Us Conductors (45 page)

“You’re new?”

“Yes,” I murmured, guarded.

A woman tossed a basket of black bread onto the table before us. Instantly I grabbed for it, teeth clenched, expecting a scramble. My dining partners burst out laughing. Their laughter was loud and forceful, with a little sadness in it. Across the table, Zaytsev said, “Normally I hold out for the
white
bread.”

“What is this?” I said, angry somehow.

“You can have as much black bread as you want,” Korolev muttered. “The white bread is rationed.”

“And the sour cream,” complained Zaytsev. “And the butter.”

“At least you get the full portion,” snapped another man, an engineer.

They brought us borscht with vegetables, a piece of pork, potatoes. I was dumbfounded. I stared at my place setting, the knife sitting freely on the wood. My hands were not accustomed to cutlery.

Korolev slid over his plate of meat. “Take it,” he said.

Yukachev had told me the nature of this place, its purpose, and he had told me that I was assigned to the instrumentation division, working on dials, meters, counters, but he had not told me that there would be whole pork chops and black bread, one and a half ounces of butter, a little glass of sour cream to scoop, with a spoon, into rich red broth.

“Why me?” I had asked him.

“We found your file,” he said. “Very impressive.”

I think perhaps he was lying. By Marenko’s standards I was not impressive. Over that first lunch I learned a little about the men around me. Bairamov, co-designer of the GIRD-8 rocket. Rubin, a senior physics lecturer from Novgorod. Korolev, former chief of the Jet Propulsion Research Institute—the Soviet space program.

All of these men, traitors now.

OUR LABORATORY WAS A
spacious room on the third floor, with vast windows and a dozen cluttered desks, shelves piled high with electronics. It was like a well-funded university office or the lost corner of a corporation—scientists developing their eccentric theories, trading questions through the air. Korolev tuned his radio to symphonies, music epic and thundering, which he would listen to quietly, as if the bombast should be secret. When he was away from his desk, a young engineer, Lupa, commandeered the airwaves and then our lab twinkled with popular song, snare and saxophone; I could never decide whether I enjoyed this stuff, all nostalgic, or whether it was breaking my heart.

We worked all day under Pavla’s vigilant eye. She was at once matron, ingénue, and den mother. A free worker assigned to guard the instrumentators, small and straw-blond, she settled
our arguments, reminded us to eat, told us when our shirts were buttoned up wrong. Most of the men were in love with her. She was kind to me from the very first day: she had seen so many others like this one, staggering in from Siberia, baffled by comfort. “This is your desk,” she said brightly. “Rashi’s in charge of the fuses. The hob is over there, for tea. And if your pens go missing, check Bairamov’s drawer.” At first I assumed she was another prisoner. It was only later they explained the boundary between us, the way Pavla’s papers let her pass out of the building, through the gates, into the land of concert halls, cinemas, trams. “She was taught that we are spies and saboteurs,” Andrei Markov told me. “I am certain her teachers were adamant.” Pavla’s bumbling charges were all zeks, after all. Worse, they were 58s, enemies of the people. Her masters wanted her to be watchful for insubordination, mischief, espionage. For lies, sabotage, and smuggled plans. Every night, the woman with the straw-blond hair collected Instrumentation’s most sensitive documents and placed them in a safe.

I wonder if Pavla still believes the lessons they have taught her. After all these hours together, are we still traitors? Snakes swishing in grass?

Marenko appeared to be an idyll: the airy lab, books and conversation, black bread in open baskets, science. I tried to adjust to this life. I tried to take my meals slowly, to take in each movement as I lowered my head into a feather-down pillow at night. Instant by instant, I felt for the things I had discarded in Kolyma. My imagination, under the snow. My ambition, between the slats in the barracks wall. On a piece of paper I sketched a circuit that had no purpose; on the roof I peered into Rubin’s telescope, squinting at Jupiter. The treasure I had kept hold of, that memory of you—it seemed safe to loosen my grasp, to set it
down. A woman who once loved me; there are other things to live for. Aren’t there? There was so much work to do.

I HAD BEEN THERE
for six months, I think, when I saw Andrei Markov eating alone at the end of a table. He was holding a book in his right hand, a drooping banana in the left. Something about the scene made me pause. “Are you coming?” I asked. I pulled an arm through my cardigan sleeve.

“No,” Andrei Markov said.

“Is everything all right?”

“It’s Sunday,” Andrei Markov said, not lifting his eyes.

I broke into a grin. “We work on Sunday.”

“No,” he said,
“you
work on Sunday.”

“Andrei Markov is exempted?”

“I do not
volunteer
,” he said, taking a bite of his banana.

“I don’t—” I began, but then I shrugged. I tugged my sweater’s collar.

Andrei Markov raised his gaze. He is older than me, with a crown of white hair and a longish beard. “On the second floor,” he said over his reading glasses, “at the end of the hall, beside the duty office, there is a list. It is headed, ‘Sunday Volunteers.’ ”

“Yes?”

“Sunday is entitled to us as a free day. Any work is strictly ‘voluntary.’ Do you know what ‘voluntary’ means? And yet here is a peculiar thing: every Saturday night, beside the duty office, a list of volunteers is posted. And this list includes the names of every zek at Marenko. For example, Termen, Lev Sergeyvich.”

I was not sure if he was joking. “And Markov, Andrei?”

“Markov, Andrei strikes himself from the list.”

“Is this permitted?”

Andrei Markov looked at me again, levelly. “How would they punish me, Termen?”

I checked his story later that day. On the second floor of the dormitory building, at the end of the hall, on a wall painted pale green, nine typewritten pages. Dated from the night before:
Sunday Volunteers
. And under M, one name, Markov, had been neatly crossed out, with a pencil-thin line.

The next morning I joined him for breakfast. He sat with his book, silent. Finally I asked, “How many?” This was not a rare question at Marenko.

Andrei Markov turned a page. “A quarter,” he said, “and five on the horns.”

I could not help but take a breath. Twenty-five years, and five more with diminished rights. “For me, eight years.”

“Yes.”

“How much do you have left?”

“Eighteen.”

“Seven,” I said.

Andrei Markov took another spoon of porridge. With a flick of one finger he turned the page of his book.

“You never work on Sundays?” I asked.

Andrei Markov took a moment before answering. Then he set his book face down on the table. The cover said SWIMMING HORSES.

“I am a prisoner.” He cleared his throat. “I am a prisoner and you are a prisoner. You remember?” He stared at me.

“Yes,” I said.

“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.