Exiles (10 page)

Tracy led Spiegel up the stairway and through the shop. A clerk was cashing out a register, and the workmen at the back were locking the repair desk behind a metal grate. It was dark outside, cold and still. The knife-edged wind had died. The pedestrian mall, lit by pools of amber light, was deserted. At the far end of the mall, a bus idled at an empty crosswalk.

“I think it’s very brave of you,” Tracy said, zipping tight her jacket.

“Why?” Spiegel said. “I basically don’t have to do anything but wait.”

“You could have said no. I thought maybe you would.”

Tracy was silent for a moment. Spiegel watched her breath cloud the air, as if her unspoken thoughts had been made palpable, like a series of scalloped balloons in a comic strip.

“I mean, if anything happens to him while he’s out of the country,” Tracy said, “you’re screwed, too.”

Spiegel helped Tracy brush the light dusting of snow off the flat windshield and side mirror. Ice had clotted the trigger-grip handles, and he had to squeeze hard to pop open the passenger door. Tracy tossed her stack of flyers onto the cluttered backseat.

“You’re right,” Spiegel said, as he sat down in the car. His knees bumped the dash, and his breath frosted against the window.

“You’re trying to keep clean, aren’t you?” Tracy said. She turned to him, and reached out her gloved hand. “That’s okay,” she said. “You probably want to be able to go back home. We should respect that. We shouldn’t fuck it up for you.”

“I’ll do what I have to do,” Spiegel said. “Right now, I’m in your hands. Until Aaronson comes back, I’m going nowhere. I’ll have no papers, my own or anybody else’s. In the eyes of the law, I won’t even exist.”

“I’m Nobody. Who are you?” Tracy said.

“Are you—Nobody—Too?” Spiegel answered.

Tracy smiled. “You know that poem. Great.” She turned the key. The engine cranked and sputtered and started up.

“Yeah, I was an English major, once upon a time,” Spiegel said. He tried to remember the rest of the poem. “Then there’s a pair of us?/Don’t tell!” That was as far as he could get. As they rode in silence toward the lights of Flogsta, Spiegel thought that maybe if he held still for long enough he could disappear, like his frozen exhalations, vanishing into the clear, dark air.

MARCH

5

The sink was filled
with snails soaking in water, and Jorge was involved with them up to his elbows. He swished them around in the grime, agitating the shells, cracking them against one another and against the stainless steel, and every couple of minutes he would pull up the drain and the sandy sludge would be sucked away with a huge slurp. Then he would refill the basin with a cascade of fresh, hot water that tumbled over the live snails and rattled them like chattering teeth. It was hard to talk above the noise.

“What makes you think she’ll eat these?” Spiegel shouted.

“Well, why not? They are a food of love,” said Jorge. He picked one up and held it in the light. “
Amore
,” he said, and gave the snail a kiss.

“I think she’s a vegetarian,” Spiegel said. “It’s part of being from California.”

“Well, we can think of these as vegetables, can’t we? They are more like a fruit than like an animal.”

“A fruit? I don’t think she’ll buy that.”

“I didn’t buy them.”

“Sorry?”

“I found them.”

“No.
Buy that.
It means, I don’t think she’ll believe you.”

“Okay.” With a gulp and a belch, the gray water swirled down the drain.

“What do you mean, you found them?” Spiegel asked.

“Have you ever seen these for sale, in the greengrocer’s?”

“The what? You sound like a Brontë novel.”

“What is the word, then? Where one goes food shopping?”

“Supermarket. I guess the Swedish markets sell snails. They have everything, as long as it comes in a tube. Minute steak. Fried eggs. Malted milk. Codfish roe.”

“But not snails. These I, how would you say it, gathered up?”

Jorge had put a big pot on to boil, adding oil and wine to the water. He had brought all the ingredients over to Spiegel’s kitchen, carrying the bottles of oil, the wine, the spices, and the two plastic tubs of live snails, in big string shopping bags slung over his shoulder.

“You foraged. It means gathered your own food. Not a very common word.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“And where does one forage for snails? In case I ever get a tremendous craving for snails in the middle of the night, when the kiosks are closed?”

“You wouldn’t forage for snails in the middle of the night.”

“Because they go to bed early?”

“No, because you find them in the graveyards. Is that the right word?”

“Oh my god.” Spiegel felt a rising in his throat. He swallowed to repress the sensation, but he knew that he was turning white, or maybe green. Jorge had chopped some herbs, and he was tying the bundle inside a square of cheesecloth. “Graveyards?” Spiegel said, choking on the word.

“There’s one down by the field at the end of the bus line.” Jorge secured the knot on the cheesecloth and dropped the bundled herbs into the stockpot. “I go there when it’s wet, and the snails climb out of the mud. They crawl on the gravestones. They must like the cold and damp. Maybe they munch on the minerals. Maybe the lime dissolves a little in the rain, and the snails like that. Maybe it helps them to build good, strong shells. I go with a little sack, and I pluck them off the graves. Sometimes, if I don’t find enough on the stones, I dig a little in the mud with a stick. That stirs them up. It stirs up little bugs, too, but those I wash away, down the sink.”

