Exiles (24 page)

“I’ve been doing some research,” he said. “I looked into the background of your friend Leonard Spiegel. Are you familiar with it?”

“A little,” Tracy said. “We had friends who knew him back in the States.”

“Friends, yes, but it is impossible to talk to any member of his family. His mother is deceased. His father worked for intelligence and now is apparently with the Foreign Service, at a posting somewhere in Africa. I cannot find anyone who knew Spiegel until he entered—what was the name of your school?”

Tracy told him.

“Exactly. Before that time, he is hard to locate. No good records, transcripts, that sort of thing until he transfers to your school. He becomes there a student in, I think you call it pre-law. Or so I am told. The school has no record of him, you see.”

“No?” Tracy said, a bit surprised. “Maybe the police seized all his records when they arrested him that time, by mistake.”

“No, not because of that. The school administration told me it was because he never received any credits. He may have enrolled in courses, they said, but he never completed any. So they have no official record. He did, apparently, live in the city, near the school. He was arrested, as you know, not on the campus but at his home.”

“Yes, he was mistaken for Aaronson. The cops let him go, but by then we were safely out of the country. It worked out well for us,” Tracy said.

“Exactly. How convenient for you,” Mendelsohn said. “As it happens, the police in your city will release no records of the arrest because, as they told me, all charges have been dropped. So I cannot confirm anything from that source. All I have to go on, to learn about Spiegel’s arrest, is news reports. And your word.”

“We weren’t there, of course. But from what we know the school tried to turn in Aaronson, but gave out the wrong ID card because Spiegel and Aaronson are practically twins. Spiegel had never been involved in the movement.”

“Until then,” Mendelsohn said. “Then, he became involved. He leaves the States, comes to Sweden, doesn’t exactly enroll in the university but takes a room at Flogsta. He signs up for the Swedish classes at the institute. And then, he follows his pattern.”

“Which is what?” Tracy asked.

“He disappears. Two months after he gets to Uppsala, he vanishes. He doesn’t finish the language class. They say at the institute, yes, a student named Leonard Spiegel did register and attend classes for several weeks. But he never finished even the first unit of study. At Flogsta, the records show that indeed a Leonard Spiegel rented a student flat. But now, he has disappeared, and it seems that another foreign student has occupied his dwelling. And except for one student who says that he saw your friend this week, no one that I talked to in Flogsta seems to remember when it was that they saw him last. All of which I find very odd indeed.”

“He . . . kept to himself a lot,” Tracy offered, lamely.

“No,” Mendelsohn said. “You can’t lead me on any more. I understand your game now.” He leaned close to Tracy and spoke quietly. “What I want from you is confirmation, before I write the story.”

“I suppose,” Tracy said, “if you know, you know. What is it you’re going to write?”

“The truth, of course,” Mendelsohn said. “That Leonard Spiegel does not exist.”

Tracy froze. She was startled by a jingling sound. She had forgot that she was clutching her key ring. She looked, and saw that her hand was shaking.

“Ha. You didn’t think I could figure that out,” Mendelsohn said.

“No. How did you?”

“Simple. It all added up. There never was a Leonard Spiegel. His name appears here and there, in the news, on certain lists, transcripts. But he has passed through life like wind through a forest, moving the branches around for a minute but changing nothing, leaving no mark. He is, how to say it? Your invention. He allowed you to escape from America, and perhaps, for a time, he even allowed your friend Aaronson to travel around the continent, until the military police got wise to your game and decided that if you were going to pretend that there was such a person as Leonard Spiegel, they could pretend to put out a warrant for his arrest. That would make it impossible for you to use him any longer for your purposes.”

“But why don’t they just arrest Aaronson?” Tracy said.

“Here in Sweden? Don’t be ridiculous. But you got the message, didn’t you? I think it’s clear. They will no longer live by the rules of your fiction. If your friend Aaronson tries to leave Sweden again, he will be subjected to Spiegel’s fate. He, too, will disappear. I would like to write this in my story. That Leonard Spiegel does not exist and never has. But I wanted to check with you first. A word from you can stop me. Have I come upon the truth?”

