Us Conductors (2 page)

On Family Day there were displays by the wrestling squad, the botanical club, one of the choirs, and a class recited parts of
Ilya Muromets
from memory. Vova Ivanov sang a song about seagulls. After this, Professor Vasilyev clambered onto the stage. In his gentle voice he explained to the audience that some of his students were about to distribute Geissler vacuum tubes. We were lined up and down the gymnasium aisles, crates of tubes at every corner. We passed them hand to hand as though we were building something together. Soon all of the parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents had Geissler tubes in their laps. They turned them over and over, like wineglasses, like seashells, like emeralds. Then Professor Vasilyev asked everyone to look
up at the ceiling. What they saw were the sagging lines of fourteen criss-crossing copper wires. I had pinned them up myself as Professor Vasilyev held the ladder. We had hidden the induction coils in a broom closet.

The ceiling wires now flowed with electric current.

They made no sound.

“Please raise your Geissler tubes,” said Professor Vasilyev.

One after another, they lifted their little glass tubes. They held them up with their fingertips. The feeling I had was the feeling you get as you pass through a gate and into a walled garden. As each vacuum tube entered the electrical field of my lacework of wires, one by one, the Geisslers began to glow.

I felt then what I have felt many times since. It is the moment you forget the electricity, the conducting metals and skipping electrons, the tubes and wires and fundamental principles; standing with hands in pockets you forget these things and for a hot, proud instant you think it is
you
who did this, who made the tubes glow, you clever mouse.

This is the hubris of the inventor. It is a monster that has devoured many scientists. I have strived to keep it at bay. Even in America, among ten thousand flatterers, I tried to concentrate on my machines, not their maker.

Perhaps if I had been prouder, this story would have turned out differently. Perhaps I would not be here, in a ship, plunging from New York back to Russia. Perhaps we would be together. If I were more of a showman. If I had told the right tale.

But Lev Sergeyvich Termen is not the voice of the ether. He is not the principle that turned glass into firefly. I am an instrument. I am a sound being sounded, music being made, blood, salt and water manipulated in air. I come from Leningrad. With my bare hands, I have killed one man. I was born on August 15,
1896, and at that instant I became an object moving through space toward you.

MY FIRST INVENTION
was called “the radio watchman.”

I was still a student, scarcely out of adolescence, and I invented a magical box. The radio watchman emits an invisible electromagnetic field and then waits for a disruption. If a human body passes inside this field, the circuit closes and an alarm goes off.

Imagine a vigilant wireless set, keeping guard.

It was a small triumph to have devised something new. At Petrograd University my class was full of rivals and each of us wanted his own calling card. During my first semesters, the only thing distinguishing me from the other students was an uncommon interest in music theory. Twice weekly, I attended courses at the conservatory across town. Sometimes I jangled out Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” on the piano in the physics lounge. Nobody was impressed. But now I had a desk with a magical box, a bulb that flashed whenever I came near it. Classmates would stand just outside the watchman’s field, as if by setting it off they were submitting to my success. Only Sasha came close and backed away, waved his arm or threw a shoe, testing what I’d done. Only Sasha wasn’t intimidated; he was always so sure of his cleverness, that he was cleverer than I.

My friend was tall and thin, with an unknit brow. His life seemed effortless. The day I presented the radio watchman, he insisted on taking me out to celebrate. It was a winter night, one of those chill evenings when your vision is interrupted by ten thousand wild snowflakes. We were talking science. Probably Sasha was telling me about the paper he was writing. We ducked into a tavern near the grey Fontanka River, took two stools near
the window, but the spirits hadn’t even started flowing when a commotion blasted through from around the corner. Banging, shouts, and then the procession of a few hundred people, dark coats flying past our window, rippling banners, a gathered effort in the marchers’ faces.

“Reds,” Sasha said, without any disdain. We were Reds too. This was 1917. Both of us had mustered for protests at the university. Now we watched the parade of Communists and read their slogans and more than anything I remember feeling the rhythm of their drums, the clang of wooden spoons on iron pots.

“Should we join the rascals?” Sasha said. He was already a party member. I hesitated. It was one of those instants when you feel your youth. I glanced back into the safety of the tavern, where drunks were slouched against the tables. Then we threw on our coats and went outside. The mob was boisterous and happy. To be in a parade like that, bold and loud, owning the road, is a messy jubilation. The snow was still falling. The crowd was strident, casual. “Bread and land!” we shouted. We moved together through the city. “Bread and land and freedom!”

Suddenly there was disorder up ahead. The front of the procession stalled. We bumped into our neighbours. Sagging banners, yells, then two loud pops. “What is …?” Sasha began to say, before a channel opened through the crowd.

There, at the square, a row of riflemen, their guns aimed straight through the snowstorm.

We bolted. Men and women were breaking in all directions, some toward but most of them away from the Imperial soldiers. Bodies pushed into us like shoving hands. Snow was still falling. Cold light. More pops, thin trails of smoke, dark coats, and now glimpses of green uniforms, gold buttons, then rising up, the terrifying silhouettes of horses, cavalry, and we ran and ran and ran, over torn earth, over ice, filled with raw, fierce terror. From
the street ahead, another bang—deafening, like an explosion. Reality seemed to be on the diagonal; I was so scared I felt I might be sick. We dashed down a bright alley and I pulled Sasha into a half-open doorway. Pressed together, we caught our breath. “You all right?” I said, finally.

