Chapter 39: The Foundation

Chapter 39: Chapter 39: The Foundation

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 26 July 1910

Ayaan sent his letter to üsküdar by the morning boat, and he wrote it three times before he was content with it.

It said that he was honoured by the invitation of Cevdet Efendi, and that a child was expected in his house within the fortnight, and that he begged to be excused until the middle of September.

The answer came by the evening boat, on a single sheet of the same cream paper.

The library has stood for ninety years and will stand for six weeks more. I congratulate you in advance upon the occasion, and I shall expect you on the twelfth of September, if Allah permits.

Zeynep read it over his shoulder, and she raised her eyebrows.

"He did not ask what the matter was, or why you were delaying."

"He is a man who does not need to ask."

"Then he already knows that the child is coming." She laid a hand upon her side. "I do not find it comforting, Ayaan, that a librarian in üsküdar knows the date of my confinement."

"He does not know the date, but he can count." Ayaan folded the note. "I think that it was meant to be seen, and that he wished us to see it."

"To what end?"

"To tell us that he is not hiding." He put the note in the notebook with the others. "A man who is not hiding is either very safe or very honest, and I should like to learn which."

II

Constantinople, Bab-? ?li — 1 August 1910

The commission upon the supply and accounting of the schools met for the first time in a narrow room on the second floor of the Ministry, around a table that had been polished for the occasion.

There were five members. Re?id Bey sat at the head, and Ayaan at his right hand, and across from them sat Server Bey with his ringed hand upon a folder, and two older officials whom Ayaan had not met.

"We are met by the Minister’s order," said Re?id Bey, "to examine how the schools are supplied, and to report upon it by the end of the year."

Server Bey inclined his head.

"I should like it recorded, Efendi, that I regard the presence of a merchant upon this commission as irregular." He said it pleasantly. "I do not say that it is improper. I say that it is new."

"It is new, and the Minister is aware of it." Re?id Bey did not raise his voice. "The clerk will record your observation."

"I am obliged."

Ayaan waited until the clerk had finished writing.

"Efendiler, I should like to say one thing before the work begins, and I should like it recorded also." He kept his tone mild. "I am a supplier of the Ministry, and I shall not vote upon any matter that concerns my own price, or the price of a rival."

The older officials looked at one another.

"That is a generous restraint," said Server Bey slowly.

"It is a necessary one, Efendi. A man cannot be a judge and a party in the same room."

He has taken the first small mistake away before it could be made. It will not satisfy him, but it will make his patience longer.

Re?id Bey’s face showed nothing, but the corner of his mouth moved.

"Then we shall begin," he said, "with the matter of the carriage of registers to the provinces, which Server Bey has kindly agreed to explain."

Server Bey opened his folder with some ceremony.

"The Ministry sends its registers to the vilayets by the carriers’ guild of the Sirkeci road, at a price per load that has stood for nine years," he said. "I regard the arrangement as satisfactory, and I do not see why it should be disturbed."

"May I ask one question, Efendi?" said Ayaan.

"You may ask it."

"Does the price per load depend upon the weight of the load, or upon the number of registers?"

Server Bey frowned at his folder.

"Upon the number of registers, I believe."

"Then a load of registers ruled upon thinner paper costs the Ministry the same as a load upon thicker, though it weighs a third less." Ayaan spoke without emphasis. "I raise it only because the ?zmit paper is lighter, and the carriers’ price will not fall with it."

The older officials made a note. Re?id Bey looked at the ceiling, and Ayaan saw that he was concealing a smile.

"The clerk will record that the commission wishes to have the carriage priced by weight," said the Under-Secretary, "and that Server Bey will prepare the figures for our next meeting."

Server Bey bowed his head, and his ringed hand tightened upon the folder.

I have made him do the measuring again. He will do it well, because he must, and he will not forgive me for being the reason.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 9 August 1910

The child was born at a little after four in the morning, in the upper room, in the light of two lamps and the first grey of the dawn.

Ayaan was not permitted in the room. He stood upon the landing outside with his back against the wall, and he listened to the midwife’s low voice and Emine Han?m’s lower one and the sounds that he could not bear and could not stop himself from hearing.

His father sat upon the stair below him with his hands between his knees. Mehmet Hassan had said nothing for two hours, and he did not look up when the door at last opened.

"A son," said the midwife. "Both are well, and both are tired, and you may come in when Han?m Emine permits."

