Chapter 34: The Family Behind the Ambition

Chapter 34: Chapter 34: The Family Behind the Ambition

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 12 December 1909

Zeynep did not come down to the shop on Sunday morning, and in all the months of their marriage Ayaan had never known her to be late.

He climbed the stair with the day’s keys in his hand and found her sitting at the window of the upper room, with the shutters open and a shawl drawn about her. She had not touched the breakfast that lay upon the tray.

"You are pale," he said. "Shall I send for the physician?"

"I have already seen the midwife, Ayaan. She came on Friday while you were at the foundry."

He crossed the room in three steps and knelt beside her chair.

"Is it serious?"

"It is very serious, and it is very good." She took his hand and laid it upon her lap. "We shall have a child in the summer, if Allah wills it."

He heard the words, and for a moment he could do nothing with them.

He had spent the autumn counting liras and francs, wages and exchange rates, and the months of a distant war. He had not once counted the months of a pregnancy, and the number that she had named was suddenly the only number in the room.

"A child," he said.

"In the summer. The midwife says August, or the end of July." Her eyes were bright, and she was smiling as she did when a difficult sum had come out correctly. "I wished to be certain before I told you, because I did not want to say it twice."

"You were certain on Friday, and you waited until Sunday."

"I wished to see your face on a morning when you had nothing to carry." She tilted her head. "You look as I hoped that you would."

"I do not know how I look."

"You have forgotten what you came upstairs to say."

"I came upstairs to open the shop."

"Then someone else must open it." She pressed his hand. "Today, I think, the shop will manage without us."

He sat down on the floor beside her chair, which was not a dignified thing for a merchant to do, and he put his head against her knee.

In the life that I remember, I planned careers, and I planned retirements, and I never planned this.

He had been a man of numbers before he was anything else, and the numbers had never once prepared him for the quiet that came with the news. He was nineteen years old, and he was to be a father.

"Are you afraid?" she asked.

"I am afraid of a great many things that I know will happen." He lifted his head. "I find that I am more afraid of the things that I do not know."

"That is the right fear to have. It will make you careful."

"And you?"

"I am afraid only of one thing." She laid her palm against his cheek. "I am afraid that we shall be so busy building the House that we shall forget to live in it."

He did not answer her at once, because he knew that she had said something that he would remember for the rest of his life.

"Then we shall not forget," he said at last.

II

Constantinople, Rüstem Pa?a — 14 December 1909

Fatma Hassan received the news with her hands in a bowl of flour, and for an instant she did not move.

Then she wiped them upon her apron and crossed the kitchen and took Zeynep’s face between her palms.

"Allah be praised," she said. "Allah be praised, and may He keep you both."

"We are not certain of the month, Anne," said Zeynep.

"I am certain of the month. I counted it in the summer, when you came to supper and did not eat the lamb." Fatma laughed, and her eyes were wet. "A mother knows these things before the daughter does."

"You did not say a word."

"It was not mine to say."

Mehmet stood in the doorway in his grocer’s apron, and he had come in from the shop with a scoop still in his hand. He looked at his wife and at his son, and then he set the scoop upon the shelf with great care.

"A child," he said.

"In the summer, Baba."

"A son, I think." He nodded to himself. "The Hassans have always had sons first."

"It may be a daughter."

"Then she will be the first daughter of the Hassans in four generations, and I shall be the proudest man in the lane." He sat down at the table, rather heavily. "Your grandfather would have wished to be here."

Ayaan took the chair opposite, and for a few moments no one spoke.

"If it is a son," said Zeynep, "we should like to give him your name, Baba Mehmet."

His father looked up sharply, and Ayaan saw the muscles of his jaw tighten.

"It is a plain name."

"It is the name of the man who taught my husband to weigh rice and to tell an honest scale from a false one." She said it gently. "I can think of none better."

Mehmet pressed his lips together and gazed at the tabletop. Fatma placed a hand on his shoulder, and he covered it with his own.

"I have not been a rich man," he said at last, in a low voice. "I have not been a clever one, as my son is clever, and I have not been to a school."

"Baba," said Ayaan.

"Let me say it." Mehmet raised his head. "I have kept my price where it was in a bad week, and I have paid every debt I owed, and I have raised a son who sits at the table of men whom I should not have dared to address. If a child is to carry my name into that world, I should wish it to be carried well."

"It shall be carried well," said Ayaan.

