Us Conductors (5 page)

IN DECEMBER
1927, Pash and I came to America on a ship called
Majestic
. The crossing was 13 days long. In a way, I had never been so free, not even at home. Here I was on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, trapped in a small floating city, and treated like a movie star. “Go where you please, Dr Termen”; “Visit when you like, Dr Termen”; “To what do we owe this pleasure, Dr Termen?” When I stepped onto the bridge, every officer rose to his feet. The
Majestic
was like a maze with a thousand friendly exits: Lo, the kitchens! Aha, the map room! Look, here’s where they keep the pets!

I did not know what to expect in the United States. I thought I would have to be on the lookout for Apaches. But I was also worried that eight weeks was not long enough to accomplish my mission. Pash did not wish to squander any time. Squared in stained red wing chairs, we sat beside the
Majestic
‘s steamed fish buffet. Ostensibly my secretary, actually my supervisor, poring over lists of officials, academics, scientists, captains of industry, he quizzed me in whispered rapid fire:

“Arthur Feuerstack?”

“Director at G.E.”

“Bert Grimes?”

“Regional director for Westinghouse.”

“Jack Morgan?”

“J.P. Morgan & Co.”

“Jimmy Walker?”

“Mayor of New York.”

“Sergei V. Rachmaninoff?”

At this I laughed. “Genius.”

Pash and his employers wanted me to slip like a hand into America’s industrial pocket. The international press was already celebrating my discoveries: I simply had to appear, the exotic Russian. I would woo the Yankees not only with the theremin but also with my radio watchman, new television prototypes, any invention that caught their magpie eyes. While I collected invitations, Pash would secure patents, ink contracts, launch corporations, and generally sign so many deals that his colleagues would have a permanent channel in and out of the USA, a passage for smuggling sheaves of industrial secrets. As a proud patriot I’d accepted this mission without hesitation. But I had other concerns, too. That is: scientific discovery, exchanges of knowledge, meetings of minds. Also, a small but persistent thought had wormed its way into my head at a Paris press conference, when a little man in an olive jacket raised his hand and asked: “Do you imagine a theremin in every home?”

It was a beguiling idea. Consider the public good that could result. Around the world millions of workers who are fascinated by music are demoralized by the challenges of traditional instruments. Little is intuitive about the keys on a clarinet, the fretless neck of a cello. But the theremin! There is an innate simplicity to it. The closer your hand to the tall antenna, the higher the pitch; the farther away, the lower the pitch. Because it trusts the worker’s own senses, not the knowledge locked away in the lessons and textbooks of the elites, the theremin becomes a revolutionary device—a levelling of the means of musical production.

Yes, I imagined a theremin in every home; not just the billions of new songs that would sing out, but the realization of millions of Americans, Englishmen, Spaniards, Siamese:
If we can do this, what else can we free people accomplish?

Businessmen often point out that a theremin in every home would make me very rich. I am not a businessman. Money has never been a motivation.

I SPENT MUCH OF MY FREE TIME
on the
Majestic
in the bowels of the ship. The engines of the vessel were not just marvels of engineering but finessed, subtle, ingenious marvels of engineering. Some of humanity’s most agile thinkers had devoted decades to these behemoths, honing their components, increasing their efficiencies, and these are no wristwatches: they are huge! They haul small cities across seas.

Amid the steamy machinery, I was also able to hide from Pash and his damned quizzes. He was conspicuous down there, too big and lumbering, a giant jammed into an expensive Moscow suit. He made the men with coal dust on their faces scowl.

There were others I wished to avoid as well. At first I was happy to put up my feet in the first-class lounge and speak with fellow guests. The marvellous cellist Pablo Casals was on board, as was Jan Szigeti, the pianist from Lublin. We spoke about Tchaikovsky, acoustics, and standing ovations. But Szigeti became a nuisance. He followed me like a pet, standing too close, smelling of the saltwater he showered in. Smitten with my peculiar brand of celebrity, he wanted my opinion on all sorts of matters, from the crescent rolls at breakfast to the best makes of typewriter.

It was our own fault, really, Pash’s and mine. As I have said, my English was then still very weak. So as we began to receive messages by wireless from America, we required a translator. Szigeti volunteered. There we were in the first-class lounge, chattering beside trays of steamed salmon, the wireless operator’s transcripts clutched in Szigeti’s puffy paws. He read them out to us. They all began with the words
Professor
or
Dr Theremin
; then they proceeded with several compliments; then a proposal—usually to do with a private party, at a chalet or on an island or at a “darling little apartment”; and finally, a figure. The lowest of these was $500, the highest, $6,100. As Szigeti converted from dollars to rubles, his eyes popped out of his head. “These are famous families!” he told us. “The Pittsburgh Clarks have a swimming pool the size of Slutsk!”

I found these invitations vaguely horrifying. I did not wish to privilege the privileged. I wished to remain as I was, and proudly so: a representative of the scientific community, and of the people of Russia.

