Selim came in on the Thursday bus with one suitcase and a letter of appointment folded twice in his breast pocket. The road ended at the harbour. Beyond it there was a quay, eleven fishing boats, a coffeehouse with its chairs turned towards the water, and, at the end of a long spit of rock to the south-west, the white tower he had been sent to keep.
The harbour master was waiting outside his office, a broad man named Nuri Bey with a pipe he did not seem to light. He read the letter, all of it, and handed it back.
"You were a signalman," he said.
"Eleven years."
"Then you can stay awake. That's most of it." He took a ring of keys from a nail inside the door. "Come. I'll walk you out before the light goes."
The path ran along the spine of the point, between thyme and broken stone. The sea on the right hand was the harbour's, flat and green. On the left it was open water, and even on a still evening it moved against the rocks with a slow sound like breathing. Two dark shapes stood off the very end of the point, wet to their tops.
"The Sisters," said Nuri Bey, without looking at them. "You'll see how the sea breaks there when it blows from the south-west. Lodos. It comes up fast in autumn. Everything that goes wrong here goes wrong in a lodos."
The station was a tower, a two-room house built against its foot, a cistern, and a fig tree that had no business surviving. Everything had been left in order. The brass was bright. The oil store was swept, the cans ranked by date, and on the table in the watch room lay the log, squared to the table's edge, with a pen beside it.
"Hasan kept this light for thirty-one years," Nuri Bey said. "His eyes went. The Administration gave him another year, and then another, and this summer the inspector couldn't look the other way any longer. He's at his sister's now, behind the boatyard." He put the keys in Selim's hand. "He won't come out here. Don't take it to heart. And don't go to him with questions. The station will tell you what you need."
Selim lit the lamp that first evening with the manual open beside him, although he knew the drill: spirit in the cup to heat the vaporiser, pressure in the tank, then the valve, and the mantle taking the flame with a soft thump and turning from yellow to a white he could not look at. He wound the clockwork. The lens began to turn on its bed, ponderous and silent, and the beam went out over the water and came round again, every ten seconds, touching the Sisters, the harbour mouth, the hills, the empty sea.
He sat the watch with the log in front of him. A keeper new to a station reads the log the way a doctor reads a history, and Hasan's was a pleasure to read. Small upright writing, never hurried. Date, wind, sea, visibility, time lit, time extinguished, oil consumed, remarks. Wind NE 3, sea slight, vis. good. Lit 17.34. Ext. 06.20. Oil 4.2 l. Steamer northbound 23.10. Nothing further. Night after night, year after year, a man saying only what was so.
He turned back to last November to learn what the month would bring him. Rain. Two gales. And on the twelfth, under remarks, a line longer than the rest.
04.10. Motor boat Poyraz, from the south-west, passed the light and entered harbour. All well.
An odd hour for a small boat, he thought, and no more than that. He went back another year.
12 November. 04.10. Motor boat Poyraz, from the south-west, passed the light and entered harbour. All well.
He turned the pages more slowly now. 1952. 1951. 1950. The weather changed. One year there was fog, one year a flat calm, one year a lodos strong enough that Hasan had noted spray on the lantern glass, forty metres up. The line did not change. The same boat, the same bearing, the same minute, the same two words at the end, back to the first page of the volume, which began in 1948.
In the morning he walked into town and found Nuri Bey at his desk with the harbour register open in front of him.
"There's a boat I should know about," Selim said. "The Poyraz. She comes in every twelfth of November, a little after four in the morning."
Nuri Bey's pipe stopped halfway to his mouth.
"There is no boat of that name in this harbour."
"She's in the log. Seven years running, in this volume alone."
"Then the log knows more than my register." The harbour master closed the register, gently, the way a man closes a door on a sleeping room. "It's a good station, Selim Efendi. Hasan left it right for you. Keep the light, write down what you see, and let November look after itself."
Selim walked back along the point with the wind getting up behind him. It was the twenty-eighth of October. Out past the tower, the sea had begun to whiten around the Sisters.