Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  I thanked the secretary and sat down and waited.

  When visitors’ hours ended that night, I returned to the Dnepr Hotel. In the morning I ironed my suit and went back to Spasskaya Tower. I passed through security and crossed the stone streets, past patrolling guards, birds in chirruping oaks, and arrived at the senate. I told the secretary I was the scientist Lev Sergeyvich Termen, from Leningrad, and again I was here to see First Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. I sat down and I waited.

  Just as it was turning dark on the other side of the glass, an officer in shoulder boards appeared beside me.

  “Comrade Termen?” he said.

  He took me upstairs.

  I passed through seven sets of closed doors. They checked my identification three times. In all my meetings with military leaders, my meeting with Lenin himself, I had not undergone so much scrutiny. Men surveyed me with faces like attack dogs. The corridors leading to Voroshilov’s office were bizarrely arrayed: oil portraits of horses, brown and black, like a parade of derby winners. Although there were also painted cavalrymen, the humans seemed like servants: men-in-waiting, holding the bridles of their leaders.

  Finally they led me into a room that was three or four times the size of Eva’s apartment, filled with paintings of Iosif Vissarionovich, Voroshilov, Iosif Vissarionovich walking with Voroshilov, and a dozen life-size canvases of Arabians, Tersks, Tchernomor horses. I recognized Voroshilov and immediately felt a sinking feeling. This was the general who had seemed most ambivalent to my research. He had a round face and platinum hair, a moustache like a smear of charcoal dust. His chest was full of medals. His eyes were too near together.

  Voroshilov sat. I stood. Between us rested the bronze sculpture of a horse. His desk did not even have a pad of paper: just a single lined sheet, and I could see no pen. Perhaps Voroshilov carried a pen in his pocket, with his military whistle.

  “Thank you for meeting with me,” I said.

  He said, “You are the doctor?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The doctor from Leningrad.”

  “My name is Lev Sergeyvich Termen. I am a scientist. Yes, from Leningrad. Thank you for meeting with me, Comrade Voroshilov.”

  “I only have a moment to see you,” he said. He did not seem to blink except when other people were talking.

  “I know you are very busy. I will try not to take up much of your time.” I clasped my hands.

  “What is this about?”

  “We met ten years ago, when I made a presentation on distance vision.”

  “Yes?”

  I hesitated. I was not sure if he remembered me or not. “So … I—since then, I have continued my research in other fields. This brought me to Germany, to France, to England, to America …”

  He had his eyebrows high, his lips dead flat.

  “In New York I collaborated with the NKVD, collecting intelligence for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” I said. It was the first time I had ever said such a thing.

  “For Beria?” he snapped.

  “Who?”

  “Comrade Beria.”

  “No, I worked—for other officers. Now I have returned to the Soviet Union and I am seeking a new project.”

  “So?”

  “So …” I began.

  “Do you think I am in need of doctors?” he said.

  “No, I am a scientist and I thought that as you had—”

  “You thought you would come here and dream up some kind of scheme? A swap of favours?”

  “What? No! I’m looking for work and—”

  “You’d line up and murmur the NKVD’s name and abracadabra, some magic powder floats down from the sky—”

  “No!” My fingertips fell against the edge of Voroshilov’s desk. I had interrupted him. He showed his teeth.

  “Comrade, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is built on systems. These are plain, practical systems. Sometimes these systems are so plain that they appear ugly. But they are not ugly. They are the most beautiful systems in the world and they function only if the people abide by these systems. Work is the most basic thing. It is the bedrock. If you try to bypass the systems, to exploit some influence in your own self-interest, it is as if you are taking a chisel to the bedrock of the Revolution.”

  There was a long pause. I said nothing until I realized that he was waiting for me to say something. “Yes, of course,” I murmured.

  “You say ‘of course’ as if you were not trying to corrupt the very foundation of the Soviet system,” Voroshilov said.

  “No, no, I just hoped that—”

  “You may go,” he said.

  “Comrade Voroshilov, I am deeply devoted to the—”

  “It is all right; we all make mistakes. Glaunov—show the doctor out.”

  A man took me by the elbow and then I was outside Voroshilov’s office, off-balance among the stallions. “Was he angry?” I said to his assistant.