“Jorge, I think that’s absolutely disgusting. How do you know we can’t die from eating these?”

“Oh, at home I do it all the time.”

“But these are Swedish snails. Maybe they’re totally different, some deadly variety that just looks like Portuguese snails. This kind of thing happens all the time with mushrooms. Some poor guy goes into the woods and thinks he’s found some delicious fungus, and he goes home and fries it up and it turns out to be the deadly nightshade. Just a whiff from the frying pan and his nerves are paralyzed and he can’t breathe and he falls over dead.”

“Yes, I have heard of such things. But those are mushrooms.”

“Or blowfish. They have such lethal poisons that the chefs who prepare them have to be specially licensed by the Japanese government. A drop the size of a pinhead, if it gets onto a portion of fish that you’re eating, it’ll kill you. Your whole body goes numb, it’s kind of pleasant they say, for a moment, and then you’re totally paralyzed and then you die. It happens once in a while in restaurants, and it’s part of the beauty of eating the fish: pleasure on the edge of danger.”

“But those are eaten raw.”

“But these come from graveyards, Jorge! Who knows where these snails have been? They may have been burrowing in the earth and eating the flesh of dead bodies, dead bodies of people. Who could have died from anything! These slimy things might be pockets of disease, little capsules of death!”

Jorge gave the snails a final rinse under cold water. “No, that is not how we think of them at home,” he said. He sat down at the table with Spiegel and leaned forward so that he could speak quietly, almost in a whisper. “We think of them as wonderful food for lovemaking.”

“An aphrodisiac?”

“Is that the word? Like an Afro hairdo?”

“No, different spelling.”

“Okay. Snails give you great power, in love, you know. It is a secret of the French.”

“Oh, come on, that’s superstition, sympathetic magic, like the Chinese and powdered rhinoceros horn. It’s just that snails are soft creatures with hard shells, and their whole texture is sexual—slimy and sticky—and the way they withdraw their heads and then poke out their little horns, it’s kind of vaginal—”

“Or like a prick, peeking out from its hood—”

“But it doesn’t mean eating snails makes you more potent.”

“It’s not just for the man, though,” Jorge said. The broth had come to a boil, and it was steaming the kitchen with the fruity smell of white wine and olive oil. Jorge lifted the colander from the sink and carried the snails, dripping gray water onto the clean floor, over to the stove and dumped them into the boiling broth. As they hit the water, they made a slight hissing sound. Each snail curled, like a little black thumb, then slowly sank beneath the rolling surface to the depths of the roiling brew.

Melissa arrived late. She rushed home from voice auditions for the peasant chorus. She had hoped to get the lead in
Miss Julie
, but she couldn’t master the Swedish. Oddly, the Australian director knew no Swedish, either. He came to Uppsala with a reputation as a wild man. He had done the famous Melbourne No Exit
No Exit
, in which the emergency doors were actually barred from the outside after intermission and the audience was trapped in the theater for twenty minutes after the show. The police closed down the production after three nights, but a crew had filmed the panicked theatergoers smacking fists and purses against the glass doors inside the lobby, stomping on one another to get to the pay phones, and when the film was shown on TV, the director—Mick Ryder—became red-hot. He topped
NENE
with a nude
Godot
in Sydney that featured various lotions, lubricants, and live animals. The police closed that one down, too, and it made tabloid headlines—Good Riddance! and Come no More!—when Ryder left for a year’s residency in Sweden.

His
Julie
, to everyone’s surprise, and perhaps disappointment, was so far looking rather traditional, perhaps because of Ryder’s struggle with the language. He was trying to cast the show by referring to his English script while the actors read for the parts in Swedish, but he seemed, according to Melissa, “lost in translation.”

“I mean, he doesn’t even look at us while we’re onstage. His nose is in the book,” she said. “I could be giving the performance of my life, and he wouldn’t even know.”

“Give him credit. He’s trying to learn the language of the play,” Spiegel said.

“I think tomorrow I’ll do the peasant dance in the nude. I bet he notices that,” Melissa said.

“Oh, from what I hear he’s seen plenty of nudity. You’d probably make a bigger impression if you use some of your props.”

“Props?” Jorge said.

“Things onstage during a play. Books, lamps, furniture, table settings.” Melissa picked up some of the flatware. “Stuff like this.”

“Guns,” said Spiegel.

“There are no guns in
Miss Julie
. There’s a razor, and a pair of boots, the count’s boots, a very important prop. They sit onstage the whole time, and they symbolize the oppression felt by Jean, the valet.”

“So come onstage wearing boots,” said Spiegel. “A pair of big black American cowboy boots.”

“And nothing else,” said Jorge.

“He’d think I’m nuts.”

