I have been carrying things across for longer than the water has been salt.
The strait believes it is the passage. The strait is the inconvenience between one shore and the other. I am the passage. I am the reason anyone arrives.
I have carried: the dead. The living. A cat, once, who looked at me with two different-coloured eyes and said nothing, which was the most intelligent thing anyone has said on my boat in twelve thousand years.
You do not speak to the ferryman. You sit in the boat. The boat moves. You arrive or you do not. The ferryman does not care which because the ferryman's job is the carrying, not the arriving.
The Bosphorus wrote a letter. It said: I carry. It said: carrying is the love. It said: the current does not choose.
The current does not choose because the current does not tire. The current is physics. I am not physics. I am a man with oars. The oars are the oldest things in the water and the water is tired of my oars and I am tired of the water and the tiredness does not stop the carrying because the tiredness IS the carrying. Twelve thousand years. The tiredness and the carrying are the same act. They became the same act around the eighth or ninth century. I am not certain which.
I lost a century once. I was carrying a woman with a child. I looked at the shore. The buildings were different. I had not noticed the century change.
The not-noticing was the first sign that the carrying had replaced the living. I carry therefore I do not notice. I do not notice therefore I carry. The loop closed. I have been inside it since.
Hafize has watched the ferries for forty years. She thinks forty years is a long time to stand on a shore. I have been the shore for twelve thousand. The shore does not watch. The shore wears down.
The Bosphorus carries without eroding. I carry and erode. The water is the same water. My hands are the same hands — smoother now, the edges gone, the calluses worn past callus into something that is not skin and is not stone but is the surface of a man who has been gripping the same oars for twelve thousand years. The hands do not grip. The hands are the oars. The distinction eroded.
I am putting the boat down.
I am not putting the boat down.
— The Ferryman
The strait. The same strait. The water is salt today.