The Invention of Exile Read online

  The homes here sit behind wrought iron railings, gates and doors with black ornamental pickets like pinstripes. The sun paints lines of light along cornices. In the distance, he can hear merchants wheeling their goods to puestos, the open-air market stalls. They are seeking out their preferred corners, setting up makeshift stands, gathering now to smoke, talk, wait.

  He pulls a wrinkled envelope from his satchel. He stops to check the contents of the envelope. It is the third time he has done so this morning. Everything is in order: Birth certificate. Nansen passport, though expired. Notarized letters from officials. Affidavits too. A postcard sits at the bottom of the envelope. Tipo de mexicanos indígenas. Type of indigenous Mexicans. “To my Sonnie,” he’d written. “Postcard for imagining Mexico.” He’d signed it “Love, from Father.” It is a colored postcard, but like the Technicolor films, it has been shot in black and white, retouched with the hues and shades of Mexico—the scarlet serapes of the Indians, their wide-lipped, camel-colored sombreros, the brown of burros crossing a small brook, the milk-blue water in the foreground of the otherwise craggy terrain. The terrain consists of boulders, a dirt road veering upward through coffee trees, trees of willow and ash, and lush green ferns bowed beneath the weight of orange orchids. The boy will like it, he thinks. He’ll drop the postcard after. It could be the last he’ll need to send.

  The empty streets, the ease of the city in the early morning meets his hopeful frame of mind—perhaps it could be different; this year could be different, he’s thinking. A sudden, swift crack of a window breaks his thoughts. He sees the flash of it opening, the pane of glass reflecting the sky in first a shimmer of white cloud, then blue. The street settles into calm again and he steps back onto the sidewalk, turning down Avenida Sonora, where he can take a camion to Paseo de la Reforma.

  • • •

  THE LIMESTONE SIDEWALK WINKS with flecks of mica. He takes the stairs two at a time. He walks to the entrance beneath the wide, shaded portico. The glass doors before him are rimmed in silver chrome. Inside, his footsteps echo down corridors. There is a resigned, empty air to these hallways—spacious and wide, still enough to inhale the scent of dust, feel the coolness of marble. Both senses spur in him the old, familiar tightness—first in his stomach, then traveling up to his chest. He is early, but the lines already come halfway down the corridor. He can hear the requests for birth certificates, applications. Next, demands for identification. An address. A sponsor name. From above comes the boom of weighted doors slamming closed.

  He reaches the head of the line. A man in a blue uniform gives him a number. It grows clammy in his hand. Up ahead the waiting room is full and appears to breathe from the collective inhalations and exhalations of uncertain men and women. Glances. Judgments. He walks down the center aisle; in the periphery the benches sit like book spines. Over the years, he’s come to know the room well—its scalloped moldings, marble floors of gray and black swirls, the rows of floor-to-ceiling windows like tall glasses of water. He knows too the way the room is awash in worry: in the faces of men who sit staring into a middle distance; in the women’s hands as they attend to their handmade laces; in others reading, eyes rising over the edge of a newspaper.

  He settles into a place on a bench at the back of the room, taps his feet and looks at the worn tips. He hopes that they will not notice his shoes, that no one will look too closely and think him useless. That morning he tried his best to polish away the scuffs and had even taken a brown pencil to color in a bit of the tips. To his surprise, it worked quite well and he wondered why he had not thought of such a trick before. It may have worked in his favor, because well, from afar, do they now not look like a brand-new pair of shoes, shined and polished? He takes in the room. There is something about the entire building that threatens an impending scolding, as if, at any moment, he will be called out, “You there, come with me.”

  One hour creeps into two. The rustle of turning newspapers, footsteps coming close and fading away, whispered exchanges. His eyes grow heavy, closing for, he tells himself, just a moment.

  • • •

  “FIFTY-TWO. AUSTIN VORONKOV.”

