Exiles (3 page)

Iris looked closely at Spiegel. Yes, anyone could mistake him for Aaronson. Perhaps, in the past, she had done so herself. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I can get you off.”

She did, and it was terribly embarrassing for the feds and the police. Once they realized that they had the wrong guy, they threatened to book Spiegel anyway, on the theory that, as an out-of-state student enrolled at the university, even if he hadn’t ripped up the draft board he was probably violating some sort of federal law: conspiracy? Unlawful assembly? Flight to avoid arrest? Who cares. But no, Spiegel was clean, anonymous, uninteresting— until, at Iris’s urging, he threatened to sue for false arrest, police brutality, violation of his rights to due process and protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the works. Then, he got really interesting, and the feds suggested that he had conked two of the city cops; they had it on video from one of the TV stations (how they had gotten the video without a subpoena would be a damn good question, Iris realized), and if Spiegel so much as filed a motion for discovery in regard to any civil suit, they warned, the criminal case against him might find its way directly to the next session of the federal grand jury.

Fuck them, Iris counseled. She was beginning to like Spiegel. True, he had no political history and he showed serious tendencies toward bourgeois individualism. She would have a lot of education to take on with this guy, a real project. But still—he was cute. And he was courageous. He’d fought those pigs, he held out, wouldn’t tell them a goddamn thing about who really hit up the draft board, what he knew about Aaronson’s whereabouts— which was, frankly, nothing, although the feds didn’t believe that—how he came to have in his possession numerous documents that advocated the overthrow of the United States government, anything. How had he gotten those leaflets?

“You gave them to me,” Spiegel told her. “Of course you don’t remember.” Now he understood that she had mistaken him for Aaronson when she left the stack of flyers on his library desk. He never told her why he had held onto them, that he had hoped the flyers would bring them together.

Iris took Spiegel on as her protégé, bringing him with her to meetings, introducing him to others in the movement. She had tons of work to do for Students and Workers United, especially with Aaronson and Tracy gone. Iris worried about them, but she had no way to reach them directly. She got an unsigned card from them occasionally and once a hurried, whispered phone call from Tracy that woke her toward dawn. They were in Montreal, where a separatist printer was going to run them fake passports, and a shadowy internationalist organization had fronted Aaronson the money for passage to Sweden. Canada was okay, apparently, for the garden-variety draft evader, but for more serious activists, resisters, deserters, felons on the run like Aaronson, it was dangerous ground. If found out, he could be held and deported. They had to travel farther, to get beyond the reach of America’s tiger claws. Iris wished Tracy good luck, and went back to sleep in tears.

She didn’t hear from Tracy and Aaronson again for weeks, when Iris got a three-page letter from Uppsala. In Sweden, they were out of danger, for Sweden, alone among the European nations, would not extradite political refugees, and was, as a result, a haven for leftists, rightists, nationalists, and extremists of every hue. But few Americans had settled in Uppsala. Uppsala was a university town, and for the deserters, most of them high-school dropouts whose reading consisted of car manuals, diner menus, and comic books, a university was more exotic and more frightening than an Asian jungle flushed with fire. Most of the deserters huddled in Stockholm, which afforded them a degree of anonymity and where hashish and other items of contraband were in ready supply in the dark alleys behind the railroad yards. But as the American community continued to grow, as more and more soldiers threw down their arms and went over the wall, the deserters found themselves the objects of scrutiny, wrath, and occasional harassment. Some right-wing politicians had begun to campaign against the American invasion, which they believed would strain the Swedish economy and corrupt the morals of the nation’s youth.

Because Stockholm had become so hot, a stewpot of anti-American rhetoric and of jingoistic backlash, the movement decided that the next wave of deserters should be settled in the outlying cities. Aaronson agreed to establish a new settlement in Uppsala. His job was to keep the chapter in the news so as to draw some of the heat, and some of the American population, away from Stockholm. What irony, he wrote to Iris. I have become like an army recruiting station, but in reverse. We end up by becoming that which we destroy. He wondered if, after all, he and Tracy might have been better off staying home and making a stand, enduring a huge political trial and, at the end, at worst, a stint in federal prison, where Aaronson could organize and Tracy could maybe write a book.

