Us Conductors (47 page)

She wishes to save her life.

Bairamov always says it is worse to be visited than to be forgotten.

ALL THESE THOUGHTS WERE
with me as the lieutenant led me from the dormitory. But almost as soon as we left, I knew that something was not right. We turned right, passed up the stairs and down the hall to the secret area. This was not the visitors section. The guard did not give me a suit to wear. He showed his pass to the attendant and he took me into an alcove, a security station, where he fastened metal cuffs around my wrists. I had not worn shackles in years, not since they brought me from Butyrska to a train car. “What is this?” I said. “Why?”

The guard did not answer.

He led me to a door without a lock. There was a rectangle of frosted glass. He turned the doorknob and the door opened.

“There,” he said.

“Who is it?”

“Go inside, Termen.”

I nudged the door further with my bound wrists. The room was a long staff kitchen: two stoves, a cupboard, an empty table. Two rectangular white windows—bare windows, ungrilled. I stepped inside.

I turned and saw then that Lavrentiy Beria was sitting beside the washbasin.

“Ah. L-890,” he said.

The junior lieutenant pulled the door shut.

I looked around once more, as if someone else might be hidden. I tried to push my breathing down into my belly. To breathe as I was taught—like a child. “Sir,” I said softly.

“Citizen Termen,” Beria said. Straightaway he rose and came toward me. Delicate and pale, the director of the NKVD, head of internal affairs, king of the gulag, state security, secrets. The birdie in Stalin’s ear, faint as shadow. He reached for my wrists and in horror I thought he was about to take my hands, to hold them, intimate. But he just wrapped my right wrist between
thumb and middle finger and unlocked the shackle. The key was on a ring. He slipped it into his pocket. He said, “You can call me Lavrentiy.”

I swallowed.

“Sit down,” he said as he stepped away.

I had met Beria before but never like this: never alone, without a supervisor, without Yukachev, someone else to quiver fearfully beside me. I knew I was supposed to be scared because I had heard all the stories. From Korolev, from Andrei Markov, from gossiping zeks at Kolyma. Deadly little Beria in his snug little suit, his glasses lenses like windowpanes. Beria, who poured vinegar into Kirov’s wine. Beria, who drove a nail into Ivan Luchenko’s face, as Trotsky’s general sat bound before his desk. Beria, whose limousine glides across Nevsky Prospekt, stalking sisters and daughters.

“Do you like it here, Termen?” Beria said.

“Here?”

“The institute.”

I swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“You know, you have a very intriguing biography,” he said. Beria does not have the voice you expect of a monster. It is a plain tenor voice, matter-of-fact. There is neither the pervert’s lilt nor the killer’s growl. “I knew I recognized your name—of course, it was from the theremin. You met Lenin?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Beria repeated, nodding. “But you have really had your fingers in many different pies.
Many
different pies. I called up the documents from your work in America …” His eyes shifted. “It’s very interesting.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Your former colleagues say you’re brilliant.”

Something flickered at my lips. “Who is that, sir?”

“Some former colleagues.” He made a vague wave. “Are you?”

“Brilliant?”

“Yes, Termen.”

I tried to measure his expression. “I do everything I can for the state.”

“Indeed, indeed. And with a history of discretion.”

I said nothing. I did not know what he meant.

“I called you here because I require your expertise.” Beria exhaled through his nose. He was standing by the stoves. He turned one of the knobs for the burners and I heard the breath of gas escape into the room.

He looked at me.

“Yes sir,” I said.

Beria turned back to the stove. He flicked the stove’s electric lighter. Snap. Snap, snap. The burners caught. Our empty room with two soft blue flames. “Suppose we had an enemy,” he said, “whom we wanted to listen to.”

He waited until I answered.

“A microphone,” I said.

“A hidden microphone, yes. But suppose this is not a simple enemy, a complacent enemy. Suppose our enemy is sophisticated. Suppose he is wary. Like you, for instance.”

“Sir?”

He had an odd little smile. “Suppose the enemy is a man like you. Someone brilliant.”

“I don’t und—”

“Here is what I am proposing. I require an undetectable way of listening. An eavesdropping bug, yes, that has no exiting wires, no power source, no traditional microphone. Inert. Invisible. Unable to be X-rayed or traced.”

“This is not possible.”

Beria maintained his peculiar smile. “So quick to say it is impossible. Surely you have not had time to give it proper
consideration. The inventor of the radio watchman, the infiltrator of Alcatraz cannot create a radio spy?”

He was plucking at my pride. I knew he was doing it. But I was not the man I had once been. I watched unmoving Beria with his clasped hands, the stove’s two fiery ghosts. “As I said, I am quite happy here.”

“Who spoke of leaving?”

“My current projects are very stimulating and we are already pressed if we are to meet our deadlines.”

“They will get on without you.”

“Besides, I am really not sure how you would implement something like this—”

“But you have an idea of where to begin.”

I gave a sharp exhale. My hands were flat in my lap. Beria snapped off the burners.

I felt my molars scrape. “Comrade, I am a plain scientist. I have no gift for skulking outside.”

“Skulking?”

“In—in concealing. In matters of concealment.” I tried a smile. “The dark arts.”

