Us Conductors (32 page)

I REMEMBER I WAS
once a man who conducted the ether.

I am no longer the conductor.

WHEN I RETURNED FROM
the United States, eight years ago, I found Leningrad empty. It was the end of 1938. It was a brilliant winter’s day and a huge albino sailor brought me out of my cabin, onto the deck, where the air stung my lungs. The city was like an elegant miniature. Waves skimmed the harbour. I remember seeing the embraces of unfamiliar men and hearing the sound of grinding metal, then later watching a crane hoist my crates from the ship. I remember my fear as the boxes swung in the air, so perilously high: the vision of an overcorrection, a mistake, a slipped hook. For one instant I could see them falling and then the crates would splinter against the ground, explode, all my past destroyed.

The longshoremen lowered the crates so gently, like gifts.

I found myself alone on Neva pier with all my worldly possessions. I did not know where to go. Part of me had expected a government agent to meet me, some delegation or welcome parade. But there was no one. The passengers had disappeared
like spiders under doorways. I remember standing on the pier and watching motorcars go round the street corner, one after another, coughing smoke, and the understanding that Leningrad had changed in my absence.

I TOOK A ROOM
with Father’s little sister, Eva Emilievna. She was a fragile woman now, thin, with watery blue eyes. She had been a soprano; growing up, I thought of her as “the singer.” But now my aunt worked at the hospital, wrapping broken legs, making splints. My parents had been dead four years. Eva told me about their funerals, one in the winter and one the next autumn, the pine halls full of friends. “Everyone was crying,” she said. “Everyone asked about you.” I imagined Mother and Father in their caskets, resting, waiting.

“What were their last words?”

Eva said she didn’t know. She touched her cup of tea with the tip of her finger.

I spent each day in a different government office, slumped in a soft chair until my name was called. I met desiccated women from various Soviet agencies. Painted eyebrows, vases full of dried flowers. They added my information to rolls and registers. “You must make sure you are listed with the LNS,” one would say. “Check with SSUG.” At night I walked home to the apartment, skidding on the frost. Eva arrived later, depleted from her day in the wards. “It is so good to be with family,” she would say, turning on a lamp.

My equipment was stored across town, with a friend of Eva’s, in a warehouse that safeguarded laundry powder.

At supper we talked about old times. About picnics with Mother, Father, my grandmother, my sister. Mother always made hard-boiled eggs, wrapped them in velvet. Father was in charge
of slicing cheese with his pocketknife. Eva remembered the time that each of us, one after another, spilled beets on our fronts. The whole family stained scarlet, like murder victims.

My sister had now moved to Nizhny Novgorod, was married to a mathematician. “Come visit,” I wrote, in a letter.

I told Eva about my years in America. I described Manhattan, Brooklyn, the bakeries in Chinatown. I recalled the parties, the brushes with celebrity. “Rachmaninoff,” I said, “shucks his own oysters.”

She answered every anecdote with wide eyes, wonder. “Did you meet cowboys?” she said.

“I saw one cowboy, from Texas, at the opening of a play. He even wore the hat. But there are not many in New York. Most of them live in the southwest of America.”

“In the desert?”

“It is not all desert. I went to California, on the West Coast. They grow oranges.”

“I would like to swim in the Pacific Ocean,” she said.

“I flew in an aeroplane,” I said, “clear over ten united states.”

Then Eva tilted her head to one side, with those wide swimming eyes. I thought she was going to ask me about the aeroplane, its shadow streaking the fields.

“I heard about Katia,” she said.

I found that my face was frozen.

Gradually I said, “Our divorce?”

“Yes.”

Our voices were very plain. I blinked at the table.

“Yes,” I said at last. “I believe she remarried.” My smile was small, neat, sad. It was not a performance. Eva watched me with a sympathetic expression, as if she were giving me cards, flowers, a consoling present.

“Did you meet other women?”

The question was uncharacteristically forward. But when I returned her gaze I understood that Eva was not inquiring as my host, as my father’s younger sister. She was asking as someone who would soon be elderly, who had never married, who lived alone. A spinster wishing her nephew a certain happiness.

And then I thought of you, standing at that theremin in the afternoon, surprising me.

I thought of you at my door, with snow on your cheek.

I also thought of Lavinia, tall and solemn, in the narrow chapel.

Or later, at the foot of our stairs, as I disappeared into the morning.

