Exiles (37 page)

Spiegel needed to move around, to shape his mind to all these revelations. He thought that if he were outside, in the fresh air, listening to the wind shaking the top branches of the trees, it would be easier to accept the truths he was learning from Aaronson: that everything is mutable, that each of us wears a mask to hide the shifting shapes of our allegiances and our longings.

“Aaronson,” Spiegel said. He stood, to emphasize the gravity of what he was about to say, to show that he would back his words, if necessary, with force. “Tracy was supposed to send me some documents, papers that would allow me either to stay in the country legally or to move on safely. I think you knew all about her plan. Maybe she sent you with the papers, or maybe you were tipped off and you got to the drop-off first and lifted them.”

“Hmm,” Aaronson muttered. “You’re very perceptive, very shrewd. Go on, I’m listening.”

“I don’t know what your game is, whether you’re trying to get back at Tracy or whether you’re trying to nail me for what went down between us when you split from Uppsala.”

“Oh, well,” Aaronson said, his voice crackling with sarcasm. “As they say, let bygones be bygones.”

“If you give me the papers, I’m gone. I’m out of your life.”

“And if I don’t?” Aaronson said. “You have nobody to turn to for help. Everyone you trusted, everyone you thought you loved is dead or gone or turned against you. Go back and retrace your steps, man. You’ll be walking down a lonely road. You’ll be walking on the ashes of the dead.”

“What are you saying?”

Aaronson looked Spiegel over, warily, assessing his strength, his condition. Spiegel felt exhausted, but he knew that he could summon whatever power he needed to fend off Aaronson, if it came to that.

“She’ll turn you in. Maybe she has already. I don’t know where you can go from here, but there’s no way you can go back,” he said. “You’re still a wanted man, you know.”

“You bastard,” Spiegel said, and he leaped toward Aaronson, trying to grab him by the throat. He was fueled by fury. He didn’t know what he would do if his hands reached Aaronson’s flesh. But Aaronson was too quick and elusive. He dodged to the side. In a flash, he grabbed Spiegel by the wrists and swung him to the floor. Spiegel smashed his shoulder against the hot stove and knocked over the pile of kindling. He grabbed a stick and lifted it, trying to advance on Aaronson, but again Aaronson caught him off balance. Aaronson kicked, and the tip of his boot caught Spiegel on the elbow. The stick flew across the room and hit the far wall with a crack like a rifle shot. Spiegel’s whole arm was on fire, as if a nerve had exploded. “Fuck, I think you broke it,” he said. “Where’d you learn that?”

“So you had enough?” Aaronson shouted. “It’s me should be coming after you, moving in with my old lady.”

Spiegel sat on the floor, massaging his injured arm, hoping to get some feeling back in his hand and wrist. “I know,” Spiegel said. “I was a shit. I can’t explain it. Except, look, it’s over between us.” Why had he have been so quick to attack? It was as if his nerves were made of dry paper, and the slightest spark could set off a fire.

“I don’t have your papers,” Aaronson said. “Whatever Tracy sent is waiting for you at the railroad junction. We can hike there in the morning.”

“Whenever the fuck that is.”

“And you can decide what you want to do, whether you want to stay in Sweden and take your chances with the military police or cross the frontier.”

“I think that depends on you,” Spiegel said. “I think we know the truth. It’s like a law of physics. The two of us can’t occupy the same space at the same time.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Aaronson said. “After tomorrow, you won’t see me again.”

In the morning, Aaronson explained, they would set out together down the trail toward the railroad line that ran through the valley. When they reached the junction, they would proceed along their separate ways.

“If you want,” Aaronson said, “you can keep going north to the frontier. It would take you about another four hours—a pretty rugged hike. Or you could turn back and spend another night in this shelter,” Aaronson said.

“And what happens to you?” Spiegel asked.

“I’m waiting at the junction for the next train. It’s a really remote piece of track, mostly used for shipping iron from the Kiruna mines. Big flatcars rumble through there all the time, spilling rock dust on the valley floor. The trees there, you’ll see them, they look red, like rust. But twice a day a passenger train comes through, once heading north, once heading south. It’s a drop point for some forest rangers and for some of the mail that goes to the outlying mines. I’m going to pick up the northbound.”

“The northbound? You’re crazy. There’s nothing north of here. You’ve reached the fucking top of the world. You’ve got no place left to run, man. You’ve run out of space.”

“That’s not true,” Aaronson said. “Have you looked at a map?”

“Yeah, and there’s nothing between us and the North Pole except Santa’s reindeer.”

“There’s Norway.”

“As I said . . .”

