Chapter 9: The Stationery Venture

Chapter 9: Chapter 9: The Stationery Venture

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 15 March 1901

By the spring he turned eleven, Ayaan Hassan had been buying the lentils for four years.

He had also been buying the rice, the chickpeas, and the dried figs from Ayd?n, and for the last winter he had made the Thursday count of the back room without his father checking it. The gray ledger had long since been filled and replaced, and the third one now lay open on the supper table between the lamp and the bread.

On Friday evenings, the two fathers still read it aloud.

"Three hundred and ten kuru?," said Mustafa Efendi, running a thick finger down the last column. "That is the total of what you have set aside since the tea. It is a respectable sum for a boy."

"It is a respectable sum for a grocer," said Mehmet, and Fatma, who was mending by the stove, did not quite hide her smile.

Ayaan waited until the figures had been read, the page turned, and the cups refilled.

Then he said, "I would like to open a stationery counter."

The room went quiet.

Zeynep, seated across from him with her chin in her hand, sat up very straight. She was eleven too, with her braid pinned up now and a new look of impatience that had arrived with her height, and she had known what he was going to say for a month.

"A counter for what?" said Mehmet.

"Paper, pencils, pens, ink." Ayaan kept his voice level. "There is a new school at the end of the lane, and the one by the mosque has doubled its classes, and every office in Bab?ali needs clerks who can write."

"The Sultan opens a school in every district," said Mustafa, thoughtfully. "He is fond of schools, so long as nobody teaches anything dangerous in them."

"And every school needs paper, and every clerk needs a pen. Nikolaki Efendi told me last year that the price had gone up again." Ayaan folded his hands. "Nobody in this quarter sells these things. A boy who wants a pencil must walk to the Sahaflar, or wait for a peddler."

"And how much of your three hundred do you propose to spend?" asked Mehmet.

"Half, for the first stock. The rest stays in the tin."

"Why the rest?"

"Because a counter that spends everything on its first day has no way to buy the second day’s goods."

Mehmet looked at Mustafa. Mustafa looked at the ceiling, with the satisfied air of a man who has won a private wager.

"You will have questions," Mehmet said at last. "I will ask them on Sunday, one at a time, and you will answer them in writing. If the answers are good, you may begin."

"Yes, Baba."

"There is one more condition."

Ayaan waited.

"The law does not know a boy of eleven as a merchant. If a buyer sues, or a seller cheats, or the ministry wants a name on a paper, it will be mine." Mehmet’s voice was gentle and quite firm. "So the sign over the counter will carry my name. But the book will carry yours."

It was the right arrangement, and Ayaan knew it.

He had wanted a venture that was his own, and the old, careful part of him had also known that a boy alone in the Ottoman Empire was not a merchant but a target.

"That is fair, Baba," he said.

"I did not ask whether it was fair." Mehmet’s eyes crinkled. "I told you what it would be."

On Sunday, after the noon prayer, he asked his questions, one at a time, at the kitchen table.

Who is your customer?

What does it cost you to keep a pencil for a month?

What will you do on the day nobody comes?

What would make you stop?

Ayaan wrote the answers in a clean hand on four sheets of Nikolaki’s offcuts, and he took a long time over the last.

I would stop if the book showed three months of loss with no reason I could name. A loss with a reason is a lesson. A loss without one is a warning.

Mehmet read the sheets twice, folded them, and put them inside his coat.

"You may begin," he said, "on the first Thursday of April."

II

Constantinople, Tahtakale — 30 March 1901

He bought his stock in three places, over one long Saturday, and he took Zeynep with him to be the second pair of eyes.

The first stop was Nikolaki Efendi’s printing shop in Bab?ali, where the floor was strewn with trimmed paper. The printer sold the edges of his large sheets by weight, and the offcuts were thin and creamy and perfectly good.

"Four hundred sheets for thirty kuru?," Nikolaki said, with a sigh. "I was throwing them into the stove."

"You are not throwing them into the stove any longer," said Zeynep, and began to count.

They stitched them into notebooks. Hatice Han?m, who now sewed for Mustafa’s warehouse and had a clear and rapid hand with a needle, did the binding for three para a book, and her thread was strong enough to hold a ledger.

When she brought the first forty finished books to the shop, a week later, she set them on the counter in a neat stack and stood back with her red hands folded.

"I have not forgotten the door with the geraniums," she said to Ayaan, quite quietly. "You may put my name on the stitching, if you like. I should be glad to be known for it."

He wrote it in the book that night, under the supplier’s column, in full: Stitched by Hatice Han?m.

The second stop was the importer’s storehouse at the foot of the hill, where the pencils were kept. They came in wooden boxes from Nuremberg, yellow and hexagonal, with a gilt name stamped on the side.

Ayaan weighed one in his palm and turned it end over end.

