Exiles
Authors: Elliot Krieger
EXILES
EXILES
ELLIOT
KRIEGER
Copyright
©
2009 Elliot Krieger
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
All rights reserved.
“Chimes of Freedom,” lyrics by Bob Dylan. Copyright
©
1964; renewed
1992 Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright
secured. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from
Miss Julie
, by August Strindberg, translation by Elizabeth
Sprigge.
©
1955, renewed 1983 by Julyan Mulock and Rugh Lumley-Smith.
Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
TK
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of my parents, Sidney and Ruth Krieger
Contents
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
. . . We gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
—Bob Dylan, “Chimes of Freedom”
1970
One of the pleasures
of a railroad journey is the illusion that the landscape is passing by, though in fact, as you are reminded when you catch a glimpse of cars idling at a gated crossing or passengers on a platform waiting for the local or a group of children waving and tossing stones from an embankment, you are the one in motion while the landscape is fixed in its place and undisturbed by your passage. On a long enough journey, the view from the window becomes a narrative, but with no beginning and no end, just a continuously receding strip of a world that can be, for the traveler, a way to translate space into time, as what’s left behind vanishes not only into the distance but also into the past.
Spiegel had been traveling for more than three days. He had crossed the ocean, been whisked by cab through the evening rush in the amber light of the city of Paris, had struggled with his heavy bags and his rudimentary French as he plunged his way through the Gare du Nord barely in time to catch the North Star, which carried him across the plains of Belgium and the dark flatlands of Germany, up through the night into Denmark’s little mitten, and, with ferry crossings, at last into the forests of Sweden. He rustled the leaves of his railroad ticket, smearing the ink onto his fingertips. After a turbulent, restless night in the
couchette
, he had idled away the morning and afternoon contemplating the monotonous stretches of frozen lakes and snow-dusted pines until the gray sky gave way to black. When Spiegel looked out the window at the winter night, he saw only his own pale reflection staring back, as if, ghostly, a disembodied portion of himself had been brought along on the journey to act as a guardian.
In Stockholm he transferred to the local for the final leg, or toe perhaps, of his travels—an hour’s ride north to the small city of Uppsala. He liked that name. It was one of the few words in Swedish he was sure that he could pronounce. Uppsala—what could go wrong in such a place? For the fortunate citizens of Uppsala, wouldn’t life be a matter of constant good cheer, self-improvement, and civic boosterism? Uppsala, he thought, where Swedes go to get high. He knew nothing about the city.
Spiegel’s knees seemed to quiver as he walked along the open platform toward the small Uppsala station, as if he had forgotten how to walk on a solid footing. The train had pulled away, leaving behind an emptiness, a vacuum. The air seemed extraordinarily cold, the night quiet. The few noises from the station house, the rail yards, the adjacent parking lot seemed to Spiegel’s ears, after the unabated roar of steel on steel, like mere whispers. He was surprised, too, by the pervasive darkness. The platform clocks said it was a few minutes past six, but the sky was black as carbon and the air seemed icy and almost palpable. Spiegel’s breath didn’t leave the kind of foggy smoke that he remembered from cold winter nights in America but a more fragmented kind of ice-mist, as if the air were so still and dry that the moisture from his lips exploded immediately on exhale into a crystalline vapor, and then disappeared.
No one but railroad workers, slapping their hands to startle the cold, stood on the platform. Spiegel could see a few people, their faces mummified in thick wool scarves and downy caps, inside the station house, tapping the frosty glass, swirling their gloves against the panes in big circles to wipe lopsided portholes through which they could survey the platform. The row of faces, each peering through its own island of cleared glass, looked to Spiegel like a comic strip. He scanned the panels. How could he recognize anyone? There was nothing to see but fabric and eyes.
Sweden, he thought, is a land without features. So far, everyone here looks alike—they look like no one.
He shouldered his backpack and lugged his duffel bag into the station. The ticket windows were closed. There was a little snack bar, called a kiosk, that seemed to sell only strange tubes of what seemed to be processed cheese. Spiegel bought a tube because he needed the change. He squeezed a bit of the contents, which looked like beige plastic flecked with some kind of spackling, onto his fingertip. It tasted, well, not so bad—like an especially pungent Velveeta. Spiegel was glad, though, that he couldn’t read the label. Maybe, after all, he had purchased some sort of skin ointment or welding glue?
