Ermek opens the booth at seven. He takes off the padlock, raises the shutter, switches on the platform scale. The display reads zero point zero. The booth stands at the entrance to the Alatau landfill, in the Almaty region, in Kazakhstan: thirty-four hectares of waste, and thirty of them burned in September last year, in the largest of the six fires since two thousand and twenty-one. On the table lies the weighing register. It is a ruled notebook with a green cover and forty-eight sheets. Ermek opens it to Friday's page. In columns are the names, the kilos of copper, the tenge owed, the buyer's signature. The last two pages, the two Fridays of September, have no buyer's signature. Yesterday at the bazaar word came that the court has annulled the contract of the company that ran the landfill, and that the thirty-four hectares go back to the municipality. The buyer has not come for two weeks. Nobody has come from the municipality. Ermek takes the pen from the jar. He tries it on the back of the register. Then he writes the date at the top of the new page: Sunday, the twenty-seventh of September.

At eight the pickers arrive, the sacks of copper on their backs. Ermek weighs one sack at a time. He reads the display, writes down the kilos, works out the sum in tenge, turns the register toward the little window. Each of them signs beside their number. Saule, his sister, is last in line. On Fridays she signs with a cross, because she never went to school, and beside the cross Ermek writes her name out in full, as he has done for six years, since the company put him in the booth because he was the only one on their street who could write. Before that, for two years, he pulled copper out of the ditch with her. The names in the register, forty-eight sheets, are all in his hand.

At ten a white Niva comes in through the gate. Serik gets out, the company's man for the landfill, with two men. Serik lays an envelope and a sheet of paper on the table. In the envelope there are a hundred and eighty thousand tenge, a month's pay. The sheet says that as of today's date no weighings are outstanding, with a line for the attendant's signature. Serik explains: the contract is gone, not one more tenge for the pickers is coming to him from the company, the municipality does not pay other people's debts, and the two Fridays in the register stay paper. With the envelope at least one person gets paid. He says the rest as well. If Ermek does not sign, the envelope goes back, and on those two pages the name that remains is his. From tomorrow nobody will have him weigh again, not the company, not whoever comes after. Saule is behind the glass, the sack at her feet. She says one sentence.

"If you sign, our two Fridays never happened."

The scale is on. On the table the envelope is sealed.

Ermek takes the sheet. He turns it toward himself, smooths it with his palm on the table, beside the register. He takes the pen from the jar. He pulls off the cap and fits it on the end of the pen, as on Fridays. He lowers the tip to the signature line and holds it there, a finger's width from the paper. Outside, behind the glass, Saule has set her sack on the platform and waits with her hands in the pockets of her apron. The scale's display reads forty-one point two. Ermek puts the cap back on the pen. He lays the pen crosswise on the blank sheet. He pushes the envelope back across the table, to the edge on Serik's side, with two fingers. Then he closes the register and keeps it there with his open hand on the cover.

Serik looks at the envelope and does not touch it at once. He says that in that case he is taking the scale away, because it belongs to the company, and that he is taking the register too, because that belongs to the company as well. Ermek says the register goes to the municipality. Serik calls the two men from the Niva. They pull the plug, lift the platform by its handles, carry it out between them. Saule takes her sack off before they lift it. Serik picks up the envelope and puts it in the inside pocket of his jacket. The register stays under Ermek's hand.

The Niva leaves through the gate at ten forty. On the floor of the booth, where the scale stood, there remains a rectangle of clean concrete, one metre by eighty. Ermek opens the register to the last blank sheet and tears it out along the stitching. He folds it in four and cuts it with the bread knife into four equal rectangles. He tears out two more. Then he takes the pen. For each name of the two Fridays he writes a rectangle: the name, the date, the kilos of copper, the tenge owed, and underneath "weighed by Ermek Sadykov, Alatau booth", and the full signature, not the initials. There are eleven names. The last three he writes standing, because they took the chair away along with the scale. Then he goes out. At the gate the pickers are waiting in line, as on Fridays in front of the buyer. Ermek gives each of them their rectangle and says the total out loud. The first one reads it, folds it, puts it in his jacket pocket. The second holds it in his hand and looks at the signature. The last is for Saule. Saule takes it and slips it inside her glove, against her palm, where on Fridays she kept the money.