Us Conductors (23 page)

We went on,
clack-clack
. I looked out the window at the dull land that ringed the city. Now and then a white barn, a grey river, like the stations on a pilgrimage. I found myself waiting keenly for the ticket inspector, someone who would come in and tear this piece of paper.

The last time I had seen Katia was backstage at Carnegie Hall, four years earlier. A hundred men in pressed black suits, dandies in seersucker, a procession of women in taffeta and jewels, Steinways and Rockefellers, Rosens and Schillingers, the Bolotines and little Yolochka, prawns and devilled eggs, wine and mousse, playbills and coiled cables, and Ekaterina Pavlova Termen, my secret, hidden in a corner, clutching her elbows. Do not imagine that I ignored her. I said hello. I said I was surprised to see her there. I lingered. I wondered if she had come to embarrass me. So many others were waiting for me, around the room. I went away but came back later with a plate of melon and gravlax. She picked at the capers. She wore a plain dress and a gaudy necklace that was not in fashion. When I introduced her to Otis Skinner she nodded at what he said but I do not think she understood him. Her English was not good. I realized that she probably did not even know who he was. In Russian I said, “He’s an actor.”

“Yes,” she replied. “You can tell by how much he talks.”

I had not liked Otis Skinner in
Kismet
but he had come to my performance. He told stories of sneezing during the filming of the movie’s harem scenes. Katia stood like a faded statuette. After a little while I found a reason to leave her. I glanced back often. Through the glad crowds I glimpsed her arms, her back, the side of her face, always at right angles, as if she had been carved out with a chisel. Then finally she disappeared.

At Newark I changed to the Erie line. I sat across from a father and son. The father was my age. I was not sure of the age of the son; only parents seem to have an instinct for the age of children. He was a boy. He had blond hair and a dark summer tan. He was holding an incandescent light bulb. “Hello,” he said to me.

“Hello,” I said.

His father gave me a nod.

The boy tapped his light bulb against the carriage window.

“Be careful with that,” his father said.

I wondered why the boy had a light bulb, why he was not at school. Where was he going with his father, was the light bulb new or burnt out. The boy tapped the light bulb against the carriage window.

His father glared. “Leon,” he said sternly.

The boy sighed. “Yes, Pop.”

A boy named Leon, carrying a light bulb through New Jersey.

I rang the hospital from the station in Paterson.

“Can you please connect me to Katia Termen?” I asked the switchboard operator.

“Who?”

“Katia Termen. She is a nurse.”

“You mean Catherine Termen?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask who is calling?”

“This is Mr Termen.”

“Just a moment, please.”

Katia answered the telephone in English. She said “Hello” in an elongated way, rising. I scarcely recognized her voice.

“Hello?” I said back.

“Yes?”

“It’s Lev.”

I told her I was in Paterson. She was not friendly or unfriendly. I said I had come to see her.

“When?” she said.

“Tonight?” I said.

“Lev, I can’t. There is a shower tonight for one of the other girls.”

We were speaking in English. “Before, then?”

There was a short silence. “At lunchtime, maybe, I have some time.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“Come to the sanatorium.”

“All right.”

“Wait outside.”

“Outside the sanatorium.”

“Yes, Valley View,” she said.

“What?” She had pronounced
valley
like
velly
.

“Valley View.”

“
Velly
View?”

“Valley View!” she shouted, angry.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you,” I said.

I met her outside Valley View, a little after one o’clock. It was a small tuberculosis hospital. There was a measured lawn, empty flower beds. A thousand suspended leaves, red and brown, like old ornaments. A single path led past the gate, through the centre
of the grass. A patient drooped in a wheelchair. I looked away. I sat on a bench. The path was made of the sort of dusty gravel that coats your shoes, turns the cuffs of your trousers to parchment. A carriage rattled past, horse kicking up powder, and I imagined my face caked in a thin layer of dust.

Suddenly Katia was standing before me, hands at her sides, in perfect whites. I felt my heart jerk.

I stood. I greeted my wife.

