Us Conductors (8 page)

“Give me that,” Pash said.

A few weeks later there was a concert sponsored by a hot-dog company at Lewisohn Stadium, to twelve thousand. Pash organized this after the Communist-run Coney Island gig, after the meeting with Danny Finch. We needed to demonstrate our bland bona fides: the Lewisohn concert was pure scientific spectacle. It was time for the theremin to become an assimilated, red-blooded American.

“As of today,” Pash said, “we are done with hammer and sickle.”

He joked about handing out American flags, recruiting baseball-player accompanists. I did not find this funny. He told me, “Put on your best smile.” When I came out on stage, blinded by the lights, I felt as if I might be at the beach: wave upon wave of applause greeted me, like rolling surf. The New York Philharmonic sat behind me, poised. We performed Handel’s “Largo,” Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.” Pash had wanted me to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“That’s too much,” I said.

“Maybe you’re right,” he agreed. “Just make sure everything’s loud.”

I had devised a series of new loudspeakers, mounted on trellises. They were deafening. Even in the stadium’s open air, with dozens of string players sawing behind me, and trumpets blasting, the theremin sailed over it all. I felt as if I were commanding the winds. The audience’s faces went on forever, like fields of wheat. I lifted one arm and the sound rose up; lowered it and there was a hush. Was I serving myself, or my country?

There were five minutes of sustained applause, five curtain calls, five women who fainted at the sounds of the machines.

AT SUMMER
’
S END
I owned five tuxedos. It seemed that I was always either in my undershirt, stripping wire, or in black tie, receiving toasts. There was a queue of pupils. More and more, my visitors were dilettantes and star seekers, with little patience for practice. Women came with their husbands, balked at taking off their fur coats. I let them mill about. I stripped wire in my undershirt. I showed Alexandra Stepanoff how to hold her arms.

Gradually I collected about forty dedicated players. Although students’ first lessons were always at fixed times and dates, there was an open door for advanced students. For a long time the city’s only theremins were the ones that rested heavily in my apartment’s master bedroom, or splayed in the parlour, so my pupils drifted in and out of the studio, practising on their own schedules, meeting to discuss scientific principles or alternate scales. They appeared at breakfast time, or after dinner. Henry Solomonoff, a gentle, doughy accountant, would often spend the whole weekend hanging around. “Where else am I gonna go?” he said, rubbing a plump cheek. “The track?”

The most dedicated was wealthy, serious Lucie Rosen, who came most days in the early afternoon and stayed until evening. She was skittish but proud; she worked alone, concentrated, careful, an auburn stole around her neck. She was gifted, but only in the way that hard work makes you gifted. Sometimes I would be in another room, plotting data or doing push-ups, and when I came in she would not even lift her eyes. She kept her kind, young gaze on the theremin’s motionless antennas, her own two trembling hands.

Meanwhile, Schillinger recited his mystical poetry and lectured me on jazz. He was writing another tome about his theories of art. I tinkered with my television prototype, built cameras on a circuit, wired the rehearsal studio so I could watch my students from the bedroom. Occasionally I sat with Henry and each of us tried to write an anagram couplet, as I had been writing in Russian for years. I remember my first poem in English:

Wide United States
,
Wise and destitute
.

At night, after everyone had gone, I pushed rolls of parcel paper out over the floor, over empty snifters and packs of cigarettes, covering everything. With the day hiding under thick brown paper, distractions buried, I sketched with a short pencil, inventing things that did not yet exist. A device for ascertaining the height of an aeroplane; for finding veins of rock salt underground; a fingerboard theremin, with a neck like a cello, for bass notes. And in my wallpapered closet, surrounded by patterns of weaving ivy, I kicked, stooped, practised the
bong sao
.

And then one day I met you.

SNOW WAS FALLING
in streamers on West 59th Street. The studio was nearly silent.

I stood at the window, looking into the flurries. Headlights flashed and went away, distant gestures of civilization. Heat lifted from the radiator. All my students had stayed home. There is weather all around us and then sometimes it interrupts our lives, as though a temporary new law has been passed.

There was a bell from downstairs.

I picked up my watch and went to the door to wait.

Dr Vinogradov wore a grey mohair coat and hat. He was accompanied by five other men, similarly dressed. They took off their hats. Two girls stood among them, shivering, heads lowered. You wore scraps of snow, as if you had been decorated by hand.

“Dr Theremin,” said Vinogradov, “I hope you don’t mind that I brought some guests.”

“No,” I said lightly.

Vinogradov was a friend of Schillinger. He taught chemistry at the New School. Often he would come to the studio and sit, eating
oreshki
, as I disassembled circuits. We would discuss metals. He loved the theremin but could not play it. Utterly tone-deaf, his hands swam aimlessly in the air.

“This is Mr Larramy,” he said, “from the faculty of physics. Mr Gorev, from the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra. Stanley Marbelcek, one of my postgrads.”

We shook hands.

“Gary Kropnik. I play in the orchestra,” said a man with sandy eyes.

“Trumpet,” someone added.

“Mitchell Pelt. I work at ETT. I’m an old friend of Vlad’s.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. I turned to you and your sister.

