The Invention of Exile Page 12

  “Aussie, Vera. Go sit down now and watch Mama,” she tells them. She pulls the seeds from her pocket, each wrapped in palm leaves. They fall like marbles into the palm of her hand.

  “How is it going down there?” Austin asks. It’s his first appearance of the day. She sees him leaning out, his torso hanging over the balcony. The children shield their eyes and look up. She does the same.

  “Fine. I’m going to plant now.”

  “The water will wash it away. You don’t listen, but it is true.”

  She ignores him.

  “Papa, there is no water.”

  “Not now, but with a storm—just wait until the next storm comes.”

  She listens to their exchange as she places the seeds into the ground. Vera and Aussie run around the house, staring up at their father. They tire and walk out to the farthest edge of the plateau, where it drops off to the hill and then far down to the sea.

  “Be careful,” she yells to them.

  “We will,” come their voices in singsong. She can hear his footsteps clanging down the iron staircase. He is hurrying down like she tells him not to, so fast he moves that he might propel himself over a banister. She hears the front door open, and can feel him watching her.

  “What? What is it?” she turns to him, angry. But he stands there, with that little gleam in his eye, smiling, a pleading smile that both teases her and asks for forgiveness. He knows she cannot stay angry long.

  “Julia, Julia, my jewel. Why do you not listen to me?” She ignores him. He walks closer to her, following in her footsteps as she bends to place the seeds in the ground.

  “Don’t step on my seeds with your big, heavy boots,” she tells him, pushing him away.

  “Well, if I do, it will not matter. You’ll see. The storm will come and ruin it, not me.”

  • • •

  IT CAME WITHOUT WARNING, no gray clouds hovering on the horizon at sunset. Even at night the clear sky held no sign of the early morning hours’ torrents and squalls of water.

  The winds thrash the house, the shutters spring open, banging. It feels as if the lighthouse itself might break off into the sea. Austin springs out of bed, frightened. It takes them a moment to realize it is only a storm. He runs up the stairs to the light. She runs to the windows, grabbing for the shutters. Wooden and splintered, they nick her hands. She manages to get both closed and place the plywood across the windows. The room is lit by candles and the shaft of light from above. The floor near the windows is soaking. She is wet through. Vera and Aussie stand at the edge of the circle of light, blurry-eyed, barefoot.

  The next morning is like the previous day’s—cloudless, tranquil. She is sleeping now. They are sleeping now. She wakes first, slipping out of bed, her feet bare and the floor cool, still damp. Out the windows the sea is calm as if last night’s tumult exhausted it. It’s appeased, serene. The air cool, but tinged with a heat that will grow, edging over the day’s hours.

  The shore is littered with the storm’s refuse, seaweed clinging to the sand like a residue. Wood has washed up on the shore too. Later, Austin will collect it, dry it out in the sun, maybe burn it for a fire or carve it into something of use.

  She steps outside and all seems cleansed, bleached. The cement walk is still damp under her bare feet, no longer chalk white, but a dirty gray. It scratches the soles. Branches of the palms are strewn across the pebbled ground, the burned grass, like garments along a bedroom floor. She turns to look back at the lighthouse. Disheveled. It seems as if more paint has peeled, like the earth dried and cracked. Shutters are blown off, glass shattered.

  He is right about the garden. Flooded. The white seeds are like beads unearthed. She finds them in the crevices between the rocks, floating in puddles of water, in the tufts of grass. She begins to move quickly. Her feet sink into the muddy ground, her footsteps making a sucking sound. The ground is cold. She shivers. Goose bumps. She gathers the seeds and steps into the garden and the dirt pushes up between her toes, soon her heels are stained brown, her ankles. She tries to replant the seeds, placing each down in a divot, scraping the earth back, removing portions with her hands. The dirt smells of clay, pungent and fecund, a moldy smell that almost reminds her of spring, those last days of March when the mornings were chilly but the earth had a give to it, the crocuses peeping up behind the back of the house. She misses the seasons. She tells the children about winter, and they look at her wide-eyed. They cannot believe a world of white.

