Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  Sasha was not prudent. He stood before my latest experiment with caked ice melting from the soles of his boots, the cuffs of his trousers. I was on the floor, patting the tiles dry. Water was a dangerous thing in the laboratories of the Physico-Technical Institute.

  “It’s very clever,” Sasha said.

  “Thank you.”

  He tapped one of the dials with his fingernail. “This is the density?”

  “Y—yes. Be careful. It’s very sensitive.”

  Both of us had been at the Physico-Technical Institute for a couple of years. Sasha, the brilliant theorist, was already a senior researcher. I was less feted, coasting in on the fumes of my radio watchman. We worked together and apart: competitors, co-workers, scientists who sometimes went to concerts, or for cherry cake at Café du Nord, who talked of family and politics, of elementary particles. If I had mentioned my sister to him, it was to say that Helena seemed distant to me, a creature of another phylum. And if he had mentioned his own sister, Katia, it was not to reveal that she was pretty, or that she was unrelenting, like a flood; it was to describe a holiday they had shared as children, or the ham she had carved at New Year, while Sasha scored chestnuts.

  I would learn for myself that blue-eyed Katia was pretty, that she was unrelenting.

  I got up from the floor. Sasha was still peering at the same dial. “Very clever,” he repeated.

  I hoped he would say something to Ioffe, my supervisor.

  “But alas for the blind man,” Sasha said.

  “What?”

  “All these dials.”

  There were many dials. Splayed before us, the device was a disparate contraption of coiled wires, readouts, rubber piping and a hissing chamber with two suspended plates. The plates formed a circuit: electricity jumped from one to the other, through the air. When the chamber was filled with gas, the electricity’s crackle changed, quickening or slowing. And thus it was able to measure the properties of various gases, particularly their dielectric constants. A dial read: 1.055.

  “It’s a calamity,” Sasha said. “How will the blind man learn the dielectric constant of helium?”

  “How is he to check his pocket watch?” I said.

  “You mean he should ask his wife. Machines like this are the reason we don’t see more blind physicists.” The joke really entertained him. “Couldn’t you rig something up? Make it spray a new scent for each gas?”

  “So sulphur gas can smell of roses?”

  He chuckled.

  “It would be easier for it to make a sound,” I said.

  “If the constant’s higher than 1.2—a puff of cinnamon and the sound of a barking dog.”

  “A tone,” I said. “Actually …” I thought about this. “A pitch that reflects the conductivity?” I picked up my notebook. “By adjusting the temperature, the gas could be made to sing a song. Or just wave your hand …”

  Sasha tapped his fingertips against the wall of the chamber, making the dials’ needles wag. This made him laugh again. “But what about the frostbitten soldiers,” he asked, “without any fingers?”

  I was no longer paying attention. I watched the needles flicker, a tiny back-and-forth, as if they were gesturing for my attention, and an image came to me, strongly, the kind of intuition a scientist leans on. It was like a film loop, the same scene over and over: a man inside a bell jar, his hand hovering above a metal plate, and the metal plate singing. La, it sang. Fa so la.

  I looked at my own small hand.

  THE THEREMIN WAS MORE OR LESS a combination of its precedents: the soundless watchman, the hissing gas monitor. I was measuring human movements as if they were the fluctuations of a gas, and adding sound.

  The early prototypes were variations of the metal plates I’d shown Sasha, with added oscillators and an earpiece. I demonstrated the concept to the department head, Abram Fedorovich Ioffe. My waggling hand sounded out something between a shrieking bumblebee and Massenet’s “Élégie.” Ioffe was tickled. “One day,” he pronounced, “our orchestras will run on batteries.”

  In November 1921, I was invited to demonstrate the theremin before the institute’s mechanical engineers and physicists, my first formal audience. I felt again like Lyova with a crate full of vacuum tubes. But these were not credulous dedushki and babushki; these men had invented and reinvented radio, sent complex messages through the air. They spoke the language of electricity. They’d not be dazzled by twinkling little lights.

