Voice and absence work together in the piece to explore memory’s erosions. The narrator’s recollections arrive unevenly—complete details at times, spectral gaps at others—suggesting either the trauma of what was experienced or the deliberate strategy of concealment. This instability invites a reader to tolerate ambiguity, to accept that some truths are partial and some histories are palimpsests. The SS Leyla thus becomes a site of layered testimony: official logs overwritten by gossip, intimate confessions layered over bureaucratic language. Each new layer reframes what lies beneath.