Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  “It shows you the note,” you observed.

  “Does it help?” I asked.

  You came slowly to your feet, the light going rosy. The terpsitone played a C sharp. You pointed at me; your leg swung out in an arc; you showed me your wrist and then the back of your hand. It was not quite a song, but it was a measured, considered singing. Then you laughed and shook out your arms and sent the terpsitone into a shriek. “Well,” you said.

  “Well?”

  We looked at one another. You were on your feet; I was still crouching. We were allies.

  “You are better than any dancer,” I said.

  “At this?”

  I nodded yes.

  You chewed your bottom lip. “It’s interesting,” you said after a moment. “Each movement is a choice. Up or down, elbow or knee.” You moved your elbow, your knee. “Sixteen bars is like a sequence of decisions.”

  “Would you play it with us at Carnegie Hall?” I asked.

  You seemed surprised. “What? How?”

  “You’d learn,” I said.

  “Leon, I’m a violinist.”

  I still had bicycle grease on my hands. I said, “Then we will have a violinist playing the terpsitone.”

  I RECALL ONLY THREE MOMENTS from the last time I played Carnegie Hall.

  I remember all of us standing in the wings at the beginning of the show. We were half hidden in folds of black velvet. Albert Stoessel, from Juilliard, spoke at a microphone. He said, “The instruments devised by Dr Theremin are instruments of feeling; they are instruments of the heart.” Sixteen friends stood beside me. Ten-year-old Yolanda was the first to go out; she opened the concert alone but for an accompanist, playing Glinka’s “Lark.” She was as tall as a young maple. I remember I had a screwdriver in my right hand, which I had used to replace one of the fingerboard theremin’s vacuum tubes. I dropped it to the stage floor as we all began to applaud.

  The second moment was yours. You crouched in black on the terpsitone’s platform, as if you were praying, centred in a spotlight. Carlos, the harpist, sat beside you. In the wings, I held my breath.

  You stood, slowly, staring into the room’s rapt silence. You arched your back. You were a black-barked cherry tree. You were my one true love.

  With Carlos you played Bach and Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” Each note was shown in a beam of light. I had built a loudspeaker, covered it in twill, raised on a simple mount above the stage. Your music pushed like breath against the cloth. It trembled and then sang. You danced, choosing every moment, guiding the melody with a rolled shoulder and the tilt of knee. At the clubs you had not danced like this.

  The third moment was hours after the concert, eleven o’clock or midnight. We had just crossed the street, you and I, arm in arm. Our bellies were full of champagne, blini, and chocolate. We were headed to the party at Little Rumania, where we would drink more champagne, toast Wagner and Grieg, listen to old Moskowitz behind the counter, conjuring Gemenc herons on his dulcimer. On the street corner, beside a closed-up newspaper stall, we met a man. He wore an overcoat despite the balmy air. He had a square jaw, wide shoulders. He seemed a full foot taller than I. He had hands like the paddles of a boat.

  “Clara!” he said. You stopped and turned. I could not see your face.

  “Robert,” you replied.

  “Late night at the office?” he asked. He gave an isosceles smile.

  You said, “Leon, this is my friend Robert Rockmore. Robert—Dr Leon Theremin.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said. As we shook hands I imagined pivoting as I stepped forward, raising the elbow of my arm, striking this man across the chest, then releasing his hand, hooking his right leg with my right foot, and shoving him the rest of the way to the ground, to where the pavement was stained black.

  I wonder if you felt some tensing of muscles. You did not seem to change but there was a subtle adjustment of body language, a rearrangement of planes, and in that second I sensed that we two were one thing and he was another.

  Your hand was on my arm. “Robert,” you said, “we need to run.”

  SIX

  CLOSER

  BEFORE DAWN THIS MORNING I heard a dog in the passageway outside my cabin. The sounds were unmistakeable: running, panting, barking. It sounded like an animal of medium size, a pinscher or golden retriever. I pressed my ear to the metal door. The sound came, disappeared, came again. What was a dog doing on a boat? Who would bring a dog to sea?