"I know that it will." His father rose and went to the window, and for a time he looked out at the lane. "Fatma, bring out the good tea. We shall drink to the child, and I shall close the shop at noon."

"At noon, on a Tuesday?" said Fatma.

"I have a grandchild coming. The rice may wait for one afternoon."

It was the first time in the whole of Ayaan’s life that his father had said such a thing, and Ayaan found that he could not speak.

III

Constantinople, Sultanahmet — 22 December 1909

The house of Mustafa Efendi stood near the old Hippodrome, behind a wall of whitewashed stone, and its garden was bare under the winter sky.

Emine Han?m brought the tea herself, and she had been weeping and laughing in turns since the news came on Tuesday.

"I have told her to rest," she said, "and she tells me that she has a ledger to close."

"I have a ledger to close, Anne," said Zeynep from her chair. "It is the last of the year."

"It is the last of the year, and there are four days remaining." Emine pressed her hand. "Ayaan, I hold you responsible for seeing that she sits down."

"I have no authority in the matter, Han?m. I have only ever won an argument with her once."

"Which argument?"

"The one about whether to marry me." He kept his face grave. "She conceded on the third day."

Mustafa laughed aloud, which he did very rarely, and the two women looked at one another with satisfaction.

When the tea had been drunk, Mustafa led Ayaan into the small study that overlooked the garden. He closed the door and sat down upon the divan.

He had plainly been preparing his words for a week.

"I wish to say something that I have not said, because there was no occasion for it." He rested his hands upon his knees. "A merchant house is built by the first generation, and held together by the second, and squandered by the third."

"I have heard the proverb."

"It is not a proverb, my son. It is a ledger kept by the world, and I have seen it balanced three times in this city." Mustafa looked at the bare garden. "In every case the wealth was not lost to a storm or a creditor. It was divided."

"By the law of inheritance."

"By the law, and by the number of sons, and by the daughters’ lawful shares, which are right and just and which no honest man may evade." He spoke slowly. "A house that is worth ten thousand liras at the death of its founder is worth two thousand to each of five heirs, and each of the five is tempted to sell his portion to a stranger."

Ayaan nodded slowly. He had known the principle from a hundred years of later history, and he had not applied it to the small room above his own shop.

"What would you advise?"

"I would advise a vak?f." The old merchant said the word with care. "A foundation, held in trust, whose income serves a purpose that you name, and whose capital cannot be sold or divided."

"For charity."

"For charity, and for education, and for the care of your own descendants, if you draw the deed with skill. The law allows it, and the Sultans themselves have done it for five hundred years." Mustafa leaned forward. "A family that wishes to remain a family must have something that does not belong to any one of its members."

A trust that outlives its founder, with a charter and a purpose.

It was the oldest institution in the Empire, and it was also the most modern thing that Ayaan had heard in a month.

"I have not yet thought of it as a matter for me," he said.

"No one thinks of it as a matter for himself until his first child is expected." Mustafa smiled. "Now you may think of it with a clear head, and you have ten or twenty years in which to do it well."

"Thank you, Baba Mustafa."

"Do not thank me. Name the first child well, and keep the second rule of the reserve, and write the deed when you have understood what the House is for." He rose. "It is the last part that takes the longest."

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 29 December 1909

On the evening of the twenty-ninth, Zeynep sat in the lamplight with a clean notebook upon her knee, and Ayaan sat opposite with the old one.

The shop below was dark and the lane was quiet. There was a smell of snow in the air that had not yet turned to snow.

"I propose that we answer a question tonight," said Zeynep. "I do not wish to do it in a hurry, and I do not wish to do it alone."

"What is the question?"

"What do we wish our children to be?"

He had expected a smaller question, perhaps about the name or the rooms or the midwife, and he found that he was not ready for this one.

"I should wish them to be well," he said slowly. "I should wish them to be educated, and honest, and happy."

"Those are the wishes of every father in the Empire." She tapped the pen against the page. "I mean what we wish, and not what everyone wishes."

He thought of the foundry yard, and of Halil R?fat bent over his balance, and of Mustafa’s dry voice upon the third generation.

"I should wish that they were not copies of me," he said.

She looked up, and there was something in her face that he had hoped to see.

"Say that again."

"I should wish that they were not copies. I have an unusual mind, and I have seen what it costs, and I do not wish to build a house of small Ayaans." He met her gaze. "If a child of ours prefers a laboratory to a ledger, he should have the laboratory."

"Or she."

