Exiles (39 page)

At last the trail leveled to a gentle slope along a rockfall at the base of the cliff. When Spiegel caught up to him, Aaronson was kneeling at a streambed, drinking water he had cupped in his hands.

Spiegel was out of breath. “Can you still hear the train?” he asked. He strained to listen for the chug of the engine or the hiss of steel on steel, but he heard nothing. “Maybe it was headed away from us.”

“No, you can hear much better from the summit,” Aaronson said. “Down here, the sound gets swallowed by the trees. But it’s coming.”

“How do you know?”

“Put your hand to the ground. You’ll feel the vibrations.”

“Then we ought to pick up the pace,” Spiegel said.

“The station’s just there,” Aaronson said, pointing into the woods. “A couple hundred yards.”

The narrow trail followed the upper bank of the stream. They walked in silence beneath the thick spruce boughs. The long needles brushed their sleeves and their skin, staining them with pitch and with traces of iron dust. The ground was soft and resilient. Spiegel kicked a small log in the path, and it broke apart into splinters of punk. He knocked aside a rock with his boot and saw the damp ground in the exposed hollow swarming with insect life.

In a short distance they came into a small clearing where a shack of weathered barn board stood beside the railroad track. An old woman was sweeping the wooden platform with a straw broom. Across the tracks, the trail led to a cluster of cabins shaded by a tall stand of old forest.

“The station,” Aaronson announced. “The village is up there.”

“Who would live here?” Spiegel wondered.

“The railroad owns it,” Aaronson said. “Train crews use it, when they’re repairing track. And a watchman, who tends the station.”

“What a lonely life.”

“Yes, it kind of gives you the creeps. But you don’t have to stay. You could hike north, to the Kungsled.”

“I think I’m going to head back, after we say good-bye.”

“I guess despite everything I owe you thanks,” Aaronson said.

“For letting you spare my life?”

“For lending me your—everything.”

The woman on the platform set her broom aside. She was the first to pick up the sound of the approaching train.

“Once I get where I’m going, I’ll get to choose who I am,” Aaronson said.

The ground shook as the train cut through the woods toward the small landing. The woman on the platform waved a flag to signal the train to stop. Aaronson’s words were barely audible over the hiss of steam and the metallic ringing of the breaks.

“Will you?” Spiegel shouted. “Or will they choose for you?”

“They?”

“Whoever you’re meeting. Whoever’s setting you up.”

Aaronson opened his arms and pulled Spiegel to him. They held each other in a firm embrace, as Aaronson said his last words to Spiegel.

“I’m not working for anyone, anymore,” Aaronson said. “I guess I’m no longer part of the solution. I’ve become part of the problem. And what about you, brother? You know? You must choose.”

Aaronson held Spiegel’s face before his and gave him a hard kiss on both cheeks, a rough and masculine gesture. The woman tending the platform shouted something to them, words lost beneath the beating of the diesel engine. Aaronson leaned back to get a last look at Spiegel’s face, worn and tired and the mirror of his own. He reached his hand to Spiegel and handed him some papers, then turned and bounded up the folding steps and boarded the train. In a flash, the whistle blew again. A man in uniform drew the folding steps up into the car. The woman waved her flag once more, and the train pulled out of the station. Spiegel strained to see Aaronson through the cloudy windows, but he had taken a seat on the far side, looking north. His eyes stinging from the oily smoke, Spiegel watched, waving his hand farewell, until the train, with its strand of freight cars in tow, rattling like an iron chain and spitting lines of gravel, had passed out of sight around a distant notch of trees. The woman on the platform was walking up the hill toward the dark cabins. Only when he reached up to brush the cinders and dust from his face did Spiegel realize that he had been clutching a small white envelope with no address. He ripped it open. Inside, he found Jorge Ramos’s passport.

18

Responding to a tip
from an anonymous caller, the Uppsala police yesterday recovered the body of an American war resister and leader of the American community in Uppsala. . . .

