Chapter 23: The Year of Decision

Chapter 23: Chapter 23: The Year of Decision

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 22 October 1906

The letter from Monastir came with the afternoon post, in a plain envelope without a seal.

The address was written in a hand that Ayaan knew from the margin of a pay register, and he carried the letter to the storeroom before he opened it.

Tahir Sermet wrote as he spoke, directly and without ornament.

Monastir, 15 October. Hassan Efendi: I write only figures, as you advised.

The third battalion of my regiment has received two months of pay in the last eleven.

The men sell their winter blankets to the shopkeepers to buy bread, and three of my fellow officers have pawned their swords.

Friends here have formed a society this autumn, and I will not write its name.

They ask whether it is true that the Debt Administration takes from the customs more than the Treasury keeps. I do not know the answer, and you do.

Send me the arithmetic, and I will place it in their hands.

Do not send opinions, for we have enough of those. T.S.

Ayaan read it three times, and then he set it on the crate and looked at it.

A society formed in the autumn. Salonica, September 1906.

I know the names of its first members, and I know what it becomes.

The request was reasonable. The arithmetic was no secret, and he could assemble it from published decrees and the lists that the Debt Administration itself made public.

That is what makes it dangerous.

Cevdet had advised that he answer with figures and not with opinions. Ayaan saw now that the advice was incomplete, because a figure supplied at the right moment was an opinion with columns.

A reckoning in a clear hand, from a stationer in Emin?nü, would carry weight in a room full of angry officers. It would turn their anger into an argument, and the argument into a program, and the program would be partly his.

He had refused the curtain in Beyaz?t. This was the same door, approached from the side.

He folded the letter, and he did not answer it that night.

II

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 26 October 1906

Zeynep read the letter through, and then she read it again more slowly.

"He asks for figures," she said. "He does not ask you to join anything."

"He asks me to supply those who will."

"That is a large word for a column of numbers."

"The column is the one thing that they lack. They have their anger already."

She put the letter down on her knee and regarded him for some time.

"Then I will ask the question that you have not asked yourself. Suppose that these officers succeed, and that they demand a constitution. Suppose that the Sultan refuses." Her voice was even. "Which of the two do you keep?"

Ayaan did not answer at once. He had avoided the question for a year, and he found that avoiding it had not made it smaller.

"Both, if both can be kept," he said. "An empire of this size, with Turks and Arabs, Armenians and Greeks, Albanians and Kurds, needs a person to whom all of them may be loyal without being obliged to be loyal to one another. A parliament cannot be that person. A committee of officers cannot be that person either."

"And if he refuses?"

"Then I must ask whether the refusal is his, or his advisers’." He leaned against the shelf. "At Midilli he accepted foreign supervision rather than war. At Akaba he accepted the British demand rather than a fleet. He is not a man who refuses what he cannot afford to refuse."

"So you intend to show him that he cannot afford to refuse this."

"I intend that the cost of refusing should be plain, and that the cost of agreeing should be bearable." He chose the words slowly. "A constitution without competent courts and a competent treasury is paper, and he knows it. His fear of it is not unreasonable. If the institutions worked, a parliament would be something that a dynasty could survive."

"That is an argument for institutions," said Zeynep. "It is not an answer about Tahir."

"I will write the arithmetic."

She waited.

"But I will not write it for Tahir. I will write it for someone who has the power to correct it, and who may do so in an orderly manner."

"You mean Cevdet Efendi."

"I mean the reader to whom Cevdet Efendi can carry it."

Zeynep nodded slowly.

"Then do it properly. Write it as you would write a loan proposal: what is wrong, what it costs, and what it would take to mend."

She handed back the letter. "And do not write anything that you could not defend aloud before a magistrate."

"You said that once before."

"I meant it once before," said Zeynep. "I mean it more now."

III

Constantinople, Sirkeci — 5 November 1906

Hovsep Agopian poured the tea himself, and he did it slowly, which Ayaan had learned meant that he was choosing his words.

They sat in the small room behind the warehouse, where the stove was lit and the window looked out upon a wall of crates. The accounts for the month had been finished in a quarter of an hour, and neither of them had risen.

"Do you know what the word constitution means to a house like mine?" asked Hovsep.

"I would be glad to hear it, Efendi."

"It means that a man cannot be taken from his bed at night by the whim of a clerk." He set down the pot. "In July, a policeman asked me whether I loved the Sultan. My father was asked nothing in his lifetime. He was tolerated, and he was grateful for the toleration, and I do not wish my sons to be grateful for it."

"I understand."

