Sumalak Night

At five o'clock on Friday the twentieth of March, the town chime played "Yūyake Koyake" over the Shiokaze Ginza, and Moriyama Cycle's last customer came in under it.

It was a boy in a Shirahama High jacket, a first-year for four more days, holding a five-hundred-yen coin in his fist. I knew him. In April, in my third week at school, Tetsuo-san had fixed his chain under a work lamp that I held, and had not charged him.

"You said it was free," the boy said, and put the coin on the counter. "My mother says nothing is free. It's been bothering her for a year."

Tetsuo-san looked at the coin for a long time. Then he rang it into the old till, ching, and bowed, and the boy bowed, and went out, and the bicycle bell on the door rang behind him for the last time as a shop bell.

Tetsuo-san pulled the shutter halfway down. Half down, the way he had written it in January.

The shop floor was empty. Every bicycle had been sold or given away, the hooks in the ceiling hung bare, the workbench was clear, and the floor had been swept so many times it shone. Only one bicycle was left, standing in the corner on its stand, its front wheel pointing west: the Samarkand-gō.

In the middle of the floor, on two gas burners, stood the shopping association's sixty-litre pot, the same pot that had turned my first plov into porridge in May. Beside it waited everything sumalak needs, and nothing else: a bucket of green juice, which we had made that morning by crushing and soaking and squeezing the wheat through cloth until our hands were green to the wrist; flour; the biggest bottle of oil the supermarket sold.

At the bottom of the pot, under the first ladles of oil, lay seven pebbles from the beach, each the size of a walnut. Kotone had chosen them at low tide and washed them until they squeaked.

From six o'clock, everyone came.

The Moriyamas, of course. Kotone, with Grandma Tae on her arm; her parents were asleep, because in whitebait season the Shirases go to bed at eight, but Grandma Tae had announced that at eighty-one she would sleep when she was dead. Daichi, with a rice cooker. Fumika, whose parents believed this was a study group. ("Technically," she said, "we are studying.") Minase-senpai, in his last week before Kyoto, who said "Sardor," as if he had always said it, and told me that his father was still speaking to him, mostly. Hanzawa-sensei, who was asleep in a folding chair by nine. Nakagawa-san with skewers of chicken, the tofu-shop couple with a tray of fried tofu, and Kurata-sensei with a stack of English flashcards.

"Sardor-kun! Happy Navruz! Is that correct?" she said, in English.

"Completely correct, Sensei," I answered, in Japanese.

The paddle was an old oar Grandma Tae had brought from the harbour, which Tetsuo-san had planed smooth. I explained the rules. You take turns stirring. You scrape all the way to the bottom, so nothing burns. Every time you take the paddle, you make a wish. You never say it.

"In Tashkent," I said, "the women of the whole neighbourhood stir all night and sing. The men mostly stand around and give advice."

"Here," said Yukari-san, rolling up her sleeves, "everyone stirs."

So everyone stirred. The mixture went from green to khaki to the brown of a wet field, and the shop smelt of hot wheat and oil, and outside the half-shutter the street went dark and quiet. Tetsuo-san stirred slowly and seriously. Daichi stirred like a man rowing a race. Fumika stirred in exact circles and timed herself. Mio stirred with one hand and filmed with the other. Kotone stirred with her whole body, eyes closed, and I did not ask what she was wishing for, because you never say.

At two in the morning Buvi called. It was ten at night in Tashkent, and she had just come home from our neighbourhood's own pot, with flour on her sleeves and the bitten loaf on the shelf behind her.

I propped the phone on the workbench so that she could see the whole floor. She did not say hello.

"Stir to the bottom!" she shouted. "The bottom! Who is stirring like that? Tell him the bottom!"

"That's Daichi, Buvi."

"Tell Daichi the bottom!"

Daichi, who did not understand a word, stirred to the bottom with enormous respect. Then it was Kotone's turn. She took the oar from him, and Buvi, six thousand kilometres away, put both hands to her cheeks.

"Voy," she said. "Kelinjon!"

Silence on the shop floor. Nobody there spoke Uzbek.

Nobody, that is, except Mio. She was already typing into her phone, slowly, with one finger, her tongue between her teeth.

"Kelin," she read out. "…It means 'bride'."

Kotone stopped stirring. She turned round, slowly, with the oar in both hands, and looked at me.

"Sardor-kun," she said. "In Tokyo, you said it meant 'guest'."

The shop floor howled. Daichi fell off his box. Yukari-san shrieked, "A HUNDRED AND TEN POINTS!" Fumika wrote something down. Minase-senpai put his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook. On the workbench Buvi was demanding a translation, loudly, in two languages, and asking why everybody was laughing at her grandson.

I stood in the middle of it all, the colour of beetroot, and wished, with my whole heart, to be a pebble at the bottom of the pot.

At half past four the shop was quiet again. Half the guests were asleep on flattened cardboard boxes. Hanzawa-sensei had not woken once. The rest of us sat round the pot in a ring and took the oar in turn, and nobody talked, because at that hour nobody needs to.

Then Grandma Tae began to sing.

It was the old Shirahama net-hauling song, the one she is the last person in town to know all of. Her voice was thin and loud and cracked at the top, like a gull's. The first verse belonged to the men in the boats: pull, and pull, and the net comes up heavy, and the tide turns. She sang it alone, with her eyes closed, keeping the beat on her knee.

The second verse belongs to the women on the shore, calling the boats home.

At the second verse, Kotone sang.

I had the oar. I did not look up. All year I had wanted to see things: her face, her ears, what she wrote. This time I wanted to hear. So I kept stirring, to the bottom, the way Buvi said, and I listened.

Her voice was low and clear and completely steady. It did not crack. It filled the empty shop from the swept floor to the bare hooks in the ceiling, and it went out under the half-shutter into the dark street, toward the sea. For the first time since I had arrived in Japan, I understood her name. Kotone. The sound of a koto. Something that had been tuned a long time ago and put away in its case, and taken out, and played.

She sang the verse to the end. Then she stopped, and took the oar from me, and went on stirring as if nothing had happened.

Grandma Tae was crying. Nobody mentioned it. Not even Daichi.

At a quarter to six the sun came up behind the Miura hills and crept in under the shutter like water under a door. It was Saturday the twenty-first of March. Navruz.

The sumalak was done: dark brown, glossy, sweet, twelve hours of wishes cooked down to the bottom of one pot. We ate it from paper bowls, sitting on the shop floor in our coats, and it tasted exactly like Chilonzor in spring. Mio said, "Ninety points," and asked for more.

Tetsuo-san bit down on something hard.

"Mm," he said, and took it out of his mouth. A small grey pebble from the beach, washed until it squeaked.

"That's the rule," I said. "Whoever finds a stone, their wish comes true."

He held it up to the light for a long time. Then he spoke, and it was the longest thing I had ever heard him say in front of other people.

"In August," he said, "I'm going to ride the Samarkand-gō from Tashkent to Samarkand. About three hundred kilometres." He put the pebble in his apron pocket and looked across the empty shop at me. "Sardor-kun. Will you ride with me?"

"Yes," I said. I did not even have to count.

Navruz, stirring dawn—

all the wishes in the pot,

only one stone found

Four days left. For the first time, I was counting forward too: to August, to a road, to a bowl of real plov in Buvi's kitchen, with somebody beside me.