Us Conductors (31 page)

“Where are you taking my husband?”
Lavinia demanded, in Russian now.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Lev!”

They had taken me by the arms and were guiding me to the door. She came at us, tried to pull them from my shoulders. She was stronger than they expected and abruptly we were standing together, in the night’s halo, the two of us.

“I have to go,” I murmured, and I saw her jaw set, saw frozen water at her eyes. “I have to go.” With this last speaking, she suddenly became smaller.

She kissed me once, fiercely. She had questions in her face.

“I love you,” she said. Her glance flicked to the other men.

“Good night,” I said. I swallowed.

She grabbed the scruff of my coat and stayed that way, holding me, until one of the men removed her hand.

I went away with them.

WE DROVE THROUGH
the city’s darkness. Young men on street corners, holding cigarettes. Dogs in the middle of the road. Hobos in doorways, curled on their sides. Neon signs spelled words. POMADE, CABARET, CHOP SUEY, each in red, each somehow a goodbye. The men I was with didn’t speak. I wondered whether I had seen my last familiar face? Was I already given over to strangers? New York flickered outside my window. Now I was thirsty for farewells.

We dipped into the Holland Tunnel.

I leaned back in my seat. I looked at the wedding ring on my finger. How long would I wear it? Perhaps they would send for Lavinia after all. Perhaps Lavinia would follow, in a fortnight, her trunk packed with sundresses. Perhaps she would dwell with me in the hills beside Lake Ladoga, planting dill and tarragon, while I strained with wires and tubes and the distance of you.

We emerged in New Jersey, where the sky was pricked with twenty thousand stars. The road lifted us up and set us down and we followed the bend of the water. It was like a sea. Slowly, I remembered: it is a sea, it is a sea. The lights streaked and glittered, New York City across the bay, and then everything beautifully deafened by the roar of a locomotive running beside the road, fine and sparking, iron. I realized I was going home. Home
to Russia, the motherland, canyons and cities and three million rivers, rushing. The Physico-Technical Institute. Sasha and Helena. Blini from the stall on Kolokolnaya Street. Springtime and the bitter winter that makes enchantment out of candlelight.

I could see the boats now, in the harbour. They were as big as mountains. One of them was mine. The men in the car were more attentive, roused somehow, looking. The tires beat a rhythm on the road. I folded my hands in my lap. We twisted into the docks, stopped at a sign, wheeled round and into the shadow of the
Stary Bolshevik
. Lights shone down on us. The men got out of the car and I followed them, alive in my shoulders and ankles; the wind was everywhere, whipping, salted. Lev was there, talking to a man in uniform. I shook his hand. I was smiling now, girded. He introduced me to the captain, to the ship’s master. “Our log keeper,” Lev said. “That is what you are.”

“Log keeper,” I said.

The captain spoke with a Samaran accent. “Assistant log keeper.”

“It is my pleasure,” I said, bowing my head.

Lev watched me with a certain skepticism. I did not care about his skepticism; I knew who I was, where I was headed; I knew what I carried in my heart. I was Lev Sergeyvich Termen.

“My equipment is all here?”

“Show him,” said the captain.

The man who appeared at my elbow was like a polar bear. “Follow me,” Red said, and he led me up the gangplank into the body of the ship. Just as I passed through the bolted doorway I turned and glimpsed Lev with two other men—were they the Karls?—and I think there was a huddled warehouse and the silver imprint of a city spire, and in a certain way there were countless other figures, friends, enemies, and a thousand acquaintances, Katia, Jin and Nate Stone, Rosemary Ilova and
George Gershwin, perhaps Pash, watching from the darkness, as I disappeared into the
Stary Bolshevik
.

I would not come out until we landed. Red would show me the room with my equipment, the theremins packed in crates, the boxes of files, and he would show me the room I am now inside, eggshell blue, with its tidy cot. I remember the key turning in the lock. I remember the heave of the ship as its engines wakened. Like that, so simply, like a folded piece of paper, I was gone.

