第 95 页

At home, my mother had smiled as I relayed this story, then said: “You mustn’t tell anyone at school about your great-granny Pakize in France!” This was just one of the many enigmatic pronouncements my mother would make, and whose mystery I was never able to solve no matter how many years I spent puzzling over them. I would sometimes think of these as “metaphysical” riddles, though I understood the political worries and fears that must have lain behind them after 2005, when my luggage, handbag, documents, and files would be given at least one rough search (designed to make sure that when I came back to the room, I knew exactly what had happened) every time I visited the island. By 2005 I had given up on trying to convert the old accession licenses into proper deeds and claim ownership of the Mingherian land that should have been inherited by the Queen’s heirs, yet these searches did not stop, and several documents were stolen from my bag and my desk over the years. I am sure that many of the pages in the book you are holding now must have been read before you by the agents of the Mingherian Intelligence Agency, founded by President Mazhar early in his career.

Toward the end of 1958, the teacher called my mother to school one day to tell her that I was a very bright and talented student, and that I should probably be sent abroad to Europe to continue my studies. My mother, who hoped I would be a Mingherian through and through, could have chosen not to mention the teacher’s advice to my father. But far from wanting to keep it a secret, she too agreed that I should be educated outside of Mingheria. It was thus decided that rather than going to London, I should move (with my mother) to live with my grandmother in Nice and finish primary school there, where I could also learn French. (I had already more or less figured English out from hearing it spoken at home.) It was around this time that I began to hear my mother and father mention not just my grandmother Melike but my great-grandmother Pakize too—whom they would either call Great-Granny or lovingly and respectfully refer to as the Queen—and her husband, Doctor Nuri.

My father, who had always been an entertaining and outgoing man, wrote to the Queen and the Doctor to tell them that their great-granddaughter was “a Mingherian they would be proud of.” One day, we received a fresh envelope from Marseille containing seven blank postcards showing scenes from the island in the 1900s. Great-Granny Pakize had sent her little Mingherian the postcards she had taken with her when she left the island. As I would later find out, she had also posted many of these to her sister Hatice. That year, I went to each and every location depicted on those postcards and used the simple camera my father had bought me to take black-and-white pictures of those same spots as they looked in late 1958, having the film developed at the Vanyas Photo Studio.

But before I even got the chance to post the photographs back, my father—with his characteristic generosity and ingenuity—made full use of an opportunity which happened to arise in that same period, and having obtained everyone’s approval, he arranged for us all to meet in Geneva. The World Health Organization had decided to award my great-grandfather Doctor Nuri, who had retired twenty-five years ago, a Distinguished Service Award. While the Queen and Doctor Nuri were in Geneva, looked after by my grandmother Melike, I was to stay there too. My father had booked us two panoramic rooms at the Hotel Beau Rivage for a week.

In my mind, the city of Geneva in August 1959 was an enchanted place. Like most couples who are always fighting and splitting up only to get back together again, my mother and father had been delighted to be able to leave me in safe hands and had quickly disappeared, but I did not mind too much, for my grandmother Princess Melike had clearly resolved to be happy and enjoy her time with me. Following the death of her husband (and my grandfather) Prince Sait Effendi in a plane crash five years before, she too would have liked my mother and me to move to Nice and be closer to her.

In the mornings, my grandmother Princess Melike and I would sit in our hotel room until nine o’clock, waiting until the moment the water from Geneva’s famous fountain (which was turned off at night) began soaring into the air, and afterward we would go out for long walks. My grandmother would gather her light brown hair into a bun held in place by a silver hairpin, and she had a pair of black sunglasses which—unlike my mother—she always wore. Sometimes we would hold hands and take the tram across the bridge to the opposite side of the city to visit the markets and department stores there. I would always assume my grandmother was either comparing prices or looking for something. Every now and then we would sit at a coffee shop or feed bread to the white swans swimming on the lake or stare at the even-uglier and more peculiar shapes of the boats floating on the water or pass the time in one of the city’s parks. I remember my grandmother trying to get me to talk about my parents—and specifically about how often they argued. A few times, she mentioned what a strange and distant city I lived in, then smiled and told me about her own childhood in Hong Kong. One day we went to an eleven o’clock matinee of a film that was “suitable” for me (Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle). Another time, we sat on a boat and went on a very leisurely tour of Lac Léman. Right from the first day, I knew that we were doing these things to pass the time until my grandmother Melike’s mother and father were ready to receive us.

