Us Conductors (4 page)

Back in Leningrad I was beginning to feel like a star. I spent weekdays at the institute, improving my devices, advancing my theories, feeling the satisfaction of the inventor who knows his inventions will be seen, will be wondered at, in open air. Sasha didn’t want to hear any of my crowing. He became grumpy when I hung around his office doorway, unspooling anecdotes. “You can have your shepherds and milkmaids,” he said. “I’ll take the committee chairs and Nobel laureates.”

One night, he stood me up. I had tickets to the ballet, but Sasha wasn’t at home when I arrived to collect him. Instead, a pretty girl answered the door. She had dark eyelashes, an upward tilting chin, a soft assurance to her face. I imagined she was the type of person who writes down her dreams in the morning. Her arms were crowded with screwdrivers, pliers, a tin full of nails. She seemed vexed.

“Pardon me,” I said. “I’ve come for Sasha.”

“He’s out.”

I was surprised. “Out?”

“Yes, out. At the lab.”

“I see,” I said.

She examined me. “Are you Termen?”

“Yes. Lev Sergeyvich.”

“He said to say sorry, he wanted to finish something.”

“Ah,” I said. I looked at the shined toes of my shoes.

“I’m Katia,” she said. “His sister.”

It was as if I saw her for the second time then. “Are those your tools?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Sasha left his mess for me to tidy up.”

“How rude of him,” I said. “Would you like to go to the ballet?”

THE NEXT THREE YEARS
were a time of self-creation. I was in a rush to be established—the sturdiness of my life, I thought, should match the heavy type that newspapers were using to print my name. There were so many elements to put in place: published papers; professional endorsements; applications for a new apartment, for a new laboratory; a wife. Eventually I quit the Physico-Technical Institute to work under my own supervision, in a shared lab overlooking the Neva. I moved into a new home. I invented better theremins. I made abrupt, titanic promises.

My parents disapproved of all these metamorphoses. The Revolution was fresh in their minds and they advocated steady advancement, sober restraint. They wanted me to be more like my sister, Helena, who was studying botany, obscurely cultivating a career. “We always taught you to keep your voice down,” my father said, perched on a chair in my kitchen. “Whose attention are you in such a hurry to receive?”

Worse than my parents’ disapproval was how little they cared about my accomplishments. Father could not be persuaded to flip through my write-ups in scientific bulletins, let alone to assist at a demonstration of the theremin. He sipped from a cup of strong tea and issued advice about how to start a family. “Patience, Lev. The main thing is patience.” When I tried to show him the distance-vision prototype I was working on, it was only a few minutes before he became distracted by a squirrel scritching on the windowsill. He shouted through the glass, “Hello my friend! Hello!”

Finally I directed the explanation to my mother. “Good work, Lev,” she murmured, without lifting her eyes from her knitting, without waiting for me to turn it on.

I had more and more reasons to stay at home and I found more and more reasons to go away. Sometimes Katia and I would have arguments by letter—underlined words and no signatures. I attended a conference in Nizhny Novgorod. I made a presentation to generals in Moscow. I came back from a visit to Kiev and found that my country had new ideas for me. They wanted to send me into western Europe. “Impress them with your machines,” said a man from a dark corner of the interior ministry. “Our operative will do the rest.” I faced Katia across our small table, ham on plates like little moons.

My new mission began with an appearance in Berlin. It was my first visit. I arrived in the mid-morning—weary, excited, dishevelled from the sleeper car. The streets were smeared with red and gold leaves. Lines snaked from the door of every bakery—it was some sort of national holiday. I was met by the eminent Dr Beirne, and we toured the National Academy. I demonstrated the theremin and the radio watchman to a classroom of physicists. They stroked their short silver beards. We took a carriage across town, to the Deutsche Oper, where the rest of my equipment was being stored. I went down into the basement. I met the man I call Pash.

Pash. That is how he introduced himself to me that day, so that is what I always called him. Pash. My operative. My handler. I was the communist magician, the conductor of the ether, sent out by the state to show off my great discoveries. And here was a man in an overcoat who travelled alongside, like a shadow, a larger shadow, filled with his own directives.

Pash had a gentle face, square and well formed, with blue irises like chips of stone. A kind face, and an ogre’s back and shoulders, as if his body foresaw circumstances that demanded something more than clear, quick, handsome eyes.

We travelled together in Berlin, and then to other German cities—Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt. By the time we arrived
in Dresden, the rest of the tour had sold out. Crowds filled the theatres. They called me “the Russian Edison”; they said I would transform the world. At the Tonhalle they applauded and applauded even after my presentation had finished, even after my second curtain call, even after the stagehands had raised the house lights and propped open the exits. They applauded, stamping their feet, shouting.

“Theremin!” they shouted. “Theremin, Theremin!”

Pash steered; I followed. From Germany we cut through to France, then over to England. Each city offered the same obstacle course of handshakes and expectation. First came someone from the Russian consulate or, in London’s case, someone from the former Russian consulate. These someones were always tall, malnourished, jumpy. They were not sure why I had been sent, or under whose aegis I travelled. My companion particularly perplexed them.

“And you are …?” said the someone from Paris.

Pash shrugged in his overcoat. “It doesn’t matter.”

The someone laughed at this, raised expectant eyebrows.

“Pash,” Pash said finally.

“Pash?”

“Yes.”

“But you are Dr Theremin’s … that is, Dr Theremin is your—?”

“May I use your telephone?” Pash said, and then he took out his identity card, emblazoned with a particularly intricate and notorious seal, and the someone asked no further questions.