ONE DAY SOON I WILL
arrive at the Leningrad port. I do not know what will await me. I do not know the forces that will swiftly act upon my being. They will let me out of this room and I will go to the mouth of the vessel, shake hands with my captain, feel no more seasickness. After weeks of waves I will wobble on the pier. I will do my duty. I will build new wonders.

I will call to you through the air.

IT IS SNOWING IN MOSCOW
. I have spent the past hour in front of this square of window, this square of snowstorm, deciding what to write to you. My headset is around my neck. The machine whirs before me. How does one begin the first letter in eight years? With a greeting? Hello Clara? Dear Clara? Dearest Clara? But then this letter will never reach you. I am almost certain that it will never reach you. I heard your voice again today. I sat at my desk and tried to choose the first line of a letter that you will never read.

It is snowing in Moscow. It has been eight years since I wrote a letter like this, at a desk, to a friend. Is that what you are—a friend? Today I heard your voice through the earpiece, while I bent over my machine. Your voice was hiding in the noise, like a ghost. Like a transmission from the other side of life, from the spring.

When I am finished writing to you I will fold this piece of paper in thirds. I will trade Zaytsev some cigarettes for an envelope. A letter in an envelope, such an easy thing. My plan ends there. There are no mailboxes in Marenko. What is a prisoner to
do with a letter? Perhaps I will slip it to a sympathetic guard. Perhaps I will burn it. Perhaps I will keep it forever in my things, forever until a guard discovers it, snatches it from where it hides in a book, tears it into a hundred dry scraps. I remember when this happened to Andrei Markov.

I have a question for you, Clara: What good is a letter that will never be read? What good is a lost message?

I heard your voice in the noise, in the shush of crackling static, on a tape they brought from Spaso House. As I listened to Averell Harriman.

All these new names.

MY NAME IS
Lev Sergeyvich Termen, as it always was. My number is L-890. I live in Marenko prison, outside Moscow, with four hundred lawbreakers. We are called
zeks
. It is February 1947, not yet St. Valentine’s Day. Nobody in this country celebrates St. Valentine’s Day, except perhaps Ambassador Harriman. I am in the attic of a residential building. It is on a side street near the Kremlin; unheated, glacial, but I have known worse cold. I will not ask Beria for a heater. I will not ask Beria for anything. Until he appears in a doorway, with eyes of coal, I will pretend he does not exist.

The reason I am in this place is that when I sit at the small, square window, there is a direct view of another window, four or five hundred metres away, across a red brick wall. I will not tell you who sits behind that window, gazing out across the city.

The attic has a low, angled ceiling. It is all made of wood, like a cabin in the forest. Each corner of the room has a knit of light cobweb, but I have seen no spiders. They are either concealed or they have gone away.

There is a door in the far wall that leads down a back passage to the street. It is not shared with the apartments below, where Kremlin officials live with their families, dine on pork and fresh peaches. I come to this attic twice a week, for fourteen hours. I have never seen my neighbours. I hear them through the floor but only Beria knows I am here.

Sometimes I fear that one of the residents will hear me, and call up to the attic. She will call up to the attic, wondering who is hiding here, and I will not answer, and then my patron will send some NKVD agents to have my neighbours murdered.

There is a desk along one wall of the attic. It has a stack of folders, several writing pads, labels, pens and ink. There is this small typewriter. There are two boxes of magnetic tape. There is my whirring machine, innocuous and painted cream, and another machine, a player, connected to a headset. The first machine has one wire for the power supply and another wire that leads up behind it to the window. It snakes outside through a hole in the wall. On the other side of the glass, a device is fastened to the window frame. The wire leads into this device. The device is black and unusual. It looks like a crow, hunched, gazing out toward the Kremlin.

There is also a gun on the desk beside me. This gun is not for self-defence. If I need to defend myself I will kill my enemy with kung-fu. The gun is not for strangers; it is for me. If I am discovered, I will turn the muzzle of the gun toward myself and pull the trigger,
click
.