Chapter 8: A Merchant’s Son

Chapter 8: Chapter 8: A Merchant’s Son

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 14 January 1897

On the morning Ayaan turned seven, his father gave him a key.

It was an ordinary iron key on a loop of twine, a little rusted at the teeth. Mehmet pressed it into his palm at the shop door, before the shutters were up, and said nothing about the date.

"It opens the back room," he said. "From today, you will count it."

"Count it, Baba?"

"Every Thursday evening, after the last customer. Every sack, every crate, every jar. You will write the numbers in a book, and on Friday I will check them against my own."

Ayaan turned the key over in his fingers.

For six years he had been allowed to sweep the back room, to carry small things into it, and to sit among the sacks while the grown men talked. He had never once been trusted with the door.

"What if the numbers do not agree?" he asked.

"Then we will learn something." Mehmet lifted the first shutter and let the gray winter light into the shop. "A count that always agrees is a count nobody is checking."

It was a small responsibility, and Ayaan understood how much thought had gone into its size.

It was large enough that a mistake would cost something, and small enough that the cost could be survived.

That evening, Fatma placed a bowl of wheat pudding in front of him without a word. There was a single walnut on top, set in the middle with great care.

"What is it for?" said Ayaan.

"Nothing," said Fatma. "It is a Thursday."

She sat down across from him and began to mend a sleeve, and she did not look up again until the bowl was empty.

II

Constantinople, Tahtakale — 6 February 1897

The wholesale lane of Tahtakale began at the foot of the hill, and Ayaan smelled it before he saw it.

Raw hides, dried fish, hemp rope, and the sharp sweet dust of ground sugar hung in the winter air.

Men shouted prices from the doors of storehouses, and porters carried sacks at a half-trot.

Mehmet walked through it with his hands clasped behind him, nodding to the doorways he trusted and ignoring the rest.

Ayaan walked beside him with his Thursday notebook in his coat. Zeynep, who had been invited because her father was buying in the same lane that morning, walked on his other side and stared at everything.

"You have come to see how a shop buys," Mehmet said. "Not how it sells. A grocer who sells well and buys badly goes broke slowly, and a grocer who buys well and sells badly goes broke fast. Remember which is which."

He stopped at a high stone door, where a lean agent in a gray coat was waiting with a ledger tucked under one arm.

"Mehmet Efendi. The Malatya apricots have come early."

"How early?"

"Four hundred sacks, down the river from Samsun and over the road. The grower wants to be rid of them before the spring."

Mehmet’s face did not change, but Ayaan saw him begin the calculation. He did it as he always did, silently, with his lips pressed together.

"The price?"

"Eleven kuru? the sack, if you take fifty or more."

It was a very good price, and the agent knew it. He waited, composed and patient.

Ayaan did the sum without wanting to.

The shop sold apricots at fourteen kuru? the sack in the spring, and the profit on fifty sacks was a hundred and fifty kuru?, almost a month of Fatma’s household money. The apricots would keep, if the back room stayed dry.

He heard himself say, very softly, "Take a hundred."

Mehmet did not look down. "Why a hundred?"

"If fifty is cheap, a hundred is cheaper. The agent will not lower the price again, because he thinks he has already done us a favor. But he will not refuse a bigger order."

Zeynep nodded, quickly. "And a hundred sacks sold at fourteen is two hundred and ninety..."

"Three hundred," said Ayaan.

"Three hundred in profit." Her eyes were wide. "That is a whole winter."

The agent had been listening to the exchange with an amused expression, and now he raised his eyebrows at Mehmet.

"Your children have a fine head for sums, Efendi."

"They do," said Mehmet. "Fifty sacks."

"Baba..."

"Fifty." He said it gently and without heat. "Come, Ayaan. I will tell you why, but not here."

They walked down to the water, and sat on a coil of rope while the ferries went by.

Mehmet took a long time to begin.

"A hundred sacks is eleven hundred kuru?," he said at last. "Do you know how much I have in the tin, today, that is not already promised to someone?"

"No, Baba."

"Nine hundred."

Ayaan was silent.

"I would have to borrow two hundred, from a moneylender in Galata, to buy a bargain. And if the spring is slow, or the roof leaks, or the apricots come in damp, I would owe two hundred kuru? that I did not have, to a man who charges ten in the hundred each month." He looked out at the water. "You have seen what that does to a woman in a blue-door house."

"But the profit..."

"The profit is a number. The loan is a fact." Mehmet turned and smiled, a little wearily. "You see the three hundred, Ayaan. I see the two hundred."

Zeynep spoke in a small voice.

"My father says that stock is money asleep."

"Your father is right. And a man with half his money asleep and a loan eating him from outside is a man who cannot wake up when the lane needs him." He rose and brushed off his coat. "A bargain is only a bargain if you can pay for it with money you already own."

