Exiles (15 page)

As he spoke, his hand wandered farther to the south, his fingers gently exploring the many coves and inlets of the unsettled coast, until eventually, a little Vasco da Gama, he rounded the Cape of Good Hope where he caught sight of land, anchored, and ventured forth into the dark continent.

“. . . can you explain that?” Edström was asking. “The entire American community in Uppsala dropped out of the language classes. And you sit here and tell this audience that it is the fault of the Swedish government that you have been isolated and stigmatized.”

“Is he correct, sir? ” the moderator asked. “Did the Americans quit the language school?”

“We thought we could get better instruction on our own,” Spiegel said. “We hoped to find a teacher who would be free to explain the lessons to us in English.” But he really didn’t know why Aaronson had drawn the men of ARMS out of the language school, other than to pull the group more tightly together and to fix a line between the Americans and the rest of the expatriates in Uppsala.

“But did you or did you not quit language school?” the moderator asked.

“Of course we fucking quit,” the Worm sputtered. “Can’t you tell him, fuckhead? Who would stay in that cesspool, with all those assholes from countries that aren’t even on the map? You expect me to sit there and learn Swedish next to some farmer from Ethiopia? Or some so-called scholar from, what the fuck did he call his country? Bangledish? There’s only one goddamn reason those greaseballs were in that class with us.”

The Worm was getting used to talking to himself. In fact, he found himself to be rather good company when he was drunk, which was most of the time, now that he was living in Uppsala, free, alone, without a care in the world. He didn’t need much to survive. His apartment, two rooms in a basement below a dry cleaner’s, was almost bare: an iron bedstead and two straight-backed wooden chairs from a country church, bequeathed to the resisters by a sympathetic minister. A single pine table served as his countertop, dining area, and desk. The only window was set at street level, and it admitted no daylight. This was the best apartment the Worm had ever had.

“They were spies, trying to keep an eye on our community. Pretending they didn’t speak English. Looking up every time one of us said anything about them. Then looking into their books and coughing. Ha! We could see right through them like they were made of glass. Dirty fuckers. Tell them that!”

“In my country,” Spiegel was arguing, “we have this thing called the Statue of Liberty, and on its base there’s written a motto, it’s a sonnet actually, and it says—”

“I know what it says,” Monika put in. “‘Give us your tired, your poor’!”

“But we’re not talking about his country,” the moderator interrupted.

“If your country’s so great, why are you here?” Edström asked. “We would be more than happy to see you and your compatriots to the border, and we would wave you good-bye. . . . ”

But Spiegel was no longer concentrating on Edström’s tirade. He had heard enough, and he was trying to figure out how to get off the set, out of the picture, out of this whole charade that had begun to consume his life, when he caught sight of Tracy. Because of the floodlights, he could barely see beyond the rim of the makeshift set—a small plywood platform designed to look vaguely like a living room. But he had heard some noise, the sound of a door slamming shut, and if he squinted he could make out, just over the shoulder of one of the cameramen, Tracy’s form in the darkened studio. She was standing in the back of the room, behind a row of unoccupied chairs. It was hard for Spiegel to tell, but it seemed that she was edging her way forward, toward the pool of light, the heat of combat. He tipped his hand to let her know that he had noticed her.

“Wave us good-bye, I bet you would, you fat fuck,” the Worm was saying. He was well into his second tall glass of—something. What was it he was drinking? It tasted, he thought, like perfume, or lighter fluid, or . . . who cares? It burned as it went down, and he felt as if he could breathe like a dragon and set fire to the world with his words, even with his thoughts. “Sweden for the Swedes. The master race. The blondes and the blues!
Sieg heil!
” He opened a drawer below the tabletop and pulled out a skin magazine.
Svenska militäriska flickerna
—the girls of the Swedish Army. They rode tanks, flew fighter jets, learned to shoot, fought with knives, marched through the mud. That’s what he liked, the mud on their uniforms, how the wet khaki clung to their thighs and their breasts like a second, richer skin, deep and earthy and moist.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” The voice came from nowhere, from the darkness, an epithet like a crack of thunder released by one of the gods.

