Karim aka has repaired washing machines in the same yard in Chirchiq since 1994. In the corner there is an old green machine with a button covered in yellow tape, and above it a card in his own handwriting:
If you press this button, nothing happens. If you press it twice, come and find me.
Every new apprentice reads that card in his first week. Karim aka explains the yard, the tools, the accounts book, and the ordinary rules of the trade: if you hold a screwdriver like that, you break the head. If water gets into that box, the whole board dies. Then he goes to lunch and leaves the boy alone with the green machine for an hour.
They all press it. Every single one, in twenty years, has pressed it — because the card says nothing happens, and a boy of sixteen has to know.
Nothing happens.
Then, of course, they press it again.
The second press does nothing either. The button has not been connected to anything since 1996.
Bekzod pressed it twice on a Tuesday in March, put the tape back exactly as it had been, and said nothing for two days. On Thursday he came into the office and stood there with his hands behind his back.
"I pressed it twice," he said.
"Good," Karim aka said. "If you tell me the truth about a small thing, I will believe you about a big one. So if you break something next month, you will come and tell me the same day, and I will not shout. That is the whole deal."
Two boys in twenty years never came. They did good work and they left in the autumn, and Karim aka did not keep them, and he did not explain why.
Unless a man tells you about a button, he says, he will not tell you about a heater that he has wired wrong in somebody's kitchen.
Bekzod has his own workshop in Yangiyoʻl now. There is a green machine in the corner of it, with a button under yellow tape, and a card above it in his handwriting.