Exiles (16 page)

“Yeah, I guess we were co-opted. I should have walked off the set right away,” Spiegel said. “I should never have given him the chance to get into his rap.”

“He got what he deserved,” Monika said. She turned to Tracy and smiled warmly. “And thanks for hitting him like that. You American girls could teach us a lot about political action. With us in Sweden, it’s always just words, words, words. I was even thinking that I should write a letter of protest to one of the left-wing newspapers. But then you hit him, and there was nothing more to say.”

“I’m flattered. I’m overwhelmed.”

“I hope the world saw what you did. I hope the newspapers report this tomorrow,” Monika said.

“Peace protester packs punch, sets off studio scrap,” Spiegel said.

“I’ve never hit anyone in my life,” Tracy said. Spiegel could see that she was trembling, as if she was in shock. “I can’t believe I did that!”

“I wish I had been brave enough,” Monika said.

“Yeah, so do I,” Spiegel said. He was feeling sheepish, a failure. He had neither played his role nor stepped out of it at the proper time. He had relied on Tracy to come to his rescue.

“How’s your hand?” Monika asked.

“It’s sore, but I feel great.”

“This is Tracy, Tracy Green,” Spiegel said. “She’s with me. I mean, we’re both with ARMS.”

“I’m with SSS,” Monika said.

“I’ve heard so much about your student group and the work you’ve done with the Americans in Stockholm,” Tracy said to Monika. “We’ve been hoping to set up a meeting between ARMS and your Uppsala chapter.”

“Well, the chapter right now is pretty much just me,” Monika said softly. “But we should talk. We could go somewhere for coffee. I would like to show you that not all of the Swedish people are like those—pigs.”

“Right now,” Tracy said, “I think we should just get out of here, as fast as we can. But would you call me?”

Tracy gave Monika her number, and they agreed to get together. While Spiegel held the door for her, Tracy leaned over and gave Monika a quick kiss on the cheek, as if they had known each other for years, as if they were saying good-bye after a dinner party. That’s just Tracy’s way, Spiegel thought. She can bring people so graciously into her confidence, into her orbit. He envied her ability to touch people’s hearts through the simplest of physical gestures, and he realized that he, too, might be falling under her sway.

“So are you satisfied?” Mick asked Melissa.

“Hmm, what do you mean?” she said. She had been lying back on the bed, and Mick had been gently stroking her as she shivered with delight.

“I mean with your bloody TV show. It just ended in a near fucking riot,” he said.

“Yeah, me, too,” she said. She turned away from him. It was actually a relief, she realized, to get away from his hand, so animated, like a little furry animal, a pet. “When did you turn it off?”

“The telly? I didn’t. The screen went black. Weren’t you watching? It was you who wanted it on, to see your American friend.”

“Oh, I remember. But I don’t know him. He just looked like someone.”

“Well, he got into a rumble, and then a girl jumped up on the set and started hollering—”

“An American girl?”

“Yeah,” Mick said. And he described Tracy.

“Maybe I do know them. They had dinner at my suite, and then—she cut his hair. Son of a bitch.”

“She runs a salon?”

“Not quite,” Melissa said. “I don’t know what she’s running. She cut his hair so he’d look like someone else. Probably whoever he was supposed to be tonight. He was playing a role. Like, acting.”

“Well, if he was acting, he was good. I could cast him. An American Jean, to play against your American Julie. What do you think?”

“I think it’s late.”

Melissa began dressing. It would be a bad idea, she realized, to spend the night with Mick. There was enough talk among the cast about them already, too much talk. She should cool it with him, she knew, at least until after the show. Then—who knows?

“I do have an idea, though,” he said. “A
Julie
in two languages.”

“American and Australian?”

“Very funny. No, bilingual, with multiple screens and overhead projections. We’d use stereo sound. On one side of the stage, I’d set up a rock band, and on the other I could have a Swedish folk troupe. The clash of two cultures—”

“Good-bye, love,” she said, and she kissed him on the ear. By the time she picked up her keys, Mick was in another world, scribbling on a notepad:
Setting: a disco club. Cast of characters:
Julie, the cocktail girl. Jean, the barman. Time: the present . . .

