The twelfth of August, late afternoon, in the changing room of site two.

Sanjar folds. He folds the overalls on the benches, the ones the others leave dropped where they fall, and he stacks them in a column on the locker door. He lines the boots up under the bench with the toes to the wall. He puts the gloves back in the right pockets.

It is what he does. He has done it for four years and nobody asked him to.

That morning he was not there. He had worked the night and at seven he had gone to sleep in the dormitory behind shed three, and at seven forty he was sleeping. That is why on the morning of the tenth of August he was not on the plant.

Otabek was.

Otabek had been on shift since six. Otabek was twenty-nine. Otabek was always laughing. On the site they called Otabek by his number, like everyone, because nobody here remembers names and the number is written on the helmet.

On the shelf above the locker Otabek's helmet is still there.

On the tenth of August the drones came over Nizhnekamsk. They came over the plant, which is the reason the town exists and the reason all of them came here. Thirteen died. Eight were Uzbek. One was Tajik. Nobody finished counting the injured.

They were nearly all in construction, on the expansion. Bricklayers, steel fixers, carpenters. People who raise the things other people fill.

On the morning of the twelfth they gave the news about the bodies. A Ministry of Defence plane, from Kazan, for Tashkent. The State pays the transport. The State pays the funeral. The families who travel with them go only if there is room.

Then they gave the figure. The government of the republic gave it, before the inquiry is finished, and it reached the changing room from the phone of a man on the other crew: two million rubles per family. Bahodir, who has been in Russia eleven years and knows the rates, did the sum out loud. It comes to twenty-three thousand five hundred dollars. The figure went round the changing room the way a new rate goes round, bench to bench, and one man asked whether that was before tax, and nobody could answer, and one man said that at home with that money you build the house and pay for your little brother's wedding.

Sanjar sends the money to Namangan province on the twenty-seventh of every month. Otabek sent his too, the twenty-seventh. From two of them his mother got two on the twenty-seventh.

In the pocket of his wallet Sanjar keeps an expired phone card. On it, in pen, is his mother's shoe size. Twenty-three and a half.

The minibus for the airport comes past the dormitory at eighteen thirty. The ones from the families go on it. Sanjar packed his bag at midday and left it under the bench.

It is eighteen ten.

Outside the minibus sounds its horn. It sounds once, short.

Rustam comes into the changing room with the shift sheet. He opens it against the locker door. He says the crew number for Monday. He says the places one by one.

Sanjar is standing at the shelf. He has Otabek's helmet in his hand. The tape on the visor is the grey packing tape, two turns round, and under the tape is the number done in black marker.

He pulls the tape off. It comes away all in one piece and takes a little of the white plastic with it. The number stays.

The helmet knocks against the metal of the locker. It sounds empty.

Sanjar puts the helmet under his arm. Then he says it.

He says it in Russian, which is the language spoken in the changing room, and he says it loud enough for the ones in the back row to hear too, and he does not say it looking at the floor: he says that Monday he is not there.

Rustam does not look up from the sheet. Then he looks up.

Nobody says anything. The fan above the door turns.

The minibus sounds its horn again. Twice, short.

Rustam folds the sheet in four. He says something short about Monday's place. He says that on Monday somebody else takes the place and that Sanjar knows this.

Sanjar says he knows.

Rustam goes out first. He does not shut the door.

The man from the next locker picks Sanjar's bag up off the floor and holds it out to him. He does not say anything. Sanjar takes it with his free hand because the other one is holding the helmet.

A man from Andijan puts a plastic bag into his hand. There is bread inside. It is the canteen bread, the round kind, the kind left over at the end of the shift and shared out.

Sanjar goes out. He gets on the minibus. He sits in the second seat on the right and puts the bag between his feet. He keeps the helmet under his arm, he does not put it in the bag.

The minibus pulls away. The gravel under the wheels makes the noise it makes.

In the changing room the light stays on. On the shelf, where the helmet was, there is a clean rectangle and around it the grey mark of the dust, and the mark holds the round shape because the dust settled all around it for four years. Next to it there are two yellow helmets, then the shelf goes on empty to the wall. The door is open. Nobody shut it.