“There’s fishing villages, and a pretty big port, called Narvik. I’m going to get myself on a boat, a whaleboat maybe, and work my way east. I’ve got the papers and a visa. . . .”

“If you’re trying to get back to the States, I don’t think a polar crossing is the way you want to go.”

“That’s not where I’m heading. Haven’t you figured it out? I’m going to China.”

Spiegel stared at Aaronson, amazed. He began to think that maybe Aaronson really was crazy, that the stress of the past year had stretched thin the filaments of his mind until the connections that should have held his thoughts together were left loose and loopy, dangling.

“China? You’ll be the only American there, unless some missionaries are still holding out.”

“We’ll be heroes, vanguards of the Second American Revolution.”

“We?” Spiegel said. “I ain’t going.”

“Me and Tracy. That’s where she’s headed, overland.”

But the whole idea of going to China was preposterous. The country had been closed to the West for thirty years. There probably wasn’t a person in a million who could speak a word of English. Aaronson the hero? More likely they would lock him away in a bamboo prison as a spy or, if he was lucky, ship him off to a rice paddy where he could shovel manure with the peasants. He would be better off almost anywhere—Israel, Moscow, Africa, even trying his chances with the justice system back in the States. No, Spiegel thought, there is nothing I can do anymore for Aaronson. Maybe all I can do is save Tracy—or myself.

17

Spiegel and Aaronson agreed
to set out together on the trail during whatever felt to them like the morning. Their energy incinerated by the flash-fire fight, their senses dulled by the warm, smoky air inside the shelter, they had collapsed into sleep without coming to any understanding about Aaronson’s needs and Spiegel’s obligations. Spiegel slept fitfully, favoring his injured arm. When he woke, he lay still for as long as he could. He was in no rush to be under way. The shelter was a shambles. It looked like the cartoon image of a saloon after a gunfight, the furniture toppled and two cowboys splayed out on the dusty planks of the floor, snoring off their drunk. When at last Spiegel sat up, he put some weight on his arm, giving it a test. It was okay, he thought, not broken. Aaronson’s steel-shanked toe must have caught him on the funny bone. He could still feel the tingling at the flat edge of his hand, but he could flex and grip and he would be able to shoulder his pack.

The fire was dead, but a thin film of soot seemed to cling to his skin, his clothes, everything he touched. The stove must have been poorly sealed or inadequately vented. That could have been a danger had not the shelter itself been of such rude construction. Spiegel could see daylight through numerous chinks in the walls, roof, and shutters. The dappled sunlight, filtered through the high birch trees, danced and flickered on the boot-scuffed floor.

Hot water would be nice, Spiegel thought, to wash away the grime and sweat of the night. But it wasn’t worth struggling again with the stove. Instead, he slipped on his pants and his hiking boots and went outside. The sky was clear. The tops of the trees swayed gently in a light breeze. The ground was damp and soft, spongy against his step. He walked up the trail a couple of hundred feet to the last crossing he remembered, a swift stream where the water looked clear as glass. He hung his shirt on a branch and kneeled on the bank. He leaned forward, as if he were bowing before a god, and lowered his face into the stream. The coldness shocked him. He tilted his head and let his hair dangle in the rushing water, then cupped his hands and splashed his shoulders and chest with icy droplets that stung him and cleansed him. He shook his hair dry. He had forgotten a towel, so he sat on a stone to dry in the air. The sun was warm on his back, but he still felt a deep chill from his icy ablution.

He closed his eyes and tried to recall the events of the night, to piece them together and to make sense of all that he had heard. Each time he followed one of the lines of thought that Aaronson had laid out for him he smashed into a dead end, a brick wall of questions. So Tracy was leaving Uppsala, Aaronson said. In a way, that was a relief, for how could he have explained to her what had developed, so suddenly, between him and Monika? But why was she following Aaronson to China, and how could she possibly get there overland? Why had she bothered to send Aaronson to this remote outpost in the Arctic? Or had he split from Tracy and tracked Spiegel down on his own? Was Aaronson really planning to disappear across the frontier, another vanishing act, or had he come to the north on a mission of revenge?

Aaronson was sitting on the wooden step in front of the shelter when Spiegel returned. He was eating a candy bar, one square at a time.

“You know what I really miss?” Aaronson said.

“Almonds?”

“No, seriously.” He offered Spiegel a square, but Spiegel shook his head no. The thought of a chocolate breakfast made his stomach a little unsteady.

“I miss the stars,” Aaronson said. “I miss the black skies and the stars. I mean, it could be midnight right now, and the stars could be up there, behind the blue.”

