Exiles (4 page)

“That’s from the Universal Peace Church, isn’t it?” Aaronson said. “Let me see it.”

“Did you think it was antiwar?” Tracy asked Spiegel.

“No, it’s just—I’ve got to tell you. I had a strange encounter.”

“Those guys are strange,” Aaronson said. “They seem to live in the airports and train stations. I think they’re spreading all over Europe, like a virus or a rash.”

“Yeah, their church is based in Denmark,” Tracy said. “Isn’t that right?”

Aaronson nodded.

“A bunch of them got on the train with me, in Paris,” Spiegel said. “They wandered up and down the aisles all afternoon. In the evening, one of them came into the compartment where I’d been riding.”

“I would have moved out. I’d rather sleep sitting up in the café car.”

“I was hoping he didn’t speak English, but, my luck, he was an American, a big guy, with eyes the color of steel and a jagged scar sliced across his jaw. He was the kind of guy you used to try to get away from in gym class. He’d slam the basketball into your face, just for the hell of it.”

“I don’t know. Girls’ gym was different.”

“So this guy sits across from me and stares at me. It’s a little creepy; it’s going to be a long journey.”

“You should have split.”

“I tried to ignore him. But he leans forward, fixes me in his madman gaze, tells me that the church has changed his life and that it will change mine. Then he shows me this pamphlet. He says the book gives him strength and power, the power to bend my will to his command. He says there is nothing I can do to escape from his control, that he is going to bring me with him to the elders of his church and I will submit to their authority. That’s where I should have told him to knock it off, I’m not interested.”

“But instead . . .”

“I let him go on. He said the only way I could free myself would be to buy the book from him. Then, I would have the power at my own command.”

“So the whole thing is like a big sales pitch,” Tracy said.

“Sort of. We sat there, in a showdown. I told him that if he was so powerful, let’s see if he can make me buy the book. He couldn’t think of anything to say or do. Nothing had prepared him for this. He just sat there grinding his molars. Finally, he says, ‘I’ll do anything to make you read this book.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just give it to me.’ At that point, like he’s acting on cue, he leans toward me, puts his face right in front of mine, and says, ‘I’m taking you to our church.’ And I say, ‘You are?’ He nods. So I say, ‘I’m taking your book and throwing it out that fucking window.’ I reach and grab for the book—of course, the window’s closed—when he jumps on me and tries to pin my arm back. I hit him as hard as I can across the chest, and then another shot, to the side of the head. The book goes flying, and we both tumble to the floor. I’m trying to get some leverage so I can pin him, working my knee into his chest, but it’s a tight space between the seats. And the next thing I know, someone’s pulling me up, by the armpits.

“
Was gehen sie hier?
someone’s saying, or something like that. It’s the conductor, big German guy, in a uniform. He has a dark walrus mustache and a huge beer gut. He doesn’t speak a bit of English, which seems odd in his profession. Two other guys from the church come in and try to calm everyone down, telling the conductor,
der est nicht, nicht
—nothing, nothing, I guess.
Nein, nein
the conductor’s saying, and he wants to see everyone’s passport.”

“You know, you probably should have flown right to Stockholm,” Tracy said. “At least they couldn’t throw you off a plane.”

“Well, no one threw us off, but we did show the guy our passports. Then he took the believers out, to another car I guess. I never saw them again.”

“So how’d you get the book?”

“It’s weird. I woke up in the morning, just before the train got to the ferry, and the book—it was in my pack. Maybe my pal slipped it there, or one of his partners did, on the way out. Like the tooth fairy.”

“So now you’ve got the power,” Aaronson said.

“Well, only if he reads the book,” Tracy said. “And masters its teachings.”

“And that’s the funny thing,” Spiegel said. “After all that, he must have slipped me the wrong book. Except for the cover, this one’s all in Danish, or Swedish. Can you tell?”

Tracy opened the pamphlet, and leafed through the pages, cheap ink poorly printed on coarse paper. “Danish, Swedish, gibberish—who cares. Let me know when you’re planning to convert, and I’ll get someone to translate this.”

“Sure,” Spiegel said. “I’ll call you up on Thursday night.”

They all laughed.

“Well, what did you think about his story?” Aaronson asked Tracy as she stepped through the beaded curtain that separated their bedroom from the living room. Tracy sat on the bed, folding her legs beneath her, Indian-style. She ran a comb through her thick hair.

“I think he’s lucky that he got here,” she said. “He’s lucky they didn’t arrest him and fuck up the whole thing.”

“I mean,” Aaronson said in a whisper, “do you think he was followed?”

“Yes, I do,” Tracy said. “Someone spotted him in Paris. Someone must have been watching, at the Gare du Nord. They were watching for you, and they wanted to provoke you and take you into custody. The conductor was probably in on it, too. But when he saw Lenny’s passport, he let the matter drop.”

