Our village sits at the edge of the Kyzylkum, and in 1998 that meant two things. It meant we had the blackest sky in the country, and it meant we had almost nothing else.
There was no internet. Nobody in my class had left Uzbekistan. I had heard of the USA and the Tian Shan and I could not have told you which of the two was further away.
Rustam aka taught physics. He was a small, patient man who played the accordion badly at every wedding, and in the winter of 1997 he built a telescope out of a cracked lens from a broken camera, a length of pipe and the tripod from the school's film projector.
He carried it up onto the school roof twice a week and let anybody stand in the line. The young came first, and after a month the old started coming up the ladder too, slowly, in coats.
The first time I looked through it I was eleven. He had it pointed at the moon, and I saw the edge of it, and the edge was not smooth. It had craters on it and a broken grey shadow down one side.
Then he moved the pipe and said, look again.
There was a small white disc, and beside it, in a line, four tiny points of light.
"Jupiter," he said. "And four of its moons."
I told him he was wrong. I was eleven and I told a physics teacher he was wrong, and I remember the sentence: there is only one moon, and it is the moon.
He did not laugh at me. He pointed up at the sky with one hand, and at the eyepiece with the other.
"That is the moon," he said. "These are moons. Ours has a name and a the because it is ours. It is not the only one."
I have thought about that answer for twenty-seven years, because it was not really about Jupiter. A word I had used every day of my life turned out to be a claim: the means the one we both know about, and if you have only ever seen one of something, you will call it the one for your whole life.
Rustam aka died in 2016. He never saw the Alps, or the USA, or a real observatory.
He showed about four hundred children a moon that was not the moon. Two of us do this for a living now.