It was a plain thing, and Ayaan had known it as a principle in his old life, in the Chapter on leverage that every student skimmed. He had never felt it as a limit.

He had been counting the apricots, and his father had been counting the lane.

On the way home, Zeynep said very quietly, "You were right about the price."

"I was right about the sum."

"That is what I said."

"No," said Ayaan. "It is not the same thing."

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 20 March 1897

By the middle of March, the back room had begun to smell of apricots, and Ayaan had begun to smell something else.

It was a faint, stale sweetness, low down, near the rear wall, and he had noticed it first on a Thursday when he knelt to count the lowest sacks. He knelt again, pushed aside two of the rice sacks, and found a small gray patch of mold on the plaster behind them.

He sat back on his heels and looked at it.

It was very small. It was also exactly the kind of thing that a grocer of many years might have missed, because the rice stood in front of it, and a man did not move the rice unless he had a reason.

He fetched Mehmet at once.

Mehmet crouched, ran a thumb along the wall, and sniffed it. His face hardened.

"The rain from the winter. It comes in behind the plaster." He rose slowly. "How far does it go?"

"Only to the third course of sacks. I checked the others." Ayaan hesitated. "But the order matters, Baba."

"What order?"

"The sacks at the front are the newest. The ones at the back have been there the longest, and nobody reaches them, because the front ones are in the way."

Mehmet looked at the room.

He looked at it for a long time.

The new sacks stood before the old, stacked neatly, in a line that was good for the eye and bad for the stock.

"A man takes what is nearest," he said slowly.

"And what is nearest is always the newest."

"So the oldest rots."

"And the loss does not appear in the book until the sack is opened. By then it is too late to know when it began."

Mehmet was silent.

Ayaan waited, and understood what he had just done.

He had explained, in a child’s voice, the principle his old textbooks called first in, first out.

"Show me what you would change," said Mehmet.

It took them the rest of the evening.

They moved every sack, one at a time, with the lamp swinging on its hook. The oldest went to the front and the newest to the back, and Ayaan chalked the date of arrival in a small corner of each one, in numerals so plain that even a tired porter could read them.

Mehmet carried the heavy ones, and Ayaan the light.

When they were done, the back room looked the same as it had before, but when a man walked in, the first sack he touched was the one that most needed to be sold.

"The mold is in the plaster," said Mehmet, wiping his hands. "I will send for a mason on Monday."

"Yes, Baba."

"And you will keep chalking the dates."

"Yes, Baba."

"Every sack. Every Thursday." He was smiling in the lamplight, tired and rueful. "When I was your age, I thought the work of a grocer was to buy and sell. I did not learn until I was thirty that the work is to know what is in the room."

He paused.

"Who taught you to see that?"

It was a question Ayaan had been expecting for six years, in many forms, and he had never found a good answer. He had found only a series of true ones, each smaller than the last.

"The smell," he said. "I only followed the smell."

Mehmet looked at him for a moment, and Ayaan could not read his face. Then the older man laughed, softly, and put out the lamp.

"A good nose is a gift," he said. "Do not waste it."

The following Thursday, Ayaan counted the room, and the numbers agreed with his father’s, and nothing at all had spoiled.

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 10 April 1897

The question of credit arrived on a Saturday, in the shape of R?za Efendi, the coffeehouse keeper from the corner.

He came into the shop at midmorning with his apron still on, rubbing his hands together, and he spoke to Mehmet in the low and cheerful tone of a man who intended to ask for something large.

"Mehmet Efendi, I come with good news. The Galata ferry company has granted me the tea concession for the quay."

"My congratulations."

"It will triple my trade. I will need sugar, and rice for the pilav stall, and coffee beans, and honey for the cakes." He named a figure, and then, quickly, another. "All of it delivered by the end of the month. And, if Allah wills, on a little credit. Six weeks, perhaps eight."

Mehmet set down his pen.

It was the pause that Ayaan had watched before, in the shop and at the ledger, and it was always the same: a very slight tightening around the eyes, the face of a man who did not like to say no to a friend.

Ayaan was sitting on a stool near the counter, with the gray book on his knees.

He had learned, by now, to turn its pages without a sound. He found the tab that Zeynep had made, in pale green thread, for R?za Efendi, and he looked at the column that covered the last three years.

There were forty-two entries. Thirty-five had been paid on the day, five within a week, and two within a fortnight.

He read them again to be certain, and then he did the thing he had been working toward for weeks.

"Baba."

Both men looked at him.

"May I show you something?"

Mehmet’s eyebrows rose slightly, but he nodded. Ayaan crossed the shop and laid the open book on the counter, with his finger on the green tab.

"He has been a good customer for three years. He pays quickly." He kept his voice very small and very plain, a child reading from a page. "But he has never before bought more than eighty kuru? in one week. This order is five times that."