“But, it would be a statement,” said Spiegel. “A statement for women’s rights. For sisterhood.”

“Our bodies, ourselves,” Melissa said.

“Well, look, if you want to stay in the chorus your whole life—”

“My friends, we must not argue,” Jorge said. “This is a special night. I thank you for asking me over to your flat for dinner. And perhaps you can help prepare the dinner table by setting down the—props.”

“Oh, Jorge, this isn’t a play,” Melissa said, as she began to help him set the table. Tracy was expected after dinner, but Spiegel set a place for her, just in case. She had called Spiegel in the morning and said she was coming to Flogsta. Spiegel hadn’t seen her since Aaronson had left Uppsala, more than a week ago. It was obvious that she had been trying to keep her distance while Aaronson was gone. Maybe he’s come back, Spiegel figured, and she’s returning my passport.

The kitchen had become thick with the perfume of garlic and oil—just like home, Jorge said—and the Swedes who lived on the floor were gathering in the doorway, trying to make sense of this aromatic invasion. There were three of them—Lars, Brigit, and Sven—serious students who, Spiegel thought, had been through the wash cycle a few too many times. They were so fair-skinned and blond it looked as if the color had been rinsed out of them, along with most of the starch of personality.

“Have you guys eaten?” Spiegel called to them.

“Oh, yes,” Sven said.

“Join us, join us.”

“No, no.”

Spiegel knew that they had eaten their dinner, white on white, some sort of flaky cod with potatoes and bread, as soon as they had come home from classes, and then they retreated to their rooms to study for the rest of the night. No one he knew in America worked so hard. The Swedes he had met were so different from what he had imagined. Back home, Sweden had a reputation as a country of license and liberty. Spiegel could see that the image was false. Swedes were free—free from government oppression, free from the need to atone for the sins of one’s country—but they were not exactly liberated. They were shackled by an interior oppression, a product of their cultural and geographical isolation, and perhaps by a reaction formation, a self-imposed inhibition to compensate for the lack of legal restraints on their public and political behavior.

Spiegel thought that eating snails with garlic might do the Swedes some good.

But, having checked out the aromas, perhaps just making sure that the kitchen wasn’t on fire, they returned to their own rooms, vanishing silently, like smoke in a breeze.

“What’s for dinner?” Melissa asked.

“Jorge cooked up something really special.”

“Will you try this food?” he asked. “It is from my country.” He spooned a big helping onto her plate while Spiegel sliced up some sweet, yellow bread.

“Is this meat?” she asked. “I’m a vegetarian.”

“You will like this,” Jorge said. “It has shell.”

“Like clams?”

“This is great,” Spiegel said.

On the tongue, each morsel had a confusing resilience, as if it resisted giving up its flavor until fully masticated, at which point the flavor was released in a burst. The snails had absorbed the fruitiness of the wine, the grassiness of the herb bouquet, and a slight astringency from something more subtle—the garlic? a splash of vinegar?—that seemed to fill his whole palate with an explosion of sensation, complex yet harmonious. Yet beneath the exhilaration imparted by the garlic and the oils, he could detect—was it because he knew the source?—an undercurrent of earthiness, a darkness, a slightly burnt and muddy taste that made him think of death.

Melissa screwed up her face as she chewed. She had thought of herself as an adventuresome diner, but this was a long way from one of her curries. Bravely, she swallowed, then paused for a moment before speaking, to wait for her disordered senses to regain their equilibrium.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Mushrooms?”

“No, escargots,” said Spiegel.

“Snails. Oh, god,” she said. She felt pinpricks of sweat break out on her face and neck. “I can’t eat these.”

“A snail is not much different from a vegetable,” Jorge said.

“That’s not why,” said Melissa. “It’s just too gross. It’s like eating worms. Or rubber bands.”

“I like it,” Spiegel said. Just then, he heard someone at the doorway.

“Hey, like, what’s cooking? And I mean that literally.”

“Tracy!” She was carrying a big grocery bag, which she set down on the countertop.

“The elevator’s broken so I walked up, and the door was open. Man, you can smell this all the way out on the highway. You can probably smell it in Norway. What is it?”

“I have prepared a special meal, in the Portuguese style.”

“Tracy, this is my friend Jorge, and this is our friend Melissa.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve seen you guys around town,” Tracy said. “There aren’t that many of us, you know.”

“You’re from California, too?”

“No, I meant foreigners. Outsiders.”

“Do you really feel that?” Melissa asked. “Sometimes I think everyone here’s an outsider. That’s the beauty of a university town. Everyone’s here kind of like on a visa. And they’ll all be going home someday.”

“We won’t,” said Jorge.

“That’s true, but you won’t stay
here
, will you? You’ll probably settle somewhere else in Sweden. Everyone leaves Uppsala, eventually.”

“You’re saying Uppsala is a city whose whole purpose is to get people to want to leave it,” Tracy said.

“Yeah,” said Melissa. “Like a family.”