  My room was almost completely dark, just the porthole’s disc of morning light at the head of my cot. I strained to imagine the scene outside: the lone animal at the end of the corridor, tail wagging, waiting for something. For its owner? I rattled my locked door. I wanted to take the dog above deck, into the sunrise, to watch the brightening sky. The dog would leap and happily snap. We would be friends. We would be the only two friends on this great iron vessel.

  When Red arrived with my meal, hours later, I asked him about the dog.

  “What dog?” he said.

  “The dog that was here.”

  Red jerked straighter. “Here?” he said, peering around my room.

  “Out there.” I gestured toward the corridor.

  Red looked puzzled. “No,” he said.

  “I heard it.”

  “There is no dog,” he said.

  “I am certain I heard a dog.”

  He looked at me darkly. “You are making things up.”

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE I used to carry an alarm clock. Despite my longing for a pocket watch, my mother and father made me wait for my tenth birthday. In the meantime, persistent little Lev convinced his aunt Eva to lend him a square, windup alarm clock, swimming-pool blue, which I carried with me wherever I went, like a talisman.

  I couldn’t tell you quite what compelled me to haul around the device. At school, with my instructors’ tacit approval, I extracted the clock from my bookbag and placed it on my desk. Its ticking tallied the day. It quickened my pace. At home I sat in Father’s easy chair and read the newspaper. When the alarm went off, at ten after six, I vacated the seat. “What’s the story?” Father would ask as he took off his shoes, and I’d report the day’s headline.

  I loved the clock’s mechanism and I loved to set the clock’s alarm. There was enormous satisfaction in the ordered, accurate outcome, the hammer striking its bell. And yet a separate feeling stalked and chased this pleasure. Fear. A trembling, embarrassing, childish terror, like needing to urinate. Despite the clock’s ticking it was never quite predictable: no second hand, no warning. Once or twice it went off randomly, through some error in the mechanism, for a bleating half a minute. The machine made its invisible countdown and abruptly the whole thing was seized, shrieking, shaking with torsions, until it stopped, or I stopped it, and I sat with heaving breaths, like a man just pulled ashore.

  A love of timers’ timing, a hatred of alarms’ alarms. A stupid circumstance, but I was just a kid. Living with the clock, I would find myself holding my breath, tightening fists, imagining an any-second shrill. Walking down the street, the thing in my bag, I imagined its plain tin shell and the coiled springs inside. I woke from nightmares, heart thumping, and stared at the placid face beside my bed, tick tick tick, that harmless metal panic. It was an awful companion.

  So at a certain point I stopped setting the alarm. I pretended I simply didn’t want to. And a little while after that, I stopped carrying the clock. It was enough to know it was at home, unattended, counting.

  IN THE DAYS AFTER you gave up the violin, I wondered whether it had been the same for you with your arm. Had you been frightened of it? Had you carried the fear with you?

  We were sitting on the floor in the workshop, legs before us, one of those show-and-tell mornings—leafing through art books, keepsakes, last week’s Sunday Times. You found my packet of anagram poems; I felt strangely shy.

  “What are these?” you asked.

  I didn’t have a name for them. Silly couplets, the same letters on each line.

>   I watched you pass from one page to the next.

  You said they should be called leonids, like the meteor shower.

  I was in love, sipping ginger ale. With sunlight folding over us I got up and went to the icebox.

  “Here,” I said. The ice gave little fizzing sounds as it dropped into our tumblers.

  I sat back down beside you. Every time I took a sip, my tongue touched the dusty cold taste of snow.

  After a moment I said, “Do you want to visit the North Pole?”

  You were staring into your cup, a serious look on your face, as if you were remembering something sad. You raised your eyes. “What?”

  “Would you like to visit the North Pole?”