The moderator flicked his head back and forth like a pigeon. “
Vem var det?
” he shouted. “Who’s this? Where’s this coming from”—and then a string of invective in Swedish, as Tracy went on shouting from the darkness.

“You don’t represent the Swedish people. You have no right sitting on the stage with this man. Do you know anything about the war? Do you understand a thing about why he is here—”

The translator, thoroughly confused, was typing Tracy’s words, in English, onto the screen. Edström couldn’t read them. He stood as if to walk off, and the moderator put a hand on his shoulder, trying to calm him. But Edström took it the wrong way and shouted, first at the moderator, then at Tracy’s disembodied voice.

“What the hell is going on?” Jorge could make no sense of it. Tracy was out of range of the boom mikes, so her voice was not picked up for broadcast. Jorge was watching Edström, red in the face, his voice rising to a shrill whine as he screamed at the moderator, but he was reading Tracy’s words, picked up by the harried translator, scrolling across the bottom of the screen:
He came here
because he loves peace! He came here because he couldn’t take up arms
against his brother!

“It looks like a big fight, what’s the word, a riot,” Lisbet said, as she shifted her hips to pull her panties back up to her waist.

The moderator, a big fellow, was bullying Edström back down into his seat. Lisbet tried to translate for Jorge what Edström was actually saying, but it was getting harder to pick up his voice and in truth she was confused as well. English, Swedish, Portuguese, her biology text, his hands all over her—who could keep up?

“Jorge, love, maybe this isn’t such a great idea,” she said. “Can we stop?”

“But this is just now getting interesting.”

“I don’t mean the TV. I mean us,” she said.

“Us? You mean, our relationship?”

“I mean, this sex, all this sex. I mean, can it wait? I have to study.”

“Well, why can’t that wait? Which is the more important?”

“To me? Right now? My biology.”

Jorge stood, and began to pace the room. “Your biology? What about my biology?” He chopped the air with his hands as he spoke. “In my country, you know, this would never happen. No woman would deny her man his rights as a husband.”

“But you are not my husband,” Lisbet said. “And this is not your country.”

“And it never will be. I will always be some sort of exotic to you—like a rare parrot, like an orchid.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “That’s not fair. I have been ready to announce our engagement. But what have you been doing? Sleeping late, skipping classes, staying out all night at cards—or so you say.”

“What do you mean by that? Do you accuse me?”

“I accuse you of nothing but the truth. I hear what goes on, but I don’t care. Go screw your American girlfriend. But you’ll come back to me, I know. Because I’ve got something she can never give you.”

“Do you think I would marry you just to become a citizen?” Jorge yelled.

“I think you would do anything.”

“I have no girlfriend,” he protested. “You know that I spend time with the Americans, yes. I know them from school. We play cards, talk, study our lessons. You can meet them. I will introduce you.”

“Then we can all be friends together, you and I and your American whore.”

Jorge stood before Lisbet and raised his hand high over his head.

For a second, Lisbet thought he was going to strike her. That would be the end, she thought. If he hits me, I will turn him out, I will never speak to him again. She closed her eyes, anticipating not so much the pain as the humiliation, the disappointment that would descend on her like a flood when she felt the force of the blow. She had fallen blindly into love with this man, and she would be knocked out of it, just as blindly, just as suddenly. But the blow never came. When she opened her eyes, she saw Jorge in the doorway, his jacket draped over his shoulders like a cape.

“You don’t understand a thing,” he said, as he pushed the door open. “I must go out, to walk and to think. I will leave you alone with your—biology.”

Jorge shut the door behind him, and Lisbet set her book down on the coffee table. She pulled a tissue from a pack and wiped her face. She was surprised to find that she had been crying. The tears did not sting her eyes, but they flowed freely down her cheeks, as if some great pressure had been lifted from her soul, as if a band of tension had been snapped and her emotions, held within for so long, had been released. The hell with him, she thought. She held the tissue before her eyes, like a veil, and took in the scent of her own musky perfume. Lovely, she thought, as she gently touched the tissue to her neck and with her other hand grazed the satin fabric along the piping of her blouse. With her fingertips, she worked open a pearl button, and she could feel the nipples on her breasts rising like buds, like green shoots emerging from the dark soil. She arched her neck and spread her legs wide and lay there luxuriant, like an indolent goddess, basking in the flickering blue light cast by the television screen.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tracy yelled. She had stepped up onto the set, into camera range, as the moderator was trying to bring order back to the show. He stepped toward the camera for a close-up that would block the commotion from view. The television audience could see only his face as he ad-libbed an apology.