  • • •

  “IT LOOKS LIKE A diamond,” she says.

  “Yes. It does, doesn’t it?”

  Austin lifts it out of the crate and the sun glints off it, sparkling, triangles of light across his face, forehead. The prisms, staggered steps of glass, smooth cut, surround the lens, which is concave like an enormous crystal eye. The Fresnel lens, shipped from Paris.

  “It’s like cut crystal,” Julia says. Vera reaches out her hands to touch it.

  “No, no. We cannot smudge it up, it will dull the light,” Austin explains, and he crouches down to her, holding the lens upright. “Do you want to know something?” She nods, smiling.

  “This light. Ah, well, we will see to the other side of the world.”

  “No, Papa. That’s impossible.”

  “Well, if you don’t believe, I’m sorry for you.”

  They carry the lens up the staircase, two steps at a time, Julia at the bottom, Austin holding the top. There are five hundred steps in all. They stop at each landing. She’s stopped counting, her arms ache, quiver; soon she no longer feels them.

  When they reach the top, the day is ending. After the work is done, after mounting the lens, they sit.

  “It will shine, reach farther. The light will reflect off the prism.”

  “But how does it create more light?”

  “Light moves in waves like the ocean.”

  That night they light it. They’ve brought the children up and the glow of it, like a chandelier, falls on their cheeks, reflects in their eyes. And the beam, a band of whitish light, reaches far out over the water, cuts through the mist. It seems to burn a hole in the dusk’s horizon and then disappears.

  • • •

  THIS HAPPENED LATER. In the copper mines of Cananea where Austin had found a more secure job as a mine foreman. 1934. After all her letters—to consulates, senators, to her mother and sister—a telegram arrives. How she’s not sure. But she envisions it on the course there, Connecticut to Mexico. In a sack, on a train and perhaps another, crossing the border, getting on a truck bound for her. It’s a wonder to her how such a fragile thing as paper, prone to tears and other destructions—fire, water—can arrive, bearing a message. Paper is stronger than one imagines. It has a power. Sometimes she’s not sure what has more efficacy—the blank page, what is yet to be written, or the page filled with words like the telegram she received.

  One letter and we will travel distances.

  VISA APPLICATION ACCEPTED.

  COME HOME.

  LOVE MOTHER.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, they do not sleep. They lie awake and stare out the window at the mines, hearing the clatter of the copper carts in the distance, echoing off the hollow land, seeing the flicker of fire in the hills.

  “You must go,” he tells her.

  “You will come with me.”

  “If they permit me.”

  “They will permit you.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What do you mean by ‘perhaps.’ They must and they will.”

  “They’ve reclaimed you. We now belong to two different countries. We are foreigners to each other.” He chuckles at the thought. She can feel the tears slide down her temples into her hair, which is spread out on the pillow.

  . . .

  THEY ARE DRESSED, she in her navy frock, hat. He in his gray suit, a white shirt, stained brown at the co
llar. It will do. Mitchell has come to take them to the consulate in Nogales. It is a two-hour drive and they leave Cananea in the blue of morning. The horizon is rimmed in white. It is like they are traveling into night, but they know it is day. In an hour, the sun will breach the horizon, golden and full. The heat will come and the haze.

  • • •

  A MAN BEHIND THE glass tells them Austin will not be permitted.

  “Deported once. It is difficult. I’d listen to what the senators have told you—if there is a chance at all, it is from the other side. You, Mrs. Voronkov, can go back now and work from there to bring him in.” They look at each other. Austin raises his eyebrows, questioning her.

  “Maybe this is so, Julia.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s your best chance,” the man says. She stands silent. Later, all she can say is how much she doesn’t like the leaving.

  • • •

  SEPARATION COMES QUITE SUDDENLY. One day you are as close as two people can be. The next, a line is drawn and you stand on opposite sides, regarding each other across an expanse that is barren and unknown. To look at him reminded her of all the ways she’d miss him. That whole rest of the day, wandering through the dusty streets and the long drive home in the blue of encroaching evening, she felt far from him as if they’d already taken the first steps away from each other and her stomach was hollow. The gnawing had begun.

