第 89 页

As the boat sailed toward the open sea, the secretary gestured at the unbroken darkness and informed them that the Aziziye had arrived just before nightfall, and dropped anchor right over there.

Yes, he had indeed said “the Aziziye.” The very same Aziziye that had brought them to Mingheria instead of China, and where they had seen Bonkowski Pasha. They stared at each other in silence, caught in a state of dreamlike confusion between fear, curiosity, and anticipation. As Princess Pakize would describe in her letters, they both suddenly felt like children again, about to be taken somewhere without anyone asking them whether they wanted to go.

Moments later, the dark silhouette of the Aziziye surfaced in the moonlight. The rowboat picked up speed and reached the platform at the foot of the white ladder hanging from the ship.

For a time, the shadow of the ship covered everything in darkness. Then Doctor Nuri saw their suitcases being lifted up onto the ship. Princess Pakize was just about to step onto the ladder when the Minister of Scrutinia’s secretary stood up on the swaying rowboat and called out to them with a ceremonious air.

“Your Majesty! Your Excellency!” he began. “The Aziziye shall resume its travels from Alexandria, where you had left off, and continue on its journey to China.” When the moon briefly illuminated their figures, he bowed to them in deferential greeting. “The people of Mingheria are in your debt!” he added, looking mostly at the Queen rather than at Doctor Nuri.

With these gratifying words, the Queen climbed the ladder and boarded the ship. The familiar Russian captain with his familiar solemn bearing had come out to greet them, and smiled when he saw them. The torches in the other cabins and in the guest hall where they’d had dinner with Bonkowski Pasha had all been lit, as if in reminder that this place was a realm of its own. As they were settling into the same mahogany paneled room with the gilded mirror and the smell of dust and leather where Princess Pakize and her husband had spent many a happy hour before, the ship began to move. The Princess stopped what she was doing and climbed onto the deck. She wanted to look out at the “inimitable” landscape of Mingheria, that same view which travel guides for the Levant have been recommending to their readers throughout the twentieth century.

As the Aziziye sailed along the ridge of the Eldost Mountains, stretching north to south across the island, Princess Pakize could see their sharp volcanic peaks. Then the moon slipped back behind the clouds, and everything was dark again. Princess Pakize was gloomily thinking that she would not be able to see Mingheria again when she noticed the pale blinking beam of the Arab Lighthouse in the distance. In that same moment, the moon surfaced from among the clouds, and she saw the Castle’s pointed spires with the magnificent form of the White Mountain in the background. But this was only a glimpse, for soon the moon disappeared again. Princess Pakize gazed tearfully into the darkness, hoping she might see Mingheria again for one last time, before finally returning to her cabin.

Many Years Later

Attentive readers may have noticed that I have been more understanding toward Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri than anybody else in this book. I am their daughter’s granddaughter. I obtained my doctorate from the University of Cambridge on the subject of the islands of Crete and Mingheria during the second half of the nineteenth century, so it is only natural that I have been asked to edit Princess Pakize’s correspondence for publication.

After a stormy twenty-day journey, my great-grandmother Queen Pakize and great-grandfather Doctor Nuri arrived with a six-month delay to the port of Tianjin and traveled from there to Peking.

In the meantime, the Boxer Uprising—the reason the Ottoman Guidance Committee had been sent to China in the first place—had ended in victory for the Great Powers. The foreign invaders’ armies, assembled from many different nations, had crushed the Chinese people and their soldiers with bloody force and looted Peking for days. The Chinese rebels, including Chinese Muslims, who had been murdering Christians on the streets the year before, were slaughtered in droves by French, Russian, and German forces. (In the court of international public opinion, the only open objection to this ruthless bloodshed, and the savagery displayed by the invading armies to whom Abdul Hamid himself had lent his symbolic support, had come from the novelist Leo Tolstoy. “The greatest of novelists,” as Virginia Woolf would later call him, had denounced the Russian czar and the German kaiser Wilhelm for the massacres committed by their troops and defended the insurgent Chinese people.) Having exacted the deadly revenge demanded by Kaiser Wilhelm II, victor of the brutal war, the allied forces had invited the mullahs of the Ottoman Guidance Committee to organize a series of conferences instructing China’s Muslims on Islamic history and culture, and on Islam’s inherent pacifism.