Ayaan did not hear what was said after that.

He went into the room and saw Zeynep upon the pillows with her hair loose and her face white and wet and utterly alive, and in the crook of her arm a small red face with its eyes shut tight.

"Come and look at him," she said. Her voice was hoarse and very quiet.

He knelt by the bed, and he looked.

The child had a great deal of dark hair, and a forehead that wrinkled when the lamp was moved, and a hand that opened and closed upon nothing.

I know the date of every great battle of the century.

I do not know what this child will become.

It struck him with a force that he had not expected. In twenty years he had been able to read the world before him, because he had already read its history, and that history had no page for this person.

Whatever the child became would be his own, and no memory of Ayaan’s could guide him.

"What shall we call him?" said Zeynep.

"Your father has a name that he would like, and mine has another." Ayaan found that his voice was not quite steady. "I should like to call him for the one who made the cradle."

"Mehmed," she said, and she smiled with exhausted triumph. "I had hoped that you would say it."

His father had come to the door and stood there with his shoulders bowed, and the old man’s eyes were wet.

"The cradle was finished before the child was thought of," said Mehmet Hassan, hoarsely. "I did not know that I was building it for a grandson who would carry my name."

"Baba." Ayaan rose and crossed the room and put his arms around him. "You did know. It was why you built it so well."

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 28 August 1910

On the nineteenth night after the birth, when the house was dark and the child was fed and asleep, Ayaan took the notebook to the back table and began to write.

He wrote without stopping until the lamp had burned low, and when he looked up, Zeynep was standing in the doorway in her shawl with the child upon her shoulder.

"I heard the pen," she said. "It does not sound the same when you write a ledger as when you write something else."

"I am writing a plan."

"Of what kind?"

"Of the kind that I should have written years ago, and could not." He pushed back the chair. "Sit, and I shall read you the beginning."

She sat, and she shifted the child higher upon her shoulder, and he read.

The House is not a shop, but a foundation for the persons who work in it, and for their children, and for the state that protects them.

It shall be judged by what it does after its founder is gone.

"That is a grand beginning," said Zeynep.

"It is meant to be. I did not wish to begin with a figure."

"Go on."

He read the five principles that he had set down, one after another, and she listened without interrupting.

First, that people are the capital, and machines are only their instruments.

Second, that every institution shall be built to outlive its builder.

Third, that capital shall be kept in separate vessels, so that no single loss can sink the whole.

Fourth, that knowledge shall be taught, written, and shared within the House, and not hoarded in the head of any one man.

Fifth, that the House shall serve the Sultan and the state by being competent, and not by being near.

"The fifth is the one that I should like to understand," said Zeynep.

"It is the one that I most wish to be right." He looked at the page. "A man who seeks to be near power will be asked to do what power wishes. A man who is useful to the state in what he does may refuse what he should not do."

"Mustafa has said the same."

"Baba Mustafa taught me most of it." He turned the page. "There is a second part, which is the ten years."

"The ten years?"

"What the House should be by 1920, and the steps that lead to it." He drew a breath. "I should like you to read it before I defend it."

She took the pages and read them by the lamp, with the child asleep upon her shoulder and her lips moving very slightly, as they did when she checked a sum.

When she had finished, she was silent for so long that he began to be afraid.

"You have written that a great war will come within four years," she said.

"I have written that it is likely."

"You have written it with great certainty." She did not look up. "You have not said how you know."

Ayaan felt the old, familiar tightness in his chest.

I cannot tell her that I have read the end of this age in another life.

I can only say what a careful man might say.

"I have read the naval estimates of the Powers," he said slowly, "and the loans that the German banks have made to Russia and Austria, and the railways that are being laid toward the frontiers. I have read what the newspapers of five countries print about one another."

"And?"

"And I think that the great houses of Europe have bound themselves so closely to each other that a quarrel in one of them cannot remain a quarrel in one." He met her eyes. "I do not say that it will come, Zeynep. I say that the cost of being unready is greater than the cost of preparing."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"That is not an answer," she said at last, "but it is an honest part of one."

"It is the part that I can give you."

"Then I shall wait for the rest." She did not say it unkindly. "I have waited for you since I was five years old, and I have learned that you will tell me what you can when you can."

Ayaan could not speak.

"Now," said Zeynep briskly, "I have three corrections to the ten years, and I wish to make them before the child wakes."

She turned to the first page and laid her finger upon it.

