Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  The longshoremen lowered the crates so gently, like gifts.

  I found myself alone on Neva pier with all my worldly possessions. I did not know where to go. Part of me had expected a government agent to meet me, some delegation or welcome parade. But there was no one. The passengers had disappeared like spiders under doorways. I remember standing on the pier and watching motorcars go round the street corner, one after another, coughing smoke, and the understanding that Leningrad had changed in my absence.

  I TOOK A ROOM with Father’s little sister, Eva Emilievna. She was a fragile woman now, thin, with watery blue eyes. She had been a soprano; growing up, I thought of her as “the singer.” But now my aunt worked at the hospital, wrapping broken legs, making splints. My parents had been dead four years. Eva told me about their funerals, one in the winter and one the next autumn, the pine halls full of friends. “Everyone was crying,” she said. “Everyone asked about you.” I imagined Mother and Father in their caskets, resting, waiting.

  “What were their last words?”

  Eva said she didn’t know. She touched her cup of tea with the tip of her finger.

  I spent each day in a different government office, slumped in a soft chair until my name was called. I met desiccated women from various Soviet agencies. Painted eyebrows, vases full of dried flowers. They added my information to rolls and registers. “You must make sure you are listed with the LNS,” one would say. “Check with SSUG.” At night I walked home to the apartment, skidding on the frost. Eva arrived later, depleted from her day in the wards. “It is so good to be with family,” she would say, turning on a lamp.

  My equipment was stored across town, with a friend of Eva’s, in a warehouse that safeguarded laundry powder.

  At supper we talked about old times. About picnics with Mother, Father, my grandmother, my sister. Mother always made hard-boiled eggs, wrapped them in velvet. Father was in charge of slicing cheese with his pocketknife. Eva remembered the time that each of us, one after another, spilled beets on our fronts. The whole family stained scarlet, like murder victims.

  My sister had now moved to Nizhny Novgorod, was married to a mathematician. “Come visit,” I wrote, in a letter.

  I told Eva about my years in America. I described Manhattan, Brooklyn, the bakeries in Chinatown. I recalled the parties, the brushes with celebrity. “Rachmaninoff,” I said, “shucks his own oysters.”

  She answered every anecdote with wide eyes, wonder. “Did you meet cowboys?” she said.

  “I saw one cowboy, from Texas, at the opening of a play. He even wore the hat. But there are not many in New York. Most of them live in the southwest of America.”

  “In the desert?”

  “It is not all desert. I went to California, on the West Coast. They grow oranges.”

  “I would like to swim in the Pacific Ocean,” she said.

  “I flew in an aeroplane,” I said, “clear over ten united states.”

  Then Eva tilted her head to one side, with those wide swimming eyes. I thought she was going to ask me about the aeroplane, its shadow streaking the fields.

  “I heard about Katia,” she said.

  I found that my face was frozen.

  Gradually I said, “Our divorce?”

  “Yes.”

  Our voices were very plain. I blinked at the table.

  “Yes,” I said at last. “I believe she remarried.” My smile was small, neat, sad. It was not a performance. Eva watched me with a sympathetic expression, as if she were giving me cards, flowers, a consoling present.

  “Did you meet other women?”

  The question was uncharacteristically forward. But when I returned her gaze I understood that Eva was not inquiring as my host, as my father’s younger sister. She was asking as someone who would soon be elderly, who had never married, who lived alone. A spinster wishing her nephew a certain happiness.

  And then I thought of you, standing at that theremin in the afternoon, surprising me.

  I thought of you at my door, with snow on your cheek.

  I also thought of Lavinia, tall and solemn, in the narrow chapel.

  Or later, at the foot of our stairs, as I disappeared into the morning.

  Shame skirted my edges, like thin smoke. I could imagine you so clearly, staring hard at a small article in the paper.

  My wife, tearing through my shelves, ringing embassies.

  Searching for answers in folders of blueprints.

  A hundred carbons with my mute signature.

  They had said they would bring her to Russia but they would not, and I had known they would not, and I had disappeared into the morning.

  I took so much from this woman and then I took away her husband.

  I TRIED TO FIND old friends. In a strange way, it was difficult to recall them. I went to dinners with former colleagues from the Physico-Technical Institute, regaled them with tales of radio waves, factory errors, million-dollar patents. My stories were gilded, full of wealth and opportunity. “And now after all that I have come back. I have come back to work.” They responded with an odd reticence, as if I had something in my teeth.

  I was penniless. Despite my lofty anecdotes, I did not have a job, a workshop, dispensation from the authorities. I lived in my aunt’s apartment. I dreamed of what I did not have. I fastened my cufflinks and raised toasts to Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, but I was not the prodigal son returned. I was a pauper in a land where I thought poverty had been abolished.

  On a Friday afternoon I went to my old workplace. I brought F. Lèle’s Principles of the New Radio, for Ioffe, carried from America. It was as if I was still twenty-two, clambering aboard the tram, feeling the old bump and shuttle of rails. The carriage was emptier than it used to be. Outside the windows, buildings had been wrecked and rebuilt. Everyone wore heavier coats.

