“Wow, it’s only eleven—that still leaves time for me to ruin
tomorrow by staying up doing nothing on the Internet.”
cause of the coolness with which Soraya
told her stories. She had about her a
kind of unassailability. And yet I sup-
pose she felt the need to test whatever
it was at her core that had come to her,
like all natural gifts, without effort, and
what might happen if it failed her. The
sex she described seemed to have lit-
tle to do with pleasure. On the con-
trary, it was as if she were submitting
herself to a trial. Only when Tehran
was woven into her discursive stories
and she recounted her memories of
that city was her sense of pleasure truly
palpable.
N
ovember, after the arrival of the
snow: it must have been Novem-
ber already when the businessman
showed up in our conversations. Dutch,
more than twice Soraya’s age, he lived
in a house with no curtains on an Am-
sterdam canal, but every couple of weeks
he came to Geneva on business. A
banker, as I recall. The lack of curtains
I remember because he told Soraya
that he only fucked his wife with the
lights on when he was sure that peo-
ple across the Herengracht could see
her. He stayed at the Hôtel Royal, and
it was in the restaurant of that hotel,
where her uncle had taken her for tea,
that Soraya first met him. He was sit-
ting a few tables away, and, while her
uncle droned on in Farsi about all the
money his children spent, Soraya
watched the banker delicately debone
his fish. Wielding his utensils with pre-
cision, a look of absolute calm on his
face, the man extracted the skeleton
whole. He performed the operation
perfectly, slowly, with no sign of hun-
ger. Not once, as he proceeded to de-
vour the fish, did he stop to remove a
small bone from his mouth, the way
everyone does. He ate his fish without
choking, without even making a pass-
ing grimace of displeasure at being
speared in the throat by a tiny, errant
bone. It takes a certain kind of man to
turn what is essentially an act of vio-
lence into elegance. While Soraya’s
uncle was in the men’s room, the man
called for his check, paid in cash, and
rose to leave, buttoning his sports jacket.
But, instead of going straight out the
doors that led to the lobby, he detoured
past Soraya’s table, on which he dropped
a five-hundred-franc note. His room
number was written in blue ink next
to Albrecht von Haller’s face, as if it
were Albrecht von Haller who was
affording her this bit of precious in-
formation. Later, while she was kneel-
ing on his hotel bed, freezing in the
cold gusting in through the open ter-
race doors, the banker told her that he
always got a room overlooking the lake
because the powerful stream of its
fountain, which shot up hundreds of
feet into the air, aroused him. As she
repeated this to us, lying flat on the
floor with her feet up on the twin bed
of Mrs. Elderfield’s son, she laughed
and couldn’t stop. And yet, despite the
laughter, an arrangement had been
made. From then on, if the banker
wished to let Soraya know of his im-
pending arrival he would call Mrs. El-
derfield’s house and pretend to be her
uncle. The five-hundred-franc note
Soraya put away in the drawer of her
night table.
At the time, Soraya was seeing other
men. There was a boy her age, the son
of a diplomat, who came to pick her up
in his father’s sports car, the transmis-
sion of which he destroyed on a drive
they took to Montreux. And there was
an Algerian in his early twenties who
worked as a waiter at a restaurant near
the school. She slept with the diplo-
mat’s son, whereas the Algerian, who
was genuinely in love with her, she only
allowed to kiss her. Because he had
grown up poor like Camus, she pro-
jected onto him a fantasy. But, when he
had nothing to say about the sun he
was raised under, she began to lose feel-
ing for him. It sounds cold, but later I
experienced this myself: the sudden dis-
sociation that comes with the fear of
realizing how intimate you have been
with someone who is not at all what
you imagined but something other, en-
tirely unknown. So when the banker
demanded that Soraya drop both the
diplomat’s son and the Algerian, it was
not difficult for her to comply. It ex-
cused her of responsibility for the Al-
gerian’s pain.
That morning before we left for
school, the telephone rang. When she
cut things off with each of these lovers,
the banker instructed, she was to wear
