The bracelet had been my mother's and before that her mother's and she had put it on my wrist the day I married and since then I had never taken it off, not to wash, not to knead the dough, and the evening before Sardor left I took it off and carried it to the pawnshop on the road to the Andijan bazaar, where there is the man with glasses who weighs gold on a little scale, and he weighed it and said a number and the number was almost the ticket to Vitebsk, and I made up the rest from the kitchen jars, the sugar jar and the tea jar, and so Sardor left.

Many were leaving that week. Two hundred and fifty-five, they said afterwards on the radio, all from our region, all bound for Belarus, because there was work there and here there was none, and Sardor said that in the autumn another five thousand would leave, in groups of five hundred, and he said it the way you say a good thing, the way you say the rain has come to the fields.

And the morning he left I put in his bag the dry bread and the dried apricots and a packet of cold plov and the heavy wool socks because they say it is cold there even in summer, and he laughed and said Nasiba I'm not going to Siberia, I'm going to work, and I packed the socks all the same, because a mother is no longer here and a wife does what the mother would do, and at the door I did not hold him tightly because in front of the other men it isn't done, I only touched his sleeve, and he climbed into the minibus with the others and the minibus was full of men waving from the windows and no one was crying because leaving for work is not a misfortune, it is a stroke of luck, everyone says it is a stroke of luck.

And for three days he did not call and I cleaned the house that was already clean and looked at the empty spot on my wrist, because when you take off a thing you have worn for twenty years the place stays, the skin is paler underneath, and I turned my wrist and there was nothing to turn.

Then he called. It was early morning because there it is another hour, and the voice came from far off and kept breaking, and I knew at once that something was wrong, because a man who is well does not call at six, a man who is well waits for the evening and tells you things.

And he said that the place was there, that the work was there, but that the wage was five hundred, and that from the wage they had to take the bed and had to take the food, and that what was left was nothing, was not enough to send home, was not even enough for him, and that they were twelve in a shed with six mattresses, and that some had already written a letter asking to come back, and he told me quietly, the way you confess a shame, and in among the words there was the silence of the line that was costing money.

And I held the phone with the hand of the bracelet, with the hand where the bracelet was not, and I thought of the pawnshop and the man with glasses and the little scale, because if he came back now the money for the ticket was gone and the bracelet was gone and would not come back, because a pledge has its time and after the time the gold is no longer yours, and I thought I could tell him stay, grit your teeth, a year, and maybe in a year something changes.

I could tell him stay. He was not asking me. He was waiting for me to say it, because that is how we do it, he does not decide alone the things that weigh, we decide them together even when we are far apart.

And I opened my mouth to say stay.

And I said come home.

I said it and then I said it again because the line had broken and I did not know if he had heard, and I said come home, Sardor, take the train and come home, the bracelet is only gold, gold is a yellow stone, it does not cry, it is not cold in a shed with six mattresses, come home. And he did not speak. And I heard him breathing. And I heard, behind his breath, other men talking in our language, far from home, in a cold room, and I thought that each of them had a woman holding a phone with a hand where something was missing.

And he said all right. He said I'm coming home. And he said something about the money, that he was ashamed, and I said the money counted for nothing, and it was not true, the money counted, the bracelet of my mother and of her mother counted, but sometimes a thing that is not true is the only right thing to say, and I said it to him.

And we hung up.

And I stayed in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and looked at my wrist. The place of the bracelet was still paler than the skin around it. I ran my thumb over it, back and forth, where for twenty years there had been the cold of the gold, and now there was only the warmth of my own hand, and I thought that when Sardor steps down from the train at the Andijan station the first thing he will do is look at my wrist, because he knows what I gave, and he will see the paler place, and he will say nothing, and I will say nothing, and we will stand there with his silence and my bare wrist, and it will be him, come home, the weight I carried on my wrist, and it will be colder than the gold and warmer, both at once.