  At Finland Station I disembarked. I shed the crowds and walked up the road. Snow was falling. Empty trees stood like turrets. I watched a cyclist press through the snow and grass. A wall topped with barbed wire had been built around a field and I tried to remember if there had ever been anything in that field, if it had even been mowed. Here, the city sounded the same as it used to. Wind, wheels rolling over sleet. Muffled animal sounds, as if dogs had been buried in the snow.

  I kept pace with the man on the bicycle. We came to the rise and I looked away into the arboretum, beaten bare by winter. There were still squirrels in the trees. Who feeds them? I wondered. Footprints had made paths. One crow. Above my head, white cloud went on uninterrupted.

  There was a moment when my boot skidded on ice and I looked up, breathing suddenly hard, and the cyclist had disappeared.

  It was almost two hours before I passed across the school’s frozen garden, rimmed by new fence. The buildings came into view and I found this was a respite, a gift. They were grand and quiet and I knew them. I went into the western entrance of the institute. My steps echoed in the dim marble hall. I left water footprints. I crossed the floor to Ioffe’s office, in the corner, with windows that looked upon the hills and the road, where you could watch the blue sun go down. The office was empty. Not even any furniture: just scratched marks in the floor.

  Sasha’s room was empty too.

  I went to reception. It was a room of strangers. I could not remember the names of the women who had once worked there, with whom I had once joked, but it didn’t matter. I spoke to a Tatar secretary. His voice was so quiet that I had to lean across the desk. He gave me the number for Ioffe’s new office. I went through the empty hallways, up the stairs, to this door. I knocked. Through the door, he said, “Da?” and I went in.

  Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, my former supervisor, sat behind a low desk. His hair had turned white. His shoulders were hunched, as if he had been carrying a load. I remembered the way we used to share a samovar of hot water, both of us looking in on it, shepherding it, pouring out two teapots. The big pot of honey that used to sit on his desk. I could not see it here.

  I stood in his door, da
mp and dripping.

  There was no recognition in his gaze.

  “It is Lev Sergeyvich Termen,” I said.

  “I know.”

  The way he spoke, I was afraid he was unhappy to see me.

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  “Extremely well,” he said. His voice was level. His spectacles made him look even older than he was.

  I extended the book. “I brought you a gift.”

  Ioffe straightened. He looked at the spine of the book. He looked at me. I sensed then that it was not ambivalence I was feeling, or hostility. It was caution. Perhaps it was fear. Ioffe smoothed his coarse moustache. He looked at me again. I saw him make a decision. This was a fragile moment. He pushed a hand down his brow and over his face, and stood up, and he crossed the room to embrace me. A bear hug in the office of the director of physics and technology, among ticking clocks and electric eyes.

  “Zdravstvuyte, Lev,” he said, into my shoulder.

  “Zdravstvuyte, Ioffe.”

  As we released each other I asked again, “How have you been?”

  “Extremely well,” he said, and swallowed, and turned away from me.

  We spoke for a long time. His office was grey, illuminated by the window’s cold reflection. His desk was crowded with papers, thick reports, everything stamped with a seal. The institute had grown and it had shrunk; there were many new responsibilities, he said. Deadlines. Many scientists had left or been sent away.

  “I am looking for work,” I said.

  He looked at his hands. “Are you registered with the planning committee?”

  “Of course. But there is some kind of holdup. I thought that if the institute contacted them …”

  Ioffe gazed at me. It was a steady, heavy stare, as if he were rolling a steel bearing toward me, seeing if I would catch it.

  I said, “My research saw many advances, in America.”

  “Tell me about America,” Ioffe murmured.

  So I told him about America. Teletouch, Alcatraz, the altimeter, the aeroplane. My adjustments to the theremin, the rhythmicon. My purer research into electric fields, capacitance, signals through the air. He did not interrupt. He listened, leaning back in his chair. I felt the need to be poetic: “With radio,” I said, “I feel like an explorer who has only just glimpsed the outline of a continent.”

  I described to him the time I played before twenty thousand people at Coney Island. “I have many ideas about loudspeakers. Amplification. There are many applications. Not just performances—official announcements, public address systems …” Ioffe shifted in his seat. “Or perhaps … er … military functions …” I said.

  “What happened with Konstantinov’s sister?” he said.

  “What—”

  “With Sasha’s sister.”

  “Katia?”

  “Yes,” Ioffe said. He set his elbows on the desk.

  “We …” I exhaled. “We fell out of love, Abram.”

  Ioffe looked so sad.

  “Is Sasha here?”

  “No,” he murmured.

  “Where is he? It would be good to see him.”

  “He was arrested.”

  I was horrified. “Why?”

  “Article 58.”

  “What is Article 58?”

  “ ‘Counter-revolutionary activities.’ ”

  “How could Sasha be accused of counter-revolutionary activities?”

  Ioffe rose. He stood in silence for a moment. “I do not have work for you here,” he said finally. He lifted Principles of the New Radio, turned it over in his hands. “I am sorry, Lev.”

  I swallowed. I got to my feet as well.

  “Lev,” he said, meeting my eyes. “You must speak less well of your time abroad.”

