Exiles (5 page)

The Flogsta dorms were an architectural desecration, six towers rising from a barren patch of land that had been roughly cleared of brush at the top of the windswept hill. The hilltop offered a vista of the surrounding woods and fields, but the effect was diminished by the oppressive closeness of the buildings. Spiegel felt both claustrophobic and isolated, as if the world were crowding in on him, yet he was all alone. Perhaps it was all the traveling he’d done and the disorientation caused by the many time changes, but for a moment he felt as if the whole journey had been a mistake, an act of self-aggrandizement. Maybe it’s the latitude, Spiegel thought. Can that have the same effect as altitude on the mind?

He had been assigned to building five. None of the buildings had names, although someday, no doubt, each would bear the moniker of a famous Swedish botanist or the like. Building five was still under construction. The small lobby was being used as a storage shed for tools and ladders. The work crews had left buckets and trowels in a corner by the stairway. There was no functioning elevator. Spiegel climbed to his suite on the third floor.

As it had been explained to him, each student had a bedroom and private bathroom, and each hallway shared a small communal kitchen. The arrangement promised the advantages of both the privacy of an apartment and the sociability of an American-style student dorm. He liked the prospect of meeting Swedish students, although he didn’t imagine that he would become terribly involved in the life of the university: cheering the bobsled team, getting drunk on reindeer punch, whatever Swedish students did. No, he knew he had to concentrate on his work, and he had to find out, as soon as possible, what his work was meant to be.

The room he had been assigned was better than he had hoped. At least the interior had been completed, even if the exterior of the building was decked in construction scaffolding. The room was fitted with a good desk, a comfortable platform bed, built-in shelves, and a solid chair made from attractive white birch. The bathroom, tiny and clean, had an ingenious shower arrangement. The floor was sloped toward a drain and, by drawing a curtain along a small ceiling track, you could transform a corner of the bathroom into a shower stall. The whole place seemed designed with great intelligence and efficiency. It will be like living inside of a machine, Spiegel thought, with some relief. For, after his arrival at Flogsta, in which he was impressed by the general state of disarray, it was nice to see that his own small place was well-suited to his needs. He resolved to figure out, in the afternoon, exactly what he would have to buy to furnish the room—a clock? a desk lamp? a wastebasket?—and to catch the bus back to town to shop.

He had brought no cooking supplies or equipment. Before leaving the States, he had thought that he would eat out most of the time. He barely knew anything about cooking. But Tracy had mentioned how expensive it was to eat out in Sweden. Restaurants were heavily taxed, and even the students, denizens of bars and coffee shops back home, rarely went out except for a draft beer in a student pub. From his window, Spiegel could see one of those little kiosks he had noticed in town. Apparently, in accordance with some Swedish law, the kiosks sold only food in cans and tubes. (Grilled hot dogs counted as a tube.) Other than that, there were no restaurants anywhere near the Flogsta complex. He hadn’t anticipated living in such isolation. He walked down the hallway to check out the kitchen.

Like the bedroom, it was clean, compact, and well designed, much nicer than anything he had known in any student housing in America. There was plenty of counter space, good wide steel sinks with strong water pressure, two four-burner electric stoves, a spacious refrigerator built into a recessed wall. The cabinets were an attractive wood laminate. Spiegel reached to open one of them. He was hungry and hoped that perhaps the communal living extended to cereal packs, as well. Four of the cabinets were locked. One was bare; his, he assumed. Maybe, he figured, he could raid the refrigerator and replace what he took later, after he’d had a chance to shop.

Scanning the refrigerator, however, was like trying to read a book written in an unknown language. The contents were, recognizably, food, just as a foreign language is made up of what are recognizable as words, but what did the words mean? He saw many jars with what seemed to be pastes and crushed berries and creams, some carafes of pale liquids that reminded him of vitamin elixirs, a few slabs of cheese sliced into unrecognizable dimensions, and more of the ubiquitous tubes, many of which bore pictures of smiling, bright-blond children. Were these tubes of toothpaste? Spiegel took one, and squeezed a dab onto his fingertip. Out came a dollop of reddish-orange gel. Maybe hair cream? But why would it be kept in a refrigerator? He lifted his finger to his nose, and caught a whiff of fish, just as he was startled by the noise of someone entering the room.

