Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  “No,” Andrei Markov said.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “It’s Sunday,” Andrei Markov said, not lifting his eyes.

  I broke into a grin. “We work on Sunday.”

  “No,” he said, “you work on Sunday.”

  “Andrei Markov is exempted?”

  “I do not volunteer,” he said, taking a bite of his banana.

  “I don’t—” I began, but then I shrugged. I tugged my sweater’s collar.

  Andrei Markov raised his gaze. He is older than me, with a crown of white hair and a longish beard. “On the second floor,” he said over his reading glasses, “at the end of the hall, beside the duty office, there is a list. It is headed, ‘Sunday Volunteers.’ ”

  “Yes?”

  “Sunday is entitled to us as a free day. Any work is strictly ‘voluntary.’ Do you know what ‘voluntary’ means? And yet here is a peculiar thing: every Saturday night, beside the duty office, a list of volunteers is posted. And this list includes the names of every zek at Marenko. For example, Termen, Lev Sergeyvich.”

  I was not sure if he was joking. “And Markov, Andrei?”

  “Markov, Andrei strikes himself from the list.”

  “Is this permitted?”

  Andrei Markov looked at me again, levelly. “How would they punish me, Termen?”

  I checked his story later that day. On the second floor of the dormitory building, at the end of the hall, on a wall painted pale green, nine typewritten pages. Dated from the night before: Sunday Volunteers. And under M, one name, Markov, had been neatly crossed out, with a pencil-thin line.

  The next morning I joined him for breakfast. He sat with his book, silent. Finally I asked, “How many?” This was not a rare question at Marenko.

  Andrei Markov turned a page. “A quarter,” he said, “and five on the horns.”

  I could not help but take a breath. Twenty-five years, and five more with diminished rights. “For me, eight years.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much do you have left?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Seven,” I said.

  Andrei Markov took another spoon of porridge. With a flick of one finger he turned the page of his book.

  “You never work on Sundays?” I asked.

  Andrei Markov took a moment before answering. Then he set his book face down on the table. The cover said SWIMMING HORSES.

  “I am a prisoner.” He cleared his throat. “I am a prisoner and you are a prisoner. You remember?” He stared at me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It took until my hundredth morning at Marenko for me to remember. We laugh and eat and scribble in our notebooks and we get distracted. We don’t notice our jailers. Then one morning I remembered. I looked. We are caged and counting. While our friends die, on the outside, and our wives fall in love with other men, and our children go to school where they are taught lies concerning their fathers, we stay here, frittering away our breath. Every day we get closer to death and every day is wasted, spilled out into the laboratory. This is a theft. This is the most terrible theft. They have taken away my life and it does not matter that my hours are easier here than they were in Kolyma. I will die inside this place. If my life has any meaning, that meaning was made—it must have been made—before they arrested me on February the second, 1933.”

  “You can still …” I began.

  “A man has only a slim chance to matter,” Andrei Markov said, in a voice that was stony. “A slim chance, like a blade of grass or a poured cup of water. They have taken this from me. They have opened a wound in my side and taken my entrails.”

  He lowered his head.

  “No, I never work on Sundays,” he said.

  But I did not believe him. Andrei Markov pretended that Marenko was a crevasse, a terrible slit in the earth that had swallowed us up. Marenko was not a crevasse. It was a refuge. In the laboratory, I peered at my voltmeter and consulted with fellow thinkers, all of us in this strange sanctuary, creating things. I said hello to Pavla, and good night. Sometimes, for old times’ sake, I did push-ups beside my bunk. I went through the first and second forms, Little Idea and Sinking the Bridge, and the other zeks laughed.

  I worked on Sunday, I worked on Sunday, and I worked on Sunday.

  Two years passed.

  A war raged in Europe.

  Every so often we would have a visit from a short man with a small smooth head and round pince-nez glasses. He walked with a slight slouch. His eyes flicked, flicked.

  He asked us about our projects. He listened and asked questions.

  Yukachev stood beside him, sweating, white as a maggot. The man’s name was Lavrentiy Beria.

