The boy from Shobrakheit used to swear to anyone who’d listen that even if he had a million pounds, he’d never leave this country. He denounced everyone who did leave as traitorous sons of whores and shoes. But sometimes, late at night, in bed with the lights off, he used to ask me quietly what it was like “outside.” That’s how he talked about the rest of the world—“outside,” as though this country were a broom closet, as though I were a fish-eye peephole.