"Ten kuru? the dozen," said the importer, a stout Levantine named Mr. Castelli, who regarded the boy with polite incomprehension. "I do not sell by the dozen to children."

"Then I am not a child," said Ayaan. "I am a man who is buying five dozen."

Mr. Castelli looked at Zeynep, who looked back without blinking, and sighed.

"Five dozen."

The third stop was the corner of Tahtakale where the pens were sold. Ayaan chose steel nibs from Birmingham, two hundred in a flat tin box for forty kuru?, because the old reed pens split in a week and the schoolboys of the new age wanted something that held a point.

He chose ink powder too, in little twists of paper that could be dissolved in a cup of water, at half a kuru? each.

When it was done, he sat on the stone steps outside the last storehouse with the day’s stock in a basket at his feet and the ledger on his knees. Zeynep leaned over his shoulder, her braid brushing his sleeve, and read the figures as he wrote them.

"A hundred and fifty-two," she said. "It is less than you planned."

"It is half of what I could have bought."

"Why did you stop?"

"Because I do not know yet what will sell." He tapped the page. "I think it will be the nibs, but I think that only because I think it. The first stock is for finding out whether I am wrong."

She considered this for a moment.

"That is a very expensive way to find out you are wrong."

"It is the cheapest way," said Ayaan. "The other way costs the whole three hundred."

Zeynep laughed, short and surprised, and reached into her pocket. She drew out a small folded square of cloth and put it in his hand.

It was a measuring tape, a narrow strip of linen marked off in ar??ns, which she must have borrowed from her mother’s workbasket.

"For the paper," she said, and walked ahead of him down the steps without turning around.

III

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 4 April 1901

The counter was two planks laid across a pair of barrels, just inside the shop door, facing the lane.

Mehmet had hung a board above it that morning, painted in plain black letters by the tailor next door.

Hassan K?rtasiyesi. Paper, Pens, Pencils, Ink.

Under the board, on a card that Zeynep had lettered, stood the prices.

Pencil, 1? kuru?. Nib, 15 para. Ink powder, 1 kuru?. Notebook, 2 kuru?.

It was Ayaan’s one innovation, and it had cost an evening of argument. Every price was written down and hung in the open, and no one was to be asked for more than the card said.

In the bazaars, such a thing was not done, because a price on a card could not be bargained. But he had worked out that a schoolboy with two coins in his hand did not want to bargain.

He wanted to be sure he was not being cheated.

The first customer came at half past three, when the mektep let out.

He was a thin boy of nine with ink on his sleeve, and he stood at the counter with his hands behind his back, reading the card with great suspicion.

"A nib," he said, in a whisper.

"Fifteen para."

"It says fifteen para."

"It does," said Ayaan.

The boy produced a small, sticky handful of coppers and counted them out onto the plank with solemn care. Ayaan gave him a nib, and the boy examined it, nodded once, and fled.

By six o’clock, eleven children had come.

They bought nibs and pencils, one at a time, and a girl bought a notebook, and a very small boy brought a single para and asked what it would buy. Ayaan sold him half a twist of ink powder.

Zeynep, seated behind him on an upturned crate with the daily sheet, wrote down each sale in a column of small ticks.

On the third Thursday a young man in a clean apron stood for a long while across the lane, watching the counter and the card.

He was an apprentice from one of the booksellers near the Sahaflar, and he wrote something on his cuff before he walked away.

Zeynep noticed it, and said nothing, and wrote it on the sheet.

When the lamps were lit, she tallied the sheet and held it up with a frown.

"Thirty-one kuru?," she said. "That is less than you expected."

"It is about what I expected."

"You told me forty."

"I told you forty as the number I would be afraid of missing." He took the sheet and read it. "It is good. A hundred and fifty-two kuru? of stock, and thirty-one sold in one afternoon, and nobody argued."

She did not seem convinced.

But on the Friday after, the sheet read forty-four, and on the Thursday following, sixty-one, and it was Zeynep who saw the pattern.

"They buy on Thursday," she said slowly, looking at the whole month. "Look. It is always on the Thursday afternoon, after the mektep. And on Friday, almost nothing."

"Why?"

"Pocket money." Her eyes lit. "Their fathers give it to them on Thursday, before the day of prayer. By Monday it is spent."

Ayaan stared at the tallies.

He would have found it in a week, he knew, in a month. But she had found it in four weeks, with nothing but a column of ticks and an eleven-year-old’s inexplicable knowledge of what other children carry in their pockets.

"Then we buy on Monday," he said slowly. "And fill the counter on Wednesday night, so that on Thursday nothing has run out."

"And on Friday we can leave early."

"And you may count the sheet at your father’s warehouse, and have the evening to yourself."

"I should be paid for it," said Zeynep, promptly.

