Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  I shook my head.

  Beria licked his lips and then as the recording went dead he began to speak in the same kind of incomprehensible sounds, twinned and smothered words. A weak imitation—in another context I would have laughed—but here his impersonation felt joyless, wrong. I felt as if a river were running over me.

  “Please stop,” I said.

  He stopped. He laughed in a short way.

  “When you have made the voices clearer,” he said, “write down what they say.”

  I made my return to the top-secret laboratory, where the air still felt pinched, as though the room were held in a set of needle-nose pliers. Every morning an NKVD agent delivered a locked box containing one day’s tapes. I set up a listening station, sat with headset and whispering machine, adjusted dials for Hz, KHz, MHz, aW.

  There could be no better operator: the bug’s solemn English-speaking inventor, sentenced to prison. I began my uneasy relationship with Averell and Kathy; and Mr Capaldi, the ambassador’s chief aide; and Snuff, their bearded collie. I listened to Harriman’s conversations with himself, late at night, repeating the words of an upcoming speech. I listened to his small talk with the cook, about capers and brown sugar. I listened to the secrets, the United States’ state secrets, the conversations between our World War allies as they sat with neglected biscuits, glasses of sparkling water, two folded newspapers. “I am frightened,” Harriman muttered one morning. “Jack, I don’t know that this will all shake out.”

  YOUR VOICE CAME on a Saturday.

  I was sitting in the silent lab. Just two of us there: the free worker and me, paper shifting on paper. I wore a padded, heavy headset. I had a book of lined paper, a typewriter pushed aside. Usually I would transcribe by hand and then retype the pages; the originals went to my guard, who burned them.

  For reasons of quiet, the laboratory had no clocks.

  I wound back a section of tape that was giving me trouble. Harriman was talking to Capaldi, discussing a meeting with one of Stalin’s marshals. He was summing up their plans but he was doing it as he opened the study’s door, with scraping wood and a rush of air. “I suppose we’ll have to xxxxx xx xxxxx tomorrow,” Harriman said, and went out. I rewound. “… suppose we’ll have to xxxxx xx xxxxx tomorrow.” I rewound. “… xxxxx xx later tomorrow.”

  Rewind. “… xxxxx xx later,” “… xxxxx xx,” “… to xxxxx xx later tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t make it out. “Resolve”? “Call it off”?

  I manipulated a panel of switches and dials. The door scrape deepened and then went treble. The voices became airy, aqueous. Certain frequencies became clearer and others slipped away. I imagined lanterns lashed to a pier, shining dimly through fog. “… we’ll have to susxxxx xx later,” Averell said. “… have to susxxxx,” “… have to suspxxx,” “… have to suspend xx later.”

  “ ‘Suspend it later,’ ” I murmured aloud.

  The free worker glanced at me.

  I wrote down the words.

  I wound back the tape for a final pass.

  “I understand your point,” Harriman said, “so if they do continue down that track I suppose we’ll have to suspend it later tomorrow.”

  And then.

  And then there was something else. Buried in the warp and hiss of static.

  Suspended like a moonbeam.

  After Harriman spoke, or perhaps just ghosted over the grey end of his words, another colour.

  Was it the door? Was it Capaldi?

  I closed my eyes. I went back and forward.

  Distortion?

  I went back and forward, searching.

  Then, suddenly.

  Or maybe it was not suddenly. Maybe it was not suddenly; maybe it was slowly but in the way that only certain changes are slow, slow and very almost, almost sudden. When you stare at a thing that is unfurling and you know it is unfurling, and then finally there is a moment when it is unfurled, strong and present, wide as a sail, or like a new sky, a change that has impossibly slowly suddenly arrived.

  It was your voice, unmistakeable and completely hidden, the voice of Clara, who lives in New York City and who said she would not marry me, back when she was young, back before I was wrecked.

  You hear a voice in the crowd and you recognize it. Across all the roar of life, through terrible cacophony, you hear the voice you know and you recognize it, catch it in your hands. What were you saying? I did not know. I heard your muffled and secret voice, slowly, suddenly, hidden in the magnetic tape that came from Averell Harriman’s study at Spaso House.

