Exiles (33 page)

“Swedes, too. But I think foreigners have the hardest time. I used to think that you Americans could never get used to our land. But now, you’ve made me think, maybe it’s because so many of you have come here under such unhappy conditions. You’re just . . .”

“Projecting. Putting our own personal feelings outside of us, onto the landscape. They’re easier to deal with that way.”

“Yes.” She drove in silence for a while longer. Their plan was working, Spiegel was relieved to see. No cars were following them. They had hardly seen another on the road. Once in a while, a huge logging truck, a thick mountain of spruce strapped to its long flatbed, would whisk by them heading south. Otherwise, the road was theirs alone and the pathway north was unobstructed.

“And you, Lenny,” Monika asked. “Why are you so unhappy?”

“I’m in mourning for my life,” he said. She turned to look at him, puzzled. “It’s a line from Chekhov,” he explained.

“Your life,” she said. “It’s just begun. How old are you?”

He told her.

“Would you go to Vietnam, if they draft you?”

He told her that he would not be drafted.

“Then you are lucky. But you are also brave. Most Americans, if they could get out of the war, would just stay home and do whatever Americans do. Make money, I guess.”

“I didn’t come to Sweden for any great moral reason,” Spiegel confessed. “I came because I wanted to prove something.”

“To yourself?”

“No, I was in love. I wanted to prove it to her.”

“To Tracy.”

“No, not Tracy. I didn’t know Tracy in the States. I met her in Uppsala.”

“And now, she’s the one you love. And you have to prove yourself to her.”

“I think by now,” Spiegel said, “I don’t have to prove anything to Tracy. Now, I’m proving something to myself.”

“No,” Monika said, after a moment. “I don’t believe that. I think now you have to do what’s right. Even if that means—”

“Abandoning Tracy?”

“Or giving her up. That’s why you’re unhappy. Am I right?”

Perhaps, Spiegel thought. He didn’t feel as if he were giving up Tracy, for he had never been sure that she was his alone. As he rode farther away from Uppsala, the whole city, the whole episode of his life that had passed there, seemed somehow dreamlike and unreal. Yet it didn’t feel as if he had begun a new journey. Spiegel felt as if he were continuing along a passage that reached far back into his past and also far into the future. In short, it felt good to be on the move again, even though he was leaving the unsettled and heading for the unknown.

It may have been his imagination working, but it seemed to Spiegel as if the air, the sky, the quality of light itself became more weak and diffuse as they drove north. The Baltic Sea looked gray and cold, like metal. The fields along the roadside were barren and rocky. The low hills were patched with thin stands of spruce that disfigured the topography. Occasionally, they passed a farming village where the houses seemed to huddle together as if for protection from the great, harsh emptiness that pervaded the landscape. It’s like a desert with trees, Spiegel thought, severe, extreme, inhospitable to life. He could sense that they were approaching the top of the earth. He imagined what he would see if they continued north. The vegetation would give out by nearly indiscernible gradations until the forest had imperceptibly dwindled into tundra, and then the tundra would succumb to the vast reaches of polar ice.

Monika’s village sat in a quiet valley less than an hour from the north coast of the Baltic and within a day’s hike of the Arctic Circle. She had told her family that she was bringing home a friend from school, an American, who wanted to backpack along the Kungsled, the national trail that passes through the mountains near the Norwegian border. Monika thought that hiking the trail would be a great experience for Spiegel; it would give him “a taste of the real Sweden.” But he wasn’t so sure. The real Sweden, to him, still tasted like cheese in a tube, which he could buy at the Uppsala train station. Since his days on the Ohio beet farm, Spiegel felt a mild revulsion toward all recreation associated with the great outdoors. A sleeping bag rolled out on a parquet living-room floor was about as close to nature as he cared to get. He would prefer to camp out in Monika’s guest cottage until Tracy sent word. She had promised to dispatch Spiegel’s papers, along with a plan to get him safely out of the country, to a postal box at the railroad junction near the frontier, a two-day hike from Monika’s village. In return, Spiegel pledged he would keep the plan secret, even from Monika.