  IN MID-FEBRUARY I SOLD a set of tools and bought a train ticket to Moscow. It was a night train. I slept under a thin sheet. When I awoke, someone had stolen my shoes.

  I went to Moscow to find employment. To find employers who would petition the planning committee on my behalf. I bought new shoes from a stall at the station. Shiny new shoes. Already my money was almost gone. I checked into a shabby hotel. On a wall in the foyer there was a notice from a travel agency seeking English translators. I made a note on the back of my train ticket. I went up into my minuscule room, like my cabin on the Stary Bolshevik. I lay down on the bed, still made, and closed my eyes.

  Over the next weeks I took a few small translation jobs. They gave me Russian copy about the Black Sea, the Winter Palace, Kiev’s former cathedral. I translated this into the language of Shakespeare and Twain. I remember one sentence, like a treasure I was able to keep: The columns of Manpupuner will never change, not even in winter.

  I HAD COME TO Moscow with the names of four generals.

  These were men I had met more than a decade before. Three years after I showed Lenin the theremin, one year after he died, the Kremlin had once again contacted me, requesting that I demonstrate my work on “distance vision” technology. Television. With Ioffe I had developed a working prototype: a small display, one hundred lines of resolution. It worked relatively well in low light. In a room with very high ceilings, four men crowded around the machine. Their assistants stood in a huddle near the door. I tried to introduce the principles behind the device; the four men just stared at the screen. Eventually they sent me away.

  I had taken down their names: Ordzhonikidze, Tukhachevsky, Budennyj, and Voroshilov. Under Tukhachevsky’s name, I wrote a sentence, something he had said: One day, the Red Army will see into tomorrow.

  A few months later I received a message saying Iosif Vissarionovich had been very happy with the device. It would now be developed internally, by army scientists. Send us your notes, the message said. Send us everything.

  I was angry. Ioffe advised me to say nothing.

  I turned my focus to the theremin.

  In Moscow now, I hoped to find these generals. Wherever they were, I would find them. I would tell them: Let me return to work.

  From Ioffe I had learned that a chemist from the Physico-Technical Institute, a man named Totov, was working as a clerk at the Politburo. “He turned in his vials,” Ioffe said. I vaguely remembered Totov: a man shaped like a triangle, wide at the hips but with very compact shoulders. He had sandy hair and glasses. This was all I had, coming to Moscow: four generals’ names and Totov, at the Politburo, like a triangle with glasses.

  I was persistent, and I located him. On my third visit to the Kremlin’s gates, Totov came tottering out. His hair was longer now, like a woman’s. There were more lines around his eyes.

  “Comrade Totov,” I said.

  He stopped where he stood. “Who are you?” he said. In the moment’s pause I saw the rise of panic.

  “Termen,” I said, “from Leningrad. Do you remember?”

  There was a short beat, then relief splashed over him. “Termen!” he said. “The man with the warbling boxes!”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes, just so.”

  When he was done work, we met at a café near the library. For a long time we exchanged pleasantries. He did not ask about my past ten years; it was not clear whether he knew I had been to America. I asked him about work and he spoke with a rambunctious, unconvincing enthusiasm. Finally there was a lull in the conversation and I told him why I had come to Moscow. I told him that I was looking for some men who knew my work, who might be able to help me.

  “I cannot give you a job,” he blurted.

  “No, no,” I said, “of course not. I wish to continue my research. But I am looking to speak to some men I once met. Generals.” I swallowed. “I thought perhaps you could teach me the best way to—to reach …”

  “Generals?” Totov whispered.

  I took the paper from my jacket. “Budennyj, Ordzhonikidze, Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No.”

  “You know these men?” he said.

  “I did know them.”

  Totov quavered
in his chair. “I do not know them. I do not know that I can help you.”

  “What is it?”

  His eyes flicked up and down.

  “Totov?”

  “Ordzhonikidze was in the Politburo. He died a few years ago.”

  “Yes?”

  “Tukhachevsky was executed,” he said. “Treason.”

  “I see. And the others?”

  “Budennyj is a marshal.”

  “A marshal?”

  He stared at me, incredulous.

  “What?”

  “A marshal. A marshal of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He is the second-most important soldier in the world.”

  “I see,” I said. “And Voroshilov?”

  “Voroshilov?” he said. “Voroshilov is the most important soldier. He is the first marshal. The hero of the southern front. The commissar for defence. You didn’t know this?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember Luhansk?”

  “The city?”

  “Now we call it Voroshilovgrad.”

  I swallowed.

  “How did you not know this?” he muttered.

  I folded up the paper. “I was not here.”

  “How did you not know this!” he repeated.

  “If I wanted to meet with Voroshilov, how would I do this?”

  Totov threw up his hands and squeaked. “How would you meet with Comrade Stalin? How would you meet with the man in the moon?”

  I paid for our tea and cakes.

  The next day I ironed my suit and went back to the Kremlin. I passed through red-brick Spasskaya Tower and to the entrance of the senate. At reception I said in a quiet voice that I was the scientist Lev Sergeyvich Termen, from Leningrad, and that I wished to have a meeting with First Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. In my message to the first marshal I said that we had met ten years ago, when I had shown him how to see through walls.