Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  He wanted a demonstration, of course he did; he wanted to license the theremin for his company. He had papers in a crocodile-skin attaché, ready for me to sign right then and there. But I didn’t; of course I didn’t. I gave Pash a pre-emptive glare. I wanted to wait and see. I wanted to speak with other Yankee gentlemen. Perhaps things would have gone differently if I had signed with Mr Wurlitzer. Perhaps there would be a theremin in every home. He said he wanted to introduce me to Thomas Edison, “the Theremin of America!” At the Grove, 10:30 in the morning, he ordered a steak (well done).

  One more recollection of our arrival: as we crossed the gangplank to the pier, I could see the covered rows of the West Street Market, tables piled with sweet potatoes, buckets of oats, fish on ice. Men stood smoking. Horses waited. I gazed at these first tableaux of New York City and Pash gazed too, both of us newcomers, awed and curious. I glanced at my companion and abruptly I saw him darken, straighten, not because of me but because of something he had seen. Pash was suddenly more like himself. He stared out past the journalists, the musicians, to where the tugboats were docked, scuffed and beetle-like. A figure in a slate-grey trench coat stood on the timber pier, in the boats’ wide shadows. He was tall. He was almost motionless. He looked as if someone had placed him there. Through binoculars, he watched us.

  “Who is that?” I murmured.

  Pash continued down the gangplank. It did not seem as if he was going to answer me. He put his hands in his pockets and lowered his head. I followed. “Pash?”

  He looked back over his shoulder. “The enemy.”

  I HAD MY DEBUT on January 24. I performed in the Plaza Hotel’s ballroom for scientists, academics, journalists and the rich. Many of the attendees’ names were familiar from Pash’s quizzes: Edsel Ford, Charles S. Guggenheimer, Vincent Astor. I spent much of the evening hiding from Szigeti behind piles of oysters, wedged into corners by Mr Downes from the Times or Mr Klein from the Evening Post. At the demonstration, Sergei V. Rachmaninoff and Arturo Toscanini sat in the same row, and my eyes were drawn to the composers’ faces. These faces were grim. I watched them as I played Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Offenbach’s “Musette.” From all around—gasps, murmurs, applause. But Rachmaninoff and Toscanini did not smile, did not yawn. They were imagining, I am certain, the chopping and splintering of ten thousand cellos, violins, and trumpets, rendered obsolete by the theremin’s ethereal tone.

  Later, outside the ballroom, the composers greeted me like an old friend. Rachmaninoff called the performance “singular.” Toscanini said it was “magnificent.” Yet in both men’s voices there was this faint faraway tremor, the shiver of men who are shaking hands with their executioner.

  I spent much of the next three months on tour: deep winter in Cleveland, Akron, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago. Back to New York, where I removed my mittens and made my first appearance at Carnegie Hall. For every demonstration, I brought three or four different devices as well as the Y-shaped loudspeakers I call the cypresses, for their shape. I usually began with an introduction to electric conductivity, passing current through solutions in large crystal bowls. Charged with electricity, the acid chromate changed from summer orange to emerald green; the tourmaline pink permanganate solution went instantly as clear as glass. My apothecary vials were like a jeweller’s cache.

  I also rigged up a basic music-stand theremin whose antennas are hidden within the stand itself, invisible. (Although the instrument’s sensitivity is dramatically reduced, it’s an elegant illusion.) I brought my illumovox, with its spinning wheel of coloured slides, and set it beside an electric lantern at the foot of the stage, tilted up like a footlight. When connected to a theremin, it responds according to movements around the pitch antenna. As the music changes, the illumovox whirs, colour wheel spinning, and throws different shades of light onto the player’s face. The low notes are bathed in burgundies, the highs in glimmering grass greens.

  Throughout this early tour, I was frustrated by one unavoidable fact: there were just two thereminists in all of North America—Pash and me. We would roll into town with a small truck full of devices and yet I was forced to work with traditional accompanists—pianists and string quartets. The music was fine, certainly, but I was hampered by a lack of human resources. Pash’s itinerary did not allow me to pause and recruit theremin pupils, let alone to train them.

