SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 14, 2021] “God Has Passed Through Here”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
This is a dark story. As Manguel notes:
The vast shadow of the Armenian Genocide, when a million ethnic Armenians were murdered in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, hangs over every Armenian writer today.
In this story a young girl is to be inspected by The Europeans.
The story starts kind of amusingly with The Europeans having a very hard time getting to the Armenian village:
In about twenty minutes, when the highway ends and we turns right. Then we’ll take the first side road, it’s about fifteen minutes long, after which… No we won’t come to the village yet…but it will be closer.
They wind up having to carry the car the remainder of the way because the roads are impassable.
The girl, Noem, is to be sold to the Europeans, because the family is in dire need of money. She must undress un front of the men, and she is embarrassed.
But the men are not lascivious about her nakedness. Indeed, they turn the lights out when they see her: “It’s a sacrifice for a man of my age to touch a woman of your age, but I must examine you.”
Why are they looking her then? Because she glows–70% of her body is phosphorous. They give her father half of the money up front and then say they await her death.
The rest of the story grows as dark as her skin is light.
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