The Invention of Exile Read online

A HEAVY THUNDERSTORM. In early July. Austin was delayed at the factory. The force of sudden rain flooded a section of the warehouse basement and the men stayed on, trying to keep the water from damaging the machinery. In their minds, water in the gears, moss in crevices, mold within wires, and wetness causing corrosion meant days with no work and no work meant no pay. They divided into groups of five, passing buckets of water down six different lines that ran from the interior of the basement to the nearest window or door. Austin sloshed through inches of the rising water, his boots then socks absorbing the wet until he felt the chill on the soles of his feet and then the hunger too, his whole being aching for hot food. He was eager to be home, in dry warmth, but disappointment tugged at him too, sad that he wouldn’t be meeting Julia for their time alone in the park, knowing that, in this weather, she’d certainly go straight home. When he was free to leave the factory, he didn’t stay with his fellow workers who wanted to wait out the rain in the neighboring bar. Instead, he walked with shoulders curved forward, crouching away from the rain. When he entered the house, he was grateful for a moment of stillness and to have the sound of the downpour dulled as he stood in the front vestibule.

  Julia was not there. Her mother sat alone under the grim kitchen light, twisting a napkin into a coil. The sister was out looking for Julia, who had not returned, the mother said expressionless, which had an anger of its own. He left at once and ran to the park, where he found her before their bench, umbrella in hand, though it hadn’t done much good because she was soaked. The rain had tapered off just enough so that the blossoms of the linden trees could give off their soap and honey scent, the ivory yellow blooms fierce and fresh against the wet leaves. He embraced her. She was shaking. He drew his arms around her. It was the first time he’d touched her so fully and she gasped.

  “You need to get warm,” he said. “Come closer, I’m warm here.” He could feel her chill through her clothes, along her neck and wrists. Her cheeks were both feverish and damp and he brought his own cheek to hers.

  “I waited for you,” she said.

  “I should’ve come here first,” he said by way of apology.

  “What happened?” she murmured into his chest.

  “Flood at work. We all stayed. Had to clear four inches of water out of the basement. I thought for sure you’d go home.”

  “You went back to the house?”

  “Yes. Come, we’ll go now.”

  “Does Mother know?” She pulled away from him, her face slick and shining white for a moment in contrast to the drab wet gravel pathway, the rain-darkened wooden benches and the trees hanging low and weighted above her.

  “No. I just turned around and left as soon as I knew you weren’t home.”

  “She surely suspects by now. Did you tell her where you were going?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go in first,” she said. “I’ll make up some excuse. You should come in later.”

  “You’ll make me stay out in this? You’ll be sick as it is and then I’ll be next.”

  “If we go back in around the same time she’ll guess.”

  “Well, let her. We have to tell her at some point.”

  “She’ll throw you out of the house, you know.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “But it’s not going to be like this forever. We’ll have to tell them. I’ve been saving. It’ll be soon.”

  “You say all this, but you know I worry about how they’ll manage without me.”

  “She can let another room, get another boarder.”

  “But it’s not near the amount that I make at work.”

  “They can’t be your concern forever, you know. You must have your own life.”

  • • •

  “YOU AND ME. We will marry,” he had told Julia a full year after he’d moved in. It was his attempt at a kind of official proposal. Till then, it had been talk around the subject—that he was saving, what his plans were, how she might fit into that picture he was drawing out for her, with the whispers of a house. Now he’d made his intentions known.

  “And how are you so sure?” she had asked, teasing and falling back from him for a moment. The park growing more crowded as the weather softened into full summer and passersby had to filter between them, turning their heads at the abrupt way Julia had stopped.

  “It’s inevitable,” he said. “We will give each other an oath.”

  “An oath?” She was enraged. She was thrilled.

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of oath?”

  “An oath to live together, to be.”

  “Marriage.”

  “Yes. I will pass all my belongings to you. All my property.”

