The old bathhouse stands near the Sarchashma Springs, behind a door that is lower than a man. You bow to come in, and Kadyr, the attendant, 64, bows too. He has done it eleven thousand times a year since 1987 and says it is the reason he has such a strong back.
Inside is a marble hall with a dome, a star of small round windows high in the stone, a warm slab in the middle, and a smell of soap, steam and wet linen. Men come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, women on the other days. Kadyr gives out towels and keys, takes the coins, looks after the shoes. He has never bathed here. "My father said, the one who guards a house should not sleep in it."
"Nobody lies in a bath. A man who comes here with a secret leaves it with the water. I only hear the sound of him lightening."
In the cold months the line goes out into the lane. A teacher after a week of exams. A bridegroom before the toi, carried in by his friends and washed like a calf. A man of eighty who has come every Friday for sixty years and who sits on the same corner of the marble with a copper bowl and does not say a word. When he leaves, Kadyr puts a cup of tea in his hand, and the old man puts a coin in the saucer, and each is happy.
At closing time Kadyr turns off the water, walks through the hall with a lamp, and wipes the marble with a cloth. It is the one hour of the day when the bathhouse is quiet. "It sounds," he says, "like a stone that has finished thinking."
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