He found the telephones, and found them to be confusing. A big red button at the center of the dial had some words in Swedish and a weird icon of a person in great distress—sort of like a little sketch of Munch’s
Scream
. What if I push it? Spiegel wondered. Will it connect me directly to the art museum? He fumbled in his pocket for some kroner and for the slip of paper on which he had scribbled the number that he needed.
And then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned.
“Lenny? Yes, it’s you. Sorry I’m late. I wasn’t sure you’d be on this train. Welcome to Sweden. I recognized you right away.”
He recognized the girl right away, too. He had observed her often back in the States. He had seen her chatting with friends in the cafeteria, handing out leaflets on the green, speaking at a rally, studying, or seeming to, at a carrel in the library. She had never noticed him, he knew, but that was all right. He was content, or at least resigned, back in those days, to admire her from afar. He was new on the campus, trying to get back into the groove of academic life after a rocky start at one of the state schools. He had spent most of his first semester wishing that he had the courage to talk to that lovely girl with the pigtails and the almond eyes. Only later did he learn her name, Tracy Green. By that time, she had gone underground.
“You’re Tracy?” She nodded, smiled. He reached to shake her hand, but she spread her arms wide and pulled Spiegel to her in a tight embrace. He reached his arms around her, and the nylon of their down jackets scratched and whistled.
“It’s good to see you. We’ve missed you,” she said.
“Missed me? You’ve never really met me.”
“We’ve missed America, and everyone back there. Iris has been in touch with us. She’s told us all about you, and about everything you did for us. Just hearing her voice—”
“You’ve called her? She never told me.”
“Not often. It’s risky, and too expensive. Look.” She broke the embrace, pointed to the bank of phones. “Twenty-five kroner just for a local call. Just because the phone system is owned by the state doesn’t mean it’s cheap. Everything here is taxed phenomenally. Fuel tax, food tax, liquor tax. Water tax every time you flush the toilet. Clean-air tax every time you open the window.”
“Complaining about taxes, you sound like a capitalist.”
“All the categories are different here,” she said. “You’ll see.”
“I don’t know. So far things look pretty good. Clean, at least.”
“Yeah. Everything’s clean. Come on.” She hoisted his duffel bag.
Tracy’s little, but strong, Spiegel thought. He had been shouldering his pack for three days, and his arms felt as if they were about to pop from the sockets. Maybe it was his crazy night in the
couchette
on the train—a compartment with six beds that popped from the wall like venetian blinds, and not enough room, once you’re zipped inside your slot, for even a big dream.
“How far is it?” Spiegel asked.
“It’s right here.”
“You live in the station? I didn’t know housing was that tight.”
Tracy looked at Spiegel and smiled. She liked his sense of humor already. “I’ve got a car,” she said. “See?”
Tracy’s Beetle was parked in a far corner of the nearly empty lot, under a street lamp that cast a weird sodium glow like rust. The car looked battered. The front fender sagged, and a tattered sticker with two raised fists and some words that Spiegel couldn’t discern was fixed to the rear bumper, like some sort of bandage.
“How’d you get a car here?” Spiegel asked. “You didn’t have it shipped?”
“No, that would be way too expensive. We can’t really afford Rosa, either.”
“Rosa?”
“You’re in her. Rosa the Red. She’s kind of owned by the whole community, but we get to keep her.”
“Like a dog that followed you home from school?”
“Yeah, we like strays.”
As with most VWs Spiegel had known, the front seat had become an all-purpose receptacle, filled with books, leaflets, crushed cigarette cartons, unmatched gloves, soda cans, and a box or two crammed with records, wrenches, and spare auto parts. He scrunched his knees in and wiped the window with his wrist. He thought he would get a look around the town while they drove to Tracy’s place, but it was hard to keep the windshield clear of frost. The heat roared, and, in the confined space, the moisture from their breath and their bodies kept the glass in a steady soak. So Spiegel’s first view of Uppsala was like a series of snapshots taken through a mist—a glimpse of a row of neat, amber-colored town houses as Tracy wheeled around a corner; a triplet of low-arched bridges crossing an ice-blocked river; a warren of narrow cobblestone streets that cut like a maze through the high embankments of fresh snow; Gothic brick buildings whose white spires gleamed in the moonlight like ivory.
“We live here,” Tracy said, as she turned into an alley between two tiny shops, closed for the night. All that Spiegel could see at first was a little sign that read TOBAK. That one, he could figure out. “Hey, I’m learning Swedish already,” he said to Tracy. “It’s a tobacco store.”
