But that Monday morning his Mercedes remained parked in the driveway, and he stood underground at a metro station with his son. At a kiosk on the train platform he picked out a morning paper as he clutched William’s hand. They had been forced to take public transport as another round of demonstrations near Gezi Park had brought traffic to a standstill. Murat bought a copy of Radikal, one of the few papers the conservative government had yet to take a controlling share in. If a thought couldn’t be served up alongside poached salmon at a society dinner party in Beyoğlu, it couldn’t navigate its way through the elitist and leftist editorial team at Radikal. Murat had spent many evenings perched silently next to his wife at such tables. These were her people and he read their paper and went to their dinner parties because he thought it made good sense to keep tabs on those who might undermine both his business interests and, as he began to suspect, his personal interests.
A train hurtled into the station, its brakes whining along the track. Murat handed his son a five-lira note. The boy placed it on the kiosk counter and was given two lira in return. He glanced back at his father, was rewarded with a nod and then pocketed the pair of coins. Murat thought it was important for the boy to get used to handling money. They rushed to the platform. William liked riding the trains and waited eagerly for the doors to open. His father hated the cramped cars and the indignity of standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers. He held his son close, pressing the boy to his legs.
After the first stop, two seats opened up. Murat and William sat alongside one another. Murat handed his son the funny pages while he leafed open the business section. A column in the margin referenced his unfinished football stadium, specifically the latest delays in construction. Since the Gezi Park riots, Murat had been unable to place his other projects as collateral against the loan he needed to erect the superstructure, to say nothing of the interior—seating, concession stands, turnstiles, restrooms, electrical fittings—a crippling assortment of minutiae. The unfinished stadium sat along the main thoroughfare of Cevdet Paşa Caddesi like a ruin viewed in reverse, a monument to what had never existed.
A midlevel functionary from the Ministry of Interior had given a quote to the newspaper: “Yaşar Enterprises’s share will be bought out at a fair price if funds cannot be secured to continue this project.” The loans Murat needed would have to come from a government bank, yet the column made no mention of this fact and its bearing on fairness. A couple of years before, the government had petitioned Murat to partner with them on the project during a citywide revitalization initiative, yet the column also made no mention of this fact and its bearing on fairness. The phrase “loss of confidence” appeared in print several times with Murat’s name appended to the allegation. Then the piece ended with a final quote from the football club’s general manager. “Murat Yaşar sold us a shell, not a home.”
Murat folded his paper in half and tossed it under his seat.
Look at us all, he thought, crammed onto trains, unable to drive because of the gridlock created by our own childish dysfunction. If it weren’t for last spring's protests, my stadium would have been built. The government has overreached. The protesters have overreached. They are all equally guilty.
A woman searching for a seat stepped on his foot. She apologized halfheartedly to Murat and then hoisted up the toddler perched on her hip. The train carriage rocked. Murat thought to offer her his seat, but, irritated as he was, he didn’t and instead watched as the woman stumbled along, burdened by the weight of her child.
You have little in common with these people, he assured himself.
They had one more stop before Şişhane.
Murat put his arm around William, and then glanced down. The light from the fixtures above them was shabby. It fell bitterly over the compartment and it shorted off and on, flickering as the darkness outside in the tunnel contested with it. Father and son fixed their shared concentration on the dimly lit funny pages. They began to laugh and the sound of their laughter rose above the unrelenting noise of the train.
* * *
A pair of boys, Arabs or gypsies, played a game at the station’s exit. They raced up the down escalator, pulling after one another’s shirttails, nearly tumbling on the treacherous steps. Murat and William rode up the escalator the correct way, silently passing the playful boys, who examined them with desperate eyes. As they came out of the station and into the combination of fresh air, low morning sun and blue sky, Murat’s gaze shifted to a vagrant lying on the sidewalk. The man held a cardboard slat with a message penned in black marker, soliciting money for food. Next to him was a collection of empty lager cans, some tipped over, some still upright. The vagrant’s rheumy, glacial eyes stared toward the tall buildings whose dead windows shone high above, and in the way he searched vacantly upward he appeared like a defeated mountaineer stranded at an inescapable base camp, his lager cans like so many depleted cylinders of oxygen, the evidence of his many failed attempts at the summit. His gray beard hung to his chest. His saliva-tipped mustache curled into his mouth. And the small bloodshot pustules of alcoholism congregated on his cheeks like freckles on a fair-skinned child.
Murat stopped and glancing down he took William by the shoulders and pressed him to his legs as he had done on the train. He held him in front of the vagrant. “Do you see this man?” Murat asked his son.
William nodded.
“This man has nothing. Now look at me.”
William turned over his shoulder and stared up at his father.
Murat wore a tailored suit, as he always did, today it was a conservative charcoal gray, a white handkerchief meticulously folded in the pocket, a creaseless full-Windsor knot cinched at his neck; he had shaven at six a.m., his hair was cut the first Tuesday of each month. That morning he looked the same as he did any of the other mornings that his son had known him.
“That man is half a billion lira richer than I am.”
William looked again at the vagrant.
“Do you understand?” Murat asked.
William nodded, as if trying to comprehend his father’s debts. Murat crouched next to him on the sidewalk, stooping to eye level with his son. He had confused William and he regretted it. The boy couldn’t appreciate such debts, and shouldn’t have to, at least not yet. The silk hem of Murat’s suit jacket brushed against the street. He and the vagrant were close, their bodies almost touching.
Murat dragged William away by the hand. They wandered onto İstiklal Caddesi and Murat pointed out certain buildings, quizzing William about their value relative to one another and sharing insider details of many—the confidential plans for a new shopping center here, a landlord who bribed building inspectors there. They then passed Galatasaray Lisesi, the oldest school in the city. Engraved on the iron gate was the year of its founding: 1481. Murat explained to William that this was not even thirty years after Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror seized Constantinople from the defending Christians.