Us Conductors (24 page)

I STAYED IN PATERSON OVERNIGHT
. At a church near the guesthouse, a string quartet was performing Haydn. This is a music of astonishing tricks, flourishes that hairpin and buck. The quartet was incompetent. The cellist was graceless; the violinists sounded as if they were golems, made of clay. Only the violist had the capacity for beauty. I wished the other players were dead and it was only that viola, constant, under unilluminated stained glass.

Raspberries, I wondered. Cranberries, bilberries, blueberries, ash berries.

WHEN I GOT BACK
to the house in Manhattan, Lucie Rosen was alone on the second floor, practising. It was one of those strange, gloomy mornings: a wet wind, skyscrapers grazing thunderclouds. Lucie had not put on the lights. She stood in darkness with the theremin, repeating two low figures. I came up the stairs and watched her. The gale had come into her face. She seemed fierce, almost stricken.

“Good morning,” I said, when she stopped.

“Good morning.” She used a wrist to smooth the sweat on her cheek.

“Exceptional tone.”

When I said this, Lucie began to cry. Small, contained sobs. I brought her a handkerchief. We stood with the theremin between us. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, no.”

She dabbed her eyes and balled the handkerchief in her hand. For some reason, I was reminded that she owned this house. I felt so tired. I stood beside her, wondering if she and Walter were
getting divorced, if she was moving to India or California or Cape Cod. I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right,” I said.

She swallowed. “Were you there last night?” she said.

“Where? New Jersey—”

“The concert.”

I did not understand.

“At Town Hall.”

“Here?”

“Clara’s concert,” Lucie said in a bitter voice.

I did not say anything.

“At Town Hall. She played the theremin.” Lucie, my best pupil, seemed about to cry again. “Leon, it was beautiful. It was so beautiful.”

There was no thunder, no lightning. It did not rain that day. The clouds passed over and away. Lucie told me about your debut recital, performing works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saëns, on a theremin painted with gold curlicues, pink and red and blue flowers, the finest solo performance that there had ever been.

“She held her hands like this,” Lucie said, showing me. “Like this.”

WHEN IT WAS WINTER
, the streets filled up with snow. The pipes in the house froze. I invented a stand-alone heater that turned on only when it was cold. I sat in my workshop watching its light flicker.

Sifu died. Jin came round to tell me. He asked why I had stopped coming to the kwoon. I told him I had killed a man, and that one day I had found I could not bring myself to go to a room across town to repeat the same motions, in rehearsal. Jin
laughed. He thought it was a joke. “You are scared you are getting old!” he said.

I did not go dancing. I did not go to dinner parties with Frances and Schillinger. Tommy Dorsey and George Gershwin did not come over for spaghetti. I missed meetings, lying on my back on my bed, imagining machines that did not work.

I filed for divorce from Ekaterina Pavlova Termen of Paterson, New Jersey.

In February, the doorbell buzzed. It buzzed and buzzed. I did not answer it, but my guest would not be deterred. Whoever it was leaned into the buzzer, letting it sound throughout the brownstone house. Perhaps a kid is being a nuisance, I thought. Perhaps someone rude wants my attention. I refused to move. I lay on my back on my bed. My brow creased.

Then there was a crash. It was the thud of the door being busted in, and broken glass. I sat bolt upright. I could feel my heart in my chest, pounding.

I thought:
Danny Finch’s friends
.

I looked around for a weapon, some kind of weapon, a club or knife or a perfect deadly revolver. I would not wait with bare hands. I grabbed a hammer. I padded to the top of the stairs. Someone was coming. Someone very large. I could hear his footfalls, like the first booming of an avalanche. I heard a palm smack the handrail. I shifted my weight to my left leg, bent. I raised my hammer. I breathed, waiting.

Pash appeared around the landing, like a brown bear returning. He seemed twelve feet tall. His hair had thinned a little but his eyes were still pale blue. “Lev Sergeyvich Termen!” he shouted. “King of the Termenvox!” He clapped his eyes on me and held out his paw. I took it, shook it, as if I was checking a door to see if it was locked.

“Pash,” I stammered.

He laughed. “Am I a prince of the termenvox, would you say? A baron?”

“Where have you been?”

“Working hard.” He was thinner. He smelled like the outdoors, like an evergreen place where a creature would hibernate. “Which is more than we can say for you.”

I was speechless. I was breathing like a child. I was a cabin thrown up by a hurricane and then set back down.