  “What?”

  “Was he angry just now?”

  “Who?”

  “Voroshilov!”

  “Oh, no. No.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I fumbled at the buttons of my suit. “Thank you,” I repeated.

  I left the Kremlin and walked along the water. The air was clear and brisk. Night had fallen and I found that I was wandering in straight lines: the path by the river, then across the bridge, and back, and for miles along a road. I passed a silvery concert hall as a children’s orchestra streamed out of its doors: boys and girls hauling violins and trumpets and double basses wrapped in cloths. Parents’ hands rested on their children’s shoulders.

  The moon was almost full. The city’s glass reflections looked like flashing signals.

  I was irritated with Voroshilov but I was more irritated with myself: that I had done no research, that I was so ill-prepared. I was very hungry but in that state of mind where one cannot decide what to eat. I left the river and passed among stalls selling sandwiches, pelmeni, shashlyk. Finally, I ducked into a late-night café for a bowl of soup, some bread. I sipped from the bowl. I remember the soup was very peppery. I remember I was wondering whether I should try to meet with the other marshal, Budennyj. I turned this question over in my head.

  The waiter asked me if I wanted a piece of apple cake with cream. I shook my head. I did not even say the word no. How many thousands of times did I revisit that moment and wish I had said yes. How many thousands of times did I long for a piece of apple cake with cream.

  I went back to the hotel. I read from a novel about flying in a rocket to the stars. I never finished this book.

  I went to sleep on the bed.

  In the middle of the night, as is their way, there came a knock at the door.

  THREE

  PERFUME GARDEN

  BUTYRSKAYA WAS MY FIRST PRISON. It was not the worst. I began to tremble as the car approached its gate: uncontrollably, as if I was having a seizure. The guard beside me did nothing. He rode with his truncheon on his lap. I held my jumping hands to my face and tried to slow my breathing, but my heart kept on skipping in my chest like a piece of gravel.

  We stopped and someone got out to open the door. I asked the guard again: “What have I done?”

  They ordered me out and into a line of other prisoners. The bricks shone in the moonlight. None of us spoke. We searched each other’s faces, fearful. Guards yelled commands, cars arrived and sped away, engines shrieked. The prison door creaked open and closed, like the jaws of a trap. From far away it is difficult to write of these things: everything sounds like an exaggeration, a story you have already heard. But I had not heard these stories. I stood in the night, trembling. I did not know it was Butyrskaya. I did not know the names of Moscow prisons. The windows were covered with sheet metal and the bricks were the shade of dried blood. The trap creaked open. A man told me to go inside.

  Now it has been eight years since I stepped inside these prisons.

  In a small room, two guards told me to take off my clothes. I asked
them why. Our voices echoed. They repeated the order. I began to unbutton my shirt. I took off my shoes. Razor wire lay coiled beside the exit. I stripped off my jacket and pants, unthreaded the tie from my collar. I stood in my undergarments. “Continue,” a guard said. He pointed at my socks, gestured lazily at the rest. I removed my undershirt. I removed my socks. I took off my underpants. Everything was thrown into a bin. The concrete was cold as frost. One guard started sorting through my clothes. He crouched. He set aside my belt, tie, tore the elastic from my underpants. “What are you doing?” I said. The other guard told me to lift my arms and came wearily toward me. He began at my feet, feeling the spaces between my toes, then scraping the backs of my knees with his fingers, and up to my armpits, my splayed hands, and in every touch I felt the grubby casual-ness of his hands, and I thought of the hundreds of other men he had touched like this, in the middle of the night. I shuddered. He pulled back my ears, rubbing the insides with his thumb. He felt in my hair. He made me close my eyes and pushed at my lids, like a pawing animal. Suddenly his fingers were in my mouth, around my teeth. His hands tasted of vinegar. I gagged. Then he made me take my penis and show that there was nothing else between my legs. He told me to turn and I felt a new dread. But he did not touch me. He ordered me to pull apart my buttocks, to squat, but he did not touch me. He walked back toward the other guard. They told me I could get dressed.

