The Invention of Exile

by Vanessa Manko

  He feels a sudden movement from behind, the hurried scuff of a walk too fast and he increases his pace. With as much ease as he can muster, he turns his head to the side, a casual look behind him, though it’s difficult to see. He’d have to crane his whole neck around, do an about-face and confront his follower. But he is being ridiculous. He is not sure, though he keeps walking and now slows his pace to show that he is not frightened, not worried in the least. His heart loud and thudding as the thoughts of crossing pursue him even as he tries to walk them out. He is focused at once on the possibilities if he were to succeed. Next, on if he were to be caught and then on if he were to return. To be deported, to return, to cross, to not cross, to cross, all the while meandering, one foot in front of the other along the star of the walking path, each spoke, each ray a new terrain of mind. And on such a day as he dares imagine crossing, it is as if he has nearly forgotten what he was doing in Mexico City at all. He’s grown so accustomed to his routine, this starburst pathway that is etched deep into the day, as if he’d always been here in the DF, walking this same way. He is not the man who, in 1913 and with one foot in front of the other, left his village—this first time by choice, the second time in 1922 by force—and not the man who had been pulled through countries and across borders and who now remains these many years later without his family.

  Sweat breaks out along his forehead, upper lip. He will make an exit, losing his pursuer, if there is indeed anyone who may care, may want to know his paths and routines, which are quite consistent and predictable, like himself, dressed in the same suit. Like an image on celluloid, pulled through the city on some endless reel. Faces stream past him. Conversations, shouts. There are more faces on the benches, heads thrown back in relaxation or laughter. The sounds accumulate as if gathered in the bottom of a well. White light comes through the trees, the heads backlit by the afternoon sun so that actual faces are dark, shadowed until he walks closer and features find their shapes again. Gazes lift from the pages of a newspaper. He can feel their eyes on him; falling away and then meandering back, away and back, like the gentle rock and sway of a small boat at mooring.

  He hears footsteps behind him. Loud and soft as if his follower has a limp. He increases his pace, his whole body labored. A great strain in his joints, a heavy clampdown. If he wanted to run, lift his legs, move swiftly, he knows he will be unable. He lets the weight come. Thoughts of crossing descend, to a subterranean place within himself.

  • • •

  THE FLAGSTONE FLOOR of the post office is as empty as a stage. The late daylight falls in long white rectangles along the walls. He is grateful for the silence; he works to enter such establishments in the off hours. No crowds. A large crowd disturbs him. It sends a shiver along his chest, makes his knees buckle, his jaw clamp closed. Bristling, he freezes, coming to a full stop as a strange lassitude, a near paralysis overtakes him. It is not just the sight of masses moving, but more the sound. The roar and hush. It has happened to him at Sanborns, at the bullfights. He cannot withstand the bullfight’s stadium crowd, the ring and the endless bleachers of people, all distinct, yet en masse. He feels something sinister lurking there—in a snippet of faces. The voices stalk him, approach low and murmuring before he can hear a whole rush of human sound—whispers, shouting, laughing—approaching him in one mass, like a large dark wave, threatening to drown out his voice, his very self. Where are you from? What is your country of citizenship?

  He cuts a path across the open, clear main lobby. He knows the feel of the floor beneath him, the way his shoes squeak just so along the worn tiles. There is the scent of pulp and glue, perfume and tobacco. The window to the right of the door, high up with a kind of welcoming sheen, is where he’d stood reading Julia’s first letter to him in Mexico City. She’d described their flat, the street they lived on. And she’d written out the meals they’d eaten, how the children insisted on setting a place for him. In the succeeding years there must have been a day when she’d paused before setting out the plate—there must have been that day, that moment, when she stopped herself. It wasn’t needed anymore.

  Words—throngs of them reached him in Julia’s fine hand, in the children’s slanted, fumbling pencil print—I love . . . I miss . . . I pray for . . .health . . . years . . . time . . . God willing . . . home. . . . I kiss . . . eyes. You must . . . News . . . children . . . return . . . coming home . . . good faith . . . He has read them all straight through, standing in place. Sometimes, two times over, he, lingering within the building that held their voices, delaying the moment he’d have to walk to the door, down the steps and back out into a city in which they did not exist.