  You smiled. “Are you planning something?”

  I shook my head.

  You felt the rim of the glass with your thumb. “Not by foot,” you said. “But maybe by air, like Nobile.”

  Now I was the one who must have looked serious. You were just naming a man from the newspapers, but Umberto Nobile’s name meant more to me than that. His first polar airship, the Norge, came through Leningrad on its way to Svalbard. I had stood in its long shadow at Palace Square, watched the foot of its rope ladder wave, magical, above the paving stones. That night there was a reception by the Electro-Technical Society. Amundsen would have been there, and Ellsworth. I was not interested in Norwegian explorers and American tycoons so much as I was by the Italian engineer who was to pilot his own airship to the Pole. But I was knotting my tie when Katia came and asked where I was going, and I said to the Society, and she began to cry. I did not go out. As the adventurers sipped cherry brandy, I nursed a dying thing.

  Nobile reached the Pole in his airship. Two years later he returned with the Italia, built with the assistance of the city of Milan. This airship was blessed by the Pope. Six hundred miles past the Pole, buffeted by winds, with ice-jammed controls, the dirigible began to plunge. It banked into a spire of blue ice and the Arctic tore up through the floor of the control gondola, at once a blizzard and an electric saw. Nobile and nine others were thrown onto the ice. One man, an Italian mechanic, bled to death as they waited for the rescuers. Six more, trapped in the envelope of the Italia, were lifted up, and up, and up, and they disappeared.

  But Nobile lived.

  I took a sip of ginger ale.

  You said, “Leon, I’m not going to play the violin anymore.”

  I looked at you with a start. “What?”

  “It’s my arm.”

  Your arm, your right arm. I stared at it, resting on your thigh. It was docile. It was lovely. You held it out before you, as though someone had taken your hand to kiss. “It hurts,” you said.

  “It hurts badly?”

  “The doctors say it is from when I was an infant. There was not enough to eat, and my bones did not form correctly.”

  “In Vilnius.”

  “In Vilnius.”

  “They can’t do anything?”

  “It is an old wound.”

  “They are certain they cannot do anything?”

  You circled your wrist with your fingers. “It used to ache when I played. They gave me exercises. The exercises made it worse. The ache became a sting. Bending my elbow, drawing the bow; it’s as if there are hot pins in my joints.”

  “You never told me.”

  You shook your head. “I’m telling you now.”

  I asked you, “What will you do?” The ice cubes had melted in my glass.

  You flared suddenly. “All these questions!” You climbed to your feet. I got up as well.

  “Clara,” I said.

  You still were not looking at me.

  “Clara,” I said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We don’t need to talk about it,” I said gently.

  You were staring at the wallpaper’s column of twisting roses.

  “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  This sentence made you flinch. Your brow was dark and knit. “Let’s go out,” I said.

  After a moment you said, “Go out where.”

  I searched your face for inspiration. It showed me nothing. Strange when a face is bare and yet secret. You were gazing at my painting of a foreign island filled with ruins.

  “Connecticut,” I said.

  Your eyes flicked back to mine.

  “Connecticut,” I said again.

  Your face cracked into a smile. “Connect-icut?” you said. I did not know, but I had pronounced it wrong. “You mean ‘Connecticut’?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why would we go to Connecticut?”

  “We will go and we will find out,” I said.

  “You’re an idiot,” you said.

  “I will call for a car,” I said.

  We hired a silver convertible, like the lining of a cloud. Its top speed was very slow. We eased out of New York City and along the bay into New Rochelle. We wove through small towns. We scrutinized hay bales. We passed chimneys and stables and billboards reading LOCKSMITHS. Cows loitered, birds cheered. Rivers ran with cold water.

