Exiles (2 page)

“Thanks, man,” Spiegel said. “Those are good words to hear.” Spiegel held out his hand, palm open and fist up, for a soul handshake, but Aaronson took him by the shoulders and pulled him close, chest to chest, for a brotherly embrace.

“We’re going to end this fucking war,” Aaronson said.

Spiegel laughed. “I don’t know about ending the war. That’s a lot to put on one guy’s ticket. But I came here to help your community, maybe to bring some of you guys home.”

“It’s the same thing,” Aaronson said. “We’re not coming home until the war is over. But you can bring our message home.”

“And tell us everything that’s going on back in the States,” Tracy put in. “We hear so little—and even then I don’t think we get the whole story. Everyone’s worried, whenever they talk to us, about being taped or tapped. And I’m not even sure that the mail’s secure.”

“Definitely, I’ll fill you in,” Spiegel said. “There’s a lot to tell.”

“But first,” Tracy said, “let me get a good look at you two guys together. Stand side by side. No, back-to-back.”

They complied, like schoolboys told to line up for recess, awkward, impatient, maybe slightly annoyed to be placed under scrutiny.

“It’s weird,” Tracy said. “To think, you two guys must have crossed paths all the time back in school, but you never met. You had to travel halfway around the world for your lives to converge. So I guess I’m the first one to see you actually together.”

Tracy compared them as if she were examining some rare biological specimens. She moved close, leaned back a little, slowly walked around Spiegel and Aaronson to see them from every angle. At first, she was disappointed. The resemblance was not immediately obvious, for Spiegel’s hair was a tangle of unruly brown corkscrews and his smile was obscured by a shaggy auburn beard while Aaronson was clean-shaven, his hair neatly cropped. But as she adjusted her focus, Tracy could see why so many people had mistaken one for the other. They had the exact same facial structure: angular, slightly lantern-jawed, thick eyebrows, intense blue eyes. More remarkably, they carried themselves the same way, leaning slightly forward, as if always in a rush, a tangle of nerves and impatience. They had the same mannerisms, too— fidgety hands, feet tapping to some mad internal rhythm—and, evidently, the same taste in clothes, or the same budget. They each wore jeans, flannel shirts, and thick-soled work boots. They could be brothers. They could be twins.

“I understand it now. It must be weird for you guys, to look at each other,” Tracy said.

“I don’t know,” Spiegel said. “I’m not sure I see the resemblance.”

“That’s because you didn’t see him before he cut his hair,” Tracy said. “I’m looking at you, and I see Aaronson, the way he looked six months ago.”

“You have to get beyond the hair, man,” Aaronson said. “Hair’s just superficial.”

“Is that why you cut yours?” Spiegel asked. “To try to get down to the bare essence?”

Aaronson laughed. “It’s nothing like that,” he said. “Long hair made me stand out too much. It marks you right away as an American.”

“What are you trying to do then? Blend in? Become a Swede?”

“In six months, you’ll need subtitles to understand me.”

“Say something, then,” Spiegel said.

“
Da ringer jåg på torsdag kväll
.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I’ll call you up on Thursday night,’” Tracy said. “He just memorized it because it sounds so Swedish. Whenever people ask him to say something, that’s what he comes out with. It’s the only thing he can say.”

“How about you, Tracy?”

“
Nej, tack
. That means, no thanks. That’s what you say when they offer to put ketchup on your hot dog at the kiosk.”

“I’m thinking I might want to learn a little of the language, too, while I’m here,” Spiegel said.

“You should,” Tracy said. “Anyone on a student visa can sign up for a Swedish class, and they teach you for free.”

“Are you guys in the class?”

“Well,” Aaronson said. “Right now I’m concentrating on my political work.”

“We’re involved with a group of deserters, here in Uppsala,” Tracy said.

“I’m kind of their representative,” Aaronson said. “I go before municipal boards and hearing officers, helping guys apply for permits and vouchers, housing allowances, food and welfare certificates . . .”

“They give out all that stuff, to the deserters?” Spiegel said. “Sounds like an American here has got it made.”

“No American has it made. We’re at their mercy, and they know it. We can’t leave, obviously, until there’s a general amnesty. Sweden’s like a big prison, a prison without bars. And I’m like the trusty, the guy who asks the warden for a bigger ration of bread.”

