It was the most expensive boarding school in the world, the place where American rock stars and Middle Eastern sheikhs and Russian oligarchs sent their children to polish themselves with a European gloss. In summer it became the most expensive camp in the world. I did not know any of this when I found the address in a book of European summer camps and sent off my résumé. I had never heard of the school. Later, the other teachers told me that there was a lot of dirty money floating around, so much, they whispered, it could make you uncomfortable. They said I would laugh when the parents came to pick up their children on the last day, that the women would be wearing garish designer blouses and dripping with gold.
The school was on the shores of Lake Geneva, in the shadow of the Alps. The first time I saw the grounds I experienced the same feeling of alignment I had in Nuremberg when I came upon the main square—that what I found was exactly what I had set out to find. It was uncanny to see my vision of Switzerland so confirmed: the blue-white Alps rising above the lake’s reflection, long white cumulus clouds floating ethereally over mountains and water. Everything seemed iridescent, ablaze, diamonds and crushed ice.
In the mornings I taught English to a class of twelve teenagers. They came from Spain, Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Mexico, France. The students were, for the most part, spoiled. It was not uncommon to interrupt the class eight or nine times in an hour to stop them from talking or listening to their Walkmans. They made it clear this was supposed to be a summer camp, not a school, and so all but a few rebelled against the formality of their lessons. Their logic was irresistible. I was barely out of college, trying to see the world, so why should I strive for rigor when this was, after all, a summer camp? Perhaps I was simply a bad teacher. I called Jess and Susie, who had both worked at camps, but they didn’t have much advice. I had no experience working with teenagers, and I am sure this fact contributed to my frustration and, finally, my indifference.
I quickly befriended a few of the other counselors: Otto, a German; Hannah, a Swede; Johann, Swiss; and Tristan, a Brit. At night, after we put the campers to bed, we met down by the lake. We ’d light a bonfire, pass around beers. Sometimes we stayed out all night. We were capable of it. We ’d go home at dawn, sleep for a couple of hours, then wake up to teach our English classes, bleary-eyed and groggy. Sometimes it was clear the teenagers had also been up all night. We did not ask them what they had been up to. Complicity kept us allied.
I became close to the other counselors. We partied together, spent our days off in Lausanne, piled into the school van and drove to the summer music festival in Nyon. Tristan was a sailor who captained the school’s forty-foot yacht. He brought the campers on sailing trips to Geneva. At night, he took us sailing on the lake, though this was against the rules. He was English, as I’ve already mentioned, a few years older than me, with deep-set blue eyes and wavy, shoulder-length blond hair. We did not have much in common other than sailing, our love for the ocean. For me, this was enough. So when he sat down next to me on the bow of his boat one night and offered me a beer, I took it. When he kissed me a few moments later, I lay back on the teak deck and brought his full weight down upon my body. The wind was light. I looked up and saw the sail luffing lazily back and forth above our heads.
It was like that almost every night, sometimes on the deck of the boat, sometimes in the small cabin below, or sometimes in my room on the top floor of the dormitory. By that time I had the confidence to make such things happen. Once we woke up very early to the sound of thunder.
My windows were open and I could smell the summer rain, the freshly cut grass, and the wet earth. Tristan told stories about the sea, voyages around the Cape of Good Hope, where the waves were high as houses. He sailed rich people’s yachts for them, brought them from port to port. Once, on watch off the coast of South Africa, he tied himself to the mast so he wouldn’t fall overboard. When they landed in Cape Town, he blew his paycheck on champagne and drank until dawn, then sailed for Mauritius. He had a flat, he said, in Antibes. I didn’t know if any of it was true. But he did not tell me about men locked in cellars, men who awoke in a pit of dead bodies.
When the camp ended, he said, he would leave for the Caribbean. He told me he had a girlfriend in the Dominican Republic. She was American and taught windsurfing at Cabarete Beach. He said I reminded him of her. He told me all of this on the boat during our last night. He thought we were friends, and he wanted to tell me the truth. But I had been sleeping with him for two weeks and I did not want to hear about his girlfriend who taught windsurfing at Cabarete Beach. I raised my voice at him, angry words that echoed across the lake. How hypocritical I was. I too was on my way to someone else, and I too had treated our time together as a lark. I had used him to distance myself from Christoph. Now I realized I had let myself go under, just a little. He said he was sorry, he thought we were having fun. He hadn’t meant to hurt me. It was just summer. I stepped off the boat, onto the dock, and walked away.
When I looked back, he was standing on the deck, holding on to a halyard, watching me walk away from him.
The next day I said goodbye to the others and left for Gstaad. I wanted to go hiking. Also, Christoph was expecting me and I was determined to make him wait. He had called me only once at the camp. He talked about sunny weather and parties, his perpetual hangover and lack of sleep. The easiness of his voice concerned me. I heard nothing that suggested longing. There were no deep pauses, no questions. He said to call him when I arrived and he would pick me up at the station. We did not talk about how long I would stay. Before I hung up he asked me if I had met any nice Swiss men. I said no, but I’d met a lovely Englishman. He laughed and said, See you soon.
All I wanted to do was walk for as long and far as I could.
In Gstaad, I checked into a youth hostel in an old chalet. They gave me a small room with two bunk beds and a balcony overlooking the Alps. By some small miracle—it was late July—I had the room to myself. It seemed like a sign, like this was the right place to have come. The middle-aged woman who worked at the reception was friendly. A few young hikers came and went. No one asked me why I was there or where I was from. I was anonymous, as I wanted to be.
I stayed in Gstaad for a week. Every morning I walked to the mountain’s base and ascended to the summit on the chair lift. I took a map and walked for miles through alpine meadows, fields of soft green grass and pink and yellow wildflowers. I was Julie Andrews, high above and far away from everyone and everything that I knew. Nobody could reach me. Nobody knew where I was. I thought that if I walked far enough I would stop hearing the sounds of the halyards clinking against Tristan’s mast, or the cathedral bells outside Christoph’s window.
But Tristan was gone, and Christoph was waiting for me at the end of a train ride. I pictured myself hurtling toward him, down a dark tunnel, under mountains. It all returned, the dull fear, the heady anticipation, the loss of breath. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to return to him. But I knew I would.
I walked during the day and ate at night in small restaurants. One evening I was the only patron in an Italian trattoria. The waiter was older, in his sixties, and spoke a little English. He smiled as he set my plate down in front of me and whispered, I too like to eat alone.
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From The Scrapbook by Heather Clark. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Heather Clark.
