The physics of safety: "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss, Best American Short Stories 2021

At the end of "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss, the unnamed narrator muses that a "person can happen to you and only half a lifetime later does this happening ripen, burst, and deliver itself." As central as this slow ripening--of a person the narrator knew thirty years early--is to the story, it's a much briefer encounter with someone that's at the heart of what the narrator is struggling to understand. Unlike her encounter with Soraya, the narrator's encounter with this person takes root immediately:

"...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."

That this brief encounter had a deep impression on the narrator is seen not just in how she ran in terror to the tram stop immediately after, but in how, decades later, she thinks of the words this stranger said to her when she is trying to make sense of "wild child" Soraya and what people like Soraya can teach her about herself and her daughters. She thinks that Soraya's abusive lover "could have broken her in two with one hand, but either she was already broken or she wasn't going to break."

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My Kindle has the annoying habit of showing me what passages in a book other readers have highlighted. I'm sure there's some way to turn this off, but I'm too lazy to discover it. I don't want to know what other people thought was interesting; I want to decide for myself. There were a number of passages in this short story highlighted, more than in other stories in the 2021 BASS anthology, and it's easy to see why. Krauss drops breadcrumbs on nearly every page about what Soraya and young women like her say about female sexuality and independence, about the treacherous balance between tenderness and violence. Readers didn't seem, however, to underline the one phrase I thought most pithily captured this tightrope walk for young women, which is "...the power to attract men, when it comes, arrives with a terrifying vulnerability." 

Brief synopsis

The narrator has arrived in a boarding house on the outskirts of Geneva. It's kind of a stuffy place, with the matronly named "Mrs. Elderfield" keeping an eye on the narrator and the two eighteen-year-old girls she's staying with. Both of the older girls are there because they had become too much for their parents to handle. They'd been sent to a kind of cobbled-together thirteenth year of school because of "wildness--sex, stimulants, a refusal to comply." 

They've been sent to Switzerland because it seems the safest place on Earth. It represents "reserve and conformity." The narrator calls it "neutral, alpine, orderly," and a "sanitorium or asylum." The parents of the girls have come from professions that one might argue share an obsession with preparing for trouble. The narrator's father is in Switzerland to study to become a trauma doctor, while Soraya's father once was royal engineer for the Shah of Iran, specializing in the "physics of safety," before the Shah was toppled from power. 

The narrator no longer arrives than she is unable to escape the uncomfortable feeling of her budding sexual maturation. Aside from the talk about sex she hears from the older girls, there are the "red apples...rotting in the autumn sun" outside her window, reminders of how quickly her sexual bloom that is only arriving will fade. Then there is the fact that the beds the girls sleep in were once slept in by Mrs. Elderfield's sons. "...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." Like it or not, the girls are at an age where male intimate intrusions are going to come at them from all over.

The ecstasy I feel with a story as full of symbolic grist for the analyst to grind as this one.

As stultifying as this house is, it's a breath of fresh air for the narrator compared to her home. She's freed from her parents continual fights and the "Olympic cruelty" of the girls from her school in America. She is also able to wander around Geneva, which is a considerably larger playground than she's used to. 

The two older girls both are there because of "sex and stimulants," but their relationship to these things is different. The narrator thinks of Marie as someone who "radiates trouble." She has strict house rules set by her father. Soraya, on the other hand, radiates "a sense of authority." She seems confident in her beauty, her sexuality, herself. But it's Soraya who gets in far deeper trouble.

Soraya takes up with a banker who is creepy in a that-guy-from-those-Fifty-Shades-books-I've-never-read-but-can't-help-having-heard-about kind of way. We don't get elaborate details, but it's enough to sketch out what it likely amounts to: a game where he sets the rules and Soraya is punished if she breaks them. The narrator, still much younger than the other two girls and not yet understanding sex like they do, tells herself that Soraya must be amused with the relationship or else she wouldn't allow herself to play the game. She thinks of Soraya as too "unassailable" to act otherwise. 

Looking back, the narrator can see the error of her calculations. "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 little to have to do with pleasure. On the contrary, it was as if she were submitting herself to a trial." 

So what's Soraya's deal?

"Switzerland" reminds me of another wonderful story from a past Best American collection about young women making questionable sexual and life choices, "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline. (Interesting that both stories are named for cities. Seems like this is an easy pairing for a lit professor somewhere. You're welcome.) Sexuality for women is a gift, but a double-edged one. When Soraya first notices her creepy, abusive banker in a hotel restaurant, she is fascinated by how carefully he debones his fish dinner. "It takes a certain kind of man to turn what is essentially an act of violence into elegance," the narrator deadpans. Sex always pairs violence and elegance, and if someone can go in one direction (violence to elegance), they can probably also go in the other. 

Women should celebrate and enjoy being young, sexual, and sensual. That part of life doesn't last long, as the rotting apples remind us, and so young women should be as adventurous as they care to be when they feel ready. But adventures always carry risk. When the narrator first makes out with a boy on a bench in Geneva, it ignites a feeling "both tender and violent." So we get pairings in the narrative both of "tender and violent" and "violence and elegance." In nature, the coexistence during sex of both tenderness/elegance and violence is much easier to see, as we are reminded when a little girl is afraid of a (too on-the-nose?) praying mantis she sees on her wall. But it's there in human relations, too. There are boys more afraid of women than the women are afraid of them, and then there are men who threaten to tear you apart with one hand and then keep on walking. 

Soraya knows these risks, but the only way to enjoy the upside sometimes is to pretend you aren't terrified of the downside. The narrator doesn't simply trust Soraya would not play a game she didn't want to play; she needs to believe this in order to come to terms with her own just-arriving sexuality. She "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." So she believed, or made herself believe, that Soraya was playing 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."

Soraya is likely a frustration to the reader, as she was a consternation to her would-be-guardian father. Not for the first time in his life, the father realizes that he was unable to insure against collapse, that not even Switzerland could keep her safe. So the reader is left to ask the same question as in "Los Angeles": why would a young woman with the potential to make less damaging choices make these particular choices? Why would she stay in a relationship that is not just abusive, but seems to be founded on abuse? Was she far less in control than the narrator thought, much more "assailable" than un-? 

The question takes on more than abstract importance for the narrator when she sees her second daughter beginning to show similar signs of imperiousness. "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." The narrator's daughter is confronting the difficult choice nearly all heterosexual women have to face: be fearless and open to possibilities or listen to fear and be safe. We can feel a paternal, well-meaning frustration with the impulse to "refuse to comply with vulnerabilities," but we have to recognize its centrality as a choice women face. 

Ultimately, the story asks the reader to consider a broader spectrum of reactions to women who allow themselves to be taken advantage of than pity, concern, or frustration. Concern should exist, of course. The police are right to search for Soraya when the grown-ups finally learn what kind of trouble she is in. But along with pity, concern, and frustration, we should also feel respect for the way young women are refusing to live with their vulnerabilities, refusing to be afraid. It turns the young woman's occasional dangerous choice into a rebellion against the way things are every bit as moving as Ahab's.


For Karen's Carlson's take, including a breakdown of the dual meanings of "finished," see here.