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“Thank you,” I say, and eat the meat. It is delicious.

Entrance

Quand un étranger

arrive... il éprouve,

sans pouvoir s‘en

rendre compte, un

sentiment de gaiété

et de bien-être qui

persiste jusqu’au

départ.

—Ibn Khurdadba

Anyone Can Live Anywhere

Avast and silent darkness settles over Tsebar as we approach, and my flashlight cuts a bright wide beam through the blackness. Karma Dorji points to the dark shape of Jane’s house a few yards away. The wooden slats that cover the windows are rimmed in warm yellow light. Jane opens the door before I knock. “You made it,” she smiles. I turn to thank Karma Dorji’s aunt and uncle again, but they wave off my thanks and disappear.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” Jane says. She is wearing a dark blue kira that falls smoothly to the floor, and her straight blond hair is tied neatly back. Everything about her is elegant and serene. How is it possible, I wonder, to wash clothes in a creek and still look like that?

“I got lost,” I gasp, wriggling out of my backpack. I am afraid to sit down. My knees will not bend, and if they bend, surely they will never again unbend. I stand inside the door, looking around. At one end of the room is a kitchen; the low stove is made out of mud, with two holes in the top for pots and another in the base for the wood. Pots and plates are stacked tidily on shelves above a screened cabinet. At the other end is a sitting area with benches and a low, wooden table. The floor is covered with a straw mat, and the rough mud and stone walls look freshly whitewashed. There are candles everywhere, jam jars of flowers, blue-covered cushions on the wooden benches. In one shadowy corner, there is a skinny chicken. I blink several times but it does not vanish. Is it a pet? Is it dinner?

Through the door to the other room, I can see a thick quilt spread over a wooden bed, a stack of books and a kerosene lamp on a bedside table, a shuttered window.

“What a lovely house,” I say. Jane laughs but I mean it. It feels like a real home, except perhaps for that chicken. I tell myself that I will also transform that horrid place in Pema Gatshel. I will have blue-covered cushions and jam jars of flowers when I go back. And then I remember: I am not going back to Pema Gatshel. I am going home.

“How is your foot?” I ask. I notice she is limping slightly.

“Okay but not great,” Jane says. “I’m supposed to go across to Pema Gatshel next week for our health course—it should be better by then.”

“Our health course?”

“It’s run by the Norwegian doctors at the Pema Gatshel hospital for all the teachers assigned to morning clinic. Do you mean you haven’t been assigned to morning clinic yet?”

I shake my head.

“You will be,” she promises, taking down tin plates and spoons from the shelves. I start to say that I have already eaten but realize I am hungry again. “My landlord and his wife are coming for dinner. In fact, they are bringing dinner. Pema is an excellent cook,” Jane says. “Now, tell me, how is everything over there at Pema Gatshel? How do you like it?”

I hate it, I want to say. Pema Gatshel is awful, my students don’t understand a word I say, I got bitten by a dog, my apartment is hideous and, anyway, I’m going home right after this visit. But the door opens and a man and woman come in. Jane introduces them: Jangchuk, her landlord, a thin wiry man in a dark-red gho, and his wife, Pema, plump and apple-cheeked. We smile crazily at each other, and then Pema begins to unpack several bottles and pots from her bag.

“Bangchang and arra before dinner,” Jane says. “Can you drink?”

“I haven’t had arra yet. What’s bangchang?”

“It’s a kind of barley beer. It’s delicious.”

We sit in a semicircle around the mudstove. Jangchuk has taken a small wooden bowl out of his gho and is wiping it with a piece of cloth. Jane and Pema have their own wooden bowls; I am given an enormous tin mug. Pema stirs and strains and ladles and finally fills our cups. I sip at mine gingerly and am pleasantly