It was about two in the afternoon, some twelve hours after Spiegel had been shaken out of his dreams, when they turned onto the gravel road that led to Monika’s family home. Her parents lived five miles from the nearest town, and they were five difficult miles, even in summer. In the winter, the road was nearly impassable. Monika slowed to a crawl, as the road surface was gashed with ruts carved by the spring rains and the steady runoff of snowmelt. Sometimes a fresh stream spilled across the roadway, like a ribbon of silver. For a long stretch, the gravel had been entirely washed away, and they rattled along on an under-bed of raw rock. The car was jostled from side to side, and stones cracked against the fenders like gunshot. At last, they came to a wooden signpost where Monika turned to the right onto a dirt lane that hugged the weedy shore of a lake. Gradually, the lane dwindled into two broad wheel ruts pressed into the soft earth, and then it vanished altogether and the car nosed its way through high meadowgrass and came to rest at the edge of an unmowed field. “This is ours,” Monika said. “We’re home.”

Her parents and her kid brother lived in a sprawling house set on a grassy hill just above the shoreline. There was something immediately pleasing to the eye about the house: the gingerbread carvings above the porch railings, the excellent carpentry of the doorways, the windowsills, the moldings and cabinetry, all, Spiegel learned, the handiwork of Monika’s father. The comfort was not only in the details but in the satisfying proportions of the dwelling. The interior was cozy, even quaint, with its low ceilings and many small windows made up of multiple panes of thick glass that had begun to ripple and bubble with age, but the house was also spacious and generous in the way it opened to the out of doors and allowed for a comfortable flow of traffic from room to room. In all, it reminded Spiegel very much of Monika’s cottage nestled in Uppsala’s botanical gardens.

“Welcome to my house,” her father said, extending his hand to Spiegel. It was the traditional Swedish greeting, and in this case fully appropriate, Spiegel thought. The man and his house are as one. All the family members, including some aunts and cousins who had come by for the occasion, embraced Monika one at a time, and then in clusters of three or four. They couldn’t get enough of her. She had been home earlier in the spring term, Spiegel knew, but they acted as if they hadn’t seen her in years. Perhaps it was a function of the loneliness and isolation of the setting. The appearance of a stranger or the return—even after a brief absence—of a loved one, had an intensified effect.

While the kid brother ran around in the fields chasing butterflies with a long stick, Monika’s father ushered Spiegel and the assembled company into the dining room. A table of sandwiches, cheeses, and sausages had been laid out, and Monika’s dad immediately set to pouring tall glasses of foamy dark beer from a big pitcher. There were “
skåls
” all around and the clinking of glasses, the
ting
of silverware against china. Spiegel found himself with a full plate of sliced ham in one hand and a glass of beer in the other. He drained off the beer. “My dad makes it himself,” Monika said. Spiegel nodded: very good.

As he went for a refill, he began to realize, however, that he was the center of attention. Everyone was too polite, or too reserved, to stare at him. And his Swedish was so awkward that none but Monika could carry a conversation with him beyond the plane of platitudes. But Spiegel could discern, from the way people approached Monika, tilted their heads toward him as they spoke, caught his eye and met his gaze with a knowing smile, that they were asking her about him and sizing him up. He wished his Swedish were better. He felt as he had when he had first arrived in Uppsala, his voice and even his thoughts nearly drowned by the unknown language that washed over him as he struggled to stay afloat in the choppy waters. At Monika’s, though, the still indiscernible words sounded to him much sweeter. The lilt of the Swedish language, with its sudden and surprising interspersals of the elongated
sh
sounds between the hard K’s and V’s and the loopy vowels and swooping, softened consonants, seemed to him like a flock of birds dipping and diving through wild air. Perhaps he was drunk.

Monika was laughing as she spoke, gaily shaking her head, no no no, and holding her hand aloft in protest. The guests were teasing her about something, making her blush. More people had joined the party, and the crowd had begun to spill outward, drinks in hand, to the porch and front lawn. The whole village must be here, Spiegel thought, the whole county.

By what according to Spiegel’s best guess must have been early evening, some of the men went outside and built a small fire of birch logs in a stone-lined pit. From a kitchen shed, Monika’s mother wheeled out a table on which sat rows of long metal frames. On each frame she set a whole fish, a silvery salmon, scaled and boned. She snapped the frames shut so that each salmon looked as if it were clinched in a tiny cage. These racks were to be smoked over the hot stones around the fire pit.

