Exiles (8 page)

“Yikes, speaking of food!” From what they could discern, Melissa was not a kitchen whiz. Her method seemed to be boil water, add rice and curry powder, watch for smoke. The aroma of curry had filled the small kitchen, but it was beginning to be displaced by the acrid odor of scorched rice.

Melissa rushed to the stove and yanked the pot off the burner, singeing her palm. She began to shovel the rice out of the pot and into a soup bowl, scraping the burnt husks from the bottom.

“Shall I put that in cold water for you?” Jorge said.

“It’ll clean,” she said.

“No, I mean your hand.”

“I’m okay. Are you guys hungry?”

“I have to be getting to my home,” Jorge said. “But will you allow me to renew my offer?”

“Of cold water?”

“Dinner,
á la portuguese
.”

“That’s nice, but there’s so many things I don’t eat.”

“There are so many things I don’t cook.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Melissa said.

“It seems to me damned hard to be a vegetarian in Sweden. No vegetables,” Spiegel said.

“Sad but true,” Melissa said. “But there’s always rice. Sure you guys don’t want some?”

“Rice, I can cook. But I will add something else, something you will like.”

“Great, but maybe not right away. I’ve got rehearsals at night and all.”

“Every night?”

“Every night this week.”

“Next week, then,” Jorge insisted. “Is that okay with you?” he asked Spiegel.

“Fine. Dinner’s like a regular thing with me.”

Jorge laughed. “If you like,” he said, “invite a friend as well. We can be a quartet. Like the Beatles.”

“Sure,” Spiegel said. “I’ll ask that
vackra svenska flicka
in our class.”

Jorge looked at Spiegel, puzzled. “Karin?” he said.

“
Fröken Fält
.”

Spiegel saw Jorge to the door, and walked with him down the rough cement stairway—elevator still out of service—to the lobby. They stood for a moment in the courtyard by the front door. The ground was littered with the debris—planks, pieces of scaffolding, toppled buckets—tossed aside by the construction crew, which had left the job at sundown, that is, in the early afternoon. Jorge lit a Players and looked up at the windows in the adjacent building.

“I live up there,” he said. “My old woman could be watching me, even now.”

“Old lady.”

“Yes. She trusts me. But you know, a man must have his, what do you say?—his foreign affairs?”

“Sure,” Spiegel said. “It’s a free world.”

“It’s good,” Jorge said, “if she’s looking, for her to see me here. With you.” He took a long draw on the cigarette, then crushed it out in the rubble with the toe of his black boot. He blew out a last wisp of smoke, then he lifted his gloved hand, looked up, and waved at a row of dark windows. As he waved, a light flicked on.

4

A great paved wasteland
split the city of Uppsala like an open wound. To the south was the old city and the pseudo-Gothic towers of the church, the castle, and the university. To the north lay the new city, office buildings of concrete and gleaming glass, the boxlike student tenements, and the long strips of residential housing that at last gave way to the farms and hills. The dividing line that separated the two worlds of Uppsala was the shopping mall, a long pedestrian walkway lined with window displays of teak furniture, stainless-steel kitchenware, cotton fabrics of bold geometric design, and ultralight winter clothing. Spiegel made his way among the drifts of crusty snow, stepping gingerly along the strips of cobbled pavement that had been cleared down to the bare ice. A wind cut to his bones, and he pulled the toggles to tighten the grip of his parka hood. This is not a day for people, he thought. It’s a day for sled dogs.

When he reached the pottery warehouse at the far end of the mall, Spiegel stood in the doorway and slapped his mitts together to knock off the snow. It took him a minute to clear the steam from his glasses, another minute to kick the ice from the soles of his boots so that he could walk casually through the aisles, gazing up at the shelves stacked with teapots, canisters, Dutch ovens, and thousands of pieces of plastic dinnerware in a rainbow of colors. Suitable for play school or dollhouses, Spiegel thought. On display along the walls were radios and electronic appliances. Some men behind a counter in what seemed to be a repair shop were hunched over pieces of circuitry, probing about with stripped wire. A worker stood on a ladder, gently placing baskets on an upper shelf, while another ripped open packing crates stuffed with white straw. A bored cashier leaned against her register, flipping the pages of a fashion magazine. No customers, Spiegel noted. He made his way toward the back of the store, where he saw a man sitting on a stool by the doorway, idly polishing some wineglasses. The guy had dirty red hair pulled back into a ponytail and a scraggly beard, stained at the fringes by nicotine. He was wearing drab olive army fatigues, at least a size too large for his scrawny frame. He looked up from his work as Spiegel approached.

“
Vad kan jag stå till tjänst med?
” he said.

“I’m looking for—”

“You’re Spiegel, right?”

“Yeah. Is this the place? I thought you guys would meet in a church or a union hall.”

“Nope, you found us. I’m McCurdy.”

He put down the stemware and held out his palm to Spiegel for a clenched-fist soul handshake.

“How long you been here, brother,” McCurdy asked.

“Week or two,” Spiegel said.

“It gets easier, man. The first weeks are the hardest.”

