In a single evening at his home they had agreed on the terms of the adoption. They had sipped tea at a simple wooden farmer’s table in one corner of the gecekondu, which was partitioned in half by a bedsheet slung across a wash line. On one side were the kitchen and table, on the other Deniz’s bed and a wicker bassinet for the newborn, who slept peaceably through the night. Stacked in the kitchen were tins of formula. Two empty bottles lolled in the half-filled washbasin. A jute rug covered the floor and at its edges the floor was dirt. An electric camping lantern hung from a bent nail in the ceiling.
“I don’t want to give him up,” Deniz had told Catherine.
The next morning, she would register his son as her son with the Central Authority. In return she would find Deniz some steady work and from time to time she would permit him to see the child.
“We didn’t give him a name,” Deniz said. “We thought whoever took him would want to do that.”
“Who is we?”
“We is no one now. Just me.” He stepped to a small burner in the kitchen. Its flame sputtered erratically as the gas seeped through a snaking hose fastened onto a propane tank. The kettle had come to a boil. He reached for the handle and at that moment an uneven surge of gas caused the flame to leap over his wrist before it snuck away. Deniz dropped the kettle back onto the burner and cursed, clutching his hand to his chest.
Catherine found a dish towel and dipped it into the sudsy washbasin with the two bottles. “Let me see that,” she said, reaching for Deniz, who slowly unhinged his arm toward her. The dark hair around his wrist had been singed and a finger-length welt already spread across a strip of burnt skin that was turning translucent. She wrapped and then tied the wet dish towel around his wrist while he gritted a single curse as she cinched it down.
Catherine shushed Deniz, glancing toward the wicker bassinet. “You’ll wake him. Keep that cloth pressed there.” The kettle steamed heavily and she carefully lifted it from the burner and poured them both their cups of tea. They returned to the table.
Deniz cast his eyes toward his son, who had begun to stir but was now settling back to sleep. “Already you’re taking care of him.”
Catherine nodded.
“You don’t have to worry about his mother …” Deniz said and paused, searching for a sufficient explanation. “It’s my fault. I allowed her to think I was one way when clearly I am another. I never meant for this to end so badly.” Deniz sipped his tea, his stare shifting from Catherine to the infant who slept in the corner. “If a man trapped on a sinking ship handed off his son to a stranger, you wouldn’t judge him, would you?”
Catherine shook her head no. But she wasn’t certain he believed her.
“And you? You want this child because … ?”
“We can’t have children,” answered Catherine, recognizing that her misfortune had promised to rescue Deniz from his, and when she caught him glancing at her stomach, Catherine felt an impulse to immediately correct his assumption that she was the barren one, but loyalty to her husband prevented this and left her with a spike of resentment that she would once again have to assume Murat’s frailties as her own. “I think that we can help one another,” she added, and then reached across the table, pulling Deniz’s arm toward her. She removed the wet dish towel and examined his burn. It would heal in a few days. Perhaps it would leave a scar but nothing more.
They spoke late into the night. Catherine missed the last bus. The first bus would run out of Esenler at just after three o’clock in the morning, taking the janitors, laundresses, busboys and day laborers to their stations in the eastern, affluent reaches of the city. Deniz thought that Catherine should be on the first bus with the child. “Do you have a name picked out for him?” Deniz had asked.
Catherine said that she didn’t, that she would talk it over with her husband.
“Do you think it will be an American or a Turkish name?”
Catherine said that she wasn’t sure.
“You’ll have to pick before we go to the Central Authority,” said Deniz.
Catherine nodded.
“So you’ll have to pick by tomorrow,” he added.
“Yes, by tomorrow,” answered Catherine.
“And will I meet your husband then?”
“I don’t think he’ll be coming.”
Deniz’s gaze shifted around the room, to the kettle on the now cold burner and to the washbasin and to the carpet, which didn’t quite cover the dirt floor, and, last, to the infant, who still slept in the corner. “It is better if your husband doesn’t know much about where his son came from … or maybe nothing.”
Catherine crossed the room and swaddled the sleeping infant in an extra blanket before taking him outside. She and Deniz arranged a time to meet in front of the Central Authority the following morning and then Catherine stepped into the street. The half-moon was up and it was reflected in the puddles of filth that pooled in the clogged gutters. The road was slick and Catherine walked unsteadily, getting turned around almost as soon as she left. The alleyways all looked the same, an endless congestion of ramshackle gecekondus. She was eager to get to the seat on the bus that would take her home.
But she was lost. She remembered that she had passed an empty lot with a pile of building materials staged nearby, but she couldn’t find it as a reference point—those materials had disappeared. After doubling back several times, she had even become confused about where Deniz’s home had been. She retraced her steps, but only became more disoriented. It was then—not the next day when they signed the papers but then, when she was lost and alone—that she realized the irreversibility of her choice. The child was hers.
In the clutch of this fear, she heard a noise from behind the shut door of one of the gecekondus: it was a hammering. Then the door swung open; its backside was red and beyond it a man was jointing together the crossbeams of a wooden frame while another stepped outside for a cigarette. In the corner of the nearly completed gecekondu, a woman and her two sons slept on a rug laid across a dirt floor. From the empty lot earlier that day, she remembered the red door—red for luck.
She now knew where she was going. As she walked toward the bus stop, she thought how remarkable it was that a home could be built in a single night.
* * *
That morning in his office Deniz had refused her. No matter her approach—whether it was pointing out the merits in Peter’s work or asking for a personal favor on his behalf—Catherine had made no headway. “What is the debt you believe I’m obliged to repay you?” Deniz had said. Without Catherine, Deniz would still be living in the gecekondu. Without Deniz, Catherine would be childless. There was no debt between them, quite the opposite: they were even.