The Bike That Faces West

I had rehearsed it on the stairs. I would show him the photograph at dinner, and he would be surprised, and then delighted, and then he would tell me everything, and we would talk about Samarkand until nine o'clock.

All day I had carried the photograph round school like an egg. It was the first day of summer uniform, and the school had turned white overnight, the boys in short-sleeved shirts, the girls in white blouses; only the girls' scarves had stayed dark green, and Kotone's was tied exactly right, as always. Twice I nearly showed her the photograph. Twice I decided that Tetsuo should see it first, which was, I still think, the only correct decision I made that day.

On Monday the second of June, between the grilled mackerel and the miso soup, I put my phone on the table in front of Tetsuo.

"Tetsuo-san. I found this. In the club room. Shiosai, volume 26."

He looked at the screen. He didn't pick the phone up. He looked at it the way you look at a letter in someone else's handwriting that you already know.

Nobody said anything. The rice cooker clicked. The television talked about the weather to no one.

Mio leaned across and read it upside down. "Dad wrote POEMS?"

Yukari stood up. "Mio. Help me with the tea." It was not a question. Mio went, for once without a word, and the kitchen door slid shut behind them.

Tetsuo pushed the phone gently back across the table to me.

"That was a different person," he said, and picked up his chopsticks.

I ate the rest of my mackerel without tasting it. I had broken something. I could feel the pieces under the table, but I couldn't see what it was, and I didn't know how to ask.

At ten o'clock, an hour after he should have been asleep, there was a knock on my door.

Tetsuo stood in the corridor in his socks, holding a torch. "Mm," he said, and turned, and I followed him down the stairs, through the dark shop, where the hanging bicycles turned slowly in the air from the door, and up a wooden ladder into the storage loft.

It smelled of dust and rubber and old summers. The torch moved over boxes of inner tubes, a broken fan, a child's tricycle with a bell. Then it stopped on something long under a white sheet.

He pulled the sheet away.

It was a bicycle, but not like the ones downstairs. It was a touring bike, steel, painted a deep dark green, with a leather saddle gone stiff with age and racks over both wheels for carrying the whole world. Its tyres were flat. On the top tube, hand-painted in white katakana, careful and a little crooked, was a name: サマルカンド号.

Samarukando-gō. The Samarkand. In Japanese you add -gō to the name of a ship, or a train, or a horse you love.

Its front wheel was pointing at the wall. I worked it out from the window: it was pointing west.

"Built it at eighteen," said Tetsuo. The torch made a small circle on the saddle. "Rode it to Kamakura once."

"And Samarkand?"

For a long time he said nothing. Somewhere below us a bicycle turned on its hook and ticked.

"Some roads you ride in your head," he said.

That was all. He put the sheet back, carefully, tucking it round the wheels as if the bike might be cold.

And I, Sardor Aliev, who asks everybody everything, asked nothing more. I climbed down the ladder behind him, and said good night, and went to bed, and lay awake for an hour, very proud of myself, and very sad, and not sure which one was bigger.

On Thursday, at four o'clock, the Student Council president was standing in the doorway of Room 3.

It was the first time I had seen Kaito Minase in the Old Building. He did not seem to belong to it; the corridor creaked for everyone, but it did not creak for him. His summer shirt was buttoned to the collar, his indoor shoes had the blue toes of a third-year, and his back was as straight as an arrow that hasn't been fired. Down the corridor, two girls from the banner on recruitment day were reading the notice about dental check-ups with great concentration. I knew that notice. It is not that interesting.

"Shirase-san," he said, and bowed, a small perfect bow. "Last autumn the school newspaper printed a haiku of yours." Then, without looking at anything, he recited it.

Autumn range—the string

holds its breath before the shot,

and so does the hall

He said it the way it should be said, which is to say, better than I would have. Kotone didn't move. The pencil in her fingers had stopped turning.

"The kyūdō club shoots at the prefectural tournament this month. It is my last. We hang a banner in the gym corridor with a verse on it, and I would be honoured if the verse were yours."

Kotone had gone very still, the way a small animal goes still in a field. I saw her hand tighten on the pencil. And before I had decided anything, my mouth decided for me.

"She's busy," I said. "The club is busy."

Minase turned his head and looked at me for the first time, politely, the way you look at a chair that has spoken.

"How interesting," he said. And then, past me, gently: "Shirase-san?"

She took a blue note, wrote on it, folded it once and held it out: not to me, to him.

He read it. He smiled, a real smile, very slightly surprised. "Thank you. Friday, then." He bowed again and was gone, without a creak, and down the corridor the two girls abandoned the dental check-ups and followed him.

For a while Kotone looked at the door. Then she wrote on another note and pushed it across the low table to me.

It was not a haiku. I counted anyway, out of habit. It was not five, seven or five of anything, and I had learned by then that when she didn't count, it mattered.

You don't have to answer for me.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought— I'm sorry."

She nodded, once, and opened her book. I didn't understand. I understood that I had done something, the way you understand in the dark that you have stepped on something, without knowing what.

I made tea with the kettle that does not exist and put a cup by her elbow. After a while she drank it. That was something. It was not everything.

I would like to be very clear about one thing. I was not jealous. I was protective of the club's schedule.

On Saturday the weather map on the television turned blue over the whole of Kanto, and the announcer declared the rainy season open, like a sports event. Yukari cheered. "Hydrangea season!"

On Monday the banner was hanging in the gym corridor: a long strip of white cloth, and on it, in brush calligraphy so strong and so calm that it looked as if it had been cut rather than written, a haiku, and underneath it, small: verse, K. Shirase; brush, K. Minase.

Early summer wind—

the target does not move, so

neither does the heart

Kotone walked past it on her way to the stairs without looking up, the way you walk past your own name. I stopped.

I read it five times. It was about archery. It was also about something else, I was fairly sure, but I couldn't have said what, and I stood in the corridor until the bell trying. It was very good. I hated how good it was. I mean the calligraphy.

On Wednesday afternoon Hanzawa-sensei, who had been asleep against the club-room wall for forty minutes, opened his eyes at exactly half past four and announced, "Ginkō."

"Excuse me?"

"A walk, Aliev-kun, to write haiku. Saturday the fourteenth. Kamakura. The hydrangeas at Meigetsu-in." He closed his eyes again. "Wear shoes you don't love."

At dinner I mentioned that on Saturday I would be going to Kamakura with the Literature Club, to look at flowers.

"So it's a date," said Mio, not looking up from her phone, "with a chaperone who sleeps."

I explained at length that it was a club activity. I explained the word ginkō, and the history of haiku walks, and the educational value of hydrangeas. Yukari nodded and smiled into her rice. Tetsuo said, "Mm." Nobody at the table believed me, including, I realised at one o'clock in the morning, me.