Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  Again I put the missive in a drawer. I went back outside. The dusk felt early. I took my bicycle and headed to the kwoon, which was almost empty. Some of the lanterns had gone out. Perhaps sifu was having supper. I took off my shoes. I stared at the portrait of Leung Jan floating above a lake. I touched my right fist to my open left hand. Another student did the same. We skipped rope and did push-ups. Sifu arrived with Yu Wei, Lughur and some other students I didn’t know. They took off their shoes and touched right fist to left palm. Sifu demonstrated falling. We all fell and got up and fell again. Then we practised chi sao, the hand dance, standing with partners and moving, always remaining wrist to wrist, flowing and following, sensitive. But I had no sensitivity that evening. I kept losing my position. I kept seeing, in my mind’s eye, my typewritten name.

  That night, I called the telephone number. A woman’s voice answered. She asked my name. Then a man’s voice came on the line. He asked when we could meet. Two weeks later, I went to see an old man at a rented office on Nevsky Prospekt. I am certain it was not the same man I’d spoken to on the telephone. One week after that, I met another man at a café on Sadovaya Street. These men always seemed different and the same, like dominoes. They worked for the state. They asked me questions about my work, about its commercial potential, about Bolshevism. My answers seemed to please them. I met yet another man, this one short, very short, like a doll. He met me in a train carriage at Moskovsky Station. We were the only people on the train, which idled on the track. He had a table lamp in the carriage, and a small desk, like a doll’s. It was not until I left, stepping from doorway to platform, that the train pulled away. It took the small man with it. He had asked me questions in Russian, Italian, French, English and German. I had never learned any German and I told him so. He asked me about my family. “Are you close with your parents?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered before I knew what I was saying.

  The man did not seem surprised.

  “Are you prepared to travel?”

  “Yes.”

  He said, in a voice like a circular card being slipped into a circular envelope, “We would like to offer you a new responsibility.”

  In Leningrad that summer I felt so alone, standing beside Katia on the tram, sipping thin stew at my parents’ apartment, wandering up to the Physico-Technical Institute, where I no longer had a lab. Even attending a lecture with a pretty student, an admirer, and strolling in Alexander Garden. Children rushed by me, officials clambered into a carriage, squirrels darted, a line of soldiers filed past the flower beds. The girl said something and I thought of Katia waiting for me. The sun refused to set. All around, lives were going on. I watched water pour out from the fountain and into the drain.

  The men from the government called me a beacon for the Soviet people. They called me an adept.

  These were not the same sort of people who had worked under Lenin. This was a different time. Our Dear Father, Iosif Vissarionovich, boomed from the wireless sets now, and when I’d met his generals, earlier that summer, they had been interested only in whether my distance-vision technology could be implemented, immediately, at our borders. All matters were reduced to directives, simple prescriptives. Our country needs your help, they said. Our country needs you to travel to Western nations, arranging demonstrations, forming companies, filing patents, inking trade agreements. These contracts will allow Mother Russia to increase its influence, to diversify its investments, to multiply its channels of information and trade. They explained all this. These different and same men looked at me with hooded eyes. On my next trip, they said, they would send me a handler. I practised chi sao, watching my partner, sensing my partner, moving with his movements. I walked in Alexander Garden with the pretty student. These men asked me, “Would you like to be a hero?”

  A FEW YEARS LATER I sat with Mr Thorogood from RCA as he asked, “Would you like to be a millionaire?”

  He opened his attaché case and I saw that it was almost empty. It contained two copies of a contract, which he withdrew, and a dozen pens, flashing like electric components. I wondered which was his favourite colour of ink. I liked dark green. Lenin was always said to write in red. Pash used either black or blue.

  I didn’t sign his contract. I told him I would be in touch. I told him I was a scientist. That night, at the Plaza restaurant, I conveyed our conversation to Pash. He was cracking crabs’ terracotta shells with his bare hands, sopping crabmeat in butter. His suit looked bulkier than it used to; I wondered if he was carrying a flask, or a gun.

