Exiles (14 page)

Jorge waved his hand, dismissively.

“We expect more from our government,” Spiegel said.

“Maybe you expect too much.” Jorge gunned the car out onto the highway. The road was clear, and they had it to themselves.

“We’re idealists, I admit it. Most of us first got into politics when Kennedy was president. We expect our government to be more honest.”

“More glamorous,” Jorge said. Spiegel didn’t answer. “So why is it,” Jorge went on, “that you Americans don’t like Sweden? It’s the most honest government in the world, I think. And here we are, nobodies, you know? ‘I’m a real nowhere man.’ And they take us in and give us housing, schooling, freedom to do as we please. And all I hear from the Americans is they hate this country, it’s mean, it’s cold, unfriendly. What is it you want?”

“You haven’t heard me complain, except this morning with Lisbet—”

“Yes, exactly! You are catching the infection, from your countrymen.”

“Like who? I didn’t think you knew other Americans here.”

“Well, there was a group, in the language school. They left to form a class of their own, and the government even allowed this.”

“Yes, the deserters and resisters. I know some of them.”

“There you have it,” Jorge said. “I would just say to you, stay away from them. Those fellows are trouble, and they’ll, how do you say it, bring you down?”

Spiegel thanked Jorge for the warning. He thought that maybe it would be best if they just drove the rest of the way to Tracy’s in silence. He wished there were some good rock’n’roll on the radio.

“Here we are,” Jorge said, as he slowed the car. “Lisbet took me to this place.”

“A shortcut?”

“No,” Jorge said. “It is a place where we used to come to be free.”

“That must have been before the winter. Now it looks like a place you would come to be stuck.”

Jorge turned off the main road onto an unplowed lane that cut through one of the white fields whose ugly monotony had so disturbed Spiegel on his first bus ride out to Flogsta, weeks ago. The car cut its way through the fresh snow. The grip on the road seemed secure, and Spiegel realized that he felt safer off the road than on the highway. What could happen? There was nothing into which they could collide except a few snow-covered mounds. At worst, the Volvo would stall out, or Jorge would spin the wheels and lock the car in place, in a furrow of ice, and they would walk back to the road and he would catch the bus. Somehow, Spiegel knew, Jorge would extricate the car—or Lisbet would know how to do so. Maybe they would leave it in the field, a monument, awaiting the spring thaw.

But Jorge drove with care and precision. It was difficult discerning the course of the dirt roadway beneath the pure white field of snow. “Do you know what they are?” Jorge said. He gestured toward the mounds of snow.

Spiegel said that he did not. They looked like hayricks.

“Viking tombs, they say. No one knows how long they have been here.”

“You’d think the government would dig them up. Or zap them with X-rays, to find out.”

“Maybe the Swedes like the mystery. Sometimes it is better not to probe secrets, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean by that?” Spiegel said.

“I mean sometimes if you start to dig too deeply, you may turn up ugly things that you would rather not have to see. It may be better, sometimes, to leave things as they are.”

Jorge turned abruptly, and the Volvo slid down the lip that must have marked the side of the road. “Hold on,” Jorge said, and he accelerated. The wheels spun in the snow for a second, then gripped dirt and the car kicked across the field toward one of the low hills. The ride was surprisingly smooth, Spiegel thought. The field must be unplowed. In spring, it would be a meadow. Jorge kept picking up speed as they approached the base of the hill. The nose of the car tilted upward at a slightly sickening angle. They had enough momentum that the car made it right to the top, where the hill seemed to flatten into a plateau. Just at the edge, Jorge pressed the pedal to the floor, and with a final surge and a pop they were on top of the hill. From there, Spiegel could see a new expanse of farmland. At the center of the landscape was a lake, its surface a white disk of snow and ice.

“Very pretty,” Spiegel said. “A frozen pond.”

“So smooth and clear. In Portugal, the only place we see such ice is in a glass of whiskey,” Jorge said. “To see so much of it at once is like a miracle.”

“Getting us out of here will be a miracle.”

Jorge fixed his gaze on the pond. He stared ahead in silence, like a diver poised on the high board.

“Are you okay?” Spiegel said. He thought Jorge must have been recollecting a previous visit to this site. He could picture Jorge and Lisbet, naked in the tall grass, making love in the shadow of the Viking tombs.

“Jesus walked on the water,” Jorge said, after a while. “That, too, was a miracle.”

“Yeah, and Moses parted the Red Sea. But the age of miracles is over.”

“Let’s find out,” Jorge said.

Jorge let the Volvo begin its long roll down the far side of the hill, a much more steady and gradual descent than the steep slope that they had climbed. “Here we go,” Jorge hollered, and he let the car pick up speed as it approached the pond, and then, on level ground again, he floored the accelerator and they shot across a band of snow and dropped onto the hard surface of the pond.