  The lista de correos window is the last of a long bank of postal windows, all outlined in a filigreed copper. The marble countertop stretches across all twelve windows. Only two clerks at work. No one at the lista de correos window, but someone will come. Two postal workers push large canvas carts filled with letters. A whole mass of them—thick, thin, gray, white, light pink, or pale blue. So many letters in the world and he only wants one, at most two, but he will settle for one he thinks, just one.

  “Nombre.”

  “Austin Voronkov,” he says, his palms against the coolness of the marble counter. The postal clerk nods and steps to the side wall—a grid of cubbyholes, envelopes nestled in tight neat squares, awaiting pickup from others whose addresses are like his own: lista de correos, general delivery. He hopes for a letter, but better to trick the mind, he thinks, remembering days he’d been undoubtedly certain of a letter as days when he, almost without fail, received nothing. Defend against disappointment—one day’s lack of a letter. Nothing from the Labor Department. Nothing from the patent agents and attorneys. He works instead to be disappointed, certain that no letter has arrived so the opposite effect will occur—delight, should he actually receive a letter. Disappointment. Delight. They are two sides of a coin. Like circuitry, the current of disappointment cutting a path through the midpoint, then changing—like the flip of a switch—to delight.

  “Voronkov,” says the clerk, “Austin Voronkov?”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “No letters.”

  • • •

  IT IS A WOODEN BOX but he wishes he could remember what kind. Oak. Fir. He’s ashamed in his realization that he cannot remember the wood. It may have been burl wood, much more likely that than oak. Or walnut. He should know it though. He should remember. It once belonged to his father. His father’s snuff box. It is here he keeps some of his smaller drafting tools—lead pencils, sharpener, slide rule, and compass. Eraser. He removes the pencils from the box, the heady lingering scent of snuff now layered over the bitter sharpness of lead and metal. He sees the evenings when he was a boy, watching his father, a stout ashen-haired man, take this box off the sideboard and remove its hand-carved lid. His father had carved it too—the amber-handled knife, pressing with a steady intention and focus, creating notches, which became cross-hatchings for sun rays or water. The careful precision of a knife’s cut. The wood’s minuscule shavings he’d collect from the carving—a refuse he liked to feel tickle the palm of his hands. The box was transformed. The at one time solid, plain lid soon became embellished with ornate cross-hatchings and rosettes, crescent moons. How superstitious the old man had been. It frustrated Austin so, now remembering the days before leaving when he’d scowl in disgust at his father and mother’s insistence that he take pause and sit for a while before his journey. How callous he’d been when his father had given him the box, thinking the man old, harmless, and just a bit ignorant. Disdain for the snuff box and its symbols, significant to his parents only, and their old beliefs and superstitions—the goddess Mokosh and her hold on the grain harvest, and the lectures and reminders to wear a belt, never place a hat on the table lest you lose money (or the bed in which case you could become ill), to always leave a pinch of snuff for the domovoi, the “he,” “the other half,” the “well-wisher,” who might pass in the nig
ht and thus bless the home and harvest—were the very things he’d so wanted to throw off.

  But there it is. The box beside him. A significance in that, Austin knows. Gifts that, in the giving, were to him a kind of burden now a relic he has come to love, the border of cross-hatchings pleasing, humming of home, soil and snuff, incense and icons. And could he not still smell the clove and camphor each time he opened the box?

  Out the window of his shop, he can see that the evening has moved on without his realizing it. Cars with their lights on now, streetlamps glowing in fanned skirts, men and women walking at a more relaxed pace, digesting dinners. He’s set out the drafting papers, considering the whys and reasonings for the lack of a letter. Perhaps the designs he’d sent had been lost in the mail. It is something he knows is liable to have happened. The country’s postal system is a precarious one at best. His work may be stuck in a mail processing plant—in the state of Sonora or across the border. Stranded. The designs could be sitting at the bottom of a burlap mailbag in the Midwest or left on a sidewalk where pedestrians may now be trampling upon his envelopes unaware, leaving footprints of street dust or gutter rain, he thinks, all the while watching the passersby on the sidewalk. Watch where you step, he suddenly shouts out to them, as if they are representative of all pedestrians and so bear a responsibility, are culpable, for his besmirched drafts. Oh, but there is no way to be quite certain of any of this. As a reassurance he decides that he will simply send his designs again. He will mail them tomorrow because while he does not have any verifiable proof that these scenarios have in fact occurred, they do remain possible. He will vary the probability. Tip the balance in his favor and send them again. It will not hurt, he thinks, though he also understands that he could never really know, be certain of, anything. One could be certain of nothing.

