Chapter 2: The Boy Who Remembered

Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Boy Who Remembered

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 19 July 1890

By the sixth month of his second life, Ayaan Hassan had made his first discovery about being a baby. Nobody expected anything of him, and that was a kind of freedom.

He could not walk.

He could not speak.

But he could listen, and the city poured language into him from dawn until the last lamp went out.

He sorted it the way he had once sorted data. The shouts of the street went into one column, the talk of the kitchen into another, and the flowery courtesies his mother used with visitors into a third.

It was not the Turkish he had grown up with. A hundred years of reform had scrubbed that language clean of Persian and Arabic, and here those words were everywhere, thick as spice in a bazaar sack.

His modern vocabulary was a trap as much as a gift. Twice that month a word from his old life rose to his lips before he caught it, and both times he was glad his lips could not yet shape it.

Here a school was a mektep. A railway was a ?imendifer, from the French chemin de fer, and the old men said it with the weary scorn of people who had watched a great many foreign things arrive.

Every word went in and stayed. He never had to hunt for one again, and he understood, with a faint chill, that this was the part of himself that had followed him through the dark untouched.

He also understood the danger of it. A baby who spoke in sentences would be a miracle, and a miracle in a city of informers would draw a visitor, and a visitor would write a report.

So he made his second rule, quietly, in the dark of the cradle. Speak late. Speak badly. Be exactly as clever as a child is allowed to be.

On a hot Saturday in July, Nazl? Han?m came bursting through the door without knocking, which she had never done.

"Fatma! Fatma, come and look. There is a tooth."

There was.

Fatma’s finger found it in his lower gum, a tiny white edge like a grain of rice.

Ayaan, who had been aching for three days and bearing it with what dignity a baby could, bit down on the finger with real feeling.

"Ma?allah," Fatma said, laughing and wincing together. "He has teeth like his father. He will eat the shop."

The whole street seemed to know by noon. In the old city a first tooth was a feast, and by evening the kitchen smelled of boiled wheat.

It was called di? bu?day?, tooth wheat, and Fatma made it in a great copper pot: wheat simmered soft, then sweetened with sugar and mixed with raisins, walnuts, and the red jewels of pomegranate. She sent bowls to every house on Has?rc?lar Street, and the neighbors’ children came to the door to collect theirs with the solemn greed of small tax officials.

Ayaan watched all of it from his cradle, in the arms of one woman after another.

They put a silver coin in his fist.

They said a prayer over his head.

A very old woman with a face like a dried fig told him that he would grow up to be a haf?z or a pasha, and that she hoped for his mother’s sake it would be the pasha.

He was given a spoonful of the wheat, mashed fine, and it was the first sweet thing he had tasted in two lifetimes.

He had to concentrate very hard to keep from weeping over it.

Everything here is warm, he thought.

Everyone here is real.

In his old life he had read about neighborhoods like this as a social structure, a network of reciprocal obligations that stood in for the state, and now he was inside one, being fed.

That night Mehmet sat by the cradle with the lamp turned low. He looked at the tooth for a long while, with the face of a man doing sums.

"He is a quiet one," he said at last. "Not a word yet. Hacer Han?m says some children are slow."

"Some children are listening," Fatma said, without looking up from her sewing.

Ayaan closed his eyes and said nothing.

It was an easy rule to keep, on that night.

It would not always be.

II

Constantinople, Sirkeci — 3 November 1890

The new station at Sirkeci opened on a gray Monday, and half the city came to see it.

Mehmet closed the shop for the morning, which Ayaan had never known him to do. He carried his nearly ten-month-old son on one arm, wrapped against the cold, with R?za Efendi puffing along beside him and complaining about the crowd all the way down the shore road.

"They say the Sultan gave them the very gardens of Topkap? for the track," R?za Efendi said. "Imagine it, Mehmet. A railway through the Padi?ah’s own roses."

"I would rather imagine the freight rates," Mehmet said.

The station rose out of the crowd like a piece of Vienna that had come ashore. It was long and pale, with a great round window set high in the front, and arched niches in the walls that were meant to say Ottoman to anyone who needed to be told.

Inside, under the lamps, there were officials in frock coats and fezzes standing very straight, and foreign gentlemen in tall hats standing slightly less so.

Ayaan, perched on his father’s arm, felt the breath go out of him.

He knew this hall.

He had walked through it once on a school trip in the fourth grade, when it was a museum, and a guide had shown the class a tiled stove behind glass and a model train on a table.

There had been no trains then.

The station had stopped working the year he turned nine.

The stove was here too. It stood in the corner of the waiting room, hot and alive, with a man in a stiff coat feeding it coal.

It is brand new, he thought, with a dizzy, tender horror.

Everything in that museum is brand new.

