Chapter 28: A State Worth Saving

Chapter 28: Chapter 28: A State Worth Saving

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 27 January 1909

The answers to the first two questions went to the secretariat on the twenty-seventh, in sealed envelopes of plain paper, carried by a boy from the Court of Accounts.

The third question remained on the back table, where it had lain for a week.

"You have looked at it every evening," said Zeynep. "You have written four lines and burned them."

"It is not a question about borrowing."

"Then what is it a question about?"

"It asks whether the Empire is worth lending to." Ayaan pressed his fingers against his eyes. "I cannot answer that without saying what a state is for, and I am eighteen years old, and a stationer."

"You are a partner in a house of trade, and the Palace has already asked for your figures. It is a better qualification than most that it has received."

She sat down across from him and drew the lamp nearer.

"Tell me what a state is for, then. Tell me as you would tell my father."

He was silent, and she waited.

"It is the thing that remains when the men who run it are gone," he said slowly. "A shop that depends upon one clerk will close when the clerk dies, and a state that depends upon one minister, or one sultan, is the same shop on a larger scale."

"And the throne?"

"The throne is not a promise, Zeynep. It rests upon a treasury that pays what it owes, courts that are believed, schools that fill the offices with able men, and an army that is fed." He opened his hands. "If those are strong, the dynasty endures. If those fail, no loyalty will hold it."

"That is a great many things."

"It is seven. Institutions, finance, industry, science, the army, the schools, and trade."

"Seven pillars," said Zeynep. "They will accuse you of arrogance. A stationer, writing to the Palace, to say what the Empire should build."

"The Empire has begun upon every one of them. There are schools, and a university, and a court of accounts, and a railway to Baghdad that is being built."

"Then say that first, and say that you have come to count what remains."

"Then I shall write them as questions that the Empire must answer, and not as orders."

"And for each one, you will say what is already being done, so that they do not suppose that you imagine you are discovering the Empire." She took the pen from the tray. "The Imperial Engineering School, the University, the medical college, the schools of trade. You will name them."

"I do not know enough about any of them."

"Then you will go and look at each, with your own eyes, before you write a line." She smiled. "Begin with my father. He has complained of the customs for twenty years, and he will be flattered to be asked."

II

Constantinople, Rüstem Pa?a — 30 January 1909

Mustafa Efendi listened to the whole of it in his study, with his fingertips together and his eyes upon the wall.

"You wish me to explain the customs," he said when Ayaan had finished. "I will tell you, and you will be disappointed, because the matter is simple and cannot be changed."

"I should like to hear it, Efendi."

"The duty upon what I import is eleven in the hundred. It was eight for a generation, and the powers allowed us the three more only two years ago." Mustafa drew a sheet toward him. "Any alteration of the tariff requires the consent of every power that holds a treaty with us, and every power wishes to sell more cloth, not less."

"And the Empire’s own goods?"

"Come to the window."

He led Ayaan to the shuttered window and opened it a hand’s breadth upon the lane.

"There is a bale of cotton in my warehouse that came from Adana. It went to Lancashire in the autumn, and it has returned as calico, at four times what the planter was paid." He closed the shutter. "The Empire sold the fiber, and bought it again as cloth."

"So we pay the weaver’s wage of another country."

"And his freight, and his insurance, and the commission of the foreign house at Galata, which is a Greek house, or a French one, or an Armenian one, and never a Turkish one." Mustafa’s voice was dry. "I do not say it in anger. I say it because it is arithmetic."

Ayaan wrote steadily.

"The ships are the same story," he said. "The steamers that cross the Black Sea carry our grain under foreign flags, and the freight is paid to foreign owners."

"Then the Empire pays for its own harvest to be carried."

"It pays twice, Ayaan, because it also pays the insurance." Mustafa sighed. "There is something that I must confess, young man." "I live by this arrangement. My warehouse is full of Manchester calico, and my daughter’s dowry was built upon it."

"I had noticed, Efendi."

"I would rather that the Empire wove its own cloth, and that I sold it, than that I grew rich upon its weakness." The older man looked at him. "I do not say that I would rejoice at the first year of the change. But I would rather that my grandchildren inherit a strong Empire than a full warehouse."

"Then I shall put it in the paper, without your name."

"Put in my name if it is useful. A merchant who argues against his own profit is believed more readily than a prophet."

He sat down again, heavily.

"Trade is not shut doors, Ayaan. It is ports that can receive the steamers, and ships that fly our own flag, and a law of commerce that a Greek and an Armenian and a Turk will all trust in the same court." He tapped the desk. "The rest is detail."

