Exiles (12 page)

“American army?”

“Of course. It used to be that posting in Germany was the best thing you could hope for. Mainly, that’s where they sent the enlistees and the ROTC kids. It was a way to get people to sign up: If you enlist, you might go to Germany.”

“No war in Europe that I know of.”

“Right,” Tracy said. “Great deal, for a while. But now they can’t draft enough bodies to fight the war, so they’re starting to send whole divisions over to Vietnam.”

“Like from Germany?”

“Not yet, but there’s talk, and plenty of guys are scared. And pissed. They thought they’d made kind of a deal—enlisting for three years instead of being drafted for, what is it, two? And now, it’s no deal at all.”

“Like junior year abroad turns out to be a year stranded in the jungle.”

“I don’t know if they thought of it as junior year abroad, but a lot of the guys stationed in Germany are college grads. A lot of them used a little pull to get assigned to a NATO base, where no one’s shooting at you.”

“So what’s Aaronson doing? Enlisting?”

“Not hardly. He’s helping the SDG with recruiting. The Germans hang around the off-base clubs, get to know some of the soldiers, talk to them, at first about, you know, movies, music, American TV. They get to know them a little bit, they dance and drink and smoke.”

“The SDG has girls, too?”

“Of course. They flirt with the soldiers, maybe they even fuck. They make a date to meet the guys, somewhere off base, a German club, or someone’s apartment. A group gathers there, a group of Germans, drinking and arguing, debating. The soldiers listen. They’re smart, they’re curious. They’re hearing stuff they’ve maybe thought about but have never really dealt with before, arguments about racism, imperialism, American hegemony. Then the Germans start to ask the soldiers questions, about their background, their home, what brought them to the army, to Germany. They get them to think about the war, about how it’s immoral, about how they’re being used by the war machine. Coming from Germans, with their role in history, it’s a really powerful argument.”

“Enough to convince soldiers to desert?”

“These guys are really vulnerable. They’re confused. And that’s where Aaronson comes in. Eventually, when the SDG thinks they have a good group of candidates, they bring Aaronson into one of their sessions, a real American who has gone over the wall. He can talk to the soldiers in their own language, answer their questions about Sweden, show them it can be done, that they can live here in peace. He can lead the way.”

“The Pied Piper.”

“Moses. The Messiah.”

“It’s illegal?”

“Highly. By American laws, it’s treasonous, I think—interfering with military operations during wartime. For that, they still have the death penalty, at least under the military code.”

Son of a bitch, Spiegel thought. “And as he does this missionary work, what name is he using? Is he Aaronson? Is he me?”

Tracy paused. “Why would that matter?” she said.

“If he gets caught at the border, trying to cross using my passport, that’s one thing. But what if he isn’t caught? What if he’s just observed? What if one of the SDG members is a spy or a mole, right? And he makes a report about this American who’s trying to get soldiers to desert in time of war. But the only thing is, this American he’s reporting on is me, right?”

“No!” Tracy said. She reached out and put her hand on Spiegel’s arm. “That’s not true at all. If anything happens, he would come clean and take the blame.”

“Would he? He didn’t the first time I was arrested, when he was in Canada.”

“By the time he heard about that, you were free. And that’s what gave him the idea that you could help him again.”

“Great, but being arrested wasn’t exactly the highlight of my life.”

“No?”

And Spiegel realized that Tracy had a point. Perhaps being arrested in Aaronson’s stead
was
the highlight. It was an epochal moment, a turning point that had given a new aspect to everything that followed. Since then, he thought of things as either “before I was arrested” or “after the arrest.” And events on either side of the divide seemed so different that he felt at times almost as if he had led two lives, one that had ended that frozen night when he lost consciousness in the center of the swarm of cops, and a second, a much brighter life, full of possibilities and hope, that began when he opened his eyes in the hospital bed and saw Iris standing in the doorway.

“But nothing will happen,” Tracy added. “He’ll come home safe.”

“Well, that’s good. I’ve done my part.”

“Not completely,” Tracy said. “It’s more than giving him the passport. We have to be careful until he does come back.”

“I’m always careful.”

“More than careful, then. I want you to be visible. Now that I’ve cut your hair so that you look like him again, I want you to be seen in public. I want people to think that Aaronson’s still in Uppsala.”

