The girl didn’t understand, and gave him a puzzled look.

  “Palais de Çırağan,” he said to her. “Palais imperial.”

  The owner of the shop went over to her and whispered into her ear. The girl gave him an elegant curtsy and said, “Excuse me, Your Majesty, excuse me.”

  That night, as he thought about her, Hamid wondered if revealing his identity had been the right thing to do. What if I scared her off?

  The following day he didn’t go to the shop. In the evening, at closing time, he waited in his carriage on the corner. The staff came out one by one. Then there she was, the Belgian miracle. She was wearing a coat with a fur collar and a pair of elegant gloves. She parted from the others and began walking toward Galatasaray. The young Hamid began running after her. “Oh,” he said. “Did I get here too late, is the shop closed?”

  The young woman looked at him in surprise. “Yes, Your Majesty, but if you like I can open it for you right away.” She turned and took two steps toward the shop.

  “No, no, there’s no need, I can come back tomorrow.”

  “But you came all this way.”

  “Well, at least I had the pleasure of seeing you.”

  The young woman seemed to blush slightly.

  “But I would like to ask something of you. My carriage is waiting right here. Might I drop you home?”

  He saw her hesitate.

  “Don’t disappoint me. For a long time I’ve been looking for an opportunity to converse with you on matters other than shopping.”

  She smiled and said, “D’accord, majeste.”

  What followed was like a dream for Hamid. Listening to the young woman’s voice as the carriage rattled over the cobblestones to Pangaltı made him happier than he’d ever been.

  He brought her home again the following day. And the day after that, and so on.

  Meanwhile he spent a lot of time brooding. Being a prince was a great obstacle to his being with this woman. No heir to the throne could marry a Christian woman who had not converted to Islam. He could not have children with her. If, God forbid, his uncle should hear about it he’d get angry and send him to Fezzan, deep in the desert of Libya. The prince would be happy to forgo the throne for Flora, in any event he had no ambitions in that direction, but they still would never allow their union.

  One evening he gathered all his courage and invited her to dinner at his home.

  “Don’t disappoint me, mademoiselle, please.”

  Lying in his bed in Thessaloniki under the influence of heroin, he felt the touch of Flora’s skin on his old body, flames rose up within him as he felt her lips on his. “Flora,” he moaned.

  His time with Flora flashed before his eyes, their secret marriage, how he kept her hidden like a treasure in his mansion in Tarabya, showing her to no one, being with her day and night, skin to skin, together, it was as if he had come across a spring in the desert, he tried to drink his fill from it but still couldn’t quench his thirst, that beautiful year, that beautiful woman, that beautiful lovemaking, those burning vows…

  The sultan’s dry, bony hands moved as if he were putting on a pair of gloves, and as he remembered those times, a soft, tender smile spread across his face. It was perhaps the first time he’d smiled since being brought to the mansion.

  Unfortunately, as the effects of the heroin wore off he had to come back to the bitterness of his reality, and he was unable to return to his “eternal bliss” with Flora.

  He had to make the most difficult decision of his life when Mithat Pasha and his friends came, saw that Murad V had indeed gone mad, decided to depose him, and offered him the sultanate on the condition that he proclaim constitutional monarchy. On one side was the imperial crown, which he’d thought he didn’t want but which excited him when it became a real possibility, and on the other was the deep love that still turned his head. He couldn’t have both. If his secret marriage became known, it could be an obstacle to his dreams of the sultanate. Perhaps the only solution was for Flora to convert to Islam and enter the harem, but this was a very strange solution. She was a free woman, she would never accept this. The young prince writhed in turmoil. His ancestor Mehmet the Conqueror’s mother and wife never converted to Islam, but that had been a different age.

  The adventure ended with broken hearts and tears, with him ascending to the throne and her getting out of a carriage in front of the Belgian embassy and telling the guards at the door, “My name is Flora Cordier, I’m a Belgian citizen. I want to go home.”