“And these are the Reisenberg girls,” Vinogradov offered, wiping fog from his glasses.

You raised your head, Clara, and a drop of melted snow slipped down the centre of your face, from your brow to your chin.

“Nadia,” said Nadia. I kissed Nadia’s hand.

You cleared your throat. “Clara,” you said, without moving your lips, as if the word were lifting unspoken from the floor.

You all left your boots piled by the door. They looked like kindly, resting things. I led the grand tour, scientists and musicians in socks and stockings. It was a parade of zing and spark, static electricity jumping from our fingertips. The light fixtures glowed orange and although it was noon, it felt like night. In the workshop the men admired my wire cutters, my jars of radiotron tubes. We looked upon the reproduction of Arnold Böcklin’s
Die Toteninsel
, hanging above the fruit bowl. The image is of a strange island, a kind of relic, filled with tall trees; a boat approaches. “A tribute to mysteries,” Vinogradov remarked. For
me, the painting had always been an evocation of destinations. The places we’re headed.

I took inventions from cabinets or kneeled beside them on the floor, and the group leaned in around me. The men drew on their cigarettes, Vinogradov on his pipe, while I explained the principles of conductivity and resistance. Nadia applauded my carpentry. But you were the one who seemed startled by every new idea, as if your world was not ready for it, as if I were knocking you off balance. You held my altimeter in the air and then lowered it to the ground. We all watched the needle flicker in your hands. Clara, you had such brown eyes.

We came to the theremins. New models, old models, models hidden in music stands or cabinets or bare on the carpet like dismantled engines. I blew sawdust from box tops, polished glass dials with a frayed sleeve. I had a keyboard prototype, with just two keys. Gorev played it, slipping back and forth between the two notes, as I calibrated a regular theremin. It sounded like two kettles, you said, side by side. “You mean like a viola,” joked Kropnik. I didn’t laugh but you did, a laugh like a tumbling kite.

Nadia was the first to try. She stood before the theremin’s cabinet with me opposite, in mirrored pose. One of each of our arms was low, the other high. I leaned forward and flicked a switch. We could feel the buzz, the electromagnetic fields, the instrument’s tiny stormy thrum. I brought one hand in toward the pitch antenna, showing Nadia how to proceed. She followed.
DZEEEEOOOoo
, said the device. You all jumped. Mitchell Pelt began to giggle. The theremin warbled with the nervous gestures of Nadia’s hand. “Well, listen to that,” someone said. I indicated she should mirror me and guided her through a very shaky “Frère Jacques.” She was smiling wide but her eyes were serious. I could feel her frustration at the instrument’s sensitivity, its
jumpy vibrato. She was a pianist: she was used to pure, chosen notes. You sat in the corner, by the wall, with your legs folded beneath you.

Nadia motioned to you to join her but you shook your head. Kropnik pushed off from his chair and they tried playing together, he and Nadia. He interrupted her high note with a low, trembly bass. She rolled her eyes at him. You were smiling.

Nadia went to sit down beside you. She said: “This is a remarkable invention.”

“It really is, professor,” you said.

I asked you to call me Leon.

Gorev tried playing, then the rest of the men. Vinogradov played a rough version of “Jingle Bells,” his tongue between his teeth, the rhythm unmistakeable but every note wrong. You got up, then, tucking a curl of brown hair behind your ear. The theremin greeted you. You held your hand in the air and it was a perfect D. I wondered where you came from, Clara Reisenberg. Then you moved your hand, sliding between notes, trying to poke out a melody but lost in glissando. Almost immediately you stepped away. “I would need to practise,” you murmured.

I was going to say: “Come practise,” but you said: “Please play something, Leon.”

I played “The Swan.” I remember the early twilight, the way certain windows were frosted, others steamed up, and others clear. Outside the glass, the blizzard was infinite and slow. I remember breathing, and seeing you all breathing, chests rising and falling, under the shelter of my roof. I remember our shadows slanting by the lamps, and touching. My hands passed through the air and I looked at you, just a girl. Already, I knew: You were so many things. I tried to make the room tremble. I tried to make it sing. I think it sang.

IN CERTAIN NEW YORK CIRCLES
, you and your older sister were a sensation that winter. The Reisenberg girls, who emigrated from Lithuania as children; now 17 and 24, on violin and piano. I went with Schillinger to see you at Peveril Hall. The tickets said 7:30 but the concert must have begun at 7:00; the aisles were criss-crossed with latecomers and ushers. In the tumult of our arrival I did not look at the stage until we were seated, my gloves folded on my lap, my hat on my knee. You were in a spotlight, violin on your hip. Nadia was playing a solo. You listened to her with perfect patience. You were so serious, slim and pale, with almond-shaped eyes and a fighter’s round jaw. You were always dry-eyed, playing music, listening to music. Nadia’s cascades rang and jumped, scattered like skipped stones in the quiet of the hall. Ushers were still escorting latecomers like will-o-wisps, led by glimmers. I could not see the shape of your legs under your black dress, the arc of your ribs. You held your violin by the neck, its curves in silhouette.