"I am not a political man. I am a man who wishes that his ledgers should be believed by anyone who opens them." The merchant looked at the tea. "If a constitution would give me that, I would say a prayer for it."

Ayaan said nothing for a moment.

"A constitution is only as good as the judge who applies it," he said. "On the first day, it is a sheet of paper. On the thousandth day, it is whatever the courts and the tax collectors have made of it."

Hovsep raised his eyes with a small, surprised smile.

"You have thought further than the men who shout the word in the coffee houses."

"I have thought about what must be built beneath it."

"Then let me tell you what troubles me, since you are willing to listen." He lowered his voice, though no one else was in the room. "I have heard the word liberty spoken lately in a manner that meant liberty for the man who says it. And I have heard Ottoman said in a manner that meant Turk, when the speaker believed that he was among friends."

"Where?"

"In rooms that I will not name. Not often, and not by the worst of them." Hovsep shook his head. "But I have noticed it, because a man in my position learns to notice."

"That is the reason that it must be built by people who count everyone," said Ayaan.

"Then count us, Ayaan." The merchant said it quietly. "That is the whole of what I ask. Count us in the ledger, and in the court, and in whatever comes afterward."

"I will, Efendi."

"I believe you," said Hovsep Agopian. "That is why I have said it to you, and not to someone else."

IV

Constantinople, Galata — 29 November 1906

Hovsep had given him a name, and the name led to a room above a tailor’s shop in Galata, where a single candle burned on a table covered with columns.

Isak Benveniste was twenty-six, thin, and careful, and he did not rise until he had finished the line that he was adding.

"Hovsep Efendi tells me that you left the Debt Administration," said Ayaan.

"I was not dismissed, Efendi. I was moved to a desk with nothing on it, and after four months I resigned." He closed the ledger. "I had refused to alter a total that I knew to be correct."

"Which total?"

"A collection from the stamp revenue. The figure was inconvenient to an official who had promised a different one to his superior." He said it plainly, as one reports a matter long finished. "It is not an uncommon story, and I do not tell it to be pitied."

"I did not ask in order to pity you." Ayaan laid the draft of the first two sections on the table. "I have written a reckoning of the army’s pay, from the published lists, and I should like it examined by a man who knows how those lists are made."

Isak read the first page and then the second, and his eyes moved down the columns with the speed of long habit.

He read for half an hour. Ayaan did not interrupt him, and the candle burned lower.

"Your totals are within two parts in a hundred," said Isak at last. "That is a remarkable accuracy for a man outside the office."

"And the two parts?"

"The stamp revenue has been understated since the spring of 1904. I can give you the true series, if you will not say from whom you had it." He tapped the page. "Here the Administration’s own report has a fault, and I believe that it is a deliberate one."

"I will not name you."

"You will not need to. No one else would know where to look." He raised his eyes. "Why does a stationer want this, Efendi? You will forgive the question."

"Because someone ought to know what is true, and write it in a place where it can be read."

"I wrote what was true once, and it was removed from the file."

"This will not be removed. It will be carried to a man who reads to the end." Ayaan gathered the pages. "I cannot offer you a salary yet. I can offer a fee for each task, paid in gold on the day it is done, and a place at my table when I have one."

Isak considered this for some time.

"I have kept books for two cloth merchants," he said. "They pay me promptly, and they never ask whether my columns agree. You ask first."

"I am told that yours do."

"They do," said Isak Benveniste, and he smiled for the first time. "Give me three days with the stamp series."

V

Constantinople, Y?ld?z — 14 December 1906

On the second Friday of December, Mehmet closed the grocery at noon and took his son to see the Sultan.

"I have seen him eleven times in my life," he said, as they climbed the hill from Be?ikta?. "I wish you to see him once."

The road below the Hamidiye Mosque was lined on both sides with soldiers in dark blue uniforms and red fezzes. Behind them stood the crowd, in rows, and it was quieter than Ayaan had expected.

The gate where the carriages had gathered in July of the previous year had been repaired. The new stone was paler than the old.

Seventeen months ago.

He kept his eyes on the stone and did not allow his face to change. Mehmet had noticed nothing, for his gaze was fixed on the road, where the escort was coming up.

A band began to play, and the horsemen came first, and then the carriage. The Sultan sat upright in it, a small spare man of sixty-four with a thin gray beard, in a plain dark coat.

His face was pale and tired. His eyes did not rest on the crowd, but moved steadily along the rooftops and the upper windows.

"Padi?ah?m ?ok ya?a!" called a voice near the front, and others took it up. "Long live my Sultan!"

