The Night Ferry

Twenty minutes had passed since they left the Çanakkale quay. Selin gripped the wheel tight, as she did every month, waiting for the familiar shudder she felt when the tires settled onto the ferry's metal deck. Eight years, the same hour, the same route, the same ship. The night ferry to Bozcaada rocked along with her inside the truck.

Kerem sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window. He had pushed up the sleeves of his grey sweater and held the thermos on his knee with both hands. He wasn't talking, but Selin was used to his silence; some nights Kerem never opened his mouth, he was simply there, and that was enough.

“Has the coffee gone cold?” Selin asked, her eyes still on the road.

No answer came. The lights flickered then, once, then three times in a row, as if the ship were breathing in and out. Selin blinked for a second, the drone of the engine swelling in her ears. When the lights steadied, the passenger seat was empty.

The thermos lay on the floor, its lid off, coffee soaked into the fabric of the seat. But there was something darker than that: a stain in the middle of the seat, fresh, still wet, a redness. Selin reached out and touched it. Her fingers came away red.

She slammed the door open and ran across the deck until she found one of the crew. The man looked her over and wasn't the least bit surprised.

“Again?” he said, his voice tired, as if he were talking about the weather.

“Again what? Where's Kerem?”

The man shrugged, shifted his pipe to the corner of his mouth and walked off, his boots squeaking on the metal floor. Selin shouted after him, but no one turned around. There were two more men on the deck, and neither looked at her as they went on with their work, as if they had seen this scene hundreds of times.

Selin checked her watch. Forty minutes to Bozcaada.

For eight years it had always been the same: the lights flickered, Kerem vanished, and then he would be found somewhere, sitting in some corner, remembering nothing. Selin had never asked, never really searched. This time was different.

This time there was blood.

This time she would search.

She slipped the phone back into her pocket. There was no signal, she knew that, but she had wanted to try anyway. No one on the deck was looking at her; everyone had suddenly found somewhere else to look: the lighthouse, cigarette smoke, the tips of their shoes. Selin approached the first passenger, a young man, who looked away.

“Didn't you see anything? Before my husband disappeared?”

The young man shook his head, stammered out a couple of words and hurried off. Everyone was like that. Half sentences, broken glances. As if the ship were a school that taught silence.

She found Yaşar Usta at the engine room door, his pipe in his hand, clenched between his teeth but never lit. His glasses had fogged up, and the two missing fingers of his left hand were trembling.

“This isn't the first time, is it?”

Yaşar Usta's face fell all at once. Then, in a whisper, as if speaking to himself:

“Like the accident eight years ago. It started like this then, too.”

The words opened a door inside Selin. Suddenly, unbidden, an image came: a dark deck, shouting, the screech of metal as something heavy was dragged. Was that Kerem's voice, or only a figment of it? She couldn't tell. She shook her head and drove the image away.

“What accident?”

But Yaşar Usta wasn't speaking anymore; clamping the pipe between his teeth, he had fled into the engine room.

Selin didn't follow. By a rusty pipe on the floor she noticed a crumpled piece of paper, nudged aside by someone's foot, forgotten. She bent down and picked it up. It was a cargo manifest, its ink faded but still legible. Unlogged cargo, date unclear, and below it a signature: Cengiz Aksoy.

Her fingers stilled on the paper. Every time she heard Aksoy's name something stirred inside her, and now she understood why: every time someone vanished, he had been on the ferry. Eight years ago, last month, tonight.

The wind stiffened on the deck. From far off, from the engine room, came a metallic sound, and then something like a scream. Or was it only the sound of chains?

Pressing the manifest to her chest, she went down the stairs. The metal steps trembled under her feet, and that scream from the engine room still rang in her ears. Or had the sound really been cut off, and was it only going on inside her head? She couldn't tell. At the bottom of the steps, the pieces inside her head came together: the coffee she drank before every crossing and the heavy, numbing sleep that followed; and the crates in the truck's bed that she had never opened, never asked about.

The cargo hold door stood ajar. Inside, among the crates, Aksoy was standing. He held a lantern, his face lost in shadow, but beneath the thick grey mustache his teeth gleamed, as if he were smiling.

“Selin, what are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

“You killed Kerem,” Selin said. Her voice sounded strange even to her own ears, flat and cold. “Eight years ago he found out what was in my truck. He told you, didn't he?”

The smile on Aksoy's face slowly died. He lowered the lantern.

“He was a curious boy,” he said, his voice almost gentle. “He opened the crates. He saw what he shouldn't have seen. So I... took care of it.”

“And you fooled me for eight years.” Selin's hand was shaking, but her voice wasn't. “Did you make my coffee every time? Is that why I saw him on every crossing, on the deck, in the cabin?”

“You needed to stay calm,” said Aksoy, and took a step. “As long as you saw him, you weren't looking for anything. You didn't ask questions. And I was doing my work.”

My work. The words landed in her stomach like a fist.

“There are inspectors at the port tonight,” Aksoy said, his voice hard now, the mask of friendliness gone entirely. “And you know everything. That won't do.”

He lunged. Selin fled from the hold back onto the deck; her back struck the cold railing. Far off in the darkness, the harbour lights showed as little points, so close, so far.

Aksoy's hands reached for her throat.

The instant his fingers touched her throat, Selin flung her hand back, and her palm found not the railing but the red button on the wall. She slammed the alarm with all her strength. The sound exploded across the deck, spreading over the metal surfaces like a sharp, unending scream. Aksoy froze for a moment, then his hands loosened. Coughing, Selin scrambled back and grabbed the radio, calling the captain. Her voice shook but the words came out: “Attack on the deck. Send help.”

The ship's lights flashed on and off, and the captain's voice came over the loudspeaker. The crew came running; two of them pinned Aksoy to the floor, and he was shouting, but no one was listening anymore. The harbour lights grew, no longer little points but real ones, yellow and steady. When the coast guard boat tied up at the pier, they led Aksoy away in handcuffs.

Yaşar Usta, his hands trembling, told the officers everything. He said that eight years ago Kerem had noticed the cargo in the trucks, and that Aksoy had thrown him into the sea that night. Then his voice cracked: “Every crossing, we put something in the woman's coffee. It was Aksoy's order. The drug kept her half asleep. And while she was like that, now and then, in the dark, we would seat someone by the truck. From a distance, in the mist, she took that man for Kerem. Then he would vanish, of course, because he was never there.”

When Selin heard this, she didn't cry. Something inside her quietly settled into place; the question she had carried for eight years closed like a wound that had finally found its answer.

In the morning, she stood alone on the pier. She went back to her truck and looked at the passenger seat. It was empty. It had always been empty. She touched the old stain on the seat and rubbed at it; it wouldn't come out, but now she could look at it.

> “Don't look for me here anymore,” the voice in her mind had said, once more, for the last time.

She turned the key. As she left the ferry, the sun was rising over the sea. The truck rolled down the ramp, its tires meeting the asphalt. Selin looked ahead, not behind.