  SEVEN

  TARANTULA

  THIS IS WHAT I IMAGINED you were doing while I devised new instruments for Soviet aeroplanes:

  I imagined that you went to eat at Rose’s and walked home past the stationery shops, a million miles of paper and all those wells full of ink.

  I imagined a springtime that was cold at first and then warmer, and you called your sister: “What is with this kooky weather?”

  I imagined you voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt. You went alone to the voting place and stood behind the screen and toyed with checking the box beside Wendell Willkie’s name, just out of mischief, smiling to yourself.

  I imagined you played the theremin in Canada, on tour, in a city where they speak French. They said to you: “Bravo, bravo!” and “Enchanté,” and you marvelled that somewhere so close could be so different.

  I imagined you ordered a crate of oranges, you and your husband, but he didn’t eat any of them. You ate them all yourself, one a day, cutting them down the centre with a small knife.

  I imagined you played the theremin at Carnegie Hall, alone, before velvet sewn with stars.

  I imagined there was an article about you in the Times. They said you had studied with Dr Leon Theremin. The journalist described your appearance as “luminous.” Rockmore didn’t want to discuss her former tutor.

  I imagined you fought with your husband one night, in bed, both of you sitting with your backs to the headboard, your heads to the wall. He said he wanted to have a son. You scraped your fingernails over the duvet. You said, “You live your life and I’ll live my life, Robert.”

  I imagined you sitting in your dressing room after a concert, staring at your reflection in the mirror. You had been in dressing rooms like this before. In front of mirrors like this before. I imagined you were recalling, gently, how close you had come to never playing music again—to becoming a violinist with a tired arm who sits at home with a romance novel and a simmering pot of chicken stock. You looked at your face in the mirror, severe and proud.

  I imagined you went to see the ballet, all those dancers throwing their partners across the stage.

  I imagined you ate the heels of many loaves of bread.

  ONE EVENING, LATE, I came out of the laboratory and into Marenko’s hallway. I was heading back toward the main staircase. I was thinking of I-don’t-know-what. There were no sounds. I walked. At a certain moment I realized that I was following a path of footprints: a single set of footprints, faintly braiding, the wet footprints of a cat. I knew of no cats in this place. The footprints continued down the centre of the hall and I followed them. I followed them around a corner. I wondered about the story of this cat. This was such a pleasant adventure. I followed the footprints. Then the path abruptly stopped, the path disappeared, as if the cat had been swallowed into thin air.

  THIS IS WHAT I imagined you were doing while I was designing rockets with Korolev, furies that would roar into the sky:

  I imagined that you went on long walks through the city, through the snow and rain, the sweltering July, seeking something you couldn’t remember.

  I imagined that you wondered whether your husband would be drafted. Killed on a hill in Egypt, obliterated on a Pacific gunship. “No, Clara,” he said, “never.” You wondered about the certainty of n
ever. You spoke to girlfriends whose men had gone away, who wrote letters on dusted paper. You thought of a boy from the theatre, an usher, who was in England now.

  I imagined that at night you came home and sat with Robert Rockmore, the radio singing.

  I imagined one morning you took a cab up to Harlem and got out where we used to get out sometimes, though you didn’t realize it until you got out, right into a puddle, looking down at your feet then lifting your gaze up to the orange awning, QUIET BARBERSHOP. “Oh, the Quiet Barbershop,” you used to say. “D’you think the barber’s name is Sammy Quiet?”

  I imagined you walked through Harlem like a wind walking through a million stalks of wheat.

  This is what I imagined you were doing while I spent sixteen months in Sverdlovsk, a different sharashka, where the furnace clanged, on a team designing radio beacons for submarines:

  I imagined the booking of your first overseas tour, London and Paris and Casablanca—you wanted to go to Casablanca. You were packing your cases and practising new material, Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla. I imagined the meetings you had with your girlfriends, giggling over little coffees, thumbing through travelogues at bookshops off Broadway. Then the tour was called off. “Of course it was cancelled!” your husband said. “There’s a war on. It was a silly idea in the first place.”

