Sean Michaels: Us Conductors

“Sir,” I said.

The free worker stood and saluted.

“L-890,” Beria murmured. His trench coat was speckled with wet drops. His assistant’s dark suit showed that it was snow.

He removed and wiped his spectacles. “It’s ready for a demonstration?”

“If you would stand behind the glass,” I said.

“No.” Beria gestured to the free worker. “You.”

The man with sandy eyes walked into the booth.

Beria took a position beside me. “Begin,” he said.

I pressed several switches. The emitter hummed. It was now sending radio waves through the room, in a narrow stream.

“Go on,” I murmured to the man behind the glass.

“Test, testing, 1-2-3. Testing,” he said.

Beside us, a dish was listening to the reflection of radio waves off the surface of the glass. The vibrations were recorded, as sound, on a revolving tape machine.

“Test, test, test,” said the free worker.

When he had finished I rewound the tape and played it back through a set of headphones. I adjusted the levels, watched Beria’s expression. He showed nothing as he listened. For a long moment I wondered whether the contraption had failed. He was just a bureaucrat listening to an empty tape. Then he raised his gaze. A smile appeared and disappeared on his lips. “Good,” he said to me. He made a gesture to his aide, a movement of the hand that looked as if he was saying, Come here or Come here and listen . His pale accomplice immediately went to where the free worker was standing behind glass, took a silenced revolver from his jacket, and shot him in the chest. It made a sound like a punctured bicycle tire. The man with sandy eyes was saying something but he was unable to say it.

A man becomes heavier when he dies. Beria’s guard dragged the body to the door. I gasped at the shooting but then I said nothing else. I wanted very much to burst into tears. How much I wanted to burst into tears, Clara, to show the dead man at least that respect. Danny Finch, young Fyodor, the ones at Kolyma, the free worker with the sandy eyes. My face trembled. I felt as if I was being slowly lowered into a lake.

Beria had the headset around his neck. He said, “This is called Operation Snowstorm. You are never to mention it to anyone. If you even speak its name I will cut off your arms and tear the muscle of your tongue and put you in a cattle car to the taiga.”

I was not sure I had any voice left in my throat.

“We will take this thing to Moscow. You will oversee its installation and transcribe its recordings.”

“Who are we listening to?” I was like a ghost.

Beria began to remove the headset. He said, “The man in all the portraits.”

SNOWSTORM IS RELIABLE at a distance of up to 1,600 feet.

But not in snow.

Not in fog or rain.

ON THE DAYS I AM at Marenko I laugh and kid with Bairamov. I help Zaytsev perfect his recipe for cake. I stroll down the hall with Pavla and ask about her children. In the shared lab, where there are clocks, where there is music, I lean in beside Korolev and we argue about the life span of different vacuum tubes. We rap them, ping , against the edge of the desk.

At breakfast I sit with Andrei Markov, stirring a lump of sugar into porridge.

I do not work on Sundays.

ON MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS they bring me to Moscow. I climb the stairs to the attic and sit with the machines. A gun waits beside me.

I write down the words they bring on tapes from Spaso House. Harriman has the same conversations, and different ones. His bearded collie barks.

There is another set of tapes, from the thing perched on my window, which faces the Kremlin, and those words I write down too.

He has a gentle voice, like a music teacher’s.

I FIND YOU in every recording.

WHEN IT HAS BEEN RAINING, the tapes they bring me are hours of haze, like listening to clouds form, smoke filling with cinders. The bass notes are great, long presences, like appetites. Spirits wander. Sometimes the silences are like waves rolling and breaking. Sometimes figures coalesce. At the edge of hearing, boundaries fizz and snap. I hear them — forces in the uninterrupted air. Intersecting fields. Loss.

You hear a noise and you think it is a presence; but it is just a shrieking emptiness, interference. You have made a mistake.

I hear your voice speaking and I do not know what I am to do with it. Does it mean that we are touching? Does it mean that we are destined? There is no destiny. There is no touch. My unrequited love, speaking across the sky. You cannot see me hearing. This letter will not reach you. These words will not be read.

Still I hear your voice. It is what I have.

There are nights when I imagine that these bricks and tiles, this glass, this land and city and plain and wood, these towers, these gurgling oceans, and sewers, and the roar of automobiles, of orchestras, aeroplanes spilling bombs, sparrows that land and leave, barracks, pasts, rings, are all distortion. There are only two of us, two real things, two tellers, unseen reflectors, sending signals we cannot carry ourselves, or follow.

Somewhere you are waving your hands in the air.

Lev Sergeyvich Termen was released from Marenko on June 27, 1947.

Over the next decades his research included work on rust, piano sustain, rockets, floating bridges, immortality, UFOs, atomic-bomb detection, long-distance touch, male impotence and a device that could track the movements of a musician’s eyes.

After his release, Termen married Maria Feodorovna Guschina, a secretary. They had two children together.

In 1962, Clara and Robert Rockmore travelled to Moscow. At a small party, Robert mentioned Termen’s name. Agents had come in the night, Rockmore said, and kidnapped the scientist. “Oh,” replied an acquaintance, “Termen lives near Lubyanka.”

Clara was seen to faint.

Friends arranged a reunion. The next day, three people met on a subway platform, under the city. Strangers brushed past. Robert’s arm was over Clara’s shoulder. Termen looked at them without speaking. “Scientists are not supposed to meet with foreigners,” he said at last. “We are being watched.”

That night, Clara and Robert attended a play at the Bolshoi Theatre. During the intermission, they descended the steps to the street. Termen was waiting in a taxi. They drove together to his home.

Robert and Clara sat on a hard divan. Termen stood with Maria, his wife. Outside, it was raining. His daughters played violin. The lamplight fell at strange angles.

Robert died in 1963, slipping on ice.