Exiles (6 page)

“I need those,” Melissa said.

“Your dad must have some far-out clients.”

“No, those are mine. They’re for classes.”

“I thought you were taking acting, not S and M.”

“I am.” She stood her ground, folded her arms across her chest, as if to tell him: Don’t push too hard.

“You are what? Taking S and M?”

“Acting.”

“Someone wants to cast you in a nice Swedish movie, I bet. Look, Melissa, I don’t really know you, but—be careful. Not every Swede behind a camera is Ingmar Bergman.”

“These are for acting classes. Props.” She went to the display case and picked up one of the whips. “This is a riding whip,” Melissa said. “Didn’t you ever read
Miss Julie
?”

“No, I’m pre-law.”

“It’s Naturalism, and all that. It begins with a cook onstage, alone, for about five minutes, frying up some kidneys in a real kitchen. So it feels like you’re really in a country kitchen on a Swedish estate at the turn of the century.”

“And you’re the cook.”

“I’m reading for the part of Julie. I have to learn to use the whip.”

“Does she ride?”

“No, she snaps it at her lover. To make him jump. Want me to show you?”

“I’ll pass.”

“It’s a great part. She’s a rich girl who falls for a poor boy, her father’s groom. She’s a tyrant. She has power over men.” She suddenly raised her hand high, snapped her wrist, and cracked the whip against the floor.

“Yeah, she’s a man-eater,” Melissa said, fumbling through the loose pages of her script. “Listen: ‘Oh, how I should like to see your blood and your brains on a chopping-block! I’d like to see the whole of your sex swimming like that in a sea of blood. I think I could drink out of your skull, bathe my feet in your broken breast, and eat your heart roasted whole.’ ”

“You’ll have to learn to use more than the whip to play that part,” Spiegel said.

“Well, those are just words.” Melissa put the whip back in the case. “As it turns out, she doesn’t do any of that shit. She lets the groom fuck her and then, when her father returns to the estate, she kills herself out of shame.”

“The gun?” Spiegel asked.

“No, that’s
Hedda Gabler
. This.” Melissa picked up the long steel blade. “A razor. Jean, the groom, puts her in a trance, and Julie slices open her own throat.”

“So she wasn’t so strong after all,” Spiegel said.

“Yes she was. I think you have to be strong to make such a powerful exit.”

“I don’t believe that,” Spiegel said. “I think the stronger person is the one who, you know, stays on the stage.”

“To do what? Bury the corpses? Turn off the lights?”

“Exits are cheap, and easy,” Spiegel said.

“Are they always? Even when the world you’re leaving is—intolerable? Immoral? Even when there’s no turning back?” She looked at him, to see if her words had registered, to see if he understood exactly what she meant. “You’ll see,” she said. “Sweden is like a big stage. A land of exits.” And with that, she made her own.

Later in the day, Spiegel thought about what Melissa had said as he sat by the window in his room. His view was to the west, away from the town. Looking into the fading light, he could see a few lonely farmhouses and a railroad track crossing a snowy field, like a seam. He crumpled the scrap of paper Melissa had given him and tossed it into the trash.

3

“De här ar Fröken
Fält
,” said the teacher.

Spiegel had been attending Swedish class for a week now, so he understood: Here is Miss Felt. The teacher, a rail-thin, stone-serious woman in her mid-twenties whose blond hair was cropped so short that it looked to Spiegel as if she were wearing a yellow bathing cap, placed the flat little cutout figure of a girl onto the display board.
Fröken Fält
. It amused Spiegel that the display board was covered in felt; a felt board they used to call these things when he was in kindergarten. He wondered if anyone else in the class would get the pun.

Spiegel was in a somewhat honored—or at least privileged— position in the class, for he was the only one whose native language was English, and English was the coin of the realm. No one’s ability in Swedish had advanced beyond the primitive stage of answering the phone and ordering a sandwich. So the closest thing to a common language was English. The Mexican world wanderer was nearly fluent, the Biafran refugee spoke good if rather bookish English, the two Guatemalan freedom fighters spoke broken English filled with idioms gleaned from television. Others spoke little or no English: the two furtive Kurdish nationalists, the diligent Polish agricultural exchange student, the Moroccan with his furrowed brow couldn’t speak a word, and as a result they were cut off from the occasional cafeteria, hallway, and even classroom banter. But Spiegel knew that while he and his friends traded their jokes in English, the noninitiates would forge ahead into the strange new world of the Swedish language.

Until coming to Sweden, he had thought that Vietnam was the only war in the world. Now he was learning about wars he had never heard of, some of them fought in countries he had never heard of. Where was Kurdistan, he wondered, and who knew there was a battle for independence raging there fierce enough to send refugees in truck caravans across the whole length of Europe to seek sanctuary in the glacial north? He had heard of Biafra and Guatemala and their Bosch-like scenes of death, destruction, and famine, but he had never realized how deeply war had permeated the colorful fabric of life in these tiny countries. In the Third World, there were no deferments or draft lotteries. Everyone had to choose a side, and those who chose ineptly, that is, who backed the loser, paid with their lives.

