Chapter 13: Beyond the Shop

Chapter 13: Chapter 13: Beyond the Shop

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 17 January 1903

Mustafa Efendi came to the shop on the Saturday after the snow, and he did not ask for tea.

He stood at the end of the counter with his hands folded over the head of his cane, and he waited until the last customer had gone out into the slush of the lane.

"Mehmet Efendi tells me that you have not yet decided," he said.

"I have decided, Efendi. I have not yet said it."

"Then say it, and I will know where I stand."

Ayaan had written his answer the night before, in the blue book Zeynep had given him, and then he had crossed it out and written it again.

"I will accept your roof," he said. "But I would like to accept it on paper."

Mustafa’s eyebrows rose a little. "On paper."

"The stock stays mine, and it is counted into your warehouse each Friday in the presence of a witness. Your name goes on the invoices to the offices, and mine stays in the book. The arrangement lasts one year, and at the end of it either of us may end it without a quarrel."

"And what do I receive?"

"One part in five of the profit from every sale made under your name." Ayaan kept his voice level. "And the right to say that the best paper in the Porte came from your warehouse."

The merchant was silent for a long moment. In the back of the shop, Mehmet had stopped moving the sacks.

"You have thought about what I will say," said Mustafa.

"I have thought about what a merchant would say, Efendi. I do not know what you will say."

"A merchant would say one part in five is too little." He tapped the cane once against the floor. "But a man who is offering his name for safety should not bargain too closely. I accept."

He held out his hand, and Ayaan took it. Then, because the moment seemed to require it, Mustafa spoke again, more quietly.

"I will tell you why I made the offer, so that you do not wonder. I have three warehouses and one daughter, and I have not been fortunate in sons."

"Efendi..."

"Let me finish. A merchant who has no son looks, in the course of his life, for a young man he can trust in the next lane. I did not expect to find him at a grocer’s counter, and I did not expect him to be thirteen." He almost smiled. "But Allah does not consult us on the matter."

He went out, and the bell rang after him.

Mehmet came forward from the sacks and stood for a time without speaking.

"A grocer’s son," he said at last, "and he has agreed terms with a man who owns three warehouses."

"A man who offered, Baba."

"Yes. That is what I am trying to remember."

Then he laid a hand on the back of his son’s neck, briefly and firmly, and returned to his work.

Zeynep arrived an hour later with a sheet of paper and a pencil, and she wrote the contract in her small clear capitals while Ayaan dictated.

When she had finished, she read it aloud, and it was exact.

"My father will sign it tonight," she said. "He told me to tell you that he has never had a contract drawn so clearly by anyone under fifty."

"Did he say it as praise?"

"He said it as a warning to himself." She set the pencil down. "I think he means to be careful with you."

"That is the best thing he could do."

Zeynep looked at him, and then she looked away, and for the second time that winter she did not say what she was thinking.

II

Constantinople, Eyüp — 2 February 1903

The Feshane stood on the bank of the Golden Horn, a long hall of pale stone with chimneys that sent smoke across the water.

Mustafa had business there, which was the sale of wrapping paper and printed labels to the storekeeper, and he had agreed without enthusiasm to bring Ayaan. He had made the same condition as before, which was that the boy would look at the floor and keep his mouth closed.

"The Feshane makes the fezzes of the army and half the Empire," Mustafa said as they crossed the yard. "It is the oldest steam factory in the city. If anything in Constantinople works as it should, it works here."

The storekeeper was a lean, tired man named Rasim Efendi, who received them in a small office at the end of a long corridor. He and Mustafa spoke of prices for a quarter of an hour, and then Rasim rose and said that he had to walk the floor, and the boy might come if he wished.

"I wish to, Efendi," said Ayaan, and he did not look at the floor.

The weaving hall was enormous. Rows of looms ran its whole length under a roof of glass and iron, and the noise was so great that Rasim had to lean close to be heard.

Along the wall stood a long shed of finished fezzes in stacked bales, red and dark and dusty, far more than any warehouse could sell in a season.

"Overstock?" Ayaan asked.

"The army has not ordered since autumn," said Rasim. "The ministry prefers to keep us running, because a factory that stops is hard to start again."

Half of the looms were running. The others stood idle, with their shuttles stopped and their threads hanging slack, and a few of them had been covered with canvas.

"Why do they not work?" Ayaan asked.

"Broken parts." Rasim spoke without surprise. "A pinion, a bearing, a gear. We cannot make them here, so we order them from Manchester or from Lyon, and the order goes through the ministry."