  I played with dials, switches, filters.

  You were saying, “LIFT IT!”

  It was so clearly you.

  But you were not in the room.

  This was not a voice in that room, a voice in Moscow, at Spaso House, some visitor calling from downstairs or out in the street.

  “LIFT IT,” you said, vibrations caught on a wind.

  It was not possible that I should be hearing you.

  “Lift it,” you said.

  It was not possible.

  What were you lifting, wherever you were?

  I took off my headset. I sat motionless. I stared at the squared blue lines in my notebook, then I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand.

  I wondered if my faculties were failing, hearing a faraway girl in the static of a secret recording.

  I took my head in my hands. Yes, my faculties were failing. The air was duping me. You were not there; your voice was not there.

  Voices do not stray across the world.

  I slid the headset back over my ears, rewound, pushed play.

  Lift it, you said.

  I WAS NOT ALLOWED TO keep the tape with your voice, nor could I make a copy. Every recording was accounted for, collected by Beria’s men at the end of the day. There is no carelessness to espionage. And so I did not leave the laboratory until late that night, listening and relistening to your intonation, your inflection, your sound. I wanted to memorize your voice as I had never done in New York.

  Lift it,

  lift it,

  lifted.

  I could not explain how your voice had come to Russia. Acoustic waves can be amplified; electrical fields can be used as catapults. But the calculations were not realistic. Did the Americans have a new kind of loudspeaker? Were you visiting some physics lab at NYU? Perhaps it was a trick of frequencies, an aural illusion?

  I rewound the tape.

  No. You were there, Clara.

  Perhaps you were not so far away, in Sofia or Wien, talking on a radio program. “Lift it,” you told the talk show host. And then this signal was caught by a receiver in Moscow.

  I did not know.

  Finally, it was too late and I stood up from my desk. The free worker took my tapes and placed them in a locked steel container. A guard took the container when we left. I went down the stairs to the dormitory, along the wall, to my bed. I sat there. I had missed dinner. My ears hurt where the headset had pressed against them. I could not stop imagining your clear straight look.

  IT WAS NOT LONG after this incident that Beria brought me to the lake.

  I do not know which lake it was. Maybe Glubokoye. Maybe Pirogovo. They brought me in a Black Maria. Once again I believed I was being taken to my death. Then the car stopped, the door opened, and I stepped out onto moist grass. There were wide woods and the lake reflected everything, and the sky itself seemed green.

  Beria stood in the weeds. “Come here,” he said. I padded toward him, into soft mud. It has been months since I was outside, years since I had been in open air like this, wet and open air, with arrowheads of birds running south. There were rich and earthen smells, smells I scarcely remembered, wild raw smells that evoked gardens, boating, my parents’ cellar. Battery Park, after horses have scraped up the sod. The low touches of sex. Beria wore a trench coat tied shut. I shivered. They had not given me anything to wear over my overalls. Far behind us, where the driver waited in his compartment, an engine rumbled.


  “Citizen Termen,” Beria said. He made a sound with his tongue.

  I did not say anything.

  I wondered if he planned to kill me with his small hands. Would I fight back? After all this, would I fight back? “You have done excellent work.”

  I did not thank him. I looked at the beautiful straight line of the horizon and clasped my hands. The lake was interrupted only with minuscule stirrings, fish rising underneath. There was the barest suggestion of fog.

  “So, now, something new,” he said.

  He explained he wanted a bug that did not even require a bug. A way of listening from outside a room, outside the building, without even smuggling something inside. “Microphones on exterior walls,” I said, immediately.

  “No, no. From a distance. It must be from a distance.”

  “You could easily conceal a small microphone …”

  Beria turned. There was a secret in his appeasing smile. “We all have places we cannot go, Termen.” His lips twitched. “And we wonder: what is going on inside?”

