Us Conductors (48 page)

BERIA GAVE ME A
special office in Marenko’s secret wing. I had an orange pass with my name and Yukachev’s signature. The other engineers asked what I was working on now and I just shrugged, lifted and lowered my shoulders. They let the matter drop. I was not the only zek with a mysterious new commission: Rubin had been transferred to a facility across town, for something to do with hydrogen isotopes.

My work was not with atoms. Every day I showed an attendant my little orange card and entered an almost empty laboratory—four rows of desks, shelves of equipment, an incongruous crystal chandelier. Stalin glowered from a wide, dark painting. I shared the lab with one other engineer, a radar man, and a lanky free worker whose job it was to watch us. We spent our days in separate, silent labour. It never felt like the room had enough air. I ate lunch in the same kitchen where I had sat with Beria, chewing softly beside the stoves. The windows had been closed and locked. If I needed new components, new machines, I submitted a written request. Every requisition was granted.

My task was simple, but then it was not so simple: a bug that required no power source. That required no wires leading in or out. That required no tapes, and scarcely any metal. An invisible, imperceptible, inert device that remembers any secrets that are told to it.

I think it is probably the best thing I ever made.

ONE MORNING IN NEW YORK
the owner of L’Aujourd’hui came up to my table, drying a plate, like a character in a play.

“Hello,”
he said, in Russian.

“Hello,” I said, in English.

He dried his plate.

“Gotta ask,” he said. “You okay, bud?”

I did not lift my head from my work. I was drawing a semicircle. “Yes.”

Mud Tony shrugged. “All right,” he said. He began to move away.

I raised my face and squinted at him. “Can I ask you a question?”

“What’s that?”

“Should I go back to Russia?”

He laughed. “How should I know?”

“I’m just asking,” I said.

“Huh.” Mud Tony tugged at the ends of his lips. “Is there anything keeping you here?”

“Yes,” I said.

I felt my face was very sad. I tried to smile.

The radio was singing a stupid love song.

I saw him see my wedding ring. “Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “No. You should stay.”

I looked at the placemat, covered in fragile marks. “Of course,” I said.

“At least until things are worked out.”

“Of course,” I repeated. “Yes.”

In early evening, golden hour, I called you from a public telephone. The Plaza Hotel’s booths were tucked behind tall windows
and there were waving trees, newspaper sellers, a million people pouring past. I took a deep breath and then immediately felt intoxicated.

I said, “Clara?”

You said, “What?

    Yes?

                   Who is this?

    I can’t hear you.”

“It’s Leon.”

“Leon?”

    “Yes.”

“Oh! Hello.”

“Hello.”

“How’s it going?”

    I said, “Clara, I love you.”

    “What?”

    “I love—”

      “What? I can’t hear.”

“I love you!” I shouted.

“Leon, I’m sorry, I can’t—”

I put down the receiver. My breathing was wild and shallow. I went out of the Hotel Plaza and onto Fifth Avenue and I ran straight through the city to your house, down alleys and over fissures, swift as a blazing rocket. I was ragged and sheer and decided. The knocker was a lion’s head. I took the lion’s head in my hand and banged on your door.

Birds flew up from the eaves.

You did not appear at the door. You appeared on the balcony, above my head, leaning against an iron railing.

“Leon,” you said. You were wearing swinging pearl earrings. “What are you doing here?”

Your skirt was the same dark blue as the sky.

“I love you, Clara,” I said.

You did not tremble when I said it.

You did not move.

You looked at me.

“I never stopped loving you,” I said.

Your fingers tightened around the railing.

“We are
married
, Leon.”

“I thought I could escape,” I said, in a clear voice. “That we could slip away from each other.”

You began to say something.

“But I never
escaped
, Clara. I never did.”

“Leon, I was just a kid when I met you.”

You trailed off.

“Yes,” I said.

I waited for you.

You said into the air, “Your feelings were always so
certain
.

Like you already knew. But I didn’t know anything yet.”

A truck rattled past.

“Run away with me,” I said.

“You have a wife.”

“I am forty-two years old, Clara, and my heart has never felt real except when I am with you.”

You took your hands from the railing. “You’re a crazy person.”

“No!”
I shouted. “I’m not, it’s not—This is the plainest—”

You were furious then, lips drawn in a line. “You stroll through life like you’re indestructible. Like an indestructible—an indestructible
blockhead
, Leon. Immune to everything: to responsibility, to patience. Always wanting, never listening, never—”

“I am not indestructible,” I said.

“Like you can just walk away from a life. Like promises don’t matter. You are
married
, Leon.
I
am married.
Not
to each other. Wishing doesn’t change that.”

“I am
not
indestructible!”

“Wishing is just the empty air between people.”

“Is it?” My voice was like a piece of lead.

You pushed away from the balcony. “We have to leave some things behind.”

