The Invention of Exile (6 page)

He can see Julia now amid the suitcases. Pausing. Always a calmness, a complete composure. She, set on establishing some kind of stability.
Two months.
He'd be on his way—in two months, now three. One year, now two . . .
I'll be with you soon. . . . And soon I shall be with you all. . . .
The letters to or from Julia, the consulate—once a constant stream that crossed and recrossed the border, on one long line of communication whose open channel was, in the first years, strong and coursing with desire and need—
I love . . . I miss . . . I pray for . . . health . . . years . . . time—
had, in these later years, frayed. Between Austin and his family lay the border, yes, with its immigration houses, guards, patrols, and posts, but also the more impenetrable gray, white light of the embassy's windowless offices, dreary-eyed clerks and paper stamped with seals.

It was those same men in offices, the bureaucrats with their sharpened pencils, their white, starched shirt sleeves, always delving into their mire of papers, stamps, decrees that kept them apart.

Two months had long passed. It is 1948. Fourteen years. It is nearly impossible to absorb how the time has passed—he still waiting for the one great invention of his life.

“I did nothing!”

“Austin, what are you mumbling about?” Miguel asks.

“I wish I had done something. I did nothing, nothing.” The urge to shatter, to break, to feel the force of two hard surfaces colliding comes over him. It is the same impulse he'd felt the night of the arrest—January 2, 1920. The frustration that tore through him like something alive and malevolent, contained within and unable to act, to speak, caused in him such a rage that he'd thrown the meager wooden chair against his concrete-blocked cell.

“Well, that is an unfortunate situation.” Miguel adds, “But, if you're innocent, well, I'd rather be innocent, you know? Always innocent.”

“No. I disagree,” Austin says.

“But truly guilty,” Miguel offers, “that stays in you. The guilt lives. That is a kind of punishment.”

“I'd rather I'd done something worthy,” Austin argues, “something rather than nothing at all.”

“So you say you did nothing. There it is. Live with your good conscience. You know the truth. And live, live! You've got a mind for invention—invent another life, a different life.”

“I cannot invent myself out of Mexico.”

“Well, and it's not such a bad place to be, is it?”

 • • • 

M
EXICO
C
ITY
.
1946. 1947.
1948. The era of President Alemán. The shift within the city. It had begun. Austin had seen it. More automobiles, people, pollution clouding what Alfonso Reyes once named “the most transparent region of the air.” The Americans were busy stripping the country's resources—the oil, copper, silver, labor—to meet their industry's demands, an industry that provided housewives in Michigan with brass-plated sewing needles, the U.S. military with copper sheets for bullet heads, clock gears, radio wires. In among the other Russian and Eastern European refugees, the American tourists were invading the historic center. The blacklistees of Hollywood flitted over the border too, so that the
distrito federal
, DF, began to glint, gleam from the faces of the actresses, actors, screenwriters, set designers, any of whom could be found at Sanborns. Coca-Cola bottles dotted cantina tables, and whispers about the Red witch hunts and an American named McCarthy flowed through the
taquerías
, the outdoor gardens. Men in suits and fedoras dominated the
avenidas
and one had to walk to the outskirts of the city, to the old-fashioned neighborhood of Coyoacán, to find the Indians selling serapes, or the occasional sound of horse hooves on cobblestone.

 • • • 

A
USTIN
HAD
FIRS
T
COME
to Mexico City from the north of the country, where he had been working for most of the 1930s in the copper mines of Cananea, in the state of Sonora. It was work that had lasted, had allowed him to support his family the first years they'd arrived in Mexico after fleeing Russia. When Julia and the children were granted visas to enter the United States, Austin had to stay behind, waiting until he could join them. After one year, then two, and when the copper mine closed, he, with others in search of jobs, headed for the city. The electric company, it was rumored, was hiring. That was in 1937. He did not know Spanish fluently, but knew—by that time he'd been in Mexico for six years—enough to get by. He'd been punctual and precise. He could soon read the power grids of the city. He knew the voltages coursing in currents through transformers scattered amid the city streets. It had been through the electric company that he'd found a boardinghouse in the historic center. His room had cost only ten pesos a week. That price bought a bed, two windows (for he had a corner room), a dresser, closet, a washroom, a desk and chair. It would be enough, for now, he'd thought then, saying as much in a whisper to the proprietor, one of those middle-aged men in impeccable dress—always in white shirt and black pressed pants—who had handed him a map of the city with a room key affixed to a wooden circle. Austin's room number (302) was carved crudely into the surface and dyed with red ink.

Later, alone in his room that first day, with the city blazing white through the windows, Austin spread the map out on the bed. He took a blue pen and circled three locations: the boardinghouse, the Palacio Postal, a grande dame sandstone building that sat at the corner of Calle Tacuba and Cárdenas, and the U.S. Embassy far down the long diagonal of Paseo de la Reforma
.

It was a start.

