Us Conductors (46 page)

I imagined you went to see the ballet, all those dancers throwing their partners across the stage.

I imagined you ate the heels of many loaves of bread.

ONE EVENING, LATE
, I came out of the laboratory and into Marenko’s hallway. I was heading back toward the main staircase. I was thinking of I-don’t-know-what. There were no sounds. I walked. At a certain moment I realized that I was following a path of footprints: a single set of footprints, faintly braiding,
the wet footprints of a cat. I knew of no cats in this place. The footprints continued down the centre of the hall and I followed them. I followed them around a corner. I wondered about the story of this cat. This was such a pleasant adventure. I followed the footprints. Then the path abruptly stopped, the path disappeared, as if the cat had been swallowed into thin air.

THIS IS WHAT
I imagined you were doing while I was designing rockets with Korolev, furies that would roar into the sky:

I imagined that you went on long walks through the city, through the snow and rain, the sweltering July, seeking something you couldn’t remember.

I imagined that you wondered whether your husband would be drafted. Killed on a hill in Egypt, obliterated on a Pacific gunship. “No, Clara,” he said, “never.” You wondered about the certainty of never. You spoke to girlfriends whose men had gone away, who wrote letters on dusted paper. You thought of a boy from the theatre, an usher, who was in England now.

I imagined that at night you came home and sat with Robert Rockmore, the radio singing.

I imagined one morning you took a cab up to Harlem and got out where we used to get out sometimes, though you didn’t realize it until you got out, right into a puddle, looking down at your feet then lifting your gaze up to the orange awning, QUIET BARBERSHOP. “Oh, the Quiet Barbershop,” you used to say. “D’you think the barber’s name is Sammy Quiet?”

I imagined you walked through Harlem like a wind walking through a million stalks of wheat.

This is what I imagined you were doing while I spent sixteen months in Sverdlovsk, a different sharashka, where the furnace clanged, on a team designing radio beacons for submarines:

I imagined the booking of your first overseas tour, London and Paris and Casablanca—you wanted to go to Casablanca. You were packing your cases and practising new material, Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla. I imagined the meetings you had with your girlfriends, giggling over little coffees, thumbing through travelogues at bookshops off Broadway. Then the tour was called off. “Of course it was cancelled!” your husband said. “There’s a war on. It was a silly idea in the first place.”

Which made you furious. You stood by the window, jaw clenched, staring into the hard wide blue sky. You felt white with rage but also a thin separation, a kind of caul, shame at your pride. “Even in a war,” you said, “the world goes on.” Silently, you asked Robert to drop the subject, to give it up, to condescend no further. This is what I imagined. And I imagined that you thought of me, as I imagine that you do, and you told yourself: “Lev was worse. He was even worse, Clara.”

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?”