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 magazines. The small 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 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 but 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.