For decades, Evy, who was fifty-five, had been haunted by memories of the house, where she had been confined for several months, starting when she was eight.
She remembered being wrested from bed in the middle of the night at the home of her foster family, in the Alpine valley of Kleinwalsertal. Perhaps two dozen children were living there. In the morning, Evy attended school in the villa. She was terrified of wetting the bed, because whenever she did the white coats would awaken her, even from deep sleep, and march her to the bathroom for an ice-cold shower; she would then have to stand in a corner for the rest of the night.
Children at the villa were issued thick, bloomer-like underpants. Shrill alarm bells rang day and night. Orders blared from loudspeakers that hung over doorways; to Evy, the voices seemed to belong to all-seeing powers. Sometimes she was summoned to recount her dreams to an adult. Once, she was shown a set of farm animals and told to assign to each one the identity of a person in her foster family. Evy agonizedβsurely it was the wrong choice to make her foster mother the pig. One day, she and some other children were told to line up in front of a closet to receive a treat.
Evy shook her skirt frantically, jumping up and down. White-coated adults carried her to the bathroom, where they held her down on the tile floor and administered a shot. The pervasive sense of shame and surveillance had created a blurring effect. Evy could recall almost nothing about the children who had slept alongside her, in one big room, perhaps because talking to one another was largely banned.
A yellow dot had marked her bed and the location of her toothbrush, and the color had perturbed her ever since. As an adult, she reminded herself that yellow was a happy shade, and tried to overcome her aversion by bringing home sunflowers. When Evy was twenty, she moved to the United States. They relocated to D. She and Schwartzman later divorced, but over the years Evy amassed a tight circle of friends in D.