"How long does it take?"

"Four months, if the ministry is quick. Eight, if it is not." The storekeeper shrugged. "We have eleven looms idle at present, and three waiting since the summer."

Ayaan looked along the hall. The engine at the far end, a great iron machine with a flywheel taller than a man, turned steadily, and a boy in a leather apron poured oil into its bearings from a long-spouted can.

Eleven looms idle. Four months to replace a gear.

He did the sum in his head. If each loom produced what the books claimed, the factory lost a month of the Empire’s fez cloth every year to a pinion that a decent workshop could cut in a week.

"The coal," he said. "Where does it come from?"

"From England, by the Black Sea route, and the price has risen since the new year." Rasim glanced at him with a flicker of curiosity. "You ask sensible questions for a boy."

"I ask the questions that the ledger would ask, Efendi."

They walked down the length of the hall. At the far end, a young man in a stained shirt was kneeling beside one of the idle looms with a file in his hand, and a small heap of brass shavings beside him on the floor.

He was perhaps nineteen, with broad shoulders and a thin dark mustache, and he did not look up when they approached.

"This is Tahsin," said Rasim. "He is the apprentice of the head mechanic, and he is the only one of them who does not wait for Manchester."

"What is he doing?"

"Making a bearing." The storekeeper lowered his voice. "He should not. It is forbidden to repair a machine with parts that are not from the maker. But the head mechanic looks away, because the loom runs afterward."

Ayaan watched the young man work. His hands were quick and sure, and he measured every cut against a worn gauge that he had made himself.

When he finished, he fitted the bearing into the loom, spun the shaft once with his palm, and listened. His face did not change, but he nodded to himself.

"Does it run?" Ayaan asked.

Tahsin looked up for the first time.

His expression was guarded. "It will run for six months. Perhaps a year."

"And then?"

"And then I will make another."

He went back to his work.

"What does he earn?" Ayaan asked quietly, when they had walked a little way.

"Eighty kuru? a month, and his bread." Rasim lowered his voice further. "A foreign mechanic earns eight times as much, and cannot make a bearing without the drawing."

Rasim moved on. Ayaan lingered for a moment, and then he followed.

He stored the young man’s face where he stored the faces of those who might matter.

On the walk back to the gate, Mustafa asked nothing. But when they reached the road, he stopped and looked at the boy for some time.

"You did not look at the floor," he said.

"No, Efendi."

"I know. I saw you looking at everything else." He started down the road. "Tell me what you saw."

"A factory that is richer in machines than in people who can mend them," said Ayaan. "And one person who can."

Mustafa did not answer at once.

"There is no workshop in this city that makes a bearing to a drawing," he said at last. "Not a good one. I have asked, for my own machines, and they all say to send to Europe."

"Then someone must teach it."

"Someone must pay for the teaching first." Mustafa walked a little more slowly, and Ayaan understood that the answer had been heard.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 21 February 1903

The papers covered the floor of the storeroom, in rows, with a stone placed on each corner against the draft.

Zeynep had gathered them over three weeks. There were price lists from Mustafa’s invoices, a customs schedule that Hovsep had lent them, a column of figures cut from a newspaper, and four pages in Ayaan’s own hand headed Why they cannot grow.

"I do not understand why you want to know this," Zeynep said, sitting on a crate with her notebook in her lap. "We sell paper and ink. The Feshane is a different world."

"It is the same world, seen from a higher window."

"Show me."

He took the first page from the floor.

"The duty on foreign goods is eight in the hundred. It was fixed by treaty, and the Empire may not raise it without the consent of the powers."

"So foreign cloth enters cheaply."

"Cheaply enough that a weaver in Bursa cannot sell his cloth for what it costs to make." Ayaan laid the page down and took another. "A merchant who wishes to open a factory must buy machines abroad, and he pays eight in the hundred on them as well. Then he must borrow to buy them, and the interest at the bank is nine in the hundred, or twelve, or more."

"And if he cannot borrow?"

"Then he does not build." He picked up a third sheet. "And if he builds, the machine breaks, and there is no one nearby who can mend it. If it is mended, the goods must be carried to market on roads that wash out in the spring."

Zeynep wrote quickly. "How many roads are there?"

"Very few that a cart can use in winter. The railways go where the foreign companies have been granted concessions, and not always where the merchants wish to go."

"So the goods move slowly."

"And they pay a tax on every town they pass through, and a tithe at harvest, and a fee at the gate of the city." He ran his finger down the column. "A man who wishes to make something and sell it must overcome every one of these before he has earned a kuru?."

