The Blank Week

On Thursday my orange note sat on the corner of her desk all day, and nobody touched it.

She came to school. She kept her head down behind her fringe. She answered no notes and wrote none, and when the last bell rang she was gone before its echo. My note was still there at half past three, curling slightly at one corner in the damp.

So I asked everyone how you apologise in Japan.

Daichi demonstrated on the stairs at lunch. He knelt, put both hands flat on the step and pressed his forehead to the floor. "Dogeza," he said, into the concrete. "Maximum sorry. Emperor-level." A first-year stepped over him without comment.

"Buy Whitebait-chan something expensive," said Mio at dinner, which was the first time I heard her call Kotone that. From Mio, I would learn, it was very nearly affectionate.

"Cook for her!" said Yukari. "Nobody stays angry at plov!"

At ten o'clock, which is six in the evening in Tashkent, I called Buvi. She was at the kitchen table shelling beans, and behind her on the shelf the bitten loaf sat where it always sat, getting harder, waiting for me.

"Sardorjon! Are you eating? Do the Japanese have enough bread?"

"Enough, Buvi." I told her everything: the book, the desk, Kimura's voice, the empty chair. She listened, shelling, and didn't interrupt once, which frightened me more than shouting.

"Shirin so'z ilonni inidan chiqarar," she said at last. A sweet word draws a snake out of its hole. "Be sweet, and be patient, and don't poke the hole with a stick."

I thanked her. I decided, on the whole, not to tell Kotone that in this proverb she was the snake.

On Friday I put a new note in the same place, and it stayed there all day too. At cleaning time, Fumika was wringing out a rag beside me at the corridor sink. Kotone was at the far end, wiping the windows, her back to us.

"Some things are for one person, Aliev-kun," said Fumika, twisting the rag until it squeaked. "Not for a desk."

She went back to her bucket. I stood there with my rag dripping on my shoes.

Not for a desk. I had put Kotone's words where thirty people could reach them. I had left the Blue Book in my desk as if it were a textbook, and I had stuck my answers on her desk in front of the whole class as if they were notices. I had taken something that was meant for one person and made it public, and I hadn't even noticed, because in my head the notes had only ever been ours.

So I made a new rule. No more notes on her desk.

That afternoon I took the club key from hook 14, went up to Room 3, filled the kettle that does not exist and switched it on. Then I took down Shiosai, volume 1, the oldest and thinnest, which nobody but Kotone ever opened, and put an orange note inside its front cover.

Rain on the window—

the club room kettle is cold.

I boiled it for two.

Rain ran down the window. The kettle ticked as it cooled. I sat on the tatami and drank my cup in a room that was exactly the right size for two people and had one in it, and I left the second cup on the table with a saucer on top to keep it warm, and went home.

On Monday I wrote about bread.

In Uzbekistan you never leave bread on the ground. If you see a piece lying in the street, you pick it up, and kiss it, and put it somewhere high, on a wall or a windowsill, where the birds can have it and nobody can step on it. Buvi slapped my hand once, when I was six, for putting a non upside down on the table. I have never done it again.

In my country, bread

is never left on the ground.

Neither are people.

On Tuesday I wrote about the gulls on the Old Building roof, and it was not very good.

At cleaning time that day Fumika said, to her bucket, not to me: "Shirase-san goes to her family's shop at the port after school. I'm telling you because watching you is inefficient."

Then it was my turn to take out the class rubbish, so I was late to Room 3, and when I opened the door the kettle was warm. Not hot. Warm, the way a chair is warm when someone has just got up from it. And Monday's note had moved. Not far. A centimetre, perhaps, towards the spine, as if a thumb had held it open.

At half past four on Tuesday I was standing in the drizzle at Shirahama Fishing Port.

It smelled of salt and diesel and steam. The boats were in, knocking gently against the quay. Under a long roof, great vats were boiling, and the steam rolled out into the rain and disappeared. On the roof of a two-storey building with a faded sign, SHIRASE SUISAN, rows of bamboo drying racks were covered in blue tarpaulins against the weather.

I didn't have a plan. I had a sweet word, somewhere, if I could find it.

"Are you Aliev-kun?" A woman in rubber boots and an apron had come out of the steam. She had Kotone's eyes and none of Kotone's silence. "From the club! Come in, come in, you're soaked, don't stand there like a heron! I'm her mother. Kotone's upstairs. The rain's been terrible, hasn't it, the catch has been terrible, the tourists have been terrible, here, take this for your host family, it's tatami-iwashi, you toast it, don't burn it—"

Akiko Shirase put a flat packet into my hands: sheets of tiny white fish pressed together as thin as lace. I bowed. She talked. I didn't have to say anything at all, and I understood, for the first time, where Kotone's silence might have come from: in a family with Akiko Shirase in it, somebody had to listen.

From behind the counter, a tiny old woman in a quilted vest and rubber boots was studying me as if I were a fish of uncertain price.

"The Uzbek boy," she announced, loudly. "Kotone used to sing, you know!"

There was a sound on the stairs at the back of the shop. I looked up. For one second I saw her: Kotone, in an apron, halfway down, one hand on the rail, looking at the collar of my wet shirt. Then she turned and ran back up, and a door closed somewhere above.

The old woman, who was her grandmother, Tae, reached into a tray of raw whitebait, took a small handful, glistening and nearly transparent, and held it out to me on her open palm.

In Tashkent, when a grandmother holds out food, you eat it. I took the fish from her hand and ate it without making a face. It was cold, and sweet, and tasted of the sea and very slightly of Tae.

She watched me swallow. "This one's all right," she said, to nobody.

I didn't know what "used to sing" meant. I didn't ask. I bowed to the empty staircase, very deeply, and went home in the rain with the lace fish under my shirt to keep them dry.

That night Yukari toasted a sheet over the gas ring until it crackled and smelled of the harbour, and broke it into four, and Tetsuo ate his piece with rice and said "Mm" twice, which from Tetsuo is a review.

On Wednesday I wrote my best one yet. Yukari had told me at breakfast that hydrangeas change their colour depending on the soil: blue in one earth, pink in another.

Blue ajisai

change their colour in new soil—

I am changing too

On Thursday the kettle was warm again when I got to Room 3. The second cup, which I had left out for her the day before, had been used, and washed, and put back on the shelf. When I opened volume 1, my orange note was gone.

In its place, inside the front cover, there was a blue one.

After the rain stops—

the breakwater's red lighthouse.

Friday. Come alone.

I read it until I knew the shape of every letter. Come alone. I had not been planning to bring anybody. But I appreciated the clarity.

That evening I checked the weather app eleven times. Rain, ninety per cent, until three o'clock on Friday afternoon. I had never wanted rain to stop so badly, and I am from a country where it hardly ever starts.