  “You don’t own anything.” She stepped beside him then and they continued on.

  “I own a typewriter.”

  “And what am I going to do with that?”

  “I have a farm. I will inherit a farm.”

  “But that’s in Russia. What good will that do me here?”

  “Will you take the oath with me or not?”

  “How do we take the oath?”

  “We just say it.”

  “And then?”

  For Austin, who still practiced the old customs and rituals, marriage meant kissing the icons, kneeling together, pressing lips to the Bible. Then you were husband and wife, it was merely an oath between a man and a woman. That was all. She’d agreed to it. It was a violet evening in August. The Russian Social Club’s summer dance was held in the cool basement of the stone church. She was in a lace frock, borrowed shoes with a fake rhinestone buckle; he in a navy suit and a white collarless shirt.

  “A Cossack. You look like a Cossack,” friends from work and the club teased him.

  The heavy light of August, the late afternoon light of summer’s last month, fell through the windows like ship portals. Some of the windows were stained glass so that here a circle of rose, there the blue of a star, the yellow of a leaf anointed the faces, the bodies moving.

  “My cheeks hurt. From smiling,” she’d told him. They’d come separately. She with her sister and he with some of the men from work. When he spotted her, he watched her among the crowd and he could tell she was struggling to keep focused. She half listened, nodding as she searched the room for him. Each, though, was aware of the other’s movements—she through a handful of women gathered like a bouquet at the edge of the dance floor; he tracing the back wall to greet a just-entered friend, each smiling faintly when within each other’s gaze. “My wife, zhena,” Austin mouthed to her across the room. She blushed and turned her eyes away.

  The day’s mist and light rain was like an effervescence. They were eager to move into the future days awaiting them like pristine windows strung in a long row.

  • • •

  JANUARY 2, 1920. We all carry dates within us, flash cards, silver-plated, perhaps engraved. We carry them in us like the memory of those long dead, tucked like the pages of a book, dog-eared. January 2. This was Austin’s date. His days hinged here.

  It started in rumors. Things one would hear. Nothing definite, just a sense to be watchful, aware and—to get rid of anything from Russia. Books. Newspapers. “They are taking Russians.” “They don’t do that here.” “Yes, but they are taking them.”

  He ignored all the talk. The ones who were saying it were old. He thought they were simply prone to paranoia. But he started to hear things. Anarchy, socialism, communism, proletariat, revolt. To him, they had a clanking, rattle sound, like a chain-link fence in strong winds.

  “Better throw out anything from the fatherland,” that was the advice. He removed all the Russian books from his shelves. He still had some of them—Science and Society, Aspects of Engineering.

  • • •

  “THEY’VE ROUNDED UP OTHER Russians.” Julia was wringing her hands
. She is standing at the door as Austin walks in. The house is warm, but he brings in the cold, rubbing his hands, taking hers in his own.

  “How did you hear?”

  “I’ve heard them talking at work. They are holding some in Hartford, others in New York.”

  “I know. I’m not involved in any of it.” He removed his hat, his coat.

  “Please, do not spend these evenings out anymore. Come straight home.”

  “Most of the things I go to are harmless—music, English courses, history.”

  “It’s dangerous now.”

  “Don’t worry yourself, Julia, my jewel. I’m not a worker. I’m more advanced. They don’t want men like me.”

  “Please don’t go anymore,” she says, handing him the day’s late-edition paper. He reads the headline:

  PLAN FOR RED TERROR HERE—Program of Organized ‘Russian Workers’ for Revolution Revealed—General Strike First Step—Then Armed Revolt and Seizure of all Means of Production and Articles of Consumption Criminals to be Freed—Blowing up of Barracks, Shooting of Police, End of Religion, Parts of the Program.

