Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  “Try the mussels,” they said. “Try the flan. Try a banana.” In London, the Earl of Shaftesbury flourished a curving yellow fruit. I watched him peel it. “Now,” he pronounced, “anoint it with a scoop of ice cream.”

  After the dignitaries came the businessmen, with whom I had been instructed to seem polite but distracted. “Be soap-stone,” Pash had said, as our train clicked past Reims. “Promising but inscrutable—let them think you are a mystery to be drawn out.”

  My box of tricks was not a deception, simply physics. And yet the mission in Europe was to tantalize, plant seeds, dangle hooks. All these foreign entrepreneurs, seduced by the theremin: What would they trade for a share?

  I smiled thinly at the Western wealthy. I kissed widows’ hands. I smoked their sons’ cigars. In time I derived a formula: my accord with a person was inversely proportional to the number of rings he or she was wearing.

  At every stop, my favourite group was admitted last. Once the dignitaries, businessmen and socialites had cleared to the punch bowls, at last: the physicists, the chemists, the engineers, the doctors, the astronomers, the autodidacts and the musicians. I welcomed them with joy and relief. Pash had come to meet the chamber of commerce but I was here for this: to encounter men and women of refinement, intelligence, and curiosity. In Paris: Paul Valéry, the marquis de Polignac, the English ambassador John Rafe; in London, Julian Huxley, Sir Oliver Lodge, Maurice Ravel, the conductor Henry Wood. Not to mention John McEwen, principal of the Royal Academy of Music, and brilliant Ernest Rutherford. Finally—finally!—we could talk about something besides the weather. This esteemed company discussed electricity, hypnosis, and Dmitri Shostakovich. At that time my English was much worse than it is today, and my French, non-existent. So I had interpreters. In Paris I was assisted by a lovely girl called Aurélie—the daughter of an émigré who taught at the polytechnic. Translating French interrogatives into Russian, Russian conjectures into French, she moved her miniature hands before her: tiny gestures that evoked the poses of birds. I remember the press conference where I announced that I would be going abroad at the end of the year: a “short trip,” organized by Pash, to introduce my work to the Americans. A lure at the end of a line. Standing on a makeshift stage, in the bar of the Paris Opera, I found that I was apprehensive. Not just about the substance of my statement—where I was headed, why—but about my whole overblown situation. Equipment was being unloaded downstairs and instead of labouring among my crates and wires, I was here, leaning against a baby grand, making a speech to Valéry, Polignac, and a columnist for Le Temps. For a long, yawning moment I felt utterly outclassed. I did not know what kind of wine I had been drinking, or which term I should use when addressing the marquis. I was so nervous, and beside me Aurélie was so solemn, measuring each word as if it were a death sentence. Compulsively, I began to extemporize. I tried to provoke Aurélie, to unsettle her gravity, employing esoteric nouns and far-flung adjectives, inserting references to folk songs and fairy tales, Nevsky Prospekt vernacular, pops and crackles of onomatopoeia. Noticing a plate of biscuits, I said they smelled like Tulsky gingerbread, like the nave of the Church of the Annunciation, on Vasilievsky. “Such a perspicuously mnemonic aroma,” I said. I wanted to make Aurélie smile. I wanted her to lower her hands that were like small birds and to comfort me with a smile. But solemn Aurélie simply stood in her neat black skirt and parroted my nonsense in pearly perfect French.

  I wonder where Aurélie is now.

  She has probably married a lawyer and taken his name.

  WHEN I RETURNED TO LENINGRAD, the Physico-Technical Institute seemed unchanged. I came up the long road in a glossy white taxi; my driver wore gloves. Inside, the marble hall was almost empty; two students were disappearing up the staircase. “Helloooo!” I called, letting my voice echo. The students stared at me. Nyusya popped out of the charwomen’s closet.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed. “Professor Termen, you’re back!”

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  I bumped into Ioffe outside the lab upstairs. “My boy!” said my former supervisor. “To what do we owe the pleasure?” He fetched the teapot and poured two mugs of tea; we sipped them standing. I told stories of my travels and he marvelled. “Rutherford himself!” he said. “What an age this is.”

  Later I found Sasha in his office, scowling into a book.

  “Toc toc,” I said, instead of knocking.

