Exiles (13 page)

“Welcome to our flat,” Lisbet said. “Are you the one Jorge has told me about?”

“What has he told you?”

“There’s only one American in his language class.”

“
Det är jag,
” Spiegel said.

Lisbet clapped her hands together, and smiled at Spiegel. “
Bra,
” she said. “
Bara bra.
You are learning the language, which is more than I can say for some. See what you could do if you would mind the teacher?” she said to Jorge.

“I do mind her. I mind everything about her.”

“See,” Spiegel said to Lisbet. “Puns in English. He’s good with languages. He’ll learn Swedish in no time.”

“He had better,” she said. “I told him we could not announce our engagement until he can speak my language.”

Perhaps, Spiegel thought, that accounts for Jorge’s three languid tours through
svensk
for beginners.

“In America, all he would have to say is ‘I do,’ ” Spiegel said.

Lisbet explained to Spiegel that Swedes take engagement seriously. To be engaged meant seeking the consent of both sets of parents, exchanging rings and gifts, setting a date, notifying the minister, filing documents with the parish, then hosting an intimate party for friends and family.

“And Jorge would be expected to give a speech,” Lisbet said.

“I could do that now,” Jorge said.

“Yes, but your speech would be about ordering a cheese sandwich.”

Jorge and Lisbet laughed, but their laughter seemed to hold within it a whole conversation, a conversation that had been going on between them for months. Marriage was a subject that Jorge and Lisbet had worked over until it was raw, and just touching lightly on the topic had fired up their nerve ends. In Lisbet’s laughter, Spiegel could hear a challenge, and in Jorge’s something else, something like the last gasp for breath before submission to another’s superior strength.

“In any case,” Jorge said, “I found the scarf,” and he held it up for Lisbet to see. It was white and finely woven, useless against the Arctic cold.

“That was my scarf, you know,” she said to Spiegel. “He’s so careless with my things. But let me just try to touch one of his precious items and—he explodes like a gong.”

“Like a bomb?” Spiegel said, tentatively. He had learned that some Swedes did not take well to having their English corrected. Many had a false pride and liked to believe that their English was flawless, and it often nearly was, except for mastery of the idioms and pronunciation of the
w’s.

“Yes, like a bomb. Thank you.”

“You speak so well, though. Where did you learn?”

Lisbet laughed. “You mean my accent?”

“She grew up in Liverpool. She is John Lennon’s half-sister!”

“Jorge!”

“It’s true! If she could sing, she would be the fifth Beatle.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and one for Spiegel.

“He’s lying. I’m from the North.”

“Of England?” Spiegel asked.

“No, of course not. Of Sweden. Norland, we call it. What do you Americans call it? Land of the midnight sun?”

“ ‘There is a house in New Orleans . . . ’ ” Jorge began to sing, as he strummed an imaginary guitar.

“So they speak English differently up there?”

“No, but we have trouble getting teachers, or keeping them. The only one that we could get for my school was from Liverpool. He taught us very well, but we all learned his accent, you see. It’s rather funny. My whole little village, we all sound like the Beatles.”

“All four of you.”

“It’s not that small,” Lisbet said, laughing. “But it is terribly boring. I couldn’t wait to get out. Right after high school, I went to Stockholm—”

“That’s where we met. In a club—”

Lisbet took off her glasses, and set them down on the magazine. Spiegel noticed that she had left the pages folded open at a lingerie ad.

“You make it sound,” she said, “like I was hanging around in a club, trying to catch a man!”

“Lisbet worked in the club,” Jorge said. “She served drinks.”

“I was trying to save money to travel, but look what it got me instead.”

“A two-room suite,” Spiegel said.

“I’ve told Lisbet that if she wants to travel, she has picked the wrong bloke.”

“Now, Jorge, I’ve told you, we can get jobs on a cruise ship. I can be a chambermaid and you could—you know, work in the lounge and on the decks, keeping the ladies entertained.”

“Oh, lovely,” Jorge said. “You have a word for that in English?”

“Gigolo.”

“While you entertain the lonely old men.”

“The rich Americans.”

“Left alone in their cabins while their wives—”

“—dance in the discos, with the handsome Portuguese prince—”

“—the count of Lisbon—”

“But you are forgetting about the problem with my passport, love,” Jorge said.