Tracy nodded in confirmation. “Yes,” she said to Mendelsohn. “There’s truth in what you’ve told me. I won’t admit everything you’ve said is true, but I won’t call the other papers to deny it, either. I won’t stand in your way. Go ahead,” she said, as she turned from Mendelsohn to slip her key into the door lock. “Write that story.”

MAY

12

It had been daylight
for so long that it felt like high noon by the time the march began. But it was only ten o’clock. The crack of dawn, Spiegel would have called it, back in the States. Now, as the days grew and stretched and threatened to consume the darkness altogether, like some monster from a Grade-D horror movie, the creature that devoured the night, Spiegel found himself awake at unthinkable hours. Three a.m. Four-thirty. He had never before seen those moments—at least not from the waking end—in his life.

Each morning, Spiegel would find himself awake, listening for the sounds of birds, of traffic. He would lie in bed, his hand resting on Tracy’s back, thinking that he should get up, do some work, get on with his life. Here he was, after more than three months in a foreign country, and what had he to show for it? He knew hardly any Swedes, for one thing. Other than Monika and Lisbet, his only friends were Americans and a few other foreign students like Jorge. For another, he hadn’t left Uppsala since he’d arrived at the railroad station. Shouldn’t he at least try to see part of the countryside, and maybe even Stockholm, before he went back to the States? And the language. Ever since he had begun to represent himself as Aaronson, he had stopped going to language classes. He knew hardly a word of Swedish, couldn’t carry on a conversation, could barely even order a cheese sandwich at a kiosk, lesson number-one in language school for immigrants. Well, he could read the banners unfurled in the great courtyard in front of the old castle.
Arbetares frihet för arbetare.
Freedom for the workers, he figured. Or maybe it was the name of an Uppsala rock group.
Låt oss bli fria!
The last shall be the first? Lassie, come home?
Ut ur Vietnam, USA imperialister!
That one he could understand. He had learned that, just as there is a universal language of love, and of sex as well, there is also a universal language of hate, and of violence. So he didn’t need to speak Swedish to make his feelings known. All that he had to do was join the May Day crowd, marching as one from the park behind the castle—he knew the word for that,
slottsbacken
—through the center of town to the factory yards by the river. He would be one with the masses. He was glad about that. He did not want to take a place at the podium. Monika had urged him to speak to the crowd, said it would be great to have a voice from the Americans as part of the citywide, nationwide, worldwide—so far as they knew—demonstrations. But Spiegel said he couldn’t do it, and Tracy backed him. They both knew why he had declined. He would rather preserve his obscurity than bask in a false glory behind the guise of another’s name.

The events of the past month had been wearing Spiegel down. He hadn’t slept much, and it wasn’t just the dawn awakenings. It was also the sheer physicality of a new sexual relationship. Loving Tracy was not something he was able to step into easily, gracefully. He was always stumbling over something, something that wasn’t even there. Even when he and Tracy were in their deepest moments of passion, moments that made Spiegel feel as if his body had been transformed into light, into pulsating waves of energy, she would sometimes turn her head in such a way, pulling back from him slightly with a faint look of puzzlement, and she would utter a soft sigh not so much of pleasure as of regret, and Spiegel would know that her body was with him but that part of her being, part of her consciousness, still rested with Aaronson. What he couldn’t determine, and what Tracy could not or would not tell him, was whether her love for Aaronson was fading and growing dimmer or whether it still burned strong. And if it did, maybe Spiegel’s passion was inadvertently keeping the fading ember alive. Maybe he wasn’t the fire but the air that the fire consumes. If so, he was doing Tracy no favors. His presence in her life might be giving her a false hope, making it harder for her to relinquish her memories of Aaronson, keeping her in a constant state of anticipation, of readiness for his return. Yet if there was anything Spiegel had come to believe in the past month it was that Aaronson was not coming back to Uppsala.

If he were, he would have been there for May Day. He would have wanted to lead the Americans as they marched, chanting and waving banners, through the city. The deserters looked great, Spiegel thought, like an invading army come out of the bush after a month’s maneuvers. Most of the guys wore their khakis or camouflage. Some, despite the bright sun and the surprising heat, wore beat-up leather flight jackets. One guy wore a grimy gray sweatshirt, the sleeves cut off, a deep blue tattoo of a devil’s face on his bulging biceps. Another guy sported a beret, and another had slung a heavy rucksack over his shoulders. They all had full beards or stubble, stringy hair shoulder-length or longer, droopy mustaches. The Swedes, in contrast, even the leftists who had organized the march and the old socialists who came out to wave the banners and sing the “Internationale” every year, looked diminutive, well-groomed, and disciplined.

