Exiles Read Online Free Page A

Exiles
Book: Exiles Read Online Free
Author: Elliot Krieger
Pages:
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that she had mistaken him for Aaronson when she left the stack of flyers on his library desk. He never told her why he had held onto them, that he had hoped the flyers would bring them together.
    Iris took Spiegel on as her protégé, bringing him with her to meetings, introducing him to others in the movement. She had tons of work to do for Students and Workers United, especially with Aaronson and Tracy gone. Iris worried about them, but she had no way to reach them directly. She got an unsigned card from them occasionally and once a hurried, whispered phone call from Tracy that woke her toward dawn. They were in Montreal, where a separatist printer was going to run them fake passports, and a shadowy internationalist organization had fronted Aaronson the money for passage to Sweden. Canada was okay, apparently, for the garden-variety draft evader, but for more serious activists, resisters, deserters, felons on the run like Aaronson, it was dangerous ground. If found out, he could be held and deported. They had to travel farther, to get beyond the reach of America’s tiger claws. Iris wished Tracy good luck, and went back to sleep in tears.
    She didn’t hear from Tracy and Aaronson again for weeks, when Iris got a three-page letter from Uppsala. In Sweden, they were out of danger, for Sweden, alone among the European nations, would not extradite political refugees, and was, as a result, a haven for leftists, rightists, nationalists, and extremists of every hue. But few Americans had settled in Uppsala. Uppsala was a university town, and for the deserters, most of them high-school dropouts whose reading consisted of car manuals, diner menus, and comic books, a university was more exotic and more frightening than an Asian jungle flushed with fire. Most of the deserters huddled in Stockholm, which afforded them a degree of anonymity and where hashish and other items of contraband were in ready supply in the dark alleys behind the railroad yards. But as the American community continued to grow, as more and more soldiers threw down their arms and went over the wall, the deserters found themselves the objects of scrutiny, wrath, and occasional harassment. Some right-wing politicians had begun to campaign against the American invasion, which they believed would strain the Swedish economy and corrupt the morals of the nation’s youth.
    Because Stockholm had become so hot, a stewpot of anti-American rhetoric and of jingoistic backlash, the movement decided that the next wave of deserters should be settled in the outlying cities. Aaronson agreed to establish a new settlement in Uppsala. His job was to keep the chapter in the news so as to draw some of the heat, and some of the American population, away from Stockholm. What irony, he wrote to Iris. I have become like an army recruiting station, but in reverse. We end up by becoming that which we destroy. He wondered if, after all, he and Tracy might have been better off staying home and making a stand, enduring a huge political trial and, at the end, at worst, a stint in federal prison, where Aaronson could organize and Tracy could maybe write a book.
    Iris wrote back, through a safe drop-box number in Paris where a French student leftist group picked up sensitive mail and distributed it by private courier throughout the Baltics, and she told them about Spiegel. They had never met him, but now they would understand: why the flyers Iris thought she had delivered to Aaronson never arrived, why so many people during Aaronson’s last days on campus had thought they had seen him in places he hadn’t been. Iris described how Spiegel had been arrested in Aaronson’s stead—they had heard something about that, but never understood how the cops could have made such a mistake—and how she had gotten him off, and gotten to know him, in fact to like him and to trust him, had brought him into Students and Workers United, introduced him to the leaders, to Brewer and the others.
    She didn’t
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