Aigerim sent a video: my nephew Ermek, two years old, walks across the courtyard to the walnut tree, holds its trunk and says "ata". He means me. He has never seen me except on Aigerim's phone.
I watched it eleven times. Mahmud watched it twice and said "Fine boy. He will build." In the evening I counted: I have sent home so much since 2005 that I could have paid for half of a house. And I'm not at home to see the walls.
Today on the metro the police checked my documents again. Third time this month. Our Iradi passport they look at a long time, they don't know it. "Irad? Where is this?" I say: near Kyrgyzstan. "So you are Kyrgyz." No, I am Iradi. "Same thing." Then the registration, the work permit, the stamp, 500 roubles "for coffee".
Five years in Moscow. I built nine houses. Never once was I inside one of them after.
There are four or five Iradi Christians in our corner of Moscow. A girl from Talas who is a nurse found us, she has the address of a priest from Tashkent who has a small room in a flat near the Kursk station. We were nine people at the Qurbana: six Iradis, a Lebanese man who prays in Syriac better than the priest, and two Russian women who came for the singing.
It is not the cathedral. The ceiling is low. But when the priest started the old hymn we all knew it by heart, from three different valleys, and it sounded like one.
There is an internet cable in the bytovka now! The company put it in for the office, and Dmitry shares the password for twenty roubles a week. Now I write here from my bed on the top bunk, with the laptop of Mahmud's cousin that he lends me on Sundays. It is slower than the club but it is mine.
Aigerim has also learned to use the computer at the club, so we can chat in writing on Wednesdays, with her typing with two fingers. It is better than the phone card.
The new object in Khimki. Mixed: a shopping centre and flats. Salary 400 roubles a day less than the old one, but regular. Nikolai Fyodorovich did not come with us. A new foreman, Dmitry, young, with a tablet, who says "optimisation" and checks who is on the scaffolding with a stopwatch. We call him "the Clock".
The Uzbeks are back. Sherzod grew a moustache at home and now he looks like his father.