Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

Then I came across you, in a corner, among a ring of strangers. I was beside a girl in a translucent pink dress. Two young men were wearing sweaters and bright white trousers. A laugh had just subsided. Everyone was staring at the floor, at the circle of shoes, as if there were something important there. I imagined we had uncovered a turtle or a shard of clay pot.

After a long pause someone said, with a smile, “This party is dead anyway.”

I could not tell if these were old friends or new ones. I tried to divine it from the way the bodies tilted toward each other and away. Someone recognized me and I remember I gave a quick little bow, my hands behind my back, and when I straightened you were looking at me with wry concentration, as if you couldn’t tell if I was a joke or a riddle.

“Do you live in Moscow?” someone said.

“In Leningrad.”

“Is that Petrograd?”

“Actually he lives at the Plaza,” you said.

They all laughed. Was this funny? Everyone seemed so young. You set off a ping-pong of jokes and conversation, boys who held forth on rafting down the Mississippi River, a girl telling the story of a teacher who distrusted light bulbs. You stood with your head tipped very slightly forward, eyes flicking between faces, a narrow smile that would flash into place and then disappear. You were generous with your attention but not with your approval; as your friends told stories I saw you stare them down, patient, waiting for the value of all that talking. And when you were delighted — when someone’s story revealed something or when they spoke a truth — you became almost solemn. You let your fascination express itself as stillness, steady stillness, like a lake gone smooth. Your violin sat in its case, near the points of your shoes. Only the corners of your lips showed your sparking heart.

At a certain point I told you I’d enjoyed the concert and you rubbed your elbow, smirking, only half contented. You said, “Thank you.” You nodded twice, firmly, to yourself or else to me. You said, “I’m glad.” Then Schillinger came over from where he had been speaking to your parents, and I looked to where they were standing, holding plates of lemon cake, proudly surveying the room, so capably elegant in their early middle age. I thought to myself, She is fifteen years younger than you . I decided I should go. So I made my farewells and left.

IN 1925—FOUR YEARS AFTER I met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (may his memory be illuminated), four years after he gave me the card with his name that is still in my pocket, three years after his stroke, one year after Petrograd became Leningrad and our leader died, and two years before I went to New York and met you, Clara — I received a curious letter.

I had already been touring the theremin for several years. Zigzagging through Russia, attending conferences, making excursions to foreign universities. I returned from a visit to Kiev and found the correspondence waiting on the table by the door. It seemed so innocuous. The exterior had a stamp and my name, typewritten. A circle of paper was concealed inside an ingenious circular envelope, about as wide as my hand. On one side of the paper was again typed LEV SERGEYVICH TERMEN. On the other, these words: GOOD WORK. There was no signature.

I remember I immediately tucked the letter away, into a drawer. Like a note from a mistress or from someone trying to collect on a debt. Family had come over for supper; my parents were sitting in the cramped parlour with Katia and my aunt Eva. Father saw something in my face. “What is it?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “An invitation to a colloquium.”

A week later, I arrived home from the lab to find a similar postcard. LEV SERGEYVICH TERMEN, it said on one side; and on the other: WE SHOULD TALK, with a Moscow telephone number.

Again I put the missive in a drawer. I went back outside. The dusk felt early. I took my bicycle and headed to the kwoon, which was almost empty. Some of the lanterns had gone out. Perhaps sifu was having supper. I took off my shoes. I stared at the portrait of Leung Jan floating above a lake. I touched my right fist to my open left hand. Another student did the same. We skipped rope and did push-ups. Sifu arrived with Yu Wei, Lughur and some other students I didn’t know. They took off their shoes and touched right fist to left palm. Sifu demonstrated falling. We all fell and got up and fell again. Then we practised chi sao , the hand dance, standing with partners and moving, always remaining wrist to wrist, flowing and following, sensitive. But I had no sensitivity that evening. I kept losing my position. I kept seeing, in my mind’s eye, my typewritten name.

That night, I called the telephone number. A woman’s voice answered. She asked my name. Then a man’s voice came on the line. He asked when we could meet. Two weeks later, I went to see an old man at a rented office on Nevsky Prospekt. I am certain it was not the same man I’d spoken to on the telephone. One week after that, I met another man at a café on Sadovaya Street. These men always seemed different and the same, like dominoes. They worked for the state. They asked me questions about my work, about its commercial potential, about Bolshevism. My answers seemed to please them. I met yet another man, this one short, very short, like a doll. He met me in a train carriage at Moskovsky Station. We were the only people on the train, which idled on the track. He had a table lamp in the carriage, and a small desk, like a doll’s. It was not until I left, stepping from doorway to platform, that the train pulled away. It took the small man with it. He had asked me questions in Russian, Italian, French, English and German. I had never learned any German and I told him so. He asked me about my family. “Are you close with your parents?” he asked.

“No,” I answered before I knew what I was saying.

The man did not seem surprised.

“Are you prepared to travel?”

“Yes.”

He said, in a voice like a circular card being slipped into a circular envelope, “We would like to offer you a new responsibility.”

In Leningrad that summer I felt so alone, standing beside Katia on the tram, sipping thin stew at my parents’ apartment, wandering up to the Physico-Technical Institute, where I no longer had a lab. Even attending a lecture with a pretty student, an admirer, and strolling in Alexander Garden. Children rushed by me, officials clambered into a carriage, squirrels darted, a line of soldiers filed past the flower beds. The girl said something and I thought of Katia waiting for me. The sun refused to set. All around, lives were going on. I watched water pour out from the fountain and into the drain.

The men from the government called me a beacon for the Soviet people. They called me an adept.

These were not the same sort of people who had worked under Lenin. This was a different time. Our Dear Father, Iosif Vissarionovich, boomed from the wireless sets now, and when I’d met his generals, earlier that summer, they had been interested only in whether my distance-vision technology could be implemented, immediately, at our borders. All matters were reduced to directives, simple prescriptives. Our country needs your help , they said. Our country needs you to travel to Western nations, arranging demonstrations, forming companies, filing patents, inking trade agreements. These contracts will allow Mother Russia to increase its influence, to diversify its investments, to multiply its channels of information and trade . They explained all this. These different and same men looked at me with hooded eyes. On my next trip, they said, they would send me a handler. I practised chi sao , watching my partner, sensing my partner, moving with his movements. I walked in Alexander Garden with the pretty student. These men asked me, “Would you like to be a hero?”