  I was nervous. All right—I was petrified. Beforehand, I shut myself in Ioffe’s office. The sun had dipped behind the hills and filled the room with blue silhouettes. As I paced, the shadows skewed and reoriented themselves. I felt as though I was sabotaging something: the order in the room, its tranquillity, its dusk. I went to turn on the electric lamp on Ioffe’s desk, but it was broken. I took a small screwdriver from my jacket pocket. I was partway through the repair when he knocked on the door and said through the wood, “It’s time.”

  In the low-ceilinged hall I stood beside the apparatus. Twists of smoke rose from cigarettes. I named and indicated the transformer, the oscillator, the unlit vacuum tubes. I closed the cabinet, concealing the components. I cleared my throat. “And so,” I said, and I turned the theremin on.

  Here is the way you play a theremin:

  You turn it on. Then you wait.

  You wait for several reasons. You wait to give the tubes the chance to warm, like creatures taking their first breaths. You wait in order to heighten the audience’s suspense. And, finally, you wait to magnify your own anticipation. It is a thrill and a terror. You stand before a cabinet and two antennas and immediately the space itself is activated, the room is charged, the atmosphere is alive. What was potential is potent. You imagine sparks, embers, tiny lightning flecks balanced in the vacant air.

  You raise your hands.

  Raise the right hand first, toward the pitch antenna, and you will hear it: DZEEEEOOOoo, a shocked electric coo, steadying into a long hymn. Raise the left hand, toward the volume antenna, and you will quiet it.

  Move your hands again, and the device will sing.

  My theremin is a musical instrument, an instrument of the air. Its two antennas rise up from a closed wooden box. The pitch antenna is tall and black, noble. The closer your right hand gets, the higher the theremin’s tone. The second antenna controls volume. It is bent, looped, gold and horizontal. The closer you bring your left hand, the softer the instrument’s song. The farther away, the louder it becomes. But always you are standing with your hands in the air, like a conductor. That is the secret of the theremin, after all: your body is a conductor.

  My colleagues at the institute did not applaud that day. They simply listened very carefully. I played works by Minkus and Massenet. I performed Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan.” I remember looking out over the sheet music into rows of faces, mostly moustached, and seeing Andrey Andreyevich Korovin, a man I had never spoken to, a man I had only seen, his features like the scored bark of a tree. Andrey Andreyevich had worked in the metals lab for fifty years. He had sharp grey eyes and a thin mouth. He was listening to me. My hand was in the air and I was playing a low note. Andrey Andreyevich Korovin, a man I had never spoken to, appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  The theremin has always been a machine with two strangenesses. There is the strangeness of the playing: palms flexing in empty space, as if you are pulling the strings of an invisible marionette. But the stranger strangeness is the sound. It is acute. It is at once unmodulated and modulating. It feels both still and frantic. For all my tweakings of timbre, the theremin cannot quite mimic the trumpet’s joyous blast, the cello’s steadying stroke. It is something Else.

  Yes, the Elseness is what brings audiences to their feet. It is what inspires composers like Schillinger and Varèse. But there is no escaping the other part, too: like the pallor of an electric light bulb, like the heat of an electric stove, the theremin’s sound is a stranger to the Earth.

  I have escorted this stranger ac
ross the globe. For all the assembled multitudes, for Rockefeller, Gershwin, Shostakovich, cranky George Bernard Shaw, for wives and friends, enemies and lovers, lost hopes, and for empty rooms, I conducted the ether. In a hundred halls, Saint-Saëns’s “Swan” floated like a ghost. The voice that was not a voice neither paused nor took a breath.

  LATER, IN AMERICA, one of the RCA salesmen, Len Shewell, told me the story of selling a theremin to Charlie Chaplin. Len had been invited to Chaplin’s vast mansion, a place done up in marble and ebony, as black and white as Chaplin’s moving pictures. Len dragged his suitcase after the butler, through corridors with sharp corners, to a wide parlour where the Little Tramp reclined on a chaise longue. A vase of roses posed on every table, Len said, and the fireplace was roaring even on that August afternoon. Chaplin asked him to begin his demonstration and Len launched into his routine, but when the sounds started, DZEEEEOOOoo, Len’s hand wavering by the pitch antenna, Chaplin gasped so loudly that Len turned off the machine.

