Switzerland
It’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 understand her now that I was older and maybe could, which I suppose is the same as saying that I was afraid of myself: 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 father 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 European Jews, even in America, which is to say that catastrophic things had happened, 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 grandfather. 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 Columbia, then a residency in orthopedic surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery, 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 that nosedived into a hill in Cove Neck. At bottom, he might 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 on 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 asylum. Instead of padded walls it had the snow, which muffled and softened everything, 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 promptness 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. Schweizerdeutsch 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 Internationale in Geneva. My brother lived in the dormitory on campus, but as I’d just turned thirteen, I wasn’t old enough. To save me from the traumas associated with Deutsch, a solution was found for me in the western outskirts of Geneva, and in September 1987 I became a boarder in the home of a substitute English teacher named Mrs. Elderfield. 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 small desk, a reading chair, and a bed at whose foot was folded a gray wool 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 person 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, the 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 their body heat and 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 understand. They laughed at my naïveté, but they were both only ever kind to me. Marie had come from Bangkok via Boston, and Soraya from Tehran via the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris; her father had been the royal engineer to the shah before the revolution had 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.
We used to set out for school in the dark. To get to the bus stop, we had to cross a field, which by November 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 under the enclosure, inhaling secondhand smoke from Soraya’s cigarette. The bus took us past the Armenian church to the orange tram. Then it was a long ride to the school on the other side of the city. Because of our different schedules we rode back alone. Only on the first day, at Mrs. Elderfield’s insistence, 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 stopping in the tobacco shop next to the tram stop, where before catching the bus I bought myself some candy from the open containers that, according 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 atmosphere 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 never had any destination, though I often ended up by the lake, where I watched the tourist cruises come and go, or invented stories about the people I saw, especially the ones who came to make out on the benches. Sometimes I tried on clothes at H&M, or wandered 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 only recall John Calvin’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 somber giants I used to visit regularly, anti-Semites all, who believed in predestination and the absolute sovereignty of God. In it John Calvin leans slightly forward to gaze down at the blind Borges, seated on a stone ledge holding his cane, chin tilted upward. Between John Calvin and Borges, the photo seemed to say, there was a great attunement. There was no attunement between John Calvin and me, but I too had sat on that ledge looking up at him.