Exiles (22 page)

Monika stood, and stepped over to the window. She brushed in passing against a small pot of geraniums, and a faint scent of powder drifted through the air, mixing with the vapors rising from the teacups. Monika turned to look outside, at the darkening sky and at her flickering reflection in the window glass. The twin candles cast a double image of her silhouette onto the slope of the low ceiling.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you want to take a walk? I’ll show you guys the gardens. They are beautiful at night.”

“I think we should probably get home,” Tracy said. “You could walk us part of the way.”

“That would be nice,” Monika said. “But if you both are going home, I think I’ll stay here. What is your expression? I have to get my head together.”

“Yes,” Tracy said, “we all do.”

Spiegel stood. His legs were wobbly, and he felt tipsy from the vodka and the sweet tea. He put his hand on the table to brace himself. He turned to say good-bye to Monika, to thank her, but she had stepped aside, and he found himself about to speak to a face on a tattered poster that had been tacked to a kitchen cupboard. He was staring into the shaded eyes of the Black Panther leader Huey Newton, a sash across his chest and a carbine slung over his shoulder, his clenched fist raised in a salute.
You are either part of the problem or part of the solution,
the block letters above him screamed.
You must choose, brother, you
must choose!

Absurdly, Spiegel mumbled something to the poster.

“I’m sorry,” Monika said. “Were you speaking?”

“Right on,” Spiegel said. “I just said, right on.”

“You were talking to the wall? You Americans really are crazy.” Monika laughed.

“I like your taste in art.”

“You do?” Monika said. “I’m surprised. I think most of these posters are ugly, but I like what they say. I look to them for inspiration. Would you like one?”

“No, I think it would depress me,” Spiegel said. “It would feel like someone’s in the room yelling at me all the time. But thanks.”

“It’s nothing. And if you change your mind, well, I have some art posters, too. In my room.”

“Yes, and thanks for your offer,” Tracy said. She was standing at the doorway, impatient to be going. Monika folded her arms and made no move toward the door. “To get word to Aaronson, I mean,” Tracy added.

“Sure,” Monika said. “You just let me know what you need, once you decide.”

“I will,” Tracy said.

Somehow, Spiegel felt that all evening the exchanges between Tracy and Monika had been floating way above his head, like clouds, but that suddenly their words had sharpened and the syllables were zipping past his ears like bullets. Their voices burned through the fog of his vodka-clouded thoughts like two search beacons, revolving in the night, bright enough to alert him to a proximate danger but not sufficient to reveal its magnitude or its source.

11

The office of the
Uppsala Tidskrift
was in the older section of the city, not the quaint Old City where tourists walked the narrow, cobbled streets that zigzagged up the gentle slope from the church to the castle but the working-class quarters, a patch of barracks-like apartments and commercial buildings set on the flatlands beside the railroad tracks and the factories. The broad main street had buckled from hard use and long neglect, the concrete sidewalks had been broken apart by frost and weeds, and every exterior surface felt slightly gritty. A residue of ash that had been spit from the kilns of the nearby brickyard and the smokestacks of the power plant accumulated on the rooftops and window ledges. The newspaper was housed in a low, cinder-block building whose facade was drab and unadorned save for two rectangles of glass brick on either side of the steel door. The windows stared out at the dull street like two dead eyes.

Inside the office, Gunnar Mendelsohn sat at his rickety wooden desk, leaned back in his swivel chair, and propped his feet on a stack of papers and magazines. His worn-down right heel rested on a glossy image of a woman’s bare breasts. He was reading over some notes he had typed after his interview with the two Americans. He was trying to decide if he should pull these scraps of information together into a story. An American student living in Uppsala goes on the run. So what? Would the readers care? What they really want from a newspaper, Mendelsohn knew, was the minutiae that affects their lives: schools, crime, culture, and taxes, taxes, taxes.

He employed no staff to speak of, just an occasional intern from the university to help with the layout and skilled workers from the trade school to handle production and distribution. So he couldn’t really compete with the daily paper and didn’t try to. If readers had to know about the water board, the health commission, or land transfers, they would have to read the daily, and most of them did. But Mendelsohn had attracted a loyal readership by paddling away from the mainstream and following the stories that he alone wanted to explore. If the readers stayed with him, Mendelsohn thought, he could offer them a journalistic product unique in the land, eccentric, unpredictable, quirky, passionate, all in all a newspaper created pretty much in the image of its editor.

And the story he was after this week was about to fall apart just as he should have been going to press. He had to tell the production crew to put everything on hold. The workers were huddled in the back of the plant by the idle presses, grousing, but they had been through this kind of crisis together before, plenty of times. The men would work through the night, like an army besieged, and they would get the job done—at time and a half.

But first, Mendelsohn had to make sense of his story. What he knew was that his instincts had been right. No American exchange student would try to enter the country carrying a gun.