  THERE WAS STILL MUD on my shoes, blades of grass, when I returned to the laboratory. I sat at my desk with a blank sheet of paper. The free worker watched me from across the empty space. A new curiosity hid in his sandy eyes.

  I looked at the stray headset, the empty Spaso tape machine. They had taken the last set of recordings away. I knew I was already forgetting the sound of your voice. I felt a hole in my chest. I smoothed the page with my hand.

  I told myself you had always been unknowable. Even in New York, when I thought I saw you, when I thought I was listening at your chest, I never knew.

  So many signs are meaningless.

  I picked up my pencil and began to sketch an idea, in arcs and squares.

  How do you listen to a closed room?

  MAYBE YOU LIFTED A THEREMIN, maybe a suitcase, maybe a chandelier, maybe a chest, maybe an infant’s heavy pine crib.

  IT TOOK JUST OVER A WEEK. I handed in my request for materials and watched the free worker’s eyes flick down the list. “All right,” he said.

  A crate arrived. Radio emitters, dishes, lenses, plywood, two thick sheets of glass, in different sizes. I erected the glass in a little room—like a telephone booth, a vestibule. “Could I ask your help?” I asked my guard. “Stand here. Speak.”

  He stood on the other side of the glass, observed me through the pane. The most difficult part was the fragility of what I was observing: the tiniest changes, smaller than the drawing of breath, the tilt of a head.

  “Testing, test,” said the lanky, sandy-eyed free worker.

  “Yes, like that,” I said.

  I was not listening to a voice; I was listening to the reflection of the stirrings of a voice.

  THE FIRST RECORDINGS of my new device did not sound like Testing, test, test test testing 1-2 testing test.

  They sounded like Shhhhhhkhkhkhff shhhh fffmmm m m mmm-mmshhhhhhh shhhhhh ffmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm khhh and then your voice, I swear it.

  You were saying, “Oh, it’s that way, Doris.”

  And then, “Of course I promise.”

  And then, “Let’s go out.”

  THE NEXT TIME I SAW Beria he came to the laboratory. My radio emitters were set up along one wall, with the booth at the far side. The whirring recording device sat beside my notes.

  Beria came in with another man, a pale thin man with a blue tie, who waited beside the portrait of Stalin.

  “Sir,” I said.

  The free worker stood and saluted.

  “L-890,” Beria murmured. His trench coat was speckled with wet drops. His assistant’s dark suit showed that it was snow.

  He removed and wiped his spectacles. “It’s ready for a demonstration?”

  “If you would stand behind the glass,” I said.

  “No.” Beria gestured to the free worker. “You.”

  The man with sandy eyes walked into the booth.

  Beria took a position beside me. “Begin,” he said.

  I pressed several switches. The emitter hummed. It was now sending radio waves through the room, in a narrow stream.

  “Go on,” I murmured to the man behind the glass.

  “Test, testing, 1-2-3. Testing,” he said.

  Beside us, a dish was listening to the reflection of radio waves off the surface of the glass. The vibrations were recorded, as sound, on a revolving tape machine.

  “Test, test, test,” said the free worker.

  When he had finished I rewound the tape and played it back through a set of headphones. I adjusted the levels, watched Beria’s expression. He showed nothing as he listened. For a long moment I wondered whether the contraption had failed. He was just a bureaucrat listening to an empty tape. Then he raised his gaze. A smile appeared and disappeared on his lips. “Good,” he said to me. He made a gesture to his aide, a movement of the hand that looked as if he was saying, Come here or Come here and listen. His pale accomplice immediately went to where the free worker was standing behind glass, took a silenced revolver from his jacket, and shot him in the chest. It made a sound like a punctured bicycle tire. The man with sandy eyes was saying something but he was unable to say it.

  A man becomes heavier when he dies. Beria’s guard dragged the body to the door. I gasped at the shooting but then I said nothing else. I wanted very much to burst into tears. How much I wanted to burst into tears, Clara, to show the dead man at least that respect. Danny Finch, young Fyodor, the ones at Kolyma, the free worker with the sandy eyes. My face trembled. I felt as if I was being slowly lowered into a lake.

