Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Beria repeated, nodding. “But you have really had your fingers in many different pies. Many different pies. I called up the documents from your work in America …” His eyes shifted. “It’s very interesting.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Your former colleagues say you’re brilliant.”

  Something flickered at my lips. “Who is that, sir?”

  “Some former colleagues.” He made a vague wave. “Are you?”

  “Brilliant?”

  “Yes, Termen.”

  I tried to measure his expression. “I do everything I can for the state.”

  “Indeed, indeed. And with a history of discretion.”

  I said nothing. I did not know what he meant.

  “I called you here because I require your expertise.” Beria exhaled through his nose. He was standing by the stoves. He turned one of the knobs for the burners and I heard the breath of gas escape into the room.

  He looked at me.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  Beria turned back to the stove. He flicked the stove’s electric lighter. Snap. Snap, snap. The burners caught. Our empty room with two soft blue flames. “Suppose we had an enemy,” he said, “whom we wanted to listen to.”

  He waited until I answered.

  “A microphone,” I said.

  “A hidden microphone, yes. But suppose this is not a simple enemy, a complacent enemy. Suppose our enemy is sophisticated. Suppose he is wary. Like you, for instance.”

  “Sir?”

  He had an odd little smile. “Suppose the enemy is a man like you. Someone brilliant.”

  “I don’t und—”

  “Here is what I am proposing. I require an undetectable way of listening. An eavesdropping bug, yes, that has no exiting wires, no power source, no traditional microphone. Inert. Invisible. Unable to be X-rayed or traced.”

  “This is not possible.”

  Beria maintained his peculiar smile. “So quick to say it is impossible. Surely you have not had time to give it proper consideration. The inventor of the radio watchman, the infiltrator of Alcatraz cannot create a radio spy?”

  He was plucking at my pride. I knew he was doing it. But I was not the man I had once been. I watched unmoving Beria with his clasped hands, the stove’s two fiery ghosts. “As I said, I am quite happy here.”

  “Who spoke of leaving?”

  “My current projects are very stimulating and we are already pressed if we are to meet our deadlines.”

  “They will get on without you.”

  “Besides, I am really not sure how you would implement something like this—”

  “But you have an idea of where to begin.”

  I gave a sharp exhale. My hands were flat in my lap. Beria snapped off the burners.

  I felt my molars scrape. “Comrade, I am a plain scientist. I have no gift for skulking outside.”

  “Skulking?”

  “In—in concealing. In matters of concealment.” I tried a smile. “The dark arts.”

  Beria was humourless. “Remember who you are speaking to, Termen.”

  Was I brave now, I wondered?

  “I prefer the work I am doing now. I am not a spy.”

  Beria finally sat down, directly across from me, but far—bizarrely far, the distance of a firing range. “It does not matter what you prefer. It does not matter what you are. I have seen your file. You will not pretend, here. You were a spy and you will be again, if I ask it. You will dive into the abyss and fetch whatever treasure I require. You will steal, and wash your hands, and steal again. You will be brilliant, and you will be loyal, Termen, do you understand?”

  I made a beseeching gesture. “I am just a scient—”

  “You are a traitor, Lev Sergeyvich Termen, sentenced to prison.”

  “My sentence—”

  “Your sentence will end in a pit.”

  I tried to sit erect. I tried to show that he had not defeated me. I found that I stooped, as if I was being physically beaten.

  “It is scarcely a choice,” Beria continued. “Either you will disappear, you and your whole world, swallowed up in smoke … or else you will serve your country, serve it brilliantly, a weapon in the Soviet’s hand, and you will live. Perhaps you will win a Stalin Prize. You will be released, you will live, you will be celebrated for all you have contributed to our mighty and unbreakable union.”

  Beria said it all with that even cadence, that wicked voice. He leaned back, crossing his legs.

  “Are you lying or are you telling the truth?” I said, as if I was brave. My voice was as thin as notepaper.

  “Oh I am telling the truth,” Beria murmured.

  For an instant I imagined leaping from my chair, throwing myself out the open window, a long free leap. I closed my eyes.

  It would not really be so different, would it, colluding with Lavrentiy Beria? My life already felt like a remnant of itself. Like a thin dream. Like a habit.

  What would change?

  Just a new set of orders.

  Danny Finch’s blood, moving across the floor.

  Perhaps this is what Lenin would have wanted: his scientist, listening for the state.

  His scientist, going on.

  Perhaps I was not giving anything away. A lossless exchange, a chance for redemption. Trading scraps of my present for what we all would require tomorrow, in this war.

  I looked at the faded lights behind my closed lids.

  I wondered how much a man can make up for the parts he has wasted.

  In a small voice, I said: “I want my family.”

  “What?”

  I cleared my throat. “My wife. Lavinia.” I straightened in my chair, blinked bloodshot eyes. “They told me they would bring her from America.”

  Beria looked at me with a frozen expression, lips barely parted.

  “I love her,” I said, in a tarry voice.

  Then his lashes fluttered behind his spectacles and he laughed, hard and flat, key ring jingling in his pocket, because he knew it was not true.