  He runs his hand along the drafting table’s surface, scraped and worn from use. A piece of blue felt lies over one end. His tools arranged in a neat line. A few splinters of iron sit near the table’s edge. He does not like to be gone from his work area for long. After dinners, he returns, looks everything over. Tonight is no different, though it’s later than usual. The clocks are arranged on the bookshelf to the left. Alarm clocks, squat and round with bulbous bells, flat and large wall clocks, a cuckoo clock. All sit still and silent, their hands frozen as if in shock. On the shelf above are the transistor radios—knobs and tuners like eyes, watchful and reticent. Across the counter and along the back wall stands the honey-colored rolltop desk. The curtain of red and amber beads that separates the small back room from the workshop sways and clicks in the breeze.

  His first strokes are always mere scribbles, half-rendered tracings. A few fragments of an equation. Several erasures before he can fully see how the propeller should be shaped. The propeller could tilt according to the ocean’s currents, gain more power and speed and work with the current rather than against it. It is a rough sketch, repeated until he can begin the full depiction. Then, the different views. From above. To the sides. A cross section. A semi–cross section. He is working out the number of blades, the full diameter of the propeller, the blade angle and curve, the velocity of rotation, the pitch of it.

  An hour has passed. He isn’t sure. The street noise is ambient, not invading. He steps outside now into the colder late evening. He lights his cigarette and takes drag after drag, contemplating the sky and clouds of this particular evening—silver gray. He wonders what the children remember of Mexico.

  This time of day is his own, free from disturbances so that he can enter a space in his mind, create a mental image of how steam might flow more efficiently through a pipe, or what torque might provide enough resistance for his tilting propeller. How to calibrate the copper wiring to send currents of electricity along coiled springs. When he is stumped, he returns to the fundamental questions: What is light? What is energy? What is force or ether?

  There is an agitation across the street, and he can see a flurry of movement through the trees of the median. On the opposite sidewalk, a woman is running. It is not something he sees often and he turns his focus, reluctantly, abruptly from the sky and thoughts of his children to this woman. It is a light step, but apprehensive nearly, and her steps clomp evenly and then sputter, slowing to a hurried walk, then run again. He moves from the doorway and sits hidden in the alcove window, watching as she dashes down the sidewalk. She slows and the flounce of her burgundy dress settles and then, as she begins to run again, swings in one great swath from side to side. She crosses the street, and moves into the median, cutting through all its green. Soon, she is running down his sidewalk, running toward him, and in a moment she will pass right in front of him. He watches as she continues to alternate between running and walking. Whoever it is, he’ll wait, he’ll wait, Austin thinks, when suddenly she draws to a halt before his storefront, her shoulders rise and fall, she throws her hands down to her sides so that they ricochet off her hips; it is the gesture of a spoiled child. And now, who exactly is this here? he wonders. He does not reveal himself. Maybe she’ll go away. She turns on her heel, walks to the curbside, pivots once again, ducking her head fast beneath the lowered gate of the shop’s front door.

  “Buenas tardes,” she calls.

  Austin sits forward in the alcove of the front window. He presses his hands against the adobe walls, which offer a coolness despite the all-day sun that floods this side of the building.

  “Out here,” he says, walking to the door, eyes on his shoes. He is annoyed by her impudence. To come at such an hour. He sees her flinch, spring back, and, in her surprise at a voice behind instead of in front, outside rather than inside, she swings around to exit, but not before banging her forehead on the lowered grill as she steps out to the sidewalk.

