Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  Levelly: “You must get to see a lot of the country.”

  “There are many, many meetings. Lunches at the Rockefeller Plaza and the Empire State. NYU, MIT, Columbia.”

  “You’re still in midtown?” she murmured.

  “Four storeys, and the basement.”

  She made a thin smile. “The dorm is scarcely big enough for Judy and me. Only one of us can be in the kitchen at a time. If she is making her lunch I have to wait on my bed for her to finish. It’s funny. Sometimes I pretend she is my servant. ‘Judy, some toast!’ ”

  “I have a very large kitchen,” I said. “Do you know Tommy Dorsey?” She showed me she did; in a small way I was surprised. “He comes to dinner parties sometimes. And George and Ira Gershwin. We all just crowd around with the girls, laughing, cooking.”

  “ ‘With the girls.’ ”

  We had passed into some woods and began climbing a slope. In spite of the incline we were pretending that we were just strolling. Katia was a little ahead of me now. With the girls. These words hung in the air. I had known they would hang in the air, before I said them, but I said them anyway. It was as if I wanted to bring us to a particular tree, to look again at an engraving we had carved there.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “You know you can. We agreed, when you arrived here—”

  “Yes of course I know. I was seeing someone, now I am not.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t need your ‘sorry,’ ” she said. These could have been bitter words but they weren’t. She said them simply, almost lightly. I looked at her, just up the path, the side of her face dappled with light. Straight-backed in her whites. Katia did not need my sorry.

  I lowered my head. Ten years ago, I had met her at Sasha’s door. A beautiful girl with an armful of tools. A bouquet of tools. We married so quickly. I made a mistake. It was not that I was careless in my calculations; it was that I was seeking the wrong sum. Sasha’s little sister, a beautiful girl with an armful of tools, reverent and unhappy. She wanted for us to sip clear borscht at dinner, and then to sit beside me, knitting, as I read the newspaper. She wanted for us to have a dog. She wanted for me to grow bored of my devices, to spend summer afternoons building cabinets in the kitchen, or for us to move to the country: to live alone at the centre of a valley, eating apples from the trees around our dacha.

  The second time I went to Paris, I brought her with me. The city of lights and love: perhaps I could salvage my error. We had been married for three years. But she hated the taste of French bread, the dank water dripping down alleyways. She hated the unfamiliar bath and the way the Parisian women looked at her. “Lyova, this is shit,” she said.

  I gave her money, a map, circled the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Galeries Lafayette. At one of the parties at the Paris Opera I asked a black-haired girl where to go for shoes. She finished her champagne flute in one long swallow. “Rue Meslay,” she said. The next day I told Katia: “Meslay Street. Go, buy anything.” She came back with a pair of slippers. “Calfskin,” she said. I shrugged. She yelled at me: “Aren’t you angry?” They had cost three hundred francs. I remember standing under the crystal chandelier in our hotel room, both of us shouting. Then I went out.

  “We must end this,” I said, the morning I left for America.

  She lay in bed and closed her eyes.

  When I boarded the Majestic, the manifest listed me as a bachelor. I do not know why. I felt somehow vindicated.

  When I arrived in New York there was a telegram waiting.

  I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU, it said.

  I wrote back, SO DO NOT WAIT.

  She came on a ship. It was a deliberate misunderstanding, like she was using her life to make a dark joke.

  Now Katia and I had been wed for ten years. She did not need my sorry.

  Katia sat down on a rock. “Why are you here?”

  I didn’t have a quick answer.

  “Lev?”

  “A visit,” I said, “with an old friend.”

  She looked at her hands. “Are you all right?”

  “I am wonderful,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  I could see her clench her teeth.

  “Why are we speaking in English?” I said.

  “You are a horrible little man,” Katia said. “You are not all right and we are not old friends. Have you come all the way to New Jersey, to a maple forest, to tell me helpless lies? Why are you here? To tell me you love me? To belittle my life? Or is it to tell me you are dying, something like that?”

