“Yes, a lot of people have died,” said Nihat. “But I just don’t believe what he said, it’s slander. When I asked him about the blood he didn’t say anything, he couldn’t answer. If they’d circumcised them, wouldn’t they be covered in blood?”

  The doctor raised his beer. “Come on, let’s end the evening on a positive note. We’re all very excited. We’ll carry on tomorrow.”

  The three tipsy officers left the restaurant and went their separate ways. Even if the evening had gone a bit sour, it had ended on a good note. The doctor wanted to get home as soon as possible, because he had his nightly letter to write. He was going to tell Melahat about everything that had happened. “It depends on the time of death, Nihat,” he murmured. “If enough time has passed, dead bodies don’t bleed. And in any event, those bodies would already have been covered in blood.” But he had no intention of telling Nihat about this medical fact and getting into an argument about the conflict between the Armenians and the Muslims. After all, they were citizens of the same country.

  The secret notes of a doctor who suddenly became famous

  BEFORE HE’D EVEN BEEN able to digest what was happening, the doctor had suddenly become the most famous man in Thessaloniki. When he walked the streets and squares he’d known for years, people stopped talking and stared at him as he passed, though no one had the courage to approach him. It was as if there was an invisible bell jar over the doctor. The only thing everyone from seven to seventy talked about was the sultan having been exiled to their city. Everyone’s heart was racing, and everyone wore an indelible expression of surprise. It was as if they were dreaming a shared dream. The doctor was the only person who could enter and leave the sealed area, the only person who saw the former sultan every day and then walked among the people. This made him seem like a mortal who went to Mount Olympus to visit the gods. Though in fact he only went to the Olympos nightclub. He continued to work at the hospital, he met his friends frequently, and every night when he went home he wrote to Melahat. The only deviations from his old routine were his visits to the Alatini mansion and the notes he wrote on what he saw and heard there in the little notebooks distributed by pharmaceutical companies. He wrote about his conversations with the sultan, and although he didn’t think these notes would ever be published, he felt it was important to keep a record for posterity. The man felt the need to talk to someone and was telling him amazing things; he had a feeling there was more to come. Still, he felt it best not to mention these notes to anyone, and indeed to hide them where no one could find them. It was strictly forbidden for the former sultan to have any relationship with the outside world, to receive or send any news. If the new government heard about it, he might even face a court-martial. The sultan’s brother Reşad, whose name had been banned for thirty-three years, had come to the throne as Mehmet V Reşad, male children would now be given his name, but everyone knew that Reşad was a puppet controlled by the army. The leaders of the Committee for Union and Progress had taken over the administration. He wouldn’t be surprised if they shed so much blood that people would miss the old sultan. The “sick man of Europe” needed surgery, and unfortunately surgery was a bloody business.

  As the doctor wrote his spidery notes in the Bayer notebook he occasionally felt spooked, as if he were being watched, and he would glance around the room and out the window. At the moment, even mentioning the sultan’s name was a great risk. On the first page of the notebook he wrote: “The words of the deposed monarch Abdülhamid.” On the first page of another notebook he wrote: “Concerning Abdülhamid’s medical condition.”

  He had to be careful about his phrasing. Then later he thought to himself, “His tyrannical reign is over, why am I so worried?” After all, had freedom not arrived, had the oppressor not been overthrown? Yes, power had changed hands, but a voice within told him to be even more cautious in this new era. The former sultan used to send his opponents into exile, but these people gunned their opponents down in the streets. He’d seen everything with his own eyes in Thessaloniki.

