Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

As I refined submarines at Sverdlovsk, I wondered if I was worse, worse than Robert Rockmore, a monster I did not really know, a man I imagined in grotesque, cruel to him even now; I was cruel even now, ten thousand miles away, building murdering machines.

THEY TRANSFERRED ME BACK to Marenko in 1944. Nothing had changed. Once again I sat with Bairamov and Zaytsev, spreading one and a half ounces of butter onto fourteen ounces of white bread. Once again I worked in instrumentation, flicking dial needles with my fingernail, listening to Korolev’s quiet radio, watching the papers flutter under Pavla’s elbow. I was building another iteration of the same old machine, another new way to send the same signals home. Andrei Markov waited with an empty bowl, two more rings under his eyes. You were in America, living a life. I was a mid-level engineer. I felt like a glass of water that was slowly evaporating, my atoms fading into sheer air.

“You’re all still here,” I sighed, my first night back. Around me, men were pulling on regulation pyjamas. I was not sure if it was a thank you I was saying or a mean joke. Old prisoners go nowhere. As I lay down to sleep I found a new feeling in my belly, like a stone. A war was thundering on and Marenko had stayed the same. This changelessness was not without a cost. The cost, I understood, was our freedom.

The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out.

I WROTE, The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out .

I feel as if I must pause here for a moment.

I wrote, The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out , and then I spent some time doing the thing I am here to do, on this side street in Moscow. I checked the tape reels in my machine, my simple machine, which sits at the edge of this desk. I checked the wires that lead from it to the wall, and out to the emitter/receiver, fastened to the windowpane. I checked the dust — checked to see if it lies as it did yesterday, in the same places. I looked at the boxes of silvery magnetic tape, like tresses. Maybe one day they will destroy me for these spools of silver tape, pierce my throat with a bayonet.

After all this, I slipped on my headset and listened to the other tapes, delivered from Spaso House. To the sound of empty rooms and to the voice of Averell Harriman, American ambassador to the Soviet Union, and to Averell’s daughter, Kathy. I adjusted the frequencies, transcribed the pertinent conversations, translated from English to Russian. “We need to ask about that jam,” he said. And: “I don’t trust the fucking trade commissar, all right?” I made carbon copies. I slipped the transcriptions into their designated folders.

When I came back to this letter, my letter to you, Clara Rockmore, my true love, whatever that can mean, 1234567/////, I saw that I had written, The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out . It was one of those moments of precipitous, endless melancholy. Is this despair? The blue bulb in the dormitory never went out and it has still never gone out. It is illuminated now. When I leave Moscow tonight, in a Black Maria, they will bring me to Marenko and I will climb the stairs to the dormitory, and I will find my bed in the cold blue light, murmuring something to Korolev, leaning back in the mattress, staring into the filament that never seems to fade, or fail, and stays.

ONE MORNING, AFTER THE guards did the counting, as I was rinsing my mug in the basin, they came and stood over me. “You have a visitor,” the junior lieutenant said.

I quickly raised my head. A visitor. Visitors were very rare at the sharashka, the consequence of an almost impossible ritual. You wrote to a spouse or family member; you prayed the letter was passed through the censors; the relative wrote back; petitions were made; and then one day, suddenly, improbably, a lieutenant announced, “You have a visitor.”

I was mystified. A visitor. Who would visit me here? My aunt? My sister? I had never written to either of them. It was not shame or ambivalence that had kept me from contacting them — it was fear. I had listened to enough zeks’ stories to know that the sharashka’s visitor system was often a ruse: a 58 writes a letter to his brother, to his wife, and that very letter becomes evidence of collusion. The brother, the wife, is sentenced to eight years in Kolyma. This letter that begins My love is never returned.

On this morning, at the lieutenant’s words, I felt a terrible thrill. A visitor! My chest knotted. Just the thought of a remnant, a familiar face, a vestige of my life before. I wanted to tell Eva that her nephew was still alive. I wanted Helena to know that her brother still thought of her. Had one of them found me? Or someone else? Ioffe? Was it you? Could it somehow be you?

Sometimes a zek would persist in writing. Would write so carefully, My love, my love , to his wife on the outside. She sends an answer. They make supplications to the state. Thirteen months later, four seasons of nightmares, and finally one morning the lieutenant murmurs, “A visitor.” The prisoner exchanges his overalls for a crisp suit, provided by the administration. (These suits, we surmise, are stripped from corpses.) The prisoner keeps his rag shoes — these will be hidden from view, under the visitors table. Then husband and wife are brought together in a room; barred from touching, from embracing, from uttering a single word about where he has been, where he is now, how long he will remain. Perhaps they weep. Perhaps their eyes are clear. The zek in a dead man’s suit gazes longingly at his love, his revenant love, saying everything he can possibly say with this look. And his wife says the thing she came to say, asks the thing she did all this in order to ask. She asks, “Will you consent to a divorce?”

She wishes to save her life.

Bairamov always says it is worse to be visited than to be forgotten.

ALL THESE THOUGHTS WERE with me as the lieutenant led me from the dormitory. But almost as soon as we left, I knew that something was not right. We turned right, passed up the stairs and down the hall to the secret area. This was not the visitors section. The guard did not give me a suit to wear. He showed his pass to the attendant and he took me into an alcove, a security station, where he fastened metal cuffs around my wrists. I had not worn shackles in years, not since they brought me from Butyrska to a train car. “What is this?” I said. “Why?”

The guard did not answer.

He led me to a door without a lock. There was a rectangle of frosted glass. He turned the doorknob and the door opened.

“There,” he said.

“Who is it?”

“Go inside, Termen.”

I nudged the door further with my bound wrists. The room was a long staff kitchen: two stoves, a cupboard, an empty table. Two rectangular white windows — bare windows, ungrilled. I stepped inside.

I turned and saw then that Lavrentiy Beria was sitting beside the washbasin.

“Ah. L-890,” he said.

The junior lieutenant pulled the door shut.

I looked around once more, as if someone else might be hidden. I tried to push my breathing down into my belly. To breathe as I was taught — like a child. “Sir,” I said softly.

“Citizen Termen,” Beria said. Straightaway he rose and came toward me. Delicate and pale, the director of the NKVD, head of internal affairs, king of the gulag, state security, secrets. The birdie in Stalin’s ear, faint as shadow. He reached for my wrists and in horror I thought he was about to take my hands, to hold them, intimate. But he just wrapped my right wrist between thumb and middle finger and unlocked the shackle. The key was on a ring. He slipped it into his pocket. He said, “You can call me Lavrentiy.”