Chapter 3: A Friend Named Zeynep

Chapter 3: Chapter 3: A Friend Named Zeynep

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 11 April 1895

On a bright spring morning, five years and three months into his second life, Ayaan Hassan was sitting on the doorstep with his mother’s counting frame, pretending to be bored.

It was a skill he had refined over twelve months. A bored child was invisible, and could sit for an hour watching a street without anyone asking what he was learning from it.

He knew which porters carried for which merchants, and which ones drank. He knew the precise day the baker raised his price, and the order in which the neighbors’ shutters went up, so that he could have told the time by the sound alone.

He also knew, with a clarity that sometimes startled him, that his mother had not asked him a single question in fifteen months.

She watched him sometimes, over her sewing.

But she had kept her word.

It was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for him, and the loneliest, because it meant he was now keeping his secret not from a stranger but from someone who knew he had one.

Patience, he told himself, and moved a bead. One bead at a time.

At a quarter past nine, a cart came up the lane.

It was a big cart, pulled by two tired horses and followed by five porters and a boy with a goat, and it wedged itself into the narrow street like a cork into a bottle. The drivers swore, the shopkeepers came to their doors, and Nazl? Han?m appeared at her window with her mouth open.

"The old Karabet house," Nazl? Han?m announced to the lane in general. "At last. The family from Tahtakale. They say he deals in foreign goods."

Ayaan looked at the cart.

The crates stacked on it were stenciled in black, in letters he could read perfectly and was not supposed to.

TRIESTE.

MARSEILLE.

MANCHESTER.

Another said Vorsicht, Glas, and was being carried by two men who walked as if the floor might break.

Imported goods, he thought.

A real importer, with his own warehouse.

In the whole lane, there was no one who traded in anything larger than a sack.

He felt the old, familiar tingle of an economist who has just found a new variable in the data.

Then the first crate hit the ground, and a voice cut through the noise of the street like a knife through cloth.

"No! That is the wrong one. Put it down, put it down."

The voice was high, clear, and not at all uncertain. It belonged to a girl of about five, who was standing on a stack of crates with a slate in her hand.

II

He had spent twenty-one years looking at faces, and he had never really seen one until that moment.

She was small, and thin, with a long black braid that had half come undone in the move.

She wore a plain blue dress with ink on the sleeve.

Her face was oval and very still, with wide-set hazel eyes under dark, straight brows, and it held a look of such complete and furious concentration that he forgot, for a moment, to breathe.

She was beautiful.

Even at five, even with ink on her sleeve, the porters had stopped talking to look at her.

She did not seem to notice.

She was glaring at a man twice her height.

"Little lady," said the porter, with the weary patience of a man addressing a nuisance, "this crate goes inside. Your father said everything goes inside."

"My father said the glass goes inside. This one is cloth."

She pointed with her chalk.

"It says Manchester. Glass is Bohemia. Cloth goes in the dry room. If it goes with the glass, it will be knocked over, and then we will have cloth and broken glass together."

The porter opened his mouth and shut it.

"Also," the girl added, in a tone of scrupulous fairness, "you have carried nineteen crates and not eighteen. I counted. One of them you carried twice."

The porter looked at the cart.

He looked at his four fellow porters, who were all looking at the sky with great attention.

Then he looked at the child, and some of the weariness went out of his face.

"Eighteen," he said slowly. "Allah help me. It was eighteen."

Nineteen, Ayaan thought. And then, as the girl tapped her slate and the porter began counting again with deepening respect: No. Eighteen. She is right.

He had counted the crates himself, without meaning to. His memory held the stack as a perfect picture, and the picture said eighteen, and he had been about to say nothing.

She had said it first. Out loud, in front of five grown men, to a stranger’s face.

He sat on the step with the counting frame in his lap and a feeling creeping through him that he could not at first name.

It was not envy.

It was something more like the shock of a swimmer who, after long years in an empty sea, sees another head break the water.

The girl turned. She had felt him looking.

Her eyes went to him, and to the frame in his hands, and she climbed down from the crate with great deliberation and walked across the lane. She stopped at exactly the distance a customer stops from a counter.

"Why are you staring?" she said.

"I was not," said Ayaan.

"You were. You looked at the crates first, then at me."

She tilted her head.

"What is that?"

"A counting frame."

"What does it count?"

"Anything."

He was surprised to hear how easily the word came.

"Beads."

"I know it is beads. We have an abacus at home."

She crouched in front of him, her braid swinging.

"My father says a real merchant keeps the numbers in his head and the abacus in a drawer. Do you keep them in your head?"

