Exiles (28 page)

Spiegel nodded. There was no way he could stop Hyde, who was like a train rolling downhill, picking up speed. All Spiegel could do was wait and maybe hope to jump when the runaway freight slowed at the next crest.

“At the same time that you have taken money from our treasury, without explanation, a number of strange and inexplicable events have transpired here in Uppsala,” Hyde continued. By this point, Hyde had changed his focus and was speaking directly to Spiegel, to the accused.

“Tell it,” someone shouted.

“You have been seen,” Hyde said, “in the company of the notorious journalist Gunnar Mendelsohn, long suspected of being a collaborator with the U.S. military police.”

“He was doing an article, and—”

Hyde cut him off. “That is true! And his article would give one the impression that you fooled the authorities into thinking there was another American, who bore the name of Leonard Spiegel, who was brought to Uppsala to act as your cover, to enable you to sneak off on your travels. His article contained the revelation that Leonard Spiegel does not exist, and that the American spotted at the Swedish border and wanted by the military police was somebody else, a courier for one of your foreign enterprises. But we happen to know that Gunnar Mendelsohn’s story was a lie, planted in the press by the CIA. Because Leonard Spiegel does exist. We have found him out. And he is a spy, a snake, that you have brought into our midst.” The men burst into hissing noises, and some stamped their feet.

“Do it,” someone shouted.

“Tell it,” said another.

“Now that’s ridiculous,” Spiegel muttered.

“Is it? Well, we have had documents supplied to us that show that Leonard Spiegel’s father is an operative for the U.S. Foreign Service, based in the Lagos embassy in Nigeria. Which is to say, he is in the direct employ of the CIA, and his son, who was sent here no doubt on government orders, was no more than his father’s agent.” Hyde held aloft a bound pamphlet. Spiegel could see that it was papers, transcripts, supplied by his college. How did Hyde get those? He felt ambushed, crushed.

“His father works in Africa, yes,” he managed.

“And if we find this Spiegel,” Hyde shouted, “if he ventures among us, we will pounce on him, and we will smite his head with our heel!”

“You won’t see him,” Spiegel said. “He’s long gone.”

“Moreover,” Hyde continued, “at the height of the May Day riot, just before the police descended and broke up our rally, before Zeke or any of the expatriates had a chance to address the crowd, you were observed leaving the scene of the march, being whisked away to safety, by a squadron of the Uppsala police.”

“Not to safety, man,” Spiegel protested, although his spirits were waning, and he knew that there was nothing more he could say to avert the course of the proceedings. His fate had been determined. “I was under arrest!”

“Silence!” Reston shouted.

“Finally,” Hyde went on, “we believe that you were a knowing collaborator with the turncoat Timothy McCurdy, formerly known as the Worm, who, in his earth-dwelling, lowly, foul, and rank ways, has wriggled himself into a path underneath our feet and burrowed his way to freedom by rooting below the very soles of our shoes. He shall henceforth be known as the Pig!”

The men burst into hoots, howls, oinks, and snorts.

Zeke had not said a word. It was obvious to Spiegel that they had turned on Zeke as well. Zeke’s known ties to Aaronson and to the Worm were being held against him.

And now, Reston and Hyde stood before the membership of ARMS, accusing the Worm of being a turncoat and a liar. When had they learned the truth about the Worm? Before they had tried to drown him, or afterward? For though Spiegel knew, or at least believed, that the Worm was an innocent, he realized also that there was something about the Worm’s obsequious personality that made it seem as if he deserved his fate.

The Worm was gone. The Worm had grown wings and, through a gestational miracle, he had turned into a bird. He had stopped by to see Spiegel and Tracy, when he was released from the clinic, and he had tearfully confessed. He was holding an open return ticket to the States and a valid passport. He had never deserted, never been in the service, except for a stint in the Maryland National Guard. True, during his time in Uppsala he had missed his monthly Guard meetings. But he wouldn’t have faced a legal crisis until the summer, when he was due to report for his two weeks of active-duty maneuvers. He told Spiegel and Tracy that he would try to rejoin his unit. It would be better than allowing himself to fight in the war. He wished that he could stay and make Sweden his home, but he had learned the truth about himself. He was not strong enough to desert.