. . . Aaronson’s body was found in a late-model Volvo that had been submerged for several weeks in an irrigation pond on a dairy farm in the village of Ekby, about fifteen kilometers west of the city.

The police are calling the death an accident.

“He drove into the pond,” said police detective Anders Svenson, the department’s liaison to the American community in Uppsala. “It appears Mr. Aaronson was trying to drive across a field, probably at night, and perhaps he didn’t see the water.”

There was no evidence that Aaronson was using alcohol or drugs at the time of his death, according to a preliminary report from a medical examiner. The report said that due to the prolonged submersion the identification and examination of Aaronson’s body would be difficult. Tentative identification was made on the basis of Aaronson’s passport and other documents found in the vehicle.

Officials at the American embassy have been notified of Aaronson’s death and will make arrangements for burial.

Aaronson, twenty-two, came to Sweden last year, apparently from Canada. He had never served in the American armed forces, but he was wanted in the United States for damaging a draft office in New York State early last year.

In Sweden, he settled in Uppsala where he established the local chapter of the American Resisters Movement—Sweden (ARMS), an activist group for the American war resisters and military deserters. He headed the organization and was its spokesman at public assemblies, before government agencies, and in media forums. He gained some notoriety when his appearance earlier this year on a TV2 debate program led to a fistfight inside the studio between Aaronson and the right-wing Swedish politician Erik Edström.

Edström, chairman of the Sweden First Party, called the report of Aaronson’s death “a shame,” but he added: “It is to be expected when we let people into this country who have no respect for our traditions and ways of life.”

Aaronson’s whereabouts had been somewhat of a mystery of late. After his celebrated television appearance, he went into seclusion and apparently ceded control of the ARMS group to two of his deputies.

His last public appearance was at the city’s May Day rally, where his presence in the crowd caused a serious disruption in which another American resister was knocked off the Drottninggatan Bridge and injured in his fall into the river. Aaronson was detained at the time by the Uppsala police for his role in creating the disturbance, but he was released without charges.

“He was a great leader, and his death shall not go unavenged,” said ARMS chairman James Hyde, who calls himself the movement’s general-in-chief. “We hold the American imperial military machine responsible for Aaronson’s untimely death. This is what happens to men who challenge the establishment in a pig culture.”

“His death is a tragic loss for all of us in the movement,” said Ezekial Al-Shabazz, the ARMS deputy general. “Along with our brothers and sisters at Jackson State and Kent State, Aaronson is another casualty of the American imperialist war in Southeast Asia.”

American officials in Sweden released a statement expressing regret that “Mr. Aaronson and others like him fail to perceive the consequences of their flouting of national and international law.”

The Uppsala police declined to speculate on how Aaronson came to be in possession of the car in which he drowned. The car’s owner, a university student who lived in the housing complex at Flogsta, reported the vehicle stolen last month. She told the police that she believed the car had been taken by a student at the Swedish Language Institute with whom she had lived at one time. Based on her report, the police had issued an arrest warrant for Jorge Ramos, whose current whereabouts is unknown. The police have now cleared Mr. Ramos of all charges.

—from a front-page news article in
Svenska Dagbladet

The tragic death last week of an American war resister should lead all of us to reconsider our attitude toward the secret heroes who live among us. For Mr. Aaronson was just that—a hero. He was willing to give up everything, all the comforts and privileges of his homeland, in order to stand for his beliefs. He came to Sweden in hopes of making a better world. Who knows why he died? Perhaps the frustration and sadness of watching the war in Vietnam drag on, month after month, to no purpose. Perhaps the escalation of the war into Cambodia and the attack in his homeland on American students. His hopes were crushed, and with them his life.

How can we not think that, had he lived, he would have devoted his life to causes of justice and peace? Is this not the kind of young man we should welcome, with open arms, into our culture and our society? Let us, instead, reach out our hands and bid welcome to his American brothers.

