Us Conductors (35 page)

“Do you know where you are?”

“No.”

“You are at the heart of Soviet intelligence.”

I exhaled. As sifu taught me, I held on to the end of the exhale, extending the moment in silence and stillness before beginning the breath that follows.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why do you think you are here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I will ask the question again: Why do you think you are here?”

“I don’t know.”

One of the silhouettes moved toward and past me, illegible, and I thought it would strike me. It did not strike me.

INSTEAD, THEY TOOK ME
from the room. I was brought to a new cell, this one much larger than the last, with dripping arches and the smell of shit. It was full of bodies. Not corpses, but scarcely people: bodies in spring coats, shirts with buttons torn off. The cell, as big as a classroom, was walled in rust-red brick. There would have been room for a few dozen to sit and rest, but instead the floor was swollen with a hundred men, ashen and dying, or simply fearful; standing, teetering on trembling knees.

The cell door closed. I smelled the bodies, the uncovered toilet, and slipped into these prisoners’ woollen folds. I did not understand this room—why we stood like passengers in an elevator, awaiting the next stop. There was hardly room to stand, let alone to sit, but still, but still. And so I sat, with murmuring around me, Indian-style with my knees upraised, until the cell door thudded open and the guard shouldered in, like a cyclops. They must have had peepholes all over, to see one man sitting in the throng. He was huge and dark, with a grotesquely friendly face, and he landed a blow upon my ear, roaring, “ON YOUR FEET.”

The other prisoners cowered. When I was standing, the guard was gone. I stood, I stood, trembling.

We were not permitted to talk.

After a long time they hauled me back to the interrogation room. I do not know if the silhouettes were different or the same.

“Why do you think you are here?” they asked.

I swallowed. “It is a mistake,” I said.

      “What do you think is a mistake?”

“You believe I am a traitor.”

      “Why do we believe you are a traitor?”

    “Because of something I said to Comrade Voroshilov.”

“Comrade Voroshilov?”

    “Kliment Voroshilov, the first marshal.”

“What did you say to Comrade Voroshilov?”

                
“I said something about America.”

                “What did you say about America?”

                “I don’t know.”

    “Then why do you say you said something?”

      “I must have. I don’t remember.”

“What don’t you remember?”

“
I don’t remember
.”

        “Why did you say something about America?”

    “Because I lived in America.”

    “When did you live in America?”

    “From 1927 to 1938.”

        “Why did you live in America?”

    “I—I was a spy.”

    “You admit you are an American spy?”

      “I am a Russian spy!”

        “You deny you are an American spy?”

        “Yes!”

Then, once again, a silhouette moving toward and past me, the terror of impending violence; the door opens; I was taken back to the cell of hollow men.

THEY TORTURED US WITH
blunt instruments: hunger, exhaustion, despair. Twice a day we were led down the corridor to a small yard. For twenty minutes we sat on the gravel with a morsel of dry fish, a square of brown bread. Those who conversed were beaten. Those who fell asleep were beaten. The rest of the time we stood huddled in our crowd, trying to learn a way to close our eyes unseen, to lean softly against the murderer or traitor or innocent man next to us and simply rest there, between moments, in slumber.

It was not often possible.

This went on for two days. My interrogators wanted me to admit that I was a foreign agent. How could I admit this?
Clara, I was not a foreign agent
. I write this here, for my own record.
I was not, I was not
. In America, I believed in the Mother Motherland. I served my comrades. I did science; I stole plans; I murdered the man Danny Finch in loyalty to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

