Not Everything That Ends Has Failed

The seat lottery box for the third term was a tissue box covered in leftover Christmas wrapping paper, and this time Fumika was holding it.

"Sardor-kun! Happy New Year! Please draw!" said Kurata-sensei, in English, as always.

"Happy New Year, Sensei. Please look after me again this year," I answered, in Japanese, as always.

Fumika held the box at exactly the height of my hand. "Fairly, Aliev-kun."

I drew the window seat at the back of the room. Kotone drew the seat beside it.

"Rigged," said Daichi, from the middle row.

"Article Zero," said Fumika, and sat down.

So in January I was back where I had started in April, the other way round: I had the window, and she had the seat beside it. The glass was cold to the touch. The sea was a hard winter blue, and on clear mornings, far out, the mountain that used to hide stood there being ordinary.

Third period was classical Japanese. Hanzawa-sensei was, for once, fully awake.

"Shirase-kun," he said. "The Pillow Book. From the beginning. Aloud."

The room went quiet, the particular quiet of thirty people deciding not to look at someone and looking anyway. I did not look. I looked at the sea, which was my window now, and listened.

"Haru wa akebono," she read. In spring, the dawn. Little by little the edge of the hills grows pale, a little light comes, and thin purple clouds trail across it. Her voice was low and steady. She read the summer night and the fireflies, and the autumn evening with the crows flying home to roost in threes and fours, and the winter early morning, the frost, the charcoal carried through the cold corridors. A thousand years old, all of it. She did not stop once.

When she finished, nobody laughed. Nobody said anything at all. Then Kimura, from the middle row, the boy who had read our notes aloud in June, said without any irony at all:

"…That was nice."

"Hohoho," said Hanzawa-sensei, and wrote something on the board. He had called on her on purpose. I know because he did not fall asleep until she had finished.

The campaign began on Saturday.

The club made posters. Fumika drew up a permit application for a fundraising stall. "A stall on a public street requires the approval of the shopping association, the town hall and, in my opinion, God," she said, and began filling in all three. Minase-senpai said, "How interesting," and signed the first poster in brush. Kotone wrote seven haiku for the shop window, each about something in it: the bell on the door, the pump, a chain that had turned for sixty years. They were the best things on the street, and only later did I notice that not one of them used the word save.

Mio built a crowdfunding page. Its header was a photograph of Tetsuo-san asleep in the doppi I had given him on my first night, captioned: He is tired. Please help.

I planned a plov fundraiser: the sixty-litre pot, four hundred yen a plate, a hundred and fifty plates. Nakagawa-san offered mutton at cost. The tofu-shop couple offered fried tofu and their whole front wall for posters. Daichi offered "the entire baseball club, for carrying".

I was happy the way I am always happy when I am busy: loudly, and without looking up.

On Saturday the seventeenth, after the shutter was down, Tetsuo-san called me to the workbench.

He had a wheel in the truing stand and a spoke key in his fingers, and while he talked he turned the key a quarter at a time, listening to each spoke as if it were telling him something. Beside the wheel lay a letter, a ledger of pencilled numbers that went down the page and kept going, and the SAVE card, which Mio must have shown him.

"The owner is selling the building," he said. "He's a good man. He's old. His son wants the money." Click. "People buy electric bicycles now, from the home centre. Good bicycles. I can't fix them." Click. "And my knees." He tapped one with the spoke key. "Every morning they tell me how old I am. They have never once been wrong."

"We can help," I said. "The plov alone—"

"Sardor-kun." He spun the wheel and watched it run true. "My father opened this shop in 1965. I've had it since I was nineteen. I've fixed half the bicycles in this town, some of them three times. That's not failing. That's a thing that happened, and it was good, and now it ends." He stopped the wheel with one finger. "Not everything that ends has failed."

I did not say anything. It was the only thing I could think of to say.

"Closing was Yukari's idea," he said. "In October she sat where you're sitting and said: close it, rest, and go and ride your road." For the first time that night he looked straight at me. "In August. Tashkent to Samarkand. The road I didn't ride in 1989. I'm fifty-four. My knees have one long road left."

I had made posters. Mio had made a website. Nakagawa-san had defrosted half a sheep. For a moment all I felt was that somebody had taken my job away.

Then I understood. It was not an ending that was happening to him. It was one he had chosen, and at the other end of it there was a road. On the steps at New Year, Kotone had tried to tell me. Not everything wants to be saved.

I picked up the card and tore it in half. On the back of the piece that said SAVE, I wrote, in capitals: RIDE.

Tetsuo-san looked at the word for a long time. Then he took the card and pinned it to the wall above the workbench, next to a calendar from 1998 that nobody had ever taken down.

"Mm," he said, and put the wheel away.

Every evening that week, after closing, we brought the Samarkand-gō down to the middle of the shop floor and made it young again.

New tyres, which smelt the way new things only smell for one day. A new chain, which Tetsuo-san let me fit, and then quietly refitted. New brake cables. He oiled the leather saddle with his thumb until it shone like a chestnut. On the last night he touched up the katakana on the top tube with a brush as thin as an eyelash, one stroke at a time, while I held the lamp, the way I had held it in April for a first-year's chain. We did not ride it. Tetsuo-san said it was not for riding here. He only spun the back wheel once, in the stand, and we listened to it tick.

On Friday he gave me a receipt from the shop's pad, folded in half. "For the club," he said. On the back, in pencil, in the handwriting of a boy from 1987:

Winter shop, shutters

half down—in the back, the old

bike is facing west

His first haiku in thirty-eight years. I pasted it into the club's activity log, under Kotone's entry for the day, and Hanzawa-sensei woke up long enough to read it twice.

On the same weekend that I tore up the SAVE card, Minase-senpai sat the university entrance test. On the Monday after it I found him at the club kotatsu with the newspaper's answer pages, marking himself in red, and I put a "victory plov" bento in front of him. In Japan students eat pork cutlet before exams, because katsu sounds like "win". I had decided that plov wins more.

He ate all of it, slowly, with great dignity. Then he put down his chopsticks.

"You haven't told her, have you?"

I looked at the window. "I'm leaving in two months," I said. "It wouldn't be fair to say anything."

"Fair." He capped his red pen. "You've confused fairness with fear, Aliev-kun. It happens to the best people. It happened to me for a year." Then, without the Prince smile, not unkindly and not kindly either: "You're leaving, and you're silent. That's the cruellest thing you can do to someone who finally started talking."

The JLPT results went online on Monday the twenty-sixth. I opened the page in the kitchen at seven, with three Moriyamas breathing on the back of my neck.

N2: passed.

"A hundred points!" shouted Yukari-san.

"A hundred points," said Mio, flatly, which was somehow worse.

"Mm," said Tetsuo-san, and put an extra egg in my bowl.

At homeroom Kurata-sensei said, in English, "Wonderful, Sardor-kun! Next, English!" and I thanked her very politely in Japanese. Daichi found out in eleven seconds and told the rest of 2-B in twelve. Then, in the middle of the noise, Kotone turned in the seat beside mine and said, aloud, clearly, in front of everyone:

"Congratulations."

The whole class turned to look at her. She did not hide behind her fringe. Her ears went red, and she let them.

After lunch there was a note on the corner of my desk, not a haiku:

Setsubun at your house? Mio-chan invited the whole club. She says the oni needs to be scary.