Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

I will call to you through the air.

IT IS SNOWING IN MOSCOW. I have spent the past hour in front of this square of window, this square of snowstorm, deciding what to write to you. My headset is around my neck. The machine whirs before me. How does one begin the first letter in eight years? With a greeting? Hello Clara? Dear Clara? Dearest Clara? But then this letter will never reach you. I am almost certain that it will never reach you. I heard your voice again today. I sat at my desk and tried to choose the first line of a letter that you will never read.

It is snowing in Moscow. It has been eight years since I wrote a letter like this, at a desk, to a friend. Is that what you are — a friend? Today I heard your voice through the earpiece, while I bent over my machine. Your voice was hiding in the noise, like a ghost. Like a transmission from the other side of life, from the spring.

When I am finished writing to you I will fold this piece of paper in thirds. I will trade Zaytsev some cigarettes for an envelope. A letter in an envelope, such an easy thing. My plan ends there. There are no mailboxes in Marenko. What is a prisoner to do with a letter? Perhaps I will slip it to a sympathetic guard. Perhaps I will burn it. Perhaps I will keep it forever in my things, forever until a guard discovers it, snatches it from where it hides in a book, tears it into a hundred dry scraps. I remember when this happened to Andrei Markov.

I have a question for you, Clara: What good is a letter that will never be read? What good is a lost message?

I heard your voice in the noise, in the shush of crackling static, on a tape they brought from Spaso House. As I listened to Averell Harriman.

All these new names.

MY NAME IS Lev Sergeyvich Termen, as it always was. My number is L-890. I live in Marenko prison, outside Moscow, with four hundred lawbreakers. We are called zeks . It is February 1947, not yet St. Valentine’s Day. Nobody in this country celebrates St. Valentine’s Day, except perhaps Ambassador Harriman. I am in the attic of a residential building. It is on a side street near the Kremlin; unheated, glacial, but I have known worse cold. I will not ask Beria for a heater. I will not ask Beria for anything. Until he appears in a doorway, with eyes of coal, I will pretend he does not exist.

The reason I am in this place is that when I sit at the small, square window, there is a direct view of another window, four or five hundred metres away, across a red brick wall. I will not tell you who sits behind that window, gazing out across the city.

The attic has a low, angled ceiling. It is all made of wood, like a cabin in the forest. Each corner of the room has a knit of light cobweb, but I have seen no spiders. They are either concealed or they have gone away.

There is a door in the far wall that leads down a back passage to the street. It is not shared with the apartments below, where Kremlin officials live with their families, dine on pork and fresh peaches. I come to this attic twice a week, for fourteen hours. I have never seen my neighbours. I hear them through the floor but only Beria knows I am here.

Sometimes I fear that one of the residents will hear me, and call up to the attic. She will call up to the attic, wondering who is hiding here, and I will not answer, and then my patron will send some NKVD agents to have my neighbours murdered.

There is a desk along one wall of the attic. It has a stack of folders, several writing pads, labels, pens and ink. There is this small typewriter. There are two boxes of magnetic tape. There is my whirring machine, innocuous and painted cream, and another machine, a player, connected to a headset. The first machine has one wire for the power supply and another wire that leads up behind it to the window. It snakes outside through a hole in the wall. On the other side of the glass, a device is fastened to the window frame. The wire leads into this device. The device is black and unusual. It looks like a crow, hunched, gazing out toward the Kremlin.

There is also a gun on the desk beside me. This gun is not for self-defence. If I need to defend myself I will kill my enemy with kung-fu. The gun is not for strangers; it is for me. If I am discovered, I will turn the muzzle of the gun toward myself and pull the trigger, click .

I REMEMBER I WAS once a man who conducted the ether.

I am no longer the conductor.

WHEN I RETURNED FROM the United States, eight years ago, I found Leningrad empty. It was the end of 1938. It was a brilliant winter’s day and a huge albino sailor brought me out of my cabin, onto the deck, where the air stung my lungs. The city was like an elegant miniature. Waves skimmed the harbour. I remember seeing the embraces of unfamiliar men and hearing the sound of grinding metal, then later watching a crane hoist my crates from the ship. I remember my fear as the boxes swung in the air, so perilously high: the vision of an overcorrection, a mistake, a slipped hook. For one instant I could see them falling and then the crates would splinter against the ground, explode, all my past destroyed.

The longshoremen lowered the crates so gently, like gifts.

I found myself alone on Neva pier with all my worldly possessions. I did not know where to go. Part of me had expected a government agent to meet me, some delegation or welcome parade. But there was no one. The passengers had disappeared like spiders under doorways. I remember standing on the pier and watching motorcars go round the street corner, one after another, coughing smoke, and the understanding that Leningrad had changed in my absence.

I TOOK A ROOM with Father’s little sister, Eva Emilievna. She was a fragile woman now, thin, with watery blue eyes. She had been a soprano; growing up, I thought of her as “the singer.” But now my aunt worked at the hospital, wrapping broken legs, making splints. My parents had been dead four years. Eva told me about their funerals, one in the winter and one the next autumn, the pine halls full of friends. “Everyone was crying,” she said. “Everyone asked about you.” I imagined Mother and Father in their caskets, resting, waiting.

“What were their last words?”

Eva said she didn’t know. She touched her cup of tea with the tip of her finger.

I spent each day in a different government office, slumped in a soft chair until my name was called. I met desiccated women from various Soviet agencies. Painted eyebrows, vases full of dried flowers. They added my information to rolls and registers. “You must make sure you are listed with the LNS,” one would say. “Check with SSUG.” At night I walked home to the apartment, skidding on the frost. Eva arrived later, depleted from her day in the wards. “It is so good to be with family,” she would say, turning on a lamp.

My equipment was stored across town, with a friend of Eva’s, in a warehouse that safeguarded laundry powder.

At supper we talked about old times. About picnics with Mother, Father, my grandmother, my sister. Mother always made hard-boiled eggs, wrapped them in velvet. Father was in charge of slicing cheese with his pocketknife. Eva remembered the time that each of us, one after another, spilled beets on our fronts. The whole family stained scarlet, like murder victims.