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 the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris via Tehran, where 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—is what had landed them both in Switzerland for an extra year of school, a thirteenth year that previously 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 our family that I’d gotten 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 walking 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 the 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 same ledge looking up at him.