“Which people?”

“Anyone who’s watching us,” Tracy said. “I think you should move out of Flogsta. Temporarily, until he gets back. Move to our apartment. If we’re being watched, it would be good if you were seen with me. You know, around town, shopping sometimes. It won’t be so hard.”

“I see,” Spiegel said. “So if the SDG reports that I was in Germany, trying to pry deserters loose from the army base, Aaronson will have witnesses to testify that he was minding his own business back in Uppsala.”

Tracy stood and walked to the window. She turned her back to Spiegel. “Oh, god,” she said. “Will you stop being so fucking paranoid? If he gets arrested, that’s it—they’ll know who he is, and the whole pipeline will collapse. About ten soldiers will go to the brig, and Aaronson will be shipped home in irons and held in Leavenworth, and many people, good and sympathetic antiwar people, here and in Germany, people we don’t even know about and never will, their lives will be ruined, too. Can’t you see that we all have to take on some of this risk? That each of us has a really small part, but if we each do our part maybe we can all make a huge difference?”

Spiegel stood, too, and walked over to Tracy. He stood by her side, looking out over the dark fields. “I can do my part,” he said. “But who knows that he’s gone, other than us?”

“People are always watching ARMS, believe me: the Uppsala police, the CIA, the army’s criminal-intelligence goons. Somebody may have noticed by now that Aaronson isn’t around, and I want to divert them for a little while, so they won’t start to look for him.”

“The resisters know.”

“Yes, they know he’s gone. But only the three of them know about you: Zeke, Reston, and the Worm. We’ll have to keep the rest of the guys in the dark, at least until the end of the week.”

“What happens then?”

“Aaronson was supposed to be on TV this week, on a panel discussion about Americans in Sweden. A couple of social workers, a minister, those types—and him.”

“Can’t he back out? Plead illness?”

“No, that would seem suspicious. What I think is, you’re going to have to do it.”

“Me? On TV? Oh, no.”

“Why? It’ll be easy. It’s a big panel, you won’t have to say much—we can teach you—and no one watches these damn shows anyway—”

“Except military intelligence?”

“So if they do, that’s good, isn’t it? Then they’ll have evidence Aaronson’s here.”

“Unless they’re watching him somewhere else at the same time. Then they’ll have evidence they’ve been fucked.”

“By that time, he’ll be back in Uppsala. And you can vanish.”

“If I want to.”

“It might be better at that point if you did. If people do start spotting the two of you together, it could be awkward. I mean, you haven’t done anything against the law. When he comes back, you could just go home.”

“Or I could grow my hair back and stay here.”

“Yes.”

And Spiegel wondered if he could detect a hint of meaning, or of feeling, behind that “yes.” Did Tracy want him in Uppsala? Did she need someone to talk to, another American, but one whose life was not so stretched out on the rack of politics and intrigue?

“It’s late, Tracy,” he said. “You could stay.”

“No, really, thanks, I can’t,” she said. But had she understood him? Had he really understood himself? To start anything with Tracy could only lead to terrible complications and repercussions. Yet Iris was across the ocean and Aaronson, no matter where he was in Europe, seemed to be on the far side of some great emotional divide. Spiegel felt a sudden surge of passion for Tracy, a need to hold her, to touch her skin and her lips.

She was gathering her belongings, her scissors and clippers, and the thin sweater that she had tossed onto Spiegel’s bed. She slipped it over her head and gave her hair a frisky shake.

“There,” she said. “Will you come over tomorrow, though? I can take some of your things with me now, in the car.”

“Okay,” he said. “Tracy, I’m sorry. If I offended you. All I meant was, you could stay, and I’ll sleep on the floor. It’s snowing.”

“I’m not offended. But that’s not all you meant.”

He walked her to the car. A light snow was falling and, as there was no wind, the flakes floated down like feathers. Spiegel watched the large, downy crystals as they came to rest on Tracy’s hair and on her collar. Each flake shimmered for a moment and then, liquefied by the warmth from her body, became a little globe of water and then a teardrop. She brushed the thin, light snow from the windshield of her car while Spiegel cleared the windows.

He wanted just to rest, to let his thoughts and his feelings organize themselves, in sleep and in dreams.