On the pond, the snow was only a dusting on top of the blue ice. The wind must have whipped the fresh snow over to the high banks, Spiegel thought. The next he knew, they were flying across the ice like a puck, and the tires whined and made a funny crackling sound, as if their passage were smashing the surface of the ice into millions of tiny crystals. Part of the world seemed to be slipping away from them, flattening itself out to a thin line, a nothingness obscured by the bluish ice and the gray-green sky. But another part of the world, or of their field of vision, the far side of the pond, by indiscernible increments assumed the recognizable shapes of a winter landscape: more white fields, thin pines, stubborn hills, and beyond the hills a mustard-yellow farmhouse with a red roof.

At the center of the pond, Jorge stomped as hard as he could on the brakes. The wheels seemed to lock, and the car went into a sudden spin. Spiegel was thrown against the door frame, then back into his seat. He braced his hands against the dashboard, to protect himself. The world whipped around him in a blur, a gray cyclone, and he was at its center, surprisingly silent, and thick with a cottony heat. He saw a tree trunk flash by his window, a branch seemed to scrape the windshield like a ghostly hand, and he felt a thud as the car bumped against a snowbank and then ricocheted out again toward the center of the pond. They seemed to be moving sideways, which Spiegel would have thought impossible, and then backwards, and he tried to regain his equilibrium by keeping his gaze focused on a bent pine in the middle of the white pasture. As they came at last to rest, Spiegel realized that he was drenched in sweat and shaking uncontrollably.

“A miracle,” Jorge said, his voice shrill with excitement. “Another bloody fucking miracle!”

Spiegel thought that if he spoke he would break into tears and if he moved he would be unable to keep his hands from Jorge’s throat.

7

“We have with us
in our TVTwo-Uppsala studio tonight a founding member of a group called the American Resisters Movement—Sweden.

“Mr. Aaronson has deserted from the United States Army in protest against the war in Vietnam.

“Tonight, he will tell us about his views . . . ”

It took a moment before Melissa realized that she was hearing English. She had grown accustomed to turning the TV on in order to tune it out. The noise secured her privacy when she was at Mick’s. She was unaccountably shy about her visits with him. Maybe it was because of his flat, a garret above a row of shops and galleries in the minuscule artists’ quarter—the artists’ corner, Mick called it—on the banks of the river. The greedy landlord—a redundancy, Mick remarked—had split the loft into four units in order to circumvent Uppsala’s laxly enforced rent-control laws. So Mick’s flat was divided from his neighbors by a thin layer of peg-board overlaid, Mick thought, with nothing more sound-absorbent than a madras spread. Not only could they hear the comings and goings, and especially the comings, of the potter who lived in the flat to the right, a Don Juan in a clay-caked smock, but they got to enjoy the latest cuts from Pink Floyd and T-Rex and other hot sensations from the British scene, which were played ad nauseum by the would-be rock star who rented the flat to the left. All I contribute to this is the bubbling from my lava lamp, Mick said.

“Except when I’m around,” Melissa answered.

Still, she liked to turn up the volume on his “telly” to mask the sounds of whatever it was they might get up to. She was a little shy, as well, because of the whole nature of their relationship. It was a bit of a cliché, wasn’t it: the ingenue and the director, the American blonde earning the lead by auditioning on the casting couch? She shouldn’t be with Mick, she knew it. Or she should wait until after the play, after the semester, to work out any relationship that might develop. But she wasn’t that strong, and perhaps, yes, she was using him. But so what? It wouldn’t be the first time.

“I think I know that guy,” Melissa said.

“That’s nice, love,” Mick said. “You can tell me all about him later.” They had just finished fucking, and Mick was curled up beside Melissa, his feet resting on the pillow beside her neck, his head resting on her thigh. He was licking her in a way that seemed to her almost feral, as if he were grooming her, combing her downy hair into place with his tongue. He was trying to arouse her again for, as he liked to put it, another shot in the dark, or as she said, the second coming.

“What is it with you Aussies?” she said. “You like it upside down.”

“Down under, they call us,” Mick said.

“I’m a California girl, remember.”

“And how do California girls like it? Laid-back?”

“We like to call the plays,” she said.

“Too bad. I’m the director.”

“In the theater, yes.” Melissa was uninterested in continuing the session, at least at Mick’s level of intensity. Laid-back might be correct. She was trying to squirm her legs out from under his grip. But she didn’t want to make it a real struggle, either. That might arouse him. She didn’t want to get involved in another toss. “Come on, Mick,” she said. “Easy.”

“Yes, nice and easy, doll,” he said, and gave the inside of her thigh a long, sensuous lick, ending with a little fillip right by her crack.

