The flight had left Tashkent at six in the morning and I'd told my mother not to come all the way to the airport because the road from Asaka is long and her knee is bad, and she came anyway, and she'd slipped a piece of dry bread wrapped in a handkerchief into my pocket, and at the gate she said only one thing, that I should come back with a clean face, and I said I'd come back with a thousand dollars a month, and she nodded the way you nod at something already decided, and I believed it, and she believed it too, because the man at the office had written it on the form and on the form there was a stamp.

The barn is near Orsha and there are forty-two cows and I milk them at four in the morning and at five in the evening and in between I clean and carry the hay and wash the concrete floor with the hose, and in winter the concrete is so cold that the cold climbs up inside your boots and stays in your bones even in bed, and the hut has six mattresses for us who are more than six, and in the evening we eat soup and bread and we keep quiet, because everyone does his own sum and the sum comes out wrong for all of us.

The first month the envelope was five hundred dollars and I looked at the envelope and I looked at the man and the man said board and lodging, and he said transport, and he said the rest was written in the new contract, and the new contract said seven hundred and then the deductions and the deductions ate it down to five hundred, and I had a thousand in my head and five hundred in my hand, and the difference between a thousand and five hundred isn't a number, it's a lie, but the lie wasn't mine, so whose was it, and this is what I asked myself while I milked, my forehead against the warm flank of the animal, and the animal didn't answer and I milked.

I'd taken on the debt to leave, for the papers and the flight and the new suitcase that turned out to be useless, and I'd taken it from a man in Andijan who lends and who waits, and he was waiting, and every month that went by without the thousand the man's waiting grew the way wet hay grows, it swells, and back home there was the calf, ours, the one my mother had been fattening for a year so it would become a beast to sell when the need came, and the need was now.

Then one Sunday my mother telephoned and her voice came small and far away and she asked how I was and I said fine, and she asked about the work and I said good, and then she stopped, and in the silence I felt she was about to say the thing, and she said it, she said she was selling the calf, that she'd sell it right away, that this way I'd pay the man and come home, and there was no shame, she said, coming home is no shame.

And there, in those three seconds, with the phone against my ear and my winter breath coming white out of my mouth inside the barn, I chose. Because I could have told her the truth, I could have told her five hundred, I could have told her that the form with the stamp was a lie with a stamp, and she'd have sold the calf and I'd have come back to Asaka with no thousand dollars and no calf and no face, and she'd have looked at me with those eyes that say it's all right anyway, and those eyes I can't bear, those eyes are worse than the cold concrete.

And so I said no. I said the work was good and the wage was good and that she shouldn't sell anything, mama, don't sell anything, that the money was coming, that it wouldn't be long, and while I said it I looked at the deductions sheet nailed to the post beside the door and I counted the lines of the deductions with my eyes, the bed, the bread, the transport, the electricity, and my voice said everything's fine and my eyes read everything crooked, and she believed the voice, because a mother believes her son's voice even when the son learned to lie from her, from the very way she said fine when fine it wasn't.

She hung up happy. I stayed with the phone in my hand and then I put it in my pocket and I went to the door of the hut and I took my boots and I stood them upright beside the door, laced, the way a man stands them who leaves tomorrow, and I wasn't leaving tomorrow, and I knew it, and I laced them anyway, because a laced boot beside the door is a promise you make to yourself when you can't make it to anyone else.

In the morning at four I went back to the barn and I milked, and the milk came warm into the pail and steamed in the cold air, and I thought of the calf that wouldn't be sold, that stayed in Asaka fattening for nothing, for a homecoming I put off month by month with my own voice, and I thought that I'd saved the calf and lost myself, and that maybe this was the bargain, that one of the two got sold either way, and that I'd been the one to choose, and while I milked I said the words to myself, the ones I'd said to her, don't sell anything, don't sell anything, and I said them to the animal and the animal didn't answer and I milked.