The Invention of Exile

by Vanessa Manko

  “I thought you were late,” he says, stopping next to her on the sidewalk.

  “Ready to go back,” she says, throwing her cigarette to the ground. They both watch the last of its embers fade.

  “You sound like it’s a performance.”

  “Isn’t it?” She faces him.

  “Life?”

  “No. A party.” She sighs, then reaches for the radio at her feet and sets it on her hip once more. Her eyes meet his, somewhat startled, he thinks, pulsing and pleading in a way Austin finds, in spite of himself, alluring.

  “Here. I will carry this for you,” he says, taking the radio from her.

  “Gracias,” says Anarose. “I am just down here. Thank you,” she says again, nodding. He follows a half step behind her.

  “Don’t thank me. Just practical,” he says.

  “Thank you,” she repeats. This time it is a retort, her hint at defiance. “Thank you. Au-stin,” she says.

  “Yes. Anarose.”

  “You remember it?”

  “I try to learn names. When they are offered.” He keeps his gaze straightforward.

  The streets are filling up again. People are on the sidewalks ambling through the night. Cars pass. Some with headlights on. Others waiting for real darkness. They walk by homes with doors the color of violets—deep purple and blue.

  “I am just here. See. Look. Mira,” she says. They have stopped now beneath a stucco wall behind which sits a kind of hacienda—a fine large home of wrought iron and glass, limestone. “They’re all arriving,” she says, peering around the edge of the building. He steps out to the corner to look, but she stays behind, hidden.

  He knows the house. He has passed this corner several times. He knows all the houses, all the buildings in this colonia, but none of the occupants. Until now. He watches as the cars pull up. Fords mostly. A few Cadillacs in their colors of evergreen, cornflower blue, opaque canary yellow. Some park, others drop off men and women, each carrying a gift. The older women are in black skirts, pumps. The younger women wear flowered dresses, large skirts of crinoline and taffeta, scarves over their heads, bags like small pill boxes. He can hear their distant laughter.

  “Nice. What is the party for?”

  “Petición de mano.”

  “Who’s getting married?”

  “Me,” she says, and then begins to laugh. “No. I am only teasing. It is the daughter of the family.” She peers around the edge of the wrought iron railing and then pulls back again to stay out of sight. Austin remains at the corner, watching the guests arrive.

  “Come. We will need to go around.” She waves for him to follow as she approaches a narrow passageway between this home and the row of homes that sit behind it.

  The alleyway is dark. Water and grease combine to stretch lengthwise like a black vein. It smells of soap, onions, and gasoline, lemon and orange peel. Water is running somewhere. He follows her, stepping around box crates, a withering bed of pachysandra, stacks of terra-cotta tiles. The 7 P.M. sky is a rivulet of sapphire between the buildings. They stop in front of a dark window under which sit two wooden crates.

  “I will go in. You pass me the radio,” she instructs, placing her hand on his upper arm for balance.

  “Here?”

  “Yes.” She has stepped onto the crates, still holding his arm as she lifts her skirt slightly to raise her leg up and over the windowsill before she disappears into darkness. Then, a whisper:

  “¡Un momento!”

  “Not going anywhere,” he says. From over the high wall that runs along the back of the house comes the sound of laughter, a few discordant notes from a guitar. Austin stands very still, listening. The bright brassy trumpet announces the song before shifting to a muted, mournful cry, the laughter quiets, and the jangle and strum of the guitars keep a latent 4/4 rhythm beneath the gentle, crooning voice of the singer. Of course, Austin thinks, live music. She did not need the radio at all.

  He hears her footsteps clatter across the room, a door softly shutting, and then her return.

  “Now. I’ll take it.” She holds her arms out the window, waving her hands. The anxiousness, the haste is back. He hands her the radio. Her hair is mussed, the tendrils fall down her neck, her tortoiseshell combs are crooked.

  “There is mariachi,” Austin points out. “Why do you need the radio?”

  “For the grandfather,” she says as if it is a fact known by all of Mexico City. “He listens day and night. He will not behave without it. They need him to remain tranquilo or else the party will be ruined. We place him in the corner and he listens to his bolero, corrido all night. Here, quick, I will need it now,” she says, waving her hands again.

  She takes the radio from him and whispers thank you. Then, she is gone.

  Austin walks back and forth in front of the window as if she might return. Of course she won’t, he realizes. There’s no need now. He can hear the murmur of other voices, faint and fading along the alleyway. From the street, cars creep past, someone is calling out a window, a dog barks. Night arrives first here, in these hidden alleyways, dim and shadowed save for the squares of yellow light that pour out from back windows.

  • • •

  ANAROSE. A maid of Mexico City. Ubiquitous, unknown, dropping into his life with her radio. The complicit way she had looked at him—they’d both been revealed in this talk of life like a performance. Did he like the look of her face? The inquisitive eyes, the wonder in them when locking with his own? They seemed importunate, asking: Who are you? Where are you from?