“I’m not here to stay, though,” Spiegel explained.

“You didn’t come over the wall?”

“No, I’m just—”

“Another American looking for a home, right?”

“I’m here to help the movement is all.”

“Come on,” McCurdy said. “They’re waiting for you.”

McCurdy led Spiegel through a double door marked with a big red slash—no admittance—and they went down a stairway into the basement. They walked past several storage rooms packed floor to ceiling with shipping crates, and then to a doorway onto which someone had tacked a Vietcong flag and a photograph of Ho Chi Minh. McCurdy rapped on the door, and they entered.

Spiegel immediately felt as if he had stepped into another country. This was America, this was home. He could have been in the student union back on his own campus, or in the common room of any college dorm. The linoleum floor was cracked and stained with crushed cigarette butts. The corky walls were splotched with paint and papered with ragged posters promoting long-forgotten marches, rallies, and rock tours. Bulbs dangled from cords that drooped beneath broken ceiling tiles. An asbestos-draped heating pipe coughed and clanked and spit steam from its weak seams. A ratty sofa in a corner near the door was covered with drifts of mimeos and flyers. Tracy stood beside the sofa, folding papers and stuffing them into white envelopes. At the center of the room, Aaronson and two other men sat around a small card table, beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“You found him,” Tracy said, setting down a fistful of papers.

“Or he found me,” McCurdy answered.

“How are you?” She rushed over to Spiegel and gave him a quick hug. “You settling in okay? ”

“
Bara bra,
” he said.

“I’m sorry we haven’t been to see your new digs,” Tracy said. “We’ve been so busy, trying to get this group off the ground.”

“It looks as if you’re underground.”

“Exactly.”

“So where’s the meeting,” Spiegel asked.

“This is it. It’s like a board meeting, a steering committee,” Tracy said. “Not the whole ARMS group.”

Aaronson turned and waved to Spiegel. He gestured to an empty chair. “Good going, Worm,” he said. “Sit down, take a load off.”

“Worm?” Spiegel said.

Tracy tilted her head toward McCurdy.

“Yeah, they call me that,” he said. “’Cause I unearth so much stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Like you.”

“Welcome to ARMS,” Aaronson said as Spiegel joined the conclave. Aaronson set down his clipboard and his Styrofoam coffee cup to introduce Spiegel. “These are my main men,” he said. Zeke, a black man wearing an Irish-knit sweater, had tied a red bandana around his forehead. He stood and reached his huge hand out to Spiegel. The other guy didn’t budge from his chair. He was dressed in army khakis, cleaned and pressed, and his hair was clipped razor short, as if he had just come off the base. A Boy Scout, Spiegel thought, or else a new arrival. His name was Reston.

“You, too, Worm,” Aaronson said. “Sit down.” The Worm pulled up a chair, turned it around, and slouched over the backrest. He took a drag from a cigarette, one of three that had been left burning on the lip of a black plastic ashtray. When he set it back, its thin line of smoke floated up toward the gray cloud that had accumulated among the network of cables and heating pipes that crisscrossed the ceiling. It’s like a little ritual offering, Spiegel thought—fumes of incense sent to the skies.

“We’ve been working,” Aaronson said, “on drafting a statement—”

“And on some issues,” Zeke said.

“Which I think is pretty much the same thing,” Aaronson said. “We can’t deal with the issues until we have a statement of purpose, a charter.”

“And I’m saying you can’t fight a battle on an empty stomach,” Reston said.

“You’re not starving, man,” Aaronson said. “You’re talking about maybe making your life here a little more comfortable. And I’m saying I don’t think we should be comfortable. I think we should be goddamn uncomfortable so that we never lose sight of our focus.”

“Which is what?” said the Worm.

“Which is going home. Which means making it possible for us to go home,” Aaronson said.

Reston leaned back in his chair. He twisted his mouth into a crooked smile. “You can say that,” he told Aaronson. “Easy for you to say we should live in misery. You come here right from college. You don’t know misery. You’ve never seen a firefight, man, except in the movies. When you think of guns and napalm, you smell popcorn.”

“Enough with that pulling-rank shit, man,” Zeke said.

“Hey, if he wants to make it personal,” Aaronson said, “let’s do it. I’m as much at risk here as any of you guys, maybe more. Yeah, I appreciate it takes a lot of courage to leave the active service in time of war, facing the code of military justice and all that shit. But what about guys like me? Don’t you think it’s maybe even harder to give up your life when it wasn’t in danger in the first place?”

“I think to the man there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between you two. If either of you guys went home, you’d probably get a good white lawyer like Mr. Kunstler and you’d walk,” Zeke said. “Me, I’d be doing time.”

“But who’s thinking of going home?” said the Worm.

Reston pointed at Aaronson. “He is.”

“I’m thinking we should use our status here to try to end the war. We should make it known to our brothers in the armed forces that they could safely come to Sweden and be welcomed. And if enough come over the wall, it will put such pressure on the army that they will be unable to maintain the forces of occupation in Vietnam—”

“There’s always more bodies back home in the ghetto,” Zeke said. “They can replace every deserter ten times over.”