6

Jorge stopped by to
see Spiegel in the morning, having told Lisbet that he had left a scarf at Spiegel’s flat after the poker game. His real motive was to see Melissa again, and perhaps climb into bed with her for a morning encore. But she had gotten up early and left for auditions. Spiegel, however, was awake, drinking coffee, and trying to sort through his feelings about Tracy. It stirred him that she wanted him to move to her apartment; he sensed that she had more in mind than simply ensuring Aaronson’s safety. Again, he wondered if she felt a void in her life, a need for a friend or for a lover to keep her warm through the dark nights. His mind teetered, rocking back and forth between the alternatives and occasionally peeking over the edge at another, more disconcerting, possibility. Could it be that Tracy wanted Spiegel close by so that she could keep him under surveillance? He was troubled by her line of questioning about his father. She pretended to know nothing about his father, but perhaps that wasn’t so. She might have known all along about the nature of his father’s work for the government. And if she did, why would she trust him with sensitive information about Aaronson’s travels?

It occurred to him—not for the first time—that he might be being used, that perhaps Tracy and others were feeding him a diet of misinformation in the hopes that he was passing false leads on to higher authorities. Or maybe, he thought, I am not being used. Maybe I am being held: a prisoner of war, who will be offered in exchange, if necessary, in case Aaronson is captured behind enemy lines.

Lost amid those thoughts, Spiegel hardly looked up when Jorge stepped into the kitchen.

“I can see that you had little sleep last night,” Jorge said.

Spiegel put down his coffee cup. “I’m not myself,” he said.

“Yes, I hardly was able to recognize you,” Jorge said. “Sitting there in such silence, I took you at first for one of the Swedes!”

Spiegel had in fact adopted one of the Swedish practices. His breakfast consisted almost entirely of dairy products. He was spooning yogurt from a glass bowl, and he had before him a waxy brick of cheese that he had been scraping with a “cheese plane,” an
ostraka
, then popping the little curlicues of cheese into his mouth like candy. He had made a small pot of filtered coffee, which he was drinking black. He told Jorge about his plan to move in temporarily with Tracy, skipping the details, of course, about Aaronson’s being in Germany.

Jorge raised his eyebrows and broke into a laugh.

“Good for you, old chum,” he said, and slapped Spiegel on the back. “I knew there was something cooking with that cute little dish.”

“You’ve got it wrong, man,” Spiegel said. But he knew that he couldn’t explain, or explain away, too much. He was sworn to secrecy about the real reason for—for what? The haircut. The move to Tracy’s. Perhaps even his presence in Uppsala. He knew that he would be better off, he would be safer, if he were to let Jorge go on with his ribbing. And perhaps Spiegel enjoyed hearing Jorge unleash the sexual drive that he had been holding in check, and he hoped or even believed that Jorge’s innuendoes contained a hint of truth.

“Wrong? Come on, I know what went on last night with you two. I saw the sheets in the hallway, my friend.”

“Those are just the sheets she used for the haircut. Nothing went on, Jorge. We’re friends, that’s all.”

“And you’re moving into her flat?”

“Just for a week. She needs help with a project.”

“Whoo!”

“Come on, Jorge. Maybe it’s different in Lisbon. But you don’t understand American girls. Not everything’s sex and love with them, okay? They’re more liberated. They can have a relationship with a guy that’s just friendship, or maybe just political.”

“Now listen to me,” Jorge said. He had begun to help himself to the food Spiegel had laid out on the table. He was spreading thick lingonberry jam on a rye crisp and topping the jam with a sprinkling of brown sugar. Jorge pointed the tip of the jam knife at Spiegel as he spoke. “If I know one thing, it’s birds, all right? And it doesn’t matter, Portuguese, Swedish, American, African. The heart of a bird is the same all over the world.”

“Well of course people are people, and there are certain things we all have in common—”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean that, when a girl comes over to your flat for dinner and she goes into your room and you’re all alone and the door is closed, well, there’s only one thing on her mind, you see. And it’s not, you know, politics.”

“All she did was cut my hair.”

“Then she must not have eaten the escargots.”

“The snails? Why do you say that?”

“I told you. They are the food of love.”

Yes, he had said so, and Spiegel had to admit that the snails had carried some kind of potent message to his body. He had felt weird all night, but not exactly sexually aroused, more as if his emotions had been tuned to a different key so that whatever notes of passion he had been hearing, love or sorrow or anger or longing, had been played at a higher pitch, at greater intensity.