Pash looked out over the workshop, curious, appraising, at the same time approving and unsatisfied. He rapped on the surface of a theremin, nudged a disassembled teletouch box. He lifted the skirt of the canvas that hid the cypresses. “My, my,” he said, and laughed. A laugh like an old friend. He turned back to me. “I can’t tell you how many times I imagined traipsing in here.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was sent away, Lev.” He bent to rummage in his bag. My intelligent heater gave a cough and turned on. I had forgotten how much space Pash used up. I had forgotten how much I knew his silhouette—the comfort of a familiar shape, rummaging in a bag. My chest felt tight. With rough movements Pash pulled out a carved wooden eagle, a pair of suede slippers. “For you,” he said.

I swallowed. The eagle was smaller than a dessert plate. There was something demented in the bird’s face. “E PLURIBUS UNUM,” said the chiselled inscription.

“Americans love these patriotic doodads,” Pash said. “They can’t get enough of ’em.” His English seemed looser than it had been, more at home. “This one’s from Oklahoma City.”

“Thank you?” I said.

“And these aren’t slippers.” He pressed the suede shoes into my hands. They were soft and pliable, embroidered with tiny mustard-coloured beads. “Moccasins,” he said. “Indians wear them so they can sneak up on people.”

“And I …”

“Well, now you can sneak up on people.” He laughed again, powerful and happy. “Right?” But as his laughter subsided, Pash was surveying me. He rubbed his lip. “You all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

He clicked his tongue and nodded. “You’re all right now, Lev. We’re both all right.”

I was turning the wooden eagle in my hands.

“Pash, where did you go for all this time?”

For an instant he looked at the floor. I thought he was preparing to make a joke, a feint, but instead his voice seemed scraped bare. “Lev, there is nothing nobler than work. Good work. It’s better than fortune and fame. Better than a million girls.” His eyes flicked to mine.

In the half-light, I was squinting.

“They called me away,” Pash said. He shrugged. “The Crash happened and there were matters that called for my expertise, first in Texas, then Oklahoma. A few years in Florida. Colorado. Union stuff, ports stuff, stuff you don’t need to hear about. Our employers needed me there, putting out fires.”

“You couldn’t have told me?”

“They told me to be discreet,” Pash said lightly. “You’re not a delicate flower, Lev. You could handle it. I knew you could. And other agents were taking over for me. You were taken care of?”

Taken care of
, I thought.

My answer was terse. “It was a disaster. I almost went broke. I almost abandoned everything.”

“But here we are,” he said. He let out a deep breath. “At the end of it, still, here we are.” He seemed distant, then. His eyes rested on the mirror above the mantel. It was as though he was watching some slow construction, waiting for a way to describe it.

“Every single day,” Pash said at last, “any of us could give up. Sure we could. But we don’t, Lev. Not me. Not you.” His gaze slipped back to my cypress loudspeakers, hulking under canvas. “Because we serve. Because there is a good we are doing, an end we’re striving for. The nobility of the Soviet dream, yes? And the work itself—let’s not forget. You are a genius, Professor Termen, when it comes to the work.”

He shrugged. His face was just itself: bright eyes, a small mouth, a nose like a cudgel. He grinned. “You’re a lord of the air, remember.”

This man I had met in Berlin, with whom my life had been knotted, whom even now I scarcely knew. In that moment I felt as if he understood what I was capable of better than I did; and what I wanted, now that you were gone, Clara; and how all of it could be done.

“I am sorry I disappeared, Lev.” He rested his body against the doorjamb. “But I am back now, and despite that lying mirror we’re still young men. You’ve got moccasins and I’ve got a new telephone number and I say if you’re game, then let’s finish what we started together. The inventor and his silent partner, masterminds and experts, clever spies, rascals. Ha! Snakes in this million-dollar Manhattan grass.”

There was no decision. I simply took a breath. My inhalation was a yes and I felt something heavy lift from my shoulders. I imagined a crane tilting up over the room.

Somewhere in the house, a clock tolled the hour. Pash, still in the doorway, gestured over the workshop floor, past the cypresses, the piano, the flickering intelligent heater, to where a pair of theremins stood tall and side by side, flawlessly assembled.

He said, “I’m rusty as damn, Lev, but do you fancy a duet?”

FULLY, COMPLETELY
, I became a spy. What had been halfhearted became whole. My distractions were cleared away; my mission was clear. I would walk through walls.

Pash had my house cleaned. He called a crew of three women, Romanians in coveralls, hair pinned back. “Go to it,” he told them. He took me to the pier; we rode a ferry around the Statue of Liberty. He said: “What are your ideas?”

I asked, “Ideas for what?”