When Sherbek left the village for Tashkent, his cousin Nigora met him at the bus station with a bag of bread and a list.
She had written it on the back of a bus ticket, in small letters, on both sides. Eleven pieces of advice. Nigora is twenty-four and works nights at a hospital, so she knows the city at the hour when nobody else is awake.
"You should keep your money in two pockets, not one," she said. "You ought to learn the number of the last bus. You should eat something before you study, not after."
Ten of them were like that: sensible, boring, easy to forget. The eleventh she had underlined twice, and she read it out loud at the gate of the station.
"You had better learn the name of your own street. The real name, and the old name too."
Sherbek laughed. He knew his street perfectly. The bakery, the blue gate, the tall tree, the third turning.
In November his phone died at half past one in the morning. He had missed the last bus, every shop was shut, and a taxi driver stopped and asked him one question: which street?
The bakery. The blue gate. The tall tree. At night, from the back seat of a car, none of that is an address. They drove for forty minutes through streets that all looked the same, and the meter counted every one of them. He walked the last part and found his gate at four.
That ticket is in his wallet now, folded in four. Nine of the eleven he still ignores.
But in March his own brother arrived at that station, and Sherbek was standing there with bread and a list of one line. "You had better learn the name of your street," he said, and he underlined it twice while the boy watched.