  Bored ladies—An opera at the palace—A beauty who was often pregnant—Sarah Bernhardt

  THE MANSION WAS EMPTY, the imperial family had no one else to talk to, they were under a military blockade, they were only allowed to open one or two shutters from time to time so there was usually little light; they missed all the fun they used to have in the palace, the private operas, the exotic animals, the joy of opening the packages of elegant clothes sent by the ambassador in Paris; they all had long since moved past being bored to tears and were now on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The daughters were careful not to make any sound apart from music so as not to disturb their father, but they desperately had to find some solution or they would not be able to endure this prison. The mothers, who were experiencing the same boredom themselves, didn’t know what to do to amuse the young girls. They took turns at the piano, playing both Oriental and Occidental music, and rondos, barcaroles, and waltzes. Unfortunately the music was not enough to entertain them, and indeed it could be irritating because the piano, which was flanked by two large candelabras, was out of tune.

  One afternoon when they were languishing on the top floor, Şadiye Sultan suggested playing a game. Let’s see who knows how many rooms, halls, and bathrooms there are in our palaces. All of them, and particularly Ayşe, thought this was a good idea. In any event, they were only interested in themselves. For them, the word “Ottoman” described a family rather than an empire. The family was a closed world, they felt they were above everyone and everything and their lives were completely filled with concerns such as who wanted to marry whom, which princes were at odds with each other, who had how much money, who was in love with whom, which prince had a bright future, the newborn members of the dynasty, the magnificent circumcision festivals, who was wearing the nicest jewelry, clothing brought from Paris, furs, cloth, earrings, necklaces, broches, makeup, perfumes.

  “Shall we start with Dolmabahçe Palace?” asked Ayşe Sultan.

  “Why not,” said Naciye Hanım. “You start.”

  Ayşe looked up at the high, decorated ceiling, and after thinking a while said, “First the number of rooms. Dolmabahçe has two hundred and eighty-five rooms. There are forty-four halls. There are also sixty-eight bathhouses and sixty-eight toilets.”

  Her mother, Müşfika Hanım, said, “Good for you. How do you manage to keep so much information in your head? That’s amazing.”

  Şadiye Sultan said, “Fine, so how many tons of gold were used in the ceiling decorations?”

  “Fourteen tons,” said Ayşe Sultan, and once again she was congratulated.

  “How many lightbulbs are in the chandelier in the great hall?” said Refia Sultan, thinking she was asking an impossible question, but Ayşe Sultan answered at once, “Seven hundred and fifty lightbulbs. The chandelier was a gift from Queen Victoria. It weighs four tons. It’s the largest chandelier in the world.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Fatma Pesend Hanım. “You’ve become an expert on palaces.”

  Ayşe Sultan smiled in gratitude, but didn’t feel the need to say that the information came from a page from an old French magazine she’d grabbed as they were leaving the palace, and that she’d read over and over again out of boredom. It contained a sentence she hadn’t repeated—”Dolmabahçe Palace alone was enough to bankrupt the already indebted Ottoman treasury.” Customs officials had cut this page out of the magazine and sent it to the palace. All books and magazines sent from abroad were censored in this manner. All customs officials had the right to remove whatever pages they wanted. They cut out pages they sensed were subversive and sent them to the palace. Ayşe Sultan had been in the habit of reading these pages whenever she managed to get her hands on them. A book titled The Laws of Thermodynamics had been sent to the palace because a customs official had mistaken the word “dynamics” for “dynamite,” which was one of many forbidden words. Ayşe Sultan had never quite understood why the book had been censored.

  In fact the issue of censorship went far beyond what a young girl who loved her dear father could see. The sultan was constantly restricting the press; he wouldn’t allow people he didn’t like to publish newspapers; he had writers fired, exiled, or imprisoned, but he lavished gold on newspapers like Sabah that constantly praised him. He also undermined opposition publications by buying up the newspaper’s shares. As if this wasn’t enough, he paid a lot of money to foreign newspapers to cut articles that were critical of him. He owned the Korrespondans newspaper in Vienna and the Oriyent newspaper in Paris.