  I swallowed. A squirrel ran across the path and braided between two trees. The wind had fallen away and the air felt very still. Through a break in the trunks I could see down the rise to the sanatorium, the cluster of nearby buildings, a pasture speckled with cows. An eagle wheeled through the empty space.

  I rubbed my eyes.

  Katia’s tone had changed. “Lev?” she said.

  I crouched in my suit.

  “Lev, I didn’t mean … Are you sick?”

  I picked up a piece of birch bark, like a discarded message. “I am not sick,” I said.

  She was watching me, just barely moving.

  “I am lonely,” I said.

  I felt the flick of her eyes.

  “There was a woman,” I said.

  Then she straightened, like a building pulled back to standing. The only colour in her face was in her lips and eyes. I could see her choosing what to say.

  She stood up.

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  She smoothed her skirt with her hands and walked away down the path.

  I STAYED IN PATERSON OVERNIGHT. At a church near the guesthouse, a string quartet was performing Haydn. This is a music of astonishing tricks, flourishes that hairpin and buck. The quartet was incompetent. The cellist was graceless; the violinists sounded as if they were golems, made of clay. Only the violist had the capacity for beauty. I wished the other players were dead and it was only that viola, constant, under unilluminated stained glass.

  Raspberries, I wondered. Cranberries, bilberries, blueberries, ash berries.

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the house in Manhattan, Lucie Rosen was alone on the second floor, practising. It was one of those strange, gloomy mornings: a wet wind, skyscrapers grazing thunderclouds. Lucie had not put on the lights. She stood in darkness with the theremin, repeating two low figures. I came up the stairs and watched her. The gale had come into her face. She seemed fierce, almost stricken.

  “Good morning,” I said, when she stopped.

  “Good morning.” She used a wrist to smooth the sweat on her cheek.

  “Exceptional tone.”

  When I said this, Lucie began to cry. Small, contained sobs. I brought her a handkerchief. We stood with the theremin between us. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, no.”

  She dabbed her eyes and balled the handkerchief in her hand. For some reason, I was reminded that she owned this house. I felt so tired. I stood beside her, wondering if she and Walter were getting divorced, if she was moving to India or California or Cape Cod. I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right,” I said.

  She swallowed. “Were you there last night?” she said.

  “Where? New Jersey—”

  “The concert.”

  I did not understand.

  “At Town Hall.”

  “Here?”

  “Clara’s concert,” Lucie said in a bitter voice.

  I did not say anything.

  “At Town Hall. She played the theremin.” Lucie, my best pupil, seemed about to cry again. “Leon, it was beautiful. It was so beautiful.”

  There was no thunder, no lightning. It did not rain that day. The clouds passed over and away. Lucie told me about your debut recital, performing works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saëns, on a theremin painted with gold curlicues, pink and red and blue flowers, the finest solo performance that there had ever been. />
  “She held her hands like this,” Lucie said, showing me. “Like this.”

  WHEN IT WAS WINTER, the streets filled up with snow. The pipes in the house froze. I invented a stand-alone heater that turned on only when it was cold. I sat in my workshop watching its light flicker.

  Sifu died. Jin came round to tell me. He asked why I had stopped coming to the kwoon. I told him I had killed a man, and that one day I had found I could not bring myself to go to a room across town to repeat the same motions, in rehearsal. Jin laughed. He thought it was a joke. “You are scared you are getting old!” he said.

  I did not go dancing. I did not go to dinner parties with Frances and Schillinger. Tommy Dorsey and George Gershwin did not come over for spaghetti. I missed meetings, lying on my back on my bed, imagining machines that did not work.

  I filed for divorce from Ekaterina Pavlova Termen of Paterson, New Jersey.

  In February, the doorbell buzzed. It buzzed and buzzed. I did not answer it, but my guest would not be deterred. Whoever it was leaned into the buzzer, letting it sound throughout the brownstone house. Perhaps a kid is being a nuisance, I thought. Perhaps someone rude wants my attention. I refused to move. I lay on my back on my bed. My brow creased.