  • • •

  “MY THINGS WILL GREET YOU,” he says, referring to his truck of belongings. Somehow, they think that if he sends parts of himself—clothes, shoes, books, drafts, and notebooks—he will follow.

  “We must be positive,” he reminds her. “Dream, imagine that it can happen, that I will be with you and it will be.” She smiles at him, through tears. She still remembers the green of the truck, army green, the color of a glass bottle. In a few days’ time she will unload it on the other end, unpack his things, hang his clothes, shirts and pants.

  And wait.

  He is smiling. He is composed, serene. He will not let himself be anything but, for her sake, for the children. They all know his moods too well and can sense the smallest register of panic—a flicker across the eyes, the crooked way he presses his lips together, the arch of the eyebrow.

  The train station is a crush of bodies—animal, human. They had stood in the gray room of the train depot, surrounded by people, by the dry scent of newspapers and wood and metal. It was as if they’d already left, Julia saying “My stomach feels hollow.” Women, men board the train, crates of chickens. People are hanging out the open windows. Tears.

  They’d taken the Mexican Central Railroad line, connecting to the Southern Pacific in El Paso. The train cars, the large white lettering on the smooth black surface—new trains. They stood between the X and the I. The train started and she jumped, the steam from the engine was like a giant’s sigh.

  • • •

  MEXICO CITY

  1948

  IN THE EARLY LIGHT, dawn still, Austin is up before 6 A.M. He can see out the window a sliver of the moon, not yet faded from the night sky and hanging like an eyelash. He feels the sheet over him in his small bed, the stillness of his body in the still morning, seeing if he can perhaps lull himself back to sleep even if for just an hour. He lies on his back, staring at the ceiling, also painted gray, except for the areas where peeling paint reveals a deep-sea blue green, and if he squints his eyes in a certain way or stares long enough so that his vision blurs, the successive curls of paint look not unlike a flutter of butterflies. He next tries lying on his side, legs outstretched, legs bent in fetal position. Neither position works. He rolls onto his back once more, this time bending his legs so that the sheet drapes off his knees creating a white peak, like Iztaccihuatl, he thinks, the white woman.

  But it’s no use. He is fooling himself. He will no longer be able to sleep on this morning and even though his eyes are drooping, and one or two times do actually close, he wills himself to sit up. And then, blinking, he returns to a horizontal position. Ten more minutes I will lie here awaking, he agrees with himself, listening for the usual morning noises of the boardinghouse, though because of the very early hour, the walls emit no sounds and Austin feels at once as if he were on an enormous ocean liner, adrift on calm waters, he the only passenger stirring in his berth. Soon enough though the pipes begin to gurgle, the faucets open, toilets flush, and the crack of windows opening procures the morning’s din. Footsteps above. The creak of a bed. Someone has dropped a heavy object. Someone has turned on the radio. Someone is singing. Another is shouting, but he cannot tell if the shouts are of joy and exclamation or of anger and hostility, but for the most part these noises may as well be the sounds from the structure itself, its inhabitants ghosts of bygone days, he the lone one anchored to his own time, or so he thinks for, in the years he’s lived here, he rarely encounters anyone in the hallways or on the stairs. It was as if all the boarders had come to some mutual agreement that no one person will be exiting his room at the same time as another. In this way privacy is upheld, but so too solitude and its first cousin loneliness.

  When he rises, he walks first to the window, peering through the blinds. A feeling of disquiet, but he is not sure what is causing this sudden, early-morning unrest. His thoughts still vacant from his near sedated sleep. He is now searching for last night’s worry, the idea that had vanished, the thing he should be thinking about, gnawing over in his mind. He watches the leaves in the breeze, can feel the morning air through the glass. Soon the evening returns, in pieces only—his shop, Anarose running, her radio, the window. Then he sees darkness. The full details begin to emerge, hazy still. The return to his boardinghouse, the stairs and then the unpleasant recollection—Jack. But had it truly happened? Could it have been a dream or could there now be this man named Jack watching him? If not at this exact moment, then is he in the vicinity, waiting? Has he a room in the adjacent building? As far as Austin knows that building is vacant. Could he be lurking within alcoves and alleyways? Austin remembers hiding his designs and looks around the room now, half hoping to find nothing, a confirmation that it had all been some terrible dream. He isn’t so lucky. The drafts sit where he’d hid them, strangled by the lattice bracing of the dresser like evidence of an awful crime. He tries to clear his mind, shake such suspicions away, but it seems Jack will now be something to contend with as one contends with the weather—rain or wind.