Were it not for the twenty hours I spent (according to my calculations) with my great-grandmother Queen Pakize and my great-grandfather Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri over the course of that week, I doubt I would have ever had the strength to turn that editor’s introduction I started with into the book you are about to finish reading.

They both smiled at me when I walked in. They were staying in an identical room (with the same view of Mont Blanc and the fountain) two floors below ours, yet theirs had its own completely distinctive scent of soap and eau de cologne. Even as a ten-year-old, I could tell that they were far happier and jollier than my grandmother, and the reason for this was the unique sense of companionship and trust that endured between them.

“Mummy,” said my grandmother, addressing my great-grandmother the Queen, “Mîna has brought you a present from Mingheria!”

“Has she really? How sweet of her! Go on then, show us what you’ve brought your great-granny and great-granddaddy.”

I had been gripped by a strange shyness, and although it would soon dissipate, I felt as if I were in a dream where I had swallowed my tongue and could no longer speak.

“She has photographed the villages from your postcards the way they look now!”

To hear my grandmother Melike—who had never been to Mingheria in her life or shown any interest in the island—refer to these views of Arkaz as “village” scenes was deeply upsetting to me and also caused a great deal of confusion for the Queen and her doctor husband. Addressing them both in the formal style, my grandmother spent a little time trying to describe what the photographs showed.

“This must have taken a lot of work, my little Mingherian!” said Doctor Nuri. My great-grandfather was covered in wrinkles, and his skin whiter than white. He was sitting on an armchair in front of the window, his eyes firmly on the snowy peaks of Mont Blanc. Occasionally he would turn toward us, but most of the time he hardly moved his head at all, as if he had a crick in his neck.

Eventually I managed to gather my courage and handed my gift to the Queen. I was as timid as a self-conscious diplomat. Princess Pakize took the envelope from my hands, put it to one side, then pulled me toward her, kissing me on both cheeks before sitting me on her lap and pressing me to her bosom. She was eighty years old, and she looked thin and frail, but her arms and her chest were strong and solid.

“Is it my turn now?” said Doctor Nuri a short while later.

As I climbed off the Queen’s lamp to approach him, I realized that I’d forgotten to kiss my great-grandfather and great-grandmother’s hands, which my mother had told me again and again that I must do as soon as I saw them. But I suppose they hadn’t exactly behaved as if they had been expecting me to do that. Doctor Nuri’s face was so crinkled, and his hairy ears were so enormous, that I shivered a little as I walked up to him, but I would soon come to feel perfectly safe and comfortable in the shelter of his arms too.

Now that I had relaxed, my grandmother Melike walked out of the room, leaving me alone with them. I will now relay the things we talked about with Queen Pakize and the Prince Consort that week, not in any chronological order, but in the way I’ve remembered them ever since—that is to say, grouped by subject matter.

Me. Through our conversations, I got to know myself better. Was I happy with my life? (I was!) Did I have friends? (I did.) What language did I speak with them? (Turkish—which was true—and Mingherian, which was something of an exaggeration.) Did I know how to swim? (Yes.) How did I know how to take photographs? (My father had taught me.) Where had I got my camera? (My father had brought it from London.) From my answer to this last question, and to some of the other questions which followed it, they understood that although my father was a wealthy London businessman, I had never actually been to London, and for a moment, they fell silent. Was this something I had already known and then forgotten because I didn’t really want to think about it, or was it thanks to them that I had first realized my father had been avoiding my mother and me?