—from an editorial by Gunnar Mendelsohn in the
Uppsala Tidskrift

Let others mourn the death of Aaronson, or whoever it was they dredged up from the bottom of that pond, but I say—good riddance. The only thing that saddened me was the destruction of a perfectly good Volvo. What a horrid waste!

Under the weepy eyes of the socialist government, our country has enough problems already. Rising unemployment, high taxes, crime in the cities—before you know it, we will become another America! So what do we do? Open our doors to the worst of the Americans, the ones too sick, perverse, lazy, or ungrateful to fight for the causes of their own nation. Oh, sure, we say. Come to Sweden. We will not only welcome you. We will feed you, house you, give you schools, jobs, lovers, and wives. Take from us. We are guilty. We are Swedes.

I tell you—we are a joke. Around the world, people laugh at us, they shake their heads in disbelief. Fellow Swedes, wake up! The foreigners are eating away at our culture like worms in the bud. Reject them, before it is too late. Before we all find ourselves drowning in the mud at the bottom of a frozen pond.

—from a speech delivered at a Sweden First forum by Erik Edström

Dear Iris,

I write this to you on what I expect will be my last night in Sweden. It’s nearly midnight, and there is a touch of gray in the sky. Already, the long summer nights are beginning to ebb and the darkness is lapping at the edges of the day. I’m sitting at a writing desk by a window that looks out on the tall hedges at the border of the Uppsala botanical gardens. I am with a woman named Monika. This is our last night in her house.

I don’t know what you have heard regarding news from Sweden. Monika has translated for you three recent news clippings that report on Aaronson’s death. There are things, however, that have never been in the newspapers and never will be, and I must explain them to you before I leave the country.

The body found in the Volvo that had sunk in the muddy pond was not that of Aaronson. It was that of my friend Jorge Ramos, who took his life in despair, mistakenly thinking he had shot another man to death. Although I never suspected this while Jorge was alive, I have come to accept that Jorge had been recruited by the CIA to provide information about the international community in Uppsala. He was giving them reports on me, on Aaronson, on others he met among the resisters and deserters, even on another spy who had been planted in the university by the military police. I suspect that my exchange of identities with Aaronson was well-known to all government agencies, military and otherwise. Perhaps through Jorge’s reports even my father was kept informed about my time in Sweden, about what I have done here.

As to where Aaronson has gone, I just can’t say. When I last saw him, he was bound for Norway. He said that from there he was going to ship out aboard a whaling boat and then try to make his way to safety in Asia, where he would rendezvous with Tracy. She left the country without a word to me. Perhaps she has told you more about their plans.

Before leaving, Aaronson asked me to do one thing for him—to make it appear, somehow, that he had died. I was able to do that, with Monika’s help. She knows a local newspaper editor who has extensive ties both to the left and to the local police. She gave them the “tip” that Aaronson’s body was entombed in a Volvo in a remote irrigation pond. The story appeared in the press, the police went to drag the pond, and they did find the body, along with Aaronson’s passport and other papers that Jorge must have been carrying. Whether the police had any doubts about the correct identification of the body, I really don’t know. The CIA, trying to protect its sources, may have asked the Uppsala police to suppress the true identity of the corpse. So the Uppsala police put out the story that the dead man was Aaronson, and his death by drowning has developed into a great public morality play. The newspapers, and then the politicians, have kept the story alive, exploiting the tragedy for their own purposes.

Meanwhile, I had been left with Jorge’s Portuguese passport, which you might think would do me no good. But Monika’s newspaper friend, a Danish Jew who years ago fled to Sweden to escape the Nazi invasion, has an amazing print shop in his plant, and his engravers can perform wonders with official documents. They stripped out Jorge’s photograph, bleached off his name and date of birth, dissolved the last vestiges of his identity into a puddle of ink and some scrapings of pulp. In their place, like a photographic image slowly emerging from its chemical pool, appeared a signature and a snapshot and a name in black. Here, said the old man, the foreman of the works, as he handed me the new passport, still warm like fresh bread, it’s you. But it was not me. As I stared at the unfamiliar picture and at the words that I couldn’t understand, I wondered—had my appearance changed so much that I no longer recognized my face, or was I looking not at my face but at another’s, some silent partner who was saying: This is the way. This is the man you must become.

