Exiles (17 page)

It was better to be away from Tracy for the night, to be next to this crazy Melissa and to smell her musky perfume and to relax as her long blond hair brushed against his cheek when she turned to look at a sight Jorge pointed out as they whisked down the street. Spiegel cranked open the window, and gusts of humid air swirled against his face and neck.

By the river, the streets narrowed. The pavement was made of cobblestones. Lisbet slowed the car, and as it bumped along the uneven roadway Spiegel and Melissa were jostled against each other in a pleasant manner. Spiegel felt as if he were a child, being bounced on someone’s knee.

The buildings in this part of the city were made of a rough, sandy stone, set against one another at odd angles, which made this section, the Old City, or the Gamla Stan, as it was called, a little warren of confusing corners and intersections punctuated by slits and alleyways not much wider than a man’s shoulders. The buildings presented a drab facade at street level. The doorways were of heavy oak, and the windows were tiny squares of rippled glass crossed by wrought-iron grates. The roofline of Gothic spires and arches was like a spidery script written across the night sky, breaking the moonlight into strips and fragments so that no place on the street was either fully lighted or completely in shadow. To Spiegel, the Gamla Stan, a quaint and well-preserved relic hidden behind the modern apartments and office buildings of the city center, seemed like a village out of Grimm transposed into the modern world. He felt a spasm of disgust and disorientation, as if he had come across a dark mushroom among the offerings in a bowl of fruit.

Jorge had assured Spiegel that he could get them into his friend’s club, no problem. Spiegel had assumed that meant he could cut the line, but what he meant apparently was that they would have no trouble getting in because the club was nearly deserted, although Jorge insisted that the club was merely “undiscovered” and that once Swedes learned about the place they would jam the streets with their Saabs and Volvos and line up at the doorway for the chance to descend to the stone-walled basement, sit on pine benches, drink overpriced Mateus or black instant coffee, and listen to a would-be Left Bank chanteuse strum a badly tuned guitar and sing in an execrable accent barely recognizable versions of tired antiwar ballads and early Dylan.

One of Jorge’s countrymen owned the club. There was a small community of Portuguese refugees in Uppsala who had met through the language school and who stayed in touch during the warm weather through a football league and during the winter months through occasional gatherings for boiled squid and fado music. Jorge had mentioned that the club owner, Mario, had worked his way up, starting with a little grilled-sausage stand that he expanded to a food shop and then into a snack bar that did a sideline in postcards and souvenirs, which he sold to the occasional busload of blue-haired American ladies who came up from Stockholm to tour the botanical gardens and to marvel at the Domkyrkan—that is, the church—and the great castle, the Slott, that sat at the center of the old city like a black heart.

Mario had opened the Penny Lane—Jorge had proposed the name—during one of the great storms of the hard winter. He had thought that the long winter nights would be good for the café business, that Swedes would want to dissolve the hours of darkness in heroic bouts of song and drink. But if that was so, they apparently didn’t want to pass the night hours in a club that was carved out of the rock beneath the city, for business had been terrible, so far. Mario’s hopes now were for the summer tourist trade, and he had plans to put a few tables with umbrellas out on the tiny sidewalk in front of his establishment, although Spiegel couldn’t imagine how he could do so without forcing the foot traffic over the curb and into the roadway. Cars already had to navigate through the many oddly placed granite hitching posts and iron pikes, relics of the agrarian age that today had become annoyances, even hazards, for driver and pedestrian alike.

“Welcome, welcome to my club,” Mario called when he spotted Jorge at the doorway. Mario embraced his countryman and greeted the two women, European style, with a kiss on both cheeks. They all followed him down the winding staircase into the maw of the club.

“This place should be called Le Cave,” Spiegel whispered to Melissa.

“Or Dante’s Hell,” she said.

Spiegel imagined that a century ago the space had been a wine cellar. The ceiling was low and uneven, and the few lights hung, like stalactites, from spars that seemed to have been jammed into fissures in the sedimentary rock. The walls had a disconcerting jaggedness to them, as if the space had been created by blasting or some other process of destruction rather than by design.

Mario led the foursome to a table near the small stage. Two guys near the back were in the far stages of inebriation, and smoke from their French cigarettes swirled toward the ceiling, where it massed like a storm cloud.

