Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“It took until my hundredth morning at Marenko for me to remember. We laugh and eat and scribble in our notebooks and we get distracted. We don’t notice our jailers. Then one morning I remembered. I looked. We are caged and counting. While our friends die, on the outside, and our wives fall in love with other men, and our children go to school where they are taught lies concerning their fathers, we stay here, frittering away our breath. Every day we get closer to death and every day is wasted, spilled out into the laboratory. This is a theft. This is the most terrible theft. They have taken away my life and it does not matter that my hours are easier here than they were in Kolyma. I will die inside this place. If my life has any meaning, that meaning was made — it must have been made — before they arrested me on February the second, 1933.”

“You can still …” I began.

“A man has only a slim chance to matter,” Andrei Markov said, in a voice that was stony. “A slim chance, like a blade of grass or a poured cup of water. They have taken this from me. They have opened a wound in my side and taken my entrails.”

He lowered his head.

“No, I never work on Sundays,” he said.

But I did not believe him. Andrei Markov pretended that Marenko was a crevasse, a terrible slit in the earth that had swallowed us up. Marenko was not a crevasse. It was a refuge. In the laboratory, I peered at my voltmeter and consulted with fellow thinkers, all of us in this strange sanctuary, creating things. I said hello to Pavla, and good night. Sometimes, for old times’ sake, I did push-ups beside my bunk. I went through the first and second forms, Little Idea and Sinking the Bridge, and the other zeks laughed.

I worked on Sunday, I worked on Sunday, and I worked on Sunday.

Two years passed.

A war raged in Europe.

Every so often we would have a visit from a short man with a small smooth head and round pince-nez glasses. He walked with a slight slouch. His eyes flicked, flicked.

He asked us about our projects. He listened and asked questions.

Yukachev stood beside him, sweating, white as a maggot. The man’s name was Lavrentiy Beria.

THIS IS WHAT I IMAGINED you were doing while I devised new instruments for Soviet aeroplanes:

I imagined that you went to eat at Rose’s and walked home past the stationery shops, a million miles of paper and all those wells full of ink.

I imagined a springtime that was cold at first and then warmer, and you called your sister: “What is with this kooky weather?”

I imagined you voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt. You went alone to the voting place and stood behind the screen and toyed with checking the box beside Wendell Willkie’s name, just out of mischief, smiling to yourself.

I imagined you played the theremin in Canada, on tour, in a city where they speak French. They said to you: “Bravo, bravo!” and “Enchanté,” and you marvelled that somewhere so close could be so different.

I imagined you ordered a crate of oranges, you and your husband, but he didn’t eat any of them. You ate them all yourself, one a day, cutting them down the centre with a small knife.

I imagined you played the theremin at Carnegie Hall, alone, before velvet sewn with stars.

I imagined there was an article about you in the Times . They said you had studied with Dr Leon Theremin. The journalist described your appearance as “luminous.” Rockmore didn’t want to discuss her former tutor .

I imagined you fought with your husband one night, in bed, both of you sitting with your backs to the headboard, your heads to the wall. He said he wanted to have a son. You scraped your fingernails over the duvet. You said, “You live your life and I’ll live my life, Robert.”

I imagined you sitting in your dressing room after a concert, staring at your reflection in the mirror. You had been in dressing rooms like this before. In front of mirrors like this before. I imagined you were recalling, gently, how close you had come to never playing music again — to becoming a violinist with a tired arm who sits at home with a romance novel and a simmering pot of chicken stock. You looked at your face in the mirror, severe and proud.

I imagined you went to see the ballet, all those dancers throwing their partners across the stage.

I imagined you ate the heels of many loaves of bread.

ONE EVENING, LATE, I came out of the laboratory and into Marenko’s hallway. I was heading back toward the main staircase. I was thinking of I-don’t-know-what. There were no sounds. I walked. At a certain moment I realized that I was following a path of footprints: a single set of footprints, faintly braiding, the wet footprints of a cat. I knew of no cats in this place. The footprints continued down the centre of the hall and I followed them. I followed them around a corner. I wondered about the story of this cat. This was such a pleasant adventure. I followed the footprints. Then the path abruptly stopped, the path disappeared, as if the cat had been swallowed into thin air.

THIS IS WHAT I imagined you were doing while I was designing rockets with Korolev, furies that would roar into the sky:

I imagined that you went on long walks through the city, through the snow and rain, the sweltering July, seeking something you couldn’t remember.

I imagined that you wondered whether your husband would be drafted. Killed on a hill in Egypt, obliterated on a Pacific gunship. “No, Clara,” he said, “never.” You wondered about the certainty of never. You spoke to girlfriends whose men had gone away, who wrote letters on dusted paper. You thought of a boy from the theatre, an usher, who was in England now.

I imagined that at night you came home and sat with Robert Rockmore, the radio singing.

I imagined one morning you took a cab up to Harlem and got out where we used to get out sometimes, though you didn’t realize it until you got out, right into a puddle, looking down at your feet then lifting your gaze up to the orange awning, QUIET BARBERSHOP. “Oh, the Quiet Barbershop,” you used to say. “D’you think the barber’s name is Sammy Quiet?”

I imagined you walked through Harlem like a wind walking through a million stalks of wheat.

This is what I imagined you were doing while I spent sixteen months in Sverdlovsk, a different sharashka, where the furnace clanged, on a team designing radio beacons for submarines:

I imagined the booking of your first overseas tour, London and Paris and Casablanca — you wanted to go to Casablanca. You were packing your cases and practising new material, Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla. I imagined the meetings you had with your girlfriends, giggling over little coffees, thumbing through travelogues at bookshops off Broadway. Then the tour was called off. “Of course it was cancelled!” your husband said. “There’s a war on. It was a silly idea in the first place.”

Which made you furious. You stood by the window, jaw clenched, staring into the hard wide blue sky. You felt white with rage but also a thin separation, a kind of caul, shame at your pride. “Even in a war,” you said, “the world goes on.” Silently, you asked Robert to drop the subject, to give it up, to condescend no further. This is what I imagined. And I imagined that you thought of me, as I imagine that you do, and you told yourself: “Lev was worse. He was even worse, Clara.”