  He bristled, but hid it from Julia. He came home straight from work as she requested. They took walks after dinner, once, twice around the block and then back inside. He’d begun to look over his shoulder, stopped taking the newspapers from the men on corners. He didn’t stop going to the Russian Social Club though. Here, he sang in the choir, sometimes played the zither. And once or twice a treat of elderberry liquor or someone was traveling back to Russia and could send parcels, letters, postcards home. There would be no harm in going to such gatherings. He’d long ago ended his association with the Union of Russian Workers. He didn’t believe that workers and trained engineers were equal. He, with all his learning. He’d taken the courses and studied and he did not come to America to be considered equal to the mere worker, the mere assemblymen who had no design or drafting skills, no knowledge of how physics fit part to part. The workers did not know how to calibrate and compute, measure and cut to make the actual engine, gun, carburetor. Still, he read the article. The Americans were scared. He was scared. The whole country was in a panic. He practiced his English, tried to form words in his mouth without the trace of an accent. It didn’t work. He avoided speaking to strangers. He placed all his reading materials in an empty canvas bag, hiding it under the bed. Just in case.

  • • •

  THE CITY IN WINTER. 1920. A fog shrouded the warehouses and bridges, lending an ethereal quality to the night. It was opalescent almost. The mauve sky with a dark mass of clouds encroaching. It wasn’t the usual bitter, dry cold. It was damp; moisture on the air like there’d been a little bend in winter. A crack. It was snowing still. It was nice to taste the flakes on his tongue.

  Austin left the Hitchcock Company and made his way through the rows of factories that dotted the shoreline. He crossed the railroad tracks into the residential neighborhoods, with their white sidewalks and storefronts of frosted glass. Here and there he could see lights on in the apartment buildings.

  He was late. He could make out the others—a blurred image through the foggy windows of the church basement, all seated around octagonal tables or leaning against walls. Austin’s eyes were on his step, the tip of his leather boot caught the light so that he could see the water droplets, the granules of slush forming like a string of beads. His footsteps were soft on the snow-covered cement stairs that led into the basement. The room was lit low, the green sconces lining the perimeter offered the only feeble light. The heat from the radiators and corner fire embraced him. There was dampness too. Mold mixed with tea leaves. A trace of incense, pine resin, and frankincense. Someone was speaking into a microphone.

  “Kuchinsky, Marov, Matushko,” the secretary read off the names, “Michailoff, Nikitin, Petrenko, Romanovich, Saloff, Svezda, Vinogradov, Vorinin, Voronkov—”

  They were a sorry bunch, the aliens (that’s what they’d been called) with their Russian language, all hard angles and swallowed vowels. He could see the others, their eyes sunken and gray, purple around the rims. Bruised. Some had gashes above the eye, on the brow, the bridge of the nose, blood turning black as it dried, rising over an eyebrow, along a jawline.

  They were not the only ones, though he didn’t know it at the time, lined up as he was, forbidden to talk. He was in the private recesses of the mind, panicked and uncertain. But across the city and in other towns along the eastern seaboard, even the cities of the plains and far out west to places he’d never go, the police squads had come for them—the Reds. Men in overcoats, felt hats. Men in police uniforms with their clubs and blackjacks. Men in black or brown suits, men doused in bureaucracy, an officious air as if ordained. They’d raided, entered, and destroyed; rounded up men in church basements, tore into social clubs’ back rooms and mutual aid societies’ meeting halls. They broke up New Year’s Eve dances in school gyms, dances where wives in wool skirts, velvet headbands, brooches, encouraged husbands in the fox-trot—the efforts of immigrants. They stole into private parties, gatherings in boardinghouses, three to the wall. Dinner parties.

  He didn’t know all this yet. He had arrived late to the Russian Social Club meeting. And then the sound. It was like the sound of a thousand raindrops, like the batting wings of a startled flock. Austin had seen them first though—in the already snow-filled streets, through the still falling snow, the black figure was gliding. It was an image he was used to seeing. A sleigh. Snow. He did not stop to wonder at the incongruity; in America, grown men did not glide through the streets at night on a sleigh. That was a sight he was accustomed to seeing in Russia, not here. And then he saw the men dismount, a line of them running, their bodies held tight and low to the ground. The rush of boots on the stairs, like a crashing wave. They had filled the room. These men in uniforms, some in overcoats and felt hats.