But the boom mikes were still above the panel, so while the moderator spoke, the viewers heard the words of Edström, speaking, for the first time, in English. “Typical Americans.

When there’s trouble, resort to violence. First chance you get, send in the troops, invade. Can’t engage in civil discussion, have to shoot things out, like the Wild West.”

“Don’t let him bait you,” Tracy shouted to Spiegel. “Come on.”

“He’s talking English?” One of the guys with Zeke, by now heavily into the Australian lager, was trying to make sense of the chaos on the set. “He’s talking like a chick?”

“I think that’s Tracy talking,” Zeke said. He leaned closer to the portable set. “They pulled the mike off the guy on camera.”

“What’s Tracy doing there?” Hyde asked. “Why’s she on this fuckin’ show? She ain’t never been near the army except in a parade.”

“She ain’t supposed to be there. She barged her way in.”

“Well fuck me, why didn’t I think of that?”

“Ain’t we had enough TV? Let’s go out and get drunk.”

“We’re already.”

“More drunk.”

“How you gonna manage that?”

“I got myself an unlimited capacity.”

“But not unlimited funds, might I point out.”

“I think,” Zeke said, “it would be a right damn bad idea for four Americans to barrel stone drunk through the streets of Uppsala just now.”

“What, are you afraid?”

“I ain’t afraid of nothin’,” Zeke said. “You wanna try me, boy?”

“Nah,” the guy said. “I’se just asking.”

“I’m just saying the worst thing we could do is go out there and tear up the town. It would be like proving that fucker’s point, see.”

“Well, this is the thing,” Hyde said, as he crushed a beer can with his hand and tossed it across the room. “I think he’s basically on the money.”

Zeke and the other two men laughed, as the sound of a crash and breaking glass came over the air, and then nothing.

The screen went black, and then a test pattern appeared. What the guys had not seen, what no one in Sweden except for those in the studio saw, what even those in the studio could hardly believe because it happened so fast and the place was so hot and the lights were at once so bright and so blinding that everything at first looked too sharply defined and too real and then, when you turned away from the lights, everything was cloaked in pitch so that you were never sure whether to squint or to stare, to strain to see or to shield your eyes, was Tracy hauling back and slapping Edström across the face with the flat of her palm.

His head snapped back, and a spurt of blood appeared just at his lip. He touched his face, and when he saw the blood on his fingertips he muttered a curse in Swedish—
djävla
!—and then began to bark some kind of orders at the moderator. The producer had by this time run out from the control booth and was screaming at the two cameramen, one of whom, Spiegel noticed, had abandoned his post. The red light showed that his camera was still live, but it had swung around in its turret and the lens was aimed at the black studio wall.

“Let’s go,” Spiegel said, and he grabbed Tracy by the shoulder to lead her off the set.

Edström tried to protest, to block their way, but Spiegel pushed past him and guided Tracy toward the exit.

As he opened the door, he heard behind him someone call “Wait, please.” It was Monika Nuland. She had run off the set to catch up with them. Spiegel stood in the doorway and got a look at her. Her deep-set eyes were bright with excitement. Her blond hair was pulled into a long French braid with a streak of black at the tip, as if she had dipped the ends of her silky hair in ink.

“
Hej
,” she said to Spiegel. She was slightly out of breath. “I’m so glad you spoke up to him like that. You were wonderful!” She smiled, and took both his hands in hers. “If I had known they were asking that man onto the show, I would never have agreed to appear.”

Spiegel nodded. Her hands were soft and warm, and her fingertips brushed his palms like feathers. He was afraid that his face was starting to flush. Somehow, he didn’t want Tracy to see the pleasure he was getting.