But in his downfall, there was salvation. By leaving, the Worm had managed to avoid the obligation to offer his testimony, to identify Spiegel, and to explain what he knew about Aaronson’s travels. Spiegel was left alone to confront his accusers.

Spiegel understood what he would have to do as well. He would have to be strong, like the Worm, by being weak. He would have to practice what the Taoists called moral jujitsu, the power of nonviolence. He would have to overcome the aggressor by giving in to his superior force. Before the meeting, he had stepped into Aaronson’s place. Just in time, he understood that doing so would be to step into the trap that Reston had set. Reston knew Spiegel’s true identity, but he had convinced the others that Spiegel was a fifth columnist who had conspired with Aaronson to loot the ARMS treasury, or maybe worse. The men were angry at Aaronson, but they were also gunning for the mysterious, elusive Leonard Spiegel. Maybe the Worm had understood that as well. Certainly, Zeke understood.

That’s why Spiegel couldn’t catch Zeke’s eye. This meeting was a crisis for him, too. If Spiegel called upon Zeke to confirm his identity, which he had planned to do, Zeke would be ostracized. Well, if I have to go down, Spiegel thought, I won’t take Zeke with me. They will never know that he knew. He wished that there were a way that he could signal Zeke, to let him know that he was going to hold fast to his false identity. He would be Aaronson, to the end, even if in being true to Aaronson he had to be false to himself. All he was able to say, before slinking out of the meeting and leaving Hyde in charge, was that he regretted his failures and that if anyone were to blame—for the disappearance of the funds and for the inroads of the CIA—it was Leonard Spiegel. He swore to the men that he would not return to them unless he could bring Spiegel to face their retribution. He reached for Hyde’s hand, but Hyde refused the gesture. The men were silent. Spiegel had come as close as he dared to an admission, in Aaronson’s name, of guilt. But the men held for their founding leader an almost nostalgic affection. He was the one who had brought them together and who had guided their way as they took their first steps into a new life. They were uneasy, for they sensed that in the past months, for reasons that they could not understand, Aaronson had abandoned them. Watching Hyde’s vengeful attempts to assume his authority allowed the men to see something horrible, if only for a moment. Hyde would be a wrathful god. He was one of the thousands of casualties uncounted on the nightly news. The war had injured him, as it had injured even those whose skin had never been singed by its flames. His would be a reign of terror.

Spiegel walked home from the meeting. He was alone, and he felt lonelier than he had ever felt before, though he was no longer truly alone. He had Tracy, and waiting for him in the States he had Iris. But here he had to live with his sense of failure and betrayal. He had come to Uppsala to help the movement, and all he had done was damage, particularly to Aaronson. If Aaronson ever came back, what would he find? That Tracy had been unfaithful, his comrades had turned against him, he was wanted by the Uppsala police, and he was being stalked by a religious zealot.

It was evening, but the air was still and the sky was bright. Along the sidewalks, tulips and violets grew in large wooden planters. Couples walked the pathways beside the riverbank, holding hands and talking. Groups of young people lingered by the tiny kiosks and sausage stands, laughing and sipping tall drinks. Old men sat on wood-slat benches reading newspapers and magazines, nodding to one another in mutual commiseration about the peculiar state of the world. It was as if the fine weather had melted the icy reserve that, through the long winter, had kept the people of Sweden apart from one another. During the months of darkness and cold, everyone rushed to get indoors, to the shelter of their narrow, isolated lives. Now, people seemed to thrive in the warmth and the light and in one another’s company. It was as if they had been released from bondage into freedom, which in a sense they had. But it was a freedom that, to Spiegel, seemed false because it was a freedom that he could not enjoy.

For he knew that he would have to leave Uppsala. He could offer nothing to the movement except more trouble. If he stayed, the police would question him. They would want a dossier on Hyde, on Reston, maybe on Zeke. And would they believe him if he told them the truth, that he had been exiled? No, they would see his action as subterfuge, refusal to cooperate, and they would serve him up to the dogs, like meat. His best chance—not simply for freedom but for his actual survival—might be to head for a city, for Stockholm, alone. There, he might be able to blend into the background, living at a hostel or a cheap rooming house for a few days, until he could make the right contacts, maybe with a foreign embassy. Perhaps he could get a visa for Russia or for Cuba and he could live there safely and Tracy could join him and they would work side by side in a factory or on a farm, in total obscurity, out of the glare of history, until the war ended and a new generation of Americans opened their arms in forgiveness to those who first followed the paths of peace.