  The marriage that Abdülhamid thought he’d managed to keep secret had long been common knowledge among foreign intelligence services; indeed in a report to Lord Salisbury, Benjamin Disraeli had referred to Flora as the new Roxelana. Just as Roxelana guided Süleyman the Magnificent, Hamid’s sultanate would be guided by Flora. But this remained an unfulfilled dream. Because hundreds of years had passed and Hamid wasn’t Süleyman, nor was Flora Roxelana.

  Thus Hamid’s monogamous life came to an end, and he began living like an Oriental sultan with the women in his harem. He had many wives and hundreds of concubines. And as he grew older, the girls he summoned were younger.

  The doctor’s anxieties increase

  THE DOCTOR WAS QUITE anxious as he returned home through the deserted, cobblestone streets of the Muslim quarter. The newspapers didn’t mention it, indeed they said the opposite, but from what he heard at the hospital and the news he received from the front, the war was going badly.

  He sat at his desk, took out a sheet of writing paper, and began writing a love letter.

  It’s difficult to believe, but the great empire we thought would last as long as the world is melting before our eyes like a sputtering candle. There’s terrible news from the front. After Eastern Romelia, it seems as if we’re completely withdrawing from the Balkans. We fear they may even take Thessaloniki. The Greek and Bulgarian armies are headed this way.

  For the first time, he didn’t feel like writing words of love to Melahat, and he left the letter unfinished. The visible collapse of the empire distressed him day and night. He even had trouble breathing. It was clear that these young, inexperienced committee members, who were becoming more thuggish, oppressive, and quick to shed blood, weren’t up to the job of governing. He was angry at Enver, but he didn’t have the courage to say this to anyone. His life would be in danger. If the sultan was telling the truth, he’d only had four or five people executed during his thirty-three year reign, and they were all monstrous murderers, but the number of people his friends were killing was much higher. They didn’t question what they were doing. Unfortunately they were behaving like a gang of assassins. Since the old man had been overthrown, political factions had been tearing the empire apart. Governments could not hold together. The uprisings in the Balkans had caught them unprepared. Now the government of Gazi Muhtar Pasha had resigned. The liberal party, which opposed the committee, had won the elections, but the two parties continued to clash. Each saw the other party as a greater threat than the enemy. The army was also divided in two.

  Perhaps more than two. The committee, the liberals, and the conservative officers, and the older and younger officers who tried to undermine each other. There’s so much hatred in this country, everyone hates each other, everyone is trying to cut each other’s throats. It was delusional to think that one man was responsible for this mess. But that wasn’t the truth. The problems that raged after the man was overthrown revealed that perhaps hatred of him was the only thing these factions had in common.

  The doctor was taken aback. Did this mean he was starting to think favorably about the dictator? Had his close contact at the Alatini mansion brought him to the point where his opinions were changing? If this was the case, he should be ashamed of having such a weak character. What about March 31, he thought. Hadn’t the crafty old man organized the revolt of the reactionary soldiers that drenched Istanbul in blood? Every time he brought the subject up, the man would swear on everything sacred that he had no hand in this. The incident got out of hand because of the incompetence of the pashas. Otherwise, why would a rebellion be organized in the capital, and why would it be allowed to proceed? Was there any logic in this, for God’s sake?

  The doctor finished a cigarette and lit another one, then poured himself a healthy measure of Bulgarian brandy in the hope that it might ease his heartache. He heaved a deep sigh.

  What was going to happen to the attractive, fascinating, cosmopolitan people of Thessaloniki?

  A festival of severed hands—Islam learns from the West

  WHEN THE DOCTOR WENT to the mansion the following day, he found the former sultan rested and carefully dressed. He was far from the state he’d been in the day before. Neither of them mentioned what had happened. It seemed best to forget it.

  As they were drinking their coffee, the old man suddenly asked, “Are we at war? Doctor, please tell me the truth. Are we at war? I think I have the right to know at least this much.”

  The doctor said, “No. Where did you get this idea? Did someone say something?”

