Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  It was my forty-third birthday.

  FOUR

  DISORDER

  I HAD NEVER BEEN so hopeful as when Lenin played the theremin. It was 1922. I was twenty-six years old. We were in a conference room, with stooped lamps and tall windows. The trees were bare but Moscow was flooded in bright spring light; the city rose up from the afternoon like a Fabergé miniature, a wonder assembled by human hands.

  Fifteen people stood with us around the table. I was wearing a suit under my lab coat, polished shoes. One of Lenin’s staff had given me a telescoping metal pointer. I wasn’t accustomed to using it, kept opening and closing it in my palm. Kalinin was there, and Nikolayev, the radio commissar. And Lenin! Lenin himself, attentive and present and listening before asking questions, pinching his beard between his fingers. He was compact with a long chest, a surprisingly strong physique. Some sliver of me wondered: Another student of Shaolin?

  We began with the radio watchman. I was so nervous, explaining the theory and then delving too deeply into the provenance of the components, opening and closing the silver pointer, citing journal articles by author and title. Finally, Nikolayev said, “But does it work?” and everyone laughed, but Lenin only gently, inclining his head as if inviting me into the joke. I turned on the device and nothing happened, because nothing was supposed to happen. “If someone could cross the perimeter?” I murmured. One of the commissars volunteered; he wrapped a scarf around his face and tiptoed toward the wire-clipped vase, full of poppies. We held our breath. The alarm sounded—a small bell and an illuminated bulb. Such modest magic. But the men exploded in cheers. They slapped the foiled thief on his back. The flowers shook. Lenin said, “Dmitri, I am relieved that you are such a poor burglar.”

  For the demonstration of the theremin, I was accompanied by Lenin’s secretary on piano. Her name was Lydia F. I remember because during that morning’s rehearsal, I fell quite instantly in love. Lydia had brown hair to her shoulders, a pointed chin, an awkward bearing. I arrived at the Kremlin in suit and lab coat and realized that I had forgotten to bring an accompanist. I remember standing alone in the conference room, running my hand over my face. It would not have been my first time demonstrating the theremin alone, but this was not some casual demo. This was Lenin. Inside two years, Petrograd, the city where I was raised, would be renamed for him. In Moscow that morning I was panicked and sweating until I muttered something to someone and he returned with Lydia, Lenin’s secretary, who had studied piano at the conservatory. She smiled so broadly, sitting down at the keyboard. “Hello, piano,” she murmured. “How have you been?”

  Three hours later, I flicked a switch on the theremin. It made its sound. I made the appropriate calibrations. I glanced up at Lenin and fourteen of the most powerful men in the Soviet republic. I looked at Lydia, with hair to her shoulders. I nodded to her and lifted my hands and played Saint-Saëns’s “Swan,” all familiar motions.

  Lydia and I met at every chord. With my eyes, I said to her, Thank you.

  Then I looked at Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His face was full of wonder. I breathed in and out. I moved slowly, from note to note, conducting. He was listening so carefully. The music showed in his face but so did his astonishment at the principles, the notion of human capacitance and electrical fields. I stood taller. The commissars seemed to sway. Lydia and I played our sad song, slowly, as if we were reorienting objects on a table.

  When we were finished, I lowered my arms.

  “Go on, go on,” Lenin said.

  So I swallowed and licked my lips and my heart went thump, thump in my chest. “Scriabin,” I whispered to Lydia. She smiled, paging through the sheet music. I must have seemed so serious. We played Scriabin’s op. 2, no. 1, then Glinka’s “The Lark,” with its final piano trills. It is a composition that suggests something yet will happen.

  The men all applauded. I gestured to Lydia, who stood and curtsied, and they applauded her too. We were all grinning now. I gestured to Lenin and the commissars. Lydia and I offered our own applause. All of us laughed. Someone appeared in the doorway with a cart full of fruit, cookies, tea, but Lenin waved his hands at her. “Wait, wait,” he said. “Such hasty refreshments. I’d like to try—Comrade Termen, may I try?”

  “Y—yes,” I said.