“That’s not true,” Tracy said. “You’ve become the real leader. Without you, there would be no movement in Uppsala.”

“Iris says you were a leader back in the States, too,” Spiegel said.

“Not really,” Aaronson said, shaking his head. He sat down in the beanbag chair. “I just got sucked into the role. I must have been crazy. My nerves were like live wires. I’d been strung out all summer trying organize the cafeteria workers at the student union. You heard about that?”

“Yeah, Iris told me. The movement that went nowhere. In fact, the workers voted to decertify.”

“Right. I felt useless, wasted. Guys in the movement were ignoring me, like anything I touched would turn to poison. I felt I had to do something dramatic to prove myself, to prove my worth.”

“So you busted up the draft office just to prove yourself? People back on campus, guys like Brewer, always said it was a carefully executed plot.”

“No, it was an impulse,” Aaronson said. He laughed again. “I never expected it to lead to this, though: life in exile for me, for Tracy, now for you, too. I never thought one crazy act could change the course of so many people’s lives.”

“No, me neither,” Spiegel said. “I never even thought I would be drawn into the movement. I had a low draft number, and I was basically nonpolitical. But I guess I learned that you can’t really run away from history, or at least from your own role in it. Iris taught me that we all bear some responsibility for the sins of our parents, and for the crimes committed in our name.”

“You mean the war,” Tracy said.

“That, and everything,” Spiegel said. “It’s all connected. One thing leads to another. If you hadn’t smashed up the draft board, I wouldn’t be here.”

For Aaronson’s attack on the draft board, and its aftermath, had set off the most amazing, and unsettling, series of events in Spiegel’s life, a chain reaction of mistakes, misperceptions, and deceptions that had nearly gotten Spiegel killed, but that eventually, he would come to realize, had saved his life and brought him here, at last, to Aaronson’s door.

Spiegel had enrolled in the state university hoping to get his wayward academic career, which during two hazy years at one of the downstate colleges had been devoted primarily to cigarettes and other combustibles, back on track. He thought that he could make a fresh start, that he could blend into the background on a big campus in a big city. He took an apartment, alone, in a little carriage house behind a shabby Victorian on a quiet side street, and he determined to devote himself to his studies, English, with the thought of pre-law. He staked out a carrel in the library, and through the fall tried to concentrate on schoolwork, which he found to be surprisingly easy. His mind clear of intoxicants, his life devoid of friends and other distractions, he became a reasonably good student, for the first time since grade school, since he had discovered the vices of sex and rock ’n’ roll.

But later in the semester, with the first snows, things began to get weird. Spiegel wondered if his mind was shot. He wondered if it were the long-term effects of some of the exotic chemicals he had ingested downstate, maybe some peculiar time-release psychic multivitamin that had been cooked up in one of the pharmolabs in Brooklyn where he and his pals used to send out for supplies. He couldn’t quite explain it, but it was as if he were leading a double life. People he didn’t know would greet him, make strange comments to him in passing that they expected him to comprehend, even leave cryptic messages on his windshield, drop things off at his library desk. What was happening? When he wasn’t in his own life, whose was he in?

Until eventually, he thought, maybe he should follow the path, the paper trail, and see where it led him, track down the source of one of the messages and see if he could discover the origin of this force that had threatened to unsettle his life. One day a cute girl he had been eyeing in the library left a stack of flyers beside his book bag. Maybe she had left them for him, maybe for someone else, maybe inadvertently. But Spiegel decided to take the flyers, hang on to them, and see what developed. Would the girl come back in search of them? The leaflets announced a rally to be held at a downtown square later in the week—Students and Workers United Against the War. Spiegel hadn’t thought much about the war. His draft number was hopeful, and even if he were called for a physical he was confident that if he smoked hard enough and dieted ruthlessly he could probably incapacitate himself sufficiently to fool an army doctor. But he thought, well, maybe he should go to this rally, just to see.

