Exiles by Elliot Krieger

Author:Elliot Krieger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2009-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

The office of the Uppsala Tidskrift was in the older section of the city, not the quaint Old City where tourists walked the narrow, cobbled streets that zigzagged up the gentle slope from the church to the castle but the working-class quarters, a patch of barracks-like apartments and commercial buildings set on the flatlands beside the railroad tracks and the factories. The broad main street had buckled from hard use and long neglect, the concrete sidewalks had been broken apart by frost and weeds, and every exterior surface felt slightly gritty. A residue of ash that had been spit from the kilns of the nearby brickyard and the smokestacks of the power plant accumulated on the rooftops and window ledges. The newspaper was housed in a low, cinder-block building whose facade was drab and unadorned save for two rectangles of glass brick on either side of the steel door. The windows stared out at the dull street like two dead eyes.

Inside the office, Gunnar Mendelsohn sat at his rickety wooden desk, leaned back in his swivel chair, and propped his feet on a stack of papers and magazines. His worn-down right heel rested on a glossy image of a woman’s bare breasts. He was reading over some notes he had typed after his interview with the two Americans. He was trying to decide if he should pull these scraps of information together into a story. An American student living in Uppsala goes on the run. So what? Would the readers care? What they really want from a newspaper, Mendelsohn knew, was the minutiae that affects their lives: schools, crime, culture, and taxes, taxes, taxes.

He employed no staff to speak of, just an occasional intern from the university to help with the layout and skilled workers from the trade school to handle production and distribution. So he couldn’t really compete with the daily paper and didn’t try to. If readers had to know about the water board, the health commission, or land transfers, they would have to read the daily, and most of them did. But Mendelsohn had attracted a loyal readership by paddling away from the mainstream and following the stories that he alone wanted to explore. If the readers stayed with him, Mendelsohn thought, he could offer them a journalistic product unique in the land, eccentric, unpredictable, quirky, passionate, all in all a newspaper created pretty much in the image of its editor.

And the story he was after this week was about to fall apart just as he should have been going to press. He had to tell the production crew to put everything on hold. The workers were huddled in the back of the plant by the idle presses, grousing, but they had been through this kind of crisis together before, plenty of times. The men would work through the night, like an army besieged, and they would get the job done—at time and a half.

But first, Mendelsohn had to make sense of his story. What he knew was that his instincts had been right.

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