For a moment he wanted to laugh, and it came out as a long, bubbling coo that made a woman nearby sigh and say what a sweet child.

Then the engine came in.

It entered the hall with a great breath of steam and a sound like a chained animal, and the crowd went back a step all together.

Ayaan did not.

He stared at it with his whole small body, at the black iron wheels and the brass fittings and the string of carriages behind it, and he felt, absurdly, that he was being introduced to someone.

"Look at his eyes," said R?za Efendi. "He is not afraid of it."

"He is not afraid of anything," said Mehmet, and held him a little tighter.

The speeches went on a long time.

Ayaan did not listen to them.

He was watching the porters who now streamed off the platform with trunks on their backs, and a clerk in a booth selling slips of paper, and a Greek merchant in a good overcoat who was making rapid notes in a small book.

Distance, he thought.

The railway shortens distance.

And in his old life, the first lesson of every trade course he had ever taken was that when distance shrank, prices moved.

He turned it over carefully, a baby’s thought held by a grown man’s mind.

Cheaper transport from the west would flood the markets of the city with foreign goods.

It would make some merchants rich and ruin others, and it would not ask which was which.

"They say the Bulgarian plums will come in by rail now," R?za Efendi was saying. "Half the price of the Malatya fruit, and twice as fast."

Mehmet was silent for a moment.

"Then the Malatya fruit must be better," he said, "or cheaper, or we will sell something else."

He shifted Ayaan to his other arm.

"A man cannot fight a train. He can only decide where to stand."

It was a simple sentence, spoken by a grocer in a crowd. Ayaan stored it with the same care he gave to the stove and the engine and the date.

He would think about it for the next sixty years.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 12 February 1892

By the second winter, the whole street agreed that the Hassan boy was slow to talk and strange to watch.

He had said exactly four words in two years.

Anne. Baba. Su. Hay?r.

They were the right four, spaced out with the right hesitation, and he was quietly proud of the performance.

It cost him more than he had expected.

Every day he sat silent while a hundred sentences begged to be said.

He had learned that holding a language in your mouth is a physical effort, like holding a breath.

But he had also learned to walk, and that changed everything. At two years and one month he could cross the shop on his own feet, which made him, in the cramped geography of Has?rc?lar Street, a free agent.

His father let him sit among the sacks while he worked. Ayaan sat there like a small customs officer, as his mother had once said, and watched.

He watched how a handful of figs was weighed and how the scale was tapped to settle. He watched which customers paid at once and which paid by promise, and how Mehmet’s face changed when he gave credit, a tightening so slight that only a person looking for it would see.

And he remembered all of it. Not just the numbers, but the order of the sacks, the color of the twine, the exact set of the mouths of the men who bought and sold.

On a Friday morning in February, a Greek clerk named Yorgos came in from a ship chandler’s near the quay. He was a thin, amiable man with ink on his cuffs, and he was talking before he had crossed the threshold.

"Mehmet Efendi! Good morning, good morning. I am here about the figs."

"The figs are ready," Mehmet said. "Forty sacks, as agreed. My porter took them down to the quay an hour ago."

"Forty-five," said Yorgos pleasantly.

Mehmet stopped with the ledger in his hand.

"Forty-five," Yorgos repeated. "It is written in our book. Forty-five sacks, for the Mahmudiye. The captain was very clear."

"Then your captain was mistaken. It was forty."

"Mehmet Efendi, I would not say this unless I were sure."

Yorgos spread his hands, with every appearance of regret.

"Five sacks are missing. If the shop has made an error, we will not make a quarrel of it. Only send them down."

Ayaan, on the floor between two stacks of lentils, looked up.

He had seen the morning.

Before dawn Mehmet had counted out forty sacks, and then, with a frown, he had set five more apart at the back of the shop, tied with red twine.

Those were for a ship’s cook in Karak?y, promised for tomorrow.

Mehmet had said so aloud, to the porter, while Ayaan sat with his thumb in his mouth.

Mehmet had heard it.

Yorgos had not.

And Mehmet was a careful man who did not like to call another man a liar, so he was now searching his own memory with the troubled face of someone who suspects that he himself has made the mistake.

He will give them away, Ayaan thought. Out of politeness. Five sacks of Ayd?n figs, to a man who has not paid for them.

It was a small thing.

It was five sacks.

But it was the shop’s whole margin for the week, and he had grown up under that yellow kitchen light and knew what a missing week looked like.

He told himself not to. He told himself it was the exact kind of thing his second rule was for.

Then he got to his feet, crossed the shop at an unsteady trot, and put both hands flat on the stack of five sacks tied with red twine.

"Be?," he said.

Five.

"Yar?n."

Tomorrow.

The shop went very quiet.

