He spent a day talking to her, what she called the entry interview, at the crossing at Burlington. She was in a uniform, a dark navy jumpsuit, but she was shaped in such a way that he was constantly aware of her. Her hair was black-brown and hung in a braid down her back. She was at first shy with him. He was shy in return, waiting to see when he might say something that would move the curtain just an inch or so past formality. The time came when she asked him whether he was married, and he looked at her and said quietly, “If you are not, then I am not.” She laughed and pushed her hair, where not a strand was out of place, back from her forehead. Then he dropped his head and gave off that he was shy again. But then, with his head still bowed, he looked upward and met her eyes, just the moment that was needed. He saw the shift in her instantly. She was susceptible to him.

Ghazi believed that all any woman wanted, as all men wanted, was to be considered, to be paid mind to. And it amazed him how this simple fact was unavailable to most men he knew. They seemed under the impression that contempt got in at a woman’s heart and made her want something she could not have. Ebaad tehla, ebaad teghla. The farther you are, the dearer you become. But he had always found that when he was with a woman, when she was there before him, she was dearer than when she was not.

This Canadian woman was beyond that. This woman was evoking in him the feeling that cannot be posed; when a woman senses it, it alone can be the decisive turn to make her want him or consider wanting him. He knew that this woman, this L. F. Martin, as the laminated card hanging from her neck identified her, was lonely.

When she had completed the paperwork that gave him a date for an asylum hearing, she told him it was a formality. All Algerians in Canada were granted “immediate and unconditional and indefinite residency because of the grave human-rights crisis that existed in their homeland.” She also said that her shift was ending, and she wanted to help him by driving him to the train station so that he could get to Montreal, where there was a sizable Algerian community, not to mention a national welfare system that would make it possible for him to “get his bearings and recover from the trauma he had suffered.”