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occasional pronouncements about how the work at Trico was just fucking boring were met with such awe and astonishment that you would think you had heard an oracular utterance direct from the fount of Marx or Marcuse. Finally, they would go back to Iris’s apartment, where at last Spiegel could be alone with her, touching her and tasting her and breathing in her smoky scent, and all of the indoctrination, all of his nascent interest in the culture of the proletariat, was blown away like dust in the wind.
    When Brewer proposed that Spiegel be dispatched as the Students United official emissary to Sweden, Spiegel was, at first, angry and a little bit hurt. He wished that Iris had protested, said she wanted him to stay. Instead, she agreed with Brewer that it would be prudent to move Spiegel out of the vicinity until the tempest over the mistaken arrest had been forgotten. And Spiegel sensed that Iris had other reasons as well. Apparently, he had to prove himself in some way, maybe not to her, but to Brewer and the others, who distrusted him for having been off digging earthworms while the student vanguard was fighting on the ramparts, breaking storefront windows on Main Street, and tossing hissing tear-gas canisters back at the plastic-visored police. Spiegel’s movement credentials were dubious. He was considered a hero for his role in the botched arrest. He had become known as the one who took the heat and allowed Aaronson enough time to cross the border. But he was an inadvertent hero at best, the beneficiary of misfortune, like a hapless war veteran who has earned his decorations through the bad luck of having been shot. Fate had come knocking at Spiegel’s door, in the guise of a riot cop without a warrant, and he’d happened to be standing in the line of fire.
    His trip to Sweden was, he now realized, Iris’s attempt to close the circle of fate, by presenting him to Tracy and Aaronson. They would see him and they would understand all that had taken place back in the States while they had made their surreptitious way across the border. But what was expected of him in Sweden? Tracy had evidently told Iris that there was vital work to be done and that the community of deserters needed the help of an American who was able to travel. Spiegel was willing, but so far he had been kept in the dark. He was beginning to wonder if it would have been better to stay with Iris and prove himself to her in some other way. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come to Uppsala.
    He began to wonder if he was really needed. Tracy and Aaronson, though friendly enough, had been rather circuitous and evasive when he tried to find out what it was that they wanted of him. He did like them both, though, right away. Spiegel had expected, after all he had heard about him, that he would be intimidated by Aaronson. Back home, Aaronson was spoken of as if he were some mythic figure, a courageous revolutionary who had struck a blow at the war machine and then been chased by the furies into exile. Spiegel had pictured Aaronson off in the Arctic, like Thor returned to Valhalla, a hero bitter in defeat, tending some eternal flame of revenge. But Aaronson had turned out to be much more self-effacing and approachable than Spiegel expected. Aaronson scoffed at the idea that he had been a hero and was an inspiration, and he spent much of the evening talking about all the things that he missed from America—the all-rock radio stations, the movie theaters with stale popcorn and sticky puddles of soda on the floor, the greasy cafeteria fries and thick white mugs of bitter coffee, the fumes of the big cars and of American cigarettes, the boisterous camaraderie on the quad between classes and in the student union at noon and around the basketball court on a Saturday morning—rather than about the wayward course that had brought him to Uppsala and the political realities and ideological commitments that kept him there, a prisoner of history, a victim not so much of