Exiles Read Online Free Page B

tell Tracy in her letter, but she and Spiegel were living together. They tried to keep their relationship in the shadows because the high priests of the movement preached that love was a bourgeois concept, a form of ownership, a relic of the colonial and imperialist ideology. Love, as Brewer had once argued during a self-study seminar, was the most powerful of the opiates, much more seductive than religion had been to Marx’s generation.
    So no one in the movement actually dated. They danced, drank, smoked dope, sometimes went out to hear a band or to see a movie, but never as couples, always in a small group, three at the least, “two students and a worker,” someone once joked. When Iris learned about Tracy and Aaronson, not just that Tracy had followed Aaronson to Canada, but that she had moved in with him, fallen in love with him, linked her life and her fate to his, Iris was, she had to admit to herself, puzzled and hurt, as if she had been taken advantage of, as if there were a big party going on down the block and she had not been invited, or worse, had never even known of the goings-on until she came upon the soggy streamers and the flat balloons strewn about the yard and sidewalk the next morning.
    Iris wondered, though, how much Brewer had heard about her and Spiegel when he made his suggestion that Spiegel be dispatched as a liaison to Sweden. It was during one of the weekly cell meetings, a dozen students crowded into Brewer’s tiny apartment: lights dim, shades drawn, radiators coughing steam and heating the room to a fizz. Since Aaronson’s departure, Brewer had assumed the leadership of Students and Workers United, and his goal, he said, in the aftermath of the great cafeteria-worker fiasco, was to build solidarity with the international brigades. He argued that Spiegel would be the perfect delegate to send abroad because he was new to the movement and unknown to the spooks and the feds. Besides, Brewer said, while the case against Spiegel was still hot, it would be better, safer, to clear Spiegel out of the country and let the city cops forget all about him, let the story of his arrest blur in memory, fade off the screen.
    “What do you think about that?” someone asked Spiegel, and he said, truthfully, that he had received his political education from the blunt edge of the nightstick, that he understood from experience the oppressive power of the pig establishment, and that he would be willing to put his life on the line to advance the cause of liberation and worker solidarity. Brewer smiled, and everyone in the room stubbed out their cigarettes, whistled and cheered, all except Iris, who, as she locked eyes with Brewer, tried to sort through her mixed feelings of pride and sorrow, her willingness to sacrifice love on the altar of politics and her fear that she had been abandoned and betrayed.
    Over the next weeks, it was arranged that the SWU would finance Spiegel’s journey, using money raised for the Aaronson defense fund. As a cover, Spiegel was enrolled through the little-known state university year abroad program (SUYAP) as an exchange student at Uppsala University. That way, he’d told Iris, he wouldn’t even lose credits during the spring semester. Yeah, Iris said, you can build a dictatorship of the proletariat and build up your résumé for law school, at the same time. That’s not what I meant, Spiegel said. All I meant is, when all this is over, I can come back here and be with you again. So Iris was sorry to have snapped at Spiegel, to have distrusted him. Perhaps he had, in part, taken on this mission to prove his loyalty and to test his valor, like a knight embarking on a quest. It would be hard to let him go.
    “It’s a hell of a story,” Aaronson said to Spiegel, “all that happened to you—and all because you look like me, they say. But I’m glad it happened. If the cops hadn’t grabbed you when they did, they would have come looking for me, and for Tracy. Whether you know