Tracy drove her red VW, Rosa, through the quiet streets. A soft rain was falling, the first of the season. The banks of snow that had accumulated through the winter were beginning to pock and heave apart, their slopes marked with jagged gullies through which the rainwater and snowmelt sluiced into the gutters, like rivulets off a mountainside, forming icy pools near the clogged storm drains and the high curbstones. The car sprayed a curtain of water as it rounded the corners to head up the hill toward the outskirts of town.

Spiegel had hoped that he might go back home tonight with Tracy, but he was reluctant to press his advantage. And perhaps he had no advantage. He had done what she had asked him. But had he done so to help the movement? Or to help her? He was a little bit ashamed of himself as well for the feelings he had begun to harbor, that she owed him something in return for his help. If he truly felt that, in what way had he sacrificed? To ask anything of Tracy would be to take advantage of her, as well—in her loneliness, in her anxiety about Aaronson, in her physical weariness and pain.

For Spiegel could see that she was favoring her hand when she shifted, and she was trying to steer with her left only. There was a welt across her cheek as well. Had Edström struck her? It had been impossible to see, at least from his angle and in the blinding light. Some hero he had been, in any case, letting her take a swing at his antagonist while all he could think to do was rush to the exit.

“Should you see a doctor, Tracy? Find the hospital or something?” he asked. “Your hand looks bad.”

“I’m okay,” she said.

“But you might want to file charges. It would help to document your injuries.”

“You’re forgetting that I hit him first.”

“Not without provocation,” Spiegel said.

She didn’t answer. She braked for a light as the rain beat its steady tattoo on the roof.

“I shouldn’t have agreed to sit in for Aaronson,” Spiegel said. “I’ve just drawn more attention to him. After tonight, the whole fucking country’s gonna want to speak to him, to interview him. And actually it would be great if he were here. It’s the kind of opportunity he had always hoped would develop. But I can’t go on with this any further. I’ll just fuck things up even more, say things I shouldn’t and get into more fights. . . .”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Tracy said. “I should have seen this coming. They were lying in wait for us. It was like an ambush. I’m the one who should apologize. I should never have let you get into that. I should have sent Zeke.”

“But maybe you can’t afford to risk Zeke. I’m more expendable.”

“No, that’s not true,” Tracy said. “Not for me.”

And those words were like a balm to Spiegel, soothing his wounds, wounds that were not visible like Tracy’s but that hurt just as much, that stung him with the twined lashes of remorse and regret. In the end, he was glad that he had held back and did not ask if they should go back to her place for one more night. They had agreed beforehand that he would return to his student flat in Flogsta and resume his own life while they all waited for Aaronson’s imminent return. Just as well, for Spiegel was beginning to see that the role of Aaronson was far too complex, and too dangerous, to play without a script.

APRIL

8

The rains continued for
three days. Spiegel moved his belongings from Tracy’s place back to his room at Flogsta. In a way, it was a relief to be alone. The steady vigilance required while pretending to be somebody else had worn him down. That, and the constant proximity to Tracy. More and more, Spiegel felt himself drawn to her, and he sensed that she liked him, too. But something within him, the remnant of a chivalric code of honor, probably as useless as a vestigial tail, had prevented him from taking advantage of his rival’s absence. Or had it? Perhaps he was merely afraid of revealing his own ineptitude, or of facing Tracy’s rejection and her contempt.

Spiegel began to think that maybe it was time to return to the States. He had skipped so many language classes while staying at Tracy’s that he would have to start anew if he wanted to continue. Ugh! More instructions on how to buy a cheese sandwich! During his whole time in Uppsala, he had made no contacts at the university, so the dim hope of gaining academic credit for the semester had faded completely. Most of all, now that he had filled in for Aaronson on television and managed to screw that up so badly, Tracy would no longer need his help.

Yet Spiegel could not go home without his passport. Moreover, he hadn’t heard a thing from Iris. Maybe her letters to him had been intercepted. Or maybe she had transferred her affections to somebody new. Could he really expect her to wait for him? Maybe he would return in the summer and resume the quiet life he used to lead before the police came crashing into his apartment and sent him flying out the casement window and into a new world.