  Then there was a crash. It was the thud of the door being busted in, and broken glass. I sat bolt upright. I could feel my heart in my chest, pounding.

  I thought: Danny Finch’s friends.

  I looked around for a weapon, some kind of weapon, a club or knife or a perfect deadly revolver. I would not wait with bare hands. I grabbed a hammer. I padded to the top of the stairs. Someone was coming. Someone very large. I could hear his footfalls, like the first booming of an avalanche. I heard a palm smack the handrail. I shifted my weight to my left leg, bent. I raised my hammer. I breathed, waiting.

  Pash appeared around the landing, like a brown bear returning. He seemed twelve feet tall. His hair had thinned a little but his eyes were still pale blue. “Lev Sergeyvich Termen!” he shouted. “King of the Termenvox!” He clapped his eyes on me and held out his paw. I took it, shook it, as if I was checking a door to see if it was locked.

  “Pash,” I stammered.

  He laughed. “Am I a prince of the termenvox, would you say? A baron?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Working hard.” He was thinner. He smelled like the outdoors, like an evergreen place where a creature would hibernate. “Which is more than we can say for you.”

  I was speechless. I was breathing like a child. I was a cabin thrown up by a hurricane and then set back down.

  Pash looked out over the workshop, curious, appraising, at the same time approving and unsatisfied. He rapped on the surface of a theremin, nudged a disassembled teletouch box. He lifted the skirt of the canvas that hid the cypresses. “My, my,” he said, and laughed. A laugh like an old friend. He turned back to me. “I can’t tell you how many times I imagined traipsing in here.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I was sent away, Lev.” He bent to rummage in his bag. My intelligent heater gave a cough and turned on. I had forgotten how much space Pash used up. I had forgotten how much I knew his silhouette—the comfort of a familiar shape, rummaging in a bag. My chest felt tight. With rough movements Pash pulled out a carved wooden eagle, a pair of suede slippers. “For you,” he said.

  I swallowed. The eagle was smaller than a dessert plate. There was something demented in the bird’s face. “E PLURIBUS UNUM,” said the chiselled inscription.

  “Americans love these patriotic doodads,” Pash said. “They can’t get enough of ’em.” His English seemed looser than it had been, more at home. “This one’s from Oklahoma City.”

  “Thank you?” I said.

  “And these aren’t slippers.” He pressed the suede shoes into my hands. They were soft and pliable, embroidered with tiny mustard-coloured beads. “Moccasins,” he said. “Indians wear them so they can sneak up on people.”

  “And I …”

  “Well, now you can sneak up on people.” He laughed again, powerful and happy. “Right?” But as his laughter subsided, Pash was surveying me. He rubbed his lip. “You all right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He clicked his tongue and nodded. “You’re all right now, Lev. We’re both all right.”

  I was turning the wooden eagle in my hands.

  “Pash, where did you go for all this time?”

  For an instant he looked at the floor. I thought he was preparing to make a joke, a feint, but instead his voice seemed scraped bare. “Lev, there is nothing nobler than work. Good work. It’s better than fortune and fame. Better than a million girls.” His eyes flicked to mine.

  In the half-light, I was squinting.

  “They called me away,” Pash said. He shrugged. “The Crash happened and there were matters that called for my expertise, first in Texas, then Oklahoma. A few years in Florida. Colorado. Union stuff, ports stuff, stuff you don’t need to hear about. Our employers needed me there, putting out fires.”

  “You couldn’t have told me?”

  “They told me to be discreet,” Pash said lightly. “You’re not a delicate flower, Lev. You could handle it. I knew you could. And other agents were taking over for me. You were taken care of?”

  Taken care of, I thought.

  My answer was terse. “It was a disaster. I almost went broke. I almost abandoned everything.”

  “But here we are,” he said. He let out a deep breath. “At the end of it, still, here we are.” He seemed distant, then. His eyes rested on the mirror above the mantel. It was as though he was watching some slow construction, waiting for a way to describe it.