Aware of all that had transpired on the island of Mingheria, of Abdul Hamid’s reaction, and of the possibility that Princess Pakize and her husband the doctor might be accused of treason, the British had taken care to ensure that these two distinguished figures who had belatedly arrived to join the Guidance Committee wouldn’t cross paths with the other Ottoman delegates, who had meanwhile begun to prepare for the return journey from China to Istanbul. Doctor Nuri was invited to various regions of China with Muslim populations to deliver a series of lectures on the subject of quarantine and Islam. Princess Pakize’s lively letters from Yunan, Kansu, and Sinkiang contain many observations that would be of interest today to historians of East Asian culture.

The British and French doctors who heard about Doctor Nuri’s lecture series, and remembered him from the international conferences they had all attended, invited him to join them in Hong Kong. Back then, the hospitals and laboratories the British had set up in these colonies were some of the world’s most influential and innovative institutions in the global battle against the plague—both on the bacteriological front, and in terms of quarantine methods. In 1901, Alexandre Yersin was in Indochina, working on behalf of the Institut Pasteur in Paris to try and produce a serum which could be used as a vaccine (he would not succeed), but it had been in Hong Kong that he had first identified the plague microbe seven years before, and not in a British hospital—which, as a French citizen, he wasn’t allowed to enter anyway—but in a much-more-improvised establishment. The plague microbe which struck Mingheria in 1901 had already killed hundreds of thousands of people in China since 1894. Many of the problems faced by Tung Wah Hospital, where Doctor Nuri soon began to work, were similar to those that had afflicted the Theodoropoulos and Hamidiye Hospitals too, and were also mostly caused by the public’s ignorance (many local Chinese, no matter how sick they were, refused to even set foot in this hospital purely because it was run by the British), but there were some differences too, particularly in the understanding of quarantine measures.

The Princess and the Prince Consort rented one floor of an apartment building in Hong Kong’s Victoria district, in a neighborhood inhabited mostly by British and European expatriates, and with a near-perpendicular view over the sea—just like the view of the Bosphorus from Istanbul’s Çamlıca Hill, as Princess Pakize would note in the first letter she ever wrote from this apartment. They would end up living in this place—which Princess Pakize had initially assumed would serve as a “temporary” residence until their return to Istanbul—for a full twenty-five years.

The only person in Mingheria Doctor Nuri remained in touch with was the island’s former quarantine master and current health minister, the goateed Doctor Nikos, whom Doctor Nuri had first met nine years before during an outbreak of head lice in the Ottoman garrison in Sinope. In a telegram they received from Nikos around this time, they learned that the Queen and the Chief Minister’s departure had been kept secret from the people of the island and from the general public for quite a while. The announcement had probably been delayed in the hopes of securing some kind of protection from the British in the meantime.

On the sixth of December, former Chief Scrutineer Mazhar Effendi declared himself president of Mingheria with twenty-five blank shells fired by Artillery Sergeant Sadri. At noon the next day, seven thousand people gathered in Mingheria Square, formerly known as the State Hall Square, for the most meticulously organized political pageant to have ever taken place in the island’s history. Joyous crowds watched a procession of high-school students waving tiny flags as they went, Mingherian shopkeepers and the exceptionally well-drilled Quarantine Regiment saluting the new president, and village girls from the mountainous north performing folkloristic dances in traditional costumes. Stepping out onto the balcony, President Mazhar declared that the republic was a way of life, with liberty its nourishment and the sole and common goal of all those who had gathered that day in Mingheria Square.

In those years, it was a habitual occurrence for kings and queens to be overthrown in military-bureaucratic coups and for republics to be declared straight afterward, but it was rare for an event of this sort to unfold so quietly and with so little bloodshed. Mingherian historians of the nationalist or “Marxist” persuasion have sought to add some drama to this transition by characterizing it as a “democratic bourgeois revolution.” But we can be sure that none of the developments which later took place under President Mazhar’s regime can be considered “democratic.”

