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tried to attract his attention by waving her hands about, but he ignored her until she opened the window and called to him to help her out with some of the luggage.
    Usually it was made up of bundles of cuttings from European magazines, small cheap mirrors, paper, pencil stubs, tins of food and packets of cornflakes, but today it included far more important items: a sewing machine, a sterilizer for babies’ bottles, boxes of tools, secondhand cooking pots and matches.
    When they had finished stowing them in the backseat of the car, which was buckled from a previous accident, Ingrid climbed into the passenger seat. She was worried because she was sure that Mahyoub wouldn’t give the load in the back a second thought, but she soon became more concerned about his unsmiling face and abrupt way of talking. The day before, a truck driver from the village had passed on a message from Souad to say that Mahyoub would give Ingrid a lift to the village. This had surprised her, as she hadn’t forgotten his hostile attitude toward her the last time she visited them before her trip back to Denmark. She hadintroduced the head of her school to the men and asked them to invite him to spend a few days there while she was away. They had agreed with a collective nod. their cheeks bulging with qat, all except Mahyoub, who, to her astonishment, had asked why he should be invited. She had grown used to their impeccable hospitality and the way they agreed to all her requests even if they did nothing further to carry them out. She felt herself flushing, but answered: “So that he can get to know you and understand your culture better.”
    “You mean he’s coming to inspect our dandruff and daggers?” he mocked.
    Then he had asked why she kept her head covered when she wasn’t a Yemeni, or even a Muslim, and held out some qat leaves to her, inviting her derisively to chew qat with them. The other men had silenced him and the oldest man present had risen to his feet in anger, his eyes blazing and threatening violence.
    Ingrid felt heavy, as if her luggage in the backseat were weighing her down, making her tongue-tied and even restricting her freedom to breathe. She guessed she felt this way because she couldn’t talk to Mahyoub; she wanted to ask him not to drive so fast around bends and not to crowd other cars, but she couldn’t even bring herself to ask after his sister and everyone in the village. Her spirits lifted whena haunting song came through the crackle and interference on the car radio but she didn’t feel at ease with him like before. Besides looking morose and talking in monosyllables, he drove recklessly and sighed and grumbled and gave her mutinous stares.
    Her feeling of awkwardness was justified. After some time, Mahyoub gestured toward her head scarf, saying in bad English, “Either you’re bald or your hair’s gone gray, Ingrid.”
    “Maybe,” she replied. “And it shows respect.”
    This time he actually touched her scarf. “You don’t have to respect the car,” he said, “or me.”
    And suddenly he was pulling the scarf from her head and allowing her blond hair to fall onto her shoulders. It was thick, and the color of the sun. While she was still recovering from the shock of this unexpected behavior, he shouted, “Now I believe! Glory be to God! Now I believe, Lord!”
    She was even more confused, impressed by the emotion and sincerity of his words, yet outraged by his boldness. But she recovered quickly, attributing his behavior to childishness rather than male cunning, and felt justified in this view when he warned her not to let her hair down in front of the village women or they’d be jealous and cut it off while she was asleep.
    She tried to divert him, as she had done in the past, by teaching him some English, the language that he saw as apassport to a better life. She asked him to construct sentences with a verb, a subject and an object, using conditional particles, negatives, and past, present and