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The cries of the seagulls, the crows, the doves, and all the other birds had never really subsided, but now they were joined by the calls of the first hawkers returning to the streets, the shouts of children playing outside, and the voices of people emerging from their homes to repair a door, a chimney, a crumbling wall. Princess Pakize listened to the thudding sound of women preparing for the arrival of winter by pounding the dust out of the carpets, kilims, and woven mats they had dangled out of their windows or brought out into the garden. Whether they were Muslim or Greek, they had begun to sing again as they hung their laundry up to dry.

As they traversed the city in the landau, the Princess and Prince Consort could tell from the sounds of the coppersmiths’ hammers and the clink of the knife grinders’ wheel that the market too must be coming back to life. Not all of the shops had opened yet, but many traders had already come out to sell eggs, cheese, apples, and other similar goods, compelled by the force of habit to advertise their wares as loudly as they would have done if the alleyways of the Old Market had been teeming with people. But in truth, although the mortality rate had now fallen to five or six a day, the streets remained mostly empty, and after all the suffering and death they had witnessed, people were still not quite at ease.

Around noon three days later (once again there had been about half a dozen deaths), during a spell of rain which had brought thunder and black clouds over the city, the Minister of Scrutinia Mazhar Effendi knocked on the Chief Minister’s door, and following a rather intricate assortment of bows and other expressions of respect, he reminded Doctor Nuri of the statement Princess Pakize was supposed to issue on the subject of the tyrant Abdul Hamid. Once the outbreak had fully abated, the Great Powers’ warships would of course leave, having accomplished their purpose of stopping the disease from infecting Europe. At that point Abdul Hamid’s own soldiers and warships would arrive. In addition to the islands of the Dodecanese (including Kos, Symi, and Kastellorizo), several other islands across the Mediterranean Sea had gone back and forth in this way between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Time and time again the flags hoisted upon their castles would change color, warships would bomb their cities and neighborhoods flat, people would die, and there would be a whole lot of needless suffering. The time had come to make a decision.

“The Queen is considering every possibility!” said Doctor Nuri, silencing Mazhar Effendi before he said anything else it wasn’t his place to comment on. But before the rain had stopped, he went to the guesthouse on the same floor and told his wife—who was busy writing a letter—exactly what the Minister of Scrutinia had said.

“That man is plotting against us!” said Queen Pakize in a burst of intuition.

Doctor Nuri too could see how the Minister of Scrutinia had been working to bring every one of the state’s returning employees under his own control. Government clerks, soldiers, and the newly restored Quarantine Regiment loved humble and hardworking Mazhar Effendi—who meanwhile no longer seemed to have any hesitation in disagreeing with Doctor Nuri and the Queen. He wished to see the ferry services resume, for instance, but was opposed to restoring the telegraph service, claiming that it would enable Abdul Hamid to interfere in the affairs of the island. In an effort to allow the port to open, the Minister of Scrutinia had also loosened a number of quarantine and isolation measures without consulting Doctor Nuri first. When Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri had rebuked him for it, he had deflected their criticism with an elaborate display of modesty and deference. By this point they did not believe in his “sincerity” anymore.

Yet there were some matters on which Minister of Scrutinia Mazhar Effendi’s views and the Queen’s were aligned. They both nurtured a heartfelt affection and regard for the memory of Commander Kâmil, founder of the state, and his wife Zeynep. The Minister of Scrutinia’s feelings on the subject might have been motivated by political imperatives. Mingherians were deeply grateful to Commander Kâmil for having freed the island from Ottoman control. As for the Queen, she felt there was something terribly romantic in the couple’s love story, in the way the young Ottoman army officer had fallen for this stubborn, argumentative girl who had only recently refused to be someone else’s second wife, married her, and started a revolution—all in a few short weeks. Throughout the course of more than one hundred years of the island’s subsequent history, Kâmil and Zeynep’s mythologized love and all of the various fictions created around it have served as a “cement” which has held the Mingherian nation together. Those who have expressed reservations about these myths, suggested they might be contrived, or even simply joked about their exaggerations, have often ended up in prison.

