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 a skirt with nothing underneath. She told us this as we crossed the frozen field on our way to the bus stop, and we laughed. But then Soraya stopped and cupped her lighter from the wind. In the brightness of the flame I caught her eyes, and for the first time I felt afraid for her. Or afraid of her, maybe. Afraid of what she lacked, or of what she possessed, that drove her beyond the place where others would draw the line.
Soraya had to call the banker from the pay phone at school at certain times of the day, even if it meant excusing herself in the middle of class. When she arrived at the Hôtel Royal for one of their meetings, an envelope would be waiting for her at the front desk, containing elaborate instructions for what she was to do when she entered the room. I don’t know what happened if she failed to follow the banker’s rules, or follow them to his exacting standards. It didn’t occur to me that she might allow herself to be punished. Barely out of childhood, I think what I understood then, however simply, was that she was engaged in a game. A game that at any moment she could have refused to go on playing. That she, of all people, knew how easily rules could be broken, but that she elected, in this instance alone, to follow them—what could I have understood then about that? I don’t know. Just as thirty years later I don’t know if what I saw in her eyes when the flame illuminated them was perversity, or recklessness, or fear, or its opposite: the unyielding nature of her will.
During the Christmas break Marie flew to Boston, I went to stay with my family in Basel, and Soraya went home to Paris. When we returned two weeks later, something had changed in Soraya. She seemed withdrawn, closed up in herself, and she spent her time in bed listening to her Walkman, reading books in French, or smoking out the window. Whenever the phone rang, she jumped up to answer it, and when it was for her she shut the door and sometimes didn’t come out for hours. Marie came to my room more and more often, because, she said, being around Soraya gave her the creeps. As we lay together in my narrow bed, Marie would tell me stories about Bangkok, and however full of drama they were, she could still laugh at herself and make me laugh. Looking back, I think that she taught me something that, however many times I have forgotten it and remembered it since then, has never really left me: something about the absurdity, and also the truth, of the dramas we need to feel fully alive.
From January, then, until April, what I mostly remember are the things that were happening to me. Kate, the American girl I became close with, who was the oldest of four sisters, and lived in a large house in the neighborhood of Champel, and showed me her father’s collection of Playboy. The young daughter of Mrs. Elderfield’s neighbor whom I sometimes babysat, and who one night sat up in bed screaming when she saw a praying mantis on the wall, lit by the headlights of a car. My long walks after school. The weekends in Basel, where I would entertain my little sister with games in the kitchen to distract her from my parents’ arguments. And Shareef, a boy in my class with an easy smile whom I walked to the lake with one afternoon, and made out with on a bench. It was the first time I’d kissed a boy, and when he pushed his tongue into my mouth, the feeling it ignited was both tender and violent. I dug my nails into his back, and he kissed me harder, we writhed together on the bench like the couples I’d sometimes watched from afar. On the tram ride home I could smell him on my skin, and a feeling of horror took hold of me at the thought of having to see him again in school the next day. When I did, I looked past him as if he didn’t exist, but with my gaze softly focused, so that I could still see the blur of his hurt in the corner of my eye.
Of that time, I remember, too, how once I came home from school and found Soraya in the bathroom, doing her makeup in front of the mirror. Her eyes were shining, and she seemed happy and light again, as she hadn’t been for weeks. She called me in, and wanted to brush and braid my hair. Her cassette player was balanced on the edge of the bathtub, and while her fingers worked through my hair, she sang along. And then, when she turned to reach for a hairpin behind her, I saw the purple bruise on her throat.
And yet I never really doubted her strength. Never doubted that she was in control and doing what she wanted. Playing a game according to rules she had agreed to, if not invented. Only looking back do I realize how much I wanted to see her that way: strong-willed and free, invulnerable and under her own command. From my walks alone in Geneva, I already understood that the power to attract men, when it comes, arrives with a terrifying vulnerability. But I wanted to believe that the balance of power could be tipped in one’s favor by strength or fearlessness or something I couldn’t name. Soon after things began with the banker, Soraya had told us that once his wife had called on the hotel phone, and he’d instructed Soraya to go into the bathroom, but she’d refused and instead lay listening on the bed. The naked banker turned his back but had no choice other than to go on talking to his wife, whose call he hadn’t expected. He spoke to her in Dutch, Soraya said, but in the same tone the men in her own family spoke to their mothers: gravely, with a touch of fear. And as she listened, she knew something had been exposed that he had not wished to expose, and which shifted the balance between them. I preferred that story, if I preferred any story at all, to trying to understand the bruise on Soraya’s neck.
It was the first week of May when she didn’t return home. Mrs. Elderfield woke us at dawn, demanding we tell her whatever we knew about Soraya’s whereabouts. Marie shrugged and looked at her chipped nail polish, and I tried to follow her cue until Mrs. Elderfield said that she was going to call both Soraya’s parents and the police, and that if something had happened to her, if she were in danger and we were withholding any information, we wouldn’t be forgiven or be able to forgive ourselves. Marie looked scared, and, seeing her face, I began to cry. A few hours later, the police arrived. Alone with the detective and his partner in the kitchen, I told them everything I knew, which I realized as I spoke—losing the thread, confusing myself—was not so much. After they interrogated Marie, they went to the back bedroom and combed through Soraya’s things. Afterward it looked as if the bedroom had been ransacked: everything, even her underwear, strewn across the floor and her bed with an air of violation.
That night, the second one that Soraya was missing, there was a huge storm. Marie and I lay awake in my bed, neither one of us speaking of the things we feared. In the morning, the crunch of gravel under the wheels of a car woke us, and we jumped out of bed to look out the window. But when the door of the taxi opened, it was a man who emerged, his lips drawn tight below his heavy black mustache. In the familiar features of her father, some truth about Soraya’s origins was revealed, exposing the illusion of her autonomy.
Mrs. Elderfield made us repeat to Mr. Sassani the things we’d already told the police. He was a tall and intimidating man, his face knotted in anger, and I think she wasn’t brave enough to do it herself. In the end, Marie—emboldened by her new authority and the sensational quality of the news she had to deliver—did most of the talking. Mr. Sassani listened in silence, and it was impossible to say whether what he felt was fear or fury. Both, it must have been. He turned toward the door. He wanted to go immediately to the Hôtel Royal. Mrs. Elderfield tried to calm him. She repeated what was already known: that the banker had checked out two days before, the room had been searched, nothing had turned up. The police were doing everything they could. The banker had rented a car that they were working to track down. The only thing to do was to stay here and wait until there was some news.