He pulled a chair up to his desk, flicked on the lamp, and thought about beginning a letter to Iris. He scrawled the date at the top of a piece of writing paper, but that was all. His hand balked even at putting down the letters of her name. So he sat for some time, watching the rain blow through the courtyard and smash against the walls of the adjacent tower. The scraggly pines that had survived the onslaught of the cranes and bulldozers seemed to shiver in the hard wind, and the snow on the hilltops and the meadows was softening into a greasy-looking, grayish slush. Spiegel thought that he might leave Uppsala without ever seeing green stalks rise from the fields, without ever coming upon a quilt of wildflowers by the roadside, without experiencing the extraordinary stillness of the midnight sun. To be here through the darkest months would forever shroud his memories of Sweden in sorrow and gloom, in recollections of stormy days such as this, when he’d sat and watched the world at war with itself and wondered if he would ever find a peace that was not embedded in loneliness or a love that wouldn’t tear him apart.

Lost in self-pity, he finally began to write, explaining to Iris, as clearly as he could, all the torments and dangers and disappointments that he had lived through since he’d come to Uppsala. He was surprised at how fluently his thoughts flowed from pen to paper, and he felt as if he could write all morning when he was surprised by a rapping on the door. Who knew that he had returned to Flogsta?

It was Jorge.

“I saw your light,” he said. “Welcome home.”

Spiegel noted that Jorge was clean and dry—blow-dried in fact—and without an overcoat. So he hadn’t dashed across the rainswept courtyard from building one. Where had he been?

Jorge sat on the edge of Spiegel’s bed and crossed his long legs. Spiegel noticed once again the fine cut of his clothes. He was wearing wide bell-bottoms with a sharp crease. They seemed to be of an excellent fabric, maybe linen, and the pleats made a soft swishing sound as he settled back. Beneath the cuffs, Spiegel could see the tooled leather of Jorge’s Western-style boots. It was ridiculous, how clean he kept the soles, how he polished the sharp points until the buttery grain seemed to shine with an interior light. Spiegel imagined the boots after one day of work on a ranch, caked with mud and shit, scuffed and wrecked and broken in.

“Are you back here for good?” Jorge asked.

“I never really left,” Spiegel said.

Jorge shrugged. “It’s too bad, then,” he said. “She was a very cute dish. I thought, once you got a taste of her, we would never see you again at our table.”

“But as you see, you were wrong,” Spiegel said.

He cleared the papers from his desk. He didn’t want Jorge to see the letter he had been writing and to start asking questions about Iris. Jorge’s assumptions and insinuations about Tracy were irritating enough already. Their friendship had been edgy ever since that spin on the ice. Spiegel’s initial fury had drained off, but he had since then approached Jorge, the few times they had run into each other in town, the way he would regard a snarling dog. He knew that Jorge’s polished surface masked a fierce and reckless temperament, that Jorge was capable, when denied his way, of doing nearly anything.

“Then welcome back to Flogsta,” Jorge said. “And don’t worry about that one that got away. As your saying goes, there are many fish swimming in the sea.”

“What about you?” Spiegel asked. “How’s school? How’s Lisbet?”

“Well, it’s very awkward, you see. Do you mind if I smoke?”

Spiegel found a little tin can filled with paper clips. He dumped them onto his desktop and gave the can to Jorge to use as an ashtray. Jorge lit one of his pungent oval cigarettes and inhaled greedily.

“I must confess that things are not so good. We had a little fight, a disagreement, and, well, then I walked out.”

“You what? Just like that?”

“When I came back to her, she had barred the door. I knocked, but she would not let me in.”

“When?”

“This morning. About two.”

“I see. So where did you stay?”

“Well, you know, with a friend.”

“Melissa?”

“Yes. I think Lisbet suspects that there is something between us. She no longer believes I go out at night to play cards with you.”

Spiegel said that he was not surprised. “I wouldn’t know seven-card stud from the
Seven Samurai
,” he said.

