvos. Vacated by the wealthy Greek families who used to live there before the outbreak, the mansions in this area were now populated either by the butler’s acquaintances from his ancestral village or by whoever was willing to pay the butler what he’d asked for or by anyone who happened to have a gun to threaten the butler with. As for the poorer Greek quarters the armored landau traversed, the Queen might have thought they were completely abandoned, had it not been for all the people she spotted eyeing the carriage from their second-floor windows, the children playing among themselves in their backyards, and the dogs gaily trotting along the garden walls in pursuit of the landau, just as they used to do in the old days.

It was during this period that the Queen ordered every empty street and square in Arkaz to be photographed. The descriptions you have been reading in this book are based on the photographs Vanyas took of all the city’s main squares and roads over the course of the following three days. Much like the Queen herself, we too are moved to tears every time we peruse this poignant collection of eighty-three black-and-white images, where the occasional solitary human figure also appears.

During those same three days, the death rate continued to steadily decrease, until the officials meeting every morning in the Outbreak Room finally began to believe that quarantine measures might have taken hold after all, and that the curfew and the closing of the city gates had yielded the desired effect.

Another development that pleased everyone on the island, and caused those who had campaigned for Princess Pakize to be crowned queen to rejoice that their primary aim had finally been achieved, was the publication of a new article in Le Figaro, the same newspaper that had first announced the nation’s independence to the world.

A Queen for Mingheria (Devenue Reine de Minguère)

After declaring independence and breaking away from the Ottoman Empire, Mingheria’s nationalists have chosen a princess from the Ottoman royal family as their queen and head of state. In a move that has caught Istanbul and the world by surprise, Princess Pakize, third daughter of the former sultan Murad V, has been crowned queen of Mingheria. Princess Pakize was recently married to an Ottoman quarantine doctor sent from Istanbul to stop the outbreak on the island. But with the outbreak continuing unabated, and communications with the new government severed, the island remains blockaded by British, French, and Russian warships.

The suggestion that the authorities in Istanbul were “surprised” was a detail imagined by the British intelligence services, at whose instigation the article had been written. Doctor Nuri hoped, among other things, to restore the Post Office’s telegraph services, “normalize” the island’s political situation, and improve relations with the European nations enough for the blockade to be lifted, and was constantly discussing how these aims might be achieved with the Queen and with the other doctors he had brought into the government.

Seeing how glad his wife was about the falling death rate, Doctor Nuri told her the same thing he told everyone else: “As corpses are collected at night, and funerals are banned, the public is not aware of this happy development. Should they find out, they would be just as pleased as you are, but unlike you, they would all be out on the streets the next day, walking around arm in arm. If we are to end the outbreak, the people must remain afraid, and we must not relent.”

Doctor Nuri could tell from her frown and the look she gave him that his “Ottoman” wife was displeased with this warning, though he did not dwell too much on her reaction. But while the article in Le Figaro was viewed by the island’s leading figures as a potential opportunity for political maneuvering, to Princess Pakize it was nothing less than a source of pride. Although she was perfectly aware—as noted in her letters—that she had been made queen purely to attract the attention of the press and thus increase the world’s awareness of the island’s new government, its flag, and its independence, she took her duties more seriously than ever, sitting with her husband in his office every day, and writing to her sister about the scenes she witnessed during their excursions in the landau. Another reason for the fall in the number of deaths, and one that other historians have largely ignored, was that the city’s rats had all mysteriously vanished. For the past week, the children’s gangs had stopped handing any dead rats in to the authorities.