“I’m talking moral pressure.”

“But maybe Zeke has a point. Why not moral pressure on the Swedes as well?” It was Tracy. She had pulled up a chair and joined the meeting. “If there’s one thing we know about them, it’s that they’re dripping with guilt. We could exploit that, make them see that they’re not doing enough to integrate the Americans into Swedish life.”

“What more do you want of them?” Aaronson said. “They give us residency permits, labor permits, housing allowances, free language classes, living stipends. What else could they do for us?”

“We need
more
money, man. It’s not enough to live on,” Zeke said. “And we need better social services.”

“There’s not enough language teachers,” the Worm said.

“Or jobs. Or apartments. We need to be put at the top of the housing list. We’re a priority case,” Reston said.

“But there’s a huge danger in that,” Aaronson countered.

“The more we publicize our difficult living conditions, the more we endanger ourselves politically.”

“What do you mean?” Tracy asked him.

“I mean we can’t expect a wave of recruits to drop their guns and cross the line if we go around whining about how hard life is in the socialist mecca,” Aaronson said.

“Believe me, life is harder in ’Nam.”

“You saying we should tell them life here is paradise?” Zeke asked.

“I’m saying we should focus on our long-term goals, and be willing to suffer to achieve them.”

“Well, evidently you expect to go back to the States someday, but the rest of us do not,” Reston said. “And our long-term goal is to make a tolerable life in this country.”

“I think he’s right,” Tracy said. “I think we should draft a list of conditions and state our needs—”

“—our
demands
,” Zeke said.

“—and present it to the newspaper—”

“—or the Uppsala city council.”

“We could pass it along to the other groups of deserters around the country, get hundreds of signatures on a petition, and we could get the parliament to focus on our needs—demands— before the next national elections.”

“I don’t think it’s an area we ought to get into,” Aaronson said. “We have no role in Swedish politics, and if we try to step forward we’ll get crushed like a bug.”

“The Social Democrats have always supported us.”

“And if we start speaking out and demanding more money, better living conditions, special treatment, we will be isolated. The Social Dems will back off fast, and the right-wing parties will step in to fill the vacuum. They’ll stir up hatred against the American community so fast you’ll wish you were back in the war.”

“So you’re saying—“

“Forget about Sweden. It doesn’t really matter where we’re living. We’ll always be Americans, and that ought to be our focus, ending the war, bringing us home.”

“I don’t know, man,” Zeke said. “No black man here would say that. We don’t expect they’d ever want us back home, war or no war.”

“You could choose to stay here. In seven years, you could become a citizen. But it would be your choice.”

“I’ve made my choice,” Zeke said. “I made it forever, the day I was born.”

“Why don’t we do one statement?” Tracy said. “A statement of purpose, calling on America to end the war of racism and oppression and calling on the Swedish government for continued and increased support of the American deserters and resisters.”

“Our declaration of independence,” Zeke said.

“More like
de
pendence.”

“I’ll do a draft,” Tracy said.

“I can help,” Spiegel put in, breaking his silence.

Reston turned sideways in his chair to look at Spiegel.

“Is that why you brought him in?” he said to Aaronson. “Is he a writer?”

“He’s going to help us out,” Aaronson said.

“What are you?” Reston said. He squinted, and scanned Spiegel top to bottom. “I can see from your hair, man, that you didn’t come over the wall. You’d have been gone a long time to grow out that beard. Where you from? Another college student? Doing a term paper? Junior year abroad? You got your Eurail Pass?
Europe on Five Dollars a Day
? Instamatic camera?”

“I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe I should go. I’ve heard enough.”

“Maybe too much,” Reston said.

“No, he’s got to hear it all. He’s got to be informed,” Aaronson said.

“And why is that? He writing your biography, man?”

“He’s sort of my representative.”

“You a lawyer, man?” Zeke asked.

“No, I’m just his friend,” Spiegel said.

“So this is a little reunion?” the Worm said.

“No. We never knew each other, back in the States,” Aaronson said.

“Then how come he’s here now?”

“I need him to help me while I’m traveling,” Aaronson said.

“He’s going with you?” Zeke said.

“An aide-de-camp,” Reston said.

“No, he’s staying here,” Aaronson said.

“So how can he help you?” the Worm asked.

“We’ll get to that.”

“It depends how far he’s going.”

“This stays within the group,” Aaronson said, “no matter what.”

“Which group?” Zeke asked.

“This one.”

“Not even Hyde—“

“Especially not Hyde. I don’t want him to know where I’m going, or even that I’m gone.”

“He’s gonna find out, he’s gonna want to talk to you—”

“Well, don’t let him.”

“Hyde?”

“He’s been here longer than Aaronson, longer than any of us. Thinks he should run the show. You’ll meet him—”

“—but try not to. At least not until I get back to Uppsala.”

“Get back? Where are you going?”

“How much does he know?” Reston asked. “How much does he understand?”

“I don’t understand a thing,” Spiegel said. “Nobody explained.”