“But once we’re married you will be a citizen of the Kingdom of Sweden.”

“I don’t know that the dictatorship of Portugal would recognize my citizenship, if I should set foot on Portuguese soil.”

“Well, in those ports you could stay aboard the ship, pretend that you’re ill,” Lisbet said.

“I would be ill. I hate ships. I think we should fly.”

“Now who’s unrealistic? Perhaps you picked the wrong chick!”

Spiegel felt totally weird. How had he stepped into the middle of this? Have they no shame? He got the sense, however, that Jorge and Lisbet needed an audience in order to act out their little dramas. They seemed to be playing to him, each angling for his support, hoping to draw him into the fray.

“I’ve seen you around the complex, haven’t I?” Lisbet asked.

“Maybe you have, but I haven’t been here all that long,” he said.

“And already, he’s moving out,” Jorge added.

“What, you’re going home so soon?”

“No, he’s moving in with a . . . lady friend,” Jorge said.

Spiegel raised his hand in protest. “Come on, Jorge, don’t exaggerate.”

“But I don’t exaggerate! It is true. She is a lady and your friend. Is it not so?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point,” Spiegel said. “She’s got an old man.”

“Back in the States?”

“No,” Spiegel said. “But he’s traveling.”

He regretted saying this, even as he spoke the words. He didn’t like Jorge’s insinuations—falsehoods actually—and wanted to set the record straight for Lisbet. Yet he didn’t want to draw the conversation to Aaronson. The less anyone, Jorge especially, with his tendency to joke and to blab, knew about Aaronson and his travels, the better.

“Believe me,” Jorge said, and he added a theatrical sneer. “I know plenty of birds who find someone to warm their nest while the old man is out hunting for the worms.”

“Or playing cards,” Lisbet said.

“Oh, when I play cards, I have no worries about you, love,” Jorge said.

“I’m sure that you don’t,” Lisbet said. “What about you?” she said to Spiegel. “Do you like cards?”

“Not particularly,” Spiegel said. Out of the corner of his eye, he could almost see the color drain from Jorge’s face. “It’s a chance to socialize is all,” he added.

“You and the boys.”

“Yes.”

“You will have to invite the boys here for cards some night, love,” she said to Jorge.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“You see,” Lisbet said to Spiegel. “It’s true what they say. Playing cards is just an excuse to get out of the house.”

“But why would I need an excuse?” Jorge said, indignantly. “We are not yet married.”

“Will things be so different when we are?” Lisbet asked.

“Of course,” Jorge said. “Then I will stay home and you will go out with the girls and you can tell me that you are going shopping.”

Lisbet had obviously divined the truth about Jorge’s midnight rambles. But why had he raised the ante, with his insinuations about Lisbet’s inconstancy? Was he sending a warning shot across the bow, or was he telling her that she need not worry, he was not the type to keep her tied to the mast?

“I think we all should go out some night, together,” Lisbet said.

“The three of us?” Jorge said.

“Yes, like that French movie, about the girl with two guys—”

“That’s
Jules and Jim.
I don’t know as I want that movie to be the model for my life. Don’t they all die in the end?”

“What, in a war, isn’t it? It’s terrible.”

“No, that’s some other movie. Maybe
Grand Illusion.
”

“The French movies are all about sex,” Jorge said. “The movies of Portugal, they are about—ideas.”

“Which is why no one has ever seen one outside of Portugal,” Lisbet said. “For ideas, how can you beat Ingmar Bergman?”

“Oh, who watches him?” Jorge said.

“He’s very popular in America. Isn’t it so, Lenny?”

“I’m not sure his movies are about ideas,” Spiegel said. “They’re about—conditions. Bleakness and depression. Back home, I thought it was all deeply symbolic and mystical stuff, but since coming here I’ve changed my mind. It’s just social realism. Life here really is dark and gloomy, and everyone is full of angst.”

“Well, you just have to wait until spring,” Lisbet said. “Then, it’s a new world.”

“A whole new ballgame, we say in America.”

“In the spring,” she said, “Jorge will complete his studies, and we will announce our engagement. And you can help us to celebrate. Shall we make him the first to be invited to our engagement party?”

“Will I have to give a speech? In Swedish?”