“If it weren’t for the genius, valour, and determination of Commander Kâmil, the people of Mingheria would still be slaves to some other nation today,” the Minister of Scrutinia would say. “Imagine—a whole nation slowly forgetting its language, then disappearing into nothing.”

It was agreed to set funds aside for two new elementary and middle schools in Arkaz that would focus on Mingherian-language skills. Children in these schools would be taught Mingherian through simplified rewritings of the island’s legends and history—from Homer to the romance between Commander Kâmil and Zeynep—collected in the textbook Our Alphabet. The Commander’s and his wife Zeynep’s childhoods would also be told in schoolbooks, recast as fairy tales. The girls’ school would be called Zeynep’s School, and the boys’ school would be known as Kâmil’s School. But after they got to middle school, the Queen suggested, boys and girls should be taught together. This somewhat-childish and unenforceable idea was of course far too “advanced” for its time, but it was at least agreed that the middle schools would be named Kâmil-Zeynep schools. At the Queen’s insistence, the same name was also given to the Greek school with yellow shutters and pink walls in Eyoklima. Most of the Greek families who used to live in this leafy, shaded, and now deserted neighborhood had long since fled the island, replaced by prison and isolation fugitives and various other squatters.

A cut-and-paste image showing the Commander and Zeynep side by side would be used to illustrate the new Mingherian stamps and banknotes soon to be ordered from a printer in Paris. Meanwhile one thousand five hundred copies of the Commander’s portrait were printed in the printing press of the Arkata Times and distributed by carriage and men on horseback to every government office on the island.

The Queen did not want any sort of confrontation with the island’s Muslim and conservative areas. But she did have certain grievances she couldn’t let go of. “How can a woman living in a free and independent nation still be entitled to less of an inheritance than her male peers?” she told her husband one day. “When religious precepts stipulate that a woman’s testimony in court is worth only half of a man’s, how is that anything but bigotry in disguise?”

Chief Minister Doctor Nuri agreed with his wife’s observations, and when he relayed them to the Minister of Scrutinia, he did not meet with any objections. Nor did the minister resort to any of those arguments—“What do women know about commercial law anyway!”—that aging sect leaders and holy men would often make. Two days later, on the ninth of October (when only three deaths were recorded), the new rights granted to women were summarized in dry legal language in an announcement published in the Arkata Times—now also serving as the state’s official gazette. There was no mention anywhere in the newspaper to indicate that these “reforms” had been introduced upon the will and instigation of the Queen. This was how the notion of “secularism,” which would remain a subject of debate among Mingherian Muslims for the next one hundred and sixteen years, first entered the island’s history.

On the sixteenth of October, there were no plague deaths on the island. As the island’s effective ruler, Mazhar Effendi was rather nervous, for this meant that the blockade would soon be lifted. Whenever they went out in the armored landau, the Queen and the Chief Minister were greeted in every neighborhood with an excitement bordering on rapture. The streets were filling up again, the shops had opened, and the people who’d fled Arkaz had started to come back. The swallows and starlings—who, according to Princess Pakize, could tell that the outbreak had ended—flittered about with ecstatic, exuberant chirrups. Fights kept breaking out between people returning to their homes and the squatters who’d taken over in their absence, or between furious traders whose shops had been looted and the villagers who’d come to settle in the city during the plague, and there were simply not enough policemen or Quarantine Regiment soldiers left to even attempt to intervene. But none of these problems could even begin to overshadow the feeling of euphoria that had brought the smiles back to everyone’s faces, got children gamboling again, and had frail old men with one foot in the grave still skipping with joy—nor could anything dampen people’s realization that the outbreak was coming to an end, and they would soon be able to return to their old lives.

CHAPTER 78

Before life on the island could truly go back to the way it had been before the plague, the ferries would have to start running again, and of course for that to happen, the Post Office would have to reinstate its telegraph services. On the nineteenth of October, a well-attended meeting Doctor Nuri had been chairing on this very subject was interrupted by the loud, shrill, and resonant sound of a ship’s horn heard all over Arkaz.