Mehmet’s lips moved in prayer, and Ayaan saw that his father’s eyes were wet.

In my first life I was taught three verdicts on this man, and no two of them agreed.

I have no verdict to bring into this lane. I have only what I see.

What he saw was an old man who had survived a bomb seventeen months before and who had returned to the same road, at the same hour, to be seen by his people. It was not weakness, and it was not tyranny.

In the history that I knew, he is deposed in April 1909, and he is sent to Salonica, and the dynasty is led by a council of officers who keep the throne without keeping its authority.

I do not know whether that is fixed here. I know that it must not be.

The carriage passed, and the crowd closed behind it, and the band played on into the gate of the mosque.

"He is an old man, Ayaan," said Mehmet, wiping his face with his sleeve. "He has carried this for thirty years, and I think that it is more than any one man can carry."

"Yes, Baba."

"Whatever you do with your life, remember that he was spared in July. I think that it must have been for something."

"I will remember," said Ayaan.

On the road down the hill, he walked beside his father in silence.

He thought of the soldiers who had lined the road that afternoon.

They were clothed and fed and paid in full, and he thought of Tahir’s third battalion, which had been paid for two months in eleven. He had decided something, though he could not yet have said when, and it was larger than the memorandum that he had been asked to write.

The dynasty is not the problem, and it is not the solution. The machinery beneath it is the problem.

If the next two years give him a better choice than he was given in my first life, then there may be no April 1909.

VI

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 20 December 1906

He wrote the memorandum over six nights, after the shop was closed and the lamp in the storeroom was the only light in the lane.

It was titled A Reckoning of the Army’s Pay, and the Remedies within the Law, and he wrote it in the plain, unornamented prose of a loan proposal.

The first section set out what the Treasury owed the army, month by month, from the published lists. The second set out what the Debt Administration collected from the customs, the salt, the stamps, and the tobacco, and what remained when it had finished.

The third section was the shortest, and he wrote it three times.

On the sixth night, Zeynep sat beside him with a pencil and went through every figure. She did not speak for an hour, and when she did, it was to point at a single line.

"You have written that the expenses of the Palace are greater than the Treasury can justify."

"It is true."

"It is also an insult, and the reader will put the whole paper in a drawer." She drew the pencil through the sentence. "A reckoning that insults its reader is not read to the end."

"The figure is correct."

"Then print the figure and let him draw the conclusion. A man will accept an arithmetic that he has done himself."

Ayaan looked at the crossed line, and then he nodded and rewrote it.

He had checked the customs column with Isak Benveniste, who supplied the corrected stamp series on the third day and asked for nothing beyond his fee.

The three remedies were modest, and he had chosen them so.

The Court of Accounts, which already existed, should be given the authority to publish a yearly statement of the Empire’s revenues and expenses.

The army’s pay should be drawn first from the surest of the revenues, and no other claim should precede it.

And the Empire should train a corps of accountants in the commercial schools, so that its treasury might be examined by those who understood it.

"None of it requires a revolution," said Zeynep, when she had finished reading.

"That is why it may be accepted."

"And none of it requires a constitution."

"A constitution would make it simpler. But the three remedies would be worth having without one." He squared the pages on the table. "That is the point, Zeynep. A man who accepts these has already begun to build the institutions, and the question of the constitution will be easier on the day that it is asked."

She read the final page once more.

"It is a good paper," she said. "It is the first document that I have seen you write that asks for nothing for yourself."

"I have nothing to ask for."

"You have asked for nothing so far. It is not the same." She smiled. "Let us see who answers."

VII

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 31 December 1906

Ayaan had closed the shop’s accounts on the last day of the calendar year since the spring that he began, because his suppliers in Vienna and Trieste did the same, and it spared him a second set of books.

He and Zeynep sat in the storeroom with the ledgers between them and a single lamp, and they worked through the totals twice.

"Two and a half months of costs in gold," said Zeynep, running her finger down the last column. "The plan said two by the summer."

"The plan was modest."

"The plan was yours, and I told you in March that it should have been more." She turned a page. "Nine schools are buying the exercise books now. The Ministry’s quartermaster has reordered the pay registers, and Lieutenant Sermet’s regiment has asked for a second hundred."

"Then the year is sound."

"The year is more than sound. After the reserves, there are two hundred and forty liras of profit." She said it carefully, as she said all sums that pleased her. "I have put twelve more of mine in the box, under my own key."

Ayaan smiled, and then the smile faded.

"What is it?" she asked.

"The memorandum is finished, and Cevdet Efendi is to read it on Thursday. After that, I can do nothing, and the rest depends upon a reader whom I will never meet."