"Or she. And if one of them wishes to be a physician, or a teacher, or a poet who earns nothing, that must be a freedom and not a failure."

"I shall write it as the first line." She bent over the page, and the pen moved. "No child of this house shall be bound to the trade of the House."

"It will cost us, in time."

"It will cost us a great deal, and it will be worth more than the cost." She continued writing. "What is the second?"

"That each child shall be taught to read a ledger, whether or not he wishes to keep one."

"Agreed. And the third?"

"That no child shall be told what he is to inherit until he has shown what he is."

Zeynep paused, and he saw that this was a point which she had wished to raise herself.

"It is wise," she said. "A boy who knows that he will be rich will not learn why a coin matters."

"And a girl."

"And a girl." She smiled a little. "She will know it sooner, I think."

They wrote for an hour, and the lamp burned low. By the end there were nine lines upon the page, and one of them was Zeynep’s alone.

No labor of the House shall be allowed to take the whole of a parent’s evening.

"You wrote that for me," said Ayaan.

"I wrote it for both of us, and I wrote it in my own hand, so that I shall not be able to deny it later." She sealed the page with a small drop of wax. "We shall read it again when the child is born."

"And at every birthday after."

"And at every birthday after." She laid the pen aside. "It is not the charter of an empire, Ayaan. It is only the charter of a household."

"I believe that it is the more important of the two."

V

Constantinople, Kas?mpa?a — 9 January 1910

On the second Sunday of the new year, ?smail Usta’s wife, Hatice, laid a long cloth upon the floor of the charcoal room and set out a feast that no workshop in Kas?mpa?a had seen before.

Ayaan had asked that the families of the workshop be invited, and he had not expected the whole quarter to come.

There were ?smail’s three sons, who worked at the furnace, and his two daughters, who carried the dishes. Halil R?fat had brought his widowed mother from Fatih, a small woman in black, who sat very straight upon a cushion and watched everyone in the room.

"I have not been to a table such as this," she said to Zeynep, "since my husband was alive."

"It is a table that Halil has earned, Han?m. He is the reason that we are all here."

"He is a difficult boy."

"He is an excellent engineer, and the two things are very often the same." Zeynep smiled. "You must tell me, one day, what he was like as a child."

"Stubborn," said the widow. "I hope that the child you carry will be as stubborn, and as fortunate."

The meal was lamb and rice and a pot of lentils that Hatice had cooked since dawn, and afterward the men drank tea in a circle at the end of the room. Ayaan watched them from the side, where ?smail had placed him among the youngest guests.

He saw a foundry master who had once been ashamed of his failures, and an engineer who had once drawn plans for a man who did not pay. He saw their wives and children passing bread among strangers, and he understood that this was what he had meant, in September, by a place where men of talent might be employed.

It is not only the man who works. It is the table at which he eats.

When the plates had been cleared, Zeynep rose and asked for the room’s attention.

"I wish to say something that concerns every household here," she said. "I have discussed it with my husband, and with Halil Bey and ?smail Usta, and they have both approved it."

The room grew quiet.

"The House shall keep a fund for the families of those who work in its workshops. Each man shall pay a small part of his wage into it, and the House shall pay an equal part, and it shall be held at Galata under the signature of three trustees."

"For what purpose, Han?m?" asked ?smail.

"For sickness, for burial, and for the widow and children of a man who dies in the service of the work." She spoke without raising her voice. "No family of this workshop shall be left to beg because a furnace has taken its father."

There was a silence in the charcoal room, and then Hatice began to weep quietly into her sleeve.

"It is more than the Sultan’s own foundries provide," said ?smail, in a rough voice.

"It is very little, and it is a beginning." Zeynep sat down. "I should wish it to be larger in a few years."

Halil’s mother reached across the cloth and took Zeynep’s hand, and she did not say a word.

VI

Constantinople, Süleymaniye — 21 January 1910

On the third Friday of January, by a rule that Zeynep had written herself, no ledger was opened in the House of Hassan.

They walked up from the shop in a thin winter sun, through the lanes behind the Spice Bazaar, and climbed the long slope toward the great mosque that Sinan had built for Sultan Süleyman. Zeynep took the steps slowly, and Ayaan kept a hand beneath her elbow.

The courtyard was nearly empty. Pigeons walked in the cold light along the edge of the fountain, and a few students in turbans crossed from the medrese to the library with books under their arms.