Most of the refugees, Spiegel noticed, had about them a look of perpetual astonishment. It was as if the jets that lifted them to this safe haven were more like rocket ships that had blasted them to another planet, for Sweden had not come to them first through the filtering lens of Bergman or through the highbrow porn that showed up in cinemas near American college campuses. To them, everything here—the hibernal climate, the culture that was so tolerant in the abstract yet insular in its particulars, the buildings so effectively sealed against the elements, the weight of heavy wool on the body, the monotony of white skies and spindly trees, the birdlike swoops of the spoken language, the innumerate variations on straight blond hair—was an awakening, a challenge, almost an assault on the memory of all they had left behind. They must have wondered at times whether they should have made their own pact with death, whether dying at home might have been preferable to eternal exile in this prison of darkness and snow.

Spiegel had struck up a friendship with a Portuguese war resister, Jorge Ramos. Unlike the other refugees, Jorge had learned to luxuriate in his exile. So far as Spiegel was aware, Jorge had never seen war firsthand. He had fled to Sweden, he told Spiegel, so that he would not have to fight in the African wars. That was another conflict that had gone completely unnoticed, so far as Spiegel could tell, by the American left. From what he knew, Portugal had vaguely bumped into Africa when Henry the Navigator tried to send his ships round the Cape of Good Hope back in—when the hell was it?—the fifteenth century? And then they made that terrible mistake, allowing the pope to divide the New World, and they wound up with Brazil while ceding rights to the rest of South America and all of the north. If they had cut the cake the other way, maybe the Portuguese army would be fighting colonial wars in—who knows? Alaska or the Yukon, trying to suppress the Inuit. They could be running a puppet government out on the Great Plains. But instead, Portugal was stuck with the remote African states, great savannahs filled with zebra and wildebeest and huge mines gorged with copper and diamonds, Spiegel imagined, and they had been fighting for most of the century to hang on to these last possessions, the remnants of empire. It seemed to Spiegel that the African wars must be horrible and savage beyond anything the American troops encountered in Asia. And what chance of victory, he wondered, could the Portuguese soldiers have, a little spit of a country known more for wine and cork than for guns and guided missiles?

Jorge knew that Portugal had no chance at all. He had not seen the war, but he had seen its effects, he had seen what it had done to his brother. Jorge was a son of the sophisticated urban bourgeoisie; his father was in furs and leather, importing the raw materials, exporting finished coats and wraps to the best shops on Savile Row, and Jorge’s brother had been educated at a top military boarding school. On graduation, he was commissioned, and they flew him down to Mozambique, where he joined an antiguerilla platoon. They roamed the countryside in a fleet of Jeeps, stopping at little dusty villages suspected of collaboration. They would ferret out the village chief and chain him to a stake in the market square. As the chief baked to death in the midday sun, the soldiers would go through the population, men, women, children, no order, just random intimidation, until someone talked, told them who the rebel leaders were, where they stored the arms, where the troops were hiding. Then the soldiers would burn the village to a cinder and leave.

One evening on patrol, as he rounded a hill and walked through the small clearing heading back toward the camp, he was ambushed by a band of rebels. One held a rifle to his throat while the others stripped him of his gun, his magazine, his shoes. They tied him by the waist to a thorn tree. They made him raise his arms straight up over his head and they tied his hands, by the wrists, to the trunk of the tree. A firing squad assembled. As they took aim at his heart, the leader of the rebel band, who wore a brightly checkered scarf wrapped around his face so that he peered out only through a little slit in the fabric, stepped forward and, with two quick blows of his machete, sliced off Jorge’s brother’s hands.

Jorge had told Spiegel that his brother, before the war, had been known as one of the best young guitar players in Lisbon, a passionate devotee of traditional Portuguese fado music, with occasional excursions into Spanish flamenco, which he considered a bastardized form of the only true guitar music, and even more rarely into classical compositions—Bach, de Falla, and so on—which he considered to be a technical challenge but, after all, soulless. Jorge had no interest in traditional music of any sort, but when his brother came back from Africa with his arms swaddled in dressings, Jorge took up the guitar in his brother’s honor, in memory of his brother’s lost hands, and he became a more than competent interpreter of British pop, his great passion. He loved everything British—not just the music but the whole culture of England: the Carnaby Street clothes, the sculpted hair, the Cockney and Liverpudlian accents, the discotheque scene, the girls in their minis, and most of all the music. Jorge loved to point out that in English his name would be George, hence, his favorite Beatle, his idol, was the lead guitarist, George Harrison.

Against his father’s wishes, Jorge vowed that he would never fight in Africa, or anywhere else. When he graduated from secondary school, not the military boarding school that his brother had attended, but a fine preparatory school in Lisbon favored by the ambassadorial set, he left for London, ostensibly on business for his father’s firm. He bought a whole wardrobe on Carnaby, packed it into two large steamers, and set out for Sweden. He had spent the summer in Stockholm, during which time he had concentrated not so much on learning the language as on learning the people, specifically the “birds,” as he called them. He had met a Swedish
flicka,
a university student who was working a summer job as a cocktail waitress in a hotel disco bar, and, in the fall, after an ardent courtship, Jorge moved back with her to Uppsala and into her suite in Flogsta. They had vague plans to marry sometime after she—her name was Lisbet—graduated. Meanwhile, Jorge had agreed to make an effort to learn her language.