He never got to go. Two days after he took the leaflets, a platoon of armed cops stormed his apartment. He had been in the shower. He saw the flashing lights, heard the sirens, heard everyone hollering and banging on the door. He was sure his place was on fire, so he grabbed a towel, slipped out of a window, slid down a porch railing, and landed hard in a snowbank. Immediately, a swarm of cops was on him, swinging their batons, mashing his face into the snow, pinning his arms back, snapping plastic cuffs around his wrists, yelling. The lights were blinding him, TV cameras were in his face, he was freezing, terrified, and in agony from the beating and from the fall. Someone hauled him up by the shoulder, shoved him toward a police car. Someone else yelled for a stretcher, an ambulance. A reporter shoved a microphone at him and screamed out questions that made no sense: Were you acting alone, or on orders? Was your group responsible for the bomb in Syracuse? Were you making a statement or—

That was the last Spiegel heard, the last he could remember. He was shoved into a squad car. Someone threw a greatcoat over him. He hugged the scratchy warmth to his face and collapsed sideways onto the seat as the sirens wailed off into the night.

He awoke the next morning in a hospital bed. His right leg was in traction, his left arm in a cast. A thick bandage covered his right eye. His tongue felt dull and waxy, his skin hot. He felt a sharp pain in his neck as he turned his head to look around. Gray snow streaked the tall windows. In a wooden chair by the door sat a uniformed policeman, nodding into sleep. At first Spiegel thought, how nice, they’ve sent an officer to protect me. Then it came back to him—the cops bursting into his apartment, crashing through the door, surrounding him in their vicious huddle, on him like dogs on a bone, the nightsticks going up and down, up and down—and he broke into a sweat. Nausea passed through him like a tide, and he thought, how do I get out? Where do I go? He couldn’t move, even to reach the call button.

And then he heard an argument in the hall. The cop at the door was awake, standing, barring the entryway with his fat blue bulk. Beyond him, her face crowned by a halo of light cast by a globe in the hallway, stood a woman, tall, beautiful, her hair a dark cascade of ringlets that fell to her shoulders. She was talking at the cop, not yelling exactly, but speaking forcefully, aggressively: “You’ve got to let me in . . . right to counsel . . . see my client . . .”

Perhaps I’m dreaming, Spiegel thought, and if I close my eyes, I will wake up in my own bed, free of pain. He tried to will himself deeper into sleep, to a depth beyond dreams. And perhaps he succeeded, because when he opened his eyes again the room was quiet, the arguments had ceased. The shades had been drawn, which tinted the room with a faint wash of gray shadow. The policeman was no longer in the doorway. Standing over his bed, looking down at him with a strange mixture of solicitude and disquiet, was the lovely woman he had seen in the hallway. He had seen her before, of course, on campus, at the library. She was the one who had left the leaflets on his desk. Her name was Iris.

“And who the hell,” she said, “are you?”

He found that, with great concentration and care, he could manage to speak. He told her his name.

“Listen, I thought . . . Jesus,” Iris said. “I mean, do you know why you’re here?”

“A bunch of cops,” he looked around to make sure that they were alone, “beat the shit out of me.”

“They booked you, too.”

“For what? Resisting arrest?”

“They think you smashed up the draft board.”

“They what?” Spiegel said. “Why would I do that? I’m going to be four-F.”

“They thought you were someone else. The thing is, and I think I can tell this, even with that stuff wrapped half around your skull, you look just like this other guy.”

“Like who?” Spiegel was having trouble focusing. Maybe they had given him some drugs. Maybe he needed some. “Are you a nurse?” he said.

“I’m a lawyer. Well, a law student, actually. But, as they say, you don’t need a weatherman . . . I mean, you’ve been screwed. And we’ve got to figure how to get you out of here.”

It was clear right away to Iris—Iris Mandel—that the cops had arrested the wrong guy. She knew, through a series of frantic, heavily coded calls from her best friend, Tracy, that Aaronson had trashed the downtown draft board and then crossed the bridge to Canada. Tracy had followed with a trunkful of Aaronson’s clothes and books. Their plan was to head for Toronto and try to put together enough gas money to go west. They had friends who owned a bookstore in Vancouver.

But meanwhile the cops, acting on some bad information supplied by a mole the dean must have placed among the student left—they would have to get to the root of that one, unearth the bastard—had learned almost immediately that it was Aaronson who had trashed the draft board, and they got a federal warrant for his arrest. But then, with typical pig ineptitude, using a photo ID supplied by stoolies from the university registrar, they went off and nailed the wrong guy, Aaronson’s exact look-alike, his double.