Yorgos looked at the sacks, and at the red twine, and at the child. Mehmet looked at them too, and Ayaan saw the memory come back into his father’s face like a lamp being lit.

"The Karak?y cook," Mehmet said slowly. "The Karak?y cook. Five sacks, for tomorrow. I tied them myself."

"Ah," said Yorgos.

His smile had not moved, but something behind it had shifted.

"Then perhaps the book is wrong."

"Perhaps your book is wrong," Mehmet agreed, and for the first time that morning his voice was perfectly steady.

Yorgos took his forty sacks and went away. He tipped his hat to Ayaan at the door, with an air of rueful respect that was not entirely a joke.

When he was gone, Mehmet came and crouched in front of his son. He looked at him for a long moment, and Ayaan did what a baby should do: he stuck his thumb in his mouth and looked at the ceiling.

"Five," Mehmet said softly.

"And tomorrow."

He began to laugh, helplessly, a great warm bark of a laugh.

"Allah be praised. My son’s first sentence, and it is a correction of an invoice."

He swept Ayaan up and carried him down the street to tell everyone.

By evening it was a story: how the Hassan boy had saved his father five sacks of figs.

Hacer Han?m said that the quiet ones were always the clever ones.

Nazl? Han?m said she had known it.

Ayaan bore all this in his father’s arms with the blank sweet face of the very young.

But when he looked past his father’s shoulder, his mother was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with a ladle in her hand. She was not laughing.

She was looking at him the way she had looked at him on the first day, as if weighing what they owed.

IV

Rüstem Pa?a Mosque, Emin?nü — 2 June 1893

He learned his mistake quickly, and he learned it the way a merchant learns the price of a bad deal, by paying it.

For weeks after the figs, people watched him.

Neighbors tested him with questions.

A man selling sesame rings crouched in the lane and held up three fingers and asked how many, and Ayaan looked at him with such perfect, glazed incomprehension that the man laughed and gave him the ring anyway.

Too much, he told himself. Too fast. A mind like mine does not need to hide its answers. It needs to hide its speed.

So he let the months go by without a word.

At two he was slow.

At three he was ordinary.

He learned to say a little, a little and to get small things wrong on purpose, like calling a pomegranate an apple, until the street stopped noticing and decided that the Hassan boy had been a late bloomer and was now catching up like the rest.

It was the second thing Ayaan learned that spring. A lie could be a performance, but the best lie was a pace.

On the first Friday in June, Mehmet took him to the mosque.

It was hot already by midday. Ayaan, three years and four months old, walked beside his father with one hand in his, through the lanes full of porters and the smell of roasting coffee, and up the stairs to the little mosque of Rüstem Pa?a.

He had been inside before, carried in his father’s arms.

He had never really seen it.

The mosque stood above the shops on a raised terrace, small and plain from the outside, and when you went in you found yourself in a jewel box.

Every wall was covered in tiles. They were blue and white and a red so fierce it seemed to burn, patterned with tulips and carnations and curling leaves, and the whole room was lit with a cool, glowing green.

Iznik, Ayaan thought.

Sixteenth century.

He had written an exam answer on the Grand Vizier who built it, a man who had married a sultan’s daughter and whom the historians had not been kind to.

And here was the tilework, glowing in a room smelling of wool and rosewater, with a hundred men taking off their shoes.

Mehmet washed at the fountain and showed Ayaan how, first the hands, then the mouth, then the face, as solemn as a man teaching a trade.

Ayaan copied him with perfect care.

In his old life he had prayed rarely, and often without thinking.

Now he followed each motion with the attention of a person learning a craft from the inside.

Then the congregation stood in rows and the imam began, and he lost the thread of everything else.

The voice was an old man’s, cracked and sure, and the Arabic came out of it like water out of a stone. Ayaan stood between his father’s knees and heard it as a text, as a flow of sounds and meanings, each word in its place, and every word he heard went into the place in his head where everything went.

He did not decide to remember it.

He never decided.

It was simply there afterward, whole.

When it was over, the men rose and greeted each other, and the imam, Haf?z Kemal Efendi, a tall bent man with a white beard stained yellow at the edges, came down the aisle. He had known Mehmet’s father, and he made a point of greeting the son.

"And this is the young one," he said, bending to look at Ayaan. "The one who corrects invoices."

Mehmet, red to the ears, said that was only a story.

"It is a good story. Does he know any of the Book, Mehmet Efendi? Anything at all?"

"He is only three. Fatma teaches him a little at night."

Fatma did.

She had taught him the first Chapter, the Fatiha, slowly and tenderly, line by line over many evenings, and one short Chapter after it.

It was the whole of what a mother would teach a boy his age.

"Let us hear it," said the imam, and sat down on the step, with the patience of a man who had listened to a thousand children.