  EIGHT

  THE MORNING FOG

  LET ME DESCRIBE MY LAST DAYS in America.

  In Moscow today it is balmy, like summer, a lying summer, and the melting snows rush through the streets like rivers. At my window it is as if I am in the midst of rapids, with the sound of laughing children, and sunlight, dazzling sunlight. Eight years later, let me tell you about my last days in America.

  It was like this.

  I used to meet with men at a diner called L’Aujourd’hui. The Today. These meetings were gruelling: the tedium of idiots, the brute force of an invisible hand. I hated the appointments, hated the operatives who met me, hated the bland reports they drew from me, like steam from a kettle. And yet in the waning heat of 1938, the early autumn, I spent days and nights alone at that same corner dive, waiting for today to turn into tomorrow.

  I have never told anyone this.

  I did not want to go home. I didn’t want to face the carousel of students, the visits from friends, the expectant eyes of Lavinia Williams, Lavinia Termen, who loved me as if we were young lovers, everything within reach. Instead of facing life and marriage, I hunched in a booth at L’Aujourd’hui, ordering cups of black tea, lemon squares, bowls of potato chips. I sketched plans on paper placemats. I pretended to myself that I was hard at work, waved excuses to Lavinia as I hurried out the door every morning, but there were no revelations on that glossy tabletop. My ideas were desperations. I let them blot salt crumbs and spilled tea.

  When the restaurant closed, around midnight, I packed up my things, plinked pencils into my briefcase. I meandered home through the blue streets. Usually Lavinia would be waiting. On the final block I would ask and ask the air for my wife to be asleep, dreaming, folded in sheets. Sometimes I would pass the house and double back, to approach again. Let her be sleeping. Let her be sleeping. On many of those nights I would come in and climb the stairs, turn off the lamps, stand at her fe
et. She always slept on her belly, like something brought in from the shore.

  “Hard day?” she’d ask, the other times. She would crouch beside me as I removed my shoes. “You need to take it easier, Lyova.”

  I was deeply in debt. Even living rent-free in my friends’ house, I was drowning in everyday expenses, equipment rentals, interest payments. With money she thought we had, Lavinia bought houseplants, rambling gardenias. Every day our rooms looked more alive, blooming, budding. Every week I searched for someone else to borrow money from, laughing about IOUs, lying about overdue commissions. I owed tens of thousands in taxes. My handlers at L’Aujourd’hui told me I should leave the United States, return to Russia. I refused. I always refused. At Lavinia’s ballet performances I sat with her friends, hands on thighs, watching the dancers twist in the air, watching Lavinia turn from the back of the stage to stare into the dark, the crowd’s dark, where we could not be seen.

  BERIA GAVE ME A special office in Marenko’s secret wing. I had an orange pass with my name and Yukachev’s signature. The other engineers asked what I was working on now and I just shrugged, lifted and lowered my shoulders. They let the matter drop. I was not the only zek with a mysterious new commission: Rubin had been transferred to a facility across town, for something to do with hydrogen isotopes.

  My work was not with atoms. Every day I showed an attendant my little orange card and entered an almost empty laboratory—four rows of desks, shelves of equipment, an incongruous crystal chandelier. Stalin glowered from a wide, dark painting. I shared the lab with one other engineer, a radar man, and a lanky free worker whose job it was to watch us. We spent our days in separate, silent labour. It never felt like the room had enough air. I ate lunch in the same kitchen where I had sat with Beria, chewing softly beside the stoves. The windows had been closed and locked. If I needed new components, new machines, I submitted a written request. Every requisition was granted.

  My task was simple, but then it was not so simple: a bug that required no power source. That required no wires leading in or out. That required no tapes, and scarcely any metal. An invisible, imperceptible, inert device that remembers any secrets that are told to it.

  I think it is probably the best thing I ever made.

  ONE MORNING IN NEW YORK the owner of L’Aujourd’hui came up to my table, drying a plate, like a character in a play.

  “Hello,” he said, in Russian.

  “Hello,” I said, in English.

  He dried his plate.

  “Gotta ask,” he said. “You okay, bud?”

  I did not lift my head from my work. I was drawing a semicircle. “Yes.”

  Mud Tony shrugged. “All right,” he said. He began to move away.

  I raised my face and squinted at him. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Should I go back to Russia?”

  He laughed. “How should I know?”

  “I’m just asking,” I said.

  “Huh.” Mud Tony tugged at the ends of his lips. “Is there anything keeping you here?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I felt my face was very sad. I tried to smile.

  The radio was singing a stupid love song.

  I saw him see my wedding ring. “Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “No. You should stay.”

  I looked at the placemat, covered in fragile marks. “Of course,” I said.

  “At least until things are worked out.”

  “Of course,” I repeated. “Yes.”

  In early evening, golden hour, I called you from a public telephone. The Plaza Hotel’s booths were tucked behind tall windows and there were waving trees, newspaper sellers, a million people pouring past. I took a deep breath and then immediately felt intoxicated.

  I said, “Clara?”

  You said, “What?