Postcards and Photographs. Except for the day Doctor Nuri was presented with his award, we spent most of our time discussing the postcards and photographs. I would sit in the middle of the sofa at the foot of the big bed, the Queen and her Chief Minister on either side of me, and we would spread the postcards and the photographs on a cushion on my lap so that we could study them together. They particularly enjoyed looking at those images in the style of the vue générale de la baie, showing a broad view of the city from the former Hamidiye Bridge, and they would reminisce fondly about the old Arkaz. “Do you remember this?” they would ask each other, pointing at a building or a bridge, and suddenly it would all come back to them. But in fact, Doctor Nuri’s memory had weakened considerably. One day I would tell him that the big building I had shown him in one of my photographs was the Arkaz Broadcasting House, and the next day he would ask me about it again, looking just as impressed by my response as if he’d heard it for the first time. Within two days, we had gone over every new building in the photographs I had taken. Sometimes I would look at Doctor Nuri’s enormous, bony hand—its cracked, wrinkled skin covered in moles and blemishes—and think how strange and even a little eerie it seemed. Even more surprising was when the Queen turned to Doctor Nuri one day and said: “Look! The Mingherian’s thumbs are just like yours!” After she said that, I started seeing the resemblance too. Every day that I visited their room, we would look at the photographs for a little while, but we would talk about other things too. One day, after we had finished studying the images, the Queen looked over at her husband, then turned to me with a wonderfully kind and gentle manner and said: “Our little Mingherian, we are very grateful to you for bringing these photographs all the way here. Now we have a gift for you too!”

“It’s not finished; they’re still making it!” said Doctor Nuri.

Mingherian and School. What they really wanted to know was how much of the teaching at school was “actually” in Mingherian. It was true that some of our schoolbooks were written in Mingherian. But I was honest about the fact that most newspapers and books on the island were published in either Greek or Turkish. The blonde school inspector’s fantasies of how advanced the teaching of Mingherian at my school had become, and the glowing reports she had prepared for her superiors, must have been inaccurate. That was what I had sensed from my conversations with them. But Queen Pakize could tell how nationalistic her little Mingherian was, and was careful not to hurt my feelings. I made sure not to hurt hers either, telling her that our elementary-school textbooks proudly spoke of her as the Queen who was the daughter of an Ottoman sultan, and the nation’s third head of state, and taught us about all the ways in which Queen Pakize had helped the poor during those terrifying days of plague. But the truth was that our schoolbooks didn’t talk about any of that, and everyone on the island thought she was dead.

Books and The Count of Monte Cristo. Another question—like “Do you have friends?”—which I would never forget for the rest of my life was when Doctor Nuri asked me: “Do you read books?”

At first I thought he must mean whether I had learned how to read yet, how quickly I could do it, and the kinds of things we read in class. When they understood from my response that I had clearly not yet discovered the pleasures of reading, I could see from the expression on their faces that they felt sorry for me (just as they had done when they had realized that my father had never taken me to London). Doctor Nuri told me that just as she used to do as a little girl, my great-granny now preferred to sit at home and read novels all day, rather than go outside.

“I’m afraid that is absolutely untrue, for of course I take great pleasure in being out and about,” said Princess Pakize.

Doctor Nuri felt his wife was being a little petulant, and in his eagerness to introduce the little Mingherian to the merits of reading, he showed me a thick and frayed pocket book that sat on Great-Granny’s bedside table: it was The Count of Monte Cristo! “Do you know it?”

I remembered the name of the author, and told them that The Three Musketeers had been screened at the Majestic Cinema in Arkaz this winter, but that my mother had gone to see it and deemed it not appropriate for my age. If my mother liked a film and thought it would be suitable for me, she would go to see the same film twice so that I could watch it too.

“All these years after the fact, Princess Pakize has managed to solve the mystery of a murder her uncle Abdul Hamid ordered in Arkaz just by reading The Count of Monte Cristo!” said Doctor Nuri.

“But you are embellishing, my darling!” said the Queen. “Mine is mere supposition.”

“I have no doubt that your supposition is correct!” said Doctor Nuri, turning his head with a little difficulty and giving his wife a loving smile.

Many years later, I was proud and overjoyed to discover while preparing her letters for publication that Princess Pakize’s hypothesis had indeed been right. But first I’d had to trawl through Istanbul’s antiquarian bookshops to find the six-volume Turkish translation of The Count of Monte Cristo published in the Arabic script three years after Abdul Hamid was deposed. The novel was originally published when Abdul Hamid was just two years old, and in its fifty-second chapter, entitled “Toxicology,” its author Alexandre Dumas reflects at length through the voice of the Count on how rat poison can be used to kill humans without leaving a trace and even makes comparisons between the East and West. The novel also suggests that malefactors who want their deeds to go undetected would do well to obtain their rat poison from several different sources, rather than a single grocer or herbalist. (Though of course this could also increase the number of pharmacists and shopkeepers who might eventually testify against him!)