  As Lenin joined me at the front of the room I could see that there was no performance in his actions. He was not looking at me, or at Lydia, or at his advisors’ bemused expressions. He was not looking at the retreating cart. He was concentrated on the theremin itself, my scattered tools, the dormant box of the radio watchman. Again we shook hands. “Just excellent,” he said. “Does it matter what one is wearing?”

  I shook my head. “No, no.”

  “May I try the Glinka piece?”

  I was taken aback. It was one thing to fumble through a clumsy swooping scale, but Glinka …

  He could see me hesitating. “You did say it was simple.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Perhaps I’ll just assist you …”

  “Very well!” Lenin said. He stood beside me like an assistant. Lydia F. was smiling.

  “Maybe I will have you remove your jacket,” I said.

  He did so, draping his jacket over the back of a chair.

  I addressed the shirt-sleeved Lenin.

  “As I said, this antenna controls the volume, and this the pitch. You see?” I moved my hand away from the left antenna and the instrument increased its sound. Lenin just shook his head.

  “Marvellous,” he said.

  I swallowed. “So I will simply …” I moved behind him, took his wrists in my hands. “I hope you don’t …”

  Lenin said nothing. His arms were relaxed. I lifted his left hand away from the volume antenna. “Ah!” he exclaimed, happily. Then I moved the right, adjusting pitch. It was like chi sao, the hand dance. I could feel his focus on our movements, the attention in his forearms.

  “All right?” I asked.

  “All right,” he chuckled.

  The piano began, softly. And we started. We played our stammering Glinka. I adjusted Lenin’s arms and felt him opening and closing his fingers, experimenting with these changes. We made the music louder, softer, high and low. I gradually sensed that he was anticipating the moves, holding his hands in place, lifting or lowering. I withdrew. He sagged for a beat but then he himself was playing the song, deliberate and subtle. I took a step aside. I looked at this wide, warm room, the commissars carefully watching, the pretty girl at the piano. Lenin, Lenin himself, drawing music from the air. He had a narrow smile. He was fumbling and also certain. He was not bad. For a long, strange instant, I saw him posed like a mannequin, frozen, and imagined the way my future might flow out from a single electric note, called and answered; the way I might become Lenin’s scientist, Lydia’s lover, a friend and colleague to these thoughtful men. Young Termen, building things for the people of the USSR.

  When he finished, Lenin lowered his hands.

  The theremin wailed and screamed. I dashed in to silence the device as Lenin yelped and everyone laughed, and he shook his head with a mixture of embarrassment and self-satisfaction. There was a twinkle in his eye, maybe in everyone’s eyes, that comes from a moment that is ridiculous and excellent. “I didn’t know you had been practising,” Nikolayev said.

  Lenin stayed behind when the others went out for medianyky, slices of melon. He peered inside the theremin’s cabinet, asked me questions about the circuits. He wanted to know if controls like the theremin’s could be used to manipulate an automobile or a telephone. He had ideas I had never even considered: that devices like these could be used by men who had injuries to their hands, soldiers or farmers. “The most powerful application of electricity is not for the strong,” Lenin said. “It’s for the weak.”

  Soon we were discussing prostheses—artificial arms and legs, even an artificial heart, powered through the air. “The body itself is electric,” I explained. “Our neurons, our brains—”

  “Like vacuum tubes,” Lenin s
aid.

  He asked me about my other projects; we discussed chemistry, physics, astronomy. If my laboratory needed any assistance, he said, I should contact him. “And we must show these inventions to the people.”

  It was so easy to talk to this man, to ask and answer as Lenin’s gaze darted, as he nodded and considered. It was not as if we were friends, but perhaps like old partners, colleagues. Like comrades.

  Before I left, at the doorway to his office, Lenin took my hands in his.

  “I said earlier that our minds are like vacuum tubes.”

  “Yes.”

  “We must remember, Comrade Termen: they are more than this.”