III

Constantinople, Eyüp — 2 February 1909

The cloth mill stood on the shore of the Golden Horn, a long gray building with a tall chimney, and its gates were open, but its yard was nearly empty.

The manager had gone to the Porte for the day. A thin man in a leather apron met them at the door instead, and said that his name was Kostas, and that he was the engineer.

"The only one," he added, without complaint. "The manager will tell you that the mill employs two hundred. It employs two hundred, and one man who can read the drawings."

He led them through a hall in which a hundred looms stood motionless. Dust lay upon the shuttles, and the air smelled of oil and cold iron.

"This is the German loom," said Kostas. "It is an excellent machine, and it stopped in October, because a single wheel of the gearing cracked."

"Can it not be mended?" asked Zeynep.

"It can be replaced. The wheel must be made in Leeds, and the drawing must be sent, and the order must pass through the agent at Galata, who takes his commission." He wiped his hands upon the apron. "It will arrive in seven months, if the ship is not delayed."

"And the looms beside it?"

"They run, and when they break, we wait seven months again." He said it plainly. "There is a foundry at Kas?mpa?a that could cast the wheel in a week, if it had the drawing and a man who understood it."

"Is there no school for such men?" asked Ayaan. "The Imperial Engineering School?"

"It trains engineers for the army, Efendi, and they are needed there. Not one has ever come to a mill." Kostas shrugged. "Nobody has thought that a loom is also a work of engineering."

"How many of your two hundred are women?" asked Zeynep.

"Ninety, Han?m. They are the best at the finer work."

"Then your school should have girls in it, and not forty boys alone."

"Nobody has asked me that question before," said Kostas, and for the first time he smiled. "I think the answer is that it should."

"Could you teach such a man?" asked Ayaan.

Kostas looked at him with some surprise.

"I could teach forty in a year, Efendi, if there were a room and forty boys who could already read and reckon. There are no such boys, because there is no school that teaches them." He shrugged, not unhappily. "I learned from a Belgian who came here by chance, and who died of a fever in the second year."

"What would you need?"

"Pay for the teacher, a room, a set of drawings, and a promise that the boys would have work when they finished." The engineer counted on his fingers. "None of it costs more than the wheel that we are waiting for."

On the road back to the ferry, Zeynep walked in silence beside her husband for some time.

"A loom that cannot be repaired is a debt to a foreign workshop," she said.

"It is a good sentence."

"It is yours. You said it in the dark hall, while the engineer was speaking, and you did not know that you had." She took his arm. "Write it exactly so."

IV

Constantinople, Beyaz?t — 6 February 1909

The student who rose from the table in the coffee house was thin and earnest, with a voice that no longer cracked.

"Hassan Efendi. I did not think that you would remember me."

"I remember a young man who read my notice twice, Cemil Efendi, and tore a corner from his list."

Cemil blushed to the roots of his hair, and then he laughed, and invited him to sit.

"The committee returned at the end of October, as you asked, and the seals were whole," he said. "We voted to thank you, and I was told to write the letter, and I did not do it. I did not know what to say."

"The thanks are not required."

"I have wished since then to ask you something. I am at the school for the civil service now, and I do not know whether I should be there."

Ayaan waited.

"We are taught law, and rhetoric, and the history of the dynasty. I can recite the Constitution from its first article to its last." Cemil lowered his voice. "I cannot tell you what a province yields in a harvest, or how many people live in it, or what it pays in tax. No one has taught us to count it."

"Who is the school preparing you to be?"

"A clerk, and later an official, and later a governor." The young man turned his cup. "A governor who does not know how many people he governs."

"It is a sound observation, Cemil Efendi."

"It is a treason, according to one of my teachers. He says that the Empire does not need numbers, it needs loyalty."

"Loyalty without numbers is a prayer," said Ayaan gently. "It is a good thing to say, but it does not feed a province."

Cemil stared at him, and then he began to write on the back of a list.

"May I ask what you would teach, Efendi, if you were permitted to teach anything?"

"First, that every village boy should learn to read, and that there should be a school in every village that can afford a teacher and in many that cannot." Ayaan counted slowly. "Then surveying, and chemistry, and bookkeeping, and the reckoning of a census. Then engineers, and physicians, and midwives, and teachers to train the teachers."

"Midwives?"

"A state that loses half its children before they are five will never have enough soldiers or clerks or scientists. I should begin there, if I began anywhere."

The student wrote in silence, and when he looked up, his eyes were bright.

"Go to the Court of Accounts, and ask Naz?m Efendi whether a student may copy statements there in the afternoons. He has forty clerks, and not one who has studied the numbers."

