Exiles (34 page)

“Wrong? About what?” Spiegel asked.

“They’re not drunk. The people here, they could drink through the night and not show it. Then go to their work. It’s the way of life.”

“I wasn’t accusing anyone. . . . ”

“No, I don’t mean that,” Monika said. “I mean, that was not why they were laughing. They were laughing because . . . they are remembering the last time.”

“The last time? What do you mean?”

Monika sat beside Spiegel on the bed. “My sister came home one summer with a friend, an English boy. He was going to visit for a day or two and then take the train to Norway. But he stayed on for several days, then weeks. She married him, you know.”

“Are they here, tonight? Have I met them?”

“We never see my sister,” Monika said. She turned her face away from Spiegel. He felt an urge to touch her, to set his hand on her arm or her shoulder.

“They were married that summer, at the church in town. The whole village came to the wedding. We danced all night and in the morning rowed across the lake. It was a wonderful time, but we all knew why she married Paul. That was his name. He promised to take her away. Once she went south to university, it was impossible for her ever again to live in the far north. She wanted to live in the bigger world, the world of day and night we sometimes call it. I don’t know if she loved Paul. I don’t think she did. But I think she was not brave enough to leave Norland on her own.”

“He was her ticket out,” Spiegel said. “A one-way ticket.”

Monika nodded. “Of course my parents knew, all the time,” she said. “They knew once my sister left for school that they had lost her forever. The north is dying. In time, there will be no one left here. You must have noticed, at the party. There were no young people, no children.”

“And you, Monika,” Spiegel said. “What do they think about you?”

“Can’t you tell? They expect me to do the same. That’s why we are celebrating. That’s why they have left me alone, with you.”

It was probably no longer a time to talk, but a time to take Monika in his arms, press his lips to hers, so that the two of them, for the moment, could huddle in their world of dark shadows and flickering light, could obliterate all thoughts and memories of lovers left behind, of the betrayals of friends and of parents, of the war on the other side of the world. But Spiegel felt smothered by Monika’s expectations. What kind of customs do they have here? he wondered. He remembered the peasant dance in
Miss Julie.
Maybe they still do such things. Had he inadvertently become the prize in some sort of mating ritual, complete with toasts and libations and, now, the retreat to the bridal chamber? He felt like a missionary who had wandered into an aboriginal enclave and been forced to wed the chieftain’s daughter in a ceremony witnessed by the whole village. He imagined that Monika’s family even now was strewing flowers on the pathways, dancing a fertility rite as they circled the little cottage, staring through the muslin drapes at his silhouette projected on the back wall, waiting for his shade to disappear beneath the much larger shadow cast by Monika.

She was beside him now, and he could feel the warmth from her skin, a comfort in the chilly air. She brushed some strands of hair from her eyebrows. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips trembled. She waited for him to come to her, and when he did not, her eyes moistened.

“How much do they know about me?” Spiegel asked. “What did you tell them?”

Monika smiled. “They know everything they need to know, about you and about me,” she said. “They know why you’re here, why I brought you to the north.”

What Spiegel sensed, though, was that Monika deliberately kept her parents in the dark about his activities and about her own, and that they preferred it so. It was part of the Norland code of living. Don’t ask anyone, even your children, about their lives. Keep silent, and keep your distance. Each man is an island.

Monika lifted her hands to Spiegel, touched his shoulders. They could hear laughter from the lawn. Someone was playing a guitar, and there were sporadic attempts at singing. Spiegel was dizzy, not quite drunk but light-headed from the air, the light, the noise, the smoke, the lack of sleep. Did it matter whether Monika loved him forever or just for a moment or not at all? Perhaps she was using him. She could be like some petulant Nordic god, holding Spiegel in thrall to retaliate against the alien spirit that had imprisoned the soul of her sister. Or perhaps Monika was a secret agent, trained in the ways of dissembling, enchanting Spiegel with her siren song in order to lure him into a trap, into the hands of his enemies. Or was she a warrior, flaunting her captive like a hunter’s prize, posturing and gaining status before the elders of her clan? It didn’t matter. Her words could mean everything, or nothing, for words, gestures, love itself took on strange new configurations in the far north, and whatever passed between them would have to sort itself out once again when they returned to the land of day and night.