  It was the first and last time I saw him.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, I received an envelope in the mail. Lydia F. had written my name and address in her unadorned hand. Lenin had sent me a Mandat—a card entitling the bearer to unrestricted travel on all of Russia’s railways. It carried a letter with his signature. Go out, he said in his note. Show your works in Archangelsk, Kem and Samara. I was instructed to lead a scientific tour, bringing electricity to the people.

  Two months later, in May 1922, he suffered his first stroke.

  On the night of January 22, 1924, I was working late at the institute. I had travelled by rail to Pskov, Minsk and Yaroslavl, showing the people my inventions. I had come home. The sky was inky in the windows. A charwoman appeared in the laboratory doorway.

  She said, “Lenin is dead.”

  She was ashen.

  “What?”

  “Lenin is dead.”

  My mouth closed and opened. I felt as if winter had been let into the room. She held up a sheaf of newsprint. A drawing of his face, partly in shadow, bordered in black.

  “Last night,” she said.

  I put my hands flat on the bench. “Thank you,” I said. My eyes watered. The laboratory was quiet except for the buzz from one of the machines.

  That night, instead of sleeping, I devised a plan to bring Lenin back to life. It was based on ideas I had had for years. We would freeze his body; we would perfect our techniques until we could repair the organs that had failed. I read and reread the reports of his death. His heart, his brain. We would proceed in a careful, considered fashion. In the morning I rang Rem Sarevko, a former graduate student who now lived in Gorky, where Lenin had expired. “We must save his body,” I said. “You must go to the place they are keeping him and explain.”

  “It’s impossible,” Sarevko said.

  “You are mistaken.”

  But they had already removed his brain, Sarevko told me. They had cut open Lenin’s head and ripped out his mind and put it in a jar, covering it in poison, in alcohol.

  “Why would they do this?” I asked.

  “They wish to preserve it,” Sarevko said.

  ON THE TRAIN THAT brought me from Butyrskaya prison to Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast, we were loaded like dead animals. They had brought us to the railway in a supply truck marked BREAD. The train car was wrapped in razor wire. They ordered us inside, told us to lie down on three stinking shelves. When no one else could fit, they sealed the door. We lay in darkness. We lay forever, as if in a mass grave. At last, with a sickly sway, the train began to move. A pale light bulb clicked and went on. Around me, several men began to cry.

  We were going east, across the entire country, through Omsk and Irkutsk, under mountain and over desert, past Ulan Bator, past China’s northern wilderness, forever, to the edge.

  For thirty-eight days the rails went clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack and then we reached the sea and things got much worse.

  They use boats to take prisoners to Kolyma. These boats are the most terrible places in the entire world. I did not know they would be terrible. I did not know the train would be worse than the prison, that I would ride for five thousand miles in thirst and suffocation, in a car of dying men. I did not know that the transit camp, Vtoraya Rechka, would be worse than the train, that I would squat in the dirt under sheer searing sunlight with ten thousand prisoners, ringed by dogs; that in Vtoraya Rechka you would be shot for standing, shot in the stomach, and dogs with red mouths would lap at your intestines. I did not know that the boats would be worse than the camp, that they are the most terrible places in the entire world. I left the mainland gladly, gliding away from Vtoraya Rechka’s wild, roaming cruelty. I thought I was leaving the gangs and the human, inhuman screams. Rifles pointed us up the gangways and onto the cargo ship and, through my wracking thirst, I was glad. I thought I was fleeing something. I was not fleeing anything. I was being poured down a horror’s maw.

  Lenin’s Mandat was one of the items taken from me when I arrived at Butyrskaya prison. Just a piece of card. If it was not burned, it is in Moscow somewhere, with a handful of buttons. May his memory be illuminated.