"Will he permit it?"

"He will say no at first, and then he will ask when you can begin."

"May I tell my friends that you said it?"

"You may tell them that a stationer said it, and that he is not certain, and that he asks them to prove him wrong."

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 10 February 1909

The letter from Monastir arrived on the tenth, with the stamp of the army post and no name upon the cover.

Ayaan read it at the counter, standing, while the morning customers came and went.

You asked me, Ayaan, what the soldier lacks. I shall answer it as you taught me to answer, in a list.

He lacks pay, because the arrears are not yet cleared in the second battalion, and a man who has not been paid for five weeks does not hold his post as he did.

He lacks boots. The contractor delivers half, and the half that arrives is of poor leather.

He lacks cartridges of a single pattern. In my own regiment there are rifles of two kinds, and the store holds ammunition for only one.

He lacks a sergeant who can read an order and write a report. We have many sergeants who are brave, and few who are lettered.

Ayaan turned the page.

The German instructors are excellent, but they cannot repair an unpaid man’s faith in his officers.

I have begun to think that an army is first a ledger, and only afterward a force. It is a ledger of men, shoes, bread, and cartridges, kept honestly.

You will say that this is a stationer’s view of a soldier’s trade. I say that it is the only view that has ever made a campaign succeed.

Burn this when you have read it; I sign it with my name because I trust you to do so. — Sermet.

Zeynep had come to stand beside him while he read, and she looked at the last line.

"Shall you burn it?"

"I shall keep the list in my head, and burn the page."

"A sentence of his belongs in the paper."

"Which?"

"That an army is first a ledger." She spoke without hesitation. "It is the reason that the fifth pillar is not a weapon but a payroll."

I am eighteen, and I am writing of armies. I shall write of the payroll, and the boots, and the schooling of a sergeant, and I shall leave the guns to those who carry them.

He took the page to the stove at the back of the shop, and when it was gone, he sat down and wrote the fifth section of the memorandum from memory, in three clear paragraphs, without a single mention of any rifle.

When he had finished, he read it aloud to Zeynep, and she asked only that he cut one sentence, which he did.

VI

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 15 February 1909

The newsboys had been crying the name of the Grand Vizier since the middle of the afternoon, and by evening the whole lane knew that the Chamber had withdrawn its confidence from him.

A new Grand Vizier had been named before the shops were shuttered. Zeynep read the notice twice and laid it down on the green ledger.

"You said that it would come this month," she said.

"I said that I expected a change."

"You said it in January, before any deputy had spoken against him." She did not raise her voice. "How did you know?"

I have said that I will not tell her that the drawer is empty.

"I counted the deputies who read the newspapers that opposed him, and I counted those who had voted with him in December." He chose his words with great care. "It was arithmetic, and it was only a likelihood. I did not know."

"Is that the whole of it?"

"It is the whole of what I can say tonight."

She looked at him for a long time, and then she nodded once.

"It is a drawer, and not an empty one," she said. "I accept that, and I shall not ask tonight."

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me. Work." She pulled the draft of the memorandum across the table. "I have been through it, and I have struck three things."

"Which?"

"The first is every sentence that praises the throne. You have written the most gracious and luminous throne." She read it aloud, without expression. "A Sultan has heard that sentence ten thousand times. He will not hear it from you as anything but a request."

"And the second?"

"Where you say that the Empire will become strong. You do not know it, and he will know that you do not." She tapped the page. "Write that it may be made strong, and that it will depend upon what is built."

"And the third?"

"There is none yet. I wish you to add one." She turned to a blank sheet. "A section that begins What I do not know."

"They will think me presumptuous, or ignorant."

"They will think you honest, which is rarer than either." She began to write. "You do not know the cost of the army, or the terms of the loans, or the real condition of the provinces. Say so, and say who could tell them."

"Name them plainly," she said. "The Court, the Ministry, the Treasury. A man who is named can answer, and a man who is not named can only resent."

He took the pen from her, and began to copy.

Outside, the newsboys were still crying, and the lamps in the lane had been lit, and he wrote steadily until the oil was low.

In April, in the history that I remember, there will be a mutiny. Whether it will come, I cannot say, and I must not write it.

VII

Constantinople, Y?ld?z — 24 February 1909

Rag?p Bey read the memorandum standing at the window of his office, with his back to the room, and he did not turn a page until he had finished the one before.

Ayaan sat in the chair that he had been offered, with Naz?m Efendi beside him, and he did not look at the clock.

A throne does not stand upon a promise. It stands upon a state: a treasury that pays what it owes, courts that are believed, schools that fill the offices with able men, an army that is fed and led, and a trade that enriches those who carry it on.

