Khadjou arrived with the sunset behind her, astride a petite donkey. For years to come, the men and women of the village would remember how she’d materialized on the winding path just as the mountains were starting to throw back the noises of nightfall: men calling their wives to help unload the animals; children hurrying about in search of firewood; hot milk rattling into buckets; the sandpapery lilt of the call to prayer.

The women of the village would remember her saffron aura, her dust-coated clothes set alight by the sun, and how she’d held her back so straight, her head so high, seeming to know precisely where she was, though no one recognized her face or knew her name.

      The men, for their part, would recall how she’d driven the donkey, hardly any bigger than she: a long whip in one hand, whistling aft and snapping fore, and a tiny needle in the other, pricking, pricking. They would shake their heads and murmur, “Shame,” as if they didn’t also drive their donkeys this way, and as if that very beast—The Best Donkey, Khadjou had called her, and the animal still bore the name—did not still suffer at their hands. They would snicker and giggle, remembering how Khadjou had flapped her legs open-shut, open-shut, like butterfly wings, to spur the beast on. They would burst into howls of laughter remembering how her shawl, dangling over the donkey’s hindquarters, had acquired an excrement stain.

      Khadjou was received as any stranger would’ve been: helped down from the donkey, gently separated from her shawl, which would be washed and cleaned, and ushered into someone’s home—Osama and Zhour’s—where she was given a bowl with which to wash her face and hands. In her honor, a chicken was slaughtered. The smell of its blood quickened hers, but she willed herself to stillness, straight-backed among the women, who crouched around her, shifting, giggling, asking questions, painting henna on her hands. “Far away,” she said when asked where she was from. She’d been riding since sunrise. She’d never thought the world was so large that you could ride across it for a day and still not get to France. She knew of France because of the foreigner who’d come to her village a season ago, just as she’d come to this one, except that his mission had not been to teach, but to learn.