“Famous, this place,” he’d told her in that peculiar way of his, all his thoughts unfinished, his words as soft and slick as half-chewed food. “All over. Your girls. The luckiest. True? Seven years, and no killings?”

Working the dough, she’d let a smile take hold of her lips and rearrange them: cockeyed, enigmatic, knowing.

      “The men say, ‘Good girls, our girls,’” he’d gone on. “But the women, they all say, ‘Ask Khadjou.’ So.” From the divan across from her, he’d smiled, his teeth jutting forth from his broad, pale face, clumsily shaven. “I ask Khadjou.”

      They might be ignorant in France, full of questions about all sorts of things that even children knew, but for all its puzzling emptiness, this man’s mind had proven as voracious as hers, crawling about with its bottomless hunger, devouring whatever it came across, sleepless, unceasing. With his notebooks, and his stick of silver that captured voices, and his roving, beady eyes, he’d soon grasped more than any man. He’d carried his end of that knowledge, and she’d carried hers, and their eyes had met across it. She’d never loved any man, but something in her had loved something in this one.

§

      By the time dinner was served, Khadjou understood that Osama and Zhour’s eldest daughter would be married soon. The same oblique faculty she’d shared with the Frenchman alerted her to certain unspoken concerns, inscribed in the nearly imperceptible tremors that ran through Zhour’s limbs, and the stillness that hung about mother and daughter, and the way the fire’s shadows flickered around the girl’s floor-bound eyes. Osama knew nothing. Zhour was afraid.

      That night, Khadjou slept beneath their roof. The following morning, once the men had loaded the animals and headed off into the fields, she addressed Zhour.

      “She’s not a virgin, is she?”

      These words made Zhour forget about the onions she was chopping. Blood welled from a slit in her thumb, but she seemed not to notice either this or the knife that had made it. Transfixed, she stared across the kitchen at the stranger, who knew what couldn’t and shouldn’t be known.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Khadjou. “Your secret’s safer than it’s ever been. Let me tell you a story.”

      What else could Zhour do? She listened. Before long, she’d forgotten her body, from her knife-bitten thumb to her onion-stung eyes, slipping out of her own skin and into the skin of the young bride, whose story Khadjou related, who’d failed to bleed when she had married at thirteen.

      Though the young bride hadn’t loved her husband as a husband, and he hadn’t loved her as a wife, they had loved each other as cousins. This stroke of luck, as much as her resourcefulness, had saved her.

      Before allowing their aunt into the bridal chamber, he’d promised to take her secret to the grave—unless she got between him and his other women. She’d agreed. She’d then brought out a needle, which she’d snuck into the bridal chamber for this purpose, and pricked her thigh. After that, everything had gone as it should have.

      Six days later, the girl’s husband, true to his word, had taken her secret to the grave, kicked in the head by an obstinate donkey. The needle might’ve saved her from death, but it couldn’t protect her from this fate. Returned unceremoniously to her parents’ home, she’d abruptly found herself irrelevant and useless, a specter both haunted and haunting.

      Yet, like a dibbler penetrating the soil, that needle had planted a seed. Throughout her period of mourning, its shoot had grown taller, sturdier, more resilient. One day, it had exploded into bloom. His death was no ending, she’d realized. She could set her own course now, never mind what was conventionally done. She had nothing to lose. There was need.

      She’d learned to remain on the sidelines, unseen, irrelevant, watching the women’s mouths. She’d kept track of their gossip and rumors, and once she’d gathered all the knowledge that she needed, she’d begun to intervene.

      Before long, all the girls of her village were slipping needles into their bridal chambers. For those too squeamish to prick themselves, she’d recommended using blood from a chicken, even though, unlike their own, it could be washed away.

      “Remember,” she’d said, “no one need know if the cloth has been stained.” She’d taught them how to rub themselves with alum stones, which tightened their muscles, so that they would writhe and whimper spontaneously when entered instead of having to fake that pain. Most important of all, she’d taught them how to know when they should trust, and whom.

      “In that young woman’s village,” said Khadjou, “there hasn’t been an honor killing. Not in seven years. The husbands don’t send their brides back to their families. The girls are known for their good behavior far and wide. Even France is sending its people to learn.”

      At that, a shudder passed through Zhour. In a moment, she was on her knees, gazing up at Khadjou with glimmering eyes. “I thought you were a witch. Now I know the truth. It’s God who sent you.”

      “You won’t lose your daughter,” said Khadjou, cupping Zhour’s cheek in her palm. “I won’t allow it.”

      Clutching Khadjou’s hand in both of hers, Zhour whispered, “Thank you.” 

      “You’ll help me, too,” said Khadjou. “There are other girls. Take me to them. Bring the women who want to learn.”

      For the rest of that morning, Zhour went from door to door. By early afternoon, all the women of the village were gathered outdoors on the plastic sheet where they always met to thresh and winnow grain. They brought out the wheat as usual, but this time, its only purpose was to occupy their hands.

      Once again, Khadjou told her story, repeating those magic words: “No one need know if the cloth has been stained.”

      “She’s right,” the women agreed. “It’s true.”

      “We put the other cloth over it anyway.”

      “So simple.”

      “Why didn’t any of us think of this?”

      “Tell me something,” said Khadjou then. “Do you want to save your daughters?”

      “Yes. Of course.”

      “Of course we do!”