Spiegel looked up at the peak that loomed over them, a snowy summit with great, bare expanses of rocky ledge. The top of the mountain was obscured by a thin mist, like smoke. “That’s true,” he said. “But there are always stars overhead. During the daylight, we can’t see them.”

Aaronson thought about that for a second. “You feeling okay this morning?” he asked. “Maybe we should just hang out here for the day.”

“I’m still a little banged up from last night,” Spiegel said. He showed Aaronson his arm. There was a welt at the elbow and a solid bruise along the forearm. “But it would feel good to be on the move. I thought we could hike to the railroad station.”

“Well,
station
might be the wrong word,” Aaronson said. “It’s like a siding.”

“I wasn’t expecting a shoeshine stand and a magazine kiosk,” Spiegel said. “But you’ve got a train to catch.”

“Except we have no idea what time it is,” Aaronson said. “We don’t know when the train’s supposed to come through. So what’s the point of hurrying? The quicker we get there, the longer I’ll have to wait.”

“I’m just eager to get moving again is all,” Spiegel said.

“Don’t you want anything to eat?”

“We can stop on the trail.”

“Sure, at the first Howard Johnson’s.”

“Okay, some cereal maybe.”

Perhaps Aaronson was right, Spiegel thought. There is a certain pointless futility in trying to hurry one’s fate, like running down a track to meet an oncoming train. The train will arrive. You might as well walk. He decided to let Aaronson set the agenda, and the pace. They had a little to eat, they washed their dishes, they rolled up their gear and straightened the shelter so that the next hikers to come upon it would see no evidence of their encounter, of the violence that had roared through their blood in the night like a storm.

* * *

Spiegel guessed it was about noon when they set out together on the trail. The sky was still a watery blue, and a breeze tipped the outer branches of the dark spruce. But the peculiar silence of the summer night had yielded to the ambient notes of unseen birds that filled the great empty spaces of the mountainside with a chorus of riot and mimicry.

The hiking was much easier than the scramble up the south face that had left Spiegel so depleted the day before. They followed a steady but gradual descent along an open ledge to the upper crest of the valley forest. Once they entered the woods, the trail became soft, and the beams of sunlight that pierced the heavy filter of the overhead boughs sparkled on the mossy ground, like the spangled light cast across a ballroom by a revolving crystal chandelier. The air was cool, and they walked swiftly. They made no sound as they passed except for the occasional snapped twig or the swish of the pine needles they brushed aside where the forest began to close in and the trail narrowed.

Spiegel wanted to talk with Aaronson as they made their way along the trail, but Aaronson rebuffed his efforts to open conversation. He seemed distracted, as if he had withdrawn from the present and had already, in his mind, set forth on the next stage of his journey. That’s all right, Spiegel thought. It was pleasant to walk through the woods in near silence, but he knew also that he could not let Aaronson depart without extracting the answers to his remaining questions. After all he had been through, all he had risked, Aaronson owed him that much.

They came to a fast stream, which they had to cross by a narrow spine of large, smooth rocks. “I think it’s not too far,” Aaronson said, breaking his silence. “I remember this crossing, hiking in.”

“The station?” Spiegel couldn’t imagine that they were anywhere near a railroad line. The woods were thick, with no signs of habitation. The earth was dark, the ground at a steep pitch. How could a track come through here? And why? He wondered, once again, if Aaronson was misleading him, or even if Aaronson was deluding himself.

“You’ll see,” Aaronson said, as he scrambled up the bank behind Spiegel, and they continued on their way.

Less than a mile along, Spiegel did see. The forest began to open up, and straight ahead he could make out through the gaps between the distant trees great stretches of blue sky, as if they had not hiked down into a valley but had somehow got their bearings wrong and climbed a summit. The woods ended abruptly at the head of a rock cliff, and the trail descended along a slice of ledge until it disappeared beyond an outcropping.

They had come to the brink of a chasm. The view was extraordinary. Ahead were the snowcapped mountains that rose to the Norwegian frontier. The valley floor far below them was blanketed with spruce, and a rising breeze lifted the scent of pitch to Spiegel as he stood on a small promontory jutting out above the precipice. Spiegel looked down, to see the red iron dust that Aaronson had described, but from above he could make out only a bluish green, as if the forest were reflecting the bright light of the clear sky and absorbing the summer air into its darker, more earthy hue. Ripping through the center of the wooded valley, like a long scar, was the seam that marked the clearing for the railroad track. “I see it,” Spiegel said, tracing the line of the track with his finger. “But which way’s it coming?”

“You see the train?” Aaronson said, with a touch of alarm. It occurred to Spiegel that Aaronson had no desire to sit on a rock, all by himself, waiting for the next northbound.