Beria was humourless. “Remember who you are speaking to, Termen.”

Was I brave now, I wondered?

“I prefer the work I am doing now. I am not a spy.”

Beria finally sat down, directly across from me, but far—bizarrely far, the distance of a firing range. “It does not matter what you prefer. It does not matter what you
are
. I have seen your file. You will not pretend, here. You
were
a spy and you will be again, if I ask it. You will dive into the abyss and fetch whatever treasure I require. You will steal, and wash your hands, and steal again. You will be brilliant, and you will be
loyal
, Termen, do you understand?”

I made a beseeching gesture. “I am just a scient—”

“You are a
traitor
, Lev Sergeyvich Termen, sentenced to prison.”

“My sentence—”

“Your sentence will end in a pit.”

I tried to sit erect. I tried to show that he had not defeated me. I found that I stooped, as if I was being physically beaten.

“It is scarcely a choice,” Beria continued. “Either you will disappear, you and your whole world, swallowed up in smoke … or else you will serve your country, serve it brilliantly, a weapon in the Soviet’s hand, and you will live. Perhaps you will win a Stalin Prize. You will be released, you will live, you will be celebrated for all you have contributed to our mighty and unbreakable union.”

Beria said it all with that even cadence, that wicked voice. He leaned back, crossing his legs.

“Are you lying or are you telling the truth?” I said, as if I was brave. My voice was as thin as notepaper.

“Oh I am telling the truth,” Beria murmured.

For an instant I imagined leaping from my chair, throwing myself out the open window, a long free leap. I closed my eyes.

It would not really be so different, would it, colluding with Lavrentiy Beria? My life already felt like a remnant of itself. Like a thin dream. Like a habit.

What would change?

Just a new set of orders.

Danny Finch’s blood, moving across the floor.

Perhaps this is what Lenin would have wanted: his scientist, listening for the state.

His scientist, going on.

Perhaps I was not giving anything away. A lossless exchange, a chance for redemption. Trading scraps of my present for what we all would require tomorrow, in this war.

I looked at the faded lights behind my closed lids.

I wondered how much a man can make up for the parts he has wasted.

In a small voice, I said: “I want my family.”

“What?”

I cleared my throat. “My wife. Lavinia.” I straightened in my chair, blinked bloodshot eyes. “They told me they would bring her from America.”

Beria looked at me with a frozen expression, lips barely parted.

“I love her,” I said, in a tarry voice.

Then his lashes fluttered behind his spectacles and he laughed, hard and flat, key ring jingling in his pocket, because he knew it was not true.

LET ME DESCRIBE MY LAST DAYS
in America.

In Moscow today it is balmy, like summer, a lying summer, and the melting snows rush through the streets like rivers. At my window it is as if I am in the midst of rapids, with the sound of laughing children, and sunlight, dazzling sunlight. Eight years later, let me tell you about my last days in America.

It was like this.

I used to meet with men at a diner called L’Aujourd’hui. The Today. These meetings were gruelling: the tedium of idiots, the brute force of an invisible hand. I hated the appointments, hated the operatives who met me, hated the bland reports they drew from me, like steam from a kettle. And yet in the waning heat of 1938, the early autumn, I spent days and nights alone at that same corner dive, waiting for today to turn into tomorrow.

I have never told anyone this.

I did not want to go home. I didn’t want to face the carousel
of students, the visits from friends, the expectant eyes of Lavinia Williams, Lavinia Termen, who loved me as if we were young lovers, everything within reach. Instead of facing life and marriage, I hunched in a booth at L’Aujourd’hui, ordering cups of black tea, lemon squares, bowls of potato chips. I sketched plans on paper placemats. I pretended to myself that I was hard at work, waved excuses to Lavinia as I hurried out the door every morning, but there were no revelations on that glossy tabletop. My ideas were desperations. I let them blot salt crumbs and spilled tea.

When the restaurant closed, around midnight, I packed up my things, plinked pencils into my briefcase. I meandered home through the blue streets. Usually Lavinia would be waiting. On the final block I would ask and ask the air for my wife to be asleep, dreaming, folded in sheets. Sometimes I would pass the house and double back, to approach again.
Let her be sleeping. Let her be sleeping
. On many of those nights I would come in and climb the stairs, turn off the lamps, stand at her feet. She always slept on her belly, like something brought in from the shore.

“Hard day?” she’d ask, the other times. She would crouch beside me as I removed my shoes. “You need to take it easier, Lyova.”

I was deeply in debt. Even living rent-free in my friends’ house, I was drowning in everyday expenses, equipment rentals, interest payments. With money she thought we had, Lavinia bought houseplants, rambling gardenias. Every day our rooms looked more alive, blooming, budding. Every week I searched for someone else to borrow money from, laughing about IOUs, lying about overdue commissions. I owed tens of thousands in taxes. My handlers at L’Aujourd’hui told me I should leave the United States, return to Russia. I refused. I always refused. At
Lavinia’s ballet performances I sat with her friends, hands on thighs, watching the dancers twist in the air, watching Lavinia turn from the back of the stage to stare into the dark, the crowd’s dark, where we could not be seen.