  He planned it this way, I think, because he liked being on stage. Pash was a manic-depressive spy, shunning and craving the spotlight. He could spend all week slinking in alleyways, in telephone boxes, but come Friday night he would put on his tuxedo and stride into the clouds of applause. He would introduce himself as Julius, or Yuri, or George, or Goreff, or Goldberg. I still called him Pash. Depending on whom we were speaking to, he was variously my business partner, my assistant, my friend, my cousin, or my ambiguous “liaison.”

  I do not know who taught Pash to play the theremin. I suppose he taught himself. The day we met, in Berlin, he already knew. I arrived in the cavernous basement of the Deutsche Oper, celestes and concertinas under heavy canvas sheets, and there was a man in a chocolate-brown suit leaning on one of my space-control devices. His grin sparkled in the electric lights. The man from the consulate didn’t seem to want to touch him. “Call me Pash,” Pash said. He smacked me on the shoulder. He said, “We are two men at the beginning of our careers.”

  He asked me if I wanted to hear a song. I did not know what to say. “What kind of song?” I said.

  “Your kind of song.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He hit the switch on the side of the theremin. DZEEEEOOOoo. I took a step back. I had never met another thereminist before. I had thought there were no other thereminists. He waggled his fingers like a magician.

  He played Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan.” It was as if a stranger was lifting a pen to a clean white piece of paper and replicating my signature. I could not move. This time “The Swan” did not sound melancholy or serene; it sounded mortal. Like something that will die.

  “Well?” he asked when he was finished. He had ruffled black hair, pale eyes; he played without vibrato.

  I was still in shock. “When did you learn?”

  “Sometime between seeing you perform for the second and third times.”

  I did not ask him which organization had obtained one of my devices for him to practise on. I asked him simply who he was.

  “I am your temporary friend,” he said.

  In America, Pash was my accompanist. But behind closed doors he remained the man who gave me papers to sign, who interrogated me about whose hands I had shaken and how forcefully, who mucked about with seals and photographs and cheques and who announced one evening, just as we were polishing off two bowls of apricot compote, that he had extended our visas.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Six months,” he said, swallowing. “Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  Katia would not have thanked him. She would have stared at him with her gaze like drawing pins. Our parting had been so stilted it was almost theatre. I wondered how I would tell her I was staying. I wondered what Sasha was working on, with Ioffe, in Leningrad. I imagined them staying late at the laboratory, graphing the curves of new data, uncovering secrets of space and air, becoming closer, like father and son, while I rummaged in the pockets of America.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1928, I opened the first Theremin Studio at New York’s Plaza Hotel, on West 59th Street. When I moved in, the suite consisted of a pair of bedrooms, a kitchen, a study, a dining room and a parlour. The place was full of air, well ventilated, like small gusts of wind were moving through the rooms. Everything was mauve, from the wallpaper to the lampshades. I could step to the bay window and see into Central Park, watch the swarms of insects that rose up from the woods at sunset.

  Pash insisted that my home be my workspace: the personal and professional hidden behind the same heavy curtains. I used the study as my primary research site, an array of hanging wires and whirring instrume
nts, manuals piled on the floor as they arrived from Leningrad. The dining room became our storage area: we set our plates on top of theremin cabinets, used the cypresses as a buffet. I stripped the apartment’s largest closet, a walk-in pantry off the kitchen, of shelves, then nailed an etching of Leung Jan to the wall—an old man, kicking the sky. I used it as my private kwoon, twice and thrice daily, lunging into the corners where a previous tenant had piled potato sacks. I had intended to keep the parlour free for receiving guests, but its large size made it the place for real tinkering. Pash would arrive most nights before midnight, carrying an attaché case like a cake box in both hands, with papers to sign. I would be on hands and knees in the parlour, wrestling with a mechanism, grease congealing in the mauve carpet. The chandelier glimmered above us. This was America.

  I slept in the second bedroom, in its king-sized bed. On one night table I had a jar filled with nuts and bolts. On the other, I had a jar of screwdrivers. The top shelf of my armoire held wire. I kept the most important electrical equipment piled under the window. Every morning I woke up, opened my eyes, and gazed at a long shelf of batteries.