"My father pays the gate fee on every shipment," said Zeynep. "He calls it a toll for the privilege of being a merchant."

"And the weights differ from town to town," Ayaan added. "An okka of rice in one market is not the same as an okka in the next, and a buyer who does not know it is cheated before he has bargained."

She stopped writing. The storeroom was cold, and her breath showed faintly in the lamplight.

"It sounds as if the Empire has arranged itself so that nothing can be made inside it," she said.

"It was not arranged. It has accumulated, over a hundred years, one weakness at a time, and each one was reasonable when it was added." Ayaan sat down on the floor among the papers. "That is why it is so hard to see."

"Is it hopeless?"

"No." He said it quickly, and then he said it again, more slowly. "No. But it cannot be mended from the top, because the top is not free to act. It must be mended from underneath, by people who are small enough that no one forbids them."

"What people?"

"I do not yet know." He looked at the page with the heading in his own hand. "That is the thing that I am trying to learn."

Zeynep closed her notebook and set it on her knee.

"Then I will tell you what I think," she said. "I think that everything you have listed is a problem that a person has solved somewhere. A mechanic who makes his own bearing. A merchant who writes receipts that a judge will believe. A man who pays on delivery, in coin, because the treasury cannot be trusted."

"Go on."

"You have been looking at the weaknesses. I think you should look at the people who have already gone around them."

He stared at her. It was the same thing that she had done in July, when she had asked which goods to buy by the crate, and it disturbed him in the same way.

"That is a better question," he said.

"I know."

"I will take it."

"You will thank me later," said Zeynep. "Preferably with a better pencil."

That night he copied her question onto the first page of the blue book, above everything else.

It read, in his small hand, Who has already found a way around?

He understood that it was the first useful question he had written since the autumn, and that it had not been his own.

IV

Constantinople, Bab?ali Street — 14 March 1903

Tevfik Efendi received them in the courtyard of the guild coffeehouse, under the bare branches of the fig tree, and he did not rise from his bench.

Mehmet had brought the honey, as he did every month, and Ayaan had brought the ledger. He had not been asked, but he had learned that the warden valued an offering of figures more than an offering of sweets.

"I see that the boy has grown," said the warden.

"He turned thirteen in January, Efendi."

"And already he is a man in the eyes of the Public Debt." Tevfik Efendi’s spectacles caught the pale light. "I have heard it said. The old men talk, and I listen."

Ayaan lowered his eyes. He had not expected the warden to know, and he had not expected the knowledge to be spoken so plainly.

"I mean no boast by it, Efendi."

"I know that. I would not have admitted you if you had." The warden gestured toward the bench beside him. "Sit. I wish to show you something."

He drew a small wooden box from beneath the bench and opened it. Inside lay a bundle of papers tied with a faded ribbon, each one covered with names and sums in a dozen different hands.

"These are the loans of the guild," he said. "For two hundred years, every master who fell into difficulty could borrow from the common fund, and he repaid it when he could. There was no interest, and there was no court."

"It was a bank," said Ayaan, "that was owned by the borrowers."

"I suppose it was." The warden’s voice held a thread of dry amusement. "A saddler founded it, in the reign of the third Selim, after his brother-in-law lost a workshop to a debt of thirty kuru?. He swore that no master of the trade would be ruined again for want of a small sum."

He turned the box in his hands. "It is nearly empty now. The members are poor, and the dues are low, and the fund can lend only twenty kuru? to a man who needs two hundred."

"And so the masters go to the moneylenders."

"Or to the banks, if they can persuade the banks to see them. Most cannot." Tevfik Efendi closed the box. "There are one hundred and forty masters in this guild, and thirty of them have been ruined in the last ten years. It is not for lack of skill, but for lack of a little money at the right moment."

Ayaan did not speak. He was thinking of the bank in Galata, the marble floor, and the grille behind which a clerk named his rate.

A man who cannot use the bank pays more for everything, and sells less, and cannot grow.

Here, in a courtyard, were a hundred and forty such men, and a fund that could have helped them, and an old warden who had understood the problem for thirty years and had no means to solve it.

"Efendi," he said carefully. "If the fund were larger, would the masters repay it?"

"They always repaid it. It was a matter of honor, in the old days." Tevfik Efendi regarded him. "Why do you ask?"

"Because it seems to me that you hold something very valuable, and that the world has forgotten it is valuable."

The warden said nothing. A breeze moved through the fig tree, and a dry leaf spun down onto the cobbles.