"You will be. Ten para a week, from the first of the month, written in the column for wages."

"Twelve."

"Eleven," said Ayaan, "and I will return your mother’s tape measure."

She grinned, and the grin made her look, for a moment, as she had at five, on a crate in the lane, correcting a porter.

IV

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 13 June 1901

In June, the headmaster of the new rü?diye came to the counter in person.

He was a small, precise man named R?fat Efendi, in a good black frock coat and a very clean fez. He stood at the plank and surveyed the cards, the notebooks, and the boy behind them, and said, in a voice of mild astonishment, "I was told the proprietor was a child."

"The proprietor’s name is on the sign," said Ayaan. "I am the clerk."

R?fat Efendi’s mouth twitched.

"Then, young clerk, I have an order. The school will open its autumn term with two hundred pupils. I require two hundred notebooks, three hundred nibs, a hundred pencils, and ink for the whole of the year."

He named a total, and Ayaan did the sum and held his face still.

Five hundred and twenty kuru?.

It was more than the counter had sold in two months. It was more than the entire stock and the reserve together, and it was the best order he could have wished for, and he knew that it might ruin him.

"The Ministry of Education pays our accounts," said R?fat Efendi, gently. "As you will understand, it pays slowly. We would settle in the winter, after the new year’s allotment."

"In the winter."

"I am afraid that the ministry has its own seasons."

Ayaan looked at the headmaster for a long moment.

"May I answer you tomorrow, Efendi?"

"Of course. A prudent merchant does not answer at the counter."

When the headmaster was gone, Ayaan went to the back of the shop and sat down on a sack of lentils with his head in his hands.

He did the arithmetic three times, and it did not improve.

To supply the order he needed four hundred kuru? of goods, and he had a hundred and eighty in the tin. The rest he would have to borrow, from a bank that would not look at him or from a moneylender who would look at nothing else, and the money would not return until after the new year.

Zeynep found him there, and read the figures over his shoulder.

"You cannot do it," she said.

"I cannot do all of it."

"And if you do part of it?"

"Then I disappoint the best customer I will have this year, and he goes to the Sahaflar."

She sat down beside him on the sack, and for a time they said nothing.

"Ask my father," she said at last.

"He would lend it. He would lend it gladly." Ayaan lifted his head. "That is the trouble. I have no right to a loan I did not earn."

"It is not a loan." She had the narrow, sharp look she wore when a bad bargain turned out to have a good side. "Your fathers will say you cannot borrow, and you cannot. But the headmaster owes you. That is a different thing."

"It is a promise. It is not coin."

"Is it not?"

She looked at him with her eyebrows raised, and he heard again the voice of Mustafa Efendi on a gray afternoon in Galata.

A promise written so that a stranger may trust it as if it were coin.

"The bill," he breathed. "Monsieur Vitali."

V

Constantinople, Galata — 20 September 1901

It took the whole summer, and it nearly broke him.

He supplied the order in thirds.

A hundred notebooks and the ink went in July, to prove the quality, and a hundred more with the nibs in August.

The pencils went at the start of term.

For each delivery, R?fat Efendi signed a printed receipt, and the receipts went into a leather folder that Ayaan carried to Galata on the second Friday of every month.

Monsieur Vitali did not like children.

He said so, at some length, over the magnifying glass, on the first occasion. He said that a school was not a bank, and a headmaster’s signature was not a bill of exchange, and a boy of eleven was not a merchant.

Ayaan agreed with every word of it, politely.

Then he laid the receipts on the desk, and beside them a short letter from Mustafa Efendi, who had agreed, after an evening of dry looks, to endorse the first of them for a small fee in the book.

"If the school does not pay," said Mustafa to him that evening, "it is I who am out the money, and you who owe me. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mustafa Efendi."

"And your father?"

"I have told him everything. He says he has never sold a promise in his life, and does not intend to begin, but that he cannot find where I have broken his rule."

"Neither can I," said Mustafa. "That is why I am doing it."

Monsieur Vitali bought the first receipt for a little less than its face, and the second for a little less again. The difference was the price of waiting, as it had always been, and Ayaan wrote it in the ledger without complaint.

On the third visit, Monsieur Vitali put down his magnifying glass for the first time.

"The Ministry always pays," he said, in his dry French-flavored Turkish. "It pays late, and it pays less than it promised, but it pays. You have chosen a slow debtor and a sure one, which is better than a quick debtor and a doubtful one."

"Is that a compliment, Monsieur?"

"It is a discount rate," said Monsieur Vitali, and returned to his paper.

But the cash that returned from Galata went out as fast as it came in.

By the second week of September, the shelves of the counter were nearly bare.

He had no pencils for the neighborhood boys, because every pencil in the shop had gone to the school.

He had no spare notebooks, and on the Thursday, the line at the counter was twenty children long, and half of them left with their coppers still in their hands.