  Beria had the headset around his neck. He said, “This is called Operation Snowstorm. You are never to mention it to anyone. If you even speak its name I will cut off your arms and tear the muscle of your tongue and put you in a cattle car to the taiga.”

  I was not sure I had any voice left in my throat.

  “We will take this thing to Moscow. You will oversee its installation and transcribe its recordings.”

  “Who are we listening to?” I was like a ghost.

  Beria began to remove the headset. He said, “The man in all the portraits.”

  SNOWSTORM IS RELIABLE at a distance of up to 1,600 feet.

  But not in snow.

  Not in fog or rain.

  ON THE DAYS I AM at Marenko I laugh and kid with Bairamov. I help Zaytsev perfect his recipe for cake. I stroll down the hall with Pavla and ask about her children. In the shared lab, where there are clocks, where there is music, I lean in beside Korolev and we argue about the life span of different vacuum tubes. We rap them, ping, against the edge of the desk.

  At breakfast I sit with Andrei Markov, stirring a lump of sugar into porridge.

  I do not work on Sundays.

  ON MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS they bring me to Moscow. I climb the stairs to the attic and sit with the machines. A gun waits beside me.

  I write down the words they bring on tapes from Spaso House. Harriman has the same conversations, and different ones. His bearded collie barks.

  There is another set of tapes, from the thing perched on my window, which faces the Kremlin, and those words I write down too.

  He has a gentle voice, like a music teacher’s.

  I FIND YOU in every recording.

  WHEN IT HAS BEEN RAINING, the tapes they bring me are hours of haze, like listening to clouds form, smoke filling with cinders. The bass notes are great, long presences, like appetites. Spirits wander. Sometimes the silences are like waves rolling and breaking. Sometimes figures coalesce. At the edge of hearing, boundaries fizz and snap. I hear them—forces in the uninterrupted air. Intersecting fields. Loss.

  You hear a noise and you think it is a presence; but it is just a shrieking emptiness, interference. You have made a mistake.

  I hear your voice speaking and I do not know what I am to do with it. Does it mean that we are touching? Does it mean that we are destined? There is no destiny. There is no touch. My unrequited love, speaking across the sky. You cannot see me hearing
. This letter will not reach you. These words will not be read.

  Still I hear your voice. It is what I have.

  There are nights when I imagine that these bricks and tiles, this glass, this land and city and plain and wood, these towers, these gurgling oceans, and sewers, and the roar of automobiles, of orchestras, aeroplanes spilling bombs, sparrows that land and leave, barracks, pasts, rings, are all distortion. There are only two of us, two real things, two tellers, unseen reflectors, sending signals we cannot carry ourselves, or follow.

  Somewhere you are waving your hands in the air.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Lev Sergeyvich Termen was released from Marenko on June 27, 1947.

  Over the next decades his research included work on rust, piano sustain, rockets, floating bridges, immortality, UFOs, atomic-bomb detection, long-distance touch, male impotence and a device that could track the movements of a musician’s eyes.

  After his release, Termen married Maria Feodorovna Guschina, a secretary. They had two children together.

  In 1962, Clara and Robert Rockmore travelled to Moscow. At a small party, Robert mentioned Termen’s name. Agents had come in the night, Rockmore said, and kidnapped the scientist. “Oh,” replied an acquaintance, “Termen lives near Lubyanka.”

  Clara was seen to faint.

  Friends arranged a reunion. The next day, three people met on a subway platform, under the city. Strangers brushed past. Robert’s arm was over Clara’s shoulder. Termen looked at them without speaking. “Scientists are not supposed to meet with foreigners,” he said at last. “We are being watched.”

  That night, Clara and Robert attended a play at the Bolshoi Theatre. During the intermission, they descended the steps to the street. Termen was waiting in a taxi. They drove together to his home.

  Robert and Clara sat on a hard divan. Termen stood with Maria, his wife. Outside, it was raining. His daughters played violin. The lamplight fell at strange angles.