"You have set the foundry’s expansion in the second year, and the engineers’ school in the fourth. It should be the reverse."

"Why?"

"Because a foundry without men who can read a drawing will need foreigners to run it, and a school can begin with a single room." She turned the page. "Second, you have written that the reserve shall be held in two banks. It should be three, in three cities, and one of them should not be in the Empire."

"A bank outside the Empire?"

"A house in Zürich, or in Amsterdam, that is not connected to any of the great powers." Her voice was level. "If the war that you fear should come, a House that cannot reach its own money is a House that cannot pay its workmen."

"That is wise, and I did not think of it." He wrote it in the margin. "And the third?"

"The third is that you have not written down who shall carry on if you are taken from us." She said it quietly. "You have named the principles, and not the persons."

He was silent for some time.

"I did not wish to write it," he said.

"I know. That is why it must be written."

He took the pen again, and under the last line he set down her name, and then Elias’s, and then ?smail Usta’s, and when he had finished he laid the pen aside and found that his hand was steady.

V

Constantinople, Süleymaniye — 4 September 1910

On the first Sunday of September, Mustafa Efendi and Mehmet Hassan sat side by side upon the stone bench beneath the plane tree, and Ayaan sat upon the ground before them with the child in the crook of his arm.

The two old men had not spoken for some time. They had known each other for twenty years, and the whole of that time they had been, in the courtesy of men of their trade, friendly rivals.

Now they had become grandfathers to the same child, and neither had yet found words for it.

"He has your brow," said Mustafa at last.

"He has Fatma’s chin, thank Allah." Mehmet Hassan permitted himself a rare smile. "I had not thought that I should see the day."

"Which day?"

"That my son should be a man with a House, and a son of his own, and a minister’s seat." The old merchant looked at his hands. "I sold paper in the Rüstem Pa?a quarter for twenty-six years, Mustafa, and I never owned a warehouse."

"You owned a name that every merchant in the quarter trusted. It is a better thing than a warehouse."

"It is not so useful in winter."

Both men laughed, and the child stirred at the sound.

"Baba," said Ayaan quietly, "may I ask you something that I have asked of no one else?"

"Ask it."

"What do you wish to leave behind?"

Mehmet Hassan was silent for a time.

"Nothing that has to be defended," he said. "I should wish him to be able to say that his father’s name was never used to lie."

"And you, Baba Mustafa?"

"I have said it, my son, in the matter of the vak?f." The old man tapped the cane upon the stone. "A thing that is given away in good faith cannot be taken. A thing that is kept can be."

"Then I have written it into the foundation," said Ayaan. "The House shall give a tenth of its yearly profit to a fund for the sons and daughters of the quarter’s workmen, for their schooling, and it shall be administered by trustees who are not of my family."

Mustafa looked at him sharply.

"Not of your family?"

"A fund managed by the family that benefits from it is a purse, and not a foundation." Ayaan gazed down at his son’s sleeping face. "I should like Mehmed to inherit a House that can survive his mistakes."

"Allah grant it," said Mehmet Hassan, very softly.

"Allah grant it," said Mustafa, "and Allah grant that the boy is as stubborn as his mother."

Ayaan laughed, and he lifted the child and laid him in his grandfather’s arms.

Mehmet Hassan held him with great care, and he seemed to feel that the small body weighed more than any bale of paper that he had carried in his life.

Mehmed opened his eyes, considered the old man’s face with grave attention, and closed them again.

"He approves," said Mustafa dryly.

"He is reserving judgment," said Mehmet Hassan. "It is a habit that I hope he keeps."

VI

üsküdar, the library of the retired pasha — 12 September 1910

The library was cooler than the garden, and it smelled of leather, beeswax, and the dust of a great many books.

Cevdet rose from behind the long desk as Ayaan came in, and he did a thing that he had not done on any previous occasion, which was to come around the desk and offer his hand.

"Hassan Efendi, I congratulate you upon your son."

"You are kind, Efendi."

"I am accurate, which is rarer." The scarred man’s smile was brief and dry. "Please sit. I have taken the liberty of ordering coffee, and I have sent the clerk away."

They sat in two worn chairs by the window, and for a while neither of them spoke.

"You asked me here upon a matter of mutual interest," said Ayaan.

"I did. I wish to ask you a question, and I wish to give you the courtesy of explaining why."

"I should be glad of it."

