Exiles (11 page)

“So, brothers, where can I dump this stuff? Don’t you guys have coatracks?”

“My room’s open,” Spiegel said.

“You got a bathroom there, too?”

While Tracy was gone, Jorge bustled about, heaping her empty plate with a fresh serving of the snails. As he worked, he tried to grab Spiegel’s attention. Standing behind Melissa, he gave a little cough and raised his eyebrows. When Spiegel looked, Jorge smiled and cupped his hands in front of his chest, as if to say—nice body, huh?

“I think Tracy has already eaten,” Spiegel said.

“Oh, well, of course. But maybe we can entice her to a second portion. For the sake of—variety?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You’d be surprised, my friend, how many people like to dine on more than one dish. Am I right, Melissa?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He’s saying he thinks Tracy might be interested in me—”

“Now, now—” Jorge said. He seemed, to Spiegel’s amusement, to be genuinely prudish when talking about sex in the presence of a woman. So he had been using circumlocutions. Perhaps he feared that speaking of sex, and of infidelity, would make his attempt to seduce Melissa more difficult. With Melissa, and no doubt with Lisbet and with any of the other girls in his past and his future, he would speak of sex, if he spoke at all, as if it were something holy and mysterious that had touched them, even for a single moment, with the blind force of its divinity.

“She’s not interested in me,” Spiegel said. “She’s got an old man she lives with.”

“She’s the chick who lives with that deserter?”

“He’s not a deserter. He’s a resister.” Tracy had come back to join them.

“What’s the big diff?” Melissa asked.

“Deserters leave the army. Resisters take illegal actions against the war.”

“Like burning draft cards and stuff?”

“More serious. That’s like a speeding ticket. The resisters here are wanted on federal warrants. If Aaronson’s caught anywhere outside Sweden, he’ll do federal time.”

Spiegel, stirred by Jorge’s leering assessment, couldn’t help but look at Tracy in a new way. Yes, she was cute, and now that she had shed her down jacket, he could appreciate that she had a nice, compact body and a liveliness about her step and her bearing that he found most attractive. Her expression was open and friendly. She had nice eyes and an appealing overbite. She would touch her teeth to her lower lip when thinking or when listening intently, and Spiegel liked that. It made Tracy look just a little bit aggressive, a little dangerous—as if no flesh would be entirely inviolate pressed close to hers.

“Well, I say thank god for Sweden,” Jorge said, and he raised his glass. “If it weren’t for Sweden, I might be lying dead on a beach in Africa.”

“To Sweden,” Spiegel echoed, and he raised his glass. “The last hope on earth for the oppressed—”

“Depressed—”

“Repressed—”

“Where Kurds and Turks, Egyptians and Jews, Ibo and Biafran can sit side by side—”

“—and learn to order cheese!”

They laughed and clinked glasses. Each of them took a long draught of the wine. Then they returned their attention to dinner, even Melissa, who decided, once she saw everyone else gorging on snails, that snails weren’t really so bad. As members of the mollusk family, she reasoned, snails were perched low enough on the great chain of being that they didn’t violate her vegetarian principles. She wondered if Tracy knew what she was eating, or if she cared. Something about those East Coast chicks—they were always hungry, always pushing ahead. She had known a few back in drama school at UCLA, the driven ones, the ones who wanted not so much the grades—who cared about that shit really?—as the contacts, a line to the producers, the directors, the casting agents. They drove her crazy, yet she had to acknowledge, as she watched Tracy sop up snail juice with a big slab of puffy bread, that she admired their drive and their spirit. She could learn a few things from Tracy.

“So look,” Tracy was saying. “I’ve got some business to conduct here with Lenny, and you’re welcome to watch—”

“Business? Whoa!” Jorge blurted. His face was a little flushed from the wine and the spicy food.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about!” Spiegel said, and his voice was louder than he thought it should be. He was feeling loose, too. It was more than the wine. The whole room, still pungent with cooking odors, seemed to be deeply intoxicant.

“Come on, I’ll show you,” Tracy said. She stood, and then they all did, a little shaky and uncertain. Melissa steadied herself by setting a hand on the table.

“What about all these dishes and stuff?”

“Later, later,” Jorge said, grandly dismissive, a patron on his estate anticipating that the servants would see to the details, as Tracy led them into the hallway and to Spiegel’s room.