“
Hej
,” a voice behind him said.

Spiegel quickly lapped up the gel. He almost gagged from the intense, salty taste. What had he eaten? Some horrible cooking infusion meant to be used in microdot proportions? He turned quickly, embarrassed, trying to hide both his guilt and his revulsion.

“Hey,” he said. Standing before him was a willowy girl wearing tan chinos and a skintight olive T-shirt. Her straight blond hair, parted perfectly, hung to her shoulders, and framed her lovely face, her clear and perfect skin, her delicate cheekbones.

“I’m sorry. I don’t speak Swedish,” Spiegel said.

“That’s cool. I’m American, too.”

“American? You’re kidding.”

“What’s that there?”

He was still holding the tube in his hand. He quickly twisted the cap shut. “I don’t have a clue,” Spiegel said, truthfully.

“I wouldn’t touch their food.”

“Socialism doesn’t apply to refrigerator shelves, then?” Spiegel said.

“No, not that. I mean, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Unless you like crushed fish-egg paste.”

“I could develop a taste for it. If I were stranded on an ice floe.”

“I’m Melissa,” she said. She held her hand out to Spiegel.

“Lenny Spiegel. I guess we’re neighbors.”

“Are you from California, too?”

“No, I mean I’ve got a room on this floor.”

“Yeah, I heard another American was joining us.”

“There’s others?”

Melissa put on water for a pot of coffee. “UCLA has an exchange program,” she explained. “Although I guess it’s not really an exchange because we don’t get anything back. We just send our students to Uppsala. I’ll get a year’s credits and, how do they put it in the brochure? The life experience of living abroad. What about you?”

“Well, I’m from the East,” Spiegel said.

“I could tell that,” Melissa said.

“How could you?”

“I mean, your clothes, all that flannel and khaki. And your hair. And even the way you talk. At first, I thought maybe you were one of the soldiers.”

“You mean the deserters? Why would you think that?”

“There are more moving to Uppsala all the time. Some want to enroll in the college, but I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?” Spiegel asked.

“It’s hard for them. They don’t seem to fit in. You’ll see. This place is very closed-minded.”

Melissa had been living in Flogsta for a few weeks. She was one of the pioneers of the complex, an early settler. She had arrived even before the kitchen was completed, and during her first few days in Sweden she’d had to subsist on cold cereal and sandwiches. She had enrolled right away in the language course and was already picking up the rudiments. But it was hard to learn the language, she said, because everyone, once they learned she was American, wanted to speak to her in English.

“We’d be better off, you know, in France,” she said. “I had a girlfriend there, on an exchange program in Dijon. She said that everyone there hates English, so you learn to speak French really quick.”

“Why don’t you just pretend to be Swedish, but kind of shy, or dumb?”

“People do think I’m Swedish, at first,” Melissa said. “Actually, I’m Irish. But there was some kind of Viking invasion back there in history, you know? What about you?”

“Yeah, I thought you were Swedish.”

“No, I mean, what are you?”

“I’m Jewish. I don’t think the Vikings invaded the shtetls.”

“So I guess you’re not here to find your roots or anything. Most of the California kids, that’s why they come. That, or they’re nuts about Bergman films. They expect to meet death on a beach and play chess or something. But there are no beaches here, not like we have back home.”

“And no death, either?”

“No, there’s probably that,” Melissa said.

“But that’s not why you’re here,” Spiegel said.

Melissa laughed. “To play chess with death?”

“To find your roots.”

“No, I’m doing theater.”

“All the way to Sweden for that?” Spiegel said. “I’d have thought UCLA was the place.”

“I’m not into Hollywood shit,” Melissa said.

Suddenly, Spiegel felt better about her. Maybe she wasn’t as simple as she had appeared, or pretended, to be.

“What about you,” she said. “Why’d you come all this way? You trying to get out of the war?”

“No. My draft number’s good. I’ll probably never be called.”

“So why Sweden?”

“You know, the life experience of living abroad.”

“But the only people you’ve met here, so far, are your fellow Americans.”

“Well, yes. How did you know?”

“This is Flogsta. Port of last resort. It’s all foreigners.”