  “No,” said the sultan, “no one has said anything, but for some time now I’ve been sensing something. When I look out the window, I see the officers having heated discussions. The other day I saw one of them pointing to something on a map. And there’s also…well…”

  “Go ahead. There’s also?”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this. The other day, the pencils they brought for my son were wrapped in a scrap of newspaper. It was torn and crumbled, I couldn’t make out much, but there was something about the state of the army, and the lack of weapons and ammunition. Then it occurred to me, perhaps we’re at war.”

  “No, no, we’re not at war. And even if we were, you know I don’t have the authority to tell you. And we have a twenty-five-thousand-man army in Thessaloniki.”

  “Yes, I’m sure we do,” said the sultan. He thought for a time. “Do you know, I’m terrified of war. Whether you win or lose, it wearies the people, drags the nation into misery, war is a terrible thing. Many have criticized me for taking this position, but none of them know what a disaster war is. I’m in favor of solving international problems through diplomacy. God help us if the new government goes to war…”

  The sultan offered the doctor a cigarette. As they smoked, the old man leaned forward, looked into the doctor’s eyes, and asked an unexpected question.

  “Do you think I’m a murderer?”

  The doctor was taken aback. “Excuse me, I don’t understand.”

  “Am I the Red Sultan that was described in the foreign press, do I have blood on my hands? I see that even you hesitate to answer this. Among the countless slanders about me, two of them bother me a great deal. The first is the shaykh al-Islam’s fatwa that I harmed Islam and the Quran. Was I the kind of sultan to be deposed for this reason? They wouldn’t have done this if they feared God.”

  The doctor fidgeted uneasily in his seat, he tried to interrupt what was turning into a monologue, but the old man raised his hand to silence him.

  “Do you know the King of Belgium? Leopold II. Isn’t he a civilized, European king? But do you know what this man did in the Congo? Of course not. The European press was busy depicting me covered in blood, but they said nothing about what this king did to the people of the Congo. Ten million people were killed in the Congo on the king’s orders. Can you imagine that, ten million people, including women and children. Do you know what else they did? They cut off millions of people’s hands. I’ve seen photographs. It’s an unbelievable scene, it’s heartbreaking to see children with no hands. I always avoided war and killing, but they called me the Red Sultan and they said Leopold was civilized. And what should we call the Russian tsar? He sent countless people to Siberia to die. But they tolerated this because he’s Christian. I’m the only guilty one because I caused problems for the powers that were trying to tear the empire apart.”

  At this point the doctor raised his hand. “I understand you, but please allow me,” he said. The sultan was not accustomed to being interrupted, and he gave the doctor a look of amazement, but he stopped talking.

  “Excuse me, but you sent a great many people into exile, you broke up families. Some of them died in the wilderness. They never saw their homes again.”

  “Stop, stop for a moment. Yes, what you say is true. To deal with threats against myself and the state, I had to send a lot of people into exile. But I didn’t seize their property or take their lives. Indeed, I paid salaries to people in exile, so they could live comfortably. Can this be compared to cutting off heads or hands? Please, answer me, are they the same thing?”

  “Of course not,” said the doctor in surprise. “Ten million people, you said. That’s unimaginable.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the sultan. “And he had thousands of severed hands brought to Belgium, to his palace. It seems he enjoyed looking at them.”

  “It really is unbelievable,” said the doctor. “How could anyone do something like that?”

  “Did I do anything even close to this? Did I?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Then write this, tell people, for the love of God, I don’t want people to have a false picture of me, tell them about what happens in foreign countries. I’m an old man on the verge of death. Before I surrender my soul, I need the truth to be known and to be remembered well.”

  “Please calm yourself, sir. This much excitement is not good for you.”

  “How can I be calm, doctor? How can I be calm? Do you think it’s easy to be called a murderer when you haven’t committed any crime? The Armenians call me a killer.”

  The doctor remembered an episode from his youth in Istanbul. Yes, as the man said, he’d pardoned the Armenian terrorists, but the next day Muslims, including Turks, Kurds, and Bosnians, broke down their Armenian neighbors’ doors and killed everyone they found. It was a massacre.