Spiegel took Monika to him, and her lips opened and her tongue, quick and alive, found his. She felt light as summer air against his skin, and she was as soft and tactile as wet silk. She slipped out of her jeans, and in a moment she was beneath him, open, undulant, gentle as the calm waters of the sea. Oh, she moaned softly, and her voice rose and joined with the birds of morning that were whistling in the mountain spruce and with the floating chords from the guitar someone was playing while the villagers sang round the fire and paddled in little boats along the lakeshore. For a long time, Spiegel held her, drifting in and out of sleep, while she brushed her lips against his face and his hair and watched their shadows dance in the flickering light.

16

From across the water,
the distant shoreline looked flattened, two-dimensional, so it seemed that the farther Spiegel rowed the more the village he was leaving behind him was transformed until eventually it looked like a photograph, a picture postcard. From this distant perspective, Spiegel could no longer discern the intricacies of the shoreline, the coves and inlets and the little finger-like fishing docks that probed the margins of the lake. But for the first time he noticed the hills and meadows that rose from the shore, and among the hills he saw the houses that punctuated the whole vista like end points after the long stretches of unbroken spruce. Only from here could he appreciate the village in relation to its landscape. How small it looked when seen as part of the vast expanse of water and sky, forest and field, bright air and dark earth! Each house on the shore was like a single note of music, lost within the rising swells of a grand orchestral chord. He was sorry to be leaving.

They had set out in the morning, after breakfast, from Monika’s dock. Monika sat in the stern, a picnic lunch in a basket at her feet. A straw hat shielded her eyes from the sun. Wisps of her hair fluttered in the soft breeze. She put her hand to the brim of her hat and leaned back occasionally, arching over the transom so that the stray tips of her hair brushed the surface of the water and scrolled a trail that drifted along behind them between the brackets of their wake. Spiegel stared at the soft skin of her white neck. She slipped her feet out of her sandals and rested her bare soles against his ankles.

In the bow sat her brother. His name was Per. He held in his lap a bag of nuts and raisins, which he was supposed to conserve for a snack on the return trip. But he had begun to munch shortly after they left the dock and soon, bored and impatient and incapable of setting anything aside against future want, he began tossing the bits of food onto the water in hopes of attracting fish.
Titta,
titta,
he kept shouting, look, look. A gray bird circled overhead. Per pointed and sang a few phrases. Monika laughed, and told him to hush, but Per persisted and then broke off his song, seemingly in mid-verse, to set forth on a soliloquy that Monika assured Spiegel did not warrant translation. In short, he was a pest. Or in other words, he was a typical eight-year-old kid brother who was alternately confused and fascinated by this older visitor who did not speak his language and who, in some way that he could not fathom, had aroused his parents’ solicitude and awakened his sister’s sexuality. Spiegel had initiated, in three days, a seismic shift in the family’s dynamics, and Per was determined, through his probing and nudging, to work out the mystery.

Per rested his heels on Spiegel’s backpack and bedroll. For balance, it would have been better to place the heavy pack in the stern, but how could they trust Per to keep his kicky feet away from the picnic basket? So, with too much weight in the bow, rowing was hard work. The boat lurched drunkenly forward with each stroke.

They would arrive at the far shore by mid-morning, before the sun was at its height, so that they could have lunch in a grove that Monika knew of from previous outings. Maybe Per would go for a swim or take a walk along the pebbled beach, and Spiegel and Monika could find a few minutes to be alone. Spiegel felt torn inside. What had happened in the past three days between him and Monika had made him reassess everything he had come to feel, and to believe, about Tracy and therefore about himself. He was convinced that, for several months, he had been in love with Tracy. But he was sure, now, that his feelings for Monika were so much more powerful, more elemental, than anything he had felt for Tracy, or for Iris beforehand, that he wondered if he had ever known love. If what he felt for Monika was love, the answer was no, for he had never felt this way before. But was he in love? Or had he turned to Monika out of fear, loneliness, confusion, conditions that might pass if he ever returned to Uppsala? Perhaps what he felt for Monika was merely a matter of opportunity. Perhaps he was so weak that he had no will of his own but was simply dominated by the strongest proximate personality, as an iron filament is drawn to the nearest magnetic field. He would have to step with caution as he set out to navigate the treacherous passage between Monika’s will and Tracy’s.