Two ice buckets immediately appeared beside Jorge. One held a bottle of Swedish aquavit and the other a cheap Spanish champagne. Jorge began pouring liberally, and Lisbet drank hers down even before Jorge finished the round. Spiegel thought that she must be determined to get very drunk or very sick. Her voice, her laughter, had been rising in pitch through the evening, and he had begun to realize that she wasn’t laughing out of gaiety but out of hysteria, that her laughter was a release of tension, even a sneer, an attack.

Melissa, meanwhile, was becoming more cool and glassy. She drew on a long cigarette as if she could suck nourishment from the smoke, from the tip of the flame, and Spiegel wondered if such aggressive smoking was in fact an act of erasure, an attempt to fold the outer world into oneself and to conceal it, a way of withdrawing from the world by breathing it in.

Jorge tapped the edge of his knife against one of the ice buckets and raised his glass of champagne. “I would like to make, here in the presence of my dear friends, a little pronunciation,” he said. “Lisbet and I have decided that on midsummer eve, which we will celebrate with her family, we will announce our engagement. And we wanted you, our American friends, to share with us the pleasure of this announcement.”

As he spoke, his hand tipped and he spilled champagne onto the tabletop, where it pooled into a little lake of foam. Spiegel noticed how the texture of Jorge’s English, usually so smooth and supple, like the fabric of his clothing, seemed to fray under the influence of—what? Alcohol? No, he had been with Jorge before during some long evenings over wine. Jorge’s English unraveled when subjected to the stress of hypocrisy. For Spiegel knew Jorge’s position, his bad faith, and he was convinced that Lisbet knew as well. She had to know. But why did she put up with this treatment, with this charade? Maybe the script was hers, her way of forcing Jorge into a public renunciation of his transgressions. If so, she had evidently given up on her demand that Jorge learn Swedish before they announce their engagement. She must be determined to take Jorge on in whatever language she could get him to say “I do.”

“Well congratulations, love, that’s wonderful news,” said Melissa. She leaned across the table to give Lisbet a kiss, and the silky fringe of her shawl brushed dangerously close to the candle. Spiegel had to steady her with his hand as she sank back to her seat. She, too, was pushing herself to the limit, licking drops of aquavit off the rim of her shot glass.

“Thank you, darling,” said Lisbet. She leaned toward Jorge and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I can’t wait, really. I wish we were announcing our engagement tonight, instead of in June.”

“Well, you sort of have announced it,” Spiegel said.

“No, we’ve only said that we’re going to announce it.”

“But isn’t that announcing it?” Spiegel said. In fact, the distinctions between engagement and announcement were all beginning to blur in his mind. Maybe it was a matter of semantics. Maybe the very words
engage
and
announce
meant something different in Swedish, in Portuguese, in English, and while they all thought that they were talking about the same thing, each meant something different. Or maybe it was the bad air and the wine.

Lisbet held her glass right in front of her face and tipped it at a precarious angle. Spiegel couldn’t determine if she meant to finish the champagne at a gulp or to hurl the glass across the room. Was she thinking about a Swedish toast or an English one? She stared at Spiegel, across the rim. He could see a smear of lipstick on the glass, which reflected the candlelight. If he lowered his head, Spiegel could examine Lisbet’s features through the refractions of the wine. The bubbles rising in the pale liquid looked like tears coursing across her lips, her fine cheekbones, the soft ovals of her eyes.

“Lenny? Lenny?” It was Melissa. Had his head dropped right to the table? Had he nodded for a moment? Or was he just locked away in private contemplation of the image of Lisbet, preserved in amber? Melissa raised her glass slightly and looked at him with raised eyebrow. He realized that he was expected to propose a toast to Lisbet and Jorge.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Spiegel said. He tried to stand, but his knees felt gelatinous. He wasn’t sure they would hold him. It took all his concentration to raise his glass, and his voice.

“I, too, would like to make an announcement,” Spiegel said.

“Here, here!” Someone from a table at the back of the room spoke up. The two drunk guys were sitting on a bench backed up against the wall of rock. In the weak light, Spiegel couldn’t see them well. The one who spoke wore a cable-knit sweater. He had hair cut so short that his scalp bristled like sandpaper. The other had a thick, walrus-like mustache. There was a bottle of whiskey on their table, and tall glasses.