  Which made you furious. You stood by the window, jaw clenched, staring into the hard wide blue sky. You felt white with rage but also a thin separation, a kind of caul, shame at your pride. “Even in a war,” you said, “the world goes on.” Silently, you asked Robert to drop the subject, to give it up, to condescend no further. This is what I imagined. And I imagined that you thought of me, as I imagine that you do, and you told yourself: “Lev was worse. He was even worse, Clara.”

  As I refined submarines at Sverdlovsk, I wondered if I was worse, worse than Robert Rockmore, a monster I did not really know, a man I imagined in grotesque, cruel to him even now; I was cruel even now, ten thousand miles away, building murdering machines.

  THEY TRANSFERRED ME BACK to Marenko in 1944. Nothing had changed. Once again I sat with Bairamov and Zaytsev, spreading one and a half ounces of butter onto fourteen ounces of white bread. Once again I worked in instrumentation, flicking dial needles with my fingernail, listening to Korolev’s quiet radio, watching the papers flutter under Pavla’s elbow. I was building another iteration of the same old machine, another new way to send the same signals home. Andrei Markov waited with an empty bowl, two more rings under his eyes. You were in America, living a life. I was a mid-level engineer. I felt like a glass of water that was slowly evaporating, my atoms fading into sheer air.

  “You’re all still here,” I sighed, my first night back. Around me, men were pulling on regulation pyjamas. I was not sure if it was a thank you I was saying or a mean joke. Old prisoners go nowhere. As I lay down to sleep I found a new feeling in my belly, like a stone. A war was thundering on and Marenko had stayed the same. This changelessness was not without a cost. The cost, I understood, was our freedom.

  The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out.

  I WROTE, The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out.

  I feel as if I must pause here for a moment.

  I wrote, The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out, and then I spent some time doing the thing I am here to do, on this side street in Moscow. I checked the tape reels in my machine, my simple machine, which sits at the edge of this desk. I checked the wires that lead from it to the wall, and out to the emitter/receiver, fastened to the windowpane. I checked the dust—checked to see if it lies as it did yesterday, in the same places. I looked at the boxes of silvery magnetic tape, like tresses. Maybe one day they will destroy me for these spools of silver tape, pierce my throat with a bayonet.

  After all this, I slipped on my headset and listened to the other tapes, delivered from Spaso House. To the sound of empty rooms and to the voice of Averell Harriman, American ambassador to the Soviet Union, and to Averell’s daughter, Kathy. I adjusted the frequencies, transcribed the pertinent conversations, translated from English to Russian. “We need to ask about that jam,” he said. And: “I don’t trust the fucking trade commissar, all right?” I made carbon copies. I slipped the transcriptions into their designated folders.

  When I came back to this letter, my letter to you, Clara Rockmore, my true love, whatever that can mean, 1234567/////, I saw that I had written, The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out. It was one of those moments of precipitous, endless melancholy. Is this despair? The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out and it has still never gone out. It is illuminated now. When I leave Moscow tonight, in a Black Maria, they will bring me to Marenko and I will climb the stairs to the dormitory, and I will find my bed in the cold blue light, murmuring something to Korolev, leaning back in the mattress, staring into the filament that never seems to fade, or fail, and stays.

  ONE MORNING, AFTER THE guards did the counting, as I was rinsing my mug in the basin, they came and stood over me. “You have a visitor,” the junior lieutenant said.

  I quickly raised my head. A visitor. Visitors were very rare at the sharashka, the consequence of an almost impossible ritual. You wrote to a spouse or family member; you prayed the letter was passed through the censors; the relative wrote back; petitions were made; and then one day, suddenly, improbably, a lieutenant announced, “You have a visitor.”

  I was mystified. A visitor. Who would visit me here? My aunt? My sister? I had never written to either of them. It was not shame or ambivalence that had kept me from contacting them—it was fear. I had listened to enough zeks’ stories to know that the sharashka’s visitor system was often a ruse: a 58 writes a letter to his brother, to his wife, and that very letter becomes evidence of collusion. The brother, the wife, is sentenced to eight years in Kolyma. This letter that begins My love is never returned.