“And do you think . . . ”

“Of course. They thought Lenny was you.”

“Well, that’s all right, then,” Aaronson said. “Let’s not forget why we brought him here.”

“For his good looks, right?”

Aaronson moved closer to Tracy. She set her hand on his thigh. He was smoking a thin joint. As he held in the smoke, he offered the joint to Tracy. She shook her head no.

“What we have to do,” Aaronson said softly, “is watch him for a few days before we fill him in on our plans.”

“He must have some idea. Iris must have talked to him,” Tracy said.

“Maybe. But it makes me nervous, how he managed to get into a scrape before he even got to Uppsala. We need someone who can stay out of trouble. I want to make sure that he’s clean, and that I can trust him.”

“Trust him,” Tracy said. “With what?”

Aaronson laughed. “With you.”

“Sure,” Tracy said. “We’ll see,” and she moved closer to Aaronson and let her breasts dangle in the chilly air, her nipples brushing against his cheeks, his lips, until at last he opened his mouth, and, as a cloud of sweet smoke rose slowly toward the ceiling, he pressed his tongue against her cool flesh.

Spiegel lay on his mattress for a long time, trying to fall asleep, trying to blot from his mind the thin squeaks of pleasure he could hear from the adjacent room. From time to time he would get up and look out the window at the quiet street. Large flakes of snow were falling, and some landed on the window ledge.

He wondered if he had been a fool. He should have thrown the pamphlet away before arriving in Uppsala, or he could have said he had picked up the book in the station, and let it go at that. He had begun to realize, though, as he told the story and as he watched Tracy and Aaronson, their expressions so rapt and intense, interested beyond the normal degree of polite attention, that his encounter on the train was more than happenstance, that the actions of the proselytes of the church held some significance that Tracy and Aaronson had decided, for the moment, to keep to themselves. Perhaps the encounter had been a test. If so, had he passed?

2

As a child growing
up in the suburbs of Washington, Spiegel felt as if he had been groomed, bred, perhaps destined someday to take his place among the gray-suited, fedora-topped herds of men who migrated each morning into the city and returned home in the evenings, haggard and weary, their briefcases bulging with typescripts and carbons, the
Post
or the
Star
folded neatly and wedged under the arm. His father was one of these men: vanished before daybreak, a stern and silent presence at home, whose weekend pleasures consisted of guiding the power mower in geometric patterns through the patch of yard and then implanting himself, recumbent, before the flickering light of the television. When he was young, Spiegel knew nothing about his father’s work except that he worked for “the government.” As he got older, he learned a little more, but not much. He learned to say, when pressed for specifics, that his father was in the “foreign service,” and after he had learned that his father was an expert on languages and codes he would say, dismissively, a sort of in-joke among his jaded friends whose fathers were judges, undersecretaries, and senior staff aides, that his father was a “crypto-bureaucrat.” At that time he knew only that his father wrote papers and reports that required at first a great deal of research and time away from home at nights and on weekends and, later, when Spiegel was in high school, an ever-increasing amount of travel overseas. Spiegel, immersed in the pressures and passions of his own life, thought little about his father’s absences and his mother’s consequent long engagements with bridge, tennis, cigarettes, gin, and dinners at the club. Her marriage, her life, was coming apart, and Spiegel’s mind was thankfully— or perhaps necessarily—elsewhere.

He went off to college set on learning the rudiments of knowledge and behavior that would earn him a station at the entryway to his father’s world. Barely a month into his freshman year, that world changed forever when his father announced, in a telegram, one of his favorite modes of communication, that Spiegel’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer, whose symptoms of pallor and emaciation she had evidently masked, or concealed even from herself, so successfully that, without medical detection, the disease had more or less consumed her unhindered and at leisure while she had fixed a lipstick smile on her pain-wracked face and dealt innumerable hands of cards. Spiegel went home anticipating a tearful, reconciliatory visit, but his mother, numbed beneath sedatives and enmeshed in the strands of clear plastic tubing that dripped the final spirits of life into her veins, had drifted out to the sea beyond the horizon of the conscious world. Shortly after she died, Spiegel’s father put in for a transfer to the directorate of operations, and while Spiegel was studying for final exams his father sold the house in Silver Spring and disembarked for a post in Africa. Spiegel took refuge in his work, determined to focus on his studies and, through excellence and achievement, to fill the void left by his mother’s death and his father’s absence.