“You’re a natural linguist,” she said.
Behind the shop, at the back of the alley, stood a two-story house with tall bay windows framed by wrought-iron filigree.
Gingerbread trim ran the length of the steeply pitched roofline. It’s like a dollhouse, Spiegel thought. He expected to see, poking above the roofline, a brick chimney with a little curlicue of gray smoke twisting into the sky, like a child’s drawing of home.
“How did you find this place?” Spiegel said.
“There are a lot of one-way streets in the Old City. But we’re really not that far from the train station. I’ll show you how to walk there, in the morning.”
“No, I mean—
“Oh. Find it? There’s a list of available housing. The city council runs it in the paper. But to get a good place, you have to be lucky. You like it? ”
“It’s like a postcard of Europe. It’s where I imagined you should be living. Artists in a garret, philosophers in a salon—”
“Trolls in a hut.”
“No, I think your house is perfect,” Spiegel said. “America’s full of places that look like this, but they’re all pseudo. You’ve got the real thing.”
“Funny, but this place came cheap,” Tracy said. “Around here, people don’t really like old houses. Most Swedes want something new, up to the minute. They let the older houses fall apart, and then rent them to students, or worse.”
“What’s worse than students?”
“Us. Foreigners.”
Spiegel hauled his bags out of the backseat as Tracy brushed some snow off the stone doorstep.
“I think I could get to like living in this kind of place,” Spiegel said.
“Well, don’t get too used to it. Where you’re going to be living, it’s brand new. In fact, they’re still building it.”
“Yeah, the university set something up,” Spiegel said. “A place called Flogsta.”
“You’ll dig it,” Tracy said. “But it’s kind of far out.”
“I like far-out.”
“I mean far out of town,” she said, fumbling with a key. “Here we go.”
Tracy opened the front door, and they stepped into a small vestibule. On a closer look—or maybe because he had been clued in—Spiegel could see the evidence of shabbiness. The carpet was frayed, the plaster on the walls was spidered, there was a faint odor of must and rot, perhaps rising from beneath the floorboards. At the doorway stood several precarious stacks of magazines and newspapers, set out for some indeterminate collection. Tracy fumbled with a big silver skeleton key.
“Here, get the handle, would you,” she said. “I don’t know why he locks the inside door.”
Spiegel slipped his bag off his shoulder and worked the door handle, a large lever, made of nickel probably, and rubbed smooth by years of use.
“We’re here,” Tracy called as they entered. “I found him.” She pushed open the door.
“This place is great,” Spiegel said. The apartment had everything you could want: good floors, high ceilings, huge windows almost two stories tall. The furnishings were spartan, even by student standards: some orange-crate coffee tables and bare-board bookshelves and spice racks, a couple of beanbag chairs, a frayed oval rug on the floor. Against the far wall sat an overstuffed, scratchy-looking couch. Scattered about the room were stacks of pamphlets, drafts of petitions, leaflets and colorful brochures for the National Liberation Front, the PLO, the Sandinistas, the Venceremos, the Black Panthers, the Red Army. It looked like a recruiting station for the Third World.
Tacked onto the walls were great posters, colorful and tattered— some in Swedish, some in English, some apparently in Chinese, all urging the workers to rise as one and fight the oppressors, to lift up their arms against colonial aggression, to remain valiant in the struggle to return the land to the people. There were enormous pictures of peasants bearing arms, climbing mountains, digging irrigation trenches, their faces radiant and determined, fixed on some distant point so that in effect the viewer was not drawn in but encouraged to turn away from the poster, to focus attention on the work remaining to be done in the material world.
“You’d never see those back in the States. We got them from the People’s Republic,” said a fellow as he stepped in from the kitchen, drying a coffee mug with a dish towel. “Do you like them?”
“Sure,” Spiegel said. “Screeds against injustice is my favorite form of art. I call it Oppressionism.”
“This is Lenny Spiegel,” Tracy said. “And you must know who this is,” she added, turning to Spiegel.
“You’re Brian Aaronson.”
“Come here, man. It’s great to see you at last,” Aaronson said.
“We’ve heard so much about you from Iris. About all you’ve done already.”
“It wasn’t so much. I was just in the right place at the right time—”
“But this. Coming all the way here. Lots of people say, yeah, I’m going to do something, to help you guys in Sweden. And then they forget, or they cut us a check and that’s it. Their conscience is clear. They’ve paid their debt. But you—well, you’re here. That says it all.”