I write not to praise the dynasty, which needs no praise from a stationer, but to say what must be built if the dynasty is to endure.

Seven things are needed, and the Empire has begun upon each of them.

First, institutions that outlast the men who hold them: a treasury, a Court of Accounts, and a civil service that obeys the law and not the favor of a minister.

Second, finance that is open and exact, so that the Empire may borrow upon its own credit and not upon the pledge of its revenues.

Third, industry, so that the cotton of Adana is woven in the Empire and not in Lancashire.

Fourth, science, and the schools that teach it, for a loom that cannot be repaired is a debt to a foreign workshop.

Fifth, an army that is paid, shod, fed, and taught to read, before it is given any new weapon.

Sixth, education for the children of every faith and every province, because the state is served by those whom it has taught.

Seventh, trade, with ports, steamers, and a commercial law that every merchant may trust.

Rag?p Bey reached the last page and read it slowly.

The Empire may borrow upon its own credit once the world can see that it counts correctly. That is the whole of my answer to the third question, and it will take ten years.

He lowered the pages and turned from the window.

"It contains no demand," he said.

"I am owed none, Efendi."

"It contains no flattery, which will be remarked upon in this building."

"My wife struck it out."

"Then I shall thank your wife in the name of the secretariat, though not in writing." There was the shadow of a smile. "And it contains a section headed What I do not know. In nineteen years of service, I have not seen that heading upon any document."

"It seemed better to name the limits than to let others discover them."

"The sentence concerning credit will be read by the Public Debt Administration, if it is ever seen by them," said Rag?p. "They will call it an insult to their stewardship."

"It is not meant as one, Efendi. It is meant as a goal."

"Their view of such distinctions is not generous."

"Then they will not see it from me."

Naz?m, who had not spoken, cleared his throat.

"The Court would be glad to open its books for the same reason, Efendi. It has nothing to conceal from anyone who can count."

"Seven pillars," said Rag?p. "It is a great deal to ask of one state."

"It is not asked in a year, Efendi. It is asked of a generation, and it must be begun by men who will not see the end of it."

"No Palace has ever welcomed a plan whose reward falls to others."

"Then the plan must be small at the beginning." Ayaan met his eyes. "A school for forty boys at a cloth mill. A statement of accounts that is printed. A sergeant who can read. Each of them is a single stone, and none of them is a pillar."

Rag?p folded the pages with great care and laid them upon his desk.

"I shall place it in His Majesty’s hands," he said. "I make no promise concerning what he will say."

VIII

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 4 March 1909

The message from the secretariat came on a Thursday, by the same quiet young man in the dark coat, and Ayaan read it at the counter with Zeynep at his shoulder.

His Majesty has heard the memorandum read once, in full. He has made no instruction, and he asks that none be sought.

A copy has been sent to the new Minister of Finance, with the direction that it be read and not answered.

His Majesty made one remark, which the undersigned repeats without comment: he said that the young man writes expecting the dynasty to live, and that most who write to him expect it to die.

Ayaan read the last paragraph twice, and then a third time.

"He has noticed what you wrote, and what you did not," said Zeynep.

"He has noticed that I have not claimed anything."

"It is the same thing, in a Palace." She took the letter and laid it in the drawer beneath the counter. "It is paper, Ayaan. Paper is where every state begins, but it is also where a good many end."

"What shall we do?"

"Begin with something that is not paper." She drew a sheet from the pile. It carried four columns, headed Assigned, Collected, Spent, and Owed, and it was filled in, in her upright hand, with the figures of the house of Hassan.

"The shop’s own accounts," said Ayaan.

"For February, in the form of the Court. We shall fasten it to the door on the first of each month, where the lane may read it." Her eyes were steady. "If we ask the Empire to count in the open, we ought to begin by doing so ourselves."

"Rafet Bey will be the first to read it."

"Let him. Every figure upon it may be examined, and every one of them is true."

"The merchants will think us mad."

"Some will, and some will begin to ask why the house of Hassan has nothing to hide." She held out a small brass tack. "You may fasten it, since the idea is mine and the courage will be yours."

He took the sheet, and the tack, and went out into the lane.

The light was failing, and the shutters along Emin?nü were being drawn one by one. He pressed the tack through the paper into the wood of the door, and stepped back.

A porter on his way to the ferry slowed, and stopped, and began to read.

Behind him a second man stopped, and then a third, and one of them said in a loud voice that the stationer had written down what he owed.

Zeynep had come out to stand beside her husband, and she counted them under her breath.

"Four," she said. "It is the first day, and we have four readers."