  Yes?

  Who is this?

  I can’t hear you.”

  “It’s Leon.”

  “Leon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh! Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “How’s it going?”

  I said, “Clara, I love you.”

  “What?”

  “I love—”

  “What? I can’t hear.”

  “I love you!” I shouted.

  “Leon, I’m sorry, I can’t—”

  I put down the receiver. My breathing was wild and shallow. I went out of the Hotel Plaza and onto Fifth Avenue and I ran straight through the city to your house, down alleys and over fissures, swift as a blazing rocket. I was ragged and sheer and decided. The knocker was a lion’s head. I took the lion’s head in my hand and banged on your door.

  Birds flew up from the eaves.

  You did not appear at the door. You appeared on the balcony, above my head, leaning against an iron railing.

  “Leon,” you said. You were wearing swinging pearl earrings. “What are you doing here?”

  Your skirt was the same dark blue as the sky.

  “I love you, Clara,” I said.

  You did not tremble when I said it.

  You did not move.

  You looked at me.

  “I never stopped loving you,” I said.

  Your fingers tightened around the railing.

  “We are married, Leon.”

  “I thought I could escape,” I said, in a clear voice. “That we could slip away from each other.”

  You began to say something.

  “But I never escaped, Clara. I never did.”

  “Leon, I was just a kid when I met you.”

  You trailed off.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I waited for you.

  You said into the air, “Your feelings were always so certain.

  Like you already knew. But I didn’t know anything yet.”

  A truck rattled past.

  “Run away with me,” I said.

  “You have a wife.”

  “I am forty-two years old, Clara, and my heart has never felt real except when I am with you.”

  You took your hands from the railing. “You’re a crazy person.”

  “No!” I shouted. “I’m not, it’s not—This is the plainest—”

  You were furious then, lips drawn in a line. “You stroll through life like you’re indestructible. Like an indestructible—an indestructible blockhead, Leon. Immune to everything: to responsibility, to patience. Always wanting, never listening, never—”

  “I am not indestructible,” I said.

  “Like you can just walk away from a life. Like promises don’t matter. You are married, Leon. I am married. Not to each other. Wishing doesn’t change that.”

  “I am not indestructible!”

  “Wishing is just the empty air between people.”

  “Is it?” My voice was like a piece of lead.

  You pushed away from the balcony. “We have to leave some things behind.”

  The air smelled of exhaust.

  I was looking at you but you did not look back at me. I decided to forget this conversation. I left America.

  IN MAY 1945, I completed work on a radio antenna that could be concealed within a small prepared cavity, with a sensitized diaphragm and tuning post. Nearby sounds made the diaphragm quiver; these modified the charge of the antenna. Operators up to 150 metres away could direct radio beams toward the device and record the reflected signal’s modulations. Any modulations could be translated back into sound. Whispers could be stolen.

  In July 1945, four young boys from the Lenin All-Union Pioneers attended a presentation by Averell Harriman, American ambassador to the USSR. The boys wore red kerchiefs around their necks. At the end of the reception, after sardines and orange cake, the courteous Pioneers jumbled to the front of the room. Their minders smiled. They lay their sturdy hands on the boys’ shoulders. The boys were holding a huge wooden plaque engraved with the proud eagle of the Great Seal of the United States of America. In one talon the eagle clutched an olive branch.
In the other, a bundle of arrows. “In honour of the excellent Ambassador Harriman,” squeaked a bucktoothed Pioneer, “the Moscow detachment of Young Pioneers offers this gesture of friendship and trust.”

  Ambassador Harriman was recorded to have answered: “What a kindness.”

  His government checked the plaque for conventional eavesdropping devices. There were none. It was just a noble bird of prey.

  Harriman hung it in his study.

  One hundred twenty-one metres away, a radio emitter, affixed to a window frame, pointed toward Spaso House. Separately, a receiver whirred. It recorded noises onto magnetic tape.

  I listened.

  After the installation of the emitter and receiver, the bugging of Spaso House did not require much upkeep. Beria had men to check the devices, to chase away pigeons, to observe Averell’s security staff for signs of suspicion. For a little while I returned to my old work at Marenko, finding ways to regulate the fuel in missiles. But then again one morning, the junior lieutenant said I had a visitor; again I was taken to the kitchen in the top-secret section; again Beria sat waiting for me, patient and evil, hands folded in his lap. A tape machine rested at his feet.

  There was a problem with the sound, he said. Although my bug was working, the voices it recorded seemed washed over, almost lost in distortion. NKVD audiologists were accustomed to cleaning audio, extracting intonation and syllable, but my bug did not work like other bugs. My recordings could not be scrubbed with the same processes. “Can you make them clearer?” Beria asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Beria was watching me. He let the moment stretch on. Then he smiled. “Yes, you can.”

  “No, sir, I cannot.”

  “You can, Termen. I can see that you can.”

  “You must be mistaken.”

  “Listen,” he said, reaching down toward the tape machine. He pressed a switch and it began: a blurring gasp of noise, submerged voices, like an alien broadcast.

  “Well?” he said.