Neighbors had brought other delicacies, pickles and jellies and cream pastries and long links of blood sausage, which someone had pierced with sticks and shoved one by one into the dancing fire. Spiegel found himself biting into a sausage, smoky and hot, and the juices burned his tongue. He cooled his throat with more of Monika’s dad’s dark and bitter beer. The fire crackled, and the smoke drifted off above the spruce, a thin trail rising into the weak light of the evening sky.

After dessert, which Monika’s mother ladled from a copper tub of vanilla cream dotted with fresh, dark berries, Spiegel felt like toppling over into the tall grass. His head was light, his stomach was full, and his arms and legs were cramped with exhaustion. But he could not get away graciously. The family, the villagers, crowded around him, asking him questions in broken English or in Swedish, which they spoke slowly and loudly, as if that would make up for his linguistic deficiencies. Sometimes, their conversations degenerated into little games of charades. He would hold his hands together and pretend to scrutinize his open palms as if he were reading a sacred text, and someone would laugh and say, Ah, student! An old man with a grizzly beard pointed his left arm at Spiegel, sighted down his shoulder as if he were looking through a scope, and clicked his fingers like a trigger. Vietnam, bad, bad, he said. Spiegel nodded warily, and smiled.

At last Monika came to his rescue. She was clutching a stalk of dried flowers. Spiegel plucked one, and placed it in her hair. Two of the neighbors, watching, clapped in approval, and Monika’s brother yelped out something, which brought on more laughter. Spiegel took another flower and put it in his own hair. “San Francisco,” someone called, and everybody laughed again.

“Come on, let me show you around the place,” Monika said. She took Spiegel’s arm and led him toward the lake. From the shore, they could see the few other houses of the village, neatly spaced at even intervals along the waterfront. Near them was a weathered dock. An old rowboat was tied to a piling, and a green canoe rested on the beach, like a mossy log.

“Can we swim here?” Spiegel asked.

“Yes, but it’s filled with weeds,” Monika answered. She walked ahead of Spiegel toward the dock. He looked for stones that he might skip. Perhaps he could show her something new. Maybe skipping stones was unknown to Sweden, like baseball. But all the stones were rounded. He tossed a few into the lake and watched the circles form, expand, and pass through one another in intricate patterns.

“Do you know why they’re laughing?” she said, as she sat down on the canoe.

“They’re drunk.” They could hear the sounds of the festivities, magnified, it seemed, by the properties of water and by the reflective surfaces of the surrounding hills. Insects droned all around them as well, a steady background noise that patched out the occasional intervals of silence.

“No, they’re not drunk. You have to understand life in the north. The winters are so long and dark, and the distances so great, so in the summer we take advantage of all this light and we see one another every chance we get.”

“You mean you guys party all the time up here?”

“No, but every party tends to . . . stretch out. Sometimes people stay all night because . . . ”

“Because how can they tell. It could be midnight now. It could be the next day. I have no idea. It’s funny,” Spiegel added. “I can’t even tell if I’m exhausted or not. I think I am.”

“If you want, I’ll show you where you’ll sleep. You could, what’s your word?”

“Crash?”

“Yes, like a car.”

She led him to the little summer cottage behind her parents’ house. It reminded Spiegel of the sort of clubhouse he’d played in when he was a boy. The walls were bare wood, a knotty pine that gave off a faint, resinous odor. A plain mattress on bare planks served as a bed. There were simple crates and boxes for furnishings. An oil lamp sat on a dresser beneath the small window. Monika drew the curtains, thick muslin drapings that hung from a bare steel rod.

“This is dark enough for sleeping now,” she said. “That’s why we have these little houses, for the long summer nights. My dad built it this way, with only the one window. I call it a box of darkness.”

She struck a match and touched it to the lamp wick. “There,” she said.

“I liked the darkness,” Spiegel said. “I miss the darkness.”

Monika extinguished the match, with a little puff of breath. “You were wrong, before,” she said, turning to Spiegel. The shimmering light from the lamp illuminated her hair with a beautiful backlight so that the loosened strands seemed to glow like incandescent filaments.