The Invention of Exile

by Vanessa Manko

  The sun now shines down the middle of the street, shadows underfoot. Austin scans the line—women checking watches, talking. Some stand with arms crossed, bags dangling off a wrist or shoulder. One woman bites her nails. Another opens and closes the clasp of her purse. All are in haste, eager to finish this one of many errands before launching on to the next task, and the one after that.

  “The radio is broken,” a woman says, setting her bag on the table. He looks to her, then to the radio.

  “You see, the knob, the tuner—here, it just spins round and round,” she explains.

  “You use it often?” He turns the radio over in his hands.

  “Does that matter?” she says.

  “Not really.” He shrugs. “But you know, usually a woman knows how often the things she owns are used.” He does not look at her when he speaks. He keeps his eyes on his hands.

  “A woman, but not this woman.”

  “Every day?” He looks at his nails filled with grime, grease. He is suddenly ashamed of his own, deformed thumb.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “If I had such a fine radio, I’d use it every day.”

  “Can it be fixed?”

  “One can tell a lot about a household from the use of its radio,” he says, taking a screwdriver from his back pocket, unfastening the back plate.

  “Can it be fixed?”

  “Your name?”

  “What?”

  “I will need your name. For pickup.”

  “It can be fixed then?”

  “Yes. In just a few hours.”

  “Tell me your name first.”

  “My name?” He looks to her now.

  “Yes. You asked for my name. I ask for yours.” There is defiance in her stance, her shoulders set square with a slight lean forward.

  “Austin Alexandrovich Voronkov,” he says, his eyes back to the radio.

  “Your name is as long as a Mexican’s.” She gives a little laugh.

  “Is that so? And you are?” he says, his eyes meeting hers, which are round and large, nearly black. She is very beautiful. Dark hair like the smooth gloss of a black Cadillac, the eyes intense and eager in their deep hollows.

  “Anarose Luisa de Soto.”

  “Done in an hour,” he says. Brusque. In no mood for pleasantries. The sting of the consulate’s rejection still so fresh. These past few days, he’d felt the world itself was closing in on him, his sight lines narrowing to his very feet—one foot in front of the other. These repairs, simply a trade by chance. He, falling through positions, stations in life—engineer, inventor, repairman. When he lines them up, thinks of the transitions from one to the next, it is enough to cause vertigo. But he can remember how easily all this began. A Kodak camera. Next a transistor radio. Then a fan. Several fans left overnight like offerings placed at an altar, though the altar was merely Austin’s boardinghouse room door—five to six fans lined up like retired airplanes, the steady cross breeze from the hallway windows enough to spur a lazy rotation of the opaque charcoal or iron blue propellers. He sets the radio to the side, writing Anarose on a piece of cardboard. When he looks up, she is gone.

  • • •

  AT 2 P.M. HE PACKS up his work, folds the table, and places his tools into the metal box. He carries the table under one arm, toolbox cradled in the other. He enters his shop, open to the street, setting the table against the front wall before locking the door and walking two doors down to his boardinghouse. He takes the stairs up the three flights to his room. Ten years already that he’s been here. He never imagined he’d have such a place, need a somewhat permanent home in which to reside. Can he call it home? No. It is not home. Not that.

  He makes his way up to the third floor, counting the stairs out of habit. At the twenty-sixth step, he enters his hallway and counts the remaining ten, or sometimes twelve, paces to his door. His rooms are cooler, as if they’d taken a deep breath in the colder morning air and had been holding it in all afternoon just for him, just so that he can return to a cool, comfortable place, while outside is in its usual state of brightness and dust.

  He pours himself a glass of water from his still full jug and drinks half the glass in three gulps, the temperature lukewarm. He sits at his makeshift drafting table and opens the new package of paper he’d purchased earlier that morning. Once out of its brown wrapping, it has the same familiar scent of mothballs and freshly cut wood. He sweeps away the small dusting of eraser shavings that has congregated along one edge of his table. Next, he lays the paper down and it feels good beneath his hands—his palms across the cool white surface, admiring the flecks of brown pulp, some pink, as scattered and haphazard as the stars in the night sky.