  The buttons had been torn from my clothes. My wallet had been taken. My shoes were missing their laces. “Through that door,” they said, and I wiped my mouth, and I passed from one circle of hell into the next.

  Men in grey uniforms took my photograph.

  “What is your name?” someone asked.

  “What is my name?” I said. “You don’t know my name?”

  “Please state your name.”

  They pressed my fingers onto inkpads, then onto a shiny card, like a postcard, somewhere to jot a holiday message.

  “Profile,” someone said, and they took another photograph. My wardens were not monstrous. They seemed tired. They seemed like fathers and brothers. They led me under buzzing electric lights, past painted brick, up and around and through a maze, deeper and deeper, and part of me tried to remember the turns, senselessly, fruitlessly, as if I might escape and run and then be free. We came to a corridor where it said on a plaque, INVESTIGATION–INTERROGATION, and I recoiled, clawed back to where I had come from, and for the first time a guard struck me, hard, across the side of my shoulder. I could have stepped away in jong sao, fought, punched my one-inch punch, and pivoted to a kick. Instead I crumpled inward, stumbled, caught the end of my tongue with my teeth. My shirt cuffs fluttered at my wrists. I climbed a metal grille stairway with nets on either side, to catch the suicide attempts. At the top of the stairs I came to a wide desk, like in a draftsman’s office. They told me to stop. “Sign,” they said. It was a list with the title REGISTERED LIVES. The other lives were hidden by a metal plate. Only one line was visible—a bare strip of paper for me to register my life, and then the metal plate would descend by one line, and my name would be hidden, and the next prisoner would see just the bare space for his or her ink to drop.

  Lev Sergeyvich Termen

  I went through two more sets of doors and into a cell.

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO anticipate what will be our worst thing. Our worst things are not all the same. Hunger, thirst, fatigue. Or fear. I used to think that heartbreak was my worst thing. It is not. In a certain way, heartbreak is a reassurance. There is no reassurance in hunger, in thirst, in fatigue. Or in fear. These things are hollow things, un-things. I have learned that there are certain absences you can keep and hold; and other absences, like lost memories, which you cannot.

  I WAITED IN MY cell for a hundred years. I do not know how long it truly was. Time becomes senseless over dilating hours. The room was rectangular and dimly lit. There was a hole in the ground. There was neither bed nor bench and the walls were strafed with rows of iron nails, pointed outward. The nails were to prevent a prisoner from leaning against anything. It seems nightmarish but the reality was so dull, so mundanely cruel. Those nails could have been used to build things.

  I stood until I could not stand anymore. Then I sat on the floor, in my sagging and unbuttoned clothes. I sat. I sat. I lay down and turned on my side. In a cell, you gradually begin to count: bricks, tiles, the string of seconds. I began to list primes, counting upward. 223, 227, 229 … “What is today?” I asked myself. “It is the morning of Friday, March 10, 1939.”

  I closed my eyes and cried. I roughly rubbed my face. I clasped my knees and counted. I decided I would not cry again until things got worse.

  There was a slot in the cell door through which the guards could look, and it never opened. Who had brought me here? I wondered. What had brought me here? Had I betrayed my country somehow? Had I been mistaken for someone else? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov? Was it Totov? Was it Voroshilov?

  I did not sleep because I did not think I could sleep but I wish I had slept; I wish I had slept. I wish I had taken that silent and undisturbed century to curl up on the cold floor and dream.

  Then the door opened and I was grabbed by the shoulders and dragged, shrieking, down the hall. Most shocking was the suddenness. They grabbed me and lifted me and dragged me, even though I could walk, and this violence tore the wounded shriek from my lungs. They brought me into a room, thrust me onto a chair that was bolted to the floor. A bright light. Two men in silhouette. A ventilation grate breathing hot air from above.

  “What is your name?”

  “Lev Sergeyvich Termen.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “No.”

  “You are at the heart of Soviet intelligence.”

  I exhaled. As sifu taught me, I held on to the end of the exhale, extending the moment in silence and stillness before beginning the breath that follows.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why do you think you are here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I will ask the question again: Why do you think you are here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  One of the silhouettes moved toward and past me, illegible, and I thought it would strike me. It did not strike me.

