Us Conductors (26 page)

I REMEMBER WATCHING A MAN
and a woman waving at each other from opposite street corners. He was in a workman’s uniform; she held a bag of shopping. They had different shades of faded brown hair. At first their waves were meant just to say,
I see you
. Then they repeated the waves, almost bashful, out of love. Their waves soon became a kind of joke—bigger and bigger, a caricature of waving. They were laughing, their faces so splendidly happy. Then the crowd swarmed the intersection. I did not see them meet. I wondered if it had been worth the waving.

I felt at that time like an empty cabinet. I was made of good, strong wood. Every morning someone would open my wide doors and slip a new sheaf of papers into a designated place, and the shelves were stacked with so many papers, miles of contracts, yet still I knew this cabinet was empty. Perhaps there was a locked drawer at its heart. Perhaps there was a drawer, perhaps it held something of value, perhaps there was, somewhere, a key. I did not know.

Pash went on with our business. He managed the books. I made things for him to trade away.

In 1937, I heard you on the radio, playing Ravel’s “Kaddisch” on the theremin. Your performance was matter-of-fact, dumbfounding. It was finer than any violin performance I had ever heard. The theremin had a purity of tone that made the piece feel like an inherent thing, noumenal and unmediated, a treasure that had always been.

I think I had been waiting for a coincidence.

I called you two days later.

“Is Clara there?”

“It’s me,” you replied.

“It’s Leon Theremin.”

“I know.”

“You remember me?”

You laughed. “Leon.”

I said, “I would like to build you a new instrument.”

We met on neutral ground, at Grand Central Station. I waited on the mezzanine. I wanted to see you before you saw me. It is difficult to look for a person from the mezzanine of Grand Central Station. Travellers cross the floor in unique trajectories, like the whirl of dandelion seeds. Every time I tried to pick a person out, a sudden crowd obscured him. It felt like chaos, though I knew it was not. Even these paths, given enough time, could be predicted. Plot the data, pick out its patterns, factor age, occupation, destination. I watched the stirring figures. I wondered if, ultimately, everything could be known.

Stillness separated you from the crowd. A woman in a tilted cloche hat, a three-quarter length coat, unfastened. With small shoulders. Gloves. I came down the stairs, my heart charging in my chest, ten thousand horses galloping across the plain. The windless station hall with all its flat golden light. You raised your hand and waved. You had not changed.

You had not changed, you had not changed.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello, Leon.” There was hesitation in your face, something like caution. In a certain way this made me proud. There was memory in the way you looked at me.

“Are you well?” I said.

“Yes. Are you?”

“I brought you this,” I said.

You pressed your lips together. You took the rose.

“It is good to see you,” I said.

Your eyes flicked up. Each of us took a breath. You finally murmured, “Yes.”

I gestured at a marble bench, just there, amid the crowds. “So,” I said, gently, “let’s talk about staccato.”

So we talked about staccato. We had talked about it on the telephone and now we talked about it in the station, like acquaintances and then gradually like old friends, knee to knee. You were a remarkable theremin player but you played approximately the same theremin as everyone else, with components from RCA. There were flowers on the sides but its design was seven years old. Its power supply was unreliable. It failed in humid weather. Its timbre was unsophisticated and its volume control was sluggish, unresponsive. “Like molasses,” you said. This was the way with all theremins: they were given to glissando, eliding between notes.

For you I imagined better.

I imagined a theremin that was perfectly made, with custom components for its singular player. A more sensitive theremin, with a more supple volume control. That could sing in a more bewitching voice: a voice like light in leaves, breath in chests, a slender lightning bolt.

“Let me build it for you,” I said.

“I will pay,” you said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I would build it anyway.”

You smiled. “And still I would pay you.”

I proposed to build it differently than the last, than the one you had; differently than any other theremin in the whole of the world. A theremin with its antennas reversed, for your particular injury: pitch on the left side, for your strong left arm; and volume on the right.

“No.”

“No?” I asked.

“It is too late,” you said.

With my thumb I traced the centre line of my palm.

“Some things you can’t undo,” you said.

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME
, you dream your life according to perfect conditions. You look at the lines of a proof, the clear symbols of a formula, and you understand the world.

This is dream, not knowledge. Life is not a laboratory; twenty-four imperfect hours make up a day. There is interference, distortion, accident, will. There is also hope. Hope will ruin a thing, or fulfil it.