“No, just the track,” Spiegel said. “From here, it looks empty, but it’s hard to tell. There are spots where it’s overgrown. But I think when the train comes you’d see smoke or steam, through the trees.”

Aaronson said nothing. He set his pack down and untied the top flap. Spiegel continued to scrutinize the landscape.

“You’d probably hear it as well,” he said. “Any noise from the valley would rattle off these cliffs like a drumbeat on steel. We’re sort of at the lip of a bowl here, and I think—”

“Don’t make a sound,” Aaronson said. His voice was firm, cold, resolute. Spiegel felt something hard, like a metal rod, pressing into the back of his neck, right at the jugular. He picked up the faint scent of oil. He tried to twist around to get a look, but Aaronson grabbed his shoulder and pushed him down to the ground.

“Yes, it’s a gun,” Aaronson said. “Sit, here.”

Spiegel sat on the outcrop, his feet at the edge of the cliff.

“Closer,” Aaronson ordered, and Spiegel warily drew himself along the rock until his feet dangled over the drop. The barrel of the gun was pressed against the lobe of his ear.

“I’m sorry that it happened,” Spiegel said. His throat felt parched, and his lips cracked like cellophane. “But it’s over, between me and Tracy.”

“Oh, yeah. I know that it’s over,” Aaronson said. “Tracy made that clear before she sent me up here to find you.”

“And now that you’ve found me—”

“I’ve got some things to say to you.”

Aaronson pulled the gun away from Spiegel’s neck. Spiegel shuddered. He hunched his shoulders, a reflexive act of self-preservation, and anticipated the sound of a pistol shot. He braced himself against the forthcoming impact, the pain. But there was just a long stillness, and the soft sound of the wind touching the trees below.

“It’s still on you, so don’t try anything,” Aaronson said.

Spiegel nodded.

“You must have figured out that I didn’t leave Sweden to recruit deserters,” Aaronson began. “That wasn’t the plan. I needed your papers to make my escape.”

“Your escape?”

“My idea was to use your passport as my ticket home. I was going home as you.”

“Leaving me here—”

“You could have worked it out, proven your identity, applied for a temporary transit visa. By the time you returned to the States, I would be safe.”

“And Tracy?”

Aaronson didn’t answer. Spiegel understood that she must have been in on the scheme, too, all along.

“But of course I was being watched all the time. I knew that, once you told me about that thug from the church on the train from Paris. They were watching me the whole time I was gone, waiting to see what I would do, who I would contact. I disappointed them. I didn’t do anything. When it looked like I was heading back to Sweden, the border police had to grab me before I left Danish soil. They turned me over to army intelligence.”

“So they did arrest you,” Spiegel said.

“Yes. They took your passport from me. The border police put out an arrest warrant for you as well. At least that conveyed a message to Tracy that they had me in custody.”

After Aaronson had been held for several days, four guys barged into his cell in the middle of the night. Aaronson found himself hooded, shackled, shoved, and led blind into what he thought must have been some sort of military jeep. It smelled of gasoline and cigarettes. He shook with cold and fright as they drove out of the city. He soon realized that they had taken him to an airport. He heard the scream of planes overhead as he stood, frozen in place, on the tarmac. He thought they might have left him alone, to be crushed into the runway by the landing gear of an incoming flight. He considered breaking away, but he had no idea in which direction to run or how many people might be guarding him, might even be standing right beside him. The whirlwind of surrounding noise made it impossible for him to take his bearings. At last, too scared to stand still any longer, he started to move, and hands grabbed him. He was led toward the furnace roar of a jet engine. He tried to pull his hands free, to shield his face from the heat, his ears from the monstrous noise. He was guided up a ramp, and suddenly he heard a door slam shut.

Someone yanked the hood from his head. He was left shackled, however, chained to the armrest of his jump seat. He was in the vast hold of a cargo jet. Yellow bulbs overhead cast a dim, spooky light. He could see the ribs of the fuselage, the pocked metal skin of the old plane. Across from him, on canvas seats folded out from the wall, sat four soldiers. Small clouds obscured their faces. At first Aaronson thought that the men were smoking, but soon he realized that it was frost from their breath. There was no heat. Aaronson started to speak, to ask where they were heading, but one of the soldiers cut him off with a string of expletives. Another soldier, the officer in charge, Aaronson figured, ordered the hothead to give it a rest, and Aaronson understood that none of them was to speak for the duration of the flight. Each soldier carried a large pistol strapped to his chest, to make a point. They wore the crisp khakis and black boots of the military police.