  He feels his shoes slide out from under him. There is a bolt of cold to his throat. He is not quite sure if he is standing. He feels a little surge of blood from his lip where he’s bit down. He is before the glass partition, staring at the clerk. He has not encountered this one before. The clerk has a long, thin nose. Fine light hair. Not even a strand of gray. Too young for this kind of work, Austin thinks, but then realizes, hopes, that it may work in his favor. The boy might be eager to help, be accommodating. How simple it could be. One small decree. A single stamp and a life could change, a train could pull out of the station and a border could be broken.

  “Documents,” the clerk says.

  “Good afternoon,” says Austin.

  “Documents.”

  “Everything is in order,” Austin says, patting his hand on the envelope. He passes the documents beneath the glass. His heart is racing. He wonders if the actualization of what is longed for can ever match what it is to be just within reach.

  “Quite a lot of papers here.”

  “The letters there are written on my behalf. And these here are my inventions. You’ll see that I have communicated with the U.S. Patent Commissioner. That is my oath of a single inventor.”

  “Not necessary. Country of origin, please,” the clerk says, arranging the documents into two separate piles. The muffled patter of a typewriter fills the silence.

  “Country of origin, please.”

  “Russia,” says Austin, pressing his shoulders back, feeling his neck crack.

  “The Soviet Union?”

  “Russia.”

  “You are a citizen of what country?”

  “You see—”

  “You are a citizen of what country, Mr. Voronkov?”

  “My wife . . . she is American.”

  “What is your country of citizenship?”

  “No country . . . But my wife . . . she is American.”

  The clerk places the documents back into the envelope.

  “My children are Americans—” The clerk rises, tells Austin to wait, and then walks past the long line of clerks seated at the same standard-regulation, blue-gray desks, reaching the end of the room and passing through a windowless metal door the color of slate.

  “Shit.” Austin stamps his foot, sighs. He keeps his eyes on his hands. He’s come this far, might as well see it through: Keep calm, he thinks.

  The clerk returns, carrying a manila file folder. He is half smiling, half frowning. It is a small effort at offering a kind of sympathy. Smug, Austin thinks. But what did this youngster know? This young chap who gets to come and sit here at such an organized desk, saying “yes” or “no.” Clear-cut. Simple.

  “So?” Austin says. The clerk sits down. He begins to write on a white slip of paper covered with blue lettering.

  “Is it okay?”

  Silence.

  “I’m afraid we aren’t permitted to authorize any visa for you,” the clerk says, tapping the file with the tip of his pen. “D.C. handles your kinds of cases—”

  “You see. I can explain about the file,” Austin says. His tongue is dry. A pulsing in his neck persistent.

  “Yes, you can, sir. But it doesn’t help. We’re not permitted to handle your case. It’s D.C.”

  “I come here every year and I bring you people the same papers that you require. And then I’m told the same thing. D.C. It’s up to D.C. Waiting on D.C. and then I’m told to return.”

  “We can’t reverse a deportation charge. That’s up to”—the clerk pauses—“Washington. I can give you the D.C. office to write to.”

  “I’ve written to that office. I hear nothing.”

  “It’s the Labor Department,” says the clerk, exchanging his pen for a stamp.

  “I wrote
to them. My wife has written to them. Please.”

  Silence. The sound of another typewriter. The clerk bows his head. He sets down the stamp, brushes a bit of hair out of his eyes. Austin sees the ink stains on the edge of his palm, his fingertips. He is not so neat and tidy, is he. Their eyes meet. Hazel—it is the first prolonged eye contact the two have made throughout the exchange.

  “Mr. Voronkov, you are an anarchist. You were deported from the U.S. in 1920. This office cannot help you. It’s D.C. I’m just not sure what to tell you. Deported? An anarchist charge? Don’t you see?”

  “I’m not an anarchist.”

  “That’s not what the file here says.”

  “My children are Americans. Surely that must mean something?”

  “No. I’m sorry. Listen,” he begins again in a whisper, “it says that you are an anarchist. You are, by some definitions, un-American. Unfit for entrance. You’ll have to wait for Washington to overturn such a charge.”