  SOMETIMES I AM LYING in my cot and I think: this place reminds me of the hold of a ship. And then of course I rub my eyes and remember I am indeed in the hold of a ship, and these groans are a ship’s steel groans, and my dreams are the dreams of a sailor. By standing on my pillow I can look out through my porthole, onto the water. The sea is endless. When the moon is out, it leaves a path of light across the waves.

  At mealtimes, a man appears at the door to my cabin. He is the size of a polar bear, with the beard of a polar bear, the whiskers of a polar bear, a heavy white coat like that of a polar bear. His eyes are like a polar bear’s eyes. Were it not for his hands, five-fingered, wide as 78s, I might well mistake him for a polar bear. But he is a man. He was born in Murmansk. His name is Red, which must be a joke.

  My cabin door clangs open and Red is there, holding a tray of food. “Comrade?” he says, and I answer, amenably, “Hello, comrade.” With this formality out of the way, he asks, “How are you, Lev?” And I say, “I am good, Red.” He says, “Well, here is your feast.” The feast is usually potatoes and meat, but it is indeed a feast. The cook of the Stary Bolshevik is very fine: he does much with potatoes and meat and his rack of spices. Red claims that years ago, the cook worked in the kitchen of the Czar; and so of course now he is the chef for a groaning grey cargo ship; here he feeds the workers, and me—whatever I am.

  “Thank you!” I tell Red as I take the tray. He nods. “How goes the writing?” I tell him what I always do. I say: “It goes, it goes.” Sometimes I ask if I might peek in on my equipment across the corridor. Every time, Red seems to genuinely consider this. His eyes roll up and to the left and in some old instinct, he bares his teeth. Then he inevitably answers, “I am sorry, no.” And I smile, and he smiles.

  “My regards to the captain,” I say. Red nods his polar bear nod and gives me a thumbs-up. He picks up my dirty dishes with one giant dinner-plate hand. He turns and then looks back over his shoulder, as if to check whether I am following him. I am never following him; I am at my desk with my feast.

  Red leaves and the door swings shut behind him. There is a simple pause, like the one in Chopin’s op. 28, no. 7, a pause like the passing of autumn into winter, a pause like other pauses I have known, before Red locks the door.

  JOSEPH SCHILLINGER WALKED INTO the studio on a cool afternoon. I didn’t hear him knock, didn’t let him in. I was soldering. The blinds were drawn. I looked up and a small man was in the doorway, my desk lamp’s glare reflected in his glasses. He had a slick of polished black hair and a brown bow tie. He stood as still and straight as a post.

  I put down my soldering iron. “Yes?” I asked.

  “Dr Theremin,” he said. He smiled.

  “Are you selling something?”

  He rolled his eyes. “We met at the conservatory.”

  “Which conservatory?”

  “The conservatory of music.”

  “Which conservatory of music?”

  We were speaking in English. In Russian, he said: “The Conservatory of Music at the State University of Petrograd.”

  I turned the rod at the window and light broke through the blinds. It fell across Schillinger in a series of orderly bars. He wore an immaculate grey suit and fine, polished shoes. I did not remember him. He had something in each hand, palm up. “What are you holding?” I asked.

  “They are for you,” he said, and extended the gifts. In one hand, a tin wind-up frog. In the other, what looked like a dirty white billiard ball. He gave me the frog. “Try it,” he said. I looked from the toy to him and back to the toy. I twisted the shiny crank and felt the springs inside tightening. I put the frog on the workbench and let go.

  I expected it to jump across the table. It did not. For a long moment, as we listened to the mechanism coil, it did nothing at all. Then the frog turned one of its large, painted eyes around in its head, and it stared at me. Then it said, very loudly, “Kva-kva.”

  My eyebrows jutted up in surprise.

  “They have some kind of loudspeaker in there,” Schillinger said.

  “Remarkable.”

  He nodded.

  I looked at the item in his other hand. “What’s that?”

  He put it down beside the frog. “A truffle mushroom.”

  “For cooking?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “For whatever you like.”

