THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 53
I
t’s been thirty years since I saw
Soraya. In that time I tried to find
her only once. I think I was afraid
of seeing her, afraid of trying to under-
stand her now that I was older and
maybe could, which I suppose is the
same as saying that I was afraid of my-
self: of what I might discover beneath
my understanding. The years passed
and I thought of her less and less. I went
to university, then graduate school, got
married sooner than I’d imagined and
had two daughters, only a year apart. If
Soraya came to mind at all, flickering
past in a mercurial chain of associations,
she would recede again just as quickly.
I met Soraya when I was thirteen,
the year that my family spent abroad in
Switzerland. “Expect the worst” might
have been the family motto, had my fa-
ther not explicitly instructed us that it
was “Trust no one, suspect everyone.”
We lived on the edge of a cliff, though
our house was impressive. We were Eu-
ropean Jews, even in America, which is
to say that catastrophic things had hap-
pened, and might happen again. Our
parents fought violently, their marriage
forever on the verge of collapse. Financial
ruin also loomed; we were warned that
the house would soon have to be sold.
No money had come in since our father
left the family business, after years of
daily screaming battles with our grand-
father. When our father went back to
school, I was two, my brother four, and
my sister yet to be born. Premed courses
were followed by medical school at Co-
lumbia, then a residency in orthopedic
surgery at the Hospital for Special Sur-
gery, though what kind of special we
didn’t know. During those eleven years
of training, my father logged countless
nights on call in the emergency room,
greeting a grisly parade of victims: car
crashes, motorcycle accidents, and, once,
the crash of an Avianca airplane headed
for Bogotá, which nose-dived into a
hill in Cove Neck. At bottom, he may
have clung to the superstitious belief
that these nightly confrontations with
horror could save his family from it.
But, one stormy September afternoon,
my grandmother was hit by a speeding
van at the corner of First Avenue and
Fiftieth Street, causing hemorrhaging
in her brain. When my father got to
Bellevue Hospital, his mother was lying
on a stretcher in the emergency room.
She squeezed his hand and slipped into
a coma. Six weeks later, she died. Less
than a year after her death, my father
finished his residency and moved our
family to Switzerland, where he began
a fellowship in trauma.
That Switzerland—neutral, alpine,
orderly—has the best institute for
trauma in the world seems paradoxical.
The whole country had, back then, the
atmosphere of a sanatorium or an asy-
lum. Instead of padded walls it had the
snow, which muffled and softened ev-
erything, until after so many centuries
the Swiss just went about instinctively
muffling themselves. Or that was the
point: a country singularly obsessed with
controlled reserve and conformity, with
engineering watches, with the prompt-
ness of trains, would, it follows, have an
advantage in the emergency of a body
smashed to pieces. That Switzerland is
also a country of many languages was
what granted my brother and me an
unexpected reprieve from the familial
gloom. The institute was in Basel, where
the language is Schweizerdeutsch, but
my mother was of the opinion that we
should continue our French. Schweizer-
deutsch was only a hairbreadth removed
from Deutsch, and we were not allowed
to touch anything even remotely
Deutsch, the language of our maternal
grandmother, whose entire family had
been murdered by the Nazis. We were
therefore enrolled in the École Inter-
nationale in Geneva. My brother lived
in the dormitory on campus, but, as I’d
just barely turned thirteen, I wasn’t old
enough. To save me from the traumas
associated with Deutsch, a solution was
found for me on the western outskirts
of Geneva, and in September, 1987, I be-
came a boarder in the home of a sub-
stitute English teacher named Mrs. El-
derfield. She had hair dyed the color of
straw and the rosy cheeks of someone
raised in a damp climate, but she seemed
old all the same.
My small bedroom had a window
that looked onto an apple tree. On the
day that I arrived, red apples were fallen
all around it, rotting in the autumn sun.
Inside the room was a little desk, a read-
ing chair, and a bed at whose foot was
folded a gray woollen army blanket old
enough to have been used in a world
war. The brown carpet was worn down
to the weave at the threshold.Two other boarders, both eighteen,
shared the back bedroom at the end of
the hall. All three of our narrow beds
had once belonged to Mrs. Elderfield’s
sons, who had grown up and moved
away long before we girls arrived. There
were no photographs of her boys, so we
never knew what they looked like, but
we rarely forgot that they had once slept
in our beds. Between Mrs. Elderfield’s
absent sons and us there was a carnal
link. There was never any mention of
Mrs. Elderfield’s husband, if she’d ever
had one. She was not the sort of per-
son who invited personal questions.
When it was time to sleep, she switched
off our lights without a word.
On my first evening in the house, I
sat on the floor of the older girls’ room,
among their piles of clothes. Back home,
girls sprayed themselves with a cheap
men’s cologne called Drakkar Noir.
But the strong perfume that permeated
these girls’ clothes was unfamiliar to me.
Mixed with the chemistry of their skin,
it mellowed, but from time to time it
built up so strongly in their bedsheets
and tossed-off shirts that Mrs. Elderfield
forced open the windows, and the cold
air once again stripped everything bare.
I listened as the older girls discussed
their lives in coded words I didn’t un-
derstand. They laughed at my naïveté,
but they were only ever kind to me.
Marie had come from Bangkok via Bos-
ton, and Soraya from Tehran via the
Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris; her
father had been the royal engineer to
the Shah before the revolution sent their
family into exile, too late to pack Soraya’s
toys but in time to transfer most of their
liquid assets. Wildness—sex, stimulants,
a refusal to comply—was what had
landed them both in Switzerland for
an extra year of school, a thirteenth year
that neither of them had ever heard of.W
e used to set out for school in
the dark. To get to the bus stop,
we had to cross a field, which by No-
vember was covered in snow that the
sheared brown stalks sworded through.
We were always late. I was always the
only one who’d eaten. Someone’s hair
was always wet, the ends frozen. We
huddled in the enclosure, inhaling sec-
ondhand smoke from Soraya’s cigarette.
The bus took us past the Armenian
church to the orange tram. Then it was