Spiegel saw the Worm at the edge of the crowd, pacing nervously, scrutinizing a flyer someone had handed him. Spiegel waved, but the Worm didn’t look up from his reading. Spiegel couldn’t spot Reston in the crowd. Zeke, he knew, would be at the speaker’s podium at the head of the march, with Tracy. It had been the plan to have Tracy read a letter from ARMS at the May Day rally and then present the ARMS petition on jobs and housing to the delegates from the Uppsala City Council. At the last minute, Zeke had raised a fuss and insisted that as leader pro tem of ARMS he should be the one to present the petition. Tracy objected at first, arguing that Zeke’s presence on the podium would raise questions in the press about Aaronson’s absence, but eventually she yielded for fear of alienating Zeke or pushing him to the point where he might betray her trust. She offered to hand Zeke a final draft of the petition and join the men in the line of march. But Zeke insisted that he needed her on the podium for moral support. He wanted Tracy to stand beside him.

A guy with a megaphone handed Spiegel a mimeographed sheet: a list of the phrases they would chant as they marched into the city. Each was numbered, one through five. Spiegel wasn’t sure he understood all of them. One was clear enough: U.S. out of Vietnam. Another seemed to call on Nixon and Kissinger to end the bombing, end the war. One called for NLF victory; another sang the praises of the wise man Ho Chi Minh. The fifth troubled Spiegel:
Vietnam, Palestina, samma kamp
. Vietnam and Palestine, same struggle. Were they really? He didn’t care to mix up his wars. I’ll keep my mouth shut when the march leader calls out number five, he decided.

By the time the head of the march had begun to move down the hill, the Worm had worked his way in next to Spiegel. Although it was early, the sun was well above the horizon. The day had become hot. Spiegel wished that he had brought a hat. There was shade beside the castle and in the narrow streets of the Old City, but as the line passed through the shopping district they would be marching in direct sunlight.

“Do you fucking believe this?” the Worm was saying to Spiegel.

“This?” Spiegel wasn’t sure what the Worm meant, and he didn’t want to talk to him for a whole hour as they marched. He pretended to be studying his mimeo.

“This whole scene,” the Worm said. “It’s more like a July Fourth parade. I mean, when I go to a demonstration, I wanna see someone kick ass, you know what I mean?”

“Maybe you will,” Spiegel said. “The day is young.”

“I don’t even understand this stuff.” The Worm slapped his hand against his flyer. “What’s this stuff about
Norska fiskare
?”

Spiegel looked at the Worm’s handout. He couldn’t make sense of it either.

“I think you got the wrong one. This one’s something about fishing in Norway. Maybe it’s the group against North Sea oil?”

“What’d you get?” the Worm asked.

Spiegel showed him his sheet.

“Yeah, Nixon, Kissinger. That’s where I wanna be. I’m gonna get rid of this
fisk
shit and find the right guy.” Spiegel was about to offer the Worm his hymnal, but before he could offer it the Worm had sunk back into the throng. Spiegel turned, and he could see the Worm making his way, against the flow of the crowd, toward the stragglers and the latecomers at the rear.

By that time, most of the marchers had already set off from the castle grounds. Spiegel was relieved to see that the neat lines of march were breaking apart and the order imposed by the organizers was beginning to disintegrate. Some people who had been consigned to the back had sprinted on ahead of their groups. The chanting of slogans from the many teams and contingents was overlapping, forming a multilingual cacophony that echoed off the stone walls of the castle. Organizers down the hill piped on whistles in vain attempts to bring the marchers back into line and the teams into synchronicity. But the shrill whistles and the booming megaphones just added to the tonal disorder and tended to pull the rest of the marchers into further disarray.

Spiegel found his place behind the Vietnam War banner. Other Americans in the contingent recognized Spiegel, or thought they did. “Where you been, man?” said one lanky guy in combat fatigues and black boots. “Welcome back, brother,” said another, gripping his hand in the soul handshake.

“How you doin’, Hyde,” Spiegel said. Hyde and his partner fell into step, one on each side of Spiegel.