Iris wrote back, through a safe drop-box number in Paris where a French student leftist group picked up sensitive mail and distributed it by private courier throughout the Baltics, and she told them about Spiegel. They had never met him, but now they would understand: why the flyers Iris thought she had delivered to Aaronson never arrived, why so many people during Aaronson’s last days on campus had thought they had seen him in places he hadn’t been. Iris described how Spiegel had been arrested in Aaronson’s stead—they had heard something about that, but never understood how the cops could have made such a mistake—and how she had gotten him off, and gotten to know him, in fact to like him and to trust him, had brought him into Students and Workers United, introduced him to the leaders, to Brewer and the others.

She didn’t tell Tracy in her letter, but she and Spiegel were living together. They tried to keep their relationship in the shadows because the high priests of the movement preached that love was a bourgeois concept, a form of ownership, a relic of the colonial and imperialist ideology. Love, as Brewer had once argued during a self-study seminar, was the most powerful of the opiates, much more seductive than religion had been to Marx’s generation.

So no one in the movement actually dated. They danced, drank, smoked dope, sometimes went out to hear a band or to see a movie, but never as couples, always in a small group, three at the least, “two students and a worker,” someone once joked. When Iris learned about Tracy and Aaronson, not just that Tracy had followed Aaronson to Canada, but that she had moved in with him, fallen in love with him, linked her life and her fate to his, Iris was, she had to admit to herself, puzzled and hurt, as if she had been taken advantage of, as if there were a big party going on down the block and she had not been invited, or worse, had never even known of the goings-on until she came upon the soggy streamers and the flat balloons strewn about the yard and sidewalk the next morning.

Iris wondered, though, how much Brewer had heard about her and Spiegel when he made his suggestion that Spiegel be dispatched as a liaison to Sweden. It was during one of the weekly cell meetings, a dozen students crowded into Brewer’s tiny apartment: lights dim, shades drawn, radiators coughing steam and heating the room to a fizz. Since Aaronson’s departure, Brewer had assumed the leadership of Students and Workers United, and his goal, he said, in the aftermath of the great cafeteria-worker fiasco, was to build solidarity with the international brigades. He argued that Spiegel would be the perfect delegate to send abroad because he was new to the movement and unknown to the spooks and the feds. Besides, Brewer said, while the case against Spiegel was still hot, it would be better, safer, to clear Spiegel out of the country and let the city cops forget all about him, let the story of his arrest blur in memory, fade off the screen.

“What do you think about that?” someone asked Spiegel, and he said, truthfully, that he had received his political education from the blunt edge of the nightstick, that he understood from experience the oppressive power of the pig establishment, and that he would be willing to put his life on the line to advance the cause of liberation and worker solidarity. Brewer smiled, and everyone in the room stubbed out their cigarettes, whistled and cheered, all except Iris, who, as she locked eyes with Brewer, tried to sort through her mixed feelings of pride and sorrow, her willingness to sacrifice love on the altar of politics and her fear that she had been abandoned and betrayed.

Over the next weeks, it was arranged that the SWU would finance Spiegel’s journey, using money raised for the Aaronson defense fund. As a cover, Spiegel was enrolled through the little-known state university year abroad program (SUYAP) as an exchange student at Uppsala University. That way, he’d told Iris, he wouldn’t even lose credits during the spring semester. Yeah, Iris said, you can build a dictatorship of the proletariat and build up your résumé for law school, at the same time. That’s not what I meant, Spiegel said. All I meant is, when all this is over, I can come back here and be with you again. So Iris was sorry to have snapped at Spiegel, to have distrusted him. Perhaps he had, in part, taken on this mission to prove his loyalty and to test his valor, like a knight embarking on a quest. It would be hard to let him go.

“It’s a hell of a story,” Aaronson said to Spiegel, “all that happened to you—and all because you look like me, they say. But I’m glad it happened. If the cops hadn’t grabbed you when they did, they would have come looking for me, and for Tracy. Whether you know it or not, you gave us just the time we needed to get across the border and go underground.”