She did not seem to have changed. Her upturned chin and long legs, an oval face like the image on a cameo. A mouth small and elegant. Brown hair, shorter than I had ever seen it, still parted to the right. She had always been small; she was even smaller in her uniform. Slender, compact at the shoulders, a thin belt in a ring at her waist. She was twenty when we were married, ten years ago. Now there were lines around her eyes. These eyes were clear, soft, unlaughing. They matched the season.

She smelled of washing powder and vinegar but also of herself, in a memory I could not place. Snow, books, a new cardigan.

Something twinged in my jaw. I tried to think of New York City. I lifted my head. “If it isn’t ‘Catherine,’ ” I said, in English.

Katia shook her head. “You just show up at the train station?” Her voice was as thin as paper. “Why couldn’t you call first? You appear. Just like a ghost. I have a job, Lev. I do not have your life—your luxury life. My one break in the day, and here I am meeting you.”

“I’m sorry, I …” I trailed off.

“Well, what is it? What’s wrong?”

I swallowed. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Then why are you here, waiting outside a gate?”

“I …” I swallowed again. I turned to gaze back through the gate. “The hospital looks like a very good place to work.”

“It is not a hospital; it is a sanatorium,” Katia said. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She wore two slim bracelets at her wrist. One of them I had given to her, ten years ago. The other I did not recognize. She muttered something to herself, then lifted her eyes to me. “Well let’s walk at least.”

We set off side by side, and within this parallel movement, strange and familiar, I suddenly glimpsed her wedding ring. There, on her right hand. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. I looked not at her, but up toward the hill. I wished I had brought her something: a flower, a box of chocolates. I had brought her just my bare hands.

Later we were in the rising grass. The conversation was rote: questions about weather, health, family.

“And your brother?” I asked.

She seemed so brittle. “Sasha? You don’t even keep in touch with Sasha?”

“Not in a little while.”

“A little while?” She snorted. “Two years? Three?” It had been four. “I knew you were not writing to our friends, to my parents; but Sasha—
he’s
a
scientist
.” She said the word mockingly, as if it were the title of a lord. “You’re so busy now that you can’t even dictate a letter to one of your colleagues?”

I cleared my throat. “It is not like that.”

“What’s it like, Lyova?”

I looked at her. She was being deliberately cruel. I didn’t blame her. “Tell me how is Sasha.”

“He is all right.” She took a breath. “Everyone is all right. Just all right. It is a bad time, Lev.” She sighed. “You hear stories. The letters feel sometimes like they are being written onto—no, from on
top
of ice.”

“Not for people like Sasha, surely.”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “There are several reasons I do not go back to Russia.”

I looked at the earth. “Yes.”

“And you?” She gazed at me from under her brown lashes.

“Are you going home?”

“To Leningrad?”

“Yes.”

“I am staying for now,” I said. “I have a great deal to do. Contracts. Inventions. New work every week. Many meetings.”

“One of the doctors bought a theremin. He said it was completely impossible.”

“Yes, it can be challenging. You must be deft.”

“He is a surgeon.” She giggled, folded her arms. “He said it was like eating a pie with a shovel.”

“These days we are moving on from the theremin to other things.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Different kinds of sensors based around the electromagnetic resistance of the body, sometimes configured in sequence.” She showed no interest. “Or in conjunction with geothermal readings; I am experimenting with naval applications and also aircraft. So long as you understand the principles, there are infinite ways to implement them.”

Levelly: “You must get to see a lot of the country.”

“There are many, many meetings. Lunches at the Rockefeller Plaza and the Empire State. NYU, MIT, Columbia.”

“You’re still in midtown?” she murmured.

“Four storeys, and the basement.”

She made a thin smile. “The dorm is scarcely big enough for Judy and me. Only one of us can be in the kitchen at a time. If she is making her lunch I have to wait on my bed for her to finish. It’s funny. Sometimes I pretend she is my servant. ‘Judy, some toast!’ ”

“I have a very large kitchen,” I said. “Do you know Tommy Dorsey?” She showed me she did; in a small way I was surprised. “He comes to dinner parties sometimes. And George and Ira Gershwin. We all just crowd around with the girls, laughing, cooking.”

