The Wheat Is Growing

On Thursday morning the wheat had split.

Two days in the bucket had swollen every grain, and in the night each one had put out a white thread of root, thin as a hair, as if it were testing the water with one toe. I spread them on two of Yukari-san's baking trays, covered them with a damp cloth, and carried them to the shop window, where the morning sun came in off the street.

Beside them hung a sign in Mio's neat lettering, black marker on white card:

CLOSING 20 MARCH — THANK YOU FOR 61 YEARS

By the afternoon the first green tips had come through the cloth. By Saturday the trays were a green haze, and people had started stopping.

"Is that cat grass?"

"Is it for the closing? Like flowers?"

"Is it edible? My husband will eat anything."

Every time, I went out onto the pavement and explained. In Uzbekistan the new year comes on the twenty-first of March, the first day of spring, and it is called Navruz. Before it, you grow wheat. When the wheat is tall, you crush it and cook it all night in a huge pot into something called sumalak, sweet and brown, and everybody stirs, and everybody wishes. I explained it to schoolchildren, to the delivery man, to the tofu-shop wife, to an old man who listened to the whole thing and then asked if it was cat grass. I kept count on the back of a receipt. In three days, forty times.

On Thursday night I wrote an orange note and stuck it to the inside of the glass, next to Mio's sign.

Sprouting wheat, green trays

in the closing shop's window—

spring grows anyway

"Great," said Mio. "Now it's a poetry shop."

The closing sale began on Saturday at ten, and by ten past, Moriyama Cycle was fuller than I had ever seen it.

They came with bicycles. Old men wheeled in heavy black roadsters with rod brakes and a small brass plate riveted to the frame, MORIYAMA CYCLE SHIRAHAMA, built by Tetsuo-san's father in the seventies, and asked for one last tune-up. They stood around the workbench while Tetsuo-san worked and told stories over his head. This one had carried tofu to the whole north end of town for thirty years. That one had been ridden to a wedding, and back from it, badly. A retired postman patted his saddle and said that it had been stolen once, in 1979, and had come home by itself.

A woman came in holding the hand of a small girl in a yellow hat. She had learned to ride on a Moriyama bicycle in 1981, she said, on this street, with Tetsuo-san's father running behind holding the saddle. Now it was her granddaughter's turn. Tetsuo-san lowered the saddle of a small red bicycle from the sale and took it out onto the Shiokaze Ginza himself, bent over, one hand on the back of the seat, running in little steps.

"Slowly is fine," he told her. "Slowly is fine."

Kotone had come to help. She stood behind the counter in her grey cardigan, with the old till that goes ching, and she talked to customers. Short, clear sentences, one after another, to strangers.

"That's eight hundred yen."

"Thank you very much."

"The bell is two hundred. It's a good bell."

I was carrying a box of inner tubes past the workbench when Tetsuo-san looked up from a chain and watched her for a while.

"Mm," he said. "She got loud."

He did not say it to me. He said it to the chain. But I heard it, and I carried the inner tubes into the back room and stood there for a moment among the boxes of packed-away dolls, not doing anything at all.

At four in the morning on Wednesday the eleventh of March, the whitebait season opened.

The boats went out in the dark with their lights on, one after another, the engines coughing and then settling, and the whole harbour was lit up like a stage with nobody on it yet. I stood on the quay in borrowed rubber boots, with steam coming off the vats behind me and my breath coming out in front, and waited with everyone else.

Kotone was already working, in boots and an apron, her hair tied back, carrying crates. Grandma Tae sat at her counter, which was not open, shouting prices at nobody in particular, to practise.

At half past six the first boats came back low in the water. The nets came up, and the whitebait poured into the crates: thousands and thousands of tiny, glassy, silver fish, so many that they looked like one thing, a moving light. Spring whitebait. So small that a thousand fit in one hand. Into the vats they went, and the steam rolled across the harbour and smelt of salt and the beginning of something.

The co-op served its opening-day breakfast on trestle tables by the ice house: bowls of rice with raw whitebait heaped on top, grated ginger, a line of soy sauce. I sat on an upturned crate and ate. It tasted like the sea had been made into something you could hold.

Kotone's father sat down on the crate beside mine.

He had nodded to me on the drying racks in July. He had climbed a hundred and eight steps beside Tetsuo-san at New Year without a word. In eleven months I had never heard his voice. He ate his whole bowl in silence, looking at his boat. Then he put down his chopsticks.

"Come back," he said, "and eat it again."

That was all. He stood up and went back to the boat. I sat on the crate with my empty bowl and could not, for a moment, see the harbour very clearly.

Across the quay, Kotone had stopped with a crate of whitebait in her arms. She had seen. She looked at her father's back, and then at me, and her face did something I had never seen it do: it looked surprised by her own family. Then Grandma Tae shouted at her to stop standing there like a heron, and she went on.

At school, in first period, a blue note appeared on the corner of my desk.

First spring whitebait boats—

my father's hands smell of sea

and he said 'come back'

At 14:46 the town siren sounded over Shirahama, long and low, and the whole school stood up.

It was the minute of silence for the earthquake and the tsunami of 11 March 2011. Across the classroom, across the building, across the town, nobody moved. Down in the harbour a boat sounded its horn, long and low, under the siren. Kurata-sensei stood at the front with her head bowed and her flashcards held against her chest. Thirty-two of us and one teacher, and not one sound, not even a chair. The sea in the window was flat and bright, and very quiet, as if it knew.

I thought, for a moment, of the theatre in Tashkent that my grandfather showed me, built by people far from home, still standing after the earthquake of 1966. Then I only stood.

Beside me Kotone was perfectly still. She had always been the best of all of us at silence. But I noticed, standing there, that she had become good at the other thing too.

That evening I sat on my bed and measured the wheat in my head. Eight centimetres. Fourteen days until Narita. Nine days until the shop closed. Three until White Day.

I knew now how I would answer her. Not in a haiku. Not on paper, where she could read it in private and I could hide behind the counting. Aloud. The way she had learned to do it, one rung at a time, all year, while I watched.

And I would not go with empty hands. In Tashkent you do not visit anyone important without bread. At dinner I had asked Yukari-san whether her oven could bake non. "It can bake anything," she said. "Badly!" Tetsuo-san had looked at me over his rice for a long moment and said nothing, and now, through the floor, I could hear the grinder running in the dark shop, on and off, at an hour when it never ran.

I practised into my pillow. First the whole speech. Then half of it. Then only the part that mattered, over and over, until Mio banged on the wall.

"WE CAN HEAR YOU," she said.

White Day was in three days. I would use my voice. Two sounds. I had counted them.