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 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 of 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. Not once as he proceeded to devour the fish did he stop to remove a small bone from his mouth, as everyone does. He performed the operation with perfection, slowly, without any sign of hunger. Then he ate his fish without choking, without even making the passing grimace that comes with the displeasure of being speared in the throat by a tiny, errant bone. It’s a certain kind of man that can take what is essentially an act of violence and turn it into elegance. While her 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 the hotel bed, freezing in the cold gusting in through the open terrace doors, the banker told her that he always got a room with a view 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 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 he wished to let Soraya know of his impending arrival, the banker would call the phone at 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 the 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 their ride to Montreux. And there was an Algerian in his early twenties who worked as a waiter in a restaurant near the school. She slept with the son of the diplomat, 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 on 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 it in myself: the sudden disassociation that comes with the fear of realizing how intimate one has been with one 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 Soraya to comply. It excused her of responsibility for the Algerian’s pain.