But if Spiegel was not really the one that the Americans wanted, Mendelsohn was left with two questions: Who had been seen at the border? And where was Spiegel? And that’s where his investigation was falling apart. His Danish contacts, usually extremely forthcoming, referred all inquiries to the Americans. The only response from the Americans was that the matter was under investigation.
Tack så mycket,
Mendelsohn thought. Thanks a lot, for nothing.

But at least he knew that someone had tried to cross the border using Spiegel’s passport, and then eluded the authorities. So where was Spiegel? Eventually, he would have to surface to reclaim his papers. If he didn’t, the Americans—the State Department, the CIA, Congress, somebody—would begin to look for him. They would demand an investigation. They would want to know how someone else came to be in possession of Spiegel’s passport. Had he lent it or sold it? Had it been stolen? Why hadn’t Spiegel reported the theft? Had he been silenced, killed, dumped in the Copenhagen harbor? Wouldn’t his family want to know where he had gone, where he might turn up? Wouldn’t his friends want to know? Wouldn’t everyone?

Yes, they would, but Mendelsohn guessed that the Americans in Uppsala knew more than they were letting on. Tracy and Aaronson seemed surprisingly cool about the whole issue, acting as if they barely knew Spiegel at all. Well, that wasn’t so. They had been seen together throughout the past two months. And, friendship aside, the disappearance of an American student and his possible link to a concealed gun could be a huge problem for the other Americans in Uppsala, further evidence that Americans were a violent and unstable people and that the resisters were the worst of a bad bunch. They would never integrate into Swedish culture. They would bring with them their drugs, their diseases, their ways of death, all views that were prevalent throughout the city but were anathema to Mendelsohn himself, who recalled with a shudder of horror his own shattered childhood, his flight across the frontier just ahead of the Nazis, family members and friends left behind to live under the boot heel of the occupation, forced to wear the yellow star, while the Mendelsohns wandered like spirits, forever unsettled, moving incrementally, village by village, up the coast, his father finding piecework as an itinerant tailor, the shadow of death falling all across Europe but not on the Mendelsohns, survivors of the wreck, flotsam on the surface of the neutral land.

Mendelsohn would always be grateful to Sweden for taking him in, grateful yet slightly resentful of the nation that continued to treat him like an outsider. He had spent his childhood trying to find his foothold and his adolescence trying to fit in, and his life had been torn between proving to others that he was exceptional and proving to himself that he was ordinary, just another Swede. So he understood the forces that were tearing at the Americans, the strange, combustible mixture of pride and shame that battled within the soul of all political refugees, shame for the degradation that had fallen on their native land and a rightful pride in their own moral superiority for having turned away from their country’s dishonor. Mendelsohn was determined to use his resources to help the Americans, his brothers in exile. He would learn what he could about their missing compatriot, that Spiegel, and he would tell the Americans what he had learned, even before he went to the back shop and gave the order to set the story into type.

“So,” Tracy said to Spiegel, later that morning, as they lay on their backs and watched the sunlight streak through the blinds, “how does it feel, to have vanished?”

“Hmm,” Spiegel said. He turned to nestle against Tracy’s warm body. “Like the old joke about the guy who jumps out the window. Halfway down, he says: ‘So far, not bad at all.’ ”

“You’re an optimist.” Tracy sat up, shook her hair loose, and pulled on a T-shirt that she had tossed to the floor sometime during the night.

“I tend to look on the bright side,” Spiegel said. He was still curled up in the blankets. He was determined to model his life on Aaronson’s as closely as possible, right down to the bad habits. Sloth, he found, came to him rather easily. “If this is what it means to disappear, I can take it.”

“It’s not all that it means. You know that. You’re not done disappearing.”

“You mean when he comes back,” Spiegel said.

“Then you will really have to vanish.”

“But, Tracy—” Spiegel said. He suspected that her attraction to him had been impulsive and would soon be laced with guilt and regret. But he was hurt that she voiced her reservations so readily, practically on waking.

“It’s not a question of which one of you I’d like to be with,” she said. “It’s where you can be most useful. We need people back home who can keep us on the political agenda. I mean, Kissinger keeps talking about a negotiated withdrawal, and I think for most of the Americans, that’s really all they want: Get us the hell out of Asia. We don’t care if you end the killing. Just save our asses. Let the gooks kill one another. And I think when he pulls it off, or pulls us out, which I think he’s got to do so they can win the next election, these guys here will just be forgotten. No one will remember that they were the first to say no.”

“Okay,” Spiegel said. He was annoyed by her sudden harangue, her shift from tenderness to rhetoric. “If you still feel that way, when Aaronson comes back, then I’ll go.” But he wondered if by then it would be so easy for him, or for Tracy.