It was the sort of question that, from anyone else, would have set off every alarm he owned. From her, it simply sounded like curiosity.

"Sometimes," he said carefully.

"How many crates?"

He knew the answer.

He had known it for a minute.

He felt the old rule rise, speak late, speak badly, be exactly as clever as a child is allowed to be, and for the first time in his life he felt it settle on him like an ill-fitting coat.

"Eighteen," he said.

Her whole face changed.

It was not triumph.

It was joy, pure and sudden, the look of a child who has been shouting into a well for years and has just heard an echo.

"Eighteen," she said.

"You counted them. You did not even have a slate."

"I was only listening."

"No. You counted them, I saw your eyes."

She sat back on her heels and regarded him with new respect.

"What is your name?"

"Ayaan."

"That is a strange name."

"It is a long story."

"I like long stories."

She stuck out a hand, ink-stained and small, with an adult gravity that made the whole lane seem to stop.

"I am Zeynep. We are going to live in that house. Do you have any brothers?"

"No."

"Sisters?"

"No."

"Neither do I," said Zeynep, with enormous satisfaction, as though they had settled a treaty. "Good. Then we will need each other."

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 12 April 1895

Her father came to the shop the next day, after the Friday prayer.

Mehmet had been expecting him. Half the lane had been talking about Mustafa Efendi, the importer from Tahtakale, a man with three warehouses and a good name.

Ayaan, set to sweeping around the lentil sacks, saw him come in and thought: So that is where she gets it.

Mustafa, son of Abdullah, was thirty-five years old.

He was a big, well-fed man with a trimmed black beard and a good dark frock coat, the stambouline cut that the new merchants were beginning to prefer to the old robes.

He laughed readily and a little too loudly, like someone who had learned to put people at ease because it made them agree.

His eyes did not laugh. They went round the shop in a single sweep, over the sacks, the scale, the ledger, and the man behind it, and Ayaan saw them price the whole place in the time it took to say good morning.

"Mehmet Efendi," said Mustafa, with a slight, courteous bow. "I am your neighbor. I come to ask a favor, and to offer a business, and I will begin with the favor."

"I am at your service," said Mehmet, who was wary of anyone who began with a favor.

"My daughter has declared that she has a friend."

Mustafa smiled.

"A boy, apparently, who can count crates without a slate. She would not eat last night until I promised to find out his family."

Mehmet looked at Ayaan, who was sweeping with great concentration.

"My son is a quiet boy," he said carefully.

"So I have been told. My daughter has told me nothing else for twelve hours."

Mustafa leaned on the counter.

"She is an only child, and not an easy one. She sits in my counting room and wants to know why the Marseille soap costs more than the Aleppo."

He spread his hands. "She is five years old."

There was a pause. In the corner, Ayaan swept the same square foot of floor for the fourth time.

"Then I would say," Mehmet said slowly, "that you have a very fortunate daughter."

It was exactly the right thing to say, and Ayaan saw Mustafa’s face change. The salesman’s smile went out of it, and something warmer and more tired came in.

"If Allah wills," he said. "But the world is not kind to girls who ask why."

"The world is not kind to anyone who asks why," Mehmet said.

They looked at each other like two men who had just discovered that they were standing on the same side of the street.

After that it was easy.

They drank coffee, and Mustafa explained the business he had come to offer.

A Trieste firm wanted Ottoman figs and apricots for the Austrian market, and Mehmet knew the growers, and had a reputation in the quarter for fair weights and no tricks.

"A commission," Mustafa said. "Five in the hundred. And in return, when my goods come in from the west, I will sell you what you can resell in your shop. Sugar from Bohemia, a little rice, the cheap tea from the English."

Mehmet was silent for a long time.

Ayaan stopped sweeping. A merchant who had never lost a lira to his own optimism did not take new customers lightly.

Say yes, Ayaan thought.

A man who sells you goods and buys yours is not a customer, he is a partner.

It was all he could do to keep his mouth shut.

"I will not take the commission until I have seen the first three shipments," Mehmet said at last. "Fair weights, fair price. If the Trieste men are honest, we will talk about the rest."

"That is all I ask."

"I am a small man, Mustafa Efendi," Mehmet added. "If you are looking for someone to make you rich, I am the wrong grocer."

Mustafa laughed, and this time it went all the way up to his eyes. "I did not come to be made rich. I came because my daughter would not eat."

They shook hands. It was a small handshake in a small shop on a narrow street, and nobody who saw it would have remembered it.

Ayaan remembered it. He filed it away with the stove at Sirkeci and the five sacks of figs, and wrote Mustafa in the margin of his mind, in the careful hand he kept for people who would matter.

