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, and then slumped into a seat behind the driver.

We were expected at the dinner table at 6:30 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 seems so in comparison to how much was said in the back bedroom.

Marie’s father met her mother in Bangkok while he was a GI, and had brought her back to America, where he set her up with a Cadillac Seville and a ranch house in Silver Spring, Maryland. When they divorced, her mother went back to Thailand, and for the next fifteen years Marie was tossed and tugged between them. In the last 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 her 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 these schools, already finished. And not in the good way. And so instead Marie was sent to do an extra year of high school at Ecolint, which went to the thirteenth grade. 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, these 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.