第 87 页

The Enas was a small rust-red cargo-and-passenger ship from Crete. Operating mostly along the Crete–Thessaloniki–Smyrna triangle, it only rarely came to Mingheria. As soon as she saw the ship, which despite its small, squat captain’s cabin, and its short, plump chimney, still struck a rather majestic and imposing figure, the Queen felt that same aching sorrow she had always experienced when gazing out of the windows of the Çırağan Palace at the boats sailing down the Bosphorus and the passenger ferries traveling from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea: life as it was meant to be lived was not inside these rooms she was confined to, but in some other realm she could reach if only she could get on a ship and sail to it.

But at least when she was looking at the ships from the palace windows in Istanbul, her father would be nearby, or she would be surrounded by his possessions and be able to smell his scent in the air. As she pined for Istanbul and her father, she sought to distract herself by starting a new letter to her sister, in which she also wrote that she was aware of the immense responsibility she bore toward Mingheria, and that she felt gratified about how much “the natives” loved her. The Queen thought it unfair that Muslim men could have as many as four wives and divorce any one of them at any time just by saying “I divorce you!” thrice. Her plan, as she wrote to her sister, was to rectify this too at the first opportunity. She was sure that her father would be proud of her if he knew the things she had done and still intended to do.

The rust-colored ship Princess Pakize had watched as it slowly neared the harbor had been guaranteed safe passage past the Great Powers’ warships thanks to arrangements made by the British consul in Crete. The ship was carrying belated medical supplies, tents, and hospital beds, three doctors (two of whom were Muslims), and around forty Mingherians—most of them Greeks—who had fled to Crete at the start of the outbreak.

Interpreting the arrival of the Enas as proof that the plague was definitely over, many people stopped whatever they had been doing and gathered at the docks in a celebratory mood. The Queen watched closely as the rusty vessel dropped anchor and two rowboats set out from the docks toward it. The crowds gathered at the shore immediately began trading rumors about the precise nature of the vessel and how it had managed to reach the island, and the prevailing theory soon became that the blockade must have been lifted long ago.

It was only three hours after the first passengers had made it ashore that Chief Minister Doctor Nuri was able to speak to his queen and tell her that the ship was “friendly,” and that it had been able to reach the island in light of a temporary agreement between her uncle and the British government. (He could see in her expression that this mention of her uncle had not evoked anger in her, but only a longing for Istanbul.)

As arranged by the Minister of Scrutinia, the ship’s most significant passenger was a jolly French journalist with an enormous nose whose efforts had been instrumental in the publication of the various articles about Mingheria that had recently appeared in the French and British press. The plan was for this man to conduct the interview the Queen had previously been asked to give on the subject of how Abdul Hamid had imprisoned her father, her sisters, and her whole family, and of course on how she had since become—by some fortuitous historical accident—the queen of a sovereign state. Both Le Figaro and the London Times would feature this interview prominently, and according to the Minister of Scrutinia, this would prepare the ground for the British to protect the island from Abdul Hamid. Consul George had also suggested that the Queen be reminded once more of her well-known distaste for religious fanaticism and any practices that discriminated against women.

“Tell me, sir, why did we come to this island?”

“We still do not know why your uncle put us in the delegation to China!”

“But we were sent here after the murder of poor Bonkowski Pasha—may he rest in peace!—with orders from my uncle to rescue the island from the plague and solve the mystery of Bonkowski’s killing, were we not?” said the Queen, addressing her husband in a tone that may have been slightly condescending, but was also edifying and full of tenderness.

“Indeed, and by the grace of God we succeeded in our aim, which is why the people of this island have chosen you for their queen.”

“I have yet to fully comprehend why they made me queen. But what I do know, my lord, is that we were not sent here to tear this land away from Ottoman rule and hand it over to the British. I also know that if we were to do that, I could no longer even dream of returning to Istanbul and seeing my beloved sisters and my dear father ever again.”

“Even now it would be difficult for us to return.”

“I am well aware of that,” said the Queen. “Though everything we have done here has been to stop the outbreak. Let us stay for a little longer. We have a moral obligation to these people who have taken me into their hearts and made me their queen! Far from gossiping about my uncle with some French journalist, all I want to do right now is to sit in the ironclad with you”—that was how they referred to the landau in private—“and go to Dikili, Kofunya, and Upper Turunçlar to help all those people there who need our assistance.”

