Recruitment Week (Members: 1)

On Monday the courtyard turned into Chorsu Bazaar, if Chorsu sold clubs instead of melons.

The baseball club stood in two rows by the cherry tree, chanting in voices trained to reach the outfield. The brass band played something with a great deal of trumpet. The dance club danced on a blue tarpaulin. The kyūdō club, in black hakama, had set up a straw target against the gym wall, and every few minutes a girl drew a bow taller than she was, and the whole courtyard went quiet for her, and the arrow went thock.

In the middle of it all, at a microphone, stood the Student Council president, Kaito Minase, a third-year, straight-backed, buttoned to the collar, who gave a speech about "finding the place where you belong" without notes, without a single "um", and with a small smile that made it sound as if he had only just thought of it. Four second-year girls held up a banner with his name on it. I understood about sixty per cent of the speech, and the sixty per cent was perfect.

"Sado!" Daichi had me by the sleeve. "Batting net. One swing. You're huge."

The coach, Kuroda, a man with a face like a closed gate, handed me a bat. I had played baseball exactly never. I held it like a carpet beater, which is the only thing in Tashkent that you swing at anything, and when the machine threw the ball, I beat it like a carpet.

The ball went over the net, over the fence and into the neighbour's persimmon tree, where it stayed, among last year's leaves.

Coach Kuroda looked at me the way Buvi looks at a very good melon.

"Thank you," I said, handing back the bat, "but I would like something with words."

Daichi put both hands on his head. "Seriously?!"

I found the Literature Club on Tuesday, at a folding table at the top of the stairs in the Old Building.

It was her. Of course it was her.

Kotone sat very straight behind a stack of flyers, sixty of them, hand-drawn and photocopied, with a gull and the words WE ARE QUIET. First-years came up the stairs in twos and threes on their way to the band room. When one came close enough, she held out a flyer without a word, at arm's length, the way you offer bread to a bird that might bite.

Nobody took one. Nobody even saw her. You could walk past her silence the way you walk past a wall.

I watched for two days from the end of the corridor, pretending to read a notice about dental check-ups. By Wednesday afternoon she had given away no flyers at all, and I knew the dental schedule by heart.

So on Wednesday I went to the table, took half the flyers and stood at the top of the stairs. In Tashkent, if you want people to buy your melons, you tell them so.

"LITERATURE CLUB!" I announced, in my best textbook Japanese. "VERY QUIET! VERY NICE! PLEASE COME!"

Three first-years froze on the stairs, looked up at a boy one metre eighty-six tall, shouting about quiet in an accent, and fled the way they had come. One of them dropped a recorder. It bounced down four steps, loudly.

Behind me, Kotone had put her face in her hands.

"Aliev-kun."

Fumika Tachibana arrived clipboard first, the way a ship arrives bow first. She was wearing a Student Council armband.

"Recruitment by shouting is permitted only in the courtyard. Article 8."

"Excuse me. I did not know."

"Now you know." She made a small tick. Then she turned to the table, and her voice changed, as if she had put something heavy down carefully. "Shirase-san. You know the review is the Monday after the Umineko Festival. Article 12, clause 1. Three members."

Kotone nodded. Her face had gone white. Even her ears.

"And with one member?" I asked.

Fumika looked at me, and at the flyers in my hand. "Dissolution."

She went on down the corridor, ticking. I typed the word into my electronic dictionary. Dissolution: the closing down of an assembly or official body. The example underneath was the dissolution of parliament. The Umineko Festival, said tab 9 of Fumika's guide, was the culture festival, at the end of October.

A parliament of one, with six months left. I looked at Kotone. She was straightening the flyers I had put back, lining up their edges very carefully, as if the edges were the problem.

On Thursday morning there was a blue note on my desk.

Thank you. But this room

is only big enough for

one quiet person

It was a polite way of telling me to go away. I understood it perfectly. I have never been good at going away.

After school she was at the table again, with fifty-nine flyers (one had gone into a puddle), and I asked her plainly, out loud, because I had no seventeen syllables ready.

"Excuse me. What does the Literature Club do?"

She looked at my collar for a long time. The pencil turned in her fingers. Then she stood up, gathered the flyers and walked away down the corridor, and after a few steps she looked back to see whether I was following.

I followed.

Room 3 was the last door. Inside, six tatami mats lay on a raised platform, with a low table and a window full of pines and, behind the pines, the sea. A bookcase held a long row of thin blue-grey volumes, each with the same two kanji on the spine, 潮騒, Shiosai, "the sound of the tide", numbered from 1 to 63. On the shelf beside them sat an electric kettle which, I was later told, does not exist. The room smelled of dust and old paper and, faintly, of tea.

On the wall hung a framed haiku in brush calligraphy, the paper gone the colour of weak tea, with a card beneath it: Sachiko Ishida, first president, 1962. I read it aloud, slowly, proud of every kanji I knew.

The sound of spring tide

reaches even this far room—

a pen starts to move

Beside me, she flinched. Not at the poem: at the sound of someone saying it. Her shoulders went up and her hand closed on the flyers, the way you flinch at a door slamming in another room. I didn't know why. I stopped reading.

On the windowsill lay a notebook: ACTIVITY LOG. Every day since the start of term had an entry, reading, writing, recruitment, and every entry was signed with the same name, in small, neat pencil. One name, down the page, again and again, like someone knocking on a door that doesn't open.

I closed it. For once in my life I didn't say anything about what I had seen.

I said something else instead. "Excuse me. One more question. Are foreigners permitted to join?"

She looked at the sea. The pencil stopped. Over the roofs the town chime began, "Yūyake Koyake", slow and sweet from the loudspeakers, and she didn't answer, and when the tune finished I bowed and went home.

From Kotone's notebook — Friday, 18 April

11:40 p.m. Under the covers, with the torch from Dad's boat bag, because if Grandma sees a light she will come in and ask about my day, loudly, and then the whole port will know about my day.

My day. My week. The exchange student.

Things the exchange student has done this week (fine: since last Tuesday; I am being precise):

1. Called me a fish. In front of everyone. Warmly.

2. Apologised in 5-7-5. (The counting was correct. I checked it twice at school and a third time in the bath.)

3. Shouted for my club.

Nobody has ever shouted for my club.

He shouted "very quiet" very loudly. A first-year dropped a recorder. I wanted to become a whitebait and swim away. I wanted to become a thousand whitebait and swim away in a thousand directions, so that nobody could ever catch all of me at once.

(Also I wanted to laugh. I didn't. I have a policy.)

Then Tachibana-san said Article 12 out loud, in front of him, and it was like hearing the date of my own funeral read off a clipboard. I have known since March. I have told nobody. Not Mum. Not Grandma, who would tell the fish.

Sixty-three years. Sixty-three volumes on the shelf, and I am going to be the one who puts the last one there and turns off the light.

On her last day, at the station, Mizuki-senpai put both hands on my shoulders. "Keep it alive, Kotone. You don't have to talk much. Seventeen sounds is enough."

Seventeen sounds is enough for a haiku. It is not enough for recruitment week. I had sixty flyers. I have fifty-nine. One is in a puddle.

Yesterday I showed S. the room, to prove it was small. He read Ishida-senpai's haiku out loud, slowly, very pleased with himself, like a little boy reading a menu. He didn't mean anything by it. I still had to hold on to something.

Then he looked at the log for a long time, all those pages with only me in them, and he said nothing about it. It is the first time I have seen S. not say something. I didn't know he could.

He asked if foreigners are allowed to join. I didn't answer. I don't know if I want him to. (I do.) (I don't.) (Mizuki-senpai, if you were here you'd laugh at me, and then you'd make me answer.)