"So?"

"So the thing that has made him good is not the same thing that will make him good now. He has always bought a little and paid at once. Now he wants to buy a great deal and pay late."

R?za Efendi frowned. "My boy, I have never missed a payment."

"No, Efendi. That is why we are talking about it."

"May I suggest a rule?" Ayaan said, to his father. "A customer may owe the shop no more than he usually buys in two weeks. If he pays on time, the limit rises. If he does not, it falls."

Mehmet looked at the book, then at the boy.

"Two weeks of his usual purchases is a hundred and sixty kuru?," he said slowly. "That would cover about a third of what he is asking."

"Yes. And the rest he would pay on delivery."

"And in a month, if he has done well..."

"We raise it."

There was a silence.

R?za Efendi shifted from foot to foot. "This is a strange way to run a shop," he said finally.

"It is a very old way," said Mehmet. "I had only never written it down."

He took the pen and wrote the rule across the top of the page, in his own square hand.

Credit limit: two weeks’ usual purchase. Raised on payment, lowered on delay.

"R?za Efendi, I will gladly supply your quay," he said, "on these terms. And if you have the ferry trade you describe, in a month you will have more than the limit, and you will be glad it was fixed, because you will know where you stand."

The coffeehouse keeper looked from one to the other. Then, to Ayaan’s relief, he laughed.

"I have been buying from this shop for ten years," he said, "and I have never before been audited by a boy."

"It is not an audit, Efendi," said Ayaan. "It is a map."

R?za Efendi shook his head, still laughing, and held out his hand to Mehmet. They sealed the new terms with a handshake that was a little looser than the old one, and a little more honest.

When he had gone, Mehmet stood looking at the rule on the page for a long time.

"I have lost customers," he said quietly, "because I would not give credit, and I have lost money because I gave it to the wrong men. I never found the line between them."

"I do not think I found it either, Baba. I only wrote down where it was."

"That is the finding of it." Mehmet closed the book gently. "Do not be modest about that."

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 17 April 1897

War came to Constantinople on the Saturday after, in the middle of the morning, through the door of the coffeehouse.

It was R?za Efendi who brought the news, running up the lane with his apron flapping, shouting that the Sultan’s government had declared war on Greece.

The street emptied in a moment and filled again.

Men gathered at the corner, talking over one another, and women leaned out of upper windows.

Somewhere a boy began to sing a military march that he did not know the words to.

Ayaan stood in the shop doorway with the broom in his hand and counted the cost.

He had known the war was coming, in the way he knew all the large dates of the age.

It was a dispute over Crete and a border in Thessaly, and it would be over in a month with an Ottoman victory.

It was a short war, and a small one, and it would change the price of everything.

"Baba," he said, "the grain."

Mehmet was already pulling his coat from the peg.

"I know. Come."

They went to the quay that same afternoon, and found the chandlers in uproar.

The Greek steamers that carried wheat and olive oil were gone from the harbor, ordered out or turned back at the straits. The agents who had sold flour at fourteen kuru? the sack that morning were now asking nineteen, and every price on the long board outside the exchange had climbed.

Yorgos found them, white-faced, in the doorway of the chandlery.

"Mehmet Efendi, I cannot supply you. My master’s cargo is held. He is a subject of the Greek king, and they say the subjects of the Greek king will be asked to leave the Empire within the week."

"And you?"

"I was born in Galata." Yorgos tried to smile. "I am a subject of the Sultan, as my father was. But I think that is not the same thing as being safe."

Mehmet put a hand on his arm.

"The order for the Mahmudiye is paid in full," he said. "You owe me nothing, and I owe you nothing. If you need a place to keep your papers, my back room is dry."

Yorgos stared at him.

"I am only a clerk," he said. "I have nothing to offer in return."

"I did not ask for anything," said Mehmet.

They walked back through the crowded lanes in the long red light of the late afternoon.

Everything that Ayaan saw, he measured: the price board, the closed shutters on a Greek bakery, a banker’s clerk hurrying past with a leather case.

Credit was tightening.

He could feel it coming.

The bankers on the heights would be calling in their short loans before the week was out, and every merchant who had borrowed against stock would be forced to sell it.

"Baba," he said. "The men who borrowed to buy rice last month. They are going to be in trouble."

"Yes."

"Is that why you did not buy the hundred sacks?"

Mehmet looked down at his son, and there was something in his face that Ayaan could not name.

"I did not know there would be a war," he said. "I only knew that I did not want to owe anyone anything, in a year when I could not know what would happen."

"But you were right."

"I was careful. It is not the same thing." Mehmet’s mouth twisted. "A careful man is right so often that other men take it for foresight. It is only that he has left himself room."

Ayaan walked the rest of the way in silence.

It was the best description of caution he had ever heard, and it had come from a grocer with a ledger.