So I will be traveling, too. Monika and I leave tomorrow by train for Holland, and then by boat for England. I don’t know where we will stay. She has dreams of a cottage on the Irish coast. Perhaps when we settle I will be able to reflect on all that has happened since I left America.

I came here to help the antiwar movement, I thought, and it seems that my presence has caused nothing but havoc and destruction. The movement would have been much stronger had Aaronson stayed in Uppsala and worked at building his political base. Once I realized he was not coming back, I should have applied for a new passport and gone home. But I didn’t—not because I was in love with Tracy or committed to the cause or loyal to Aaronson or afraid to face the consequences of what I’d done. No. I was no longer playing a role because there was no longer a Lenny Spiegel. I dived so deep into Aaronson’s identity that I nearly lost hold of my own. It was as if I had come to Sweden to enable Aaronson to disappear, but I had disappeared instead. And now, writing to say goodbye to you from the other side, I feel like a voice without a language, a face without a name.

Spiegel set aside the letter and laid it on the writing desk. He took a last look around the house. Months ago, he had arrived in Sweden carrying only a backpack and a canvas duffel. That was all he would need, it seemed, to take everything he owned back out, for he had accumulated nothing, nothing tangible, that is. As for Monika, there was much that she would have to leave behind. She had done her best to pack all she would take with her into two cases. The rest of her belongings she had stowed in packing boxes. She had stacked them in neat rows beneath the eaves and had labeled each box with black marker. At some point, she said, she would write to her friends and ask them to ship some of the boxes ahead and to divide the rest among themselves. She wanted part of her material life to remain behind in Uppsala.

Monika was asleep. The air was still and quiet. It was a time for thinking, or more precisely for clearing the mind. Over the next few days, Spiegel imagined, he would be consumed with the rigors of hard travel and then with adapting to the ways of life in a new land.

His one regret on leaving Uppsala was that he had not been able to say good-bye to Tracy. Whether she had loved him for himself or as a kind of artificial Aaronson no longer mattered. They had loved each other at the time, until each had found the right person with whom to move onward. He wished that he could have told her so. But, as Aaronson had warned him, by the time he returned to Uppsala, Tracy had vanished.

One evening, Spiegel decided to look for her. He walked to their old apartment, saw the Volkswagen parked at the curb, saw lights on in the bay window, but when he tried the door he was barred by a huge dark man in a black leather jacket who spoke through broken teeth. “Tracy?” he said. “Never heard of the bitch.” Behind him, through the crack of light in the doorway, Spiegel could see forms sprawled, stupefied, on the bare wooden floor. He could hear the sound of clattering dishes beneath the wail of a Hendrix guitar riff. “Now fuck off,” the man said, as he shoved a hand the size of a dinner plate against Spiegel’s chest. Spiegel had seen enough. He turned and walked off into the warm summer night.

He asked Monika what she knew about Tracy’s escape, and Monika told him that she and Tracy had long ago reached an agreement about him and Aaronson. Concerned about Aaronson’s safety once he returned to Sweden, Monika said that they could work out a plan to get him across the frontier, but they must choose their course of action and see it through to the end.

I understand, Spiegel said. You told her she had to choose between Aaronson and me, and she chose Aaronson.

No, Monika said. That’s not it at all. The fact is I chose you.

Yet Monika could not explain why Aaronson had gone to see Jorge at Flogsta, and how he had convinced Jorge to exchange passports. Spiegel had an idea. Perhaps Jorge had not been the only line from Uppsala to the CIA. Perhaps Jorge and Aaronson had been playing on the same side, so to speak. Had the CIA been using Aaronson and Jorge, the underground network of the church, the ARMS chapter and its clandestine financial arrangements to create a link to China, a back channel that could somehow lead America down a secret path to peace?