  The paper, for Austin, is most important. The texture and feel, the way the pencil scratches slightly across the page. The paper holds on to the lead a bit. It doesn’t slip and slide so that his hand must struggle to keep the lines in place. If anyone knew precisely to what kind of lengths he goes to secure such paper—once erasing twenty pages of drafts of old ideas to preserve sheets—they’d think him mad. And, well, perhaps he is.

  From out the window, the close and distant noises come—doors opening and closing, trucks spitting out exhaust, a bus screeching.

  Austin’s inventions. They are based on principles that cannot be seen: a belief in ether, wind, in force and gravity. He wants to harness the power of wind. He understands ether as a mode of transference. Gravity itself a power to work with, instead of against. He is still waiting for the one great invention of his life. Then, surely, he’ll be allowed in, praised even. Lauded. A personal apology from Truman himself! On official letterhead! With the presidential seal! A communication from the White House. He will soon show them, they’ll soon see. He knows the rules that govern induction, how to measure amperes and voltage, how sound travels on waves, and how the voice can overcome distances through a combination of oscillation and crystal conductors. That amazes him still, even during the long days of work when he looks up to find himself quite alone in the mournful hollow of night.

  He sits now tracing circles with the tip of a pencil that is neither too sharp, nor too dull. The late afternoon sunlight falls in shards: bars of light along notebook bindings, lines of light thin as string imprinted on a compass leg, the table’s edge. Already the drafting paper is half filled with arcs he has made by compass. It is a messy process. The lead pencil marks, the rubber residue of the eraser shavings, his hands covered with the resin of lead, the coal marks along his left palm. He draws and calculates, numbers the figures, writes out specifications for each section of the hydropropeller—propulsion turbines, the rotation mechanism. He sets down his pencil and picks up a ruler, sets down the ruler and switches it for a compass, and repeats the same exchange of instruments until he is ready to transfer the designs to a final draft.

  When he needs a break he stands, walking back and forth between his rooms—immaculate rooms, nothing on the surfaces. All unblemished and blank, the better for ideas to emerge out of the space of life. In the mornings, he does not turn on the lights. He prefers to wake with the dawn, the light bright and blinding, fingering its way into the room of grays and blues. The wood floor is gray. His door is gray. The walls a faded blue. He has little furniture. A small sofa. A table he’s made himself—the wood unfinished. It doubles as a work and dining table. This is where he eats. This is where he invents. The lights stay off in the afternoons too. In the evenings, long after dinner, he measures, setting numbers into equations. He likes to work as the natural light fades, as night comes on, the windows purpling. When it grows too dark for him to work, he clicks on a lamp, gold and black, a lamp he’d fixed, though the customer never returned—his abandoned lamp. It reminds him of home, the first home, Varvarovka, in Kherson province.

  He will need to write to her, he knows. He runs a hand through his hair, pulling, tugging at the ends. He sighs, pacing t
hrough his two rooms. Over the years, he has pieced together their lives. By now he knows that Julia works in a bakery, that she is lucky to have any work at all. She, a single mother, raising three children through the Depression. There is still no money. Her mother helps when she can. The boys had collected scrap metal and rubber tires for the early war effort. There was Russian school at night and Russian Orthodox services on Sundays. Julia had sent letters, of course. How it would be if you could see them dear. They were always encouraging letters, sometimes scolding ones too—do not fall into too much gloom, keep your mind occupied. And she wrote of her efforts with the senators, how much interest they took in the case. In the first years apart, the letters came with notes from the children, drawings. Sometimes a letter would not reach him and so the next letter he received would refer to events he was not aware of, a cause of much confusion, and sometimes a letter he sent would take two months, others two weeks, so their communication was nonlinear, circuitous, fragmented—letters sent like skipping stones over water.