And then—the sixties hit Spiegel like a wave and knocked him over. Anything that came along, he inhaled, ingested, and, at last, injected. And that’s as far as Spiegel got. A dizzying acid trip, which left him lying naked in January on a cot in the unheated attic of a downtown crash pad, pulling his hair out by the roots and sobbing, afraid of death and afraid to go on living, shook him so deeply that he left school in the middle of the semester, with all the belongings he would need stuffed into paper bags piled onto the seat beside him on the Greyhound. By that time, he knew almost no one in the college, anyway. One after another, his friends had dropped out and disappeared into the warrens of lower Manhattan, the remote hilltop villages of the Adirondacks, or the sun-bleached cities of the Far West. He set out to join some of them in a commune on an abandoned Ohio beet farm, where the barn had been converted into a Shinto temple.

He thought it would be the perfect place to strain the acid out of his skin, his veins. The life was quiet, regimented, pacific. Everyone shared in the cooking, cleaning, farming, and decision-making. Each evening, they gathered for a community meeting, at which they would discuss such issues as whether to replace the oil furnace, when to plant the rye, whether it would be morally correct to raise worms for bait. Spiegel hated every minute of this life. He was not designed to till the soil. At the end of each day, his back was killing him and his mind was numbed. If man must live by the sweat of his brow, what is man to do with his eyeglasses? Spiegel wondered. His were so covered with salt streaks by late afternoon that he couldn’t see to plant straight, and he was quite as likely to chop up a potato patch or a corn row as to hoe out any weeds. Besides, his draft situation was a bit tenuous, and “agrarian worker” was not an acceptable deferment. So one morning in August he turned in his bandanna, said his last devotions to the Buddha, stuffed what he could seem to recall as his former belongings into some bags that had been set aside for recycling, and headed east along the lakeshore to the university, with every intention of staying clean, making good.

But meeting Iris had changed everything. She enlisted him in her own troops, fighting the war against the war, and for this Spiegel was entirely unprepared. Although the first tidal wave of the sixties, the acid revolution, had knocked him off his feet and sent him into retreat on the Shinto farm, he had till then successfully sheltered himself from the buffeting winds of the next great storm. The fury that hit the American campuses as Johnson and McNamara built the war machine into an unimaginable monstrosity, the firestorm after the police clubbed their way through the peaceful protesters in Chicago, he had missed all of this, digging in the cornfields. He was astonished by the fervor, and even the sophistication, of the organized student left—if
organized
was the word, for at times it seemed a most disorganized, anarchic gathering of tribes, a giant beehive full of buzzing, in which everyone zipped back and forth, this way and that, from meeting to seminar to self-study to rally to picket to who knows what, never stopping for a moment, never listening or absorbing or learning, for who had time for reflection with war in the air?

Once Spiegel moved in with Iris, he found himself caught up in the same vortex. He felt as if he had been lifted from the earth, like a leaf in a storm, and he didn’t mind, so long as he could be near Iris. In the mornings, she took him along with her to the factory gates where she sold copies of the
Workers World,
then to the Students United steering committee where he would listen as the brain trust of the movement planned tactics and strategy, and later to one of the dingy bars near the Black Rock Canal where they would talk, late into the night, always with a group, mostly students and a ragged few recruited from the nearby battery factory, the token worker who had little to say while he sucked on a longneck but whose occasional pronouncements about how the work at Trico was just fucking boring were met with such awe and astonishment that you would think you had heard an oracular utterance direct from the fount of Marx or Marcuse. Finally, they would go back to Iris’s apartment, where at last Spiegel could be alone with her, touching her and tasting her and breathing in her smoky scent, and all of the indoctrination, all of his nascent interest in the culture of the proletariat, was blown away like dust in the wind.

When Brewer proposed that Spiegel be dispatched as the Students United official emissary to Sweden, Spiegel was, at first, angry and a little bit hurt. He wished that Iris had protested, said she wanted him to stay. Instead, she agreed with Brewer that it would be prudent to move Spiegel out of the vicinity until the tempest over the mistaken arrest had been forgotten. And Spiegel sensed that Iris had other reasons as well. Apparently, he had to prove himself in some way, maybe not to her, but to Brewer and the others, who distrusted him for having been off digging earthworms while the student vanguard was fighting on the ramparts, breaking storefront windows on Main Street, and tossing hissing tear-gas canisters back at the plastic-visored police. Spiegel’s movement credentials were dubious. He was considered a hero for his role in the botched arrest. He had become known as the one who took the heat and allowed Aaronson enough time to cross the border. But he was an inadvertent hero at best, the beneficiary of misfortune, like a hapless war veteran who has earned his decorations through the bad luck of having been shot. Fate had come knocking at Spiegel’s door, in the guise of a riot cop without a warrant, and he’d happened to be standing in the line of fire.