I had neglected my theremin for a very long time. I had not stared at its coils or wires, had not opened its circuitry to the light. It was early 1937 and a war was stirring in Europe. I lived in Manhattan and considered coils, transformers, pitch oscillators. Every time I dragged the stool to my workbench, I had another idea to improve the device. I met Pash when he asked, dined with his masters of industry, but in every spare moment I was experimenting with new speakers and concentrating coils, tightening and replacing tiny brass screws. I did not call you or send letters. I did not divert the bearing of my work. I did not doubt. My mind and hands were following the directives of my wakeful loosened heart and I was solitary, moving, a free particle that spins, that feels the weak and strong forces exerting gravity upon it.

It is not the same solitude I experience here, aboard the
Stary Bolshevik
. Here I am an idle man in a cabin, writing stories on this typewriter. Leaving rows of sentences, months passing in ellipses.… I do not know what forces are in play. I do not see the looming icebergs, the coming storms. Sometimes I wake in the night and I wonder if we are sinking. It would be a long time before I would know that we were sinking. You can become a dead man before you know what you are.

I MET THE KARLS
at Mud Tony’s.

“How long will it take you to tie up your business here?”

“Why?”

“It is time for you to go.”

“No. I have no plans to leave. Is this about visas? I will ask Pash to deal with it.”

“He cannot fix this.”

“We have too much work,” I said. “There is also a woman.”

“There are other problems. Has he spoken to you about taxes?”

“Taxes?”

“When was the last time you paid taxes?”

“I left such things to—to …”

“There are other problems, too,” a Karl said, squinting at the row of cars outside the window.

I WAS FRYING A SAUSAGE
in a pan when Lucie Rosen called to me from downstairs. “Someone to see you, Leon!” I did not know whether to take the sausage off the stove or to leave it sizzling. How long would I be downstairs? Would this sausage explode? It gleamed.

I left it. I danced down the steps. “Yes?” I said, peering out across the floor. Lucie was standing with a stranger. He wore an ugly green suit, a bad purple tie. He was one of those men who seem secretly large; a trick of muscles in the neck. He had a wide messy mouth. He was still wearing his hat.

“Dr Leon Theremin?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m Jim. Can we talk privately?”

“Have we met?” I asked.

“No. I’m here from Commerce and Burr.”

“Commerce and Burr?”

The man sighed, as if I were already making him sad. “We’re debt collectors, Dr Theremin.”

I brought Jim upstairs, as Lucie drilled the back of my head with a very alarmed look. We went into one of the smaller workshop rooms. “Please, sit,” I said. Jim sat in a wooden chair with wheels on casters. Throughout our conversation he was moving, slightly, back and forth, like a weaving boxer or a killer shark.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” he said.

I gave him an ironic look.

“Have you seen our letters?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “What letters?”

Now Jim gave
me
an ironic look. He withdrew a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket and passed them to me. The letterhead, C&B, in black and red, recalled mortar shells descending upon a city.

“You are president of the Migos Corporation, yes?”

“Er …” I said, flipping through the papers. Six months of them, addressed to offices in Manhattan and Queens. A few had been sent to West 54th Street but I had never seen them.
Dr Leon Theremin, President, Migos Corporation; Dr Leon Theremin, President, Theremin Patents Corporation; Dr Leon Theremin, President, Teletouch Holding Corporation
.

“Can you give me an address for Boyd Zinman?” Jim asked.

“For who?”

“Boyd Zinman.”

I had never heard of Boyd Zinman. “Who?”

Jim sighed. “Dr Theremin, let’s be serious. You have defaulted on debts amounting to almost sixty thousand dollars.”

My eyes bulged. “Sixty?”

“Remember Walmor Incorporated, Dr Theremin? Remember International Madison Bank?”

I did not remember these things.

“You should speak to my business manager, Julius Goldberg,” I said.

“Ah yes,” said Jim, “Mr Goldberg. Could I have his address as well?”

I stammered. “Yes, well, actually no. But let me give you his telephone number.”

Jim turned slowly in his chair.

When he departed, he left me with a single typed page. It was an accounting of sixteen separate loans involving six corporations, across nine different lenders. The smallest loan was for $3,000, the largest for $30,001. They dated from as early as 1929.
Commerce and Burr
, read the top of the letter,
WE SETTLE IT
.