At six in the morning the town smells of cold iron and smoke, the same smell as a stove that has been lit for the first time in autumn. From the hill above the yard the lorries look small, like beads on a string, one after another coming down the road from the mine.
Bolot Esenaliev, 49, drives a lorry with a green cab and an unreliable heater. He has delivered coal to the houses of Iyık Janyl and the villages around since 1999. His customers know him by the sound of his engine. His day has three parts: load at the yard (two tonnes, by the shovel, with a boy who does it faster than he used to), drive, and unload in a yard where there is always somebody waiting with tea.
"Coal is the only thing in the world that people thank you for when it is dirty."
A tonne is 340 som this winter, delivered. A house uses two to three, a flat in the old blocks half a tonne. The buyers are widows, young families, a church school. For the widows Bolot carries the coal into the shed himself. For the school he puts the bags in the yard and leaves a note on the door, since the headmistress does not like to see him leave.
I ride with him for a day. By noon there is black dust in my teeth. By two I stop noticing. At four, in a courtyard with a pomegranate tree, an old woman comes out with a bowl of soup for the driver. She does not ask for the receipt. She says: "I have been waiting since Tuesday. I told the neighbours: he will come when the frost comes." And Bolot, who has said nothing all day, says: "I always come with the frost."
On the way back to the yard the road goes along the river. The lorry is empty now and it rattles. The town lights come on one by one, each with a small plume of smoke over it, as if somebody had pinned a letter to every roof.
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