"I have walked past this place a hundred times and never looked at it," said Zeynep. "I looked at the dome, and I did not look at the rest."

"What is the rest?"

"A school, and a hospital, and a kitchen that fed the poor of the quarter for three hundred years." She turned in a slow circle. "A bath, a library, a caravanserai, and a shop district whose rents paid for all of them."

"It is a foundation."

"It is the greatest in the city." She looked at him with a smile that had a question in it. "You have been thinking of my father’s advice about the vak?f."

"I have thought of little else since Baba Mustafa spoke."

"And what have you concluded?"

He looked at the long colonnade, and at the old stone, and at the students who crossed the courtyard on the business that their predecessors had performed since the sixteenth century.

"That an institution lives longer than a founder because it has two things," he said. "It has an income that does not depend upon the founder’s health, and it has a purpose that does not depend upon his name."

"The income was the rent of shops."

"The purpose was the education of the poor, and the care of the sick." He turned to her. "Neither could be sold for a profit, and so neither was."

"And what shall ours be?"

"I do not yet know." He said it honestly. "I should like to build a school for the children of craftsmen, so that a foundry master’s son may become an engineer without being sent abroad. I should like a clinic, and a library, and an endowment to pay for both."

"And a workshop that trains its own apprentices."

"And that." He smiled. "Our children will inherit more than a ledger. They will inherit the obligation to keep these things alive."

"It is a heavy inheritance," said Zeynep. "I would not have it lighter, but I should like our children to be told of it kindly, and not all at once."

"It is the one that I should wish to leave." He glanced at her. "You said, in December, that you feared we should forget to live in the House."

"I did."

"It may be that the best protection against forgetting is to build something that is larger than the House." He took her hand. "If we serve a purpose that will outlast us, we shall have no need to serve our own ambition."

Zeynep was silent, and her fingers tightened in his.

"I did not expect to hear you say that," she said.

"I did not expect to say it. I find that it is true."

They sat upon the stone edge of the fountain for an hour, in a courtyard that had stood for three and a half centuries, and they spoke of nothing that required a ledger.

The sun moved across the dome, and the pigeons rose into the cold air and came down again upon the stones.

VII

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 30 January 1910

Mehmet Hassan climbed the stair above the shop with a cradle upon his back.

He had carried it from Rüstem Pa?a through the lanes, wrapped in a sack, and he was out of breath when he reached the top. Ayaan came out of the upper room at the sound of his boots and stopped on the landing.

"Baba, you should have sent a porter."

"A porter does not carry a cradle that has held three generations of this family." His father set it down with great care. "I made it from the wood of my own father’s bed, in the year that I married your mother."

It was a plain cradle of dark walnut, with a rocking frame, and the corners had been rubbed smooth by the hands of a man who had loved it. Ayaan knelt and touched the rail.

"I did not know that you had made it."

"There are many things that I did not say, and I am saying them now." Mehmet straightened and pressed a hand to his back. "I put you in it, and you slept without a sound, and your mother said that you had the face of an old man."

"Did I?"

"You looked at me with those eyes, and I thought that you were counting my coins." His father smiled, and the lines about his mouth deepened. "I was a poor man then, and I thought that I could not give you anything. I understand now that I gave you a good deal."

Zeynep had come to the door of the room, with her hand upon the frame.

"Baba Mehmet," she said. "It is beautiful."

"It is old, and it is strong, and it is yours." He turned to her. "I should not have brought it so early, but I could not wait."

"We shall keep it by the window."

"Where the sun comes in the morning." He nodded. "A child should wake to the light."

They carried the cradle into the upper room together and set it beside the window, and for a time they stood looking at it in silence.

Everything that I have built is a promise to someone who is not yet born.

He thought of the foundry and the warehouse and the three small ledgers. He thought of the wage scale, and the fund, and the charter that lay in Zeynep’s desk with its small seal of wax.

None of them was as heavy as the walnut rail beneath his hand.

"Baba," he said. "Thank you."

"It is nothing."

"It is not nothing." He rose and embraced his father, who stiffened and then returned the embrace with a roughness that was almost fierce. "I shall tell my son one day who made it."

"If it is a son."

"If it is a daughter, I shall tell her the same."

Mehmet stepped back and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, and he muttered something about the dust of the stair.

"I must return to the shop," he said. "Your mother will be wondering what has become of me."

"Allah keep you, Baba."

"And you, my son." At the head of the stair he paused. "Keep the cradle by the window, and keep the House in the light as well."