Jorge nodded and took another hard pull on the cigarette. Spiegel guessed that maybe Jorge had been awake all night. The nicotine could keep him going, at least for a while.

“May I ask you a favor?”

“Do you need me to get your stuff from Lisbet’s?”

“Oh no,” Jorge said. “That won’t be a problem.” He reached out his hand and dangled a key chain from his index finger. The keys rang against one another like little chimes. “I can return to her flat, at my leisure.” He pronounced the word in the English manner:
leh-zure.

“Then what do you need?” Spiegel asked.

“It’s just this. Lisbet and I had plans to go to a club, to hear music played by a friend of mine.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jorge. You think she’s still gonna want to go?”

“Oh, yes. I think she was looking forward to a night, how do you say it, on the town?”

“So you want me to take her? I don’t know as I could do that,” Spiegel said.

“No, I will take her. I want you to take Melissa.”

“You’re nuts.”

Jorge laughed as he crushed out the cigarette. “Nuts, tired, I don’t know,” he said. “She likes you. You—how does she say it?—speak her language.”

“But why don’t you just take Lisbet, if she’ll go with you, and forget about Melissa, at least for tonight?” Spiegel said.

“Ahh, I wish it were so easy. I can’t forget about her, though. She is in my bones and my blood. I have to be near her, you see, even if I’m not the one with her. Otherwise, the evening would be unbearable.”

“Then why don’t you just forget about Lisbet? Drop her.”

Jorge screwed up his face for a second and looked at the ceiling. Spiegel couldn’t tell if he was trying to summon up a phrase in English or if he was trying to figure out how to answer the question. Maybe the question had no answer, or no answer that an American could understand. Maybe this was just one of those peculiar European yearnings that one saw so much of in those ridiculous French and Italian films, the desire to create needlessly complex love relationships, the compulsion, no matter how seemingly successful the marriage, to carry an affair on the side. Spiegel had always thought the complex web of marital and extramarital relationships was a convention adapted for comic purposes in film and in fiction. But now he was beginning to believe that it was endemic to European culture.

“I can’t, as you say, drop her,” Jorge said. “We have plans to announce our engagement. Perhaps tonight. It is why I want you there, to be our witnesses.”

Spiegel sat still, astonished. “Do you love her, Jorge?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps a little.”

“A little? That’s not enough to be talking about marriage.”

“You know, there are many reasons one might marry.”

“What are you telling me, man? Are you saying she’s pregnant?”

Jorge laughed, a bit contemptuously. “Certainly not. That would not be a reason to marry. It would be a reason to . . . see a doctor.”

He stood and walked to the window. He scanned the rain-streaked view, then sat on the edge of the desk and leaned close to Spiegel, so that he could speak in a near whisper.

“My position here is not terribly secure,” Jorge said.

“What do you mean,” Spiegel said. “You’re a political refugee, you’re guaranteed sanctuary by the Swedish government. . . .”

“Not exactly so. You see, I was never actually drafted into the Portuguese army. Not yet. Perhaps I will be, perhaps I have been already. Until I am drafted, I am just here on a tourist visa, like you.”

“I see. Well, what’s the chance that you will be drafted?”

“Who knows? But you see my brother is a wounded war hero, so to speak. It would be a great shame to my family if I did not answer the call, when it comes.”

“They wouldn’t support you, if you decide to stay?”

“No. We see things very differently. They have abandoned me. What is the word? I am disinherited. My father has said that if I do not take up the arms in my brother’s honor he will never see me again, not even in my grave.”

“So if you are drafted, you would stay here.”

“Of course I would stay. And then I would be safe. I would be a political refugee. Until then, I am without a clear status.”

“Except if you marry Lisbet. She’s your ticket to a permanent visa, right?”

“Yes, once we are married, then I will have a secure visa and I will be free to travel.”

“I don’t see that it’s worth marrying someone you don’t love.”

“Maybe you marry for love in America and in storybooks. We Europeans marry for practical reasons. To build the family property. To create a . . .”

“Dynasty.”