      “Then keep this between us,” said Khadjou. “Can men be trusted? Sometimes. But let’s not gamble with your daughter’s lives. Until they’re famous for their honor, known far and wide, it’s better if the men aren’t involved.”

      From the women’s enthusiastic affirmations that her words were wise, no one could’ve guessed that anything would escape their confidence. Yet it did—and in less than a night and a day.

§

      Later, no one would be able to say how the news reached the men. Perhaps it was Aisha, so eager, so trusting, assuring her husband that their daughters would be safe from that day on. Or perhaps it was Bushra, who was losing her hearing and had started speaking more loudly than was necessary, discussing the events of the day with her friend while they milked the goats, even as their husbands were returning from the fields. Or perhaps it was one of the small girls, echoing what she’d heard, though she was in the presence of her brothers, unaware of what boys will become.

      One way or another, the men learned of those words, spoken by Khadjou, meant only for the ears of women, and of grain. Late that evening, a second meeting was called, announced by the same whistle used by the shepherds to signal approaching wolves. Knuckles were cracked, and jaws were clenched, and veins pulsed in necks and temples. In no time at all, a decision was reached. The meeting adjourned.

      The following morning, Khadjou gathered her clothes, tied them up in neat bundles, and loaded them onto the Best Donkey. The men had departed at sunrise as usual, some with wares lashed to their pack mules, others driving their sheep and goats into the fields, but all the women came to see her off. They surrounded her, pressing little gifts into her hands: cakes and cookies, dried fruits, nuts, and seeds, and ornaments they’d made. Someone brought out her shawl, washed and dried, and wrapped it around her shoulders.

      “Don’t let it come loose this time, sister,” she was warned.

      Along with this advice, she gave Khadjou an affectionate squeeze.

      The children, for their part, seemed to have caught a whiff of something wafting on the air. They watched from a distance with the curious, vigilant eyes of hyenas or vultures, patient, hopeful, certain that their job would be made easy for them soon.

      “Giddyap,” said Khadjou, wielding her needle. The Best Donkey snorted and broke into a trot, jerking her head from side to side. Flies scattered from the back of her neck, where an open wound festered. Khadjou started flapping her legs open-shut, open-shut. The sun was already too high. There were too many girls. France was still far away. She had no time to lose.

      Like dust settling slowly back onto the road, the women returned to their chores, milking and sweeping and washing and chopping and hauling and boiling and kneading. They did not notice, or did not think it odd, that the children remained as they had been, loosely arranged like the spokes of a wheel whose axis, the post by Osama and Zhour’s house, where the donkey had been tethered, stayed put even as the wheel began to turn. When motion did find them, it did not interrupt their formation. Through the village they drifted, as quiet as a circle of straw on a stream. They weren’t hiding. They simply weren’t seen. They were the same brittle brown as the scrub trees.

      The only sounds to be heard in that landscape, the only ones unusual enough to be heard, were the snap of the whip, and the low chanting,       “Giddyap, giddyap,” and the Best Donkey’s miserable brays.

      The path down-mountain undulated between the boulders, a serpent sunbathing. Brown and flat, it writhed unhappily beneath the donkey’s hooves.

      Then they were all there together: Khadjou, and the donkey, and the children, skulking in the clefts between the boulders, and the men, eleven of them, on the path. Their faces were ruddy. Their arms hung at their sides. They held stones.

      The man in front was shorter than the rest, so short that under different circumstances, it might’ve been difficult to take him seriously, but he was also stout and strong, with a powerful mustache as broad as a hat’s brim. The Best Donkey knew him. He’d tethered her to the post by his home and fed her with his own hands. When he spoke, his voice gave her no cause for alarm.

      “This one,” he said, “has been through enough. Hasn’t she?”

      Khadjou was already scrambling down when the first stone ricocheted off her temple, a reddening blow. She hit the earth hard, pebbles biting her palms. In an instant, she was on her feet again, her shawl flapping. The path seemed to thrash out from under her, pitching her sideways before she could gain traction. She collided with the flank of the donkey. The next two stones hit her in quick succession, one in the lower back, one in the left shoulder. A third whistled harmlessly by, loosing a shower of sparks from a boulder.

      She might’ve sprung up for a second time if the Best Donkey, spooked by the sudden explosion of motion, hadn’t begun edging backward. Attempting to rise, Khadjou found herself pinned to the earth, a rear hoof on her shawl.

      Spluttering and straining, she clawed at the fabric, but it was tough and strong, and the woman who’d returned it had wound it tight around her neck and shoulders. Her efforts only made her face redder.

      Osama stood over her. The other men crowded around him, their faces like scabbed-over wounds in the sky. Their chuckles curled upward like pale smoke from campfires.

      “What a good donkey.”

      “She’s helping us.”

      “She knows what she’s doing.”

      “She knows who’s got her best interests in mind.”

      In a frenzy, Khadjou tried once more to free herself, but the force of her sideways lurch only succeeded in cinching the shawl tighter. Her eyes bulged. Her breaths raked her throat like dirty fingernails. Above her, the men and their doubles seemed to waver and flicker and swirl and sway. Around them, through them, she could see a vast and brilliant blue.

      Then something landed on the path beside her, much too soft to be a stone.       Hoisted aloft, then borne up and over by the tilting of the world, she saw a sea of dirty little faces tumble by, set like jewels into the sky, between the stones, and a tail like a tufted whip, and legs with backward-bending knees, and there, beside her, centimeters from her, was a long cord of donkey dung, dark and segmented. 

      The last thing she saw.