  He looked up. I saw his gaze change, lengthening, sharpening, as he recognized me. “If it isn’t our Wandering Dutchman,” he said. “Are you finished your gallivanting? Back for some work?”

  “It’s good to see you,” I said.

  Sasha sniffed. His tall body was hunched over his book, almost protective. “How’s my sister?”

  “She’s marvellous,” I said.

  He perused the page, then looked back at me. He seemed about to say something; but he did not open his lips. He shook his head, then finally said, “Do you wonder, Lev, whether the thing you’re after is worth it?”

  I scratched the back of my hand. “Doesn’t everybody wonder that?”

  Sasha smirked. It was as if I had said precisely what he expected me to say. He shifted in his chair and raised his chin. “No,” he said.

  IN DECEMBER 1927, Pash and I came to America on a ship called Majestic. The crossing was 13 days long. In a way, I had never been so free, not even at home. Here I was on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, trapped in a small floating city, and treated like a movie star. “Go where you please, Dr Termen”; “Visit when you like, Dr Termen”; “To what do we owe this pleasure, Dr Termen?” When I stepped onto the bridge, every officer rose to his feet. The Majestic was like a maze with a thousand friendly exits: Lo, the kitchens! Aha, the map room! Look, here’s where they keep the pets!

  I did not know what to expect in the United States. I thought I would have to be on the lookout for Apaches. But I was also worried that eight weeks was not long enough to accomplish my mission. Pash did not wish to squander any time. Squared in stained red wing chairs, we sat beside the Majestic‘s steamed fish buffet. Ostensibly my secretary, actually my supervisor, poring over lists of officials, academics, scientists, captains of industry, he quizzed me in whispered rapid fire:

  “Arthur Feuerstack?”

  “Director at G.E.”

  “Bert Grimes?”

  “Regional director for Westinghouse.”

  “Jack Morgan?”

  “J.P. Morgan & Co.”

  “Jimmy Walker?”

  “Mayor of New York.”

  “Sergei V. Rachmaninoff?”

  At this I laughed. “Genius.”

  Pash and his employers wanted me to slip like a hand into America’s industrial pocket. The international press was already celebrating my discoveries: I simply had to appear, the exotic Russian. I would woo the Yankees not only with the theremin but also with my radio watchman, new television prototypes, any invention that caught their magpie eyes. While I collected invitations, Pash would secure patents, ink contracts, launch corporations, and generally sign so many deals that his colleagues would have a permanent channel in and out of the USA, a passage for smuggling sheaves of industrial secrets. As a proud patriot I’d accepted this mission without hesitation. But I had other concerns, too. That is: scientific discovery, exchanges of knowledge, meetings of minds. Also, a small but persistent thought had wormed its way into my head at a Paris press conference, when a little man in an olive jacket raised his hand and asked: “Do you imagine a theremin in every home?”

  It was a beguiling idea. Consider the public good that could result. Around the world millions of workers who are fascinated by music are demoralized by the challenges of traditional instruments. Little is intuitive about the keys on a clarinet, the fretless neck of a cello. But the theremin! There is an innate simplicity to it. The closer your hand to the tall antenna, the higher the pitch; the farther away, the lower the pitch. Because it trusts the worker’s own senses, not the knowledge locked aw
ay in the lessons and textbooks of the elites, the theremin becomes a revolutionary device—a levelling of the means of musical production.

  Yes, I imagined a theremin in every home; not just the billions of new songs that would sing out, but the realization of millions of Americans, Englishmen, Spaniards, Siamese: If we can do this, what else can we free people accomplish?

  Businessmen often point out that a theremin in every home would make me very rich. I am not a businessman. Money has never been a motivation.

  I SPENT MUCH OF MY FREE TIME on the Majestic in the bowels of the ship. The engines of the vessel were not just marvels of engineering but finessed, subtle, ingenious marvels of engineering. Some of humanity’s most agile thinkers had devoted decades to these behemoths, honing their components, increasing their efficiencies, and these are no wristwatches: they are huge! They haul small cities across seas.

  Amid the steamy machinery, I was also able to hide from Pash and his damned quizzes. He was conspicuous down there, too big and lumbering, a giant jammed into an expensive Moscow suit. He made the men with coal dust on their faces scowl.

