One place, two candidates, one trial day. That is how the small hotel behind the Registan takes on people for the front desk: you stand there for six hours on a Saturday and the manager watches from the stairs.
Afsona was seventeen and her English came out of a school in Kattaqoʻrgʻon and forty-one Prime English lessons.
At eleven o'clock a French guest arrived with two suitcases and a train ticket in his hand, and he spoke very fast, in a long line, without gaps.
Afsona understood the word "train" and nothing else.
"I'm sorry — could you say that again, please?" she said.
He said it again, at the same speed.
"Could you speak a little more slowly, please? Would you mind writing the time down for me?" She turned her notebook round and put a pen on it.
The guest stopped. He looked at her, he smiled, and he wrote: 06:40, Tashkent. Then he said, slowly, six words: he needed a taxi at five.
"May I take your bag to the room? And would you like some tea while I call the driver?"
She sat in the kitchen afterwards and was sure she had lost the job. Three times she had asked a guest to repeat himself. The other candidate had not asked anybody anything all day.
The manager came in at seven with two forms in her hand and one pen.
"He said 'yes, of course' to every question," she said. "A German family is standing at the airport in Tashkent this evening, at the wrong terminal, because of that. Politeness is not decoration, Afsona. It is the only tool you have when you do not understand."
Afsona works there on Saturdays and Sundays. Above her desk there is a card with one sentence on it, in her own handwriting: Could you say that again, please?