"That is true of most things worth doing." Zeynep closed the ledger. "You have built a shop that cannot be knocked over by one quarrel between governments, and you have written the best paper that I have seen on the Empire’s money. I would call that a year."

"A year of what?"

"Of deciding what you will do," said Zeynep. "I think that it is the hardest kind."

VIII

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 3 January 1907

Ayaan placed the memorandum in Cevdet’s hands, and the scarred man read it standing at the counter, without removing his hat.

The shop was empty. Outside, it had begun to snow, lightly, and the flakes melted on the cobbles as they fell.

He read for twenty minutes without speaking. Twice he turned back a page, and once he made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

When he had finished, he laid the pages square on the counter and looked at Ayaan for a long time.

"This is not what I expected," he said.

"What did you expect, Efendi?"

"A complaint." The scar creased. "In my profession, a young man who writes about the army’s pay is generally writing a petition, or a threat. This asks no favor, and it proposes a remedy to each fault that it names."

"I tried to write what I could defend before a magistrate."

"You have done more. You have written what a minister could adopt without admitting that he had been wrong." Cevdet touched the third section. "This clause about the Court of Accounts is shrewd. It asks the state to use what it already possesses."

"It is the cheapest reform that exists."

"The cheapest are the ones that are accepted." He lifted the pages. "I will carry this to a reader who reads. I make no promise about what he will do. I may tell you that he reads to the end."

Ayaan inclined his head. He had been told long ago that he would not be given more than that, and it was more than he had hoped.

"And the Lieutenant’s request?" asked Cevdet.

"I have not answered it."

"You will have to."

"I will tell him that the figures he asked for are in a memorandum that is now in proper hands," said Ayaan. "I will say that I will answer any question of arithmetic that he writes, in the open, to anyone who asks. And I will tell him that I will not supply a society."

"He will be offended."

"He will be disappointed. I think that he will survive it."

Cevdet put the memorandum inside his coat.

"You have chosen, then."

"I have chosen, Efendi." Ayaan spoke carefully, because he had never said it aloud. "I believe that the Empire needs a constitution, and I believe that it needs the dynasty. I believe that the two can exist together if the institutions beneath them are competent, and I intend to spend my life making them so."

The scarred man said nothing for a moment. Snow was gathering on the sill of the window.

"That is a very long program for a stationer."

"Yes, Efendi."

"It is the first program that I have heard in a year that I could wish to see completed," said Cevdet. He opened the door, and the cold came in. "Do not tell anyone else that I said so."

IX

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 7 January 1907

Ayaan wrote to Monastir on a Monday evening, and the letter was one page long.

Tahir Efendi: The arithmetic that you ask for has been placed before a reader with the authority to act upon it.

I will answer any question of figures that you put to me, openly and to anyone who asks, but I will not supply a society, however sincere its members.

I believe that the Empire must change, and I believe that it can change without being broken.

If you wish to know how, I will tell you what I can. A.H.

He read it twice, sealed it, and set it on the counter for the morning post.

Zeynep came in from the lane with snow on her shoulders and shook it from her coat.

"It is written," said Ayaan.

"And sent?"

"In the morning."

She looked at the letter and did not touch it.

"He will not understand."

"Not at first." He took the blue book from beneath the counter. "I think that he will understand when the figures are tested, and when the men who are angriest begin to ask what comes on the second day."

He opened to the page where he had written the countdown, and he crossed out the last number.

Eighteen months.

Beneath it, in the smaller hand, he set down what had been decided that year.

The Sultanate and the constitution, together. Institutions first.

Reform within the law, with no society and no secret.

He studied the last line, and then he amended it. No secret that is not necessary.

Zeynep leaned over his shoulder and read it.

"That is more honest," she said.

"It is more accurate."

"It is the same thing." She straightened. "Come. It is cold, and your mother has kept supper for us both."

At the table, Fatma looked at her son for a moment and then returned to the dish in her hands.

"You have the face of someone who has decided something," she said.

"I have, Anne."

"What have you decided?" asked Mehmet.

"That I will serve the Sultan by helping to make his treasury honest." Ayaan took the bread that his mother offered. "I will begin with the shop’s own books, and I will not stop there."

Mehmet laughed, and then, seeing that his son was not joking, he laid down his spoon.

"That is a large task for a grocer’s son."

"Yes, Baba. But I have been told that it is the cheapest reform that exists."

Tahir’s reply reached the shop in nine days, and it was three lines long.

You have chosen the long road, and I hope that it is long enough.

I will wait for the arithmetic. T.S.