  There were others I wished to avoid as well. At first I was happy to put up my feet in the first-class lounge and speak with fellow guests. The marvellous cellist Pablo Casals was on board, as was Jan Szigeti, the pianist from Lublin. We spoke about Tchaikovsky, acoustics, and standing ovations. But Szigeti became a nuisance. He followed me like a pet, standing too close, smelling of the saltwater he showered in. Smitten with my peculiar brand of celebrity, he wanted my opinion on all sorts of matters, from the crescent rolls at breakfast to the best makes of typewriter.

  It was our own fault, really, Pash’s and mine. As I have said, my English was then still very weak. So as we began to receive messages by wireless from America, we required a translator. Szigeti volunteered. There we were in the first-class lounge, chattering beside trays of steamed salmon, the wireless operator’s transcripts clutched in Szigeti’s puffy paws. He read them out to us. They all began with the words Professor or Dr Theremin; then they proceeded with several compliments; then a proposal—usually to do with a private party, at a chalet or on an island or at a “darling little apartment”; and finally, a figure. The lowest of these was $500, the highest, $6,100. As Szigeti converted from dollars to rubles, his eyes popped out of his head. “These are famous families!” he told us. “The Pittsburgh Clarks have a swimming pool the size of Slutsk!”

  I found these invitations vaguely horrifying. I did not wish to privilege the privileged. I wished to remain as I was, and proudly so: a representative of the scientific community, and of the people of Russia.

  But Pash was drawn to these offers like a magnet to a lockbox. It wasn’t just the lure of the greenback; it was those sterling American names. With bovine Szigeti before us, we argued in glances: Pash keen, me dull. When Szigeti was elsewhere, we were more forthright. In those days I was still sometimes able to sway my minder, to persuade him he should listen to me. I leaned on sheer pragmatism. I told him we needed to play the long game, bore any suspicious Americans with our guileless communist chastity. “We mustn’t look too eager,” I said. “We have to hide our appetite for Fords, Victors, Rockefellers.” I argued for us to keep to our plan, first demonstrating the theremin for my fellow scientists, academics, musicians, and a handful of journalists. After that, for the public at large. Finally—when we’d proven our priorities, cast off suspicion—“Then, Pash, you can go have a look at the Pittsburgh Clarks’ pool.”

  Over the course of two late-night conversations, murmuring from spring-bed bunk to spring-bed bunk, I persuaded him. Thereafter, our audiences with Szigeti were less strained. The pianist translated the offer; I feigned indifference; Pash shrugged his giant shoulders; and only Szigeti, stammering, counted the zeroes.

  THE ENGINE ROOMS ALSO provided a private place to do my kung-fu exercises. As sifu told me, my first week: practise once a day, more will do no harm.

  He had not seemed surprised when I appeared again at his kwoon, two months after stumbling in with Sasha. There was no concern in his face; he came over casually. He watched me watching the sparring students—only three there that day. “You want to learn?” he said finally.

  “I think so.”

  “You seem you think a lot.”

  It was partly the violence crashing through Leningrad in those days. It was partly the desire for physical activity: an order I could bring to my body. It was partly the grace of those fighters, their limbs that moved in deliberate lines. I wanted order, I wanted grace. I wanted to pass like a wind through any tempest.

  So I began coming to the kwoon five or six times a week. I learned how to stand; I learned how to exhale. Sifu taught me the first form, “Little Idea,” a sequence of gestures that seem like magic, summoning motions, not like any kind of combat. I stood with Lughur and Yu Wei and repeated the movements, repeated and repeated them, becoming taller, becoming clearer, ten thousand tiny refinements. Sometimes sifu called up a student, his birthmark glowing in the lantern light; five seconds of contest and then the simplest shift of weight, sifu pivoting his hips, a figure sent sprawling.

  I improved. My body became lighter and stronger. I did pushups beside the radiating stove. I squatted with Yu Wei, drinking tea, hearing tales of Peking. I laughed with Moritz, who had begun studying kung-fu during the war, when he was stationed in Tsingtao. “Even the Chinese monks know how to fight,” he said. I couldn’t visit the kwoon as often when I began travelling, but still I went. Sifu taught me the second form, “Sinking the Bridge,” with its pivots and kicks. He taught me the third form, “Darting Fingers.” He taught me as though I was the most fitting student, a natural son, and I left coins behind, in the box by the door.