  “Every single day,” Pash said at last, “any of us could give up. Sure we could. But we don’t, Lev. Not me. Not you.” His gaze slipped back to my cypress loudspeakers, hulking under canvas. “Because we serve. Because there is a good we are doing, an end we’re striving for. The nobility of the Soviet dream, yes? And the work itself—let’s not forget. You are a genius, Professor Termen, when it comes to the work.”

  He shrugged. His face was just itself: bright eyes, a small mouth, a nose like a cudgel. He grinned. “You’re a lord of the air, remember.”

  This man I had met in Berlin, with whom my life had been knotted, whom even now I scarcely knew. In that moment I felt as if he understood what I was capable of better than I did; and what I wanted, now that you were gone, Clara; and how all of it could be done.

  “I am sorry I disappeared, Lev.” He rested his body against the doorjamb. “But I am back now, and despite that lying mirror we’re still young men. You’ve got moccasins and I’ve got a new telephone number and I say if you’re game, then let’s finish what we started together. The inventor and his silent partner, masterminds and experts, clever spies, rascals. Ha! Snakes in this million-dollar Manhattan grass.”

  There was no decision. I simply took a breath. My inhalation was a yes and I felt something heavy lift from my shoulders. I imagined a crane tilting up over the room.

  Somewhere in the house, a clock tolled the hour. Pash, still in the doorway, gestured over the workshop floor, past the cypresses, the piano, the flickering intelligent heater, to where a pair of theremins stood tall and side by side, flawlessly assembled.

  He said, “I’m rusty as damn, Lev, but do you fancy a duet?”

  NINE

  RETURN OF THE ROUGHNECKS

  FULLY, COMPLETELY, I became a spy. What had been halfhearted became whole. My distractions were cleared away; my mission was clear. I would walk through walls.

  Pash had my house cleaned. He called a crew of three women, Romanians in coveralls, hair pinned back. “Go to it,” he told them. He took me to the pier; we rode a ferry around the Statue of Liberty. He said: “What are your ideas?”

  I asked, “Ideas for what?”

  “Ideas for the Americans.”

  In the clear white daylight, over choppy waves, I found I had ideas. A thousand ideas. “But on
ly teletouch is selling,” I said.

  “So let’s spear some new whales,” Pash said.

  The studio was quiet. I was not taking new students and I left the veterans to themselves. Lucie nursed her sorrows for two weeks and then began to practise constantly, morning to midnight. I heard her through the floorboards. I did not stand with her. I had my thousand ideas. I was bent over a thousand sheets of paper, with compass and slide rule, crocodile clips on my collar.

  I had always been an inventor in New York, but curiosity alone had guided me through the early years: I pursued my flights of fancy and we waited for the telegrams from captains of industry. Now I was more cunning. I knew the places Pash wished to infiltrate, so I imagined what they wanted, and then I built it.

  Sometimes I needed help. I went with Pash to a machinist’s shop in Boston. I handed the man twenty pages of plans. “Make this,” I said. We took the streetcar across town, to a professor’s basement office. “Let’s talk about the telegraph,” I said. I spent six days at the university library, digging through books. Sometimes an idea is like glimpsing a person before she disappears around a corner. You must still learn her full figure. I had no facility with written English but there is a universality to numbers, diagrams, formulas. When I did not understand the text I called a lecturer, a Nobel laureate. I had spent almost a decade in the United States, collecting brilliant men’s business cards, tossing them on my desks. The Romanian cleaners had arranged them in a shoebox, alphabetically. When I wanted to know about the railway, I called a senior engineer at Union Pacific. When I wanted to know about aeroplanes, I called MIT’s dean of aeronautics. When I wanted to know about the underlying mechanics of the universe, I called Albert Einstein. I called Griffiths from Douglas Aircraft and Lieutenant Groves from the navy.

  I sat with Pash in restaurants, opening the molten cheese on French onion soup. “It’s a sure thing,” I said.