Selim had spent eleven years sending other men's words by lamp and flag, exactly as given, and it had left him with a respect for records that was close to religion. A log was not a diary. It was the one book in which a man was not permitted an opinion. He could not leave the Poyraz alone.
For three nights he read the volume from the beginning, and on the third he stopped reading the remarks and started reading the figures.
Hasan accounted for his oil as a bank accounts for money. So many litres received from the supply boat, so many burned each night, the balance carried forward at the foot of every page, and the balance was always right. A long night burned more than a short one. A cold night burned a little more than a mild one. And the night of the twelfth of November, every year, burned half a litre more than the nights on either side of it.
Half a litre. Seven times in seven years, the same half litre each time.
A lamp does not burn more because a boat passes. He looked at the column for a long while, then took the hand lantern down to the store under the stairs, where the old volumes were stacked in a sea chest that smelled of camphor.
1941 to 1947: the entry was there each November, word for word, and beside it, each spring, the inspector's initials in green ink, a small looped mark that meant read and approved. He had seen the same mark in his own volume and taken it for routine. 1935 to 1940: there again, initialled again.
In the volume before that, the line was not there. Selim turned to the twelfth of November 1934 and found Hasan's handwriting changed. It was the same hand, but the pen had been pressed hard enough to score the paper.
12 November. Lodos 9, sea very high, heavy rain, vis. poor. Lit 17.00.
03.20. Light failed. Mantle broken, vaporiser choked. Spare fitted with difficulty.
04.05. Relit.
07.30. Wreckage on the Sisters. Motor boat Poyraz of this harbour, returning from the market at the county town. Twenty-one aboard. None saved.
Beneath it, the oil: consumed, carried forward, correct to the spoonful.
He took the book to Nuri Bey the next morning and laid it open on the register. The harbour master looked at the page for some time. He did not need to read it.
"My father was the engineer," he said. "I was fourteen."
"I'm sorry."
"It was twenty-one years ago." He struck a match at last and lit the pipe, and let it go out again. "Listen to me. I'll tell you what every seaman in this town has told him. The Poyraz had a bad engine and a full deck, and she sailed into a rising lodos because people wanted to be home. When a boat loses her engine off this point in that wind, she goes onto the Sisters. Light or no light. The captain had come past those rocks a thousand times and could have done it blind. He didn't need telling where they were. He needed an engine."
"The light was out for forty-five minutes."
"Yes. And Hasan wrote it down himself, in ink, where any inspector could read it, when he could have written light burned without fault and no man alive would have known. They read it. They cleared him. The whole town cleared him. My mother cleared him, to his face, at my father's grave." Nuri Bey closed the old volume and held it a moment before he gave it back. "There was only ever one man who didn't."
"And the entry? Every year?"
"I don't know what it is. A prayer. A punishment. I've never asked, and nor has anyone else. We know what night it is. My wife leaves a lamp in the window, and so do half the houses on the front. Up there he writes his line, down here we don't look at it, and the inspector signs. It has harmed nobody, Selim Efendi. It is the only untrue thing that man has written in thirty-one years."
Selim carried the book home along the point. That evening, after lighting up, he set the two volumes side by side, the first night and the last, and saw what he had missed. 04.05. Relit. And every year after: 04.10. Five minutes. The time it would take a motor boat, clear of the Sisters, to come up past the tower and into the beam. It was not a prayer. It was a correction. Each year Hasan wrote down the thing the light had been five minutes too late to bring about.
The half litre he understood later that night, when he went out with a torch to the end of the point. There, above the high water mark, stood an iron stake with a hook on it, and the rock beneath was black with years of lamp smoke.
He went back in and did what any signalman would have done. He counted. 1935 to 1954: twenty entries.
Twenty-one aboard.
It was the second of November. There were ten days left.