After two days they put me on “the conveyor.” I learned later that it has a nickname, like you would give to a stray kitten. The guards pulled me out from the shared cell and into an interrogation room and I remained there for days and nights, through mornings and mornings and mornings, with dawns’ and dusks’ slight light pastelling the window slit. Once you are put on the conveyor you cannot get off. Over and over they asked, “Are you an American spy?” Silhouettes and then men with faces and then silhouettes and then again men. They made me stand at attention, answering questions, blathering about Berlin, London, New York City. For hours I stood and answered, pleading that they talk to Pash or the Karls, or Lev, or to my other associates across the sea. For ten minutes, fifteen, they let me sit on the stool that was bolted to the ground but if I slipped into sleep they slapped me, hauled me up by the armpits, and we began again. The days poured relentlessly on and my interrogators seemed to grow larger, with more limbs and voices, arrayed like shadow puppets. In fatigue you begin to lose moments—whole minutes swallowed up, gone. It is as if reality is acquiring sinkholes, black pits. A tiny part of you begins to panic but the remainder cannot; it is too tired, simply too tired, and so your horrified spirit is like a gagged prisoner, bound in canvas, slowly being lowered into a lake.

“Do you admit you are a foreign spy?”

“I lived in the Plaza Hotel. I shook hands with John D. Rockefeller. I built a television.”

“You revealed Soviet technology to the Americans?”

For so long I stood and shouted, incapable of telling lies. It would have been so easy to confess, conceding to these men’s reality. But I was a scientist.
Clara, I was a scientist
. All we have is accuracy, transparency, veracity. Only truthful data gives us honest conclusions. So I clung to the shimmering facts, like grasping at fog, until finally I stopped. Finally, I stopped. I swallowed and shook my head and as if waking from a dream, I said: “I was a foreign agent.”

I RELINQUISHED SOMETHING
when I said that. Something thin and fragile, like a blade of grass. It was so easy to give away. In the relief that followed my concession, my skinny lie, I wondered why I had not relinquished it sooner. They let me sit in a chair and gave me a glass of water. I had relinquished my claim to stand beside Lomonosov, Faraday, Archimedes, Newton—any of them. In that trembling instant, I was grateful to have lost it. I wanted simply to sleep. I wanted to lay down my head and sleep.

It is now eight years later and I am no longer grateful. When I recall my betrayal at Butyrka, those leaning silhouettes, what I feel is wrath. Incandescent wrath and raw, desperate sadness over the thing I gave away. The thing I traded for a sip of water and the right to close my eyes.

BEFORE THEY LET ME
sleep, they made me sign a piece of paper. I signed it. Then I lay somewhere, on a bench or on the floor, in my own cell or in a crowd—I don’t remember.

THE GUARDS SHOOK ME
awake and brought me to a different room. They told me to write the story of my life, my story as a foreign agent. There were four walls, a desk, a cot, a typewriter. A cot! They brought me food on wooden trays. Such generosity from my wardens. “Write the story of your life, your story as a foreign agent.” Now that I had confessed, they wanted flesh for the fiction. I slept and I ate and I stared into the dull eyes of my guards. Their patience was not limitless. I sat at the desk, my fingers on the keys, gazing at a wall painted baby blue. I remembered then the cabin in which I had come from overseas. Another locked room, with cot and typewriter. Blue rooms do not have happy endings.

I wrote about my eleven years in America. My arrival and departure, concerts, contracts, meetings, inventions. In a broken, scattered way, I wrote what I recalled. I gave them the plain, tired truth, knowing they would twist it to their uses. I did not know what would happen when I finished writing, so I wrote on. I wrote about breakfasts, patents, sketched teletouch circuits.

My rebellion was this: I did not write about you. My jailers would have no part of you. I did not write about Katia. I did not write about Danny Finch. I did not write about my wife, Lavinia Williams. In this way I resisted. All of you remained free.

After four days, they took the pages away. They took the typewriter away. Two lieutenants appeared, like scarecrows. The taller read aloud the resolution:

“You, Lev Sergeyvich Termen, born 1896 in Leningrad, nonparty member, citizen of the USSR, are found to have been a foreign spy and a member of a fascist organization.”

I was not a foreign spy. I was not a member of a fascist organization.

I signed my name.