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 2 May 1895

By the first of May, the lane had grown used to the sight of them.

The old women called them the pair, and the porters called them the two clerks. The tailor next door put a wooden stool outside his shop for the girl, because she would sit on it for an hour asking why every seam went the way it did.

Ayaan could not have said how it happened. He only knew that in five years he had never been so thoroughly accompanied.

Zeynep did not play. She investigated.

She took him to the quay to count ferries, and to the Spice Bazaar to ask the pepper sellers why white pepper was dearer than black. She made him stand still in the arcades of Tahtakale to watch how a sale was won or lost in a single raised eyebrow.

He answered most of her questions in a careful, small voice, and lied about the rest. Half the time she knew the answer already, and was only checking whether he did.

She is not like the others, he thought, one hot evening, watching her draw a map of the quay in the dust with a stick. She is not like anyone.

He had been taught that great merchants were made by capital and luck, and had never believed it.

It was something quieter: a habit of noticing, and a refusal to accept that the price of a thing was simply the price.

And here it was, in a blue dress with ink on the sleeve.

That was the evening Cemal came.

Cemal was nine, the son of a coal porter, and the tyrant of the lower lane.

He had fists like turnips and a habit of stealing sweets from smaller children.

Nobody had ever stopped him, because his father carried half the coal in the quarter.

He came up the lane that evening with two friends, and stopped.

"That is the importer’s girl," he said, loudly, to nobody. "The one with the slate."

Zeynep did not look up from her map.

"She thinks she is clever."

Cemal sauntered closer and kicked the dust.

The map blurred, then vanished.

"My father says her father is a Frank-lover. He says they only came here to push the honest dealers out."

"Your father," said Zeynep clearly, still looking at the ground, "cannot count above ten without using his toes. I have watched him."

There was a short, stunned silence. One of the friends gave a snort of laughter and turned it into a cough.

Cemal went red. He took a step forward, and his hand shot out and seized the slate from beside her knee, the precious slate that her father had brought from Vienna, and held it high over his head.

"Give it back," Zeynep said.

"Come and take it."

She was five and small.

She did not scream, or cry, or run for help.

She stood up very straight, with her hands at her sides, and looked at him with the cold, level, considering look of a woman at a counter who has been shortchanged and has decided to remember it.

And Ayaan Hassan, who had spent five years being invisible, stepped between them.

He did not decide to.

In the second before he moved he was thinking, calmly, of every reason not to.

A fight would draw attention, and his mother would say nothing, and look at him from the doorway.

But something older than prudence had hold of him.

He knew that look on Zeynep’s face, and what it cost her to hold it.

And he knew that if he let this boy walk away with that slate, something in her would learn that the world took what it liked and nobody stopped it.

"Give it back," he said.

It was not loud. He said it in the voice he had once used to quote a figure at a lecturer, flat and quiet and precise, and it came out of a five-year-old’s throat with an effect that startled him almost as much as it startled Cemal.

Cemal stared at him.

He was a head taller.

He was twice as heavy.

He had never in his life been addressed in that tone by a child in a clean shirt.

"Or what?"

"Or I will tell your mother," said Ayaan, "that you have been taking the sesame rings from the baker’s boy, and selling them back to him for half price."

It was a guess.

It was an educated guess, built from three weeks of watching the lower lane.

But Cemal’s face told him that it was right.

"You do not know that," Cemal said.

"I know that you did it on Tuesday, and again on Thursday."

Ayaan kept his voice level.

"I know that he gives you the coins at the corner by the fountain. I know that you gave one of them to your friend there, to keep his mouth shut."

The friend, a thin boy with a runny nose, went white. The other one took a step back, as if the whole thing might be catching.

Cemal’s fist closed.

Ayaan braced for the blow, with a calm that belonged to a man of twenty-one and was strangely out of place in a child.

He would take it, and he would not cry.

The blow did not come.

Instead there was a small, fierce, entirely unexpected sound, and Cemal howled and doubled over, clutching his shin.

Zeynep had kicked him very hard in the exact place where it hurt most.

She did it with the grave precision of someone applying a lesson.

"That is for the slate," she said.

She took it out of his slack hand, and examined the corners for damage.

"And that," she added, kicking him again, "is for my father."

Cemal fled. His friends fled after him, and the lane returned to its evening noise as if nothing had happened.

Zeynep dusted off her dress. She looked at Ayaan, and her face, which a moment ago had been so cold, was bright and astonished and half laughing.

"You told him about the sesame rings," she said.

"I guessed."

"You guessed."

She shook her head slowly.