The night before, she had fought for him and won him like a prize, a trophy. He’d been full of joyous resolve when they left Monika’s. The night was cool, the sky was starry. They walked home, along the borders of the botanical gardens, through the quiet shopping district. The crystal vases and shiny chrome appliances behind the plate-glass windows looked like jewels and artifacts on display in a museum. Tracy remarked that she would never need such material possessions, never want them. To own a piece of crystal is to make your life as fragile and delicate as crystal, she said. A sudden move, a loud noise, and everything would shatter. Tracy wanted a life of—what? Plywood, cardboard, rolled-up mattresses, a cheap car and cheap gasoline, said Spiegel. How nice it would be, she said, to go places, see wonderful sights, eat strange vegetarian dishes on cliffs overlooking the wild ocean, if someday we can be free again.

I can travel, Spiegel told her. I’m still free. He was a little drunk on Monika’s vodka and on his own soaring spirits. Would she travel with me? Spiegel wondered. Can I become a part of her life? He took her hand, and he felt shy and tentative, like a schoolboy. She did not resist. She let her hand rest in his.

He accepted that as a signal. It was what he had wanted since the first night, at the train station, months ago, when he saw her delicate face in a cloud of frost. He knew even then, it seemed, that there had been a terrible mistake, that fate had sent him on the wrong journey. His path had somehow been crossed with Aaronson’s; he was the one who was meant to live here in Uppsala, in Tracy’s arms, in her life. He had the odd sense that, ever since his arrival, the gods had been struggling to right their mistake, to place him on the right course. Aaronson, he was convinced, could sense this, which was why he had been gone so long. It was why he had made no serious attempt to communicate. Only Tracy failed to comprehend the rightness of Spiegel’s presence in her life. But perhaps this would be the night. She would grasp his hand and they would leap together, off the precipice, into their fate.

He approached her as she stood before the kitchen sink, gazing out the window at her own reflection, slightly distorted by the mottled glass. He rested his hands on her shoulders and drew her to him with a slight but steady pressure. It’s for the movement, he tried to joke, for verisimilitude. In case someone’s watching us. No, she said, we can’t do this. Is it because of Aaronson? Spiegel asked. You love him that much? I’m not sure who I love, she said. I’m not sure that I love. You could love me, he said. Who knows where he is? Maybe he’s left you. Don’t worry about him, don’t think about him. He tried to kiss her, he leaned his face down to meet her lips, and she was there for him, warm and inviting. His tongue explored the contours of her mouth, the texture of her face, her neck. His fingers played across the light bones of her shoulders and her back, the little bones of her neck, like small shells, the fine and almost musical curve of her ribs, the strong musculature of her legs, her thighs, her ass warm to his touch. Her clothes fell to the floor beneath them. It was as if the fabrics melted away and she stood naked, in a pool of light. She led him back to her room, and he followed her as if he were floating down a river, moving with no effort, drawn by the silent flow of the deep water.

I don’t know, she said afterward, as she held him close to her. I just don’t know. Her body was slick with sweat, glowing with a feverish heat. Her legs were wrapped around him, locked behind his back, so that he pressed against her, salty and rough.

He spent the night tossed about among weird and violent dreams: He was in a zoo, behind the bars, while a parade of people, grotesque and gargantuan, went strolling by, pointing and laughing, throwing peanuts. He was in an airport, trying to buy a ticket, and the woman at the counter would not speak to him, even though he shouted: Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know who I am? And toward morning he dreamed that he was back home, at his doorway, but the door was made of glass and inside he could see Iris. She waved to him, walked to the refrigerator, and stepped inside. May I help you? a voice said. Yes, let me in, Spiegel answered. I’m sorry, said the voice. There’s no one here by that name.

“But Tracy,” Spiegel said, as he, too, got out of bed, “do you really think that Aaronson is coming back?”

She sighed, turned away. “Yes,” she said. “And maybe you think, after last night and all, that I don’t care, that I don’t want him back. But I do.”

“And what if I were to you tell that, after last night and all, I don’t?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. That’s why I think we made a huge mistake. As soon as sex enters the picture . . .”

“It was always in the picture.”

“But now our relationship is sexual instead of political. And now you’ll probably . . . oh, forget I said that.”

“In other words, you can’t trust me anymore? You think I’ll do something to jeopardize Aaronson, like spill my guts to Mendelsohn, just so I can have you to myself?”

Tracy didn’t answer. Spiegel knew that was exactly what she was thinking. It had crossed his mind as well. He could go to Mendelsohn, explain how he had been brought to Uppsala as Aaronson’s double, and Mendelsohn would write a big story.

“I won’t do that,” Spiegel assured her. “But we have to get the word to Aaronson, maybe through Monika, that if he doesn’t come back soon there will be nobody here waiting for him.”

“Nobody? Are you so sure?”

Somehow, he was. He knew that Tracy, whether she left with him or not, could not wait forever, Penelope-like, for the return of her wandering hero. “You won’t stay in Uppsala, Tracy,” he said. “You’ve fallen into a bad dream that you’ll wake up from, someday, and then you’ll head back home, back to a normal life.”

“Just click my heels, right?” Tracy took a brush from the dresser top and began combing out her tangled hair.