"For some years I have followed the progress of a young man in Emin?nü." Cevdet laid his hands upon his knees. "I have read what he has written and done, and I have seen that he is careful, and that he does not lie to the people who trust him."

Ayaan did not move.

"I do not say it to alarm you. I say it because I think that you have guessed it, and that you have been too well-mannered to mention it."

"I have guessed that someone was watching, Efendi. I have not known who."

"Now you know." The scarred man’s gaze was steady. "The question is this. What do you want?"

"Of whom?"

"Of the state, of the Sultan, of the world, of your life." Cevdet shrugged. "I do not mean what you would say to a minister. I mean what you would write in a book that no one else would read."

Ayaan thought of the page that he had written upon the back table.

He did not have the words that he had used there, because they were too large for a library, and he found that he did not need them.

"I wish to build a House that outlasts me," he said, "and that gives the state more than it takes. I wish the Empire to be strong enough that no foreign banker may dictate its policy, and no foreign army may threaten its capital."

"A modest ambition."

"I did not say that it was modest, Efendi."

"No." Cevdet almost laughed. "You said that it was what you wished, and I find that I believe you. It is a very unfashionable thing to wish."

"Why?"

"Because most men who ask for power ask it for themselves." The older man looked out at the garden. "I have been in the service of the state for thirty years, and I have met perhaps three who asked for it for the sake of something else."

"Who were the others?"

"Two of them are dead, and the third I shall not name." Cevdet turned back. "I shall not say more upon that subject."

He took a folded paper from his coat and laid it upon the small table between them.

"I have a proposal, which is not an offer," he said. "I do not ask you to serve me, and I shall not serve you. If any person approaches the House with a design that I believe is dangerous to the state, I shall tell you."

"And in return?"

"In return, you will tell me if you learn of a design that you believe dangerous." He lifted a hand. "You will not report to me, and you will not be required to say how you learned it. We shall be two men who keep an eye upon the same door."

Ayaan considered it for a long time.

"I accept, Efendi, upon one condition."

"Name it."

"That neither of us shall ask the other for anything that we should be ashamed to ask in the presence of the Sultan."

Cevdet was silent, and then he inclined his head, very slowly.

"That is a better condition than I should have thought of," he said. "I accept it."

They did not shake hands, because neither of them was a man who made gestures that he could not afford.

When Ayaan left, the scarred man stood at the window and watched him cross the garden, and he did not look away until the gate had closed.

VII

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 29 September 1910

At the end of the month, when the leaves along the quay had begun to turn and the first cold wind had come down from the Black Sea, Ayaan sealed the foundation in a box of cedar.

It was a plain box, made by his father’s own hands, and it held the five principles, the ten years, and the three corrections that Zeynep had written in the margin in her small, firm hand.

Zeynep stood at his side in the lamplight, and between them, in the walnut cradle, Mehmed slept with one fist beside his cheek.

"It is not very large," she said, "for the whole of a life’s work."

"It is not the life’s work. It is the foundation." Ayaan laid his palm upon the lid. "A house is not the foundation. It is what is built upon it, and we have built very little yet."

"We have a shop, and a foundry, and a warehouse. We have a seat in a commission, and a ledger that was praised by an inspector."

"We have an honest name in the quarter, and a clerk who refused fifty liras, and a foundry master who refused three times his wage." He smiled. "I think that these are the better part."

"And we have a son." She looked at the cradle. "I find that I have begun to measure everything by him."

"I think that every parent does."

"Baba Mustafa came this morning, and he brought a gift that I did not expect." She smiled at the cradle. "It is a small copy of the Quran, wrapped in green cloth, that was given to him by his own father. He asked that it be kept in the box with the foundation, until the boy is old enough to read it."

Ayaan lifted the lid, and he laid the little book beside the principles, and he closed the box again with great care.

"And does it not frighten you? That all that we build must pass to a person who has not yet learned to hold a cup?"

"It frightens me a great deal." He took her hand. "It is also the only reason that any of it matters."

Outside, the lamps along the quay were being lit, and across the water the lights of Galata shone upon the dark.

He thought of the years that lay before them, the war that he could not name, and the empire that he hoped to keep, and the House that was only the first small stone of a thing that no one could yet see.

I am twenty years old, and I have a wife, a son, a name, and a plan.

It is not much, but it is the beginning of a very long road.

Zeynep leaned her head against his shoulder.

"Tomorrow," she said, "you will begin to build it."

"Tomorrow," said Ayaan, "we shall."