"They will go to the Sahaflar," said Zeynep, grimly.

"Some of them."

"And they will not come back."

"Some of them will not."

He stood behind the empty planks, counting the empty shelves, and for the first time in four years, he felt the old, cold fear of a man who had overreached.

It was Mehmet who came and stood next to him, with his hands behind his back.

He said nothing for several minutes. He looked at the planks, and the cards, and the line of disappointed boys, and he did not offer a single coin from the tin.

"Baba," Ayaan said. "I have made a mistake."

"Yes."

"I should have refused the order. Or taken a third of it."

"Perhaps." Mehmet did not look at him. "What would you do now?"

Ayaan thought about it.

"I would tell the boys on Monday that the new stock is coming, and when," he said slowly. "I would buy a small lot of pencils at once with what Monsieur Vitali paid, and sell them to the neighborhood first, and the school after. And in the future I would never again let one customer take more than a third of what I have."

"Why a third?"

"Because then, if he leaves, I have two thirds left standing."

Mehmet nodded.

"That is the lesson," he said, "and you paid for it with a week of empty shelves. It is a cheap price." He turned, at last, and looked at his son. "I would have told you in March, you know. I chose not to."

"Why, Baba?"

"Because a thing I told you would be a rule. A thing you paid for is a part of you."

Ayaan’s throat tightened.

"I thought you would help me."

"I did. I stood here." Mehmet put one large, rough hand on his shoulder. "It is harder than it looks."

On Monday, the new pencils arrived. On Thursday, the line at the counter was the longest it had ever been, and not a single boy went home empty-handed.

VI

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 4 October 1901

In the first week of October, the Ministry of Education sent the sum.

It arrived in a leather bag, carried by a clerk in a frock coat who demanded three signatures and a receipt. Monsieur Vitali’s office had already been repaid by Mustafa, and the balance came home to the shop in coin that was heavier than any Ayaan had ever carried.

He counted it on the supper table, in front of the whole company.

Both fathers sat on either side of the lamp. The two mothers watched from the corner, and Zeynep held the ledger open with her finger on the last line.

"Six months," said Mustafa, reading. "A hundred and fifty-two kuru? of stock at the start. A hundred and eighty in the tin at its lowest. And a profit..." He looked up. "Eighty-four kuru?."

"Eighty-four," said Mehmet.

"After the discount to Vitali, and my fee, and Hatice Han?m’s stitching, and the week of the empty shelves."

The room was very still.

It was not a fortune. It was barely the price of a good winter coat, and Ayaan had worked every afternoon since March to earn it, and for several weeks had slept badly.

He did not feel disappointed.

He felt the particular quiet that comes to a man who has finished a hard thing, and looked at the figure, and found that it was exactly as large as it should be.

"What will you do with it?" Mustafa asked.

"Put it back."

"All of it?"

"All of it, in the stock." Ayaan glanced at Zeynep, who nodded. "A third in the tin, as the reserve. A third for the second order from Nikolaki, so that I can buy his offcuts for the whole year at the lower price. And a third to try a new thing."

"Which is?"

"Slates. The little ones, for the youngest boys. I have been asked for them eleven times."

Mehmet’s eyes crinkled.

"Eleven," he said. "Written down?"

"In the book, Baba. Every one."

"Good." He leaned back. "I have a final question, my son, and I want you to answer it honestly. Why not take a part for yourself? Eighty-four kuru? would buy a great many things."

Ayaan took a moment.

"Because if I take it out, the counter stays the size it is. If I leave it in, next year it will be larger, and the year after, larger again." He met his father’s eyes. "I think a profit that is spent is a dinner, and a profit that is put back is a shop."

There was a silence.

Then Fatma set down her mending, rose from her place by the stove, and crossed the room. She laid a small paper packet on the table at his elbow.

It held a single spool of green silk thread, such as she used for the good embroidery and had never in her life allowed herself to buy.

"What is this?" said Ayaan.

"You did not take a part for yourself," said his mother. "So I took a part for you."

"Anne, I cannot..."

"It cost nine para. I paid for it myself." She smiled, her tired, fierce smile. "Do not tell me it is not allowed. Write it in your book, in the margin, in the column for gifts."

Zeynep, behind her, made a small choked sound that might have been a laugh.

Ayaan took the pencil.

He wrote slowly, in his round clear hand, under all the careful columns of the first year of his first business.

Given. Not paid. One spool of thread, from my mother.

He looked at it for a long time.

Mehmet lingered by the door when the others had gone, and looked up at the board above the counter.

Hassan K?rtasiyesi.

"My name is still on that," he said quietly. "A year from now, we will ask whether it should be."

Ayaan did not answer, because it was not yet his to answer.

He turned the page to a clean sheet, and ruled the first line of the second year.