  “¡Ai!” she says, wincing, her hand raised to her forehead, walking back and forth, as if in the walking the pain might go away.

  “Keep pressure on it,” he says. He looks the other way.

  “Why do you have that down so low? You could hurt someone.”

  “I’m closed.”

  “I dropped off a radio here—”

  “A good one too.” He remembers. He remembers writing down her name: Anarose, 1 P.M. “You’re late.”

  “Is it fixed?”

  “I believe I told you in a couple of hours,” he says.

  “It works? Funciona?” she says, abrupt, almost curt.

  He walks to the door, passes in front of her close enough to have brushed the starched cotton of her dress, inhale the citrus, astringent scent of her hands. He raises the grill and it clatters upward, clicking into place. He watches as she furrows her brow from the sound.

  “I would be here earlier, but the day—” She is tripping over her English. “We’re having guests this evening. It was my fault. By accident. I lost my balance and it broke.” Her words are disjointed. They don’t seem to fit together. He is looking for the radio, which sits on his workbench. She is still talking. She has followed him inside.

  “I forgot. It was so quiet. Very quiet. And then I remembered. And they wouldn’t let me go with so much to do. Imagine? So, I climbed out the back. Through the window.” He is gathering his drafting papers, placing the pile on the shelf behind him. He turns back to her.

  “You climbed out the window?”

  She shows him proof—a small scrape like skid marks along her upper shin, just beneath her knee.

  “And now you’ve bruised your forehead,” he says, his hand rising, outstretched fingers drawing an arc in the air, as if tracing her brow with a touch, a questioning stroke.

  “Have I?” She raises her hand to the red spot above her eyebrow.

  “Un poco,” Austin says. It is the longest he has ever spoken to a customer, he realizes.

  He sets the radio on the table. He reaches down for the cord and plugs it in. He is moving too slowly for her he knows. Static blares through the shop and they both jump, his f
orearm grazing the back of her hand, a delicate but calloused hand adorned with a tarnished silver ring.

  “Perdón,” he says, lowering the volume, moving the dial through first a man’s voice, then more static, guitar, drums and horns. His cigarette is still burning and the ash now drops on the smooth top of the radio. He wipes it off and then looks at her.

  “It works.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “¿Se puede?” She picks up his pack of Faros, leaning against the counter, using her arms for balance. She sighs and reaches down to rub her shin. He can smell a waft of orange blossom. A bright, slightly sweet scent.

  “I am closed. So, if you don’t mind,” he looks outside to indicate that she should leave. He does not like when someone lingers. It’s not a rudeness, though some have mistaken him for that; his evasion is his protection. He keeps an arm’s length lest they ask questions, figure him out, bring the Soviets or the FBI to his door. He cannot have come this far only to be sent back. That would not happen to him—kidnapped, questioned, killed. The dirty Soviets with their questions, these men and their power, the Americans too really: What is your name? Where were you born? What is your country of citizenship?

  “No, no,” she says, frowning, arms at her sides, a little dumbfounded, looking to the right, then left. “I will take the radio and go.” She gives him the ten pesos for his work.

  “A light though?” he says. He feels bad suddenly as if he could himself feel the sting of his unspoken rebuke.

  “Sí. That would be nice,” she says, the radio under one arm. She brings her cigarette to her lips and he strikes the match, lifting his hand to hers, hovering for a moment as the light flares and then settles.

  “Gracias,” she says, turning to go. She carries the radio under one arm, balanced on her hip. He watches her leave, his gaze drawn to her waist, the curve of her upper back.

  He lights another cigarette, gathers up his satchel, and closes the door, pulling the grill down and locking the padlock. He can feel the city at his back, hear the far distant sirens, the subtle whir of evening traffic. He double-checks the lock and then turns to find her still, smoking in front of the next storefront, the radio set at her feet. She takes one drag of her cigarette, her other arm wrapped around her waist. Like him, in those moments just before her arrival, she is staring up at the sky, the shifting clouds, immense and laden in all their now cobalt and gray hues. He walks up behind her and he can nearly hear her exhale, the anxiousness that she’d come with has disappeared.