  Pash wiped his mouth with his sleeve and put down the fractured crab. “Let me tell you something, Lev,” he said, “and listen very closely.”

  I remembered that I did not know where this man had come from: where he was born, where he was taught, which Moscow spire held the safe that held the dossier that held his real name. Whenever we dined, Pash’s right hand did not stray far from his knife. “Thorogood asked you if you would like to be a millionaire?” Pash looked at me, dead straight. “Yes, you would.”

  ONE MORNING A CARD without a stamp arrived for me at the Plaza Hotel. LEON THEREMIN, it said. I slit open the envelope and found a printed drawing of an elephant, in pen and watercolour. The elephant seemed friendly and wise but very old, very tired, with hundreds of lines in his skin. In his trunk he held a lemon.

  On the reverse of the card, below date and details, it read:

  “DON’T FORGET!!”

  YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO A LEMONADE SOCIAL

  MARKING THE EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY

  OF

  MISS CLARA REISENBERG.

  R.S.V.P.

  I tapped the card against the counter, then found I was picking up the telephone receiver.

  Our conversation began like this:

  “Is that Clara?”

  “Yes, who is this please?”

  “This is Leon Theremin.”

  What did my name say to you? Did it speak merely of science, engineering, and that snowy afternoon? Did it say something else?

  You said: “How is all that electricity doing, Leon?”

  I could not attend the party. I had an appointment with RCA that same day, slated to go until dinner. Perhaps I could have cancelled it but really I was not sure what to do, at that moment, talking to you on the telephone. I hesitated. I invited you to tea, the day after. A tardy birthday. “Sure,” you said. We both put down our phones.

  The elephant seemed to be staring at me.

  There were other girls, then. I don’t mean Katia. I felt young, arriving in America. I felt new. There were flirtations, exchanges of affection. Discreet ministrations. My valentines were associates, students, chance acquaintances. One drowsy evening with a friend’s ginger wife. I write this not to embarrass you, or out of a need to confess, but to say that in the week between that phone call and your visit to my apartment, every other face disappeared, at once, from my thoughts. It was as if I had plunged my head into a bucket of seltzer: everything fluttered up and then was gone.

  On your eighteenth birthday, a collection of friends and family visited your parents’ home for lemonade. You played charades and musical chairs. There was dancing. I am given to understand that Schillinger performed an air on his Arabian mijwiz. I was not present. I was with Pash and Mr Thorogood and later I was alone in my workshop, holding a screwdriver between my teeth, working on your birthday present.

  You arrived at two the next day. I wondered if you would come alone but there you were with your mother and also a gang of friends, girls and their dates, all crowding together in my doorway. “Look at that,” I said clumsily.

  You smiled. You said: “Hi, Leon.”

  I had put on a new Paul Whiteman record. The maid had cleaned the carpets. The blinds were raised. My studio seemed like a chamber at the top of a tall tower. All the vases were filled with tulips. There was a telescope by the window, a large jade plant, a crate filled with piano keys, a tapestry in lace that depicted the makeup of an atom. Your group gathe
red twittering around each object. You seemed older than your friends. This time you were more careful in your admirations. You gazed at a childhood photograph of me, an old portrait from Leningrad. I was eleven or twelve, with a volume of the encyclopedia wedged clumsily under one arm. White stockings were hiked to my knees. In the camera’s long exposure my face seemed ghostly, already distant.

  “What were you scared of?” you asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  You found Schillinger’s frog and it chirped in your hand. You gave the happiest laugh. The lock of hair slipped from behind your ear.

  “Have it,” I said.

  “You mean it?”

  “Happy birthday.”

  I called everyone into the parlour. On a table sat a round, iced cake. I had supervised its assembly in the Plaza Hotel’s kitchen. Now I stepped behind the rose-coloured confection and twisted together two trailing wires, closing the circuit. Your mother watched me as one would watch a magician, waiting. I moved away; I invited you to read the cake’s inscription; I felt a nervous thrill. You stepped closer. Beneath the strata of buttermilk, sugar and chocolate, a mechanism invisibly stirred. A motor whirred. The oscillator in the buried radio watchman sensed your body’s electrical capacity, sent electricity along a wire into an illuminating vacuum tube, which set an axle spinning. The top layer of the cake swivelled clockwise on its axis, all the way around, a pastry shell on a hidden platform, a secret door—and revealed a copper birthday candle. The flame lit by itself, darted and danced. It wished.

