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A Novel
by Vanessa Manko
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It was Austin's habit that, when not in his shared boarding room, he scoured these walls, reading the advertisements and notices, choosing what he'd wanted, writing things down in his notebook. "Professor," some chided as they passed him entering or leaving. "Bourgeois." He didn't listen.
The flyers and notices promised a way to "pass a pleasant evening." The Russian Social Club, the Union of Russian Workers—it was a place to go, a way to avoid the boardinghouse where there was only room to eat and sleep. The Russian Social Club met in the basement of the Orthodox church. They held music recitals. He could belong to the chorus. They put on plays and pageant shows, organized sales and celebrated Pushkin's name day. The union offered English classes, courses on the automobile, radio engineering. He paid his dues. He attended sponsored lectures. He received the union's paper.
It was a brick building where bread used to be made. The ovens were now stacked with books and manuals and the pupils, all union members, sat along the old assembly-line conveyors that lay in parallel, crossing the room in broad silver bands. There was no heat in the building, just cold running water, so they sat in coats and hats. In other rooms, meetings about the state of Russia took place; these were often loud, one man's voice distinct over others' murmurings or grumblings. Leaving his English class, Austin stood in the open door, watching the meeting in the adjacent room, listening, "workers," "society," "capitalists."
"Don't just stand there," a man ordered. "Come in."
"What's this all about?"
"For workers."
"I'm not a worker."
"Let me see your hands." The man looks at Austin's upturned palms.
"You're a worker."
"I'm an engineer."
"So? That means you work, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Then listen."
He walked in, stood next to the man. The room was filled, men seated, others standing three deep along the walls. They'd turned the lights out as if for a theater performance. One man stood before the gathering, candle in hand, reciting tenets from a broadsheet.
"Why are the lights off?" Austin asked.
"No one outside can see in."
"And if they did?"
"Trouble," the man grumbled and disappeared farther into the room, lost.
. . .
To enter a house of women is to enter a home. He'd been in the country six years before reaching the moment when he could move from the men's rooming house to a home—a proper home, as a boarder, but still a home. Gone from those dank, stark boardinghouse hallways. Eight men to a room. Walls of cracked plaster. White chalky bits crumbling. A fine residue of white covered the splintered wood floors, gray and stripped bare, a fog of white along the windowpanes.
Seven dollars a month. For that he'd receive meals; the girls, two sisters, would do his laundry, mend his clothes, and, if needed, buy him things during their weekly shopping—paper, pencils, tooth powder, chocolate bars. Every Monday, he'd have to write out what he needed in a green ledger book that sat on a diminutive table against the stairs. Why he couldn't ask for things outright, he never did understand except that perhaps the mother didn't want him to get too close to her daughters. That, and they kept a careful account of his purchases.
It was a kitchen of white, save for the large table in the center of the room whose checkered red tablecloth provided the room's only color. Two large windows at the back of the house filled the room with a gauzy white light. Outside, a flock of sparrows alighted from the small rectangular yard, fluttered and traced an arc of black across a window frame like a stroke of calligraphy. One girl stood at the stove in profile to Austin, the other reached for plates from a cabinet—high enough so that her foot came off the ground a little in the reaching. She set one plate atop another, the rattle of them sweet and delicate. He watched her—careful and deliberate with each, a significance in the placing as if the gold rims aligning the white plates held a power within the circle. He knew her hands first, the gesture of them—quiet and sure. Hands that matched her peaceful face, her calm and contained kind of beauty. She had a line of flour across her forehead. He imagined that if someone had told her she would've wiped it off without a thought, with no concern for her tired, spent appearance, the loose tendrils and wisps of hair framing her face. A graveness within. Quietude in her gray eyes that he, without knowing why, wanted to upset, disrupt, and cause to flash. She reminded him of something silver—regal silver with a kind of inner poise as if she had—did have—a deep complicity with herself, had figured something out and was reluctant to part with the insight.
From The Invention of Exile by Vanessa Manko. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Vanessa Manko, 2014.
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