The Invention of Exile Read online

  “You come here to get lost?” they asked him that first year. “It’s the right country. The land of the disappeared, los desaparecidos. Even so tall a man, you can disappear, you can.” He’d been angry at that. What right had the man to define him? He would not disappear. He would not stay in this godforsaken country.

  “My stay is temporary,” he had told them. “I’m going to America.”

  “Is that right? Where are you from?”

  “Russia.”

  “El ruso! He’s Russian. Amigos. El ruso.”

  He did not like that to be known, regretted it as soon as he’d revealed it out of anger. He’d learned the necessity for vigilance—the vigilance of a foreigner. Aware, always—who surrounded him, who might be at the next table over, who lingered too long within a doorway, who asked too many questions. He did not know how else to live in the world when he was so far still from any place he could call, think of as home. Now, a city, a language has gone ahead and seeped in, and, more often than not, he knows he is mistaken for a native Mexican: skin around the eyes dark; face, forearms, and hands a tarnished bronze; black hair graying into a metallic iron.

  And now where is he? He’s come out of an alley, disoriented. He doesn’t know which way to go. It is shocking and in his confusion he begins, instinctually, to move not left or right, but straight ahead. Tout droit he thinks, remembering that was the first phrase he’d comprehended in French, those years ago on the tightly wound, cobblestoned streets of the ninth arrondissement in Paris. Hungry and in search of work, cold and bewildered by the incomprehensible streets of another foreign city. And now here he is, tout droit, tout droit, he thinks as he walks, laughing at himself for the sudden switch of language, not straight ahead, or in Russian, how does one say it? But never mind that he thinks, he has to now calmly do an about-face and pretend as if he were walking the other way and now no longer tout droit because in his disorientation, in his wanderings and his furtive, crazed walk (half run) to get away, he’s unknowingly stumbled to where he stands now—before him, just a few yards ahead, sits the building he often walks twenty minutes out of his way to avoid: the Soviet Embassy. His heart nearly gushes in his ears. He sees the steps to the front door, the sheen of the heavy thick wood and the brass doorknob. He can see two figures at the bottom of the steps, hands in coat pockets, one man nodding his head, the other suddenly giving out a loud laugh. Austin freezes. He really cannot pass in front of them. He would not be surprised if his name were printed on some large banner, a kind of indictment. He dares not look in the direction of the embassy. He’ll instead feign nonchalance, pass by it, pretending that he does not care in the slightest if his name is written in big, bold block letters, all in black, on a three-foot-high canvas banner like a call to arms—VORONKOV.

  • • •

  TO SEE HIS STREET after the evening’s wandering is a relief. He feels lucky for at least that, to see the recognizable shape of the buildings, their jagged silhouettes edging sky. The Cantina de los Remedios. Its laughter and voices fall out the lighted windows like mouths. It reaches him, draws him into the warmth, the stale, layered smell: tequila, beer, smoke, and ammonia. He sits in the way he likes, at the far end of the bar, on the side so he can see the door, aware of who walks in, who comes toward him either too nonchalantly or too directly. The clatter, rumble, and whispers bloom up from full tables, filter over those that are empty, and linger amid the few dotted with solitary patrons.

  “Austinito el inventor. Buenas tardes,” the bartender says. Austin taps his fingers on the bar. Its wooden surface nicked. The mirror above the bar like a strip of river. His eyes catch the ravaged reflection—a sudden recognition of self. He does not look good. He could have at least gotten the buttons on his shirt right. Has he really walked around all day, presented himself at the embassy with the shirt buttons all misaligned?

  “Austin, Austin,” the bartender says, grabbing his shoulder. And then to no one in particular, “the inventor who cannot invent his way out of Mexico.” He is holding a cloth in his hands. He begins to fold it into a small square.

  “Una tequila,” Austin says.

  Austin remembers how he’d first come here, still new to the neighborhood. Everyone assumed he was working for the Soviets. Then, Miguel had whispered to him, with a smile, waving his finger at Austin, “One day, you will tell me what you did that you can’t get to your family.”

  “Nothing,” Austin had said, and then, for emphasis, “Nada.”

  And it was true. He had done nothing. In fact, what he had done was follow the rules, or, at least, followed them in the way he understood them at the time. It seemed to Austin that when he looked at his life thus far, examined each year, connecting one to the next, the years were marked by a keen obedience, not unlike the bottles that sat before him in their ordered rows, the overhead light painting first one and then another bright, white arc along each successive curve of dark amber glass.

  He—an anarchist? What kind of anarchist would be so compliant? What of all his repeated visits to the embassy, all the attempts to enlist the help of the correct authorities, the formal letters to the senators, to D.C., the affidavits, notarized birth and work certificates, port of entry papers—was not all this proof enough? How could these men not see the very thing that sat right before them? But then again that was perhaps asking too much of them. He’d come to know—his very predicament was a testament to this fact—that appointed clerks, all members of this bureaucracy, were only able to see what was set before them in black and white. They could not—sometimes Austin felt that it was done intentionally, a requirement of their posts and positions—read between the lines.

  He sips his tequila from the thick, hand-blown shot glass. Its lip of indigo blue is curved, soothing. A spiky astringency. Next, warmth. Voices rise, then soften. He remembers Julia and the children on the day of parting. How very logical it had all seemed at the time. The consulate in Nogales had told them it would only take two months, maybe three. Julia would fight to get Austin, her husband, the father of her children, reinstated. How they believed so fully in the sheer momentum of travel, her travels, from Mexico to the United States—the train breaking through the border, from Cananea to Nogales, hurtling onward toward the northeast. Surely that and the bonds of marriage, progeny, would help to drag him in her wake. She had made them arrange their suitcases into a kind of sitting room on the railway platform. Sit, sit, a moment of stillness please, she’d insisted. A Russian tradition. She’d learned it from him, made it her own and practiced it with diligence, reverence. The five of them sat in silence. The train exhaled its smoke in big, rushing hisses. People clamoring, dashes on and off the train. The embraces. And still, they remained, taking pause before the journey. What to say? A forced awkward stillness. Julia cried. He distracted the children.

  “And you must remember all of it for me,” he’d told his sweet ones. “When I come, you can tell me all your stories, all your adventures.” They clung to him, squeezing his neck. The train whistle blew, a piercing cry that frightened his daughter Vera and made her bite his shoulder. The small teeth marks lasted two days.

  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?”

  • • •

  MEXICO CITY. 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.

  • • •

  AUSTIN HAD FIRST 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 SATURDAY 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.