Jasur won a place at a lyceum in the city when he was fifteen, and in September he moved into a hostel with sixty other boys and a smell of wet floors.
There was a notice on the wall of the corridor, in two languages, in old paint:
1. You must be in the building by nine o'clock. 2. Everybody has to wash his own plate. 3. You need to tell the warden if you are ill, even a little ill. 4. You must eat with somebody.
The first three were normal. Jasur read the fourth one four times.
He asked the boys in his room about it. One of them said the cook wrote it, because plates come back faster from a table of four. Another said it is an old rule from the Soviet time and nobody remembers.
In October, Jasur was homesick in a way that had no bottom to it. He had to learn the timetable, the streets, the bus numbers, and a new kind of quiet. He took his plate to the end of the long table in the canteen and sat with his back to the room.
A hand put a glass of tea in front of him. The warden sat down opposite, with his own plate.
"You know rule four," he said.
"I don't understand rule four."
The warden ate for a while. Then he told Jasur about a boy from a mountain village, two years before, who stopped eating with people in his second term. Sixty boys in this building, and for five weeks nobody noticed. He went home in February and he did not come back.
"After that we wrote rule four," the warden said. "You must eat with somebody. Not because of the plates."
Jasur is in his last year now. He does not sit at the end of the table any more. He sits in the middle, and when a new boy comes in with his plate and looks for the emptiest corner of the room, Jasur puts his hand up and says one word: "Here."