Chapter 11: The Discipline of Expansion

Chapter 11: Chapter 11: The Discipline of Expansion

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 3 July 1902

The guild dues were the first thing Ayaan wrote in the ledger that morning, and he wrote them with the care of a man signing a contract.

Stationers’ guild, dues for the year: forty kuru?. Paid from the counter.

It was the cost of being permitted to exist, and he was content to pay it. A debt to a guild was a smaller thing than a quarrel with one.

He turned the page and totaled the half year.

Profit from January to the end of June stood at two hundred and ninety-eight kuru?, after the dues. Cash in the box was five hundred and twenty kuru?, and the stock on the shelves was worth three hundred and ten.

The numbers were better than any he had written before. They were also the numbers that his mother had warned him about.

A man who grows too fast is looked at.

He had thought about her words for a week.

She was right, and she had left one thing unsaid, which was that a man who did not grow at all would be crushed by those who did.

The answer had to lie between the two. It had to be growth that was slow enough to be unremarkable and certain enough to be real.

"You are doing it again," said Zeynep from the crate behind the counter.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at the page and waiting for it to explain itself."

He closed the ledger. She had a way of seeing his thoughts a moment before he finished having them, and he had stopped trying to hide it.

Zeynep held out the daily sheet, written in her small straight capitals. It recorded the customers, the sales, and the hour at which each boy had come to the counter.

She had also brought a bundle of papers tied with string.

"What are those?"

"Invoices. My father keeps them in a box under the stairs, and he does not know that I have read them." She untied the string with a composed expression. "He buys paper from three houses, nibs from two, and ink from a man in Galata who has raised his price twice this year."

"And?"

"And he pays less than you do, for every item, and he does not know why. I think it is because he buys by the crate and you buy by the ream."

Ayaan reached for the papers. He read the first invoice, and then the second, and the pattern was as plain as she had said.

"The more a merchant buys at one time, the less he pays for each piece," he said slowly.

"Yes. But you cannot buy by the crate, because a crate costs more than you can spare."

"Not if I buy a crate that I sell quickly." He stopped. "The danger is not the price. The danger is the money that sits in the crate while it waits to be sold."

Zeynep nodded. "That is what I thought."

She tilted her head. "So how do we know which items to buy by the crate?"

"We measure," he said. "For every item that we sell, we count how many days it takes to sell a ream, a gross, a dozen. Only the ones that sell in a month are worth buying in bulk."

"And the rest?"

"The rest we buy in small lots, and we test."

She picked up her pencil. "Then I will make a second sheet, for the days."

Ayaan wrote a rule on the inside cover, below the others.

Never less than one third of all capital in coin. Never buy in bulk what does not sell within a month.

He looked at it, and he thought that it was a rule that would still be true in a hundred years.

II

Constantinople, Sirkeci — 15 July 1902

Mustafa Efendi agreed to the visit on one condition, which was that he would not be asked to say a word.

"I will walk in with you," he said at the corner of the lane. "I will say that you are the sons and daughters of a neighbor, and I will sit and drink coffee. What you buy, and at what price, is your affair."

"That is all I ask, Efendi," said Ayaan.

"It is more than most boys would ask. Most would want me to tell them what to do."

The warehouse stood near the railway terminus, a long stone building whose upper windows were dark with soot from the engines. Inside, the air smelled of lamp oil and old paper, and a clerk led them to a small office at the back.

The proprietor was an Armenian paper merchant named Hovsep Agopian, a broad man of fifty with ink on his fingers and a patient way of speaking. He stood when Mustafa entered, and he looked with some surprise at the two children.

"My neighbors," said Mustafa. "The boy has a counter in his father’s shop. He wishes to buy paper."

"How much paper?"

"A trial," said Ayaan. "I would like to buy a small quantity of three kinds, so that I may learn how your goods behave in my customers’ hands."

Hovsep sat down slowly. "Most young men come to me and ask for credit."

"I will not ask for credit, Hovsep Efendi. I will pay in coin on delivery, and if your paper pleases me, I will ask for your best price on the second order."

The merchant said nothing for a moment. The clock on the wall ticked in the quiet office.

"You are very direct," he said.

"I am twelve years old. I have not yet learned to be otherwise."

Hovsep laughed, a deep laugh that moved his shoulders, and Mustafa lifted his coffee cup to hide a smile.

He brought out samples from three mills, one Austrian, one Italian, and one Bohemian, and he laid them on the desk. Ayaan handled each sheet slowly.

He held every sheet to the window, bent it, touched a drop of ink to the corner, and counted the seconds until it dried. Zeynep stood at his elbow, and she wrote each result in her notebook in a column of her own.