The big-nosed French journalist whose arrival to the island had been arranged via telegraph through the joint efforts of Mazhar Effendi and Consul George assumed the Queen was simply being coy. While he waited for her to come round, he immediately began gathering material for all the other articles he planned to write on the history and attractions of the island, the Castle and its famous dungeons, and of course on the plague itself. When he found out that the Ottoman officials who had been sent to the Maiden’s Tower on the pretext of quarantine measures had been held there, and in rather harsh conditions, for the last one hundred and ten days, the journalist asked for the Queen’s permission to go and visit those “Turks.” The Queen accepted his request and decided she would go to the Maiden’s Tower too, so that she could see for herself what was happening there.

Two hours later, in the middle of the afternoon, Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri arrived at the Maiden’s Tower in a convoy of three rowboats. News of the Queen and Chief Minister’s visit had been conveyed in advance, yet when they reached their destination, nobody came to greet them apart from the elderly Greek clerk who was in charge of the place, and his boxer dog. Of the sixty or so government officials (sometimes referred to as “the Turks”) who had remained loyal to Istanbul and the Sultan after the declaration of independence one hundred and thirteen days before, and been sent to the Maiden’s Tower from Arkaz and from villages all over the island for refusing to collaborate with the new Mingherian government, more than half had perished. All those officials who had been hoodwinked, during the island’s early days of “Freedom,” by Sami Pasha’s assurances that “the Mingherian state was fair!” into rejecting the sizable salaries they were being offered, and openly admitting their wish to return to Istanbul, had soon been made to pay the price for their candor.

Initially their punishment had consisted of being confined—allegedly for quarantine purposes—to that small, rocky islet, barred from returning to Istanbul, and with nothing to do but sit and wither away on its narrow, sunbaked cliffs. But as more and more officials loyal to Istanbul started to arrive from other parts of Mingheria, and the plague began to spread, this tiny quarantine island soon transformed into a kind of hell. The only reason why half of its inmates were able to survive being crammed together at such close quarters was because the other half had died (their corpses nudged from a rocky crag into the currents of the Mediterranean Sea). It was during this dreadful time that the imprisoned officials learned that the Mingherian authorities were planning to use them as bargaining chips in their efforts to reach a settlement with Abdul Hamid.

A few of the “hostages” in the Maiden’s Tower had thought of seizing the rowing boat that kept coming and going from the islet and using it to escape. The rest preferred to stay put, hoping that the Ottoman warship Mahmudiye, which was participating in the naval blockade, would soon come to their rescue. But in the meantime, they kept dying, struck down by plague, hunger, and heat, worn out from fighting and arguing among each other, and by the terrible conditions they were having to endure. Many experienced Ottoman officials who had stayed true to Abdul Hamid—including Mayor Rahmetullah Effendi and the Chief of Charitable Trusts Nizami Bey, a pair Sami Pasha had particularly disliked—had thus lost their lives en masse during the first week of Sheikh Hamdullah’s reign.

The only person who had survived this massacre with his health and sanity intact was Hadi, the deputy of the new governor who had been killed before he could take office. In his memoirs, Hadi wrote about the Queen and her husband’s visit to the Maiden’s Tower in that same condescending, contemptuous tone that the founders of the modern Turkish Republic would employ when referring to the last Ottoman sultans, to Ottoman princes and royal consorts, and to the Ottoman dynasty as a whole. In Hadi’s view, Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri were nothing but a pair of stuck-up, oblivious snobs whom palace life had left completely detached from reality, and who had become pawns in the hands of foreign powers.

Most of the people who had been locked away in the Maiden’s Tower and died there before they could make it back to Istanbul had spent their last breaths on earth cursing the old governor Sami Pasha who had imprisoned them there and taken the island away from Ottoman rule.