Spiegel noticed, however, that most of Jorge’s classroom efforts were devoted to practicing his English, a much more important language, to his mind, than Swedish could ever be. It seemed that Jorge could not comprehend—or at least could not acknowledge—that the course his life had taken might mean that he would be living among Swedes, and that they might tolerate speaking English with a tourist or a student, but a permanent resident, a foreigner married to a Swedish woman, would have to learn the language and the ways of the country or else always be considered an alien, an
invandrare
.

“
Har ni någon ost?
”

“
Ja, det har vi.
”

Do you have cheese?

Yes, we have some.

Spiegel was restless. So was Jorge. It did feel rather ridiculous to be moving along on such a rudimentary level. The class was at once both more intense and more banal than any other language class he had ever taken. The teacher could never discuss or explain the language and its nuances, for there was no common tongue in which she could do so. There was no gossip, no banter. The class was never interrupted for bulletins or announcements. Karin was all business, and her business was Swedish. How can she stand it, Spiegel thought, day after day, speaking to us in slow motion, her lips stretching to accentuate each inflection, as we stare at her in wonder, so helpless and dependent? Our clumsy attempts to mime her inflections must sound to her like a travesty, a parody of her speech. How can she stand us?

Bra
, Karin said.
Det går bra.

Bra
, the Swedish word for good. Spiegel wondered who else got the joke, and even if it was a joke.

Vill ni ha någon ost?
Would you like some cheese?

Bara bra,
said Karin. Very good.

Spiegel felt a nudge, a kick at his ankle. Jorge was passing him a little folded note, as if they were kids in first grade. Well, it looked like first grade: the felt board with its cutout figures of a happy blond family, the alphabet cards festooning the room, essentially the same as the English alphabet except for those pockmarked vowels wearing the caps and goggles over their heads and for the disturbing absence of the W, whose vacancy was felt disproportionately, like a missing or chipped tooth whose gap is continually prodded by the restless tongue.

Jorge’s note said:
Karin wears a bara bra.
Spiegel dropped his face into his folded hands, trying to smother a laugh. It was all so stupid, so juvenile, yet something about the atmosphere of this class made juvenile behavior permissible, even appropriate.

Jorge took a long drag on a Players, then stabbed it out on the rim of his saucer. Jorge, Spiegel, and some of the other students had adjourned for coffee to the little canteen in the basement of the school. Here, Spiegel thought, we speak
English
. He and Jorge, because of their fluency, found themselves at the center of a cluster of acolytes whose proximity to the nucleus was determined, more or less, by their ability to speak the language. Lonesome for their obscure or distant native tongues, unable yet to hear in the rise and fall of Swedish the crystalline ring of a recognizable grammar, they were drawn to the hum of spoken English as if the very utterance of the words gave off a small, sustaining warmth. Beyond the periphery of the conversation, in the farther margins of the room, sat the few isolates for whom even English was exotic and unknown. Pale, impoverished, they hunched over their books with a determination fired by the white flame of their isolation.

“Don’t you think,” Spiegel said, “that it might be worth it—I mean for you—to pay attention? I mean, you’ve got to learn the language someday.”

“I learn better when I don’t pay attention,” Jorge said. “I’m left-handed.”

“
La siniestra
,” said Luis, the Mexican.

“Blimey, will you speak English,” said Jorge.

“It is English,” Spiegel said. “
Sinister.
It mean, like, strange, and maybe a little evil.”

“Well in Spanish, it means the left hand. It’s a Spanish word, too,” Luis said.

“What’s that got to do with paying attention, I want to know,” Spiegel said.

“It’s like this,” said Jorge. He took a good long sip of his coffee. “You learn language with the left half of your brain. True?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, it’s true. Believe me. Now your left brain controls your right hand, and, how do you say it? Vice verse?”

“Vice versa, yes.”

“Okay. I’m left-handed. I write, I scribble, I do everything I can to keep my right brain busy during the class, you see. This way, my left brain is totally free to learn the language. That’s why I’m good in languages. All left-handers are.”

Spiegel picked up a pencil. “See this?” he said. Jorge and Luis nodded.

“
Sí
,” Luis said.

“
Sí
. This,” said Spiegel. He began to scribble on the cover of his notebook, circles and spirals, meaningless doodles. “I’m right-handed, so I’m using the left side of my brain now, yes?”

“Yes, the language side,” Jorge said.

“So how do you know I’m not developing it? You know, strengthening it, like an exercise. Maybe the more I use this part of the brain, the stronger it gets. More blood flows to it or something. And if I just doodle and doodle through the whole language class, like, in no time at all I’ll be out in a restaurant with Karin ordering—a cheese sandwich.”

“
Smörgås med ost!
” Luis said.

“And undoing her bara bra,” said Jorge.