a long ride to the school, on the other
side of the city. Because of our differ-
ent schedules we rode back alone. Only
on the first day, at Mrs. Elderfield’s in-
sistence, did Marie and I meet up to
travel together, but we took the tram in
the wrong direction and ended up in
France. After that I learned the way,
and usually I broke up the journey by
dropping in at the tobacco shop next
to the tram stop, where before catch-
ing the bus I bought myself some candy
from the open containers that, accord-
ing to my mother, were crawling with
strangers’ germs.
I’d never been so happy or so free. It
wasn’t only the difficult and anxious at-
mosphere of my family that I’d got away
from but also my miserable school back
home, with its petty, hormonal girls,
Olympic in their cruelty. I was too young
for a driver’s license, so there was never
any means of escape except through
books or walks in the woods behind our
house. Now I spent the hours after
school wandering the city of Geneva. I
often ended up by the lake, where I
watched the tourist cruises come and
go, or invented stories about the peo-
ple I saw, especially the ones who came
to make out on the benches. Sometimes
I tried on clothes at H&M, or wan-
dered around the Old City, where I was
drawn back to the imposing monument
to the Reformation, to the inscrutable
faces of towering stone Protestants of
whose names I can recall only John Cal-
vin’s. I hadn’t yet heard of Borges, and
yet at no other time in my life was I
closer to the Argentine writer, who had
died in Geneva the year before, and
who, in a letter explaining his wish to
be buried in his adopted city, wrote that
there he had always felt “mysteriously
happy.” Years later, a friend gave me
Borges’s “Atlas,” and I was startled to see
a huge photo of those sombre giants I
used to visit, anti-Semites all, who be-
lieved in predestination and the abso-
lute sovereignty of God. In it John Cal-
vin leans slightly forward to gaze down
at the blind Borges, seated on a stone
ledge holding his cane, chin tilted up-
ward. Between John Calvin and Borges,
the photo seemed to say, there was
a great attunement. There was no at-
tunement between John Calvin and me,
but I, too, had sat on that ledge look-
ing up at him.
Sometimes in my wanderings a man
would stare at me without letting up,
or come on to me in French. These
brief encounters embarrassed me and
left me with a feeling of shame. Often
the men were African, with sparkling
white smiles, but one time, as I stood
looking into the window of a choco-
late shop, a European man in a beau-
tiful suit came up behind me. He leaned
in, his face touching my hair, and infaintly accented English whispered, “I
could break you in two with one hand.”
Then he continued on his way, very
calmly, as if he were a boat sailing on
still water. I ran all the way to the tram
stop, where I stood gasping for breath
until the tram arrived and squeaked
mercifully to a stop.
We were expected at the dinner table
at six-thirty sharp. The wall behind Mrs.
Elderfield’s seat was hung with small
oil paintings of alpine scenes, and even
now an image of a chalet, or cows with
bells, or some Heidi gathering berries
in her checked apron brings back the
aroma of fish and boiled potatoes. Very
little was said during those dinners. Or
maybe it only seemed so in compari-
son with how much was said in the
back bedroom.
Marie’s father had met her mother
in Bangkok while he was a G.I., and
had brought her to America, where he
set her up with a Cadillac Seville and
a ranch house in Silver Spring, Mary-
land. When they divorced, her mother
returned to Thailand, her father moved
to Boston, and for the next ten years
Marie was tossed and tugged between
them. For the past few years she had
lived exclusively with her mother in
Bangkok, where she had a boyfriend
with whom she was madly, jealously in
love and would stay out with him all
night, dancing in clubs, drunk or high.
When Marie’s mother, at her wit’s end
and busy with her own boyfriend, told
Marie’s father about the situation, heyanked her out of Thailand and de-
posited her in Switzerland, known for
its “finishing” schools that polished
the wild and the dark out of girls and
contained them into well-mannered
women. Ecolint was not such a school,
but Marie, it turned out, was already
too old for a proper finishing school.
She was, in the estimation of those
schools, already finished. And not in
the good way. So, instead, Marie was
sent to do an extra year of high school
at Ecolint. Along with Mrs. Elderfield’s
house rules, there were strict instruc-
tions from Marie’s father about her
curfew, and after Marie got into Mrs.
Elderfield’s cooking wine those strin-
gent regulations were tightened even
further. Because of this, on the week-
ends that I did not take the train to
Basel to see my parents, Marie and I
were often home together while Soraya
was out.
Unlike Marie, Soraya didn’t radiate
trouble. At least not the sort of trou-
ble that comes of recklessness, of a de-
sire to cross whatever boundaries or
limits others have set for you, without
consideration of the consequences. If
anything, Soraya radiated a sense of
authority, exquisite because it derived
from an inner source. Her outward ap-
pearance was neat and composed. She
was small, no taller than I was, and
wore her dark straight hair cut in what
she called a Chanel bob. Her eyes were
winged with eyeliner, and she had a
downy mustache that she made no
effort to conceal, because she must have
known that it added to her allure. She
always spoke in a low voice, as if she
trafficked in secrets, a habit she may
have formed during her childhood in
revolutionary Iran, or in her adoles-
cence, when her appetite for boys, and
then men, quickly outgrew what was
considered acceptable by her family.
On Sundays, when there wasn’t much
to do, the three of us would spend the
day closed up in the back bedroom lis-
tening to cassettes and, in that low-
slung voice further deepened by smok-
ing, descriptions of the men Soraya
had been with and the things she’d
done with them. If these accounts didn’t
shock me, it was partly because I didn’t
yet have a solid enough sense of sex,
let alone the erotic, to really know what
to expect from it. But it was also be-54 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020