"The Austrian is the best," she said softly, when he had finished.

"It is also the dearest," Ayaan answered. "A customer who pays much expects a perfect product, and a single flaw costs me his goodwill."

"And the Italian?"

"Cheap and adequate. It will sell to the boys, who use paper quickly and do not complain."

"And the Bohemian?"

"I would test it with both."

They agreed on the quantities after an hour of patient bargaining. Ayaan would buy six reams of the Italian, four of the Bohemian, and two of the Austrian, for a total of one hundred and ten kuru?.

He had one condition. Before he paid, he would open and inspect every bundle in Hovsep’s presence, and any damaged sheet was to be replaced without charge.

Hovsep raised an eyebrow. "That is a hard condition for a first order."

"It is a fair one, and I think you know it. If your paper is as good as your samples, you lose nothing."

The merchant studied him for a long moment. Then he extended his hand across the desk, and Ayaan took it.

Outside, in the bright street, Mustafa walked a few paces ahead of them in silence. At the corner he stopped.

"I said that I would not speak," he said, without turning around. "But I will say this, because it is not advice. It is only a thing I have noticed."

"Yes, Efendi?"

"A man who asks for an inspection clause has been cheated before. Hovsep Agopian saw that, and he agreed anyway. That tells you something about him, and it tells you something about how you are seen."

He walked on, and Zeynep looked at Ayaan with raised eyebrows.

"My father has never said that much in one breath," she whispered.

"I think he said it for you," Ayaan answered.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 29 July 1902

The test shelf was Zeynep’s idea, and it took up no more room than the end of the counter.

It stood at the end of the counter, below the brass bell, and it held six items in lots of twelve. Each had a small paper tag in her handwriting, and each tag carried a number that was not a price.

"What is the number?" Mehmet asked on the first morning, bending to read one of the tags.

"The day it was first offered," said Zeynep. "We will write on the back the day it is sold. When all twelve are gone, we will know how long the item takes to leave the shelf."

"And if it never leaves?"

"Then we will know that too, and we will not buy a second lot."

Mehmet straightened and looked at his son, who was pretending to arrange the nibs.

"Is this your doing, or hers?"

"It is hers, Baba. I only gave her the question."

His father gave the short sound in his throat that meant he was pleased, and he went back to the sacks of lentils.

The six items had been chosen with care.

There was blotting paper, which the copyists of the Porte used in quantity, and sealing wax in red and black. There were ink powder in small twists, a pen wiper of folded felt, a ruled copybook of thirty leaves, and a box of fine nibs for the schoolmasters.

The copybook was the only item that troubled him.

On the second morning, he took the question to his father in the back of the shop, where the sacks stood in rows and no customer could hear.

"Baba, the warden said that I may sell no books."

"He did."

"A copybook is bound paper. It has no writing in it, but it has a cover, and it has been sewn."

Mehmet set down the scoop he was holding. "You believe the guild might call it a book."

"I do not know. I would rather ask before I sell, than be told after I have sold."

His father regarded him for some time with the expression that Ayaan could not entirely read.

"The old men are not fools," Mehmet said. "They will notice that a boy who asks permission is a boy who intends to keep his word. I will go to Tevfik Efendi this evening, and I will take him a jar of the honey he likes."

"Thank you, Baba."

"Do not thank me. Thank Allah that you have learned this at twelve, and not at forty."

The answer came the next day, carried by Mehmet with the faintest trace of surprise.

"He says that a blank copybook is paper and thread, and that no guild has ever claimed the right to forbid a child’s exercise book," Mehmet reported. "He says that he would be pleased to see one."

"He wishes to see one?"

"He wishes to buy one. For his granddaughter."

Zeynep, listening from the crate, put her hand over her mouth.

The first copybook sold on the third day. By the end of the second week, nine of the twelve had left the shelf, and the tags showed that the schoolboys bought them at the beginning of each month, when their fathers were paid.

The blotting paper sold steadily in ones and twos. The sealing wax sold slowly, and only the red.

The felt pen wipers had not sold at all.

"They are charming," Zeynep said, holding one up with an air of regret. "I sewed three of them myself."

"They are charming, and no one will buy them," said Ayaan. "We will not order another lot, and we will sell the remaining nine at cost to your mother’s friends."

"You are certain?"

"The tags are certain. I am only reading them."

She made a small face, and then she laughed, and she wrote the word felt at the bottom of the sheet with a line through it.

It was a loss of three kuru? and a half, and the most useful the counter had ever recorded.

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 22 August 1902

The bundle of Italian paper that Hovsep had delivered in July was fine on the day it was opened, and it was ruined by the end of August.