Like any responsible queen would have done in her place, Princess Pakize felt guilty and ashamed as she listened to the accounts of the suffering these Ottoman “martyrs” had experienced. She wrote to her sister that as soon as she saw these hostages loyal to Istanbul, these prisoners who had been reduced to skin and bones by hunger and squalor, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, all she wanted to do was plead with the French journalist not to “embarrass Mingherians and Turks alike” by reporting on their conditions. Back when he was still only a prince, her father Murad V had impressed many a European journalist with his fluent French. But Princess Pakize was unsure about her own French. Nor could she really tell the big-nosed journalist “Don’t write about what you’ve seen in the Maiden’s Tower and the wretched conditions endured by the Turkish government officials” when she had just rejected his request for an interview on “the Sultan and his daughters held captive in the harem.” As she wrestled with these conflicting emotions, the Queen fell silent. She understood that she was caught between the sense of duty she felt toward the island and her hopes of returning to Istanbul one day, and perhaps that was why she was feeling so ashamed.

As they were walking toward the rowing boat that would take them back to the city, the Queen turned toward her husband the Chief Minister and, within hearing distance of all those present, issued the following order:

“Before it sets sail, the rusty Cretian vessel about to weigh anchor from the waters off of the Castle shall stop by the Maiden’s Tower first to pick up any passengers wishing to go back home to Istanbul!”

CHAPTER 79

As the rowboat made its way back from the Maiden’s Tower to the port, Princess Pakize’s eyes roamed of their own accord over the Ministerial Headquarters—the former State Hall whose guesthouse she had been living in—until they found the window where she had sat writing her letters every day. In that moment, she felt as if she were seeing herself from the outside, and discovering how narrow and limited her view of the world had been over the past one hundred and seventy-six days (she had counted them all).

Even more surprising was that she realized only now, as she sat in that rowboat, that the island’s steep, sheer crags and the monumental White Mountain had been right there behind her all that time. Surely it was impossible for a person not to be influenced by the proximity of such a colossal presence—whether or not they could see it! The Queen had just begun to wonder how the White Mountain might have affected her letters when she was overcome by the sight of that same mountain reflected in the calm mirror of the sea. Just like the day she had first arrived on the island, she could see the rocks at the bottom of the sea, the swift, spiky, fist-sized fish, the aging, absentminded crabs, and star-shaped strands of green and blue seaweed.

Back at the guesthouse, Princess Pakize could not seem to emerge from that feeling of sadness she had been nursing. When the rust-tinged Cretian boat weighed anchor an hour later, then dropped it again in the waters near the Maiden’s Tower to pick up the Ottoman officials there, her husband the Chief Minister walked into the room. Together they peered into the distance to see if they could glimpse the last of the tired, haggard Ottoman clerks preparing to make their way back to Istanbul as their bundles, their bedraggled suitcases, and all their remaining possessions were loaded onto the vessel to Crete.

“The Ottoman Empire loses another territory, and its officials withdraw from this island too!” Doctor Nuri observed impassively. “Would you have liked to be on that boat to Istanbul?”

“As long as my uncle remains on the throne, it will be difficult for us to return to Istanbul.”

So it was that the question of “treason,” which would trouble and torment them until the end of their lives, took on the new form and the more benign designation of “returning to Istanbul.”

“Istanbul will no doubt applaud you for your role in allowing these poor men to finally be reunited with their families!” said Doctor Nuri. “But Abdul Hamid and the Ottoman state’s enemies here will never stop troubling you.”

“When you say Istanbul, you mean my uncle …,” said the Queen. “But we did not set the imprisoned clerks free to do my uncle or the Great Powers a favor! We did it because after the injustice they have suffered, it was our human duty to send these brave, steadfast Ottoman subjects back to their homes! It is thanks to these loyal, selfless subjects that the Ottoman state founded by my forefathers has endured for six hundred years.”

Stirred by the weight of these words, they were quiet for a time. Once the Cretian ship mooring in the waters by the Maiden’s Tower far away in the distance had finished boarding all its passengers, it blew its horn three times, just as it had done when it had first arrived. Doctor Nuri saw that the Queen’s yearning for Istanbul had brought tears to her eyes, and he tried to comfort her.

“Even if we could return to Istanbul, we would be your uncle’s prisoners there, just like everybody else,” he said. “But here, we are still the Queen and her Chief Minister, and we can continue to be of service to this beautiful island and its noble people.”