Hyde edged uncomfortably close to Spiegel’s shoulder while his partner marched in lockstep, a pace ahead of Spiegel, boxing him in. “We got to have a talk,” Hyde said.

“Yeah, maybe after the rally,” Spiegel said. “Tracy said something about a meeting.” He looked to his sheet. He wished someone would call out a number. He wanted to shout slogans. It would be better than talking to Hyde.

“We ain’t met for how long now? Three weeks? You know, pretty much since you’ve come back.”

Nixon! Kissinger! Vietnam! As the march passed below the castle into the narrow cobbled streets of the Old City, the sounds crossed and reverberated. It was hard to distinguish one chant from another. Spiegel was feeling closed in as the lines of the march compressed. His two comrades, bumping and jostling him, were swelling with a bad attitude.

“I’m thinking maybe you ain’t so interested in the group anymore,” said Hyde. He wore a sash across his khaki shirt and a ranger hat, which made him look like a combination of a Boy Scout and Black Panther.

“No,” Spiegel said. “There’s just been tons of pressure. Since the TV thing. Threats and stuff, and I’ve laid low.”

“But what about us, man?” said the lanky guy. He had a sick-looking blond beard, and he was missing an upper tooth. “I’m talking about our reserve fundings. Like, it’s time for you to kick in.”

“Well, things are just, like, out of joint this month.” Funds? Tracy had mentioned to him the so-called emergency fund that Aaronson had established, and Spiegel knew that several of the deserters had come to Aaronson from time to time to tap into that source. Had it gone dry? And how could the well be replenished? He would have to ask Zeke, discreetly.

“We’re glad you done come back,” Hyde said. “We thought maybe you’d been dipping into our funds for, like, an airline ticket.”

“Now what the hell good would an airline ticket be to me?” Spiegel said. “I’m grounded here. Besides, I get scared shitless flying.”

“Ha, ha,” said Gap-tooth. “Maybe we could have a meeting, and talk about that. Maybe we could see what kind of souvenirs you brought back from your last trip.”

“Okay,” Spiegel said. “Maybe.” And then he focused on the mimeo he had been carrying. He had crushed it in his sweaty hand so that the only line he could read was number five:
Vietnam, Palestina, samma kamp.
When the squad leader called for it, he joined in, as loudly as he could.

Hyde and his comrade dropped back into the wall of olive-green fatigues, the scruffy and bedraggled deserters who had dusted off their salvaged uniforms and wore them proudly, like Legionnaires on Memorial Day back in the States.

From the windows above the shops, restaurants, and galleries of the Old City, young people—the artists and students who had been drawn to the quaint district, Uppsala’s Left Bank, as they called it—opened their wooden shutters wide and leaned out, over iron parapets and window boxes filled with red flowers. They waved small flags and shouted to the stream of people passing raucously below:
Hej, amerikanare!
And the deserters waved back, fluttered their flags, pumped their fists, one or two even saluted. Today, they were the heroes.

These heroes were resentful of Aaronson for his absence, for his abdication. And they were separated from him, as well, by a matter of class and social status. Most of the deserters were poor and poorly educated, but here, they had come to realize, they outranked Aaronson. They respected his brains and his daring, but they looked askance at him as well because he had never been in the army, never seen Vietnam except on the news. Whatever danger Aaronson had faced, whatever taboo had been violated to bring him to Uppsala and to keep him in exile, it could not be so great as the horrors they had seen and the risks they had run to save their souls. They couldn’t help but think that he, a college boy, could always fly home and buy his way out of trouble. But they were here forever, consigned to purgatory, an alternative they had chosen at great price after looking into the pits of hell.

The roadway widened as the march passed through the gates of the Old City and onto the shopping concourse that sloped down toward the river. Spiegel remembered how inhospitable the downtown streets had looked in winter. Seeing this part of the city for the first time since winter, Spiegel noticed that the streets looked so much more airy and open than he had recalled. The sunlight was shining off the great plate-glass windows with their tasteful displays of crystal and luggage, the trees modulated the intense light with their feathery green leaves, flags at the street corners snapped in the breeze. The bystanders, few but enthusiastic, cheered the marchers as they passed along. One young girl ran out to the Americans and handed them small white flowers.