Ayaan looked at his father, and at the old man, and at the blue and green and burning red of the walls.

He knew a good deal more than the Fatiha.

He had heard Haf?z Kemal recite twice that day, and a dozen times before, and he could have carried on for a very long time, in a voice no child should have had.

The knowledge sat in his chest like a bird in a hand.

Be a pace, he thought. Not a miracle.

So he began, in his small hoarse voice, and recited the first Chapter, and then the short one that Fatma had taught him. He made two mistakes, so slight that only the imam would catch them, and he stopped where a three-year-old should stop.

The old man was silent a moment.

"Very good," Haf?z Kemal said, quietly.

"Very good indeed."

He laid a dry hand on Ayaan’s head.

"Allah has given you a clear voice, little one. Be careful what you do with it."

It was nothing, a kind old man’s blessing.

But as they walked down the steps into the white noon, Ayaan could not shake the feeling that the imam had seen the second Chapter, the one he had not recited.

He had seen the shape of it standing behind the child’s silence, as one sees a ship through fog.

"My son," Mehmet said wonderingly, swinging his hand as they walked. "A haf?z, perhaps. Or a pasha. We will see."

"Pasha," said Ayaan, in a bored, babyish whisper, because it seemed safer.

His father laughed so hard that he had to stop in the road.

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 14 January 1894

On his fourth birthday, which nobody in the quarter would have called a birthday, Fatma gave him a gift.

It was a Sunday, and cold.

In those years a birthday was not marked in a family like theirs.

It was the kind of occasion that wealthier households borrowed from the Franks, and the Hassans simply noted that a child had lived another year, and thanked Allah.

But Fatma, in the evening, after the soup and the bread and the olives, took a small thing from her sewing basket and put it in his hands.

It was a wooden counting frame. It was no longer than his forearm, with ten wires and ten beads on each, and the beads were worn smooth and dark by someone else’s fingers.

"It was my father’s," she said.

"He used to keep the steamer’s stores in it, rice and flour and coffee. He taught me my sums on it before I could read."

She sat down beside him on the cushion, close, and the lamp made her face soft.

"I think you should have it."

Mehmet looked up from his ledger, smiling, and went back to his figures.

Ayaan ran his thumb along the beads.

Click, click, click.

They had the sound of an old clock.

"Thank you, Anne," he said. It was a plain phrase, and it was true.

She did not answer at once. She watched his hands on the wires for a long time, in the way of someone listening to a piece of music she had known once and half forgotten.

"You do not count the way other children count," she said, very low, so that Mehmet would not hear. "They move the beads one at a time. You move whole rows. You do not even look."

Ayaan went still.

He had not known he was doing it.

That was the horror of it.

For four years he had guarded his tongue, his face, and his eyes, and his hands had betrayed him on an ordinary Sunday, with no one watching but the one person who always was.

"I do not know what to tell you," he said at last, in his smallest voice.

"I am not asking you to tell me anything."

She put her hand over his, over the wires and the beads, and he felt how warm it was, and how steady.

"I have been watching you for four years," she said. "I carried you for nine months before that, and I know what that is like, to feel a person turn inside you. There are things about you that I do not understand, my little lion. I have decided that I do not have to."

"Anne—"

"Listen."

Her voice did not change, but her grip tightened a little.

"This city is not kind to people who stand out. You have heard the women talk. A man says one careless thing in a coffeehouse, and he is gone. A boy who shines too brightly gets noticed by the wrong people, and the wrong people have long memories."

He could not breathe.

"So I will not ask you what you are, and I will not tell your father what I think I see. You will tell me when you are ready, or you will not, and either way I am your mother."

She lifted her hand and touched his cheek, once, with the tips of her fingers.

"But be careful, Ayaan. Be very, very careful. Do you understand me?"

"I understand," he said.

It was the longest sentence he had ever spoken to her. It was the first one in which he had not pretended.

She smiled, a small tired smile with something fierce in it, and bent to kiss the top of his head. Then she rose and went back to her sewing, and the room settled around them: the ticking stove, the scratch of Mehmet’s pen, the wind in the shutters.

Ayaan sat very still with the counting frame in his lap.

In the history he remembered, there had been no such thing as a woman called Fatma Hassan.

There had been only the empire, falling.

In the story he was living, there was a woman in a cold room who had looked straight at the impossible and decided to love it anyway.

She has not asked, he thought, and the thought made something tighten in his throat. That is somehow more frightening than if she had.

Because now he knew that he could not hide from her. And if he could not hide from his mother, who had every reason to want him ordinary, then how long could he hide from anyone?

He moved the first bead. Click.

Then, slowly, deliberately, one at a time, like a child, he moved the next.