Long Way Round

The market is a field at the edge of town, behind a wall that nobody has repaired, and it smells like every field in the world on which animals have been standing since four in the morning. Trucks arrive in the dark with sheep. Boys arrive in the dark with goats. Old men arrive in the dark with a stick and a face.

The seller's rule is: never name the price first. The buyer's rule is: never look at the animal. I watch for an hour a man in a green shirt circle one ram without once looking at it, while the seller, a young man with a burn on his hand, stares at the sky. They talk about the weather, about a cousin in Jalal-Abad, about the price of diesel. At minute fifty the seller says a number. The buyer laughs. He says another. Now they both look at the ram, as if it had just appeared.

"The ram is not the thing. The thing is that the two of us sat on the same wall for an hour and neither of us got angry."

There is a third man, an old broker in a white cap, who sits on a crate and says nothing and gets his share. He is the voice of both and the ear of both. He has done it for thirty years. When a price is agreed, he takes the right hand of each and puts them together, and holds them a moment as if blessing a bargain. "It is the only part of the work that I like," he says.

By ten the field is half empty. By eleven the trucks leave, with the buyers' animals tied in the back and the sellers' pockets heavy in front. On the road out, a man is driving a flock of twenty sheep home on foot, the dust rising yellow in the sun. He has bought them all. He says he had come for one.