  “What is this?”

  “No one move!”

  “What is going on here?!”

  “Quiet! You are under arrest.”

  “What? There is a mistake!”

  “You are under arrest for alien activities against the United States government.”

  “We have no activities against this country.” A policeman struck the shouting man with his club. The man clutched his shoulder, falling to the ground. Chaos erupted.

  “Bolshevik pigs!”

  “Please. Where is your reason?”

  “Shut up, if you know what’s good for you.”

  The sound of skin on skin was unmistakable. A blackjack to forehead, to backbone. Amid the shadows cast by the low green lights, within the staggered jumble of coats, arms, Austin could make out the coal black of guns.

  The blow was hard, fast. He was on the floor. He could taste the metallic flavor of his own blood. He’d bit his tongue. Soon he was hoisted up with the others, all shackled now, wrists, ankles. A policeman led them up the cement stairs, every once in a while came another blow from a club, a blackjack. Sometimes too the firm press of a pistol. The shackles made it impossible to climb the stairs. They had to hop. Humiliation on a dark night.

  • • •

  HABEAS CORPUS. To produce the body, to present the body. To draw the body out of thin air, to produce it bruised and broken. His body was not presented. His body was in a cold, damp cell of a deep January winter.

  Later, he would remember those cells the most. A block of darkness that held his body incommunicado. He learned to communicate with the other prisoners using a code they had developed. It involved series of taps on the walls.

  What did they want to know? If you were a Communist. If you were an anarchist. If you belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, the United Federation of Russian Workers, the Russian Mutual Aid Society, the Russian Social Club, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party. If you read the Farewell Call, Pravda, Novi Mir.

  What they wanted? Names. Confessions.

  He wanted to
step outside his body, his mind. He wanted to send his thoughts and words to Julia. For her, his body had vanished. That was knowledge he could not handle. A compassion for her despair. His body could not take it. He shook with rage, or cold, he couldn’t tell which.

  He believed in the individual. He believed in the power of science too, that its laws could govern society, save society. He did not know that such ideas could be construed so that they aligned with a kind of anarchism. He was twenty-six years old, new to the language still. Anarchism. He hardly knew what the word meant. In later years, he would see. The idealism of his youth, his vanity, his proud nature—all of these things were traits that made him an enemy to himself.

  The one thing he had not been told, the one thing he had not learned through the taps on the walls was the phrase, “I decline to answer.”

  • • •

  THEY HELD HIM for two weeks. Incommunicado. On the fifth day, they came for him. The men led him through white cinder-block corridors lined with gray metal doors. No windows. He was desperate to know the time. He’d lost track of day, of night.

  His hearing would be conducted over three days. He sat in a windowless, low-ceilinged room. Small. No larger than a broom closet. He sat facing the metal desk. A blotter and a green lamp sat on the desk. The lamp’s brass chain rattled as metal doors slammed along the hallway. His ankles were shackled to the chair. His hands were cuffed.

  A man who smelled like morning, like shaving soap, questioned him. Another served as a translator, though Austin wouldn’t need him. Another man sat in front of a small typewriter recording his words.

  His inquisitor leaned across the desk, elbows spread to either side. He bowed his head, sighed, and something about the gesture seemed too practiced, Austin felt. It was an inherited gesture, one not his own, a stolen gesture, borrowed by a boy. Austin looked straight into this man’s eyes, the honey brown of them soft, young he’d felt. He tried to show in the gaze that he knew the man was acting.

  “You understand how this works?” the man said. His voice was quiet, tired. Austin wondered if it was late in the evening rather than early morning. The man’s eyelids were puffy. Large circles.