“Limbs intact. You?”

I swallowed, then let out a breath. The city’s din had vanished. Before us just snowflakes.

Our bundled coats had pushed the door further ajar and we stood at the entrance to a long, wide room, lit with lanterns, a crackling stove. Eight or ten men, stripped to the waist, stood staring at us.

Most of them were Chinamen, or they looked like Chinamen. At first I thought it must be a dormitory, somewhere workers slept. But almost at once I realized no. It was a gym. Two of the men were holding long sticks, like shepherds’ staves. The air smelled of sandalwood and sweat.

One of the Chinamen approached us, an older man maybe my father’s age, barrel-chested, with a birthmark across his shoulder. “Good evening,” he murmured. “Can I help you?”

“We, er …” Sasha said. “Well, we—”

“Please come in,” he offered. We did and he pulled the door closed behind us. “It’s cold.” In the partial dark, the students eyed us. I felt very clumsy in my greatcoat.

“This is a gymnasium?” I asked.

“Yes. Training room. We call
kwoon
. Are you hurt?”

“No,” Sasha and I said together.

A pair of men had lost interest in us and began to spar. One was Asian, the other Russian. They attacked each other in slow motion, with short, fluid punches, pirouetting kicks.

The man beside us called out something in Chinese.

“I tell them, ‘Breathe like a child,’ ” he explained to us.

I watched them dodge and shift. “This is judo?”

“Wing-chun kung-fu,”
said the man.

“There are soldiers outside,” Sasha said.

The man regarded him levelly. “You are Bolsheviks?” I noticed that he had bare feet. They all had bare feet.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded. “I also.”

He shouted something at the students who still watched us. They laughed and fell back into their own practices.

“You’re a communist?” Sasha said.

The man shrugged. “Yes.”

Sticks swung in slow arcs.

“Would you … fight?” Sasha said.

The man scratched his belly. “Against soldiers with rifles?” he said. “What use would we be?”

“You might be of use.”

The man, the teacher,
sifu
, clicked his tongue. “When you have the right tools—that is when you serve,” he said.

A painting of a slender old man, mid-kick, hung on the wall beside us. He seemed to be floating above a lake. He looked serene.

We never went back to find the protesters, who had bravely rallied, evading the soldiers, gathering at the Winter Palace. They shouted long into the night. Instead we watched the men do kung-fu and then I followed Sasha back to the tavern, where we drank vodka and toasted our safety, pleased with our little adventure.

Only much later that night, lying in my sheets, did shame come and find me. It rose up from the floor like a mist. I kept seeing the whirl of the crowd, the way I had clutched my fists and run. My mindless fear. My premature departure.

I hadn’t stayed to learn the ending.

THE IDEA FOR THE THEREMIN
came to me in 1921. It was Sasha’s doing. I remember he was standing in the laboratory, still in his coat, dripping wet. I was on my hands and knees, soaking up the water with towels. Scenes like this were common in those days. To get to the Physico-Technical Institute, on the outskirts of Leningrad, you had to wedge your bicycle into the tram and ride forever. Past the library, over the Okhta River, under blue skies or grey skies or in the rain, pinned against a wall with a pedal in your neighbour’s calf. You could recognize the other scientists by their bicycles. Chemists with their hands on the handlebars, biologists resting their briefcases in their bicycle baskets. The mathematicians always had the most elegant bikes, minimal and gleaming. Physicists usually had complicated ones: hand-rigged gear systems, precision brakes. I was not like the other physicists. My bicycle was ordinary, with a bell that played middle C.

Anyhow, you took the tram to Finlandskiy, the last stop, and extracted your bicycle from the train car, and saluted the driver, and off you would go—weaving eight kilometres along the dirt road, across the field and under a wide sky, through the green bends of the arboretum, fast, where birdcalls banish any heavy heart; then up the hill and panting, round the bend, coasting in low gear through the grounds of the Physico-Technical Institute, dodging bent boughs, passing students on their way to class. You’d leave your bicycle with Boris the skinny clerk and duck through the arches, saying hello to the charwomen Katerina and Nyusya, and ascend the marble staircase, past the landing, round the corner, and then you would find yourself, sweaty and alive, in the midst of all the lab’s buzzing equipment.

In the winter you couldn’t ride your bicycle, not in the snow and mud; and so you didn’t bring your bicycle; and so on the
tram the scientists were indistinguishable from the tailors, from the bankers, from the bookbinders, until you got off the tram and trudged a barren highway to the polytechnic, every path unmarked except by ice-encrusted footprints; and you’d walk forever across the arboretum’s empty woods, and the institute’s empty woods, over spaces where bushes had stood, in summer, and finally the bare trunks parted and you ducked through the arches, and said hello to Katerina and Nyusya, and climbed the slippery marble stairs, past the landing, round the corner, and if you were prudent you changed into a second pair of trousers and left the other on the radiator.

Sasha was not prudent. He stood before my latest experiment with caked ice melting from the soles of his boots, the cuffs of his trousers. I was on the floor, patting the tiles dry. Water was a dangerous thing in the laboratories of the Physico-Technical Institute.

“It’s very clever,” Sasha said.