The new president and former Minister of Scrutinia, Mazhar Effendi, remained wholeheartedly committed to implementing the nationalist reforms introduced by the late Commander Kâmil, founder of the Mingherian state. During his first month in power, he arranged for a committee composed of the archaeologist Selim Sahir and the island’s Greek and Muslim middle-and high-school teachers to standardize the Mingherian alphabet, which would start being taught in schools straightaway. Official documents prepared in the Mingherian script were to be given priority treatment in all government offices. (In practice, this was very difficult to achieve.) When a baby had been given one of the Commander’s preferred Mingherian names, the Registry Office would issue their birth certificate immediately, while those who chose Greek or Turkish names for their child would encounter difficulties. President Mazhar had ordered every storefront to put up a sign with the shop’s name spelled out in the new script. Greece and the Western nations had not paid too much attention to these reforms, but they did object to the harsh treatment President Mazhar meted out to the island’s Greek and Rumelian nationalists. Soon after he took power, nearly forty Rumelian “luminaries,” as well as twelve Muslim intellectuals who spoke Turkish at home and possessed extensive personal libraries, were accused of separatism and locked up in the Castle prison.

As a complement to this policy of Mingherianization, thousands of photographs of Commander Kâmil and Zeynep were printed and displayed with renewed enthusiasm all over the country. The Commander and Zeynep’s meeting, their courtship, and the story of how they had finally been able to get married despite the many obstacles in their way, and all thanks to the Mingherian language, became the basis of elementary-and middle-school teaching. The Mingherian Alphabet and Zeynep’s Reading Book were also very popular. Throughout all these cultural and political schemes, President Mazhar never sought to erase the memory of Princess Pakize’s reign as queen and, on the contrary, Mingherian-history schoolbooks gave Queen Pakize’s rule the humble and respectable position it deserved. To this date, every Mingherian is proud of the fact that the daughter of a sultan was once “queen” of the island and involved, however fleetingly, in its freedom and independence movement.

Not long after losing her throne to a coup just like the one that had ended her father’s reign, Princess Pakize sat at her panoramic desk in Hong Kong and began penning a rather sorrowful letter to her sister Hatice. Having noted that her father Murad V’s sultanate had lasted for ninety-three days, while she had been queen for one hundred and one days (from the twenty-seventh of August to the fifth of December 1901), Princess Pakize told her sister that she was curious to know whether her father knew about this, and that she missed them all very much. She should have been “perfectly content” in Hong Kong, where she could live as she wished to and walk freely all over the city, but she missed her sisters, her father, and Istanbul so much that she couldn’t be happy and was able to alleviate her sense of longing only by writing these letters.

A year later, Princess Pakize would come to feel even lonelier in Hong Kong following a scandal her sister Hatice became embroiled in. Back in Istanbul, Hatice had been having an affair with Mehmed Kemalettin Pasha, the handsome husband of Abdul Hamid’s favorite daughter, Princess Naime (Hatice’s cousin), when the love letters they had been tossing each other over the garden wall had fallen into Abdul Hamid’s hands. The Sultan had immediately separated his young, dashing son-in-law Kemalettin Pasha (who also happened to be the son of Gazi Osman Pasha, hero of the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War) from his daughter Naime, stripped him of his rank, and exiled him to Bursa. (As this was also an important political development, the news even made it into the New York Times, and Pierre Loti wrote about it too.) Back then, Istanbul society was even more “rigid” than it is today, and rumors of the romantic rivalry between Princess Hatice and her cousin Princess Naime (whom the more spiteful gossips would often openly describe as “ugly” or “hunchbacked”), the two sultans’ daughters whose waterside mansions in Ortaköy neighbored each other, quickly spread all over the city. House arrest in Bursa was of course a lighter sentence compared with conditions in the Ta’if fortress where Mithat Pasha had been sent, or the prisons of Sinope or Mingheria. The Sultan did not punish Princess Hatice, whom he had always been especially fond of ever since she had been a child, but he did keep her under close scrutiny for a time, during which it became much harder to correspond with her.

Rumors of the “scandal” did not reach Princess Pakize from Hatice but through other sources. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Istanbul newspapers would write that Princess Hatice had purposely arranged for the love letters to be handed to Abdul Hamid so that she could avenge her father by upsetting her uncle. Another theory put forward in this period was that Hatice had been sourcing rat poison from several different pharmacies and passing it to the Rumelian kitchen staff in her cousin’s mansion next door so that she could have Naime poisoned and marry her husband. This gossip must have reminded Sultan Abdul Hamid once more that it was possible to use arsenic-laced ratsbane to poison people “without leaving a trace.”