Spiegel had told Monika nothing about Tracy’s scheme. He had no idea what papers Tracy had dispatched to the railroad junction, whether she had managed to procure a passport that would allow him to leave the country or a residency permit that would allow him to stay or no documents at all. When he left Uppsala, he had felt that he was placing his life in Tracy’s hands, that his fate, and hers, depended on whatever official papers she could buy, steal, or fabricate for him, for them.

But in the past few days, the earth had shifted, the stars had been realigned, the rivers had reversed their flow and once again his life, which had seemed so torpid and sedentary, had branched, flooded, and altered its course. He would have to summon all the strength he had left to fight against the swift current, for, whatever plan Tracy had devised, now Spiegel could neither leave Sweden nor resettle elsewhere in the country except with Monika.

During the next few days, Monika planned to visit her aunts and uncles and cousins who lived in the surrounding villages, each a good hard hour’s drive from her parents’ place. No one would speak English at these gatherings, so there would be nothing for Spiegel to do except eat and grin and feel like a specimen on display, genus
Americanus.
Spiegel told Monika he would use the time to hike into the back country for his taste of the real Sweden. The thought of that seemed to amuse Monika. She laughed as she tried to picture Spiegel, the American pioneer, hacking his way through the wilderness, like Daniel Boone. Think of me more like Thoreau, Spiegel said. How did Thoreau put it? I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

Yes, she said, he could roll out his bag and rest his head against a cushion of moss. He could dream of her, as she would dream of him, his bright eyes and his friendly laugh, his long fingers and his cock that grew hard so quick it almost jumped when she touched it, as if her hand carried a spark. And what would he dream about? she asked.

He didn’t want to dream of her, he said. He wanted to be with her, to watch her in the morning as she ran a silver brush a hundred times through her fine blond hair, as she walked in her long skirt through an unmowed field, the grasses and flowers parting before her as if in homage, to hear her voice calling him from a distance and to feel her silky skin warm and alive against him in the night. Although he wouldn’t say so, he was afraid to leave her, for his feelings for her had emerged with such sudden and unexpected force and intensity that he worried about what would happen when he left the source. Would she fade from his mind, like a dream on waking? Was his passion just a passing thing, some atmospheric turbulence that ripped through the sky and shook the trees, filled the air with wind and rain, and then dissipated, like a summer storm, leaving the ground fresh and light but, in essence, unchanged? Would she waken and realize that her passion for him was a delusion, a midsummer night’s dream?

Late in the morning they reached the far shore. Per leaped off the gunwale into the shallow water, soaking his sneakers and cuffs. He grabbed the painter and lugged the rowboat onto the rocky beach. Spiegel helped Monika to disembark, and they carefully transferred the picnic basket and his backpack onto dry land, then dragged the empty boat above the waterline. The boat listed on the beach, a clumsy thing when out of its natural element.

“What do you think?” Monika asked. They had put in at a small inlet notched into the thick grove of spruce that limned the shore like a green wall. Hills rose behind them, the foothills to the great snowy mountains of the north. A stream tumbled down from a ledge into an icy pool of black water. Per had yanked off his sneakers and was trolling a stick along the water’s edge.

“It’s beautiful,” Spiegel said. “Great.”

“
Great.
Such an American word,” Monika said. “As if beauty has to be a matter of size.”

“Okay. It’s
bara bra
.”

She took his hand. She had just been joking, teasing him. He understood. Spiegel looked back across the lake, trying to find the village. It had disappeared around the promontory at the head of their cove. From his current vantage, all he could see was the unbroken forest, a monotony of shape and hue. He imagined that the land stretched on that way for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Baltic, to Finland, to the Russian steppes and beyond. He was glad that soon he would be climbing above the treeline, where he could look down from a lofty perspective. From on high, he thought, from a tower or an airplane, a city always looks slightly toylike, with antlike people and cars like drops of mercury slipping silently along the slender, glassy tubes of the roadways. He wondered if the forest would look different from above or if it would look just the same, grand and immense and timeless, seemingly unmarred by human presence, concealing all within its cloak of green.

He and Monika walked along the inlet to the trailhead. She suggested that they have lunch soon and then say good-bye. She didn’t want to row into an afternoon headwind on her way home across the lake. And Spiegel would have a substantial hike to reach the first of the mountain huts.