"That was not a guess. That was an audit."

He had no idea where she had heard the word.

He did not ask.

He only found, to his dismay, that he was grinning at her like a fool, with all of five years of caution gone out of him in a single breath.

"Do not do that again," he said. "Fighting. It is stupid."

"Then do not stand in front of me."

But she had put her hand through his arm, quite naturally, in the way of someone who had always done so.

"You are very brave. I did not know you could talk like that."

"Nor did I."

It was not entirely a lie.

But as they walked back up the lane in the long gold light, he knew that he had made two mistakes that evening.

He had shown too much.

And he had been, for the first time in his second life, very happy.

I will not let anyone hurt her, he thought.

It came to him simply, like a fact.

Whatever else happens. Whatever I become.

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 22 June 1895

It was Mustafa who proposed it, on a hot Saturday evening, over supper in the Hassans’ kitchen.

The families had been eating together for weeks by then.

Emine, Zeynep’s mother, was a slim, quick, dark-eyed woman with a dry wit, who had taken one look at Fatma and decided to be her friend.

The two of them sat with their heads together, laughing, while the men argued about Bohemian sugar.

The children sat at the end of the room with a plate of figs between them, and pretended not to listen.

"The trouble with this lane," Mustafa was saying, "is that every man in it knows a trade, and not one of them knows the market. Ask why rice is dear, and you will say, ’Because it has gone up.’"

"It is a perfectly good answer," said Mehmet, smiling.

"For a shop. Not for a firm."

Mustafa reached for a fig.

"I am tired of hiring clerks who can add but cannot think. I want someone to teach these children."

Ayaan, at the end of the table, did not move.

"Teach them what?" said Fatma, looking up.

"Trade."

Mustafa spread his hands.

"My daughter will not stop asking questions, and your son has a head for numbers, and I would sooner they learned from men who do it than from some book. Saturdays, perhaps. You in the shop in the mornings, Mehmet Efendi, and myself in the warehouse in the afternoons. Nothing formal."

Emine said, in a quiet voice, "I have said she may not be a clerk."

"She will be an educated girl who understands what her husband is paying for."

Mustafa smiled at his wife.

"You have kept my accounts for twelve years, and I would be bankrupt without you."

"That," said Emine, "is entirely true."

There was a ripple of laughter.

Mehmet looked at Fatma.

It was a long look, wordless, full of the shorthand of a marriage, and Ayaan watched his mother nod, almost imperceptibly.

"Saturdays, then," Mehmet said slowly. "If the children wish it."

Both children looked up at once.

"Yes," said Zeynep.

"Yes," said Ayaan, a heartbeat later, so quickly that he heard the eagerness in his own voice and was not sorry.

Fatma’s eyes met his across the table. She said nothing, but there was something in her face, like a woman watching a ship she has long prepared for finally leave the harbor.

Later, when the dishes were cleared, the two of them sat on the step outside, with the lane dark and warm around them.

Zeynep was quiet for a long time, with her chin on her knees.

"I am going to be a merchant," she said at last.

"Girls are not merchants."

"My mother is. She does my father’s accounts. She does everything, he only says she does not."

She turned her head and looked at him in the dark, with those clear, unblinking eyes.

"I am going to have my own ship. And a warehouse as big as the mosque. And everyone will say it is not allowed, and then they will say it was obvious."

She paused.

"What are you going to be?"

He thought about it, honestly, for the first time.

He thought about the revolution, thirteen years away.

He thought about the fall of an empire he had mourned in a classroom, and the man of twenty-one who had been so angry at it for dying.

"I am going to build something," he said slowly. "Something that does not fall down."

"What kind of something?"

"I do not know yet."

"That is a stupid answer."

"I know," said Ayaan, and found that he was smiling.

Zeynep considered him a moment more. Then she reached across the narrow step and put her small, ink-stained hand on top of his.

"Then I will help you," she said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. "Until you know."

He did not answer. He sat very still on the warm stone while the first stars came out over Galata, and all the careful plans he had made in the dark of his cradle went quiet in him like a room when someone enters.

In the history he remembered, there had been no one called Zeynep. There was no record of her in any book he had ever read.

He did not know yet what that meant. He only knew that the future he had come back to change had just acquired its first person, and that this time he would not be fighting it alone.

Saturdays, he thought.

Mehmet in the morning. Mustafa in the afternoon.

Two real merchants, and a girl at his side who counted crates faster than he could.

It was a better beginning than any empire had ever had.

Behind them in the kitchen, the mothers laughed, and out on the water a ferry sounded its long, low horn.

The first lesson would be the following Saturday, at dawn.