  She couldn’t come back to him, they both knew it. With a last name connected to an anarchist Russian—if she were to travel to Mexico, they certainly wouldn’t ever let her back into the States. And the children—they would grow up to be Americans, that had been the agreement, no matter what. But, despite all this, there was a part of him that secretly hoped she’d come for him.

  He steps to the window, places his hands in his pockets, and rolls back on his heels, surveying the collection of small cacti and succulents he has arranged on his windowsills. They require little care, but still he is diligent—water once a week, full morning sun, gluttons for sun, really. The aloe and agave, the ghost and amethyst plants, the prickly pear and blue myrtle. Every so often one will bloom. When that occurs, always like a small miracle, he’ll sketch the flower into his notebook of faded pages—elongated petals, alongside his blueprints, numbers, and symbols. He likes the amethyst plant the best, the rounded, plump leaves like moonstones. He runs a hand over the smooth surface of the leaves and then moves his palm above the ghost plant, feeling the slight prickle of needles like iron bristles.

  Out the window, pedestrians amble by, some loping, others with a vigor in their strides. One man walks back and forth in front of the apartment building across the street. The man is waiting, it seems, and Austin watches, his pacing as balanced, measured as a metronome. He cannot make out the man’s face; the hat shields the eyes and the sun casts a shadow along his lips and jaw.

  During all aspects of waiting or stillness—on lines, watching out windows—moments return. It could be a look or word passed in the street, a trigger. A scent of winter and snow, something clean and cold, or sometimes too the heavy, thick incense of a ceremony or a chanting, cheering, and he is back there, in the church basement. The secretary reads off names . . . Voronkov. The lights dim. A winter night, early in the new year of 1920. It’s a point he returns to, circles around and delves back into in a second, the memory of it a hinge—of a door, of his life really. In what amount of time—it took maybe twenty minutes? The rush of boots on the stairs, the blackjacks and guns, shouts and shackles . . . You Communist pig. Anarchist . . . And in Russia, the shots echo through his mind, speaking to Julia, do not look, do not look, he’d told her. The insolent stupidity of the Bolsheviks with their dirty, filthy hands, more like animals than men, Julia had always said. Her words come to him, “. . . when I think of all our adventures and you the only person who knows as well as I, I miss you. . . .”

  It’s when one least expects it really so Austin is always hyperaware. He grabs the cord of the blinds, tugs it to the right to lower them, and then thinks better of it—best not to bring attention to his window. He lets out a little laugh. Ridiculous. The man is simply waiting. It is hard to shake the habit though, watching, waiting. He remembers the other windows—a church basement window, a window beyond a lace curtain, and the men that had stood on the other side of each of those panes—worlds apart. Still, he wants to see the face; he’ll be able to spot a Russian in a moment—one eye lock is all it will take and a whole world’s worth of animosity, suspicion, and betrayal will be exchanged. An American too, one of these FBI agents he’s hearing about. Square jawed and broad shouldered. The distinctions hardly matter, amount to the same in the end, and he can nearly hear the feet on the stairs—clomping, loud and furtive voices. “He’s here. This one.” The knock on the door. And why not? If not now, then one day soon. Three clear knocks, a rapping on the door. Any time may be appropriate. Bang, bang, bang. They may crowd into the room, demanding, “Your name? Your papers.” And what then? He has none from any country. Then it will be over and then why not? Well, fine, he thinks, I’ll hand myself over instead, get it over with if they’ve come this far. And then what? Deported, repatriated back to Russia, a more official way of stating he’ll be sent straight to Siberia. He can nearly feel his fingertips stinging from the strike of an ax on frozen wood. Knock. Knock. Let them come then. Fine. Take me away, he thinks, as he blinks once, twice, shakes his head and finds himself after all this time staring out the window, his arm raised halfway to the blinds, arrested in motion, the ache along his muscle, mouth agape like someone shocked into a statue. No. He will not pull the shades down, not bring attention to his window. But now he is being ridiculous, or is he? Never mind, never mind, he thinks, shaking his head, frowning, disappointed with himself for letting his mind go so far astray, to have followed such a path when he’d begun the afternoon, quite harmlessly, about to set to work; oh the places his mind goes to sometimes, to where he stands now, in silence, in the quiet of his rooms, waiting for the knock on the door that will never come. Maybe.