“Great decor,” Melissa said, as she stifled a giggle. Spiegel had added nothing to the room except his backpack, which sat in the corner, its flaps open, a change of clothes draped over the metal frame, a portable dressing bureau.

“I just had no idea how long I’d be here,” he said. “Maybe I’ll buy some posters for the walls.”

“You need something,” Melissa said.

“Why?” said Tracy. “I think he’s got the right idea. Never accumulate more than you can carry on your back. Guerilla tourism.”

“A lesson from the snails,” Jorge said.

“Not for me,” said Melissa. “Wherever I go, I like to make the place feel like home.”

“So does your room look like Disneyland?” Jorge said.

“I’ll show you. But first let’s see Tracy’s big surprise. Is it in those bags, Tracy? Did you bring dessert?”

“I don’t know if I could handle dessert,” Spiegel said. He felt a little weird, a bit feverish, and he wondered if it had been wise to eat those snails. Maybe Swedish snails carried a subtle, slow-acting toxin, whose poison even now was seeping through his veins.

“No, it’s not dessert,” Tracy said. “Come on, you guys can help. You got some newspapers?” She began to take things out of the bag: scissors, a battery-operated electric clipper, a hand mirror, a white sheet.

“What is this, a crafts project?” Spiegel said.

“Maybe you will bury someone and wrap the body in that sheet,” said Jorge.

“I’m going to cut your hair,” Tracy said to Spiegel. “Sit down.”

“Why? I like his hair. It’s cool,” said Melissa.

Spiegel flushed. He thought of Iris running her fingers through his long hair, the last afternoon they had spent together. He had thought about getting his hair trimmed once he got to Europe—his wavy dark hair, nearly shoulder-length, made him stand out among the close-cropped, lank-haired Swedes—but every time he remembered how much Iris had liked the touch of his long hair against her face and neck he decided to let it stay.

“He looks like George Harrison,” said Jorge. “It would be a terrible waste.”

“All that work,” said Melissa.

“Growing your hair long doesn’t take any work,” Tracy said. “It’s about the only thing that you do by not doing something.”

“Gee, what do you think, Lenny? It’s
your
hair.”

“Well, I guess I do feel attached to it,” Spiegel said. “And for that very reason, it’s probably time to cut.” He wasn’t sure if he really felt that, but he understood what Tracy had in mind. Spiegel remembered his first night in the country, how Tracy had made him stand beside Aaronson, how she had inspected the two of them while they examined each other, face-to-face, then side by side before the tall mirror. Neither of them could see the resemblance, but it had to be there, and Tracy had said that it was Spiegel’s long hair that drew the line of demarcation between them. Tonight, Tracy would erase the line.

Melissa brought a stack of papers from her room and lay them on Spiegel’s floor. Spiegel placed a chair at the center of the newspaper carpet, and Tracy draped the sheet around his neck, securing it with a safety pin.

“All set for the hanging,” Spiegel said. “You guys going to watch, or do you get sick at the sight of blood?”

“It’s just too sad,” Melissa said.

“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,” said Tracy.

“Shouldn’t we have some music?” Jorge said.

“We could sing a barbershop quartet number.”

But in fact they were silent. Jorge and Melissa watched, mesmerized, as Tracy moved slowly, clockwise, around Spiegel, her scissors tapping out a steady, quiet rhythm of clicks and snaps. They moved about the room to see her work from various angles: over the shoulder, Spiegel in profile, Spiegel head-on, Spiegel from the back. Spiegel took a narcissistic delight in the attention. He was like a small sun with the planets of his solar system slowly revolving in their elliptical orbits, out there in dark space, beyond his line of vision. He felt calmed and cleansed, and he wondered if the toxins from the snails, or from who knows what Jorge might have slipped into the broth, had moved deeper into his muscles and nerves, gliding him past the point of flushed fever, then over the edge toward a pleasant narcosis, and maybe finally to the sweet sleep of death. He didn’t care. He would sit and wait for time to pass, for Tracy, and for the snails, to do their work.

“There,” Tracy said. She held up a pair of hand mirrors so that Spiegel could get a look at her accomplishment, front and back. “A new man.”