“I didn’t mean
easy
that way,” she said. “I meant, let’s call it a night, okay?”

“A night? Why not stay over?”

As Mick sat up, Melissa got a better view of the TV, which was at the foot of the bed.

“I do know him,” she said.

“Since when are you so interested in the telly?” Mick asked. “You can’t even understand a bloody thing.”

“Yes, look,” Melissa said. “It’s a show about Americans. I know that one.” She touched the screen, as the view shifted to a close-up of Spiegel.

“He’s speaking English, if you can call American English,” Mick said.

“The American resisters,” Spiegel was saying, “deserve the same rights and privileges enjoyed by all the citizens of Sweden: good housing, good schools, training for jobs . . . ”

“I think it’s a guy who lives on my floor, who showed up last month in the middle of the term.”

“Probably some CIA spy.”

“No, just your basic student.”

“Another one of your—conquests?”

“No, he’s got an old lady, in town. He’s kind of moved in with her.”

Aaronson’s name was displayed across the bottom of the screen.

“But I guess I’m wrong. The guy I know is named Lenny Spiegel.”

“All you Americans look alike, right?”

“Maybe from down under.”

“No, from that perspective one can discern exquisite differences.”

“Just how much experience have you enjoyed in that region, sir?”

“Not quite enough.” And he slipped his face back down between Melissa’s legs.

“Can I just, at least, watch the end of this show?” she said.

The camera panned to the right of the moderator.

* * *

“Also with me tonight,” the moderator said, “are Miss Monika Nuland, of the Uppsala chapter of the Swedish Student Solidarity Committee, a group devoted to helping the American deserters in Sweden, and Mr. Erik Edström, the founding member of the Sweden First Party, whose slogan is
Sweden for the Swedes.
Mr. Edström was an unsuccessful candidate for the city council, and he has vowed—”

“This is a fucking setup!” said Tracy. Because there was no extra seating in the broadcast studio, she was confined to the station’s lobby, where she was watching the show on a monitor. She had been so concerned about preparing Spiegel for his role that she had given little thought to who else might be on the panel.

She had heard about Monika Nuland and the SSS. The Uppsala chapter had just been formed, and Tracy had intended to set up a meeting with the new group. She was glad to see this Monika on the panel. Edström, however, should not be there. All he would do, Tracy thought, is stir public passions and align Swedes against the Americans, subject us to a racist harangue—in short, provide provocation. Aaronson could have handled him. He had run a lot of meetings and faced down plenty of hecklers and right-wing provocateurs, here and in the States. But she wondered about Spiegel. He was so green, so naive.

“. . . their drugs, their violence, their whole American culture—these are things we don’t need in Sweden,” Edström was saying. He spoke in Swedish, and an English text appeared below him on the screen. “Now I for one have always been in favor of providing sanctuary to true victims of political repression. But these Americans are not victims! They have left their country in a time of war, in a time of great need. They have turned their back on their motherland, and fled, leaving their brothers in arms to fight their battles. Are we to consider them heroes? Or are they traitors and bloodsuckers, looking now to leech off the Swedish state?”

“Well, Mr. Aaronson, what is your answer?”

“Son of a bitch,” Tracy said. She crossed the lobby and punched the off button on the monitor. The tube uttered a little click and a hiss and then went dark. The lobby guard, drowsy beside his console, was stirred awake by the sudden absence of background noise. He scanned the room just in time to notice Tracy push her way through the door, to see her step into the hallway that led to the broadcast studio.

“My answer to that is simple,” Spiegel said. He was sweating under the floodlights and squirming in his seat from tension and anxiety. He was trying to read Edström’s words on the video monitor, which was small and set at an awkward angle. It was almost impossible for him to frame a thoughtful response and to talk slowly, as he had been counseled, so that the translator could type his words into Swedish subtitles. “You speak as someone who does not know the American resisters. If you were to know them, to know their stories . . . ”

“Aw, what does he know,” said one of the guys sitting around the small table in the warehouse basement. It was Hyde, dressed in his full combat regalia, with a black beret and a crimson sash slung over his shoulder and pulled tight against his pressed khaki shirt. He looked like a cross between Huey Newton and a French legionnaire.

Zeke had let the members of ARMS know that he would “borrow” a television and set it up in the meeting hall for anyone who wanted to watch “Aaronson” when he spoke on TV2. Four of the Americans were sitting at a folding table, where Zeke had propped the black-and-white portable that he had liberated from an untended storage room in the warehouse above the ARMS office.

“He was never in the fucking war,” said another one of the guys, leaning forward to get a better view of the screen. The corner of the card table pressed into his gut, and when he leaned back to take a swallow of beer the table seemed to have left an indentation, like a finger poked into a puddle of bread dough. “They shoulda asked me up there.”