  “But please, between you and me, there must be someone here who can help me. Contact Washington? At least inquire—”

  “We’re not permitted.”

  Silence. He can hear a typewriter striking up from behind a row of filing cabinets that stand like sentries.

  “Not permitted,” Austin repeats.

  “No. Look. Do you see what it says here?” the clerk opens the file, turning it upright for Austin to read. The clerk’s cuff links, ring, and watch face catch the light. “See this? Clause ‘d’—”

  (d) That said AUSTIN VORONKOV is an ANARCHIST and believes in the overthrow by force of violence of the Government of the United States and that he disbelieves in and is opposed to all organized government.

  “I can explain,” Austin pleads.

  “Still, our office is not perm—”

  “All right, all right,” Austin says. He is leaning close to the glass, can feel his cheek graze its cold, smooth surface. The row of ceiling lights shine in a line of white along the pane. How he’d like to shatter the glass, the typing like steady pinpricks. His breath fast and quick. He sputters his lips, bows his head, and steps away from the partition, arms slack and at his sides, though he feels a throbbing along his jaw and neck. He shakes his head. Not permitted, not permitted. He takes his first slow steps away from the partition. He is letting it settle in with each stride, not permitted, not permitted. And what is this now, but panic, the heart flutter and chest constricting, the sudden blush as if he’d come down with an instant fever. His envelope, his postcard! He looks around. Why do all these people stare so? The clerk is tapping on the glass partition. He waves Austin’s envelope in irritation. Two long strides and Austin is back before the clerk.

  “Not permitted,” Austin says, grabbing his envelope of documents. “Well, here is what I’m permitted to say to you: I see that you are married,” he continues, motioning to the small gold band on the clerk’s ring finger. The clerk retracts his hand.

  “You see—when you have children of your own,” Austin says, “remember me and how you were ‘not permitted’ to help me. Remember me. Does your stamp there show that I am a husband, a father? No! So, I don’t want it! You have it! Why should I want a stamp from a country that threw me out? You say, ‘yes,’ and stamp, and ‘no,’ and stamp. You are a cog! Do you realize this? A cog. You are a speck on the surface of my life! So you can have your stamps and your papers and your ink-stained, filthy fingers and when you go home at night, kiss your wife, eat dinner, put your children to bed, think for a moment if you were denied all of it, all of it—the smell of your wife, the sticky hands of your children, the earth and air smell of their hair from play outside. Think then for a moment and remember me. It is you, and all the men like you, who have caused boys to have no father, a girl to have no father. I did not make this choice! So, please.”

  “We cannot do anything,” the clerk says. He swallows, his Adam’s apple like a knot of contrition. He sits motionless.

  “Please.”

  “I’m afraid we are not permitted.”

  • • •

  A CITY AWAKENING. Siesta is over. The sky has grown crimson and mauve with gray plumes rising up from factories situated on the city’s periphery. Lovers open windows, shopkeepers roll up gated storefronts and people emerge from narrow, dark doorways. Blue clouds lined in blood orange sit on the horizon.

  Sun and dust. Broken stone. He feels heavy, his whole body turned inward. He sits down. He rises. He walks beneath the building’s arcade, the marble slippery. He leans against the railing enclosing the small, manicured gardens—gardens of magnolia trees, palms. So much like those first weeks in Mexico City—how dizzying the impression for an émigré without a map. He’d come to the embassy, had been so certain then, brazen enough to believe his passage to America would be swift, secured. He is still hoping for that day.

  He walks down the stairs and across the street, his brown, sorry loafers caked with dust. He draws a cigarette from his back pocket, stops at the corner to light it, watching as the little flicker of blue begins before the burn. A car speeds past, its motor loud. Over the car’s fading rumble and from a window open and overhead he hears the faint voice of someone singing, a warble like that of a bird. The tightness in his chest loosens. He raises the cigarette to his lips, exhaling. He leans back against the building, one leg tucked up and under, resting against the stucco wall, its grainy surface pressing through his shirt. The last of the sun cuts a diagonal of light across his body—a man marked, a man crossed out.