  “Oh!” you said. You clasped your hands, you bent, you blew it out.

  “Happy Birthday,” we sang.

  It was you I felt in my electromagnetic field.

  TWO MONTHS went by.

  I REMEMBER I NOTICED a quarter on the pavement. I bent and picked it up, held it glinting in the lights of the Great White Way. There I was on Broadway, in the spring of 1929, a shining silver coin between my fingers. I slipped it into my pocket. I began to walk. I bumped into you.

  “Pardon me,” I said, shaking my head clear.

  You tugged at the collar of your sky-blue coat. “No, no, it was my fault.” You bent forward to walk on; and stopped. “Dr Theremin?”

  I blinked. “Clara,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  “How are you?”

  A smile grew on your face. “I’m good.”

  I had seen you only once since your birthday, at an anniversary party for the Kovalevs. You were with your parents. We waved across the room. The two of us had never had a private conversation. I would be out in the city, waiting for an elevator or passing through Central Park and I would recollect suddenly the angle of your gaze. I would wonder whether you ever thought of me. Now we stood facing each other on the sidewalk and you had swinging pearl earrings. I saw the slightest tremor in your brown eyes.

  “It’s a pretty night,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Broadway is no place to stand still. We were being bumped and bounced by the throngs. Cars roared past, honking; men shouted after other men; you could hear the distant crash of trains. Signs shone over and around us, projected hazy words onto our raincoats. BARBERSH read the red letters on your left sleeve. A neon dollar sign hid in the gloss of my right shoe.

  “Would you like to get a coffee?” I asked.

  “Could we make it a drink?”

  On the boat to New York, I had been told the city had no nightlife left. This was the scuttlebutt from the bankers and salesman aboard the Majestic. They raised toasts of vodka, burgundy and calvados, told me to sip the good stuff while I could. “Prohibition,” complained a luggage baron from Tallinn, “has ruined the merry USA.”

  “It’s not Prohibition,” grumbled a jeweller from Omsk. “Drunks aren’t afraid to break the rules. The trouble is enforcement.”

  All of their favourite bars were shuttered: a speakeasy discovered in springtime would disappear by the time they returned in fall. I am not much of a drinker, but it saddened me to imagine a city without taverns, without the free sound of a bottle being unstoppered.

  But neither Prohibition nor enforcement had banished liquor from New York. Manhattan came alive after dark. I could stand at my apartment window and watch couples pirouetting into the street, into taxis. I could see the streaming lights of cabs heading east and west, and in the wee hours north, to Harlem. I had been in New York two months when I asked my new friends about drinking. Henry Solomonoff scribbled down the number for a bootlegger. “Cheap!” he said. “Rum, gin, rye. Seven bucks a bottle.”

  “But where do you go for …” I hesitated.

  “For a good time?” Solomonoff laughed. “Get your coat.”

  Around Broadway, the speaks were tucked just down, just around, folded behind shopfronts. At some, visitors rang a bell and showed their face, or placed their hand flat again a frosted-glass window. At other doorways one had to murmur a pass-phrase. Although Schillinger kept a notebook of secret codes, I was not so thirsty that I required an almanac. I knew several spots, here and there, and in with my other papers I carried six or seven members’ cards, but mostly I smiled, and I was polite, and my accent refuted any suspicion that I was a cop.

  We went down into a place without a sign. Light fell from the windows in gauzy shafts. The bartender was dark and extremely handsome, but slight, as if proportioned for the dreams of a twelve-year-old girl. His name was Tony. Most bartenders’ names were Tony. This one felt more like an Anthony. There were two other couples already there and a table with four men in suits. Schillinger called this place “The Blue Horse,” for the murals that curved and galloped around the bar’s other fittings. The images were dreamlike, surreal, visions from a Krazy Kat cartoon. A blue horse reared up at the left side of the bar, its mane like the tossing of the sea. You ordered a gin fizz, Clara, and I took a rum and Coke. The glasses were cold. We drank in near silence.