“I don’t suppose
you
need snails, do you? You’re always ready.”

“
En garde
!” Jorge said, and began to flutter the jam knife toward Spiegel’s cheese slicer, a mock duel.

“Hey, cut it out,” Spiegel said. His voice was sharp. He was annoyed, at Jorge’s behavior, and also at his insolence, his assumptions. It annoyed Spiegel as well to think that there was even a slight chance that Jorge was right, that he had missed—or even actively resisted—an offered opportunity.

“No, you are correct,” Jorge said, as he put down the knife, gently, beside his breakfast plate. “The love food was not for me, although I felt its powers, certainly. She has a lovely room, you know. Most interesting. You have seen it?”

“I have. I like her wall hangings. Did she offer you a demonstration?”

“Yes. I asked to borrow her guitar,” Jorge said.

“Did it work?”

“Of course. Why not?”

“It’s just a stage prop. She brought it here in case she needed it for
Miss Julie.
I think one of the peasants plays a guitar during the interlude while Julie is offstage fucking her valet. But I guess the Australian director brought a guitar of his own.”

“Well, it definitely was no Spanish guitar. You know, you have excellent guitars from America. The Gibson. The Fender. Oh, god, if I could have a Fender I would go for a year without fucking.”

“By Christmas you’d regret it.”

“Yes, by then I would be playing drums.”

“So?”

“It needed tuning, and my ear is not really so good, but I tried. I was able to play her one or two George Harrison songs, and ‘Norwegian Wood.’ She sat on the floor as I played and crossed her legs. I think you call it the Indian style? Very American. No European girl would sit like that, so exposed in the, what do you call it?”

“The crotch.”

“Okay. I will have to ask Karin what is the Swedish word.”

“Fat chance.”

“Sorry?”

“It means: You’re out of luck. It will never happen. No way.”

“Fat chance. So I am looking at her . . . crotch . . . and thinking I feel very hot, you know, and I just have to have this bird. But I feel also like I cannot move, it would take all my strength to stand up from the floor. The guitar, it was like it weighed a hundred stone. My fingers were like trees. Well, she must have felt this, too, because she asked if she could be excused for a moment and she went to the bath, the toilet. While she was there, I thought maybe I am making a big mistake.”

“You felt guilty?”

“Oh no. I felt—have I turned her off? Perhaps my songs on her cheap guitar were very boring to her. I thought, maybe I should play some Portuguese songs. We call them fado, have you heard them?”

Spiegel had not.

“Very passionate, romantic. Knights singing outside castle walls, lost loves, roses, eternal devotion, passion beyond the grave—that sort of thing.”

“Not ‘Norwegian Wood.’”

“No. So I thought I would ask her, when she came from the bath, if she would like to hear some of the music from my native land. I was tuning the guitar, my ear right to the strings while I turned a key, trying very hard to hear the note, because some music was playing in the next room, and then I look up and she is standing in front of me, in the middle of the room, naked.”

“I guess you hadn’t turned her off.”

“She was,” and Jorge leaned forward and whispered to Spiegel, “so beautiful! A natural blonde, you know. I laughed and then told her that I had been going to ask her would she mind if I took off my jacket. She said she would like to dance. So I did play her some of the fado. I would say, Lenny, that she knows very little about how to dance. She put her hands up over her head, like some castanet dancer in a cabaret, and she wiggled around the room shaking her little muff. She was very awkward, and out of timing with the music. Of course my playing was a bit off, as well.”

“Are you sure you need to tell me this?” Spiegel thought that he would be jealous hearing of Jorge’s conquest, but he was not. He was, rather, a little embarrassed, and his own sense of prudery, or propriety, surprised him. He had never experienced that sensibility quite this way, a flush rising to his cheeks, a muscular contraction in his throat. Maybe he only wished to think of the sensation as embarrassment. Perhaps it was a mask for a deeper feeling, a jealousy that he did not care to recognize.

“Well, I will skip the intimate details, then,” said Jorge. “Or save them for some other time. But now . . . I want to ask of you a favor.”

“Come on, Jorge, how many girls here do you think I know?”