His trip to Sweden was, he now realized, Iris’s attempt to close the circle of fate, by presenting him to Tracy and Aaronson. They would see him and they would understand all that had taken place back in the States while they had made their surreptitious way across the border. But what was expected of him in Sweden? Tracy had evidently told Iris that there was vital work to be done and that the community of deserters needed the help of an American who was able to travel. Spiegel was willing, but so far he had been kept in the dark. He was beginning to wonder if it would have been better to stay with Iris and prove himself to her in some other way. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come to Uppsala.

He began to wonder if he was really needed. Tracy and Aaronson, though friendly enough, had been rather circuitous and evasive when he tried to find out what it was that they wanted of him. He did like them both, though, right away. Spiegel had expected, after all he had heard about him, that he would be intimidated by Aaronson. Back home, Aaronson was spoken of as if he were some mythic figure, a courageous revolutionary who had struck a blow at the war machine and then been chased by the furies into exile. Spiegel had pictured Aaronson off in the Arctic, like Thor returned to Valhalla, a hero bitter in defeat, tending some eternal flame of revenge. But Aaronson had turned out to be much more self-effacing and approachable than Spiegel expected. Aaronson scoffed at the idea that he had been a hero and was an inspiration, and he spent much of the evening talking about all the things that he missed from America—the all-rock radio stations, the movie theaters with stale popcorn and sticky puddles of soda on the floor, the greasy cafeteria fries and thick white mugs of bitter coffee, the fumes of the big cars and of American cigarettes, the boisterous camaraderie on the quad between classes and in the student union at noon and around the basketball court on a Saturday morning—rather than about the wayward course that had brought him to Uppsala and the political realities and ideological commitments that kept him there, a prisoner of history, a victim not so much of his beliefs as of his impulses and his passions.

The next morning, Aaronson slept late while Tracy left early to pick up some flyers from a print shop. Spiegel wondered why she hadn’t woken him or stayed a little later and offered him a ride. Though Tracy had been helpful, even solicitous, when she met him at the station, Spiegel was beginning to suspect that she had not been altogether straightforward with him, either. Clearly, she wanted him out of the apartment as soon as possible, and she didn’t want to be seen driving him through the city. Was he being watched by someone? Or was she? Spiegel had no idea.

It was only a short walk to the bus terminal. Spiegel found that the air, stinging with cold, sharpened his mind. He walked down an alley where the snow had been cleared, exposing an uneven cobblestone footing treacherous with hard black ice. The alley opened onto a small park where a narrow pathway had been cut through fresh snow that looked like grains of sugar but that had frozen as hard as rock. Crossing the park, Spiegel could pick up the scent of balsam mixed with the oily fumes of burning diesel rising from the buses idling at the terminal. Vaporous clouds spilled from the buses and hovered on the walkways like ground fog, filling the little square with thick spoors of white smoke. The small gabled shop buildings with their shutters fastened against the cold, the filigreed lampposts, the scrawny urban pines rimed with ice, all were shrouded and obscured, as if the whole square had been packed in cotton wool, like a delicate gift. Spiegel stood for a moment in the hazy, refractive light before extracting the correct change and boarding the bus that would take him out to Flogsta.

As the Flogsta bus meandered along the river, then climbed the gentle hill beside the Gothic towers of the university and out past the last brick rows of a public-housing project—bland and ugly as any of its American counterparts but without the apparent threat of a dangerous undertow of crime and violence—Spiegel got a sense of the true dimensions of Uppsala. It was a tiny city surrounded by fields and farmland, an oasis of learning set in a desert of snow-covered plains. The city gave way at its perimeter not to suburban development or industrial strip but to a great nothingness, a virgin wasteland that seemed vast and almost featureless. Spiegel had been familiar with the open spaces of the Midwest, but something about the fields around Uppsala disturbed him in a way he had never known back in Ohio. There was something nightmarish about the subtle undulations of white ground, ruptured by a few knobs and hills that broke through the snowy monotony with clusters of scrub pine and clearings of mud.

The bus route ended at the foot of a narrow path scraped clear of snow. A few young people, university students apparently, book bags and satchels slung over their shoulders, waited to board the bus, which would complete its turnaround and take them back toward town, toward the school. Spiegel was the last outbound passenger. He dragged his duffel down the steps, hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder, and set off on the pathway up the hill to the Flogsta complex.

Tracy had told him a little about Flogsta. It was, someday, to become the center of a small satellite campus. So far, though, it was just a cluster of buildings amid the rock and rubble of a construction site. Few Uppsala students had chosen to live here. It was too remote, too far from the campus and the shops and social haunts of the town, so only the late registrants and the exchange students found themselves assigned housing up on the hill. Spiegel didn’t mind. He was glad that the university exchange program had reserved a room for him. He would arrange payment terms once he was enrolled in school. Maybe, he figured, he could draw that process out as long as possible and squeeze in a few weeks rent free, before anyone knew he had arrived.