  After a little while you asked whether I had baked any cakes recently. There were very fine creases at the corners of your eyes. You rested your elbow upon the table and your chin upon the heel of your hand and I noticed the curve where your jaw met your neck. I imagined your violin cradled there. I imagined snowflakes touching the wide white courtyard that lay outside our windows, growing up.

  “I have been drawing,” I told you. “These days, it is all drawings.”

  “I didn’t know you drew.”

  A drawing was in my jacket pocket, folded into eighths. I took it out, opened it in the space between us. The paper crackled.

  “The RCA Theremin,” you read aloud from the corner.

  “Shhh,” I said, with false gravity. “These things are secret.”

  We looked at the arcs and contours and corners of my schematic. The table was painted with wet circles where our drinks had sat. Shreds of rubber eraser still clung to the page. This was a plan for the principal cabinet of the space-control device, the proposed RCA model. I would turn it in to the RCA engineers, this drawing and others like it, and they would take out their rulers and adding machines and materials books and spec manuals, and they would build prototypes, and ring up factory foremen, and perhaps they would even fly to hardwood forests, to nickel mines, to rap on tree trunks and chip at ore, evaluating whether all these things could be adequately smelted, sawed, and assembled into America’s new favourite musical instrument.

  You sipped your fizz. “If you were trapped in a snowy wilderness, just you and a winter coat and a cabin full of electrical equipment—would you be able to build a theremin? Just with this plan?”

  “If nothing were missing?” I asked.

  “If nothing were missing.”

  “Then yes,” I said.

  YOU WERE IN THE CITY to meet an accompanist. He had ended the rehearsal early. He was young, you said, and arrogant. You were eighteen years old.

  WHEN WE HAD FINISHED our drinks we went outside. The sky was a dark midnight blue, that strange nighttime blue of big cities, and it seemed so clean. Couples jostled pa
st us, men in dinner jackets and women in dresses, hats, gold at their wrists. They were going dancing. We watched them. “Do you dance?” you said. It was just a question.

  “I do,” I said. I tried to speak with the same transparency.

  “Do you?”

  Your face lit up. “Yes.”

  A moment passed. “Would you like to go dancing?”

  You hesitated for a second. I don’t know if it was because of me, or of some other beau, or the thought of your parents at home. Then your face seemed to apologize for the hesitation, and you said: “That’d be nice.”

  I glanced at the ground, where your feet stood beside my feet, and I thought the silly thought that in that second we were standing perfectly in our own footprints.

  I took you to the Make-Believe. It had the largest ballroom in the world, a room as big as Rybinsk’s town hall, the ceiling strung with paper lanterns and the walls done up in stars. We left our coats with the twins who kept the coats, I tipped the maître d’, and he brought us straight to a table and we straightaway got up. For the first time in the history of the world, since the seas cooled and birds alighted in the trees, Clara Reisenberg and Lev Sergeyvich Termen danced together. There was no band at the Make-Believe—there were two gramophones and their minders, a man and a woman, a library of records visible from the floor. The couple moved back and forth across the shelves, choosing the next song. They chose swing from New York and swing from Chicago, swing from London and Paris and Montreal. We stepped together and apart, leapt, grinned. I clasped you in my arms and I threw you away.

  Later, breathless, we leaned on the bar and drank long glasses of water. “Now what?” you asked. We grabbed our coats and went to the Roseland. The club was just heating up. A man tossed his partner three feet into the air. A woman slipped beneath her partner’s legs and rose up like a geyser. You asked me where I had learned to dance. I told you in Leningrad, that we did not have jazz but the bands played other quick songs. You danced the Charleston and I followed. You reminded me of Katia—but just for an instant, the way the rain reminds you for a moment of a particular spring. I had been trying not to think of her, the woman who had followed me on a ship. She was in New Jersey. She was, I told myself, a million miles away.