VI

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 22 May 1897

The war lasted thirty days.

It ended the way Ayaan had known it would, with the Ottoman army marching through Thessaly and the great powers stepping in to stop it. On the twentieth of May, an armistice was signed, and the next morning the prices began to fall.

By the Saturday, they had fallen further than anyone expected.

Süleyman A?a came to the shop at dusk. The red face was gray, and the many rings seemed too large for his fingers.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment with his hat in his hands, and Ayaan, sweeping near the lentils, understood at once what had happened.

"Mehmet Efendi," Süleyman A?a said. "I have come to sell you rice."

Mehmet did not look surprised.

"How much?"

"Two hundred sacks. Egyptian, dry, as good as any in the city." Süleyman’s voice cracked. "I bought it in April, on a Galata loan, when the price was twenty-six. Now it is twenty, and the loan falls due on the first of June."

He swallowed.

"I will take eighteen."

It was a very low price. It was the kind of price a desperate man named, and the kind of price a careful one accepted with a gracious nod.

Ayaan stood perfectly still.

He thought of Hatice Han?m’s blue door. He thought of the sixty kuru? in a purse, and the dry little lesson on a shop floor about who knows where the price is going.

Eighteen was a gift. At twenty, the shop could resell the whole lot for a profit of four hundred kuru?.

Mehmet took a long time to answer.

"What is the fair price today?"

"Twenty," said Süleyman, very low. "You know it is twenty."

"Then I will give you twenty."

The old rice merchant raised his head.

"Efendi?"

"I will give you twenty kuru? the sack, for two hundred sacks, in coin, tonight." Mehmet’s voice was perfectly even. "Not because I like you. We both know I do not. But because I do not mean to make a profit out of a man on the first of June, when I would not have made it in April."

"I do not understand."

"No," said Mehmet. "I do not suppose you would."

He counted out the coin from the tin, slowly, in front of the other man, and wrote the sum in his own ledger. Then he turned the book around so that Süleyman could read it.

"There. So you may see it is written, and what for."

Süleyman A?a looked at the page for a long time, and his lips moved.

When he lifted his eyes, they were wet, and he looked suddenly old.

"You are a fool, Mehmet Hassan," he said hoarsely.

"So you have told me."

"But you are an honest one."

He went out with the coins in a leather bag, bent over, and the door closed behind him with very little noise.

Ayaan finished sweeping the lentils.

Then he said, carefully, "Baba, eighteen would have been a fair price. He named it himself."

"It would have been a legal price."

"Yes."

"Is that what you mean by fair?"

Ayaan thought about it honestly, and found that he did not.

"No," he said.

"Good." Mehmet sat down on the stool and rubbed his eyes. "I shall make less than I might have, and I shall sleep better, and in a lane where the same hundred people will buy from me for forty years, that is the price of sleeping better. I am not a saint, my son. I am only a grocer who has noticed how much a good night is worth."

He reached out and took the gray book from the counter.

"Open it."

Ayaan opened it.

"Write the purchase. Two hundred sacks, twenty kuru?. And below, in the margin, in your own hand, the reason why we paid it."

It was a small thing, a line in a margin. Ayaan wrote it slowly.

Paid full market price to S. A?a. Reason: he was in need, and we were not.

When he put down the pencil, Mehmet read it, and nodded.

"I have a better task for you than the back room," he said. "Next Thursday, I am sending you to buy the lentils."

Ayaan looked up.

"By myself, Baba?"

"With a purse. Forty kuru?, and not a para more. You will go to the agent at the foot of the hill, you will name the price, and you will bring the sacks home." Mehmet’s eyes were kind, and they were also very steady. "If you spend the forty badly, you will have to explain it on Friday, and the loss will come out of the shop and not out of my pocket. Do you understand the difference?"

"Yes, Baba."

"Good. Then you may go and tell your mother. She has been making a lentil soup for you every Thursday this month, and she would like to know why."

He said it lightly, and Ayaan laughed, and the moment passed.

But that night, in the dark, he lay awake with the purse already in his mind: forty kuru?, a fixed sum, and a lane of strangers waiting.

He thought about what he had seen in a single month.

He had seen a shop that was never in debt weather a war, and a man with a loan ruined by the peace.

The difference between the two was not intelligence, because Süleyman A?a was far from stupid.

It was a quiet and unfashionable refusal to owe.

A merchant’s son, he thought, is not taught to make money. He is taught to keep the right to stay.

Four years, he calculated, until eleven.

There was a gap in the lane for paper and ink, and a lathe that could turn a wheel to the width of a hair, and a girl who had drawn a map on the floor of a hayloft. There was a long road between a purse of forty kuru? and any of that.

But for the first time, he was not afraid that the road was too slow.

He had begun to think that the slowness was the road.