  The man breaks into a smile as a woman approaches. She takes his arm and they dash into the doors of the apartment building. Austin feels foolish, though it takes a moment for his heart to settle, to stop racing. Is there now something like envy flooding up in him? To have smiled so warmly toward another, he thinks, wondering if the couple are lovers—most likely.

  He walks into the bedroom. Small, tidy. The bed sits in the middle of the room, a wool blanket of faded stripes—orange, blue, red—lies tight across the thin mattress. The sunlight arcs along the dresser’s oval mirror. He stands before it now, chest high. He opens the first drawer, feeling for the slim goldenrod envelope no larger than a two-hundred-peso bill. He walks to the worktable, and the photographs fall into his palm. He places each one onto the table, his fingers graze the corners of the photos, a task that procures a faint flicking sound, squares and rectangles in a line along the tabletop. In the first year when they believed it would be just that—one year, one of letters, telegrams—he’d kept their photographs on display. Little shrines for each image. A lock of hair tied by red ribbon, a sewing thimble, an earring. No longer.

  Here, Austin and Julia, the largest of the photographs, square, a thin rim of tarnished white. Seated side by side, unsmiling, holding hands, torsos inclined. Faces set squarely toward the camera. Julia’s hair is off her face. Two plaits swept down over her ears. She stares out at Austin now with that same direct stare—unabashed. It was what first drew him to her, a look on the stairs, a mistaken brush of hands as they passed—she going up, he down.

  And here is the house on Seaview Avenue, Connecticut, 1917. A house like the others, lined in a row—white with one bay window. A three-story house with its small front yard, grass in little tufts. The final photo is a family portrait, taken later, in Cananea, closer to the time of parting. No trace of their travels, nor their impending separation, and so a poignant image. A moment captured. A family assembled. Would there be any others?

  Julia is seated, hands folded in her lap. The children on either side of her. She is wearing a dark dress, a shawl draped over her shoulders. Her boots are black, ankle lace-ups with a sturdy heel, the leather dull. Vera leans on Julia’s knee, clear eyes like his own, her bobbed hair adding a modicum of insouciance to her young gaze. And the boys: his Aussie, sti
ll in breeches, and his Sonnie, chin tucked, eyes peering up and out, not without reservation because, Austin remembers it now, the youngest boy had been frightened, scared of the black box with the draped sheet, the folds cascading like some black ghost. The flash of the bulb, the way it exploded light.

  He looks at himself now. How confidently he stood, lording over his family, a proprietary hand placed on Julia’s shoulder. Had he done that of his own accord or had the photographer instructed him to do so? It was certainly not his gesture. Or, then, maybe it was. The proud callousness of youth, he thinks. He’d learned now, knows, that one owns nothing. Possessions—whether things or people—all an illusion. How easily the language upheld the fallacy—“my wife,” “my children,” he’d said at the embassy. He shudders to think of the white marbled walls, that floor. The nasal-deep voice of the young clerk, “We are not permitted.”

  A backhand sweep and the pictures scatter. The click and flutter of them as they fall to the floor. His palms press against the table’s edge, banging the wall once, twice. The day’s clouds pass over the sun and the room grows dark and then light, and then dark again. In periphery, he can see the branches stretched across the window, full and pulsing on the little wind. A bus passes, exhaling its exhaust through the window. Below too, men and women walk past like the steady flow of days. He wishes, longs to be one of them.

  The floor is littered with the photographs; white squares facedown. He sighs and he picks them up—first one, then another. He stares into a younger self, and he can tell by the eyes, his eyes, that he had been a happy man.