Ayaan found it on a hot evening, when he went to the storeroom behind the shop to fetch a ream for a customer. He lifted the top bundle, and the sheets stuck together in his hands.

The edges were stained a pale brown, and the smell of damp was sharp and unmistakable. He put his hand into the middle of the pile, and the paper was cool and soft.

He closed his eyes for a moment.

He had inspected the delivery in the presence of the merchant, as he had promised.

He had not looked at it again in thirty-eight days.

"The back wall," said Zeynep, from the doorway.

She had followed him in without a sound, and she was pointing at a line of dark moisture that ran along the plaster.

"The rain two weeks ago," she said. "It came through the roof tiles. My father had the same fault in his warehouse in the spring."

"I should have checked."

"You should have. And now you have." She crouched and began to separate the sheets with care. "How much is spoiled?"

They counted together by lamplight. Of the six reams of Italian paper, four were damaged beyond use, and the other two were marked at the edges but could be sold as scrap to the schoolboys at half price.

The Bohemian and the Austrian, stacked on a shelf on the opposite wall, were untouched.

Ayaan wrote the figures in the ledger that night, and the loss came to thirty-one kuru?. It was less than one in ten of what the counter had earned in the same month.

He looked at the sum for a long time. Then he took a pen and wrote a new rule beneath the old ones.

Paper is stored off the wall, off the floor, and above the line of the rain. Every delivery is looked at again after one week.

"Are you angry?" Zeynep asked quietly.

"With myself, yes. With the loss, no." He set the pen down. "If I had bought the whole of my stock in bulk, as I wished to in the spring, I would have lost two hundred kuru? tonight and I would have no coin to buy the next lot."

"So the rule saved you."

"The rule and the test saved me. I bought six reams, not sixty."

Zeynep sat on an upturned crate and rested her chin on her knees.

"My father is never afraid of weather," she said. "I believe it is because he holds more coin than he holds stock."

"He is a wise man."

"He is a careful man, which is not always the same." She looked up. "You are both."

He did not answer at once. He picked up the lamp and carried it back into the shop.

"Tomorrow I will write to Hovsep Efendi," he said at last. "I will tell him what happened, and I will tell him that the fault was in my storeroom, not in his paper."

"You will not ask him to replace it?"

"I will not. But I will ask him to sell me the next lot wrapped in oiled cloth, and I will pay him the difference for the cloth."

She smiled, and she did not say what she thought. She did not need to.

Hovsep’s reply came three days later, in a firm slanting hand on a sheet of his own Austrian paper. He thanked Ayaan for his honesty, and he wrote that in thirty years, no customer had written to him to say that a loss was his own.

He sent the next lot wrapped in oiled cloth, at no additional charge.

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 9 September 1902

Münir Bey arrived at the shop on a morning of fine rain, and he did not wait for the customer ahead of him to finish.

He stood at the end of the counter with water dripping from the brim of his fez, and he held a leather folder against his chest. His coat was the same color as old tea, and his expression was troubled.

"Young Hassan," he said. "A word, if you please."

Ayaan finished with the schoolboy, handed him his nib and his change, and stepped to the end of the plank.

"Bey Efendi."

"The treasury has not paid my office since June." Münir Bey said it flatly, as a man announces the death of an acquaintance. "Three months, as I told you it might be."

"I am sorry to hear it."

"I am not here to complain. I am here because the old man who supplies the next office along the corridor has been waiting for his money since the spring." Münir Bey shook his head slowly. "He has stopped delivering. He says that he cannot afford to feed his clerks on promises."

Ayaan said nothing, because he understood the shape of what was coming.

"The clerks in that office have come to me," Münir Bey said. "There are eleven of them, and they use as much paper and ink as my own. They asked whether the boy at the grocer’s counter might supply them as well."

"On the same terms?"

"On any terms that you name." The old copyist lowered his voice. "You will understand that they are in difficulty."

It was a very large order. It would double the monthly sales of paper and ink, and it came with a promise of more, since the other offices of the Porte were no better paid.

Ayaan thought of the five hundred kuru? in his cash box and the three hundred in his stock. He thought of the stranger in the gray coat, and his mother’s voice in the lamplight.

Smaller. For now.

"Bey Efendi, I will supply them," he said. "But not at once, and not in full."

Münir Bey frowned. "I do not understand."

"I will supply the first office a third of what it needs this month. I will supply it two thirds the month after, if it pays me in coin on the day. If it does, I will supply the whole of it, and then we will speak of a third office."

"That is very slow."

"It is. But it is slower for me to be ruined by a customer I cannot collect from, than for them to wait two months for a full delivery."

The copyist looked at him for a long time. A drop of rain fell from the brim of his fez onto the plank, and he did not seem to notice it.

