58 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
appeared to be too much for him. At
any moment, it seemed he might shout
or cry out.
In the end, Soraya came home on
her own. On her own—just as she had
gotten into it on her own, of her own
choosing. Crossing the newly green
field that evening, arriving at the door
dishevelled but whole. Her eyes were
bloodshot and the makeup around them
was smeared, but she was calm. She
didn’t even express surprise at the sight
of her father, only winced when he
shouted her name, the last syllable
muffled by a gasp or sob. He lunged
for her, and for a moment it seemed
that he was going to yell or raise his
hand to her, but she didn’t flinch, and
instead he pulled her to him and em-
braced her, his eyes filled with tears. He
spoke to her urgently, angrily, in Farsi,
but she said little back. She was tired,
she said in English, she needed to sleep.
In a voice unnaturally high, Mrs. El-
derfield asked if she wanted anything
to eat. Soraya shook her head, as if there
were nothing anymore that any of us
could offer that she needed, and turned
toward the long corridor that led to the
back bedroom. As she passed me, she
stopped, reached out her hand, and
touched my hair. And then, very slowly,
she continued on her way.
T
he next day her father took her
back to Paris. I don’t remember if
we said goodbye. I think we thought,
Marie and I, that she would come back,
that she would return to finish the
school year and tell us everything. But
she never did. She left it to us to de-
cide for ourselves what had happened
to her, and in my mind I saw her in
that moment when she’d touched my
hair with a sad smile, and believed that
what I’d seen was a kind of grace: the
grace that comes of having pushed one-
self to the brink, of having confronted
some darkness or fear and won.
At the end of June, my father finished
his fellowship and, expert in trauma,
moved us back to New York. The mean
girls took an interest in me when I re-
turned to school in September, and
wanted to befriend me. At a party, one
of them turned a circle around me while
I stood calmly, very still. She marvelled
at how I’d changed, and at my clothes
bought abroad. I had gone out into the
world and come back, and though I
wasn’t saying anything, they sensed that
I knew things. For a while, Marie sent
me cassettes on which she’d recorded
herself talking to me, telling me all that
was happening in her life. But eventu-
ally they stopped arriving, and we lost
touch, too. And that was the end of
Switzerland for me.
In my mind, that was also the end
of Soraya. As I said, I never saw her
again, and tried to look for her only
once, the summer I was nineteen and
living in Paris. Even then, I barely
tried—calling two Sassani families who
were listed in the phone book and then
giving up. And yet if it hadn’t been for
her I don’t know that I would have got
on the motorcycle of the young man
who washed dishes at the restaurant
across the street from my apartment
on the Rue de Chevreuse, and ridden
back with him to his apartment on the
outskirts of the city, or gone to a bar
with the older man who lived on the
floor below me, who went on about the
job I knew he would never get for me
at the night club he managed, and then,
when we got back to our building,
lunged at me on the landing in front
of his door, tackling me in an embrace.
I watched a movie on the dishwasher’s
sofa, and afterward he told me it was
dangerous to go home with men I didn’t
know, and drove me back to my apart-
ment in silence. And somehow I broke
free of the night-club manager and
raced up another floor to the safety of
my own apartment, though for the rest
of the summer I was terrified of run-
ning into him, and listened for his com-
ings and goings before I worked up the
courage to open my door and bolt down
the stairs. I told myself that I did these
things because I was in Paris to prac-
tice my French and had resolved to
speak to anyone who would speak to
me. But all summer I was aware that
Soraya might be near, somewhere in
that city, that I was close to her and
close to something in myself that drew
me and frightened me a little, as she
had. She had gone further than any-
one I knew in a game that was never
only a game, one that was about power
and fear, about the refusal to comply
with the vulnerabilities one is born into.
But I myself wasn’t able to go very
far with it. I didn’t have the courage,and after that summer I was never again
so bold or so reckless. I had one boy-
friend after another, all of them gentle
and a little afraid of me, and then I got
married and had two daughters of my
own. The older has my husband’s sandy
hair; if she were walking in a field in
autumn, you could lose her easily. But
the younger one stands out wherever
she is. She grows and develops in con-
trast with everything around her. It’s
wrong, dangerous even, to imagine that
a person has any choice in her looks.
And yet I’d swear that my daughter had
something to do with the black hair
and green eyes that always attract at-
tention, even when she’s standing in a
chorus of other children. She’s only
twelve, and still small, but already men
look at her when she walks in the street
or rides the subway. And she doesn’t
hunch, or put up her hood, or hide away
behind her headphones the way her
friends do. She stands erect and still,
like a queen, which only makes her more
an object of their fascination. She has
a proudness about her that refuses to
grow small, but if it were only that I
might not have begun to fear for her.
It’s her curiosity about her own power,
its reach and its limits, that scares me.
Though maybe the truth is that, when
I am not afraid for her, I envy her. One
day I saw it: how she looked back at
the man in the business suit who stood
across the subway car from her, burn-
ing a hole through her with his eyes.
Her stare was a challenge. If she’d been
riding with a friend, she might have
turned her face slowly toward her, with-
out taking her eyes off the man, and
said something to invoke laughter. It
was then that Soraya came back to me,
and since then I have been what I can
only call haunted by her. By her, and by
how a person can happen to you and
only half a lifetime later does this hap-
pening ripen, burst, and deliver itself.
Soraya with her downy mustache and
her winged eyeliner and her laugh, that
deep laugh that came from her stom-
ach, when she told us about the Dutch
banker’s arousal. He could have broken
her in two with one hand, but either
she was already broken or she wasn’t
going to break. NEWYORKER.COM
Nicole Krauss on the drama of desire.