  • • •

  LATER, NEARING MIDNIGHT, Austin returns to his rooms. He tries the front door lock with its stubborn maneuverings. He slips on the floor, just waxed. He begins his ascent up the stairs, counting out his footsteps in his usual way. The overhead lights on each landing cast a sad orange hue in the stairwell. The windows are open on each floor and from outside he can hear cars swoosh past, the nervous pedaling of a night bicyclist.

  On the twenty-sixth and final step, he opens the door to his floor. The long hallway stretches empty and remote from one window to the next. Suddenly, he hears a faint brush of fabric, a sleeve against pant leg. He spins around. A man stands on the landing below. He is beneath the stairwell window, slightly askance from it—just enough so that one half of him is in the light. Austin can only make out the full lip and quite a large indent in his chin, like a thumbprint. He wears a fine, tailored suit. Deep charcoal with white stripes—faint, as if drawn by chalk. In his front pocket is a silver pen and a slim red leather notebook.

  “You are here for me?” Austin asks.

  “Are you Austin Voronkov?”

  “Yes.” Austin steps slowly back down the stairs and he too now stands beneath the window. They are face to face. “Can I help you? Who are you?”

  “You must know who I am.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “You know why I’m here.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I have some questions for you. Certainly, you know why I’m here,” he says, cocking his head to the side and taking a step closer to Austin.

  “I’m not going to cross, if that’s what you’re insinuating.” Austin feels his chest expand, holding his breath. The drum of his heart in his ears.

  “We can never be sure. But you’ve been thinking of it, haven’t you?”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’re aware of these things so there is no use not admitting that you’ve at least been contemplating the act.”

  “Fine, then. Yes. I’ve contemplated it, but it does not mean that I will do so.”

  “All well and good, but you understand, the bureau will still need to monitor you since your word is not enough to assure us that you won’t do it,” he says, all this while taking out the red notebook, the silver pen the length and circumference of a cigarette.

  “S
o tell me,” he begins again, “in your contemplations, are you maybe thinking of trying to go through the desert in Sonora? You know those towns quite well up there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We know you worked with Anaconda, in the copper mines. Several years, in fact. You would know the layout of Cananea, Nogales, the entire state of Sonora, no doubt.”

  “I have other plans—”

  “Which are?”

  “If you must know—”

  “I must.”

  “I have my inventions.”

  “Your inventions. These are all well and good, but if these inventions of yours don’t allow you in, if the government decides you are still unfit for entrance, if there were some kind of deterrent—”

  “There will be no deterrent.”

  “No?”

  “You wouldn’t do it! Haven’t you and all your superiors, you men in power, haven’t you all done enough?”

  “We do our jobs. Our job is to be aware of any activities that may be deemed a threat.”

  “My inventions are not a threat. They are for my family,” he says. He is silent for a few moments, watching as the man scribbles down notes in his slim, red book. “Aren’t you people supposed to keep a low profile, not make yourselves known? What good does your watching me do if I can see you, know that you are here?”

  “It’s a precaution. Preventative measures, you might say.” He is still writing in his book and Austin can hear the click of the pen in the otherwise silent stairwell. “You do know you’ve been accused of anarchy and as such your activities and any relations you may have with the U.S. are always subject to the strictest of scrutiny? In our view, anything you do is a threat.”

  “And so what is it you want from me? What do you want me to do?”

  “It’s not so much that I want anything, per se, it’s more that I was sent to verify, that is, to confirm leads on any suspicious behavior, any un-American activities, below the border.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, for one, your desire to cross the border into the U.S., thus breaking the law and becoming an undesirable alien element who may be a threat to the American way of life.”

  “Look here, don’t you see, don’t you people see, if I were truly a threat, an anarchist, as you so insist, I would defy your laws and have crossed the border years ago. I would cross now if I were truly an anarchist.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No. I’m just trying to reason with you, to make you hear my side of the story. Is there anything else you want?”

  “No. Not right now. I was just sent to make you aware, as a kind of notice so that you’ll know we are watching you.”

  “I see, and now you are a threat to me.”

  “No. I wouldn’t call it a threat, merely a warning to make you aware of our presence.”

  “I am aware. How could I not be?”

  “If you do attempt to cross the border, there are consequences.”

  “I know the consequences quite well, thank you.” Austin’s heart is racing faster now. “And why not write to me on official communication? Why come here and bother me so?”

  “Am I bothering you?”

  “It feels like a taunting.”

  “No. I’m just here to assist, to help you realize your predicament.”

  “What about my family? Have you thought of that? What are they supposed to do? What is Julia to do?”

  “We know all about her.”

  “You do?”

  “We watch her too, you know. Can’t be too sure what her activities are. After all, she has a last name connected to you, and we cannot forget that she did go off to Russia with you. She may have been influenced.”

  “Influenced?”