  “Is everything all right?” Len asked.

  Chaplin was as pale as chalk. “No, yes, continue,” he said.

  The actor was plainly terrified. The best-known phantom in the world, a man who had made his fortune as an illusion projected onto silver screens—he was scared of this box of ghosts. Listening to Len’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” his face leapt from horror to ardour and back. His eyebrows rose and fell as if they were on pulleys. He trembled. When Len was finished, Chaplin jumped to his feet, crossed the room, shook the salesman’s hand. “I’ll take one,” he said, and with one finger he reached forward to touch the theremin’s cabinet—as if it were a jaguar, a panther, a man-eating lion.

  The sound of the theremin is simply pure electric current. It is the hymn of lightning as it hides in its cloud. The song never strains or falters; it persists, stays, keeps, lasts, lingers. It will never abandon you.

  In that regard, it is better than any of us.

  TWO

  PINK ORANGE RED

  BEFORE I CAME TO AMERICA, I toured my own country. It started fitfully—a week in Moscow, a few days in Smolensk, an excursion to Kazan. I huddled with researchers, smoothing schematics with my hands. I played the theremin for halls full of students. I visited the Kremlin one shining spring afternoon, to show my machine to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (may his memory be illuminated). Then my mission changed: these discoveries aren’t just for the academy, Lenin told me. They are for the people.

  I went out by train. Men towed my equipment through what was then Nikolayevsky Station, past puzzled workers, into huge railway cars. I followed them in my best but shabby suit, Lenin’s name on a card in my pocket. Demonstrations were arranged in tiny Russian towns, hamlets whose one electric light glowed wanly in the night. I slurped shchi with the leaders of local worker councils, farmers with weary faces, explaining why fires need oxygen, why lightning strikes. Tarussky’s top cattle breeder wanted to learn why silver tarnishes. A woman in Shuya asked if radiators could cause freckles. I connected a theremin to a sputtering gas engine and as my instrument shrilled, the people rose to their feet, astonished, hands held over their hearts.

  Back in Leningrad I was beginning to feel like a star. I spent weekdays at the institute, improving my devices, advancing my theories, feeling the satisfaction of the inventor who knows his inventions will be seen, will be wondered at, in open air. Sasha didn’t want to hear any of my crowing. He became grumpy when I hung around his office doorway, unspooling anecdotes. “You can have your shepherds and milkmaids,” he said. “I’ll take the committee chairs and Nobel laureates.”

  One night, he stood me up. I had tickets to the ballet, but Sasha wasn’t at home when I arrived to collect him. Instead, a pretty girl answered the door. She had dark eyelashes, an upward tilting chin, a soft assurance to her face. I imagined she was the type of person who writes down her dreams in the morning. Her arms were crowded with screwdrivers, pliers, a tin full of nails. She seemed vexed.

  “Pardon me,” I said. “I’ve come for Sasha.”

  “He’s out.”

  I was surprised. “Out?”

  “Yes, out. At the lab.”

  “I see,” I said.

  She examined me. “Are you Termen?”

  “Yes. Lev Sergeyvich.”

  “He said to say sorry, he wanted to finish something.”

  “Ah,” I said. I looked at the shined toes of my shoes.

  “I’m Katia,” she said. “His sister.”

  It was as if I saw her for the second time then. “Are those your tools?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Sasha left his mess for me to tidy up.”

  “How rude of him,” I said. “Would you like to go to the ballet?”

  THE NEXT THREE YEARS were a time of self-creation. I was in a rush to be established—the sturdiness of my life, I thought, should match the heavy type that newspapers were using to print my name. There were so many elements to put in place: published papers; professional endorsements; applications for a new apartment, for a new laboratory; a wife. Eventually I quit the Physico-Technical Institute to work under my own supervision, in a shared lab overlooking the Neva. I moved into a new home. I invented better theremins. I made abrupt, titanic promises.

