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, which nose-dived into a hill in Cove Neck. At bottom, he may 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 at 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 an 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 barely turned thirteen, I wasn’t old enough. To save me from the traumas associated with Deutsch, a solution was found for me on 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 little desk, a reading chair, and a bed at whose foot was folded a gray woollen 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, 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 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 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 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 in 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 dropping in at 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 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 recall only 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 sombre giants I used to visit, 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.
Sometimes in my wanderings a man would stare at me without letting up, or come on to me in French. These brief encounters embarrassed me and left me with a feeling of shame. Often the men were African, with sparkling white smiles, but one time, as I stood looking into the window of a chocolate shop, a European man in a beautiful suit came up behind me. He leaned in, his face touching my hair, and in faintly accented English whispered, “I could break you in two with one hand.” Then he continued on his way, very calmly, as if he were a boat sailing on still water. I ran all the way to the tram stop, where I stood gasping for breath until the tram arrived and squeaked mercifully to a stop.
We were expected at the dinner table at six-thirty sharp. The wall behind Mrs. Elderfield’s seat was hung with small oil paintings of alpine scenes, and even now an image of a chalet, or cows with bells, or some Heidi gathering berries in her checked apron brings back the aroma of fish and boiled potatoes. Very little was said during those dinners. Or maybe it only seemed so in comparison with how much was said in the back bedroom.
Marie’s father had met her mother in Bangkok while he was a G.I., and had brought her to America, where he set her up with a Cadillac Seville and a ranch house in Silver Spring, Maryland. When they divorced, her mother returned to Thailand, her father moved to Boston, and for the next ten years Marie was tossed and tugged between them. For the past few years she had lived exclusively with her mother in Bangkok, where she had a boyfriend with whom she was madly, jealously in love and would stay out with him all night, dancing in clubs, drunk or high. When Marie’s mother, at her wit’s end and busy with her own boyfriend, told Marie’s father about the situation, he yanked her out of Thailand and deposited her in Switzerland, known for its “finishing” schools that polished the wild and the dark out of girls and contained them into well-mannered women. Ecolint was not such a school, but Marie, it turned out, was already too old for a proper finishing school. She was, in the estimation of those schools, already finished. And not in the good way. So, instead, Marie was sent to do an extra year of high school at Ecolint. Along with Mrs. Elderfield’s house rules, there were strict instructions from Marie’s father about her curfew, and after Marie got into Mrs. Elderfield’s cooking wine those stringent regulations were tightened even further. Because of this, on the weekends that I did not take the train to Basel to see my parents, Marie and I were often home together while Soraya was out.
Unlike Marie, Soraya didn’t radiate trouble. At least not the sort of trouble that comes of recklessness, of a desire to cross whatever boundaries or limits others have set for you, without consideration of the consequences. If anything, Soraya radiated a sense of authority, exquisite because it derived from an inner source. Her outward appearance was neat and composed. She was small, no taller than I was, and wore her dark straight hair cut in what she called a Chanel bob. Her eyes were winged with eyeliner, and she had a downy mustache that she made no effort to conceal, because she must have known that it added to her allure. She always spoke in a low voice, as if she trafficked in secrets, a habit she may have formed during her childhood in revolutionary Iran, or in her adolescence, when her appetite for boys, and then men, quickly outgrew what was considered acceptable by her family. On Sundays, when there wasn’t much to do, the three of us would spend the day closed up in the back bedroom listening to cassettes and, in that low-slung voice further deepened by smoking, descriptions of the men Soraya had been with and the things she’d done with them. If these accounts didn’t shock me, it was partly because I didn’t yet have a solid enough sense of sex, let alone the erotic, to really know what to expect from it. But it was also because of the coolness with which Soraya told her stories. She had about her a kind of unassailability. And yet I suppose 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 little to do with pleasure. On the contrary, 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.
November, after the arrival of the snow: it must have been November 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 Amsterdam 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 people 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 sitting 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 precision, a look of absolute calm on his face, the man extracted the skeleton whole. He performed the operation perfectly, slowly, with no sign of hunger. Not once, as he proceeded to devour 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 passing 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 violence 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 information. Later, while she was kneeling on his hotel bed, freezing in the cold gusting in through the open terrace 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 impending arrival he would call Mrs. Elderfield’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 transmission 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 diplomat’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 projected onto him a fantasy. But, when he had nothing to say about the sun he was raised under, she began to lose feeling for him. It sounds cold, but later I experienced this myself: the sudden dissociation 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, entirely 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 excused her of responsibility for the Algerian’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 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, 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 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 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 to distract her from my parents’ arguments. And Shareef, a boy in my class with an easy smile, with whom I walked to the lake one afternoon and made out 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 focussed, 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. Soraya told us that soon after things began with the banker 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 that 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 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 that 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 was 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. Once they had 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 Soraya’s father, some truth about her 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 to the Hôtel Royal immediately. 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 stay here and wait until there was some news.
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 insured 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 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 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 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 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 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 apartment 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 running into him, 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 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 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 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 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, burning 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, 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 by 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. ♦