“Did I sleep?” Spiegel asked. As he cast his mind backward, he thought that he could remember every moment of the haircut, Tracy’s balletic movements, the light touch of the cloth of her loose shirt against his face and lips, her hands brushing against his neck, his throat. He could recall the banter of Jorge and Melissa, in the background, just out of sight. But at some point he must have dozed. Jorge and Melissa were gone—together?— and Tracy had finished her work. She was unpinning the sheet and shaking Spiegel’s hair onto the newspaper mats. The floor was covered with knots and strands of his hair, dark and dull but punctuated with an occasional comma of gray.

“What do you think?” Tracy asked.

“I think no one would recognize me.”

“You see now that you look just like him?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” Tracy said. “I know Aaronson didn’t explain much to you. He can’t say much, to anyone. There’s too much risk that the wrong people could learn what he’s doing. But you’re involved now, too, and I owe you an explanation.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Well, let’s just say it would be better, safer, if you understood the situation. Not that I understand it all. Aaronson doesn’t even tell me everything, and that’s probably good.”

Tracy had swept all the hair onto the newspapers and was rolling the papers into a neat cylinder. “Where can I toss these?” she asked.

“Why don’t we save the evidence?”

“I’ll send it home. Let your mom know you got a haircut.”

“Send it hair mail.”

Tracy laughed. “Where is your mom?” she asked. “Where did you grow up? You never told me.”

“It’s complicated,” Spiegel said. “She’s dead.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“And your father?”

“He’s in the foreign service, diplomatic corps. He’s stationed now in Africa.”

“Cool! Would you go there to visit? There are cheap flights, I’ve heard. A lot of Swedes go to Tunisia on vacation, on charter packages.”

“You know, I just don’t see my dad that much. When he comes back to Washington, between postings, I get down there and we go out to dinner and stuff. But we’re not really close.”

“Maybe you should try? You probably have more in common, now that you’re in college, traveling—”

“And getting a haircut?”

“Yeah,” Tracy said.

“I think these days we’d have huge political differences, too. He’s, like, the Ugly American and proud of it. I never understood that or thought about it till I met Iris, and you guys. Now, I don’t know, the gap between me and my dad may be unbridgeable.”

“I don’t believe that,” Tracy said. “I think people like you who have family in government ought to use that advantage to try to change the political structure. Imagine, if you could get your father to understand your point of view. Maybe he could open up some country in Africa as a refuge. That would be fabulous for the deserters, especially the black guys. They’re just dying here, culturally.”

“No, my dad would never do that. If he knew I was working with you guys he’d probably try to have me shot.”

“Maybe not, though. Maybe the opposite. Maybe it would change his position.”

“He’s not really in that influential a position. I mean, he doesn’t make policy. He does cultural stuff: runs the library, helps set up village schools.”

“A grown-up Peace Corps.”

“Yeah.” But Spiegel wondered, even as he described his father’s work in such benign terms, whether Tracy was asking him for information about his father or drawing him out, testing him to see just how much he would reveal. Tracy seemed to accept his ingenuous account of his father as a secular missionary. But he sensed that Tracy was not disclosing all that she knew.

Tracy brushed the last of Spiegel’s hair off her blouse and into the wastebasket. She went over to the door and looked out in the hallway. No one was about. Melissa’s door was closed, and the three Swedes were apparently deep into their studies.

“Let me tell you about Aaronson,” she said.

“Has he come back?” Spiegel asked. “I thought he’d only be gone for a day or two.”

“It was great of you to give him the passport. And you’ll get it back. But things have become a little more complicated.”

“You’ve heard from him?”

“Well, no,” Tracy said. “And I don’t expect to, not until he comes back to Sweden.”

“How long can that be?” Spiegel said. “He’s only gone to Denmark. He could swim home, if he has to.”

“Actually, he’s gone to Germany.”

Spiegel swallowed. Why hadn’t they told him the truth? “That’s crazy,” he said. “Germany’s crawling with police. Half the country’s in uniform.”

“It’s not the ones in uniform that worry me.”

“True,” Spiegel said. “What’s he doing in Germany?”

“Aaronson has contact with a leftist student group in Heidelberg, the SDG, socialist
gesellschaft
or some damn thing. They’ve been working to set up connections to the army base.”