  “Yes. Propaganda. She was exposed to it, you see, the Red Menace.”

  “She’s done nothing wrong!”

  “Still, we must watch her, you understand. America is no longer a safe country.”

  “You don’t touch her!”

  “We know she writes you letters. Several letters in the first years apart, though it seems that they tapered off a bit and now, maybe once a year, twice a year. Isn’t that right? That’s all she can do because, well, linked to an anarchist Russian—if she were to travel back here, it would be risky for her. Who knows about the children, right? Of course, they are older, but back when they were little, I wouldn’t have attempted it. She wouldn’t be able to afford it too, isn’t that right? A young mother working to raise three children alone. How would she ever have the means to travel back to you in Mexico? So, it’s just the letters. We need to monitor them.”

  “We can do that. It isn’t against the law, to send letters.”

  “No. But, again, all your activities are a threat, you must understand this, Mr. Voronkov.”

  “And you? Can you tell me something?”

  “If the information is cleared.”

  “Cleared.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Jack.”

  “Your surname?”

  “I do not have clearance to give you that information. Good night, Austin, or should I call you Ustin?”

  Austin takes the stairs back up to his hallway door. He pauses and turns to look behind him. No one is there, the stairwell now empty and still.

  • • •

  FIRST, HE CHECKS HIS DRAFTS. Then, the notebooks along his bookshelf. The papers in his drawer. All untouched. He will find a place to hide them, he thinks, folding the drafts in fours now, lunging toward his dresser, turning it on an angle in one full jerk. He stuffs the papers behind its latticed backing. Next, he remembers the loose floorboard beneath the window, and he runs his palm across the floor, his fingers grabbing hold of the wood’s edge, bent back now like a broken limb. Sweat breaks out along his neck, brow. The air in his room is too stuffy and dry. But he will not open the windows. They should remain closed, locked.

  His pulse is racing. A strain at the back of his throat. He must settle down, try to sleep. He begins to undress, washes, pulls back the covers to his bed, all the while attuned to every noise. Unsure if a floor creaking is outside his front door or from the room above, if the rattle of the glass is from the wind or someone trying to get into his rooms. The pipes creak and moan. He lies still. Thoughts. Images. They cloud in and then fade. A constant stream of words . . . deterrent, preventative measures, precaution, threat, anarchist.

  How dare they send this Jack to interrogate him! So smug and certain. His knotted-up neck, the red notebook like an insult. He was a man who had a talent for—to Austin he even seemed born into—a life of easy transition, as if his joints were overoiled so that he could slip quite easily and without effort, entering locked doors, falling into and out of cars, traveling through towns and villages, across borders.

  Anarchist. The word. It lingers. He knows it intimately, almost like a lover. He knows its connotations and contexts. It is a Greek word. Anarchos—without rulers. It is true he’d subscribed to what he now knows to be the more philosophical basis of anarchism, a kind of wish for utopia. Any man of true reason, a man like himself, would understand the beauty and sense behind the ideas, the simplicity and elegance of it—individuals could create a pact among themselves, make simple agreements to behave humanely and fairly toward one another, create a civil society based on mutuality and exchange. It is sound. It makes sense. Or maybe not—too simplistic? Too ideal?

  He turns on his side and back again. He rubs his palm across his tired eyes. But no, he was never someone who would create bombs in the basement, deliver dynamite to the front door of a senator or congressman. If he looks at the truth though, if he sorts out his beliefs in science, well, when it comes to that, then he is certainly against rulers or any governing body. He has always felt science to be the true ruler and longs
to be in a country in which he can explore and experiment with his ideas and inventions at will. He’d accepted laws, but deep down his firmest, strongest belief is that even science trumps government. It was not something to state outright. They’d seized upon it, he remembers. You have no respect for the laws of man? I am a man, I have respect for them. . . . Are you an anarchist? No. . . . Are you opposed to the U.S. government? No. . . . Are you a member of the Union of Russian Workers? Yes. . . . You don’t believe in laws, do you? I don’t know how you can call them laws. They are simply agreements. . . .

  • • •

  HE IS CROSSING the border. He is embarking on the passage, but the dream consists only of the approach and the aftermath, never the actual physical breach. Instead, he is up north in the Sonoran desert, in Cananea, waiting. The border quite near. He is conscious of the emptiness around him, and then the far-off sound of voices, men’s voices, overlapping—country, citizen, government, anarchist. The voices gather, growing louder, and then it becomes not just voices but a sense of being watched, not by any one person, but a network aware of his movements, able to see his inventions. He is holding his satchel close to his chest, all his drafting papers safely inside. He is alert, wondering just when they will step out of the invisible.

  He staggers around, trying to find his footing, though his step is light. He feels unmoored, as if he were floating, as if whatever had tethered him to the universe had snapped and he felt a falling within, still gripping his satchel. His papers are now scattered along the ground, left to a wilderness and to anyone who may take his ideas and pass them off as their own.