  Preventative measures . . . consequences . . . Jack knew most of his story. Austin had to admit he was impressed. They were good at their jobs; that was certain. Thorough enough, trained to focus on the detail, and, despite the discomfort, was he not curious to find out just what other kind of information Jack had on him? Austin had lived with the knowledge of his past, his travels, his struggles, internal and alone, and to speak of it with someone who knew, if not intimately, then on a purely factual basis, made him uneasy, yes, but also oddly comforted. Linked. Connected as if a line had now been drawn between himself and another. This will not deter him, though. He will proceed as normal if more on guard, his suspicions heightened. He’ll just take more precautions. He will go to the post office as usual. Certainly, there was nothing wrong with that, a man going to the post office, the lista de correos.

  He is dressing in a rush. He wants to beat the early traffic and lines. He leaves his rooms, satchel beneath his arm. The bright morning. The sky in its vast continents of distinct white and blue. He decides on an alternate route. Despite the early hour, the street traffic is thick. The sidewalk wide and pedestrians moving in staggered lines. He dodges the oncoming people while those behind him speed up and pass him, his peripheral vision extending farther than usual. A reminder, a warning only, Jack had said. Well, he can send a letter still. That will not be considered a threat. All your activities are a threat. . . .

  • • •

  THE POST OFFICE IS swarming. People stand before the windows and long lines trail out into the main lobby. All the
voices create a mass hum and he tries to shut it out. Focus. His heart racing, the beating loud in his ears. He keeps his eyes on his feet, cannot look up to absorb the sight of all this movement—a crowded chaos even if the people stand orderly enough in their lines, patient or impatient, fidgeting or quite still.

  He takes a deep breath and delves in. First, to the counters, finding an unoccupied one with space enough to lay out his designs. He will mail one set to the patent commissioner. Another set he will send to Julia. He takes a blank piece of paper from his satchel. Dearest Julia, my jewel, he begins, Dear, you must do as I say. Forgive me for asking this of you, but it’s of utmost importance. I am sending, herewith, an envelope that is to be sent to the Patent Commissioner. I implore you to please mail this on my behalf. It is imperative that this is done at once. I can’t tell you how crucial it is to my well-being and to yours and the children’s. Tell no one. Speak to no one. Too alarming perhaps, he realizes now, reading over the letter, but, well, he can no longer protect her from what is transpiring. She’ll have to do it for him. He will have to trust that she will send them on his behalf. It is all of his hope, he is availing himself of it, placing it all in her hands.

  He thinks of calling to let her know the letter would be on its way. He’s been through this before—days of calculating the cost of a phone call. He knows what he needs to do, skipping both breakfast and dinner for one day, though if he does call there is no guarantee that she’d be home to answer, and if she is, what will he say to her that he hasn’t already written in the letter? It would be a waste. He knew this line of argument, had spent years on the back and forth of it and all the thought-of calls had been aborted, he hungrier and in need of a meal.

  • • •

  HOURS LATER, AFTER LUNCH and an unsettled walk through the Alameda, he returns by bus, dust now filling his hair, a thin film of it along his brow, but walking down his street, he is relieved that he has at least succeeded in mailing off two sets of designs. It is growing colder as the late afternoon heads toward evening. Outside, the streetlights are glowing in amber orbs, awake in their oblong pools of light, spilling through the window so that Austin now walks through these before stepping behind the counter and through the back curtain. He sits on his chair, first in a kind of relief that he has made it to the post office and back without running into Jack. He had not realized how fast his heart was racing until now, the exertion having its aftereffects, waves of exhaustion come, little surges of heat.