"You will say no more about this," he said at last. "Not today."

"I will say nothing, Efendi."

"But you will remember it."

"I will remember it."

The old man nodded slowly.

"Good. Then come again next month, with the honey and the ledger."

He paused. "I think that there is more that you should see."

Ayaan did not answer at once, because he did not trust what he might say. A fund of two hundred years, held in a wooden box, had been described to him as a relic, and it was the clearest model of an institution that he had yet seen.

It had no interest, no court, and no foreign shareholder, and it had lasted because its members could not afford to dishonor it.

On the way home, Mehmet walked beside him in silence for a long distance. The lanes were crowded with porters and the afternoon was bright, and the smell of roasting chestnuts drifted from a stall at the corner.

"He likes you," Mehmet said at last.

"He tolerates me, Baba."

"A man who shows you a box of loans does not tolerate you. He is deciding what you are." His father shifted the empty honey jar in his arm. "Be careful which answer you give him."

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 5 April 1903

The blue book had a new page, and it was headed with a single word.

People.

Ayaan wrote it with the new pen of dark horn, in a small hand that no one but himself could have read quickly. He had also begun to use a shorthand of his own, a mixture of initials and numbers that would have confused a stranger and that Zeynep claimed to find faintly insulting.

Beneath the heading, he had written five names, each with a single line of judgment.

M. Bey, copyist at the Porte. Loyal and honest, and trusted by eleven clerks.

Useful as a channel.

H. Agopian, paper merchant. Careful, fair, and respected in Sirkeci.

Useful as a supplier and a witness.

S. Bey, sub-director, Administration. Sharp, and sees too much.

To be watched, and kept at a distance.

T. Efendi, warden of the guild. Holds the forgotten fund, and knows its history.

Useful when the time comes.

Tahsin, apprentice mechanic at the Feshane. Makes what he needs, and does not wait.

Useful above all.

A sixth place on the page was blank.

He had thought long about what the page was for.

It was not a list of friends, for a friend could not be written as a name beside a use.

It was a list of what the country already contained and what the future would need, and he wrote it with the care of someone who knew that a list could be read by the wrong person.

Do not recruit. Observe.

Learn what each person fears, wants, and can do.

Approach only when the approach would be a gift and not a purchase.

He had written that rule at the bottom, and he read it again.

"You are brooding," said Zeynep.

She had come in through the back of the shop, as she did every Sunday, and she was unwinding her scarf in the cold. Her cheeks were red from the wind, and she carried a bag of oranges that her father had sent.

"I am thinking."

"It is the same expression." She set the oranges on the counter and glanced at the open book. "What is the blank place?"

"A place for someone I have not yet met."

"Or someone you have met and not yet written down." She tilted her head. "My name is not there."

He had wondered whether she would look. He had also wondered what he would say, and he had not found an answer that satisfied him.

"No," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because the page is a list of people I may one day ask for something. I do not wish to ask anything of you."

Zeynep considered this. Her expression did not change, but her fingers closed slowly around the edge of the counter.

"That is a kind answer," she said.

"It is also a true one."

"It is both. And it is not enough." She met his eyes. "I do not wish to be a person who is not asked. I wish to be a person who is told the truth, and who decides for herself what she will give."

He sat very still. The shop was empty, and the light outside was beginning to turn amber against the shutters.

"Then I will tell you the truth," he said slowly. "I do not yet know what this page is for. I know that something is coming that I must be ready for, and that the readiness will require more people than I can see. I do not know how to ask them without frightening them, or myself."

"That is the truth?"

"It is all of it that I can say."

She nodded once. Then she reached for the pen of dark horn and, without asking, wrote a letter in the sixth place in her small straight capitals.

Z.

"There," she said. "Now you may ask me for anything. And I will answer yes or no, and you will know."

He looked at the initial for a long moment, and it struck him that the page had never held a name as plain as that one. He did not trust his voice, so he said nothing, and she did not seem to require it.

When she had gone, the oranges lay in a bowl on the counter and the smell of them filled the shop. Ayaan turned to the back of the gray ledger, to the page headed Observed.

Two weeks earlier, Tahsin had sent him a message through Rasim, a single line scratched in pencil on the back of a label. A man in a gray coat asked at the gate who the boy was who visited in February.

He had not shown it to anyone. He copied it carefully onto the page, in his own small shorthand, and he drew a line beneath it.

Then he blew out the lamp and sat in the dark, listening to the bell above the door hang motionless in the cold, and he thought that the world beyond the shop was larger than he had known, and that it had begun to look back.