“Thank you,” said Spiegel. “May I continue?”

“
Skål
! To your health,” the brush-cut one said, raising his glass.

“I would like to express my hardest—I mean my heartiest— congratulations. You know they say that opposites attract, and, I’m not saying Lisbet and Jorge are opposites but, well, like north and south, like the Baltic and the Mediterranean, like Sweden and Portugal—”

“Like Ringo and George!” said Melissa.

“Yes, they’re different but perfect together.”

“Bravo!”

“Will you tell that guy to shut up?” Lisbet said.

“Together, may they form their own Atlantic alliance,” Spiegel continued.

“A NATO pact,” shouted Melissa.

“Oh, well, nothing military,” said Jorge.

Lisbet poured some aquavit straight into her champagne glass.

“A Common Market, then,” said Spiegel. “And may they produce a fine crop of olives and . . . hey, what the hell do you grow in Sweden, Lisbet?”

“Old,” she said.

“I know who you are,” said the brush cut. “You’re a star.”

“No I’m not,” said Spiegel. “You don’t know me.”

“Down the hatchet,” said the mustache. He gulped down a slug of whiskey.

“Sit down,” Jorge said. He was tugging at Spiegel’s sleeve. “Let it be.”

“No, no, I want to finish,” Spiegel said.

“Let the American finish,” said the crew cut. “He’s a star. He’s a hero.”

“Now cut it out—” said Spiegel, and he turned toward the Swedes. But Jorge grabbed him by the wrist and nearly toppled him back into his seat.

“It’s time for some music,” Jorge said. “Listen. A surprise.”

And when Spiegel turned he saw on the makeshift stage Luis, his Mexican pal from language class. Luis had on a bandanna around his forehead and a suede vest with long fringe and colorful beadwork, and he carried an acoustic guitar richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He was adjusting a thick cloth fret band and trying to get the instrument in tune. He leaned close to the strings, but it was almost impossible to pick up the tones because of the echoes off the rock ceiling and the screeching feedback from the standing mike.

Luis’s difficulties with the guitar at least had the virtue of diverting the drunks. They began to applaud as he worked the tuning pegs, tightened the mike stand, adjusted his finger picks. Spiegel hoped that they would shut up once Luis began to play. He thought that if they ragged Luis, he might find himself in the midst of his second fight in two days. And he wasn’t yet drunk enough to think that he and Jorge—two reeds, two gnats—could prevail if they tried to sting the two drunken bears.

At last Luis launched into a long flamenco ballad, followed by some traditional Mexican folk tunes, and then he slipped north of the border for a country number. Jorge’s friend Mario, wearing an apron wet with dish suds, stepped out from behind the Japanese screen that demarcated the kitchen and grinned his approval, applauding each number with his soapy hands. Jorge offered words of encouragement in his pidgin Spanish:
Esta es,
bueno, muy bueno
. And the drunks applauded so loudly between the numbers that Spiegel thought he could detect a strand of mockery. Why are they here? he wondered. Why don’t they just leave?

After his set, Luis squeezed a fifth chair to the table and sat down. He untied his bandanna and dabbed his forehead. He had worked up a little sweat. Mario appeared with a mug of lager, and Luis tilted his head back and finished it in a long gulp.

“You were thirsty, man,” Spiegel said.

“In my country we say: Your tongue is like a tie,” Luis said. “There’s a joke, you know. An old man is going to visit a young lady who lives on the top floor, and he says to his friend: I’ll take the stairs.

“His friend says: But your tongue will be like a tie!

“The old man says: Yes. That is what I want.”

“I don’t get it,” said Lisbet.

“Then you should talk to Jorge, sweetie,” Melissa said.

Oh, boy, Spiegel thought. This could get ugly.

Mario came back with another bottle of champagne, Möet. “This comes from the two gentlemen in the back,” he said, as he settled the bottle in the bath of ice. “It is for the star.”

Luis turned to the two men and waved his thanks.

“Not for you, amigo,” the brush cut said. “For the gringo. The television star!”

“He means you,” Jorge said to Spiegel. “He thinks you were on television. A show I saw the other night had an American deserter, and he looked like you. We even thought—Did you see it?”