  Aboard the Majestic, travelling to America, I tried to maintain my practice. If Pash was out late or up early, I could use our cabin to run through the first and second forms. But usually I skipped down the ladders and across the catwalks to practise in a corner of the aft hydraulics chamber, an area the engine men nicknamed the “gym.” Several of them were enthusiastic bodybuilders (admittedly, all bodybuilders are enthusiastic). They planted themselves beside the hydraulics chamber’s heaving silos, feet flat on the grille, and lifted things: boxes, metal struts, barrels of lard. I worked beside them. It was easy to be self-conscious: I was a paid passenger, smaller than the strongmen, greaseless. I was also the only martial artist. And yet as soon as I slipped into horse pose, my insecurities fizzed away like vapour. There we were, shoulder to shoulder: sailors with sacks of coal raised over their heads, the scientist from Leningrad punching his wing-chun one-inch punch. It was hot. We sweated. I stripped to my underpants before the third form, darting biu jee. Sometimes the space was too crowded to make many movements, but this was all right, this I embraced; the student needs new challenges. In the bowels of the Majestic I tried to breathe like a child.

  Nevertheless, I had to come out sometimes, for messages, for meals, and, alas, most frequently, to be sick. At regular intervals I climbed up from the engine rooms, scurried down the aft corridor, flung open a door, and vomited into a toilet. Szigeti always seemed to be standing watch. As soon as my head poked up from the stairwell he would be over me: briny, excited, eager to talk. I’d trundle past him, breathing sideways, feeling every swaying slow motion of the ship. I kneeled by the porcelain. MADE IN TORONTO, it said. Szigeti stood quietly outside, leaning his head against the closed door, speaking in the tone of a lover. “Are you all right, Lyova?”

  “Yes,” I murmured.

  Sometimes I would come out and he would be gone, and the only sign he had been there was the glass of seltzer water he’d left for me, gurgling, sad and alive.

  NOW IT IS ELEVEN YEARS later and I am on a different ship, the Stary Bolshevik, and here too the waves fall and lift. I once proposed a device that would ameliorate a great boat’s sway, balancing the bobbing seas, a sort of unbobber, but I could not find anybody to finance the prototype.

 
I am being taken back to Russia. Where once I roamed the Majestic’s decks, now I sit in a sealed cabin, its door locked from the outside. The ship’s roster pretends I am the ship’s log-keeper. Thus: I keep a log. This is a Skylark Mk II typewriter, made in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a place I once visited. Under a red sky, I played Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India.” The applause was like a net of fish being drawn from the brine.

  When I was last atop the Atlantic, I imagined New York as a single row of gold and brass buildings, a panel of architecture nestled against the shore. Beyond these buildings—desert, cowboys, Indians. Ten thousand miles of sand, spurs, and feather headdresses. I was not seeking love or fortune, just a new frontier, just open country for young inventions, just a long, clear course to serve the Revolution.

  In the end I found much more than that, and less.

  WE LANDED IN NEW YORK on December 20, 1927. There were photographers, newsmen, a quartet of harpists. The harpists and the newsmen did not get along. At every angelic strum, the journalists’ grimaces deepened, like retraced drawings. They shouldered past the musicians, blocking their view, blocking my view of them—and I was eager to see them, the Queens and Brooklyn harpists, the first American women on whom I had ever cast my eyes.

  Of course I had no idea why there were harpists playing for us. The winds blew harshly from Ellis Island and we were all shivering as we left the ship, tucked into coats and hats. I had expected to go quietly to a car but instead—this small crowd. People yelling my name, yelling questions in squawky New York accents. Camera flashes going off. I was shocked. I was delighted. I strained to see the harpists. I had no idea Rudolph Wurlitzer had hired them to butter me up; I assumed that in America, harpists greet every ship. It was only later, plunging into a lunch at the Grove, also paid for by Wurlitzer, that I found out he was responsible. In his coughing Germanic English he said he had read an article about me, an interview in London, in which I spoke of my love for the harp. I have no idea what he was talking about. I have no love for the harp. “You spoke with such fine arteeculation, Dr Theremin,” he said. He coughed. “You were like a deegneetary for science.”