“There’s Swedes on this floor,” Spiegel said. “I can smell their fish eggs.”

“But the Swedes—they keep to themselves. And they don’t even say that much to each other. They’re not like American students. They take one course a term, and they really have to focus on that subject. So all I’m doing this term is acting. What’s yours going to be?”

“I thought I’d do the language class.”

“
Svenska for invandrare
. Do you know what it means?”

“Swedish for invaders?”

Melissa laughed. “Close. Swedish for immigrants. But that class is run by the government. You’ll have to register for university classes, too.”

“I haven’t done that yet.”

“Your exchange program probably registered for you.”

“No, it’s a really new program, and they set it up in a half-assed way,” Spiegel said. “The adviser’s back in Albany. He’s supposed to come here in the spring to check on things, but I think it’s just a huge scam so he can travel.”

“I’ve got to run to rehearsal,” Melissa said, finishing her coffee. “But I can give you the name of the guy who runs the California program. Maybe he can get you registered.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“Come on, I’ve got his name in a notebook in my room.”

She gave the coffee cup a quick swirl and dumped it into the sudsy sink. Spiegel followed her down the hall. She walked fast, and looked great from behind. She’s used to this, Spiegel thought. She’s used to being admired and obeyed, and she expects no less. Watch out, he told himself. She hasn’t come all the way to Uppsala to wrap her long legs around the likes of Lenny Spiegel.

Melissa’s room was decorated like a spread from a special psychedelia issue of
House Beautiful
: framed Escher prints and Peter Max posters, Asian wall hangings, plush chairs upholstered in black-and-white op-art patterns, and a bright orange rya rug with shag thick as ropes.

“Does the Museum of Modern Art know you took all this stuff?” Spiegel said, as he examined a double-exposed photograph of a Botticelli Venus emerging from a Venus flytrap.
Which
One Am I?
the legend beneath it read.

“I shipped a lot of stuff ahead,” Melissa said. “I like to have a nice environment around me when I work.”

“You’re a collector.”

“Of photos? My dad is. He gets a lot of stuff from, you know, his clients.” She was fumbling with the lock on a steel filing cabinet.

“He’s a lawyer?”

“No, a philosophy professor.”

“Your dad?”

“The adviser. From the California program. Here it is. I wrote his number on my script.” She pulled a folder from the cabinet, and a tore off a scrap of paper with a phone number. “My dad’s an agent, sort of a talent agent I guess you’d say.”

“Movies?”

“Clubs, more. He had a club in New York. That’s where I was born. But something went wrong, he’s never exactly told us, and he lost it. One day, I was, like, in seventh grade, and I came home from school—I was staying late for cheerleading, if you can believe that—and when I got home my mom was packing. She said we were leaving that night. My dad drove us to Newark, the airport, and my mom and me flew to LA and stayed for a week in this little motel on the strip. I loved it. We had a pool. My dad came and joined us. He drove out, in this little Studebaker he had. I didn’t go back to school until the fall.”

“It was probably Mafia,” Spiegel said. “They wanted a cut. He must have clipped them or didn’t pay for protection or something.”

“It could be, but it worked out okay. We liked LA right away. My dad knew some people there, he had contacts, and he got into booking, you know, small acts at first, nothing you would have heard of, back then. But eventually he got some bigger names, like I think he helped Nat Cole when he came out west, or maybe it was Johnny Mathis? We always had interesting people coming by our place.”

“The motel?”

“No. By then, Bel Air. That’s where we live.”

“I don’t know LA,” Spiegel said, “but your dad must have done all right.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want that kind of life. I want to do something creative. I don’t care about money.”

Sure, to hell with it, Spiegel thought. You don’t have to think about money because you’ve got all you need. He looked out the window. The day was bright and clear, but Melissa’s room was cast into shadow by two Flogsta towers, flat and dull, like huge credit cards jammed into the earth. A margin of white light separated the towers, a thin slat through which Spiegel could discern in the distance a narrow vista of fields and snow.

“And what about this stuff,” he said, tapping the cover of a glass display case resting on brackets at the head of Melissa’s bed. Inside the case were slender whips, a long-bladed knife with a handle of dark bone, and a small silver pistol.