That same year, 1937, another Russian émigré—like Austin, born in the province of Kherson—ambled off a boat in the Atlantic port town of Tampico. Trotsky with his Natalia. Bespectacled. Exiled. Roaming “the planet without a visa.” The pictures were in the newspapers. Pale-skinned, exhausted, squinting in the white light, he stood surrounded by men in fedoras, by Frida, by General Beltrán who, Austin noted, wore a uniform, the brass buttons circles of sunlight, brass made from the copper of Cananea, zinc too. Headlines ran in
El Universal
,
Reforma,
variations on the same four words: Cárdenas, Trotsky, asylum, Mexico. The dirty Bolshevik, was all Austin found himself thinking. A whole world had vanished. White Russian officers now taxi drivers along the
quais
and boulevards of Paris, now baristas and waiters or porters at La Coupole, La Rotonde.

He had ended up in the same country as Trotsky. The man who, if not single-handedly, then certainly indirectly, caused him to wander Europe before refuge came through Mexico. The irony. Did he gain any solace from the fact that they were now both exiles in the same city? He instead felt a deep fatalism at the inkling that maybe the gods still held some sway, poking and prodding men of all stations, no matter their fierceness, nor the ferocity of their convictions. In the deepest sense though, he saw it as mere absurdity.

For several years, the boardinghouse was sufficient. His two-room home, offering just enough space. He kept his shoes under the bed—a pair of working boots, a pair of thin-soled loafers. In his closet hung one suit, a sweater and overcoat, and two button-down shirts of light blue, frayed at the collars and cuffs. Across the street, a small coffeehouse offered a buttered roll with cheese and coffee for one peso. He spent some mornings here, and within a month's time he no longer had to place his order. He simply arrived, sat at his appointed spot while the waiters prepared his coffee and roll, delivering it with a simple nod of the head. At the local market, he bought an orange, sometimes a handful of grapes, but usually just an orange. After work hours and on weekends, he began a routine of walks—through different neighborhoods and then in the Alameda
park which filled on Sundays with the Indians'
puestos
,
mariachis, and the city's poor clasped close and dancing.

The boardinghouse was meant to be a temporary home. The main sitting room's puckered wallpaper, the wicker furniture, peeling, the worn staircases with their steps of gray ovals, the long corridors filled with the outlines of former decorations—postcards, calendars, movie posters—all of it a reminder of men coming and going, fleeing from or stepping toward. The sparse rooms were a way to gain one's footing before the next contraction of life thrust one this way or that. If he stayed in such a place, if he never thought of it as home, he could always be on the verge. He too could be—one day—one of the leaving.

Years passed: 1937, '38, on into the forties. The proprietor retired; his son took over. Belles Artes sank another quarter inch, its Carrara marble too heavy for the soft soil as if the old water canals of the ancient city were exerting their legacy in a slow, steady reclamation of space. Cárdenas turned over to Camacho and then to Alemán. Trotsky was assassinated. The war ended. The Soviet Union bought the Condesa de Miravalle's hacienda to house its embassy. And far back the walls of his village—stone by stone—began to disappear, the foundation of childhood now intact only in memory, he now an exile of two countries.

 • • • 

A
S
ATURDAY
MORNING
.
Bright,
a slight chill. The line stretches along the narrow sidewalk. Women in their floral skirts of rust, lime, black, shifting weight, hips thrust out, a sigh and slump against the brick wall. People hear about it at market stalls, word spreads through women's whispered conversations, the maids of Mexico City. A secret shared.

“He can fix anything,” they say. “These Russians. From such cold climates, it is good for the brain. Makes it exact and precise. Like ice. It's in them.”

These Saturdays are Austin's busiest days. The whole street has a different feel, people walking, returning from the markets with their purchases—straw bags laden with avocados, mangoes. There are chickens, feet tied with red string. Cake boxes, hat boxes too. The schoolboys are on the corner, kicking a soccer ball back and forth. The older ladies who gather each morning in the park across the street are joined now by grandchildren, plump hands reaching for a slice of peach, struggling to get a grasp of park bench. The cars glide by with a serene patience for there is little traffic. The maids of Mexico City, rising early, are either dispirited and gloomy or relieved, but several wait in line.

Already the sun is strong, even for a January morning. He will move inside to his shop soon, but in these midmorning hours he likes to work outside, a table placed on the sidewalk. The surface of it is littered with broken remnants—a wind-up alarm clock; a watch, its face shattered; a knotted silver chain; a clip-on earring, clasp loose; a pocket watch, an egg timer. These objects of the everyday. Gadgets of life and small hours. A cardboard tag is tied to each with twine. “Maria 12pm,” “Constantina 12:30pm,” the tags read. A powder blue telephone hangs off the edge of the table, its receiver dangling above an old cash register; silver keys like sparks in the noon sunlight. His hand aches. The palm holds a dull throbbing and, as he works, he pauses, setting down the wrench, screwdriver, to knead his tired tendons, the smashed nail bed of his thumb. Still, he likes the feel of the tools in his hands, his mind following the logic in mechanics, what bolt needs tightening, what hinge needs loosening to create the correct torque.

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.