* * *

At home, the blinds were closed, casting the rooms in the pearly gray shadows of winter. Tracy must have gone out. Spiegel went to the kitchen to put some water on to boil. He tilted the blinds at the kitchen window to let in some of the evening light, and he froze in place. Aaronson stood there, on the landing, looking in at him. He was hovering, above the ground, ghostly and pale, his eyes wide and his mouth open in a frozen expression of disbelief. And then Spiegel realized that, of course, he was looking at his own image, there in the glass. He stood, regaining his composure, for more than a minute, gazing through his reflection, to the clear air a few feet beyond the windowpane. Spiegel stared through the cloudy image of his face to the empty courtyard, the tobacco shop, the city streets, and he suddenly understood why our deepest thoughts are sometimes called “reflections.” We come to know ourselves, and to grow, through doubling, or more precisely through splitting. Every new phase in his life, every step he had taken, he had prepared for by imagining a new self and projecting his double into a region, of space or of time or both, that he had yet to inhabit. Our lives, he thought, are a process of creating these self-reflections and then transposing ourselves into these projected images, until we can look back at the life we had left behind and see that it has become much like an image, a reflection, as well. We are constantly turning our present life into a reflection to be seen in the future—into memory.

Spiegel was wakened from these dreamlike thoughts by the double chimes of the telephone, much softer and less insistent than the shattering, interruptive ring of an American phone. Still, Spiegel jumped. He and Tracy rarely used the telephone because they were incapable of speaking in Swedish and unwilling to say much in English, for fear of surveillance. He stepped away from the window and tentatively picked up the receiver on the fourth ring. It had to be Tracy. She must have heard about the meeting, Spiegel assumed. But why had she gone out rather than wait home for him, and why would she risk discussing the day’s events with him on the telephone?

“Hello, Tracy?” Spiegel said. “You know I’ve been waiting—”

“No, this isn’t Tracy,” Spiegel heard.

“Monika,” he said. “I’m sorry I sounded so paranoid. Things are a little intense right now.”

“I know. That’s why I’ve been trying to reach you.” Her voice, with the slight musical lift she gave to the vowels and her soft, almost powdery enunciations, stirred him, for a moment, with curiosity and desire. “You’ve been out for quite a while.”

“So Tracy hasn’t been here, either,” Spiegel said.

“No. Nobody answered.”

“I guess she had to keep her distance from me,” Spiegel said. “I’m persona non grata.”

“You’re what?”

“Like the poem says: ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’ Do you know it?”

“I don’t know it. Are you okay, though?”

“Where are you calling from?” Spiegel asked. He leaned against the countertop and with his free hand lowered the flame beneath the coffeepot. “Are you nearby?”

“I’m at home.”

Spiegel tried to picture her, sitting by the window, her crisp white shirt tucked into her black jeans, her fine hair like filaments of gold, glowing in the evening light.

“Would you like me to come over there?”

“I . . . don’t know,” Spiegel said. “I’m waiting for Tracy . . .”

“Then you haven’t heard the news,” Monika said.

“No,” Spiegel said. “What news?”

“Nixon. He’s bombing Cambodia.”

Spiegel gasped. “I don’t fucking believe that,” he said.

Nixon and Kissinger had been talking about a peace plan. Apparently, this was it—expand the war to all of Southeast Asia. Spiegel felt, for the second time that evening, as if he had been kicked in the chest.

“It seems like this war will never end,” Monika said. “We try to stop it, but it just grows and spreads, gets bigger and bigger.”

“Like a monster,” Spiegel said. “Like a disease.”

For a moment, they let a heavy silence hang on the wire between them while each was absorbed in thought.

“I . . . I called to tell you that I have to leave Uppsala for a few days,” Monika said. “The SSS has called an emergency session at headquarters, in Stockholm. We will be planning a national student strike. I have to go down there, tonight.”