  INSTEAD, THEY TOOK ME from the room. I was brought to a new cell, this one much larger than the last, with dripping arches and the smell of shit. It was full of bodies. Not corpses, but scarcely people: bodies in spring coats, shirts with buttons torn off. The cell, as big as a classroom, was walled in rust-red brick. There would have been room for a few dozen to sit and rest, but instead the floor was swollen with a hundred men, ashen and dying, or simply fearful; standing, teetering on trembling knees.

  The cell door closed. I smelled the bodies, the uncovered toilet, and slipped into these prisoners’ woollen folds. I did not understand this room—why we stood like passengers in an elevator, awaiting the next stop. There was hardly room to stand, let alone to sit, but still, but still. And so I sat, with murmuring around me, Indian-style with my knees upraised, until the cell door thudded open and the guard shouldered in, like a cyclops. They must have had peepholes all over, to see one man sitting in the throng. He was huge and dark, with a grotesquely friendly face, and he landed a blow upon my ear, roaring, “ON YOUR FEET.”

  The other prisoners cowered. When I was standing, the guard was gone. I stood, I stood, trembling.

  We were not permitted to talk.

  After a long time they hauled me back to the interrogation room. I do not know if the silhouettes were different or the same.

  “Why do you think you are here?” they asked.

  I swallowed. “It is a mistake,” I said.

  “What do you think is a mistake?”

  “You believe I am a traitor.”

  “Why do we believe you are a traitor?”

  “Because of something I said to Comrade Voroshilov.”

  “Comrade
Voroshilov?”

  “Kliment Voroshilov, the first marshal.”

  “What did you say to Comrade Voroshilov?”

  “I said something about America.”

  “What did you say about America?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why do you say you said something?”

  “I must have. I don’t remember.”

  “What don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why did you say something about America?”

  “Because I lived in America.”

  “When did you live in America?”

  “From 1927 to 1938.”

  “Why did you live in America?”

  “I—I was a spy.”

  “You admit you are an American spy?”

  “I am a Russian spy!”

  “You deny you are an American spy?”

  “Yes!”

  Then, once again, a silhouette moving toward and past me, the terror of impending violence; the door opens; I was taken back to the cell of hollow men.

  THEY TORTURED US WITH blunt instruments: hunger, exhaustion, despair. Twice a day we were led down the corridor to a small yard. For twenty minutes we sat on the gravel with a morsel of dry fish, a square of brown bread. Those who conversed were beaten. Those who fell asleep were beaten. The rest of the time we stood huddled in our crowd, trying to learn a way to close our eyes unseen, to lean softly against the murderer or traitor or innocent man next to us and simply rest there, between moments, in slumber.

  It was not often possible.

  This went on for two days. My interrogators wanted me to admit that I was a foreign agent. How could I admit this? Clara, I was not a foreign agent. I write this here, for my own record. I was not, I was not. In America, I believed in the Mother Motherland. I served my comrades. I did science; I stole plans; I murdered the man Danny Finch in loyalty to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  After two days they put me on “the conveyor.” I learned later that it has a nickname, like you would give to a stray kitten. The guards pulled me out from the shared cell and into an interrogation room and I remained there for days and nights, through mornings and mornings and mornings, with dawns’ and dusks’ slight light pastelling the window slit. Once you are put on the conveyor you cannot get off. Over and over they asked, “Are you an American spy?” Silhouettes and then men with faces and then silhouettes and then again men. They made me stand at attention, answering questions, blathering about Berlin, London, New York City. For hours I stood and answered, pleading that they talk to Pash or the Karls, or Lev, or to my other associates across the sea. For ten minutes, fifteen, they let me sit on the stool that was bolted to the ground but if I slipped into sleep they slapped me, hauled me up by the armpits, and we began again. The days poured relentlessly on and my interrogators seemed to grow larger, with more limbs and voices, arrayed like shadow puppets. In fatigue you begin to lose moments—whole minutes swallowed up, gone. It is as if reality is acquiring sinkholes, black pits. A tiny part of you begins to panic but the remainder cannot; it is too tired, simply too tired, and so your horrified spirit is like a gagged prisoner, bound in canvas, slowly being lowered into a lake.