I didn’t understand what was going on. This didn’t seem like any kind of torture, not even an attempt to teach me a lesson. It didn’t seem like anything, just an order; only, I had no idea why.

I’d never killed a rat before. I kneeled by the little cage and reached my hand out cautiously, scared of its bite. But the rat was far more scared than I was. It pushed itself into the far corner of its cage and glared at me out of one terror-stricken eye.

Gingerly, with the tips of my fingers, I lifted the trap. Drop it in the bucket and walk away, I told myself. And if they didn’t let me walk away then I’d shut my eyes and try not to look.

I dropped the cage and turned away. But the bucket was narrower than I’d assumed and the corner of the cage stuck on the lip of the bucket, preventing it from sinking all the way. Most of the cage was underwater, then, but that uppermost corner was still clear, and there the rat clung to the bars, shuddering hysterically, pushing his snout between them.

I stared at the rat. I didn’t know what to do. After a few moments, the officer glanced over at me and laughed. He said, “You don’t know how to kill it, sweetheart?”

He pointed to a second bucket. “Tip that over it.”

I lifted the second bucket and began to pour water over the rat’s protruding nose. The force of the falling water pushed the rat off the bars. The officer barked at me not to waste water. “Don’t spill a drop,” he said. I continued to pour: a steady stream whenever the rat poked his head back up. The rat was trying and trying to push his head against the stream, but couldn’t, and now the water was exactly level with the lip of the first bucket and the rat’s nose was millimeters beneath the surface. A little while longer and it gave up altogether. Stopped moving and sank.

The officer turned away, one of the guards hitched the blindfold back down over my eyes, and they took me to my cell.

On the shore of that lake in Europe, wrestling that boy, I remembered the rat.

How old was the boy? Seventeen, perhaps. Or eighteen. Nineteen? Whatever it was, that was as old as he’d get. Suddenly, the silence was absolute. I turned, but the girl was nowhere to be found. When I turned back, the body that seconds before had been locked in combat with me was completely motionless.

Looking back on that silence, its sudden settling, I feel nothing more acutely than the fragility of our existence—how out of place my pride and anger suddenly seemed.