Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

I folded my hands on my lap. “I wondered … If you want more help here, in the office … Coordinating work groups, or arranging …” I trailed off.

The major’s face looked like a woodcut.

What was I trying to prolong?

I said, “I have some ideas about telephones. Perhaps the camp could be wired up.”

The major shifted in his chair. “Termen,” he said, “you are a fifty-eight.”

“Yes.”

He said, “Politicals do not belong behind our desks.”

“Yes of course.” I took a breath. I was already dead.

“This is what will happen,” the major said. “You will work in the field, work hard, and when you have given eight years to your country, you will be a free man.”

“Yes.”

“It has already been how long?” he asked. He pulled a piece of paper toward him. He took a beat. “About seven months?”

“Yes.”

“Already seven months! So just seven years left. Seven years and five months. Does it feel like a long time?”

“Yes,” I said.

He laughed. But he saw that this was not a joke, that it was my life, and he leaned forward, toward me, toward the photograph of his children. “You’ll be all right, Termen,” he said gently. “You’re smart and strong. You’ll be on the roads a long while yet.”

“Maybe music?” The question jerked out of my throat. I saw a flicker of interest in the major’s face and then I did not stop talking, babbling, sketching a scheme that could buy me a few days of warmth. “Maybe I could arrange a concert? Something for the officers? A performance. To help pass the long days. A surprise recital. The officers would be able to—”

“No, not for the officers,” the major said. “But perhaps for the workers …”

“The workers?”

“Like you.”

A concert for the workers would have no purpose except self-delusion. An entertainment for the half disappeared. “What a wonderful idea!” I said. “It would have an excellent effect on morale.”

“It’s not a bad notion.” The major pursed his lips.

I tried to smile as evenly as I could, neither nervous nor overenthusiastic.

“I think there may even be some violins somewhere,” he said. “A cello.”

That word, cello , seemed to lift up into the air. It was like a relic from another time. Cello. I had forgotten that the cello existed.

“I’ll think about it,” the major said.

My pulse was racing. “All right,” I said.

He observed me for a few moments. He picked up the piece of sausage that was sitting on a dish on his desk. “Here,” he said. I kept the piece of sausage in my hand until all the doors had closed behind me.

WE WERE BROUGHT TOGETHER two days later: eleven rag-wrapped prisoners, hustled into a room. I knew only one of them, a spindly man called Babu. I recognized a few others. We took a moment to survey each other while the Cossack guard stood with crossed arms. “Go on,” he said finally.

I remembered that I was to be the leader. I swallowed. “You’re musicians?”

The men and women looked around. They were like skeletons. “Yes,” they said.

Four were violinists; two played the cello. Two bassists, a clarinet player, a trumpeter. One thereminist. I do not know how the major found them. The Cossack brought me to a long closet at the back of the cultural-education building, where we were supposed to see films, sometimes. No films were shown while I was at Kolyma. The closet had a box of grimy sheet music and a dark pile of instrument cases. I did not want to know where these instruments had come from. Incredibly, I found four working violins. There was a splendid old cello, like new. A battered double bass. Several cheap trumpets. Although I uncovered a couple of clarinets, the closet contained no reeds. “Do you play anything else?” I asked Babu when I came out.

“Some lousy flute,” he said. So he played that.

They gave me an upright piano, on wheels.

How had this piano come to be in Kolyma?

The major allowed us to rehearse for two afternoons. We used the sheet music we had found. Chopin’s first piano concerto. Some Mozart. A clumsy arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon. I led from the piano. The bassists and cellists shared parts. It was a hopeful cacophony.

At the end of the second rehearsal, the major listened from a doorway. “Good,” he said. “You’ll perform tomorrow morning.”

I had imagined that we would play at night, in the cultural-education building, for everyone. I had imagined rows of dark faces, silence, then the careful opening notes.

“In the morning,” he said, “as everyone goes to work.”

The next morning the Cossack wheeled the piano into the no man’s land near the fence. The squalid little orchestra stood in the snow. Everything was floodlit; the sun had not risen. There was just the grey sky and the grey earth and the silhouetted wood-line. The prisoners were standing or kneeling with their bowls of soup. They were looking at us with a mixture of fear and elation. Bigfoot was a few feet to my left, like a doting parent. I had not slept the previous night. He could see that I was unsure, my raw hands on the keys. I kept reaching up and pulling my coat around my neck. The orchestra was waiting for my signal. Our audience had fallen silent. Two night birds darted in the space above our heads.

It was cold and I felt that I was about to wrench open an overgrown gate.

“Ready?” I muttered. The violinists’ eyes were wide, asking. “One two three, one two …” The first notes of Chopin’s second movement lifted up. I played a chord. I played a chord and a chord. It was not a beautiful sound so much as it was an orderly sound. There was no bombast, no soaring melody. Looking back, we ought to have played something gay and upbeat. A reel. It would have been a kindness. Instead we played this fragile concerto, snowfall music. It was as though we were filling the work zone with new trees, empty birches and bare white elms. The barracks, the guardhouse became a little harder to see. The stars seemed to come out again, like pinpoints on a map, placeholders. Babu played his lousy flute.

Then the guards said it was time to go, and the brigades began to take formation, and they began to trudge away, through the gate. We kept playing, serenading the workers as they left for their clearings and their pits. I watched my group go — hunched Vanya, tall Sergey, Nikola dragging his fur boots. Bigfoot at the end of the line, gazing back at us. Ten minutes later, when the camp was empty, the Cossack told us to put down our instruments and catch up with our crews.

THE CONCERT WAS A SUCCESS, I suppose. It was a success inasmuch as it gave the performers a few hours away from the wind. The major listened only for a few minutes, standing on the boardwalk, but then he put out a wider call for musicians and there were almost forty of us when we gathered, a week later, in the darkened hall of the cultural-education building. This was no amateur orchestra: there were players from the cities’ philharmonics, teachers from the conservatory. Alexander Alexanderovich Gushkin, concertmaster of the Moscow symphony. And I, their leader, at a rickety upright piano.

There were not enough instruments in the little closet. “I’ll get you some from the other camps,” the major told me. “I want you to play Boléro.”

“Ravel,” I said.

“A Frenchman,” he said, as if he were trying to impress me.

“Yes.” For a moment I was going to pretend that I was impressed, that the major had proven his knowledge and that we were somehow closer for it. But I did not have the energy for this performance. I felt so tired. “We will need a snare drum.”