  Schillinger became one of my first students in America. He joined Alexandra Stepanoff, a former soprano; and Rosemary Ilova, a former mezzo-soprano; and Anna Freeman, the daughter of Hoagy Freeman, who raced horses. Alexandra was dark, Rosemary was red-haired, and Anna was blonde. All had curls to the napes of their necks.

  Schillinger arrived to lessons late, unapologetic, and always in a different outfit: a black jacket with black trousers and black slip-ons; a tan jacket with tan trousers and tan wing-tips; a brown jacket with black trousers and tan rain boots. Once, Frances, his wife, confided that he owned two hundred pairs of socks and alternated them according to a calculus of weather and season. She said he kept an almanac under the bed; crack the code and you could tell the date and the precise temperature from his sartorial permutation. She said this with a smile, a curl of hair at her lips. With the back of my fingers, I brushed it aside.

  Later, I asked him. “Schillinger,” I said, “is there an arithmetic to your fashion?”

  And he said: “In sum, I try to look good.”

  So he arrived late, accidentally perhaps, but more likely it was deliberate. In the years to follow, when Schillinger taught classes at the studio—“New Forms in Musical Composition,” “A Quantitative Analysis of Song”—he was always prompt. I think that in those early days he was simply being a gentleman, making sure that there was time for Alexandra, Rosemary and Anna to receive private instruction.

  Schillinger took to the theremin with terrific speed. He was a composer, a scholar. He needed to hear something only once to be able to recall it at will. This was not true for the things he read: the hearing was important. Schillinger had learned English, French, Italian and German by ear, in conversation. His Hebrew—learned from a book—was apparently much worse. He was an amateur table tennis champion. He was a pacifist. He believed in a system of physical aesthetics, that music and art are governed by natural laws.

  I said: “There is a formula for beauty?”

  He answered: “More than one.”

  IN THOSE DAYS I HAD two main projects: building upon the commercial potential of the theremin and prototyping new devices. For the first, classes and demonstrations were the principal means. Show the businessmen the wonder of the “ether music” and the contracts should follow; sign the contracts and appease Pash, satisfy his employers, serve my state.

  At the same time, I devised new schemas for the theremin’s circuitry: lighter, simpler, cheaper. These were the adjectives that made RCA’s and Wurlitzer’s engineers’ eyes
light up. The marketing people, stocky men with fashionable eyeglasses, preferred a different word: easy. So Pash and I told them it was easy, my theremin: easy as apple pie. We showed them my students, lovely white arms in the air.

  As the weeks passed, I began to fall for New York. I wandered through the Met, caught a foul ball at a Yankees game. I bicycled through green, green Central Park, past chasing dogs, past rhododendrons, past the lonely Indian chief in headdress, whom the city had paid to paddle around in a canoe. I bought yellow French’s mustard and developed a taste for salted potato chips. In a jazz club, in a cellar, I listened to a man play a drum solo. My life’s first drum solo. The whole world seemed in the process of being rebuilt.

  There seemed to be money everywhere. Pash’s midnight visits brought proposals, contracts, memoranda of understanding, but also commissions, advances, bankers’ cheques. RCA and Wurlitzer were both contending for the right to sell theremins across America. Eccentrics, heirs and engineers paid exorbitant sums for lessons, for recitals, for the chance to sit with me at a table and discuss collaboration. Pash looked after my bank account; he looked after my immigration status. Whatever hidden business was transpiring on his side of our mission, it was transpiring well. One night he came in with a cheap medal, bought on 38th Street. He pinned it to my suspender strap. “For unwitting services to the country,” he said.

  “I am not so unwitting as all that.”

  He gave me a stern look. “You are more unwitting than you think.”

  Toward midsummer, I played Coney Island Stadium before twenty thousand people. It was a Communist Party event. I shook hands with union leaders, quipped in clumsy English. The demonstration went well. There was nothing overtly ideological about my performance: it was political because of where I had been born. After the concert Pash and I leaned on a wall backstage, on either side of a drinking fountain. We were taking this one small moment before going back into the fray. Out of the hallway, almost invisibly out of it, came a tall man. He was slender, handsome, in a slightly ill-fitting suit. He had a sweep of blond hair and blue eyes like the flowers on a teacup. I thought he was a fan. “Hello,” I said warily.