Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

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 said.

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.