Passing through steeply descending terrain amid dramatic peaks in the Hindu Kush Mountains, south of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, with treacherous cliffs dropping abruptly only yards to our left, my driver and I saw before us a disturbing scene of near disaster. A public bus had crashed into an enormous rock on the right hand side of the road. Disarrayed clusters of passengers surrounded the bus, but no one appeared to be hurt. My driver slowed to a crawl, for fear of hitting passengers who spilled out onto the road, begging for rides. As we drew abreast of the accident, my driver and I saw that the entire front end of the bus had been crushed against a house-sized boulder. Immediately my driver exclaimed, "Good driver! Good driver!"

We regained speed and drove another kilometer or so before I spoke. "You said, 'Good driver.' Would you tell me what is so good about crashing a bus full of people into a rock?"

"You not understand," he said. "Driver lose brakes. Bus will crash. It must! But where? Driver has to decide. Not easy to decide in such situation. Easy to wait, and wait. Not easy to do difficult thing and crash up here. Easy to delay, later and later, until bus goes too fast! If he crash here, maybe some people hurt. No one die. Other way (he pointed down the mountain), everyone die. Everyone!" He hesitated a moment and then repeated, "Very good driver!"

We were silent for the remainder of the trip south to Kabul. The driver must have spent some of this time organizing his thoughts. Sitting together in his car in front of my hotel, he saw fit to shape our shared experience into a broader lesson.

"You young man," he said. "Not yet realize, sometimes in life is better to crash when damage not too much. Sometimes you wait and wait. Damage very great! Price of delay too high! Must know when to crash."

He looked at me intently, for a rather long time, as if his eyes could carry this lesson to a place within me that words alone could not penetrate. We sat quietly. The sound of his breathing mixed with my own. The future felt suspended, as lightly as the specks of dust hanging weightlessly in the air between us.

The Price is One Hundred and Fifty Afghanis
by James Opie

Throughout the 1970s most of Afghanistan lived without the distractions of television, a lack (or benefit) which influenced the ways that people entertained themselves. In more remote towns, one occasional form of entertainment was to watch a local rug dealer in the process of bargaining with an outsider. This amusement grew more appealing when one of the protagonists in the bargaining session was a foreigner.

Most transactions happened inside of dealers' shops and therefore out of public view. But sometimes bargaining sessions moved outdoors, where positive or negative features of the goods were more obvious than in the "selling lights" of a dim shop. In decent weather it was therefore customary to move the goods and the transaction out to the edge of the street. Not uncommonly, a few people, mostly boys, gathered, merely to watch. From the viewpoint of a buyer, this was disconcerting. Bargaining is serious business, and the outcome is rarely improved by the presence of idle onlookers. A local rug dealer, surrounded by a crowd favoring the "home team," enjoys a subtle advantage. A mitigating factor was that none of the uninvited locals knew anything about the value of rugs, a limitation that deprived them of an accurate yardstick with which to measure precisely what was happening. They followed the action in a general way, without saying very much or taking sides too obviously. They merely watched, as mutely and passively as we in the West watch television.

My close friend Dan Koch had a different experience in a village in northern Afghanistan, close to Miamana. During a particular bargaining session the assembled audience of villagers rapidly grew in size and could not keep still. Throughout the entire transaction they periodically broke into laughter, at times muted and at times bordering on hilarity. Dan had absolutely no idea what was funny.

The focal point of the contest was a new felt rug that Dan admired. Felt is among humankind's most ancient textile forms, and Afghanistan remains one of the few places on earth where it is still made for family use. After two years in the Peace Corps, Dan did not wish to leave Afghanistan without acquiring an example. A factor that made this particular piece appealing was the presence of a single line of writing. Felts that contain writing are extremely rare.

Dan was an experienced bargainer. One of the few Americans on the northern road between Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, he had adapted to local commercial habits and learned the value of items that he bought, calculating everything in "afghanis," the national currency. There were, quite naturally, commodities that he never had purchased, felt rugs being among them. He therefore had no idea what price to expect at the outset of the transaction. The question of what this felt rug was worth could only resolve itself in the course of bargaining.

Dan plunged in, asking the price of the piece, and the dealer responded with the figure of four hundred afghanis. The surrounding locals immediately laughed. Dan waved off this price as obviously inflated, but now he had some general framework of value in which to operate. Four hundred afghanis, or "afs," as they are called, was about nine dollars at the time, not an absurd price for such an object. He offered the dealer half of that. The crowd laughed again.

The dealer responded to this offer as dealers in that part of the world are inclined to respond: he looked offended and spoke about the merits of his merchandise, including the fact that there was a line of writing in it, a feature making it more appealing and therefore more valuable. Being a reasonable man, the dealer was willing to adjust his price downward slightly, to a figure of three hundred "afs." To go lower would, he said, be impossible, since he had paid nearly that much for it.

The crowd snickered and exchanged comments with each other.

Dan knelt, examining the felt, inspecting its thickness and in general making the usual studied efforts to appear knowledgeable. Finally he made a new offer, not so far from the dealer's own figure. He would pay two hundred and twenty-five afghanis, but no more.

Laughter erupted again. A few members of the crowd left, returning moments later with friends, bringing them into the fun.

What was it about this felt rug?

The dealer and Dan jointly moved into the final phase, with the usual gestures, protests, and pleas. When they finally agreed to two hundred and fifty afghanis for the piece the mood of the crowd passed from humor to hilarity. People fell over each other in laughter.

Dan is an even tempered person who doesn't bear grudges. Paying for his new felt rug and rolling it up, he simply left the scene, without feeling offended.

A week later he was in Kabul and he showed his new acquisition to an Afghan friend.

"Everyone laughed when I bought this," he told him. "Something was extremely funny to them, but just what the joke was no one would tell me."

"How much did you pay for it?" his friend asked.

"Two hundred and fifty afghanis, after bargaining."

"Now, that really is funny," the friend said.

"Why?"

"You know that there's some writing in this piece, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Can you read it?"

"No."

"Did you ask what it said?"

"No It didn't occur to me."

"Well, you might have done that at the outset. The writing says, 'The price of this piece is one hundred and fifty afghanis.'"