Several ministers and consuls who had been sitting at the large table where the Quarantine Committee had previously gathered now leaped to their feet. Two people ran to the window. Some were trying to see if they could spot the ship without getting up from their seats when the horn went off again, this time in two longer blasts.

All the people gathered in the room next to the late Governor Sami Pasha’s office were now filled with a great sense of anticipation. What ship was this? How had it got through the blockade? For every optimistic consul cheerfully trading bets to see who could guess the name of the ship and ferry company from the sound of its horn, there was another talking apprehensively of enemy invaders and impending massacres. There had been plenty of imperialist governments in the world that had sent vessels disguised as friendly freight ships but carrying armed and frenzied murderers tasked with slaughtering the rebellious natives of some distant colony. But surely a ship that had repeatedly blown its whistle to signal its approach, in a tune so melodious to the ear, couldn’t possibly be hostile.

As the sound of the horn echoed between the cliffs of Arkaz, Princess Pakize was on the ground floor of the Ministerial Headquarters (the former State Hall), about to witness an altercation between two elderly lunatics known to everyone in the city—Chained Servet and the Greek madman Dimitrios. Ever since the end of the outbreak three days ago, people had started coming to the State Hall to visit the Queen, present her with gifts and petitions, or even just kiss her hand (some believed it was solely thanks to this twenty-one-year-old woman that the plague demon had finally been banished). Rather than have the municipal guards turn them away, the Queen had arranged instead for a dusty archive room that faced the inner courtyard to be cleared out, furnished with couches, chairs, and a walnut desk, and turned into a chamber where she could receive visitors, consider complaints and petitions, and meet her admirers.

Queen Pakize would spend two hours every day meeting her subjects in this room decorated with photographs of Commander Kâmil and Zeynep and a map of Mingheria. She would listen to people whose families had disappeared during the plague, who couldn’t get the squatters out of their homes, who demanded to know where their relatives had disappeared to after being put in isolation, who had come to beg for help, money, or a job. Crotchety Süleyman Effendi wanted the never-ending land and water supply dispute he was embroiled in to finally be resolved. Some would show her sores and injuries they hadn’t been able to talk to their doctors about during the plague, while others would request boats or even tickets to take them off the island as soon as possible. People would ask for their telegrams to be sent or their unpaid taxes to be written off, and some—like a cantankerous old lady from Turunçlar—even expected her to help them find their daughters a decent husband. The Queen, they had all collectively decided, was selfless, good-natured, and sincere.

Some of the people queuing up to meet their queen were what we might call “pure and genuine” fans. They did not want anything in particular, except to lay eyes on Princess Pakize, pay their respects to their queen, or hand her the figs and walnuts they’d harvested from their own gardens. The older of two young sisters who had come with their mother had blushed scarlet when she had seen the Queen and hadn’t been able to get a single word out. The island’s two elderly madmen fell into this category of fan too. After spending the whole summer at home and surviving the outbreak with the help of their families and grandchildren, they had finally, cautiously stepped outside, and rather than starting to argue as soon as they ran into each other, they had begun chatting like old friends, chuckling with relief at having made it through alive.

Like many others in the city, the two lunatics had gone to the State Hall to present the Queen—who was young enough to be their granddaughter—with poems they had written in Turkish, Greek, and Mingherian, and a wicker basket full of figs and walnuts they had picked from their own gardens. But as they waited in line, they had already begun surreptitiously elbowing each other, exchanging curses in three different languages. Some have suggested they must have been egged on by the people around them, while others have noted that it was through these exchanges of blows and profanities that they had endeared themselves to society to begin with, and so they simply did not know how else to behave.

The ferry had first sounded its horn just as the friction between the two old lunatics had begun to degenerate, to the Queen’s great displeasure, into a loud and foul-mouthed squabble. When the Queen spoke to them, the two old men beamed at her “like two little boys,” and glanced fleetingly at the blue sky as if they’d heard an incantation. Then the ship blew its horn a second and third time, and without saying a word to anyone, the Queen got up, walked up the wide, carpeted staircase followed by clerks, guards, and porters bearing gift baskets, and returned to her room, where she stood at the window to see if she could spot the ship.