  We stopped when we saw horses. You were frightened, frightened of making them run, and you stayed with the car. They were the colours of pecans and walnuts. Their heads were raised, attentive. I padded through the long grass, listening to my breathing, listening to theirs, inhaling the green field smells and the horses’ scent, like paprika and clover. I heard you murmur, “Careful …”

  In Litchfield, Connecticut, we sat in the car and watched a valley disappear. Before it was fully dark, the stars had already come out. I knew the constellations by their Latin names and you knew their English names. Why did we never speak Russian with each other? I think I was trying to build something new, something I had never known before. “Ursa Minor,” I said. You replied, “Little Bear.”

  WE ATE DINNER LATE, at an inn overlooking Lake Waramaug. They brought us plates of raw oysters, sour cherries, radishes with butter. “Such strange food,” you said.

  “It’s the way of Connect-icut,” I said.

  I had fish chowder and you had a gigantic sirloin steak, a steak bigger than your head, which you attacked with a carnivorous precision I had never beheld in you before. You manoeuvred the fork in your right hand and I saw that there was no hesitation there; no pain flashed in your face. It was not that you could not use that arm: it was that you could not play violin with it. In a way, this seemed an even crueller injury. I asked myself what I would do if someone told me I could no longer be an engineer.

  At the table you spoke of your early childhood, before your family came to New York. It was like revisiting the scene of a crime. You remembered the wide cathedral square, holiday processions down Pilies Street. Vilnius was all straight runs, flat lines. You took a heel of bread and ripped it in two. After the Revolution, they closed the city market. You described playing in the empty stalls, skipping with your sister across the speckled earth. You were hungry.

  I told you about riding a bicycle through the grounds of the Physico-Technical Institute, about the spray of green leaves and rainbows bending.

  You said the weather in Lithuania had always seemed comprehensible; that even as a little girl, you felt the rain coming, saw the sunshine departing. You could intuit the clouds. “In America, what sense do things make?” you said.

  I chided you. “You know as well as I.”

  “It’s as if no one here ever learned that there are ways things are supposed to be.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s why I’ve stayed.”

  We spoke of the northern lights. In Leningrad, they streak across the entire winter. In summer there are the white nights, long bright midnights. But after the fall equinox come the gold, green, crimson nights, when glimmers lift out of all that blackness, undeniable, secure, fading. The aurora looks like roads, sometimes; bands of light twisting across hilltops. But the hills are not there, the roads are not there—like the paths of ghosts. You forget their routes as soon as you have gl
impsed them.

  “Roads less travelled by,” you said.

  I didn’t know you were quoting Robert Frost. “Travelled by whom?” I said.

  You hesitated. After a moment, you murmured, “By us.”

  I used to sit and watch the northern lights from my bedroom window, as a boy, and later, as a man, from my dormitory at Petrograd University. As a husband I watched too. I did not tell you this. I would lean my head against the glass and know that behind me, across the room, Katia lay with her eyes closed.

  For dessert you ordered a chocolate parfait. I ordered a cup of coffee. I drank it sweet, with two small spoonfuls of sugar. Someone was playing records, one after another. They all sounded like love songs. You hid your grin as you scraped mousse from the bottom of the parfait glass.

  When we went back out into the night, crossing the gravel to the car, I think we both expected to see the aurora. But everything was dark. We expected it to be weaving above us in cold blazing splendour. The sky had clouded over. In the darkness I pulled the convertible roof up over the car and then I went over to you and I kissed you.

  I remember how later you swept your hair away from where it lay around your eyes. You stretched your arms as though you were waking. When your wrist touched the window glass there was an instant when your mouth moved, almost smiling, and then you said that you felt outside and inside at the same time.

  MUD TONY’S NEVER CHANGED. The walls were an overripe lime green, the tiles a weak milky blue. Cooking oil hung like a fine mist in the air. Every two weeks I hunched in a booth with Karl and Karl and they passed me glasses of vodka and I swallowed them without protest. I spilled my guts. I looked around the diner with sad eyes. The salt shaker was always at the same level. The tabletop was covered in a tacky film.