Jay stands up, collects the tray with her cold, unfinished soup, and forces a smile. “I’ll let you get back to your work.”
Kersti doesn’t respond, but after he’s gone she stares disapprovingly at her laptop, hating every word of the opening paragraph of her latest Estonian novel. She feels no spark for The Jewel of Reval.
In spite of how angry she is with Jay, his idea to explore what happened to her in Switzerland is not a bad one. Baby or no baby, she already feels that creative twinge in her gut, the spark that typically informs which direction she’s going to go with a book.
Chapter 4
LAUSANNE—February 1995
Ten p.m. on a freezing cold Saturday night. All six of them stumble inside Huber House, the door slamming behind them. Curfew. The foyer is warm. They’re giggling and shushing one another. Six drunk girls, stomping their snowy boots on the mat, removing their hats and mittens, unzipping their coats. Alison Rumsky, Lille Robertson, Noa Vandroogenbroeck, Rafaella Schwartz, and Cressida and Kersti.
They clomp upstairs, tracking snow and slush on every step, doing a poor job of being quiet. Kersti and Cressida are holding hands. Kersti is very drunk and still buzzing from her flirtation with Magnus Foley. Cressida yanks her backward, making it impossible for them to get up to the third floor.
“Shhhhh!” Alison hisses. “Hamidou’s going to come out.”
Kersti and Alison are on the volleyball team together. Kersti is a setter, Alison the star hitter. She’s from Vancouver—one of the few other Canadians at the Lycée—and has an open, friendly way about her. She has red hair, golden freckles on pink skin, and a tall, ultralean body that serves her well as captain of both the basketball and volleyball teams, as well as on the slopes. She’s the school’s superstar athlete, Coach Mahler’s protégé.
Mahler himself was the silver and bronze medalist respectively at the 1948 and ’52 Winter Olympics for bobsled. He’s been coaching at the Lycée since the late fifties and some say he still wears the same uniform he wore back then—a snug-fitting undershirt, high-waisted shorts, and tube socks pulled up to his knees. Like many teachers of his generation, he’s never embraced political correctness in his coaching style. He often refers to the girls as twits and spinsters and schwachk?pfe—which means imbecile, but sounds slightly less offensive in German—and thus he somehow manages to get away with it. In spite of that, he’s well liked. He’s ferociously competitive and his winning record over the past three decades no doubt gives him sway with Harzenmoser and Bueche. After all, great sports teams attract an excellent caliber of students.
Even though she’s usually second setter, Kersti enjoys being part of a sports team. It makes her feel even more woven into the fabric of the Lycée’s world.
“One more floor,” Lille encourages, and they stare up at that last flight as though it’s the Monte Rosa. Cressida and Kersti double over laughing, clutching each other, tears streaming down their frostbitten cheeks.
“Sh-sh-sh!” Rafaella says, spraying saliva. She has the room next door to Kersti and Cressida. She’s the daughter of a painter from New York and a European prince. Her godfather is Tom Jones. She has a tendency to weave these whopping fibs with equally fantastical truths so that no one is ever really sure which is which. But her mother is famous and her father is in fact a prince, though Kersti isn’t sure from which country.
“I need a smoke,” Cressida says, reaching inside her coat pocket.
“Me, too,” Noa agrees, reaching into the pocket of her parka. She smokes horrible-smelling, hand-rolled cigarettes. Her father sends the tobacco from Rotterdam.
“Wait till we’re in the bathroom,” Lille says, having enough good sense not to let them light up in the stairwell. There’s supposed to be no smoking in the building, except for in the teacher’s lounge and the TV room on the main floor. But Mme. Hamidou is a smoker herself and turns a blind eye to it. The one thing she doesn’t allow is smoking in the dorm rooms, even though she smokes in hers. It’s a fire hazard, she says, with all those flammable polyester fabrics.
Mme. Hamidou is a good housemother. She’s fair and funny, and possesses just the right balance of strictness and kindness. She runs Huber House virtually independent of the rest of the school, which speaks more to the laissez-faire attitude of the Lycée’s owner, Mme. Harzenmoser, and its principal, M. Bueche. The Lycée is a family business. It was founded by the heir to a pharmaceutical empire in the Upper Rhine Valley, Philipp Harzenmoser, when he was twenty-five. He married a much younger woman—one of the Lycée’s cooking teachers—and promoted her to vice principal, a position she held, alongside her husband, until the mid-sixties. They had one daughter, Fran?oise, to whom leadership of the school eventually passed in 1966.
Fran?oise Harzenmoser never married and over the years has become more of a figurehead than a director. She lives on campus in a charming chalet, and is frequently spotted tending to an enchanting garden of purple bellflowers, lupines, Alpine rock jasmine, and potted petunias. She’s a tall, white-haired woman who cuts an imposing figure, but she is utterly benign on campus. The real leader—or principal and CEO, as he’s known—is her business partner, M. Bueche, an elegant man in his late forties with wavy black hair, a coiled mustache, and a triangle of silk scarf always poking out of the breast pocket of his jacket. There’s something slightly sinister about M. Bueche, like one of those cartoon characters who twirl their mustache while laughing maniacally. There’s a certain insincerity about him—his too white teeth, his intricately coiffed hair, the silk handkerchiefs, the airs. But the man cannot be faulted for his devotion to the Lycée.
M. Bueche is the one who controls the school, and its mission is to make money, something he’s achieved by attracting new and prominent students every year. He’s obsessed with the Lycée’s reputation, a word one might hear M. Bueche utter hundreds of times each day. He’s much less concerned with discipline than he is with profits, which are generated largely from the obscene fees students pay for laundry services, dining fees, mandatory monthly travel expenses, books, extracurricular activities, and uniforms, all automatically billed to the parents.