The house behind the boatyard had a blue door and a vine over the step. A woman in her sixties opened it, looked at the cap in Selim's hand, and sighed as if she had been expecting him for a week.
"Nuri told you not to come," Feride Hanım said.
"He did."
"Well. Wipe your feet."
Hasan sat by a window that faced the point. He was smaller than his handwriting had led Selim to expect, a neat, spare man with a white moustache and eyes the colour of milk.
"You're the signalman," he said. "Sit. Does the vaporiser still choke when the wind's in the south-west?"
"I clean it every morning."
"So did I." The old man folded his hands. "You've read the log. Of course you have, I left it out for you. Which troubles you more, what I did or what I wrote?"
Selim had prepared several answers and found that none of them were honest. "What you wrote," he said. "A log is for what happened."
"Good. I'd have said the same. For ten years I never put a word in that book that wasn't so, and I put that night in it too, to the minute. They told you it made no difference. They're very likely right. I've never been able to make it matter. The light is there for the night when everything else has failed. That is the whole of the work. It was out, and they were in the water, and I was on my knees with a mantle breaking in my fingers."
Feride Hanım set down two glasses of tea and went out again without a word.
"I couldn't bring them in," Hasan said. "There were twenty-one of them, and I knew every name. So I thought, I'll write them in. One each. Once a year, on the night, at the time she should have passed me, I'd keep the watch for one of them, and hang a lamp at the end of the point where they struck, and bring that one home, in the only book I had. It's a poor sort of payment. It was what I could afford. The first inspector read it and looked at me for a long time. Then he signed. I've always thought well of him."
"There are twenty," Selim said.
"I can count, my boy. It's the last thing I can do." The milky eyes moved towards the window. "I asked them for one more year. I couldn't tell them why."
On the twelfth of November the evening came in clear and cold, with a light air from the north and a flat sea. Selim lit up at five. Then he walked into town and brought Hasan out along the point on his arm, slowly, Feride Hanım's scarf wound twice round the old man's neck and her opinion of them both ringing in the street behind.
Hasan climbed the tower with one hand on the wall and did not need to be told where the steps turned. In the watch room he stood for a while with his face lifted, listening to the clockwork, and Selim saw his shoulders come down.
"You're keeping her well," he said.
At midnight Selim filled the storm lantern, half a litre, and carried it out to the iron stake. The Sisters lay quiet in the dark, the water barely lifting on them. He hung the lantern on its hook and stood beside it a moment, a small yellow light at the edge of the sea, under the great white one going round.
They sat the rest of the watch together and spoke very little. At four Selim opened the log and wrote up the night in his own hand, the wind, the sea, the oil. Then he waited.
"Time?" said Hasan.
"Ten past four."
"Is the light burning?"
"It's burning."
The old man let out his breath. "Then she's in."
Selim had thought about this moment for ten days. What he did, in the end, was put the pen into Hasan's fingers, set the nib on the line, and take his own hand away. Hasan wrote it blind. The words climbed off the rule and the letters were a child's, large and unsure, but they were the same words. Motor boat Poyraz, from the south-west, passed the light and entered harbour. He stopped, and felt for the edge of the page, and added the last two. All well.
Underneath, Selim wrote one line of his own. Keeper Hasan attended the watch. Half a litre over, for the lantern on the point. Account closed.
The inspector came in April. He read the page twice, standing at the window, and then he uncapped a green pen and initialled it, and asked to see the oil store.
Hasan had died in February, in his sleep. They buried him on the hill above the harbour, where the beam crosses the cypresses every ten seconds, all night.
On the twelfth of November 1956 the wind went round to the north-east after midnight, the wind the fishermen call poyraz, and blew lightly until dawn. Selim entered it in the wind column, as he would on any other night. Under remarks he wrote: Nothing to report.
That is the end of The Lighthouse Ledger. Read another.