  But the doctor didn’t want to bring this up and get into an argument with the man. It was clear he wanted to influence him and get him to write his defense.

  “Look,” continued the sultan, “I always treated my subjects well. I treated everyone equally, the way a father treats his children. I made a lot of Armenian families wealthy, all of our palaces and mansions were built by the Balyan family, there were Armenian ministers in my governments. The same goes for the Greeks. I loved Zarifi the money changer enough to address him as ‘father,’ Karatodori Pasha represented me at the Berlin Conference, and you already know about Musurus Pasha. There were many others. Ask the chief rabbi how I treated the Jews. Didn’t I build a hospital for them on the Golden Horn? You’re a doctor, you must know about it. I did this, but what did the European monarchs do? They exploited every corner of the world and traded in slaves.”

  The doctor was overwhelmed, the old man was acting as if he were defending himself in court, and it was getting to be too much. He waited for the man to pause to inhale from his cigarette, then jumped to his feet and hurriedly said, “Excuse me. I have to go; they’re waiting for me at the hospital.”

  Reluctantly, the sultan said, “Fine. Good luck. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The doctor had just reached the door when the man called out after him. “There’s something I should say in order to be fair. Franz Joseph was different from the others. When I got sick in Vienna, he cared for me in his palace like a tender father for three weeks. I have to give him his due. Wait, wait a moment. It occurred to me a little while ago when I was talking about the hands. I can tell killers from their hands. Their hands are different. People whose thumb knuckles are longer than their index finger knuckles are prone to commit murder. That’s why I always look at people’s hands first.”

  The doctor heaved a deep sigh as soon as he was out in the garden. He was bored by so much talk about emperors, tsars, kings, and queens. The hospital was full of wounded soldiers, dark clouds were approaching Thessaloniki from the horizon.

  Involuntarily he looked at his thumb. He hadn’t committed murder himself, but he felt complicit in the murders he knew had been committed by committee members, and sometimes this weighed heavily on his conscience. No, this wasn’t the thumb of a murderer.

  He’d spent his childhood and youth in Istanbul under this man’s rule. In the streets Albanians sold liver, Greeks sold fish, and Serbs sold milk and yogurt. And the Armenian neighbors were always subjected to persecution.

  There was a lot of movement on the streets of Thessaloniki. Military vehicles were coming and going, long-faced officers strode by without even noticing the soldiers who saluted them. There were so many wounded men in the hospital garden he could barely get through. Istanbul had no idea what it was doing. The great empire was paralyzed. As always, the newspapers were full of false news, they were trying to present the situation as much better than it was.

  As he struggled with these dark thoughts, which had caused him a severe headache, he did not know that he would receive the most painful news of his life from the friends he would meet that evening.

  As he went to the mansion the following day, his headache persisted despite the medications he’d taken. He wasn’t at all in the mood to deal with the man that day, but he had no choice. The sultan’s need to talk, to unburden himself, had become maddening, he never shut up. His conversations with the doctor had become an essential part of his daily routine, like the cold baths, walking for half an hour in the hall, prayers, cigarettes, and his two cups of coffee.

  A night of love in Istanbul—Woman, have you no husband?

  THE DOCTOR’S MIND WAS elsewhere that day, he was pensive, he only half listened to the man’s constant chatter. The crafty sultan noticed the doctor’s lack of interest and tried to catch his attention with a slight smile. “I’m going to tell you something today that’s going to leave you completely surprised. It’s a secret that no one knows.” The doctor couldn’t help feeling excited and curious. The sultan glanced around to make sure the chamberlains were not in the room, then leaned toward the doctor with a strange glint in his eyes and almost whispered, “What I’m going to tell you now doesn’t have anything to do with politics. It involves a sultan and an empress, but it’s a love story rather than a political story.” A mischievous smile spread across his face, he knew he had the doctor’s attention.