  The magazine page in Ayşe Sultan’s pocket was the only souvenir of the “home” that they could now see only in their dreams, that they’d left to the sound of cannon fire as the Guard Corps surrendered to the Movement Army from Thessaloniki, people rushing this way and that, animals scampering to escape the noise, and from which they’d been taken by force and loaded into brougham carriages. When they heard the approaching rebel army, the night watchmen, Albanian doormen, gardeners, butlers, cooks, eunuchs, chamberlains, and minor officials all disappeared into the night. When the guard unit of the Second Army, which had been assigned to protect the palace, began to arm themselves, the sultan said, “Put those arms away, not a single shot will be fired, I will not shed Muslim blood,” so they surrendered to the rebels.

  The palace wasn’t a single building, it was a city. It was a city inhabited by thousands of people, with its own mosque, police station, bank, hospital, guard unit, opera, theater, ceramic factory, carpentry workshop, and zoo. Every Friday her father boarded a solid-gold carriage flanked by cavalry or infantry to attend Friday prayers at the Hamidiye Mosque at the bottom of the hill. People would come from all over Istanbul, jostling one another and peering over shoulders to get a glimpse of him from a distance. It was on one of these festive occasions that they tried to blow up her dear father with a bomb. Twenty-six people and a number of thoroughbred horses were blown to pieces, but God had protected her father. Her dear father’s heart was so strong, he was so fearless that amid the carnage he seized a whip and drove the carriage back to the palace himself, showing the people that their beloved sultan was still alive and could not be disposed of so easily. Some time after this incident he’d explained to his daughter why censorship, surveillance, exile, and other precautions were necessary. “We have so many enemies within and without, my girl. If you knew how many assassination plots we hear about every day, if I hadn’t established such an effective secret service I would have died a hundred times already. They tried to enter the palace through the sewers, there were plans to smear poison on the arms of my throne during a holiday celebration, they’ve tried to incite the people to rebellion. Censorship is essential. The European press publishes slander cooked up by the nations that are trying to destroy us, some traitors at home repeat this slander because they’ve swallowed the hook of freedom that was so cynically thrown to them. The only thing the great powers want is to topple this great empire and share it out among themselves. Do you understand now, my girl? We’re in danger because they know that as long as I’m alive I will not allow this. We have to keep our eyes open.”

  Ayşe Sultan was so moved by her father’s words that she retired to her room and wept for hours, she cursed those who had tried to kill such a great and compassionate ruler, she prayed fervently till morning for God to protect him and smite his enemies. After all, he was accountable to no one but God.

  Her compassionate father was depicted on the covers of European magazines as a bloodthirsty killer, but they didn’t call King Leopold a barbarian even though he’d had thousands of people’s hands cut off. These people were hypocrites. Her father was right.

  The bored women of the mansion soon found a new way to entertain themselves. They played out scenes from the Italian operas they’d seen at the palace. They sang Verdi arias to the accompaniment of the piano, acting out grandiose scenes in their pitiful clothes, but it was enough to keep them amused.

  At the palace, which now seemed almost imaginary, when the sultan went to bed in the evening, he would have novels read to him from behind a screen at the foot of his bed, but occasionally, when he didn’t drift off to sleep, he would clap his hands and say, “Opera!” When word was sent to the Italian performers, who held ranks such as pasha, major, and colonel on the palace staff, they had half an hour to prepare to appear onstage. The director of the palace theater was Arturo Stravolo, an accomplished performer from Naples who had immigrated to Istanbul with his parents, his uncles and aunts, his wife, and his brothers, all of them also performers, and entered the sultan’s service. The sultan did not want to see any play more than once, so one of Stravolo’s duties was to travel to Europe, watch new plays, and decide which ones to stage for his master.

