Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

That first day I squeezed into a seat at the dining table wearing parachutists’ overalls and, over top, a rancid, piss-stained fox-fur coat. The man beside me, Korolev, turned with a pinched expression.

“You’re new?”

“Yes,” I murmured, guarded.

A woman tossed a basket of black bread onto the table before us. Instantly I grabbed for it, teeth clenched, expecting a scramble. My dining partners burst out laughing. Their laughter was loud and forceful, with a little sadness in it. Across the table, Zaytsev said, “Normally I hold out for the white bread.”

“What is this?” I said, angry somehow.

“You can have as much black bread as you want,” Korolev muttered. “The white bread is rationed.”

“And the sour cream,” complained Zaytsev. “And the butter.”

“At least you get the full portion,” snapped another man, an engineer.

They brought us borscht with vegetables, a piece of pork, potatoes. I was dumbfounded. I stared at my place setting, the knife sitting freely on the wood. My hands were not accustomed to cutlery.

Korolev slid over his plate of meat. “Take it,” he said.

Yukachev had told me the nature of this place, its purpose, and he had told me that I was assigned to the instrumentation division, working on dials, meters, counters, but he had not told me that there would be whole pork chops and black bread, one and a half ounces of butter, a little glass of sour cream to scoop, with a spoon, into rich red broth.

“Why me?” I had asked him.

“We found your file,” he said. “Very impressive.”

I think perhaps he was lying. By Marenko’s standards I was not impressive. Over that first lunch I learned a little about the men around me. Bairamov, co-designer of the GIRD-8 rocket. Rubin, a senior physics lecturer from Novgorod. Korolev, former chief of the Jet Propulsion Research Institute — the Soviet space program.

All of these men, traitors now.

OUR LABORATORY WAS A spacious room on the third floor, with vast windows and a dozen cluttered desks, shelves piled high with electronics. It was like a well-funded university office or the lost corner of a corporation — scientists developing their eccentric theories, trading questions through the air. Korolev tuned his radio to symphonies, music epic and thundering, which he would listen to quietly, as if the bombast should be secret. When he was away from his desk, a young engineer, Lupa, commandeered the airwaves and then our lab twinkled with popular song, snare and saxophone; I could never decide whether I enjoyed this stuff, all nostalgic, or whether it was breaking my heart.

We worked all day under Pavla’s vigilant eye. She was at once matron, ingénue, and den mother. A free worker assigned to guard the instrumentators, small and straw-blond, she settled our arguments, reminded us to eat, told us when our shirts were buttoned up wrong. Most of the men were in love with her. She was kind to me from the very first day: she had seen so many others like this one, staggering in from Siberia, baffled by comfort. “This is your desk,” she said brightly. “Rashi’s in charge of the fuses. The hob is over there, for tea. And if your pens go missing, check Bairamov’s drawer.” At first I assumed she was another prisoner. It was only later they explained the boundary between us, the way Pavla’s papers let her pass out of the building, through the gates, into the land of concert halls, cinemas, trams. “She was taught that we are spies and saboteurs,” Andrei Markov told me. “I am certain her teachers were adamant.” Pavla’s bumbling charges were all zeks, after all. Worse, they were 58s, enemies of the people. Her masters wanted her to be watchful for insubordination, mischief, espionage. For lies, sabotage, and smuggled plans. Every night, the woman with the straw-blond hair collected Instrumentation’s most sensitive documents and placed them in a safe.

I wonder if Pavla still believes the lessons they have taught her. After all these hours together, are we still traitors? Snakes swishing in grass?

Marenko appeared to be an idyll: the airy lab, books and conversation, black bread in open baskets, science. I tried to adjust to this life. I tried to take my meals slowly, to take in each movement as I lowered my head into a feather-down pillow at night. Instant by instant, I felt for the things I had discarded in Kolyma. My imagination, under the snow. My ambition, between the slats in the barracks wall. On a piece of paper I sketched a circuit that had no purpose; on the roof I peered into Rubin’s telescope, squinting at Jupiter. The treasure I had kept hold of, that memory of you — it seemed safe to loosen my grasp, to set it down. A woman who once loved me; there are other things to live for. Aren’t there? There was so much work to do.

I HAD BEEN THERE for six months, I think, when I saw Andrei Markov eating alone at the end of a table. He was holding a book in his right hand, a drooping banana in the left. Something about the scene made me pause. “Are you coming?” I asked. I pulled an arm through my cardigan sleeve.

“No,” Andrei Markov said.

“Is everything all right?”

“It’s Sunday,” Andrei Markov said, not lifting his eyes.

I broke into a grin. “We work on Sunday.”

“No,” he said, “you work on Sunday.”

“Andrei Markov is exempted?”

“I do not volunteer ,” he said, taking a bite of his banana.

“I don’t—” I began, but then I shrugged. I tugged my sweater’s collar.

Andrei Markov raised his gaze. He is older than me, with a crown of white hair and a longish beard. “On the second floor,” he said over his reading glasses, “at the end of the hall, beside the duty office, there is a list. It is headed, ‘Sunday Volunteers.’ ”

“Yes?”

“Sunday is entitled to us as a free day. Any work is strictly ‘voluntary.’ Do you know what ‘voluntary’ means? And yet here is a peculiar thing: every Saturday night, beside the duty office, a list of volunteers is posted. And this list includes the names of every zek at Marenko. For example, Termen, Lev Sergeyvich.”

I was not sure if he was joking. “And Markov, Andrei?”

“Markov, Andrei strikes himself from the list.”

“Is this permitted?”

Andrei Markov looked at me again, levelly. “How would they punish me, Termen?”

I checked his story later that day. On the second floor of the dormitory building, at the end of the hall, on a wall painted pale green, nine typewritten pages. Dated from the night before: Sunday Volunteers . And under M, one name, Markov, had been neatly crossed out, with a pencil-thin line.

The next morning I joined him for breakfast. He sat with his book, silent. Finally I asked, “How many?” This was not a rare question at Marenko.

Andrei Markov turned a page. “A quarter,” he said, “and five on the horns.”

I could not help but take a breath. Twenty-five years, and five more with diminished rights. “For me, eight years.”

“Yes.”

“How much do you have left?”

“Eighteen.”

“Seven,” I said.

Andrei Markov took another spoon of porridge. With a flick of one finger he turned the page of his book.

“You never work on Sundays?” I asked.

Andrei Markov took a moment before answering. Then he set his book face down on the table. The cover said SWIMMING HORSES.

“I am a prisoner.” He cleared his throat. “I am a prisoner and you are a prisoner. You remember?” He stared at me.

“Yes,” I said.