“No, you will only have to make sure that Jorge does not disappear.”

“And if I disappear, you will have to take my place,” Jorge said. “Do you think you can?”

“I do,” Spiegel said, and they all laughed.

There was a good three inches of fresh snow on the ground. Spiegel didn’t mind at all. In fact, he liked breaking a path from the doorway to the parking lot. No one had come up to Flogsta to plow the roads or the walkways. The main streets in Uppsala were always scraped clean as bone, but on the perimeters of the city, particularly the student enclaves, plowing was much more haphazard. Spiegel noticed that Jorge had no idea what to wear in this weather. He had never seen snow until he fled to Sweden, except perhaps in spreads in fashion magazines. So he dressed as if the snow were a white background, a drop cloth, against which he could display his well-tailored jacket and pants. He was wearing a thin, dark-blue cloth greatcoat with brass buttons the size of saucers. His silky pants had cuffs as wide as those on pillowcases. His shoes were black leather. They had stacked heels and toes that came to needle-sharp points. The soles were soft, almost like velvet, and Jorge had mentioned that they helped him move like a butterfly when he stepped onto the floor at a “discobar.” But in the fresh snow they made him slip and toddle like a drunken circus bear, and Spiegel expected that at any moment Jorge would tumble into a drift, scattering the stack of folded clothes and towels he was holding out before him. Jorge had the sense, at least, to wear gloves, for in that regard good fashion coincided for once with good practice, but Spiegel wondered whether the thin pigskin English driving gloves offered any protection against the biting cold.

“Where does all this stuff come from?” Jorge said. “You wouldn’t think the sky could hold so much.” He was trying to brush the snow from the windshield, using his elbow.

“Shit from the gods, a friend of mine once called it,” Spiegel said. He set the bags he had been carrying on top of the Volvo and began to scrape the door handles clean. He, at least, had thought to wear good, thick mittens. “They say to die in snow isn’t so bad. Jack London wrote a story about that.”

“I don’t worry about how it feels to die in snow. I worry about how it feels to live in snow.” Jorge set the clothes down on top of a snowbank. He was blowing on his hands and smacking them together and stamping his feet in place, like a colt.

“You don’t have to live in it, but you’re going to have to learn to drive in it,” Spiegel said.

“That, I like to do,” Jorge said. “I’ll show you.”

Spiegel realized that he had been drawn into Jorge and Lisbet’s relationship much deeper than he had wanted. He felt less like a Leporello and more like some gruff old father from a drawing-room farce or a comic opera, an old count booming: Make my daughter an honest woman! Marry her!

“Oh, but I will marry her,” Jorge was saying as he revved the engine and flicked on the heater. Cold air blasted onto Spiegel’s feet. He kicked his shoes against the mat to knock off the cakes of snow. “Perhaps when she finishes school.”

“Then why do you need to be jumping into Melissa’s pants?”

“I haven’t married her
yet
,” Jorge said.

“‘You’re gonna lose that girl . . . ’” Spiegel sang.

“Oh, very good,” Jorge said. “There is a song for everything, isn’t there? It’s just wonderful about the British pop.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Spiegel said. “I mean the truth of it is—it’s none of my business, and I don’t really care what you do or what you two do or what the three of you do. Get together, all three of you, like in one of those French movies Lisbet was talking about. But don’t drag me in to make it a jolly foursome.”

“You could have told her, at least, that you like to play cards.”

“I didn’t want to lie. There’s too much of that going around without my adding to it.”

“Too much lying?”

“I’m thinking big picture,” Spiegel said, changing the focus.

“Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, the Chicago police. Everyone knows they were under orders to bust skulls, to break up the peace demonstrations.”

Jorge spun the car out of the parking lot and headed down the drive toward the highway into town. One lane had been plowed, and he slipped down the chute. If they had met a car coming up the hill, he would have had to turn hard and hope to slide off into one of the snowbanks to avoid a head-on collision. Spiegel got the sense that Jorge had never driven in snow. The rear wheels shushed and shimmied, and the car shook and spun as Jorge braked at the foot of the hill.

“In Portugal, when they want to clear up a demonstration, the tanks roll in. It rains bullets. And it is never reported in the newspaper.”

“Then how do you know?” Spiegel said.