The letter arrived at nine in the morning on the 4th of June, in an envelope bearing the stamp of the Ministry of Water Resources of the Republic of Tajikistan, and with the addition of a second stamp, smaller and in red, of the Asian Development Bank, the observer: a detail that Murod, mirob of the Sokh valley, noticed because the red of the Bank was the same red as the seals his grandmother used to put, seventy years earlier, on the quince jams she sealed for the cold season, and which she kept in the pantry dug out beneath the little house of raw earth, a cool room where the air smelled of old apple, and where Murod as a child would sneak in with his tongue already long.

The agreement was trilateral: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan; it fixed the releases from the Bahri Tojik dam for the three months of June-August of 02026; and it was signed in Samarkand, in the days when, in those same weeks, the eighth Assembly of the Global Environment Facility was being held, and in the same streets where Murod, twenty-two years earlier, had accompanied his mother to the Thursday market to sell sultana raisins, in a jute sack his mother had sewn by hand, with a wide seam, the kind that can be unpicked each year to widen the sack.

The letter said: "Opening of the gates in order A1-A2-A3, high lands, then B1-B2, low lands". Murod read it standing, on the threshold of the mirob's little house, in the shade of the south wall. Five farmers were waiting for him under the mulberry tree in the yard. Three of them came from B2: they had arrived at seven, the other two at eight.

He remembered the leak. Gate B2 had a leak in its retaining wall, appeared on the 7th of May, after the three days of rain that had melted the Pamir snow early, and that had filled the canal with murky water carrying pieces of grass and wood, and that had washed away, in two places, the mortar lining. Murod had not reported it. He had thought that the official from Khujand, that man with the clean hands and the ironed shirt, would order him to close B2 for the season, and that without B2 the fields of Akhmadali's youngest grandson would stay dry for three months, and that Akhmadali's youngest grandson had three children, one of them deaf from birth, and that those three children ate from the harvest of B2.

He remembered his grandmother. His grandmother was born in 1936, the year the Vakhsh dam was designed. She used to say that water is an old woman: you respect her in the order in which she arrived, not the order in which you call her. She said it with her hand on her forehead, when Murod, as a boy, brought her the teapot and forgot to offer the tea first to the eldest in the yard. She said it to Murod too when, at twenty, he was assigned his first turn as mirob, and Murod had said "but if the inspector comes...", and the grandmother had said "the inspector too is a guest of the canal".

Change of gate: from A1, dark valve of 1972, the year it had been installed by the old engineer Khoroshev who spoke a Russian from Kuibyshev and who died of tuberculosis in 1983, but whose moustache and whose way of writing "Sokh" with three Russian letters were still remembered in the valley; to B2, stainless steel valve of 02018, with the digital manometer still working.

Murod walked from the mulberry to the A1. He opened it. The letter said fifteen minutes. He kept it open nine. He closed it. The farmers of A1 under the mulberry nodded, said "Allah bless you, Murod", did not get up. He opened A2 for seven minutes. He opened A3 for five. He went to B2. He opened it. He immediately heard the water beat against the wall where he knew the leak was — a dull blow, then a hiss, then a dull blow again. He left it six minutes. Two more than the maximum. To the farmers of B2 he said "the surveyor comes tomorrow", and the farmers of B2 lowered their caps. They knew he was lying, but they also knew he was lying for them.

When he had closed all the gates the sun was high. The letter was still in his pocket. Murod went back under the mulberry. He sat on the stone bench. The five farmers had gone. The mulberry had already lost four leaves that morning, and one of those leaves, yellow, had fallen on the bench right where Murod sat, and Murod took it between thumb and forefinger and looked at it. He remembered that, as a child, he used to gather the leaves of the mulberry in the yard of his grandmother's house, and that he put them between the pages of his schoolbook, and that in spring he found them again darker, dry, but whole.

His grandmother had died in 02007. The Bahri Tojik dam had been built in 1957. The official from Khujand, the one with the clean hands, would come on his inspection round in September. The letter, in his pocket, weighed just right. Murod took it out, reread it once, folded it again, put it back in his breast pocket. In his trouser pocket he still had two apricot kernels dried in the sun, which his wife had slipped in the evening before as a joke, and which now, while the mulberry lost the fifth leaf of that morning, he cracked slowly, one at a time.