  On this morning, at the lieutenant’s words, I felt a terrible thrill. A visitor! My chest knotted. Just the thought of a remnant, a familiar face, a vestige of my life before. I wanted to tell Eva that her nephew was still alive. I wanted Helena to know that her brother still thought of her. Had one of them found me? Or someone else? Ioffe? Was it you? Could it somehow be you?

  Sometimes a zek would persist in writing. Would write so carefully, My love, my love, to his wife on the outside. She sends an answer. They make supplications to the state. Thirteen months later, four seasons of nightmares, and finally one morning the lieutenant murmurs, “A visitor.” The prisoner exchanges his overalls for a crisp suit, provided by the administration. (These suits, we surmise, are stripped from corpses.) The prisoner keeps his rag shoes—these will be hidden from view, under the visitors table. Then husband and wife are brought together in a room; barred from touching, from embracing, from uttering a single word about where he has been, where he is now, how long he will remain. Perhaps they weep. Perhaps their eyes are clear. The zek in a dead man’s suit gazes longingly at his love, his revenant love, saying everything he can possibly say with this look. And his wife says the thing she came to say, asks the thing she did all this in order to ask. She asks, “Will you consent to a divorce?”

  She wishes to save her life.

  Bairamov always says it is worse to be visited than to be forgotten.

  ALL THESE THOUGHTS WERE with me as the lieutenant led me from the dormitory. But almost as soon as we left, I knew that something was not right. We turned right, passed up the stairs and down the hall to the secret area. This was not the visitors section. The guard did not give me a suit to wear. He showed his pass to the attendant and he took me into an alcove, a security station, where he fastened metal cuffs around my wrists. I had not worn shackles in years, not since they brought me from Butyrska to a train car. “What is this?” I said. “Why?”

  The guard did not answer.

  He led me to a door without a lock. There was a rectangle of frosted glass. He turned the doorknob and the door opened.

  “There,”
he said.

  “Who is it?”

  “Go inside, Termen.”

  I nudged the door further with my bound wrists. The room was a long staff kitchen: two stoves, a cupboard, an empty table. Two rectangular white windows—bare windows, ungrilled. I stepped inside.

  I turned and saw then that Lavrentiy Beria was sitting beside the washbasin.

  “Ah. L-890,” he said.

  The junior lieutenant pulled the door shut.

  I looked around once more, as if someone else might be hidden. I tried to push my breathing down into my belly. To breathe as I was taught—like a child. “Sir,” I said softly.

  “Citizen Termen,” Beria said. Straightaway he rose and came toward me. Delicate and pale, the director of the NKVD, head of internal affairs, king of the gulag, state security, secrets. The birdie in Stalin’s ear, faint as shadow. He reached for my wrists and in horror I thought he was about to take my hands, to hold them, intimate. But he just wrapped my right wrist between thumb and middle finger and unlocked the shackle. The key was on a ring. He slipped it into his pocket. He said, “You can call me Lavrentiy.”

  I swallowed.

  “Sit down,” he said as he stepped away.

  I had met Beria before but never like this: never alone, without a supervisor, without Yukachev, someone else to quiver fearfully beside me. I knew I was supposed to be scared because I had heard all the stories. From Korolev, from Andrei Markov, from gossiping zeks at Kolyma. Deadly little Beria in his snug little suit, his glasses lenses like windowpanes. Beria, who poured vinegar into Kirov’s wine. Beria, who drove a nail into Ivan Luchenko’s face, as Trotsky’s general sat bound before his desk. Beria, whose limousine glides across Nevsky Prospekt, stalking sisters and daughters.

  “Do you like it here, Termen?” Beria said.

  “Here?”

  “The institute.”

  I swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

  “You know, you have a very intriguing biography,” he said. Beria does not have the voice you expect of a monster. It is a plain tenor voice, matter-of-fact. There is neither the pervert’s lilt nor the killer’s growl. “I knew I recognized your name—of course, it was from the theremin. You met Lenin?”