Anvar aka was the man who fixed everything on our street. He had been an engineer at the tractor factory until 1993, and after that he was simply the man who came.
The pump that stopped in every June. The gas heater in the house at number 4 that nobody else would touch. The sewing machine that my mother still uses. Somebody's TV aerial, in wind, on a roof, at sixty-three years old.
He kept a small notebook in his shirt pocket that nobody ever read. He wrote a line in it at every house: a date, a house number, and two or three words.
The only thing in that street that he never fixed was his own gate. It hung on one hinge from about 2001, and it made a sound that everybody on our street could recognise from three houses away. His wife asked. His daughter asked. He said the same thing every time: he would do it on Sunday.
In November 2019 he had a stroke, on a Tuesday, in his own yard, and he spent nine days in the hospital in Chirchiq.
On the Saturday of that week eleven men came to his gate. Two of them were men who had not spoken to each other since a quarrel about a wall in 2015. One was the boy from number 12 who is a welder in Angren now, and he came with his own machine in the back of a car.
They took the gate off, they cut new hinges, they painted it green, and they finished at half past four. Nobody organised it. Nobody was in charge.
Anvar aka came home in a taxi on the Thursday. He stood in front of that gate for a long time with his hand on the new hinge and he did not say anything at all, and my mother was watching all of it from our window, and she cried into a towel.
He is eighty-one. He walks with a stick now, and the notebook is still in his shirt pocket, and the last line in it is our house number.