Jorge laughed. “No, not that of course,” he said. “I need you to help me with Lisbet. She does not believe that I came here last night to play cards, with the boys.”

Now it was Spiegel’s turn to laugh. “Hey, look, Jorge. You can do what you want with Lisbet, Melissa, the man in the moon, I don’t care, but don’t ask me to cover for you. I won’t tell Lisbet anything you don’t want her to know, but I won’t lie for you either.” I’m doing enough of that already, he thought.

“No, I wouldn’t ask you to do that,” Jorge insisted. “But would you come to my flat and meet her? She would feel better about all this if she could meet you. She would like you.”

Spiegel understood. Jorge had been given an order. He had come home, tail between his legs, stinking of perfume and cum, and tried to convince Lisbet that he had spent the night playing poker with the boys. So she had asked him to produce a witness, or some evidence: Go. Fetch. I’m a fool to be drawn into this, Spiegel thought, and Jorge is a fool to ask me.

“Come on,” Jorge said. “Afterwards, we can borrow her car, and I can give you a lift to your new, what did you call it?”

“My new digs.”

“Yes.”

In Jorge’s building, Spiegel got a sense of what the complex would look like if it were ever to be finished. The stairs were carpeted; the elevator hummed and dinged with efficiency. The hallways smelled of vinyl, of latex paint, and of the slightly acrid warmth given off by incandescent bulbs. Even the students looked more wholesome and complete; they moved about with a lively step, an alertness, so different from the ghostlike, almost lurking presence of the three Swedes on Spiegel’s floor. Spiegel thought with regret about his own building, still slightly rancid with the smell of raw concrete, the interior lighting patchy and uneven, the drafts in the hallway, the midnight clanging of the warped glass door in the lobby, and the incessant knocking of the elevator cables. Spiegel had assumed that the other buildings he could see from the Flogsta courtyards were merely reflections of his own, but now he knew that rather than reflections the buildings were more like steps in an evolutionary series, of which his represented the protozoan stage.

Jorge’s room was at the end of the hallway, a premier spot, as it afforded views in two directions. Usually, these rooms, the doubles, were let only to married students. Each double had a little sitting area nicely furnished with a table, desk, and chairs in addition to the small bedroom and closet-sized bath. It could hardly be called living in luxury, but by student standards the double was fairly spacious and therefore much desired. Either Lisbet had lied on her housing application, an almost unthinkable transgression among the law-abiding Scandinavians, or she was extraordinarily lucky when the lots were drawn.

She sat at the table drinking black coffee from a mug the size of a soup bowl. She was not like the other Swedish girls Spiegel had seen and not at all like what he had thought of as Jorge’s type, the flashy and glamorous European or the sun-drenched, athletic Californian. Lisbet was small, and she had short brown hair straight as string. Her owlish glasses were set on the tip of her nose. She set down her mug and shut the glossy magazine she had been reading. On the cover was a lanky model in a dress that seemed to be made of aluminum foil. The Swedish
Cosmo
, Spiegel figured.

“You didn’t tell me you were bringing company, love,” she said.

Spiegel was astonished by her voice, or actually by her accent. Unlike the other Swedes, who spoke English in a soft, reserved Cantabridgian, Lisbet spoke with a thick Midlands accent. Perhaps that’s what had attracted Jorge. Most of the Swedes speaking English sounded like Oxford dons, but Lisbet sounded like a British pop star, or a tart.

“I wanted you to meet my friend. Lenny, this is Lisbet Norstrom. Lisbet, Len Spiegel.”

“Hi,” he said, and reached out to her. He was surprised by the strength of her grip, hard and sinewy, as if, despite her tiny frame and the delicacy of her features, she had great reserves of power. Perhaps Jorge liked that as well, or perhaps not, perhaps her strength had intimidated him, had sent him out into the graveyards to harvest snails, had driven him to fabricate stories about midnight card games with the boys, all for what amounted to just a spasm of passion, expended on one of those aptly named “birds,” sure to take flight. Why couldn’t Lisbet entice Jorge to settle here by the hearth, Spiegel wondered, in this luxury suite, and cuddle up to enjoy domestic tranquility? Surely these Swedish magazines, like their American counterparts, have all sorts of tips for keeping your man content: advice on beauty, special recipes for chocolate delights, counseling on the techniques of sex.