Pash made his calls. He asked the consulate man for reports, contacts, lists of local partners. I soon realized I was the diversion, Pash’s pretext for opening bank accounts and trade offices. His briefcase filled with paper and wave after wave of visitors crashed down against us, in a blur of champagne bubbles.

Next came the dignitaries: mayors, ambassadors, lesser royalty, keen to meet Leningrad’s wonder-worker. They spoke of welcome, of international cooperation. None of the nobles mentioned Russia’s executed czar.

“Try the mussels,” they said. “Try the flan. Try a banana.” In London, the Earl of Shaftesbury flourished a curving yellow fruit. I watched him peel it. “Now,” he pronounced, “anoint it with a scoop of ice cream.”

After the dignitaries came the businessmen, with whom I had been instructed to seem polite but distracted. “Be soap-stone,” Pash had said, as our train clicked past Reims. “Promising but inscrutable—let them think you are a mystery to be drawn out.”

My box of tricks was not a deception, simply physics. And yet the mission in Europe was to tantalize, plant seeds, dangle hooks. All these foreign entrepreneurs, seduced by the theremin: What would they trade for a share?

I smiled thinly at the Western wealthy. I kissed widows’ hands. I smoked their sons’ cigars. In time I derived a formula: my accord with a person was inversely proportional to the number of rings he or she was wearing.

At every stop, my favourite group was admitted last. Once the dignitaries, businessmen and socialites had cleared to the punch bowls, at last: the physicists, the chemists, the engineers, the doctors, the astronomers, the autodidacts and the musicians. I welcomed them with joy and relief. Pash had come to meet the chamber of commerce but I was here for this: to encounter men and women of refinement, intelligence, and curiosity. In Paris: Paul Valéry, the marquis de Polignac, the English ambassador John Rafe; in London, Julian Huxley, Sir Oliver Lodge, Maurice Ravel, the conductor Henry Wood. Not to mention John McEwen, principal of the Royal Academy of Music, and brilliant Ernest
Rutherford. Finally—finally!—we could talk about something besides the weather. This esteemed company discussed electricity, hypnosis, and Dmitri Shostakovich. At that time my English was much worse than it is today, and my French, non-existent. So I had interpreters. In Paris I was assisted by a lovely girl called Aurélie—the daughter of an émigré who taught at the polytechnic. Translating French interrogatives into Russian, Russian conjectures into French, she moved her miniature hands before her: tiny gestures that evoked the poses of birds. I remember the press conference where I announced that I would be going abroad at the end of the year: a “short trip,” organized by Pash, to introduce my work to the Americans. A lure at the end of a line. Standing on a makeshift stage, in the bar of the Paris Opera, I found that I was apprehensive. Not just about the substance of my statement—where I was headed, why—but about my whole overblown situation. Equipment was being unloaded downstairs and instead of labouring among my crates and wires, I was here, leaning against a baby grand, making a speech to Valéry, Polignac, and a columnist for
Le Temps
. For a long, yawning moment I felt utterly outclassed. I did not know what kind of wine I had been drinking, or which term I should use when addressing the marquis. I was so nervous, and beside me Aurélie was so solemn, measuring each word as if it were a death sentence. Compulsively, I began to extemporize. I tried to provoke Aurélie, to unsettle her gravity, employing esoteric nouns and far-flung adjectives, inserting references to folk songs and fairy tales, Nevsky Prospekt vernacular, pops and crackles of onomatopoeia. Noticing a plate of biscuits, I said they smelled like Tulsky gingerbread, like the nave of the Church of the Annunciation, on Vasilievsky. “Such a perspicuously mnemonic aroma,” I said. I wanted to make Aurélie smile. I wanted her to lower her hands that were like small birds and to comfort me with a smile. But
solemn Aurélie simply stood in her neat black skirt and parroted my nonsense in pearly perfect French.

I wonder where Aurélie is now.

She has probably married a lawyer and taken his name.

WHEN I RETURNED TO LENINGRAD
, the Physico-Technical Institute seemed unchanged. I came up the long road in a glossy white taxi; my driver wore gloves. Inside, the marble hall was almost empty; two students were disappearing up the staircase. “Helloooo!” I called, letting my voice echo. The students stared at me. Nyusya popped out of the charwomen’s closet.

“Oh,” she exclaimed. “Professor Termen, you’re back!”

“Maybe so,” I said.

I bumped into Ioffe outside the lab upstairs. “My boy!” said my former supervisor. “To what do we owe the pleasure?” He fetched the teapot and poured two mugs of tea; we sipped them standing. I told stories of my travels and he marvelled. “Rutherford himself!” he said. “What an age this is.”

Later I found Sasha in his office, scowling into a book.

“Toc toc,” I said, instead of knocking.

He looked up. I saw his gaze change, lengthening, sharpening, as he recognized me. “If it isn’t our Wandering Dutchman,” he said. “Are you finished your gallivanting? Back for some work?”

“It’s good to see you,” I said.

Sasha sniffed. His tall body was hunched over his book, almost protective. “How’s my sister?”

“She’s marvellous,” I said.

He perused the page, then looked back at me. He seemed about to say something; but he did not open his lips. He shook
his head, then finally said, “Do you wonder, Lev, whether the thing you’re after is worth it?”

I scratched the back of my hand. “Doesn’t everybody wonder that?”

Sasha smirked. It was as if I had said precisely what he expected me to say. He shifted in his chair and raised his chin. “No,” he said.