They called to Per. He slung the basket over his shoulder and ran to them, hopping along the boulders. Spiegel could imagine, with a single missed footing, Per tumbling into the water along with their provisions. But, with a final leap of joy, Per landed unsullied at the picnic grounds. Monika spread a cloth and laid out a plate of open-faced sandwiches. Per smeared red jelly onto torn yellow hunks of soft, sweet bread.

After lunch, Monika told Per to run along to the boat and wait for her. She said she had to help Spiegel pack his gear, but Per saw through her scheme, and he began a chorus of whining and teasing. He made big smacking sounds with his lips and pretended to hug and kiss one of the slender trees, then flopped onto the ground as if he were in a fit of passion.

“Who taught this kid about sex?” Spiegel asked.

“He watches too much TV,” Monika said.

“Did he see our great debate?”

Monika laughed at that and shook her head. Spiegel didn’t want to prolong the scene. He felt sorry for Monika, having to listen to Per’s blabbing all the way home. “Come here, little guy,” he said, and Per came running over to him. Spiegel kneeled and reached out his hand to Per to say good-bye in a soul handshake. To his surprise, Per grabbed him around the shoulders and hugged him, a quick and startling embrace, and then he turned and ran off to the boat, singing.

“I think he will miss you,” Monika said.

They stood by the shore as Per rattled rocks against the ribs of the rowboat. Monika turned to watch Per, and Spiegel felt the strands of her hair brush against his face. He whispered something to her. She tilted her head back, looked up at him and smiled, and she touched his lips with a quick but sensuous kiss.

“Good-bye, love,” she said. “I’ll be here for you.”

As he set off up the trail, he knew in his heart that she would. It was as if her love was a light that clarified all the disorder of his life, a filter that purified an unsettled mixture so that it became clear and bright. Since he had opened his heart to Monika, he was beginning to see that everything that he had once thought of as love had been the fulfillment of a baser need, not a sexual drive, but a defense against loneliness, insecurity, and the tar pits of depressive gloom. He had fallen for Iris because she had rescued him from the clutches of the law, and he thought that he could prove something to her by coming to Sweden, that he could demonstrate his worthiness and valor, like a knight on a Crusade. And he had proved himself, yet in doing so he had moved beyond his need for Iris’s approval. He lost her, and then he found Tracy. And what drew him to her? He feared that he had loved Tracy, or thought he had, only to fill an absence, the absence created by the disappearance of Aaronson. To win Tracy’s heart was also a way to become someone that he was not. But Spiegel wondered whether he was ever the one that Tracy loved or whether she had always loved the image of Aaronson that she saw behind the mask of Spiegel. Perhaps Tracy had been using him—even to get back at Iris for some obscure past rivalry—as much as he was using her. They never talked about this, as if to do so would have placed the whole construct of their relationship in jeopardy, and he was beginning to recognize these silences as a great chasm that had opened up between them. To talk about their feelings for each other and their future together would have stripped away the surface sheen of their relationship, forcing them to realize that what they thought was love had been an illusion that had taken root in the rich mixture of their needs and their fears.

As Monika had explained, the spur trail took Spiegel north through modest hills, a steady climb toward the iron-rich mountains of Lapland where he would reach the Kungsled, a rugged climbing trail that traversed the highest ranges along the remote stretches of the Norwegian border. There were shelters at regular intervals along the trails, she told him, and it was fine to stay there, although often one had to share the lodgings with other hikers.

At this time of year, however, the trails were little used. For the first mile or so, footing was slippery from the spring rains and the late snowmelt. Frequently, Spiegel had to cut into the brush at the trailside to skirt a mud pit. After a time, he decided to brave the oozing ground. He stayed on the trail, cautiously seeking the most secure footing, but this slowed his progress and forced him to keep his eyes focused downward. He grew intimate with the tops of his boots.

Eventually, though, the trail began to climb, and the footing improved. The ground was soft and dry, though uneven. The trail itself might have been a streambed during the early spring, a channel for the runoff from the melting snow of the highlands. The swift water had left bare many rocks and roots, and from time to time Spiegel came upon a natural wall of branches that had washed up into an interstice where the trail narrowed or where a log had fallen. Spiegel kicked through most of these barriers. It pleased him that he was the first of the season to pass this way.