“Even though it probably turned out to be a pretty bad trip for you,” Tracy added.

“Yeah, at first. But some good things came out of it, too,” Spiegel said. “If the cops hadn’t busted me, I never would have met Iris.”

“We miss her,” Tracy said. “Tell us about her. Tell us everything you know about the States.”

They spent rest of the evening talking, drinking tea, and eating what Spiegel would describe as weird stuff from cans, pastes and jellies of various sorts spread onto crunchy rye crackers. Swedish sandwiches, Tracy said. When they finished eating, Tracy collected the cups and dishes and swirled them clean with a long brush she had hung from a hook by the stainless-steel sink. Spiegel felt physically tired but mentally alert, as if he had reached a plateau above the need for sleep. His ears were still ringing from the hours on the train, and he thought he would try to stay awake for a while longer to luxuriate in the silence of the night.

Aaronson snuffed out a smoldering cigarette in a glass tray. “We’ll move you into your own place tomorrow,” he said. “Give you a little while to settle in. In a week or so, I’ll have somebody contact you.”

“Whatever you want,” Spiegel said. “That’s why I came. I mean, I’m not here for the classes or anything. I could start working with you right away—”

“No,” Aaronson interrupted. “We’ll have to take it a step at a time. The best thing would be for you to separate from us, get going in your own life here and your own routines. Make it look as if you’re just a regular exchange student. Don’t make it so obvious that you came here for us.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to just sit around learning about cheese sandwiches. I want to do what I can to help end the war.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen overnight,” Aaronson said. “I’m telling you. First, get your feet on the ground. Sign up for classes. Get to know the lay of the land. The people here are really uptight, cautious, and they won’t take you into their confidence right away.”

“I’ve heard that about Swedes. It’s almost a cliché.”

“I’m not talking just about the Swedes, though. I mean the Americans, too. A lot of them have been burned by strangers. They’ve learned to trust nobody. Especially people who haven’t been tried by fire.”

“So what are you saying? That you’re planning to test me?”

“No,” Aaronson said. “We’re just going to give you a little time and space. We want you to learn the rules of the game before we put you on the field.”

“You okay with that, Lenny?” Tracy asked. “We thought you’d be better off living in your own place. This flat can get crowded, especially when people drop in on ARMS business.”

“On what business?” Spiegel asked.

“ARMS. That’s our group, American Resisters Movement— Sweden. We’ll hook you up with the organization, when the time comes,” Tracy said.

“Sure, okay,” Spiegel said. “But can’t I do something for you guys in the meantime? Run the mimeo or send out pledge cards? Organize a fast or a sit-in?”

“We’ve got stuff in mind for you,” Aaronson said. “But you have to do things on our terms. Nothing rash, nothing crazy. Our relation with the Uppsala city council is really tenuous, and we don’t want to do anything to jeopardize our residence status.”

So Spiegel let it rest.

“It’s late,” Tracy said, drying her hands with a terrycloth towel. “I’ll get the mattress.”

Because of the high ceilings, the apartment seemed to be large. But once you tried to find a place to lie down for a night’s sleep, it became obvious that the sense of space was an illusion. There would be plenty of room if you could sleep standing upright. Everywhere Spiegel looked he saw a corner, a doorway, a closet, or some other immobile obstruction that would prevent him from spreading out his gear on the floor.

“I can sleep on the couch,” Spiegel said. “It’s only for a night.”

“No, we can roll this out here,” Tracy said. She unfurled a thin cotton mattress, more like a coverlet, and she and Aaronson made up a small bed for Spiegel beneath the bay windows. Lying on his back he could watch the snow crystals drift past the street lamp and disappear into the black sky.

Tracy cleared a bookshelf so that Spiegel could have space to lay out a change of clothes. She watched as he unpacked.

“You didn’t bring a lot, for a six-month stay,” she said.

“I figure I can get the stuff I need here,” Spiegel said. “They have stores in Sweden, don’t they?”

“Sure,” Tracy said. “But everything’s so expensive. You’ll wish you’d brought more with you.”

“I couldn’t carry any more. But somehow, I ended up with this.” He handed her a pamphlet.