The bridge over the Chirchiq at the end of our village was built in 1957. The date is written on a grey concrete plaque at the northern end, under two lines that nobody reads: the name of a district office and the name of an engineer.
It is thirty-one metres long. The concrete was poured in October, and some of the iron was brought from a factory in Angren on two lorries. It is repaired every spring, because the river is fed by snow water and it takes the bank away in April. Three of the posts were replaced in 2011, and the road on top was covered with new asphalt in 2019.
All of that is recorded in the district archive, and none of it is the interesting part.
The bridge is not called by the name on the plaque. On both sides of the river it is called Oysha koʻprik — Oysha's bridge — and it always has been.
Before 1957 there was no bridge here at all. Between the two villages there was a crossing place where the water is wide and slow, and in summer a boy could walk it. In April and May he could not.
Oysha opa was born in 1919. From 1948, when the school on this side opened, she stood at that crossing place every school morning from March to June, and she carried the small children across on her back, two at a time, one on each arm when they were very small. Nine years. Her own children first, then everybody's.
She was never paid anything and she never asked. In 1955 a girl of six was pulled out of the water forty metres below the crossing by two men cutting reeds, alive, and that story was told in the district centre by somebody who mattered.
The bridge was finished two years later.
Oysha opa died in 1991. Her name is not written anywhere on the concrete, and nobody in the village has ever suggested writing it there. It is kept in the only place that lasts: two hundred people say it every day without thinking about it, when they tell somebody where to turn.