  All of the performers were attached to a military unit and had to wear uniforms denoting their rank. Angelo was a lieutenant, Luigi the violinist was a captain, Gaetano the baritone was a colonel, and Nicola the skilled tenor was an adjutant major. When Aranda Pasha the conductor received word in the middle of the night that he was to perform A Masked Ball, the orchestra had to be ready to perform the piece in half an hour. On some days the sultan watched plays with family and guests, but at night he would sit alone in his box. If there was something in a play he didn’t understand, or if there was anything about the performance that puzzled him, he would stop everyone with a gesture of his hand. Everything had to be explained in detail to His Highness before the performance could resume. Also, the sultan did not like unhappy endings, so the ending of every opera from La Traviata to Il Trovatore was changed. For instance, Violetta didn’t die in the end but was seen dancing happily.

  Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous French actress of the period, came to the palace theater to perform and was presented to the sultan. “Madame,” he said to her, “it’s said that in Paris you performed a death scene so realistically that the audience panicked because they thought you were really dead. Is this true?”

  Bernhardt, flattered by the sultan’s attention, said, “Yes, Your Majesty, what they say is true, and this evening I will show you.”

  The sultan, who had forbidden death scenes, hurriedly said, “No, no, madame, what I would like to request is that you not play this scene so realistically, or, if possible, to cut the scene altogether.”

  The actor the sultan most enjoyed watching was Arturo’s beautiful wife, Cecilia. He wanted her to play the lead role in every play, but because for biological reasons this was not always possible, the troupe had to go to great lengths, using wigs, makeup, and dimmed lights to disguise another actress to resemble her. Because Cecilia was frequently pregnant, her growing belly would become unsuitable for the young female roles she played and she would stay away from the stage until she gave birth. However, it was worth the trouble; the Italian performers were paid well and lived in luxury, and Arturo the director became the first person in Istanbul to own an automobile. The caliph, the protector of Islam for whom the people of Anatolia prayed, was a fan of European culture. He used to say that Turkish music made him feel gloomy, but that European music cheered him. He would say, “They call it Turkish music, but it came from Persia and Greece. Turks have no music of their own except pipes and drums.” He loved opera. The sultan was full of contradictions, though, and sometimes he would get bored halfway through the play. When Stravolo sensed that the sultan was getting bored, he knew enough to stop in the middle of a scene and bring jugglers, magicians, and acrobats onto the stage.

  The snake’s hands—Sherlock Efendi—Translation department

  “THE NIGHTS IN THESSALONIKI are longer than they are in Istanbul,” said the sultan. “I’ve always had trouble sleeping, but it’s worse here. I sit in the armchair and smoke cigarettes until morning.”

  “Here you don’t have the entertainments you had at the palace, that’s why,” said the doctor. There was a veiled mockery in his tone, and he seemed pleased with himself. “People say you had detective novels read to you in the bedroom and that when you were bored you watched opera. Is this true?”

  “Yes,” said the sultan, “that’s true. Indeed I even established a translation department. Day and night they translated the latest books from Europe for me.”

  “Is it true that you admire Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Yes, but I used to admire Rocambole. Have you heard of him, doctor? There was a famous French writer called Pierre Ponson, his lead character was a man named Rocambole who could do amazing things. I used to like him better than Sherlock, but then I got angry at the man and stopped reading him.”

  “Who was it you were angry with? The writer or Rocambole?”

  “Why would I be angry at my favorite character? I was angry at the writer, of course. I’d had his latest book translated, Ismet Ağa was reading it at the foot of my bed. There was a passage that read, ‘It was as cold as a snake’s hands.’ I warned him to read it correctly, how could a snake have hands? He insisted that this was what it said. I immediately had the translators called in. They all came in the middle of the night, they were half asleep, they’d dressed hastily and they were disconcerted. I asked them to explain what they meant by snake’s hands. I told them I was going to fire them all for such a blatant error in translation. They swore they’d translated the sentence accurately. ‘That’s what the author wrote, we were surprised too but we didn’t change it.’ I was confused. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’m going to look into the matter, if what you say is true you can stay on, otherwise I don’t know.’ They brought the book in the original French, they showed me the sentence, and yes, they were right, the man had actually written this: Elle avait les mains aussi froides que celles d’un serpent.