On the first morning of September a man in a grey jacket stood in the school yard, reading the noticeboard. Four of us watched him from the steps.
"He must be a teacher," Dilnoza said. "Look — he is holding a register."
"He can't be a teacher," Bekzod said. "Teachers do not read the noticeboard. They write on it."
"He might be somebody's father," I said. "Or he could be an inspector."
"Inspectors come in October," Bekzod said, and he was right about that. "He must be the new teacher. Ours left in June, and somebody has to teach 8-B on Monday."
The man walked past us into the building. He did not ask the way, which was strange. In our corridor there is a long photograph from 1994 — a class of graduates in front of the same tree, and one boy in the middle holding a certificate. He stopped in front of it for a long time.
Then he went into 8-B, put down the register, and wrote his name on the board with a piece of chalk: Karimov O.
Dilnoza was already whispering. The name under the boy in the photograph is Karimov O.
"That desk by the window is mine," he said. "It was mine for two years. The glass is still broken in the same corner."
He had not come for a job at all. He had come to see whether the tree in the yard was still alive, and the director found him at the noticeboard and asked him one question.
So Bekzod was right: the man in the grey jacket must be the new teacher. He simply wasn't one yet when Bekzod said it.