Shame skirted my edges, like thin smoke. I could imagine you so clearly, staring hard at a small article in the paper.

My wife, tearing through my shelves, ringing embassies.

Searching for answers in folders of blueprints.

A hundred carbons with my mute signature.

They had said they would bring her to Russia but they would not, and I had known they would not, and I had disappeared into the morning.

I took so much from this woman and then I took away her husband.

I TRIED TO FIND
old friends. In a strange way, it was difficult to recall them. I went to dinners with former colleagues from the Physico-Technical Institute, regaled them with tales of radio waves, factory errors, million-dollar patents. My stories were gilded, full of wealth and opportunity. “And now after all that I
have come back. I have come back to work.” They responded with an odd reticence, as if I had something in my teeth.

I was penniless. Despite my lofty anecdotes, I did not have a job, a workshop, dispensation from the authorities. I lived in my aunt’s apartment. I dreamed of what I did not have. I fastened my cufflinks and raised toasts to Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, but I was not the prodigal son returned. I was a pauper in a land where I thought poverty had been abolished.

On a Friday afternoon I went to my old workplace. I brought F. Lèle’s
Principles of the New Radio
, for Ioffe, carried from America. It was as if I was still twenty-two, clambering aboard the tram, feeling the old bump and shuttle of rails. The carriage was emptier than it used to be. Outside the windows, buildings had been wrecked and rebuilt. Everyone wore heavier coats.

At Finland Station I disembarked. I shed the crowds and walked up the road. Snow was falling. Empty trees stood like turrets. I watched a cyclist press through the snow and grass. A wall topped with barbed wire had been built around a field and I tried to remember if there had ever been anything in that field, if it had even been mowed. Here, the city sounded the same as it used to. Wind, wheels rolling over sleet. Muffled animal sounds, as if dogs had been buried in the snow.

I kept pace with the man on the bicycle. We came to the rise and I looked away into the arboretum, beaten bare by winter. There were still squirrels in the trees.
Who feeds them?
I wondered. Footprints had made paths. One crow. Above my head, white cloud went on uninterrupted.

There was a moment when my boot skidded on ice and I looked up, breathing suddenly hard, and the cyclist had disappeared.

It was almost two hours before I passed across the school’s frozen garden, rimmed by new fence. The buildings came into
view and I found this was a respite, a gift. They were grand and quiet and I knew them. I went into the western entrance of the institute. My steps echoed in the dim marble hall. I left water footprints. I crossed the floor to Ioffe’s office, in the corner, with windows that looked upon the hills and the road, where you could watch the blue sun go down. The office was empty. Not even any furniture: just scratched marks in the floor.

Sasha’s room was empty too.

I went to reception. It was a room of strangers. I could not remember the names of the women who had once worked there, with whom I had once joked, but it didn’t matter. I spoke to a Tatar secretary. His voice was so quiet that I had to lean across the desk. He gave me the number for Ioffe’s new office. I went through the empty hallways, up the stairs, to this door. I knocked. Through the door, he said, “
Da
?” and I went in.

Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, my former supervisor, sat behind a low desk. His hair had turned white. His shoulders were hunched, as if he had been carrying a load. I remembered the way we used to share a samovar of hot water, both of us looking in on it, shepherding it, pouring out two teapots. The big pot of honey that used to sit on his desk. I could not see it here.

I stood in his door, damp and dripping.

There was no recognition in his gaze.

“It is Lev Sergeyvich Termen,” I said.

“I know.”

The way he spoke, I was afraid he was unhappy to see me.

“How have you been?” I asked.

“Extremely well,” he said. His voice was level. His spectacles made him look even older than he was.

I extended the book. “I brought you a gift.”

Ioffe straightened. He looked at the spine of the book. He looked at me. I sensed then that it was not ambivalence I was
feeling, or hostility. It was caution. Perhaps it was fear. Ioffe smoothed his coarse moustache. He looked at me again. I saw him make a decision. This was a fragile moment. He pushed a hand down his brow and over his face, and stood up, and he crossed the room to embrace me. A bear hug in the office of the director of physics and technology, among ticking clocks and electric eyes.

“
Zdravstvuyte
, Lev,” he said, into my shoulder.

“
Zdravstvuyte
, Ioffe.”

As we released each other I asked again, “How have you been?”

“Extremely well,” he said, and swallowed, and turned away from me.