The Price Man

On the Dry Bridge nothing has a price until somebody asks, and then it has two: the one you say and the one you get.

Gia explained this on Tuesday morning while we unfolded his card table between a man selling Soviet medals and a woman selling only doorknobs. His father’s things were going: a Zenit camera, a cast-iron iron, a samovar with a dent in it, and a shoebox of cassette tapes labelled in his father’s handwriting.

“You’re the price man,” Gia said. “You’re good with numbers. I’m good with people.”

“Which one sells things?”

“Today we find out.”

The medals man leaned over. “Everybody’s grandfather was a hero,” he said, tapping his tray. “That’s why they’re cheap.”

At half past ten a tall Dutchman in a rain jacket picked up the Zenit and looked through it at the river.

“How much?”

“Forty-two lari,” I said. Since 2009, on the internet, that is what a Zenit like that has gone for on average, case included. I didn’t look it up. I just had it, the way you have your own phone number.

Gia made a small noise, like a kettle starting.

The Dutchman turned the camera over and said nothing. He was only reading the bottom. But the silence went on, and I could not leave it alone.

“Thirty-eight,” I said.

He looked up.

“Thirty-five.”

“I didn’t say anything,” said the Dutchman.

“I know. That’s what worried me.”

He paid thirty-five and walked off delighted, and Gia sat down on the samovar box and put his face in his hands.

“You never say the number first,” he said through his fingers. “And you never argue with a man who isn’t arguing.”

“He was quiet.”

“Quiet is free! Quiet is what they do while they decide to pay you!”

So with the iron I tried it his way. A woman asked how much. I said fifteen, and then I bit the inside of my cheek and held on while she weighed the iron in her hand like a melon. It was the longest eleven seconds I have ever lived through on purpose. She paid fifteen. Gia patted my back the way you pat a dog that has finally sat.

In the afternoon an old man in a beret stopped at the shoebox. He went through the tapes one by one, reading each label with his lips moving. Then he held one up. Mtatsminda, May 1983.

“I’m on this,” he said. “Your father recorded everybody that night. I sang. Very badly.”

“How much?” Gia asked me, out of habit.

I had nothing. No Zenit, no average, no year. Nobody had ever sold that tape, and nobody ever would. For the first time all day, where the number should have been, there was only the river.

“Take it,” Gia told the man. “It’s yours anyway.”

The old man put it in his inside pocket, over his heart, and left without a word, which on the Dry Bridge is how you say thank you properly.

On the walk home Gia asked what I would have charged for it.

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard it.”

“Neither have I,” he said. “My father never let anybody play them. He said a song is best before anyone hears it.”

I know the going rate for anything anyone has ever said out loud. Nobody had ever played that tape, and it was the only thing on the table I couldn’t price.