  My parents disapproved of all these metamorphoses. The Revolution was fresh in their minds and they advocated steady advancement, sober restraint. They wanted me to be more like my sister, Helena, who was studying botany, obscurely cultivating a career. “We always taught you to keep your voice down,” my father said, perched on a chair in my kitchen. “Whose attention are you in such a hurry to receive?”

  Worse than my parents’ disapproval was how little they cared about my accomplishments. Father could not be persuaded to flip through my write-ups in scientific bulletins, let alone to assist at a demonstration of the theremin. He sipped from a cup of strong tea and issued advice about how to start a family. “Patience, Lev. The main thing is patience.” When I tried to show him the distance-vision prototype I was working on, it was only a few minutes before he became distracted by a squirrel scritching on the windowsill. He shouted through the glass, “Hello my friend! Hello!”

  Finally I directed the explanation to my mother. “Good work, Lev,” she murmured, without lifting her eyes from her knitting, without waiting for me to turn it on.

  I had more and more reasons to stay at home and I found more and more reasons to go away. Sometimes Katia and I would have arguments by letter—underlined words and no signatures. I attended a conference in Nizhny Novgorod. I made a presentation to generals in Moscow. I came back from a visit to Kiev and found that my country had new ideas for me. They wanted to send me into western Europe. “Impress them with your machines,” said a man from a dark corner of the interior ministry. “Our operative will do the rest.” I faced Katia across our small table, ham on plates like little moons.

  My new mission began with an appearance in Berlin. It was my first visit. I arrived in the mid-morning—weary, excited, dishevelled from the sleeper car. The streets were smeared with red and gold leaves. Lines snaked from the door of every bakery—it was some sort of national holiday. I was met by the eminent Dr Beirne, and we toured the National Academy. I demonstrated the theremin and the radio watchman to a classroom of physicists. They stroked their short silver beards. We took a carriage across town, to the Deutsche Oper, where the rest of my equipment was being stored. I went down into the basement. I met the man I call Pash.

  Pash. That is how he introduced himself to me that day, so that is what I always called him. Pash. My operative. My handler. I was the communist magician, the conductor of the ether, sent out by the state to show off my great discoveries. And here was a man in an overcoat who travelled alongside, like a shadow, a larger shadow, filled with his own directives.

  Pash had a gentle face, square and well formed, with blue irises like chips of stone. A kind face, and an ogre’s back and shoulders, as if his body foresaw circumstances that deman
ded something more than clear, quick, handsome eyes.

  We travelled together in Berlin, and then to other German cities—Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt. By the time we arrived in Dresden, the rest of the tour had sold out. Crowds filled the theatres. They called me “the Russian Edison”; they said I would transform the world. At the Tonhalle they applauded and applauded even after my presentation had finished, even after my second curtain call, even after the stagehands had raised the house lights and propped open the exits. They applauded, stamping their feet, shouting.

  “Theremin!” they shouted. “Theremin, Theremin!”

  Pash steered; I followed. From Germany we cut through to France, then over to England. Each city offered the same obstacle course of handshakes and expectation. First came someone from the Russian consulate or, in London’s case, someone from the former Russian consulate. These someones were always tall, malnourished, jumpy. They were not sure why I had been sent, or under whose aegis I travelled. My companion particularly perplexed them.

  “And you are …?” said the someone from Paris.

  Pash shrugged in his overcoat. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The someone laughed at this, raised expectant eyebrows.

  “Pash,” Pash said finally.

  “Pash?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you are Dr Theremin’s … that is, Dr Theremin is your—?”

  “May I use your telephone?” Pash said, and then he took out his identity card, emblazoned with a particularly intricate and notorious seal, and the someone asked no further questions.

  Pash made his calls. He asked the consulate man for reports, contacts, lists of local partners. I soon realized I was the diversion, Pash’s pretext for opening bank accounts and trade offices. His briefcase filled with paper and wave after wave of visitors crashed down against us, in a blur of champagne bubbles.

  Next came the dignitaries: mayors, ambassadors, lesser royalty, keen to meet Leningrad’s wonder-worker. They spoke of welcome, of international cooperation. None of the nobles mentioned Russia’s executed czar.