“ ‘With the girls.’ ”

We had passed into some woods and began climbing a slope. In spite of the incline we were pretending that we were just strolling. Katia was a little ahead of me now.
With the girls
. These words hung in the air. I had known they would hang in the air, before I said them, but I said them anyway. It was as if I wanted to bring us to a particular tree, to look again at an engraving we had carved there.

“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“You know you can. We agreed, when you arrived here—”

“Yes of course I know. I was seeing someone, now I am not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need your ‘sorry,’ ” she said. These could have been bitter words but they weren’t. She said them simply, almost lightly. I looked at her, just up the path, the side of her face dappled with light. Straight-backed in her whites. Katia did not need my sorry.

I lowered my head. Ten years ago, I had met her at Sasha’s door. A beautiful girl with an armful of tools. A bouquet of tools. We married so quickly. I made a mistake. It was not that I was careless in my calculations; it was that I was seeking the wrong sum. Sasha’s little sister, a beautiful girl with an armful of tools, reverent and unhappy. She wanted for us to sip clear borscht at dinner, and then to sit beside me, knitting, as I read the newspaper. She wanted for us to have a dog. She wanted for me to grow bored of my devices, to spend summer afternoons
building cabinets in the kitchen, or for us to move to the country: to live alone at the centre of a valley, eating apples from the trees around our dacha.

The second time I went to Paris, I brought her with me. The city of lights and love: perhaps I could salvage my error. We had been married for three years. But she hated the taste of French bread, the dank water dripping down alleyways. She hated the unfamiliar bath and the way the Parisian women looked at her. “Lyova, this is shit,” she said.

I gave her money, a map, circled the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Galeries Lafayette. At one of the parties at the Paris Opera I asked a black-haired girl where to go for shoes. She finished her champagne flute in one long swallow. “Rue Meslay,” she said. The next day I told Katia: “Meslay Street. Go, buy anything.” She came back with a pair of slippers. “Calfskin,” she said. I shrugged. She yelled at me: “Aren’t you angry?” They had cost three hundred francs. I remember standing under the crystal chandelier in our hotel room, both of us shouting. Then I went out.

“We must end this,” I said, the morning I left for America.

She lay in bed and closed her eyes.

When I boarded the
Majestic
, the manifest listed me as a bachelor. I do not know why. I felt somehow vindicated.

When I arrived in New York there was a telegram waiting.

I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU, it said.

I wrote back, SO DO NOT WAIT.

She came on a ship. It was a deliberate misunderstanding, like she was using her life to make a dark joke.

Now Katia and I had been wed for ten years. She did not need my sorry.

Katia sat down on a rock. “Why are you here?”

I didn’t have a quick answer.

“Lev?”

“A visit,” I said, “with an old friend.”

She looked at her hands. “Are you all right?”

“I am wonderful,” I said. “Are you all right?”

I could see her clench her teeth.

“Why are we speaking in English?” I said.

“You are a horrible little man,” Katia said. “You are not all right and we are not old friends. Have you come all the way to New Jersey, to a maple forest, to tell me helpless lies? Why are you here? To tell me you love me? To belittle my life? Or is it to tell me you are dying, something like that?”

I swallowed. A squirrel ran across the path and braided between two trees. The wind had fallen away and the air felt very still. Through a break in the trunks I could see down the rise to the sanatorium, the cluster of nearby buildings, a pasture speckled with cows. An eagle wheeled through the empty space.

I rubbed my eyes.

Katia’s tone had changed. “Lev?” she said.

I crouched in my suit.

“Lev, I didn’t mean … Are you sick?”

I picked up a piece of birch bark, like a discarded message. “I am not sick,” I said.

She was watching me, just barely moving.

“I am lonely,” I said.

I felt the flick of her eyes.

“There was a woman,” I said.

Then she straightened, like a building pulled back to standing. The only colour in her face was in her lips and eyes. I could see her choosing what to say.

She stood up.

“I don’t care,” she said.

She smoothed her skirt with her hands and walked away down the path.