“Yes,” Jorge said. He stood. The air between them seemed to have cleared. Jorge dropped the stage whisper and resumed his normal speaking voice. “Also, it will be much better for me,” he said, “once Lisbet sees Melissa with you. It will put an end to her suspicions. I will go home and tell her, and she will feel better. We will kiss and make out.”

Spiegel didn’t bother with the correction.

“So you’ll join us for a big celebration?” Jorge asked. “Tonight?”

“Sure,” Spiegel said. “I’ll be the beard.”

“The what?”

Spiegel explained the term. “Like a mask. A disguise. When I’m with Melissa, it’s like I’m covering for you.”

“Right!” Jorge said. “Right on!”

* * *

By the time they left Flogsta that night, the rain had stopped, but the streets and sidewalks were wet and under the street lamps the city seemed to be bathed in a glassy sheen, a radiance that filled the air with shimmering light. Lisbet was driving. Spiegel sat in the backseat, next to Melissa. She seemed relaxed and lighthearted, amused by the whole setup. In fact, Spiegel wondered if this little drama had been her idea. Perhaps it was she who wanted to go to the club with Jorge and Lisbet, to see how Jorge interacted with her rival, to take her measure. But why? So as to know her enemy and to eliminate her, and to seize Jorge for herself? Or to get under Lisbet’s skin and to make her life miserable, even if just for an evening? Or maybe Melissa just liked the innate drama of emotional disaster. Spiegel could picture her watching little creatures at play inside a terrarium. Every once in a while she would deign to reach out and rap against the glass and watch them scatter.

Jorge seemed happy and alive, as if he were excited by being in conjunction with not one but two women to whom he could lay some claim. He rode shotgun, and swiveled back and forth between Lisbet and Melissa, pointing out the sights of the city as they zipped past, waving and gesticulating, animated, even frenetic. He would describe some landmark to Melissa—“That’s the old castle, where the botanist, what would be his name?, catalogued all of the flowers in the kingdom”—and then he would turn to Lisbet for some confirmation—“Isn’t that so, darling?”—and pat her on the shoulder, and she would say, “Yes, dear, ” and add some innocuous remark, like: “It was Linnaeus.” And Jorge would turn back to Spiegel with a wink. Suggesting what? That everything was under control? Or that his relationship with Lisbet was meant to be taken ironically, as if between quotation marks?

Spiegel was surprised at how much he enjoyed being out, as Jorge had put it, on the town. He had not yet had the chance, or really the desire, to see “Uppsala by night,” which was a bit of a local joke. Swedish students tended to be so serious and focused except on the weekends when most were either back home in the provinces or blind drunk that the most happening places, someone had remarked, were the university library and the infirmary. Going out for the evening to a club—even one chosen by Jorge on who knows what basis and with a date arranged by Jorge for his own mysterious purposes—Spiegel felt relaxed for the first time in days, even weeks. Tonight, once again, he could be himself. Until he had given up the role of Aaronson, Spiegel hadn’t realized what a burden he had been bearing.

Because nature had made him and Aaronson into virtual twins and fate had placed them together at the same university, it was assumed that they would be alike in certain interior ways and that Spiegel could slip into Aaronson’s persona as easily as if he were borrowing one of his sweaters. But Spiegel had found that it wasn’t so. Becoming Aaronson was not so much a matter of pretending as of learning, absorbing a whole history and way of being, and then suppressing his own personality. It was not that he treasured his personality so much. For years, he had been trying to discover who he was and to solve the puzzle of his own existence. It was only through his freak encounters with Aaronson back in the States that he had begun to approach a solution. Since then, he had begun to see himself as he was seen by others. Without any clear convictions of his own, he had let Iris and her allies in the student-worker movement determine what role he should play in their struggle to end the war. Yet by acceding to their wishes, he had set the foundations of his personality on a bed of shifting sands. For what would happen if while he was away from Iris his image were to fade from her memory? What would happen if he were to become so enmeshed in the tangles of Aaronson’s life that people forgot about Spiegel altogether and he began to vanish from their minds like smoke in light air, like a dream on waking? What would happen if his heart were drawn to the emotional vacuum left by Aaronson’s absence and he were to find himself, even just a little bit, in love with Tracy?