The air smelled of exhaust.

I was looking at you but you did not look back at me. I decided to forget this conversation. I left America.

IN MAY
1945, I completed work on a radio antenna that could be concealed within a small prepared cavity, with a sensitized diaphragm and tuning post. Nearby sounds made the diaphragm quiver; these modified the charge of the antenna. Operators up to 150 metres away could direct radio beams toward the device and record the reflected signal’s modulations. Any modulations could be translated back into sound. Whispers could be stolen.

In July 1945, four young boys from the Lenin All-Union Pioneers attended a presentation by Averell Harriman, American ambassador to the USSR. The boys wore red kerchiefs around their necks. At the end of the reception, after sardines and orange cake, the courteous Pioneers jumbled to the front of the room. Their minders smiled. They lay their sturdy hands on the boys’ shoulders. The boys were holding a huge wooden plaque engraved with the proud eagle of the Great Seal of the United States of America. In one talon the eagle clutched an olive branch. In the other, a bundle of arrows. “In honour of the excellent Ambassador Harriman,” squeaked a bucktoothed Pioneer, “the Moscow detachment of Young Pioneers offers this gesture of friendship and trust.”

Ambassador Harriman was recorded to have answered: “What a kindness.”

His government checked the plaque for conventional eavesdropping devices. There were none. It was just a noble bird of prey.

Harriman hung it in his study.

One hundred twenty-one metres away, a radio emitter, affixed to a window frame, pointed toward Spaso House. Separately, a receiver whirred. It recorded noises onto magnetic tape.

I listened.

After the installation of the emitter and receiver, the bugging of Spaso House did not require much upkeep. Beria had men to check the devices, to chase away pigeons, to observe Averell’s security staff for signs of suspicion. For a little while I returned to my old work at Marenko, finding ways to regulate the fuel in missiles. But then again one morning, the junior lieutenant said I had a visitor; again I was taken to the kitchen in the top-secret section; again Beria sat waiting for me, patient and evil, hands folded in his lap. A tape machine rested at his feet.

There was a problem with the sound, he said. Although my bug was working, the voices it recorded seemed washed over, almost lost in distortion. NKVD audiologists were accustomed to cleaning audio, extracting intonation and syllable, but my bug did not work like other bugs. My recordings could not be scrubbed with the same processes. “Can you make them clearer?” Beria asked.

“No,” I said.

Beria was watching me. He let the moment stretch on. Then he smiled. “Yes, you can.”

“No, sir, I cannot.”

“You can, Termen. I can see that you can.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“Listen,” he said, reaching down toward the tape machine. He pressed a switch and it began: a blurring gasp of noise, submerged voices, like an alien broadcast.

“Well?” he said.

I shook my head.

Beria licked his lips and then as the recording went dead he began to speak in the same kind of incomprehensible sounds, twinned and smothered words. A weak imitation—in another context I would have laughed—but here his impersonation felt joyless, wrong. I felt as if a river were running over me.

“Please stop,” I said.

He stopped. He laughed in a short way.

“When you have made the voices clearer,” he said, “write down what they say.”

I made my return to the top-secret laboratory, where the air still felt pinched, as though the room were held in a set of needle-nose pliers. Every morning an NKVD agent delivered a locked box containing one day’s tapes. I set up a listening station, sat with headset and whispering machine, adjusted dials for Hz, KHz, MHz, aW.

There could be no better operator: the bug’s solemn English-speaking inventor, sentenced to prison. I began my uneasy relationship with Averell and Kathy; and Mr Capaldi, the ambassador’s chief aide; and Snuff, their bearded collie. I listened to Harriman’s conversations with himself, late at night, repeating the words of an upcoming speech. I listened to his small talk with the cook, about capers and brown sugar. I listened to the secrets, the United States’ state secrets, the conversations between our World War allies as they sat with neglected biscuits, glasses of sparkling water, two folded newspapers. “I am frightened,”
Harriman muttered one morning. “Jack, I don’t know that this will all shake out.”

YOUR VOICE CAME
on a Saturday.

I was sitting in the silent lab. Just two of us there: the free worker and me, paper shifting on paper. I wore a padded, heavy headset. I had a book of lined paper, a typewriter pushed aside. Usually I would transcribe by hand and then retype the pages; the originals went to my guard, who burned them.

For reasons of quiet, the laboratory had no clocks.

I wound back a section of tape that was giving me trouble. Harriman was talking to Capaldi, discussing a meeting with one of Stalin’s marshals. He was summing up their plans but he was doing it as he opened the study’s door, with scraping wood and a rush of air. “I suppose we’ll have to xxxxx xx xxxxx tomorrow,” Harriman said, and went out. I rewound. “…  suppose we’ll have to xxxxx xx xxxxx tomorrow.” I rewound. “…  xxxxx xx later tomorrow.”