  For just a fleeting moment, Austin feels something like contentment, so tired he is of always wishing to be elsewhere. A respite from longing, an easy satisfaction in a small desire sated. A last inhale and he tosses the cigarette to the ground, wishing it could be the day.

  He had tried to adapt as well as he could, had come to, some might say, resign himself to this adopted country of his with its bright sun, dusty roads, sepia buildings, past built upon past. A city stripped down and built up again.

  But it was not the life he was supposed to live—this life, this Mexico City life. He closes his eyes and there they are—all quite clearly, going on about their lives, waking in those cold northeastern mornings when it was dark blue and felt as if night had forgotten to end, the heater clanking the children awake, he imagines. Three children, each born in a different country (Russia, France, Mexico) and all now Americans. They were walking around in streets filled with memories of his young manhood. His children, there without him. He can sometimes feel them, when younger, their small arms around his neck when he carried them in the early years in Mexico, the sound of their voices, saying Papa. How does one live with longing? He knows it. It was as if he were forever reaching, arms extended in a gesture of entreaty. Pulling on a rope, hand over hand, fist over fist, the rope only growing longer.

  • • •

  THE ZÓCALO: SPACE, a dusky silver sky. Steadfast buildings enclose the square. Streetlamps jeer, orange in the early evening . . . not going to the States after all . . . He falls alongside three older men, white hair, hands clasped at the back. One man’s voice low and thick from years of tobacco. The others listen as he speaks, nodding, earnest, grave nods. Austin recoils, draws his gaze inward and down, his shoulders hunched as if direct eye contact will sting. He is not far from it. These empty afternoons of old age, stepping into evening, stunned by the throb and pulse of all this life.

  Two women arm in arm clatter across the wide flagstones of slate, emerald, cobalt. A splice in his path. In their T-strapped heels and full skirts, he feels a yearning, a dull, near-forgotten burn of want that had made him falter in his fidelity; he was not a saint, he knew, could not be celibate. Long ago he’d come to know this, given in to it. Women of satin skin, women he’d clung to. He thinks of Julia. (It was always Julia.) He tries to picture in his mind the shape of her face. If he can recall even that much, her other features will soon emerge, come into focus—her steely
blue eyes, how they sank in slightly, the better to see the curve of her cheekbones; the way her brow sloped gently upward to the honey hair, full and always pulled back from her face, tied into a chignon at the base of her neck. And maybe, if he thinks hard enough, concentrates on the image, he can see her smile forming, which always took a little coaxing, her lips often—and when he remembers her last—pressed together into a pout, one that masked a panic. And if he allows himself even more time, if he is lucky, he can conjure up the sound of her voice: high and sweet, like a chime, and always with that American, northeastern accent of hers, so fast and held tight in her chest as if she never quite drew enough breath when speaking. And, then, when he has the face, her likeness, her very presence quite set in his mind, he continues across the Zócalo, trying to hold her in his mind’s eye. The image, though, is like quicksilver—shattered by the sounds, the night, a second’s onslaught.

  He passes what had once been the Aztec marketplace, the Inquisition’s execution ground. A walk through centuries. His mother had given him her love of walking; how much she loved to walk in the fields of their farm. Even in those insufferably frigid days of Russian winter, when evening came at three in the afternoon. They’d walk to the road that ran along the wheat fields, barren, hard. Or even those closer, less distant winters of New England, winters cracking, breaking into spring—rain or sap on branches, the green and moss of the thaw come in earnest. Could he withstand either of those winters now?

  The Mexicans are a kind people, he has to admit, though he has learned to keep a distance, slide by people, let others slide off him. He’s grown into it, another habit, though if he strips it all back and really looks, his true nature, core, or whatever one wants to call it, longs to embrace the world free of any suspicion or cynicism. And back then, in the first years in Mexico City, he had been such an obvious gringo, standing out so in the cantinas of La Condesa. His pale, white skin with its bluish pallor, like alabaster. His tall, commanding countenance.