In the hours that followed, Mr. Sassani paced grimly in front of the windows of the living room. As the royal engineer to the shah, he must have ensured against all kinds of collapse. But then the shah himself had fallen, and the vast and intricate structure of Mr. Sassani’s life had crumbled, making a mockery of the physics of safety. He’d sent his daughter to Switzerland because of its promise to restore order and safety, but even Switzerland hadn’t kept Soraya safe, and this betrayal 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 disheveled 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 embraced 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. Elderfield 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.
The 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 decide 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 oneself 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 returned 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 marveled 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 eventually 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 in 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 nightclub he managed, and then, when we got back to the 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 apartment in silence. And somehow I broke free of the nightclub manager and raced up another floor to the safety of my own apartment, though for the rest of the summer I was terrified of running into him on the stairs, and listened for his comings 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 practice 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 anyone 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 think I didn’t have the courage, and after that summer I was never again so bold or so reckless. I had one boyfriend 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 oldest 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 contrast 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 attention, 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 in 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, burning a hole through her with his eyes. Her stare was a challenge. If she had been riding with a friend, she might have turned her face slowly to her, without 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 how a person can happen to you and only half a lifetime later does this happening ripen, burst, and deliver itself. Soraya with her downy mustache and her winged eyeliner and her laugh, that deep laugh that came from her stomach, 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.
Zusya on the Roof
Heels dug into the tar paper, twenty-three floors above 110th Street, cradling his newborn grandson—how did he wind up here? It was not a simple thing, as his father would say. Simplicity was not his patrimony.
To begin specifically: Brodman had been dead for two weeks, but then, sadly, he had come back to this world, where he’d spent fifty years trying to write unnecessary books. There had been complications after surgery for a tumor in his bowel. Hooked to a respirator, bags for every fluid going in or coming out, for fifteen days his body lay on a gurney, fighting a medieval war against double pneumonia. For two weeks Brodman hung in the balance, dead and not dead. Like the house in Leviticus, he had been infested with plague: they scraped him clean and took him apart, stone by stone. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. Either the plague would be gone or it had already spread through him.