![]() ![]() That summer, everybody was talking about a girl from the area who had been rejected by her clan. They entertained themselves by spreading ridiculous rumors or by telling stories that a city kid like me found hard to believe. There was no electricity in the village yet, and nobody had a television or a computer. I could hear them laughing and burping from my bedroom, where I lay and stared up at the earthen ceiling for hours on end. When they met up to drink stolen beers in the evening, they never invited me to join them. The other teen-agers in the village kept their distance. I offered to help with farmwork, but nobody dared put me to such a thankless task, because I was a judge’s son and my arms were so thin. All the days blurred into one, and I could find nothing to distract me from the boredom. “I don’t want you to be like those idle boys who wander our streets,” he told me. In my sixteenth summer, he sent me to “that hole” to learn the hard life of the countryside, to strengthen my soul and my muscles. He was born on those fertile plains but he made his career in the city, where he became an important man who wears suits and drives a big car. My father is a feared and respected man there, and I do not want to bring shame upon him. Or the name of the rural village where this story took place.
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