Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

Then the major said something in French that I didn’t understand.

FOUNDERED IN KOLYMA, I led the camp’s little orchestra. What did I know of conducting? We performed Bol é ro at night, before a seated audience. I did not play piano; I kept time with a little whittled twig and at the end of the performance the Cossack took it from me, lest I use it as a weapon, lest I use it on myself.

The major had invited officials from neighbouring camps and for the audience, for many of the musicians, it was a joyful event. The booming horns, the weaving woodwinds, the stately percussion. We were not in Kolyma; we were on a Mediterranean hillside, in a Spanish court. We were wearing bright colours, with carafes of red wine. We were in towers, on precipices, part of the major’s well-tended garden.

But I was not really with them. I led the little orchestra and I felt as if I was standing near an open window, watching the curtains shift. As the music rose up, it also vanished. Sometimes it is like this, listening to music: the steady bars let you separate from your body, slip your skin, and you are standing before the shuttering slides of memory. Shades of light, skies filled with cloud, old faces.

At the Paris Opera, I was a man with boxes and wires. Ravel himself listened from the darkness. The smell of tobacco. All this electricity, pretending.

On the deck of a ship, I saw a distant bridge. Harpists on the pier. “Mind the step,” someone said.

Me on the floor of my parlour, laughing, resting against Schillinger’s chair, and all of us passing around a bottle of bootleg rye. Slominsky the journalist — he called it inspiration. A bottle of inspiration .

And then, like a change of film, different intensities of colour, memories of you, Clara. Lamplit and candlelit. Sunlit. Sunlit Clara Reisenberg. Tableaux in which you turned and moved, and moved away. Tableaux in which you were visible only in the corner of the scene, almost hidden. I tried to suppress these images, brushing past to other things: Pash, Lavinia, former students. The pages of an old encyclopedia, the one I used to read in bed as a child. Lepidoptera; Agra; The Mechanical Turk . I tried to remember other faces. Yet you stayed. I looked away and you stayed. All these other things faded and passed, impermanent. Just fancies, gone. Your face was the strongest thing in all of my heart.

I remember when you said you wouldn’t marry me. You looked at me with a face like a question and said nothing. On the steps of a Harlem club, at dawn, with strangers passing on the street. You swallowed. Your hands clenched. I glanced at these small fists but immediately looked back again to your face. I did not want to miss anything. I was smiling like a damn fool. Waiting, smiling, pretending I did not see the way that fear had sprung into your cheeks, like a blush. You were twenty-one and you were not ready to be a wife. Or perhaps you did not love me. Even today it is difficult to write this. In that vital instant I was too ruined to see what was before me. As soon as I saw your clenched hands I was another man, shattered.

THE NEXT MORNING I went to work and I pushed a wheelbarrow full of rocks.

BY DECEMBER, MOST OF OUR living took place in the dark. The few hours of daylight seemed illusory, like silver dreams. We shivered on the road, staring into the circles of our lamps. Sometimes I lifted my eyes and was surprised by an orange sky, a pink sky, my lamplight disappearing into air. But mostly it was darkness, with fine falling snow, temperatures that vacillated and plunged. Men were dying faster. Bigfoot tripped in the ice and tore off two of his toes. He spent two weeks in paradise, in the infirmary, with a hot woodstove and clean white sheets and a nurse who brought him double portions of food, like a hallucination.

He was discharged on a starless morning. The moon always seemed so unkind. Crouched with me, chewing on bread that was nearly frozen, Bigfoot said, quickly, without adornment, “I feel as if I am doomed.”

IT WAS INTO THIS PLACE, into this moonlight, that there came a man in a green uniform.

I was returning from a day’s work, passing through the gate, when a guard called my name. The word cut through the cold and the darkness like a dart. Each of us has these experiences, three or four times in our lives, when the instant itself feels like a messenger.

“Termen!” shouted the guard.

I walked stiffly toward him, across the crushed snow. “Yes?” I said, through my scarf.

Beside the guard, a man in a green uniform sat on a wooden bench. His greatcoat was unbuttoned. He had black hair and thin lips, a simple face except for the large round nose. I had never seen him before.

“This is Termen,” the guard said.

The man in the green uniform mildly considered me, from my face down to my ragged boots. He gave the guard a small nod.

The guard flicked his glove. “You can go.”

I pursed my lips, looking between the soldiers.

The Cossack came for me as we were rising the next morning. Someone was banging the pot by the stove and we were all turning on our sides and getting up from our bunks, holding our heads in our hands, wrapping ourselves in cloths. Those who had not slept were staring dead-eyed at their knees.

He appeared beside me and put his hand flat at the nape of my neck. “Let’s go,” the Cossack said.

I gave a start. “What? Where?”

“Now.”

He brought me to the major’s room. The office was empty. I stood with the Cossack against the wall. A piece of dried sausage sat on a plate. A picture sat in a frame. I noticed the sleeve of a 78 resting on a bookshelf. A cartoon of a fish at the bottom of the ocean, its lips in an O, a speech bubble with a music note.

The major came in with the man in the green uniform. They both appeared tired. They were holding steaming tin mugs.

“Good, Yemelya, thanks,” said the major.

The Cossack saluted and left us.

The major and the man in the green uniform sat down.

“L-890, Lev Sergeyvich Termen. Fifteenth of August, 1896.

Yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” said the major, nodding. He consulted the sheet in front of him. “This is Senior Lieutenant Lapin. Tomorrow he will be taking you back to Moscow.”

My voice failed.

“He is already making the journey. After five months at Susuman he has been reassigned, the lucky clod. So he has been ordered as your escort.”

“Why am I leaving?” I breathed.

The major shrugged. “You can ask whomever meets you at the other end.”

I didn’t know what to say. So many times in my life, now, I had been told I was going away. The major and the man in the green uniform, Lapin, were staring at me across the desk. I was grimacing — this wide, strained grimace, tears welling in my eyes. I had understood that I would die in Kolyma. I had understood that I would eke out a knife-edge of life and clasp an old lover’s memory to my chest and then die one late afternoon, under a vaulted sky, crumpling into my bootprints.

I felt as if my heart were clutched in someone’s hand. “All right,” I said finally.

I went out to join my brigade. We worked through the dark morning, in clear air, until around midday a blizzard seemed to rise up from the ground, raw white, and we shoved our wheelbarrows through the smoke-like snow, pulled planks skidding across the ice, felt our faces raked by wind, and the thought I kept having was that I was abandoning these men, my partners, betraying their stooped silhouettes as I dreamed of a hot green locomotive that would carry me westward, from Vladivostok to Moscow, through valleys. In the thick of the storm I could not make out any living things but I pushed my cart of gravel, my last cart of gravel, for the making of roads.