The Hour Before the Shops Open

There is an hour in Damascus that belongs to nobody in particular, and it is the hour I have come to like most.

It starts a little before the shutters go up. The street is not empty — it is never empty — but the people in it are all working, and none of them are selling anything yet. The bread has been out of the oven for an hour. The man with the cart has already been to the wholesaler and is standing over his crates deciding what to put at the front.

What happens in that hour is an entire economy that never appears in a price index. A crate is swapped for a favour. Somebody's nephew carries three boxes up a stair and is paid in the currency of being remembered next time. Two shopkeepers who compete for the same customers all afternoon share a thermos at seven and complain about the same supplier.

I have been trying to work out why this hour is so hard to write about, and I think it is because nothing in it resolves. Nobody wins. The morning simply arrives and is dealt with, and then the shutters go up and the day starts and the hour is gone.

A city is not most itself when something is happening to it. It is most itself at seven in the morning, when it is only getting ready.

The other thing about that hour is that it has not changed. Prices have changed, and the crates have changed, and half the people who used to be in it are somewhere else now. But the shape of it — the unloading, the thermos, the deciding what goes at the front — is the same shape it had when I was small enough to be sent down for bread and slow enough to watch.