An Iranian village apothecary of about forty-five, close, unshaven, awake all night, stands in his own open workroom door at blue-hour and looks down an empty Zagros lane; behind him his trade is undone…The same man moves through his waking mountain village and asks; a woman lifting flatbread from a clay oven and an old muleteer both look up and answer him kindly, pointing away up the lane…First sun crests the Zagros ridge and comes straight down the lane into his eyes; he stops mid-step and lifts a hand against it, unable to look at the thing that is showing him everything…Inside a neighbour's warm lamplit room the apothecary works with real skill over a sick child, a hand on the small forehead, the mother's relief breaking across her face — and he alone in the room is not helped by it…High on the oak path he has gone down in the wet spring grass and cannot rise; a shepherd boy and a woman with a bundle of brushwood are already reaching, their hands closing round his forearms…At the village spring, the apothecary holds out his small brass hand-scale over the water and opens his fingers; the two little pans go under and the surface takes them.Sunrise clears the ridge and pours down the whole oak slope, and the man is a small figure inside the shaft with the valley's whole drift of pollen and light turning slowly around him; he is weeping openly…The same workroom, the same undone jars and unopened Persian ledger, nothing tidied and nothing repaired — but full morning now comes through the door he never shut and lies right across the disorder…