"You are very young to have learned that," he said at last.

"I learned it from your own office, Bey Efendi. You taught me by telling me what the treasury did."

Münir Bey made the dry, wheezing sound that was his laugh.

"Then I have been a better teacher than I knew. Very well. Slowly. I will explain it to the clerks."

When he had gone, Zeynep came out from behind the crate. She had listened to every word, as she always did, and she had a pencil in her hand and a sheet of paper in the other.

"You refused two thirds of a very large order," she said.

"I postponed it."

"You postponed it so that you could take it later with less danger." She tapped the paper. "I drew the figures while you spoke. A third costs us ninety kuru? in coin, and we keep our reserve whole."

"And two thirds?"

"Not before November. But if the first office pays on time, we can do it then without touching the reserve."

Ayaan stared at the sheet. She had done in a minute what he would have done in an hour, and she had done it better.

"Zeynep."

"Yes?"

"I would like you to keep the second ledger."

She went very still. "The second ledger?"

"The ledger of suppliers and prices and delivery days. The one that you have already begun on your own, in that notebook you carry." He met her eyes. "I will keep the book of sales and coin, and you will keep the book of what we buy and from whom, and every Friday we will compare."

For a long moment she said nothing. Then she nodded once, quickly, and turned away so that he would not see her face.

"I will need a better pencil," she said, in a voice that was not quite steady.

"I will find you one."

"A good one. Not one of those from the cut-price crate."

"From Nuremberg," said Ayaan, and she laughed, and the rain went on falling outside.

VI

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 28 September 1902

Haf?z Kemal kept his lessons in the courtyard of the small mosque, on a worn mat beneath a mulberry tree, and he asked his pupils to read aloud until the light began to fail.

Ayaan had been his pupil for four years. He read the verse for the day, and the old man corrected a single vowel, and then the lesson was done.

"You are quicker than you were in the spring," said Haf?z Kemal.

"I have been practicing, Efendi."

"It is not practice. It is that you have stopped being afraid to be wrong." The old man rolled the book and tied the cord. "That is the best thing that can happen to a student, and the rarest."

Ayaan bowed. He picked up his own copy, and he was turning to go when the haf?z spoke again, in a different tone.

"Ayaan. A man came to see me on Thursday."

He stopped. The mulberry leaves moved overhead, and a sparrow dropped to the courtyard stones and pecked at a crumb.

"A man, Efendi?"

"He was quiet and well mannered, and he wore a plain gray coat. He said that he was a clerk who wished to enroll his nephew in my lessons." Haf?z Kemal paused. "He asked me many questions, and almost none of them were about his nephew."

"What did he ask?"

"How long you had been my pupil. Whether you were gifted in letters, or in numbers. Whether your family had relatives in the provinces, and whether you had ever spoken of the palace." The old man looked at him steadily. "I told him that you were a good boy and that I had nothing more to say."

"Thank you, Efendi."

"I did not say it for your thanks." Haf?z Kemal’s voice was low. "I have lived in this city for sixty-one years, and I know the manner of a man who asks about a boy for someone else. I tell you because you have a right to know that you are being measured."

Ayaan stood very still.

He had known it since the day of the pencil. He had known it from the stranger’s tone when he said friends.

But it was one thing to know it in his own mind, and another to hear it from an old man under a mulberry tree.

"What should I do, Efendi?"

"Nothing that you are not already doing." Haf?z Kemal smiled gently. "Be a good boy, as I told him. Be an ordinary boy, if you can. And remember that Allah sees what the city does not."

He bowed again, and he walked home through the late light with the lanes of Emin?nü around him.

That evening, after the shutters were closed, he opened the ledger on the lid of the chest. Zeynep’s second book lay beside it, with its tidy columns of suppliers and delivery days.

He turned to the back of his own book, to a page he had left blank, and he ruled it into three columns. At the top he wrote a single word.

Observed.

Beneath it he wrote the date, and the description of a man in a plain gray coat who had asked about a boy for someone else. He wrote what the man had asked, and whom he had asked, and what Haf?z Kemal had answered.

He did not write a name, because he had none. He wrote what he knew, and left space beneath for what he did not.

Then he took the first page of the ledger, where his rules were written, and he read them over once from the top.

Never less than one third in coin.

Never buy in bulk what does not sell within a month.

Paper off the wall and above the rain.

Small profits, steadily. Larger ambitions, quietly.

Beneath them he added one more.

Expansion is only worth the discipline that it costs. Whatever is built quickly can be taken quickly.

He blew out the candle and sat for a while in the dark. The brass bell above the counter hung silent, and beyond the shutters the lane was quiet, and someone, somewhere, was counting him.

He intended to be counted correctly.