“Yeah, but you can’t read subtitles,” Zeke said.

“Who says you have to read?” He took another big swallow from a tall can of Australian beer.

“How else would you know what the fascist is saying?”

“Which is the fascist?”

“See, that’s my point. You don’t even know what that guy across from Aaronson was talking about, do you? ’Cause you didn’t read the fucking subtitles.”

“Aw, shit, I thought they were in Swedish, too.”

“You really are stupid, man.”

“. . . much braver men to stand up against the military establishment and say, no, I will not kill, I will risk my life to end this killing. If more people throughout history had stood up to the forces of tyranny and dictatorship, well, we wouldn’t have had concentration camps, we wouldn’t have had, in my own country, a system of slavery . . . ”

“I’m just saying,” Hyde offered, “that I’m sick of this guy who never set foot in country telling us what to think and what to do, man. We’ve been here like two years, and the only person with a decent place to live and a car and you know—”

“—an old lady—”

“Right—is that motherfucker.”

“That’s right, Hyde,” said a skinny guy, wiping suds from his Fu Manchu mustache. “You tell it.”

“And what do we have?” Hyde said. “We’ve got like a handout from the government and enough Swedish to step up to a counter and order a hot dog. Now what kind of life is that? While he goes off traveling through Europe, staying at fancy hotels, flying in airplanes where they probably serve red wine and show movies, he’s patting the asses of those stewardesses when they push the drink cart down the aisle, and—”

“Like where’s he been, man?”

“It’s not like he’s gone off on a Mediterranean cruise, you know,” Zeke said. “It’s more like a guerrilla mission. He was down there looking for recruits, guys who wanna leave the show, and he’s got to bring them up here safely. It’s very risky stuff, man.”

“He don’t look like he’s risking all that much right now.”

“You think it’s easy for him to be on the tube, speaking for us?” Zeke said.

“Don’t look such a bad place to be,” Hyde said. “Next to that old lady.” The camera panned to show Monika Nuland, tossing her long hair back over her shoulder in a gesture of apparent contempt for Edström’s harangue.

“Just look at these people,” Edström said. “They live in the doorways, on the benches in parks and railroad stations. They drink too much, they smoke too much. They have money for these things and for who knows what else. But they do not work. Are we to support these so-called heroes? Why . . . ”

“I have to admit there’s some truth in what he says,” Jorge said to Lisbet. “Most of the Americans are pretty grotty.”

They were in the sitting room of Lisbet’s suite. She was trying to study for an exam, but she was being distracted by the chatter from the television and by Jorge’s hands, gently rubbing the back of her neck. Occasionally, a finger would stray and fondle the lobe of her ear, or his hand would slip inside the folds of her blouse to explore one of the hidden regions of her undiscovered continent. She alternated between putting him off—“Jorge, please!”—which would deter him for only a few moments, and leaning back toward him, involuntarily purring with pleasure.

“Oh, Jorge,” she said, as she leaned away from him, trying to focus on her biology text. “That’s so unsympathetic.”

“You don’t like what I’m doing?”

“With your hand? No, that’s nice. I mean what you said. About the Americans.”

“Ah, but it is true,” Jorge said. “They’re not, you know, the same as us. They seem to be from a different class of people. Much more—how do you say it?—cannibal.”

“You mean primitive?”

“Yes, that, too, perhaps. They don’t go to the school, they don’t learn the language, they have no culture, no savoir flair . . . ”

“It’s
savoir faire.
And your friend has plenty of it.”

“Of course, but he is very different, just look at him—”

“Where? That’s not him on TV, is it?”

“No. No, I mean . . . just look at that American. He looks . . .”

“It does look like Lenny, my God.”

“Well of course they don’t have jobs!” Monika was on the edge of her seat, really into it, giving it right back to Edström. “Who would hire them unless they learn the language, the culture? And isn’t it the responsibility of the host government to bring them into the culture, to treat them not as an invading army but to welcome them with open arms . . . ”

“Then why is it that you haven’t learned the language, Mr. Aaronson?” Edström said, turning to Spiegel. “I will tell you why. I have evidence . . . ”

“You see it is not Lenny. It is a man named Aaronson. Perhaps all those Americans do look alike, after all,” Jorge said.

“No, not all of them,” Lisbet said. “He’s cute, whatever his name is. More than most.”

“So you agree with me that most of them are of a lower order.”

“No, I didn’t say that. Really, Jorge.” She tried to get back to her textbook.

“In Portugal, only the better sort of people refuse the military service. The working man, he would never dream of turning down the opportunity to fight for his king and his country. It is his one chance in life to better himself and to see the world.”