But Pash was drawn to these offers like a magnet to a lockbox. It wasn’t just the lure of the greenback; it was those sterling American names. With bovine Szigeti before us, we argued in glances: Pash keen, me dull. When Szigeti was elsewhere, we were more forthright. In those days I was still sometimes able to sway my minder, to persuade him he should listen to me. I leaned on sheer pragmatism. I told him we needed to play the long game, bore any suspicious Americans with our guileless communist chastity. “We mustn’t look too eager,” I said. “We have to hide our appetite for Fords, Victors, Rockefellers.” I argued for us to keep to our plan, first demonstrating the theremin for my fellow scientists, academics, musicians, and a handful of journalists. After that, for the public at large. Finally—when we’d proven our priorities, cast
off suspicion—“Then, Pash, you can go have a look at the Pittsburgh Clarks’ pool.”

Over the course of two late-night conversations, murmuring from spring-bed bunk to spring-bed bunk, I persuaded him. Thereafter, our audiences with Szigeti were less strained. The pianist translated the offer; I feigned indifference; Pash shrugged his giant shoulders; and only Szigeti, stammering, counted the zeroes.

THE ENGINE ROOMS ALSO
provided a private place to do my kung-fu exercises. As sifu told me, my first week:
practise once a day, more will do no harm
.

He had not seemed surprised when I appeared again at his kwoon, two months after stumbling in with Sasha. There was no concern in his face; he came over casually. He watched me watching the sparring students—only three there that day. “You want to learn?” he said finally.

“I think so.”

“You seem you think a lot.”

It was partly the violence crashing through Leningrad in those days. It was partly the desire for physical activity: an order I could bring to my body. It was partly the grace of those fighters, their limbs that moved in deliberate lines. I wanted order, I wanted grace. I wanted to pass like a wind through any tempest.

So I began coming to the kwoon five or six times a week. I learned how to stand; I learned how to exhale. Sifu taught me the first form, “Little Idea,” a sequence of gestures that seem like magic, summoning motions, not like any kind of combat. I stood with Lughur and Yu Wei and repeated the movements,
repeated and repeated them, becoming taller, becoming clearer, ten thousand tiny refinements. Sometimes sifu called up a student, his birthmark glowing in the lantern light; five seconds of contest and then the simplest shift of weight, sifu pivoting his hips, a figure sent sprawling.

I improved. My body became lighter and stronger. I did pushups beside the radiating stove. I squatted with Yu Wei, drinking tea, hearing tales of Peking. I laughed with Moritz, who had begun studying kung-fu during the war, when he was stationed in Tsingtao. “Even the Chinese monks know how to fight,” he said. I couldn’t visit the kwoon as often when I began travelling, but still I went. Sifu taught me the second form, “Sinking the Bridge,” with its pivots and kicks. He taught me the third form, “Darting Fingers.” He taught me as though I was the most fitting student, a natural son, and I left coins behind, in the box by the door.

Aboard the
Majestic
, travelling to America, I tried to maintain my practice. If Pash was out late or up early, I could use our cabin to run through the first and second forms. But usually I skipped down the ladders and across the catwalks to practise in a corner of the aft hydraulics chamber, an area the engine men nicknamed the “gym.” Several of them were enthusiastic bodybuilders (admittedly, all bodybuilders are enthusiastic). They planted themselves beside the hydraulics chamber’s heaving silos, feet flat on the grille, and lifted things: boxes, metal struts, barrels of lard. I worked beside them. It was easy to be self-conscious: I was a paid passenger, smaller than the strongmen, greaseless. I was also the only martial artist. And yet as soon as I slipped into horse pose, my insecurities fizzed away like vapour. There we were, shoulder to shoulder: sailors with sacks of coal raised over their heads, the scientist from Leningrad punching his wing-chun one-inch punch. It was hot. We sweated.
I stripped to my underpants before the third form, darting
biu
jee. Sometimes the space was too crowded to make many movements, but this was all right, this I embraced; the student needs new challenges. In the bowels of the
Majestic
I tried to breathe like a child.

Nevertheless, I had to come out sometimes, for messages, for meals, and, alas, most frequently, to be sick. At regular intervals I climbed up from the engine rooms, scurried down the aft corridor, flung open a door, and vomited into a toilet. Szigeti always seemed to be standing watch. As soon as my head poked up from the stairwell he would be over me: briny, excited, eager to talk. I’d trundle past him, breathing sideways, feeling every swaying slow motion of the ship. I kneeled by the porcelain. MADE IN TORONTO, it said. Szigeti stood quietly outside, leaning his head against the closed door, speaking in the tone of a lover. “Are you all right, Lyova?”

“Yes,” I murmured.

Sometimes I would come out and he would be gone, and the only sign he had been there was the glass of seltzer water he’d left for me, gurgling, sad and alive.