  The steamer Tovarishch Stalin was originally an American vessel. It was covered in painted English words, PORT, AFT, DANGER, messages from a different time. The deck was mopped clean. There were little platforms for men and machine guns. A hatch led down to the hold. That is where the guards took us. At least a thousand prisoners pointed into the darkness. Because of the smell, several people began to vomit. There was very little air. The walls were slick wet metal or slimy grille, splitting the hold into sections. Already, experience had taught us habits: most of us sat or lay on the ground, setting out personal space. The floor was smeared with pitch, mud, feces, and vomit. More and more people were forced into the hold. We spread our legs, so other people could sit in front of us. We could hear the sound of men and women throwing up. There were no women in my section of the hold but you could hear them through the grille. As my eyes accustomed to the darkness I also realized that there was an upper level, a row of plank bunks raised over the floor. The zeks on these bunks did not look like the other men. They were urki—professional criminals. Prisoners like us, human cargo, but allowed to rule the camps. Power and deprivation turned these men into animals: cruel, powerful creatures, with tattoos on their chests. As I squinted in the darkness I watched an urka unfasten his belt and begin masturbating. He ejaculated onto the prisoners below. The journey from Vladivostok to Nagayevo took eight days. During this time, the urki spat and urinated onto those of us who sat on the floor. When we complained, they spilled down buckets of shit, fish heads, threats. I watched as a group of urki grinned under their peaked caps, nodding to one another, and slipped down like silverfish to steal a man’s coat, his boots, to break his collarbone.

  When the guards decided it was time to eat, they opened a hatch in the ceiling and threw down pieces of bread or salted fish. The prisoners clawed in the darkness. Even worse were the moments when they lowered buckets of water, water to quench our thirst; and we stood, gulping breath, following the slow bob of the bucket. I prayed that I would be able to tear through the others, to lap for a moment at whatever the guards had sent us.

  Sometimes the urki would turn off the lights. They would descend with fists and knives. They spoke in slang, like nursery rhymes, like characters from folklore. I remember a man with gold in his mouth, the most unkind eyes. I watched him bribe a guard, who allowed a strand of men to pass through one hatch and into another. They raped three women. I knew it was three, because the women called to us, pleading for help, from the other side of the grille.

  The boat bucked in the typhoons of the Okhotsk Sea. In seething effluent our bodies knocked against steel and bone, screaming, dying. I was seasick, violently seasick, clutching my ribs and holding a handful of rags to my face, my mouth crowded with bile.

  It took eight days to reach a place called Kolyma, in the northeast of the country where I was born. On the journey I remembered you. I remembered Lenin. I remembered every meal I had ever eaten, every kind word or touch. There are no friends on those boats. There is no hope. I knew we were going somewhere, to some unimaginable camp, and I imagined that misery itself coul
d drag our ship through the night. Kolyma, like a magnet, or like Einstein’s black hole, a place that draws every sadness toward it. Part of me is surprised that any sorrow can exist away from the camps. Manhattan is 136 longitudes from Kolyma and still we had the folly, there, to cry.

  NAGAYEVO is A WIDE beautiful bay surrounded by an unfinished circle of cliffs. The water is still and silver-blue. It is like a resting coin, a new dime, that reflects the sky.

  We came into Nagayevo harbour and they stacked the dead on the pebble beach.

  All of us walked away from the corpses. We climbed the hill, blinking in the daylight. The road was made of dirt and then there was a road made of rocks. We looked back at the bay and the Tovarishch Stalin sat so smally, so quietly, secreting smoke. It was just one ship in a vast harbour; it was just one ship in a vast harbour. You could found a city there, a little paradise on the sea. Guards pointed the way with rifle barrels. We came up over the rise and the country lay before us, limitless. We were marching at its edge. Are there deer here? I wondered. Wolves? Later, I learned that there are deer; there are wolves.

  We marched until we reached the village of Magadan. It was a young place, tainted by its visitors. They divided us into groups. An officer gazed down at us from a plywood stage. It felt as though we were at the end of our lives, some in-between that follows death. A place of mud and scrub and clouding breath. “This is Kolyma,” he said. His voice scraped.

  “You are here to work. You are here for crimes against the Soviet state and you will repay your debt with minutes, hours, years. You will repay us with blood and sweat. If you work hard, you will eat. If you do not, you will die. There are no tricks. We need the metal that is buried in the earth; it is your task to extract this metal. If you do not meet your quota, you are a traitor and a saboteur.

  “The law is the taiga and the prosecutor is the bear. You will remain here until you leave here. No one escapes.”