Two Sounds

The first batch of non came out of Yukari-san's oven as flat as plates.

"They're very… round," said Yukari-san.

They were. They were also thin enough to read a newspaper through. In Tashkent, bread is baked in a tandir, a clay oven as big as a barrel, slapped against the hot wall by a man with forearms like my father's. Yukari-san's oven was the size of a microwave, because it was a microwave that believed it was an oven. I had pressed the centres too hard and the rims too little, and the loaves had given up.

It was seven in the morning on Saturday the fourteenth of March. White Day. Eleven days.

The second batch was better: a real rim, a softer middle, sesame seeds that stayed on. But the middles rose up in the heat like little hills, because I had nothing to prick them with. At home every kitchen has a chekich, a bread stamp, a wooden handle with a circle of pins set in the end, so that the centre of the loaf stays flat and wears a pattern. I had tried a fork. The fork had tried its best.

Tetsuo-san came in from the shop, still in his socks, and put something on the table without a word.

It was a chekich. The handle was turned wood, sanded smooth, dark with oil. Set into the end, in a perfect circle, were short lengths of bicycle spoke, polished bright, their ends ground flat, radiating from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. So that was what the grinder had been doing in the dark.

I picked it up. It fitted my hand exactly.

"Mm," said Tetsuo-san, and went to make tea, as if he had only put down a spoon.

The third batch was perfect. Round, glossy with milk, black seeds and sesame on the rim, and pressed into the middle of every loaf, deep and clear, a bicycle wheel.

Mio, who had been watching all morning from the doorway in her pyjamas, walked in and picked up the ugliest loaf from the first batch, the flattest of the plates. She tore off a piece and ate it slowly, looking at the ceiling.

"…Eighty-eight points," she said, and took the rest of it upstairs.

At noon Daichi came running down the Shiokaze Ginza with a paper bag held over his head like a trophy.

"SADO! I'm ready! I bought them myself!"

Mio looked into the bag. It was full of marshmallows.

I had never heard Mio raise her voice. She raised it now, in the middle of the street, in front of the tofu shop, as if she had been waiting her whole life for someone to do exactly this.

"Marshmallows mean I hate you! Candy means I love you! Cookies mean friends!"

Daichi went white under his sunburn. Then he turned and sprinted across the station square to the konbini, faster than I had ever seen him run to first base, and came back four minutes later holding a jar of fruit candy against his chest like a baby.

"Is this right?" he panted. "Is this love?"

"That's love," said Mio. "Cheap love. But love."

He stood there getting his breath back, practising under it. "Iinchō. Iinchō, please accept…" Then, very quietly, once, as if trying the word for size: "…Fumika-san."

He turned the colour of a ripe persimmon, from his collar to the top of his buzz cut, and walked off toward her house without another word. At two minutes past six he sent me a photograph of her reply on LINE. One word: Acceptable.

Mio looked at the cloth bundle under my arm. "Bread isn't on the list."

"Bread," I said, "is on every list."

At half past four the wind was coming in off the sea, the first spring wind, soft and full of salt, and the breakwater was bright on both sides.

I had sent one message: Lighthouse. 16:30. Times and places. She had sent back one blue square.

I walked the top of the wall with the bundle in both hands. Gulls hung beside me at head height, not flapping, just riding the air and looking at the bread. The sea was the colour of a new sticky note. At the end, the red lighthouse stood in the sun, and at its base, on the step, sat Kotone, with her knees up and her school bag beside her, exactly as she had sat in June, when the whole sea had been listening.

I sat down next to her with my back against the red paint. I gave her the bread, wrapped in the embroidered cloth Buvi had packed in my suitcase, "for bread, not for show". On top of the cloth I had stuck an orange note.

She read it.

Spring wind on the pier—

I brought bread and seventeen

sounds, but I'll use two

She looked up. I had practised this into a pillow for three nights. It still came out small.

"Kotone."

No "-san". I heard her breath stop. Last August, on this same breakwater, I had said her name like that and the fireworks had eaten the rest. There were no fireworks now. There was only the wind.

"Suki."

Two sounds.

Then, because she deserved all of it, and because the one thing I have always been good at is saying things plainly, I said the rest in Japanese, in order, without stopping.

"I like you. I'm leaving in eleven days. Rule 7 of my programme says I should avoid serious romantic relationships. I don't know how to be fair to you."

The gulls went on hanging in the air. A wave hit the bottom of the wall and fell back.

She did not reach for a sticky note.

She looked at the sea, and she counted on her fingers, very fast, on her knee, the way she has counted all year under the desk. Five. Seven. Five. Then she turned to me and said it aloud, in Japanese, in her low clear voice, every sound of it.

White Day, the sea calm—

I have been saying it since

page forty-seven

I could not breathe.

Page forty-seven. The first day. A question I had asked without thinking, Which page?, and a blue note on the corner of my desk, and a cherry petal on the page to keep the place for me. Since then. She had been saying it since then, in seventeen sounds at a time, and I had been reading it as a weather report.

"Don't be fair," she said. "Be honest."

"And Rule 7?"

She thought about it. Her ears were red. She was smiling anyway.

"Then let's be unserious," she said. "For eleven days."

We both laughed. It came out of us at the same time, too loud, and the gulls scattered. And then she took my hand. She did. I would never have dared.

We sat like that for a while, not saying anything, because we did not need to.

"In eleven days," I said at last, "I don't want to say goodbye."

"Then don't." She looked at our hands. "At my house, when someone leaves, we say itterasshai. Go, and come back."

"At mine, you bite the bread," I said. "And the rest waits for you."

"Then it's the same word."

So that was our agreement. Not goodbye. Go, and come back.

I unwrapped the loaf and broke it on the step, the way you are supposed to, by hand, never with a knife. We ate it looking at the sea, and it was still a little warm in the middle, where the wheel was.

Then we walked back along the top of the breakwater, holding hands, all the way to the harbour, where Grandma Tae looked up from her counter and saw us.

"THE UZBEK BOY!" she announced, to the entire port, as if she were calling out a catch.

Kotone did not let go. It was the loudest thing she said all day.

That night I called Buvi. It was five in the afternoon in Tashkent, and she was in her kitchen, with the bitten loaf on the shelf behind her, as always.

"Do the Japanese have enough bread?" she asked.

"Today, Buvi, they have one loaf less."

And I told her. All of it: the stamp, the step, the two sounds, the hand.

For once in her life Buvi had no proverb. She took off her glasses. She put them back on. She looked at me for a long time across six thousand kilometres, and I thought the connection had frozen.

Then she had the best one of all.

"Oshiqqa Bag'dod yiroq emas," she said. For one in love, Baghdad is not far.

"Bring her to eat my plov, Sardorjon," she said. "And is your wheat growing? Navruz is in a week."

I went down to the shop to check.

In the window the wheat was fifteen centimetres tall and leaning toward the streetlight, as if it had somewhere to be.