Us Conductors (49 page)

Rewind. “…  xxxxx xx later,” “…  xxxxx xx,” “…  to xxxxx xx later tomorrow.”

I couldn’t make it out. “Resolve”? “Call it off”?

I manipulated a panel of switches and dials. The door scrape deepened and then went treble. The voices became airy, aqueous. Certain frequencies became clearer and others slipped away. I imagined lanterns lashed to a pier, shining dimly through fog. “…  we’ll have to susxxxx xx later,” Averell said. “…  have to susxxxx,” “…  have to suspxxx,” “…  have to suspend xx later.”

“ ‘Suspend it later,’ ” I murmured aloud.

The free worker glanced at me.

I wrote down the words.

I wound back the tape for a final pass.

“I understand your point,” Harriman said, “so if they do continue down that track I suppose we’ll have to suspend it later tomorrow.”

And then.

And then there was something else. Buried in the warp and hiss of static.

Suspended like a moonbeam.

After Harriman spoke, or perhaps just ghosted over the grey end of his words, another colour.

Was it the door? Was it Capaldi?

I closed my eyes. I went back and forward.

Distortion?

I went back and forward, searching.

Then, suddenly.

Or maybe it was not suddenly. Maybe it was not suddenly; maybe it was slowly but in the way that only certain changes are slow, slow and very almost, almost sudden. When you stare at a thing that is unfurling and you know it is unfurling, and then finally there is a moment when it is unfurled, strong and present, wide as a sail, or like a new sky, a change that has impossibly slowly suddenly arrived.

It was your voice, unmistakeable and completely hidden, the voice of Clara, who lives in New York City and who said she would not marry me, back when she was young, back before I was wrecked.

You hear a voice in the crowd and you recognize it. Across all the roar of life, through terrible cacophony, you hear the voice you know and you recognize it, catch it in your hands. What were you saying? I did not know. I heard your muffled and secret
voice, slowly, suddenly, hidden in the magnetic tape that came from Averell Harriman’s study at Spaso House.

I played with dials, switches, filters.

You were saying, “LIFT IT!”

It was so clearly you.

But you were not in the room.

This was not a voice in that room, a voice in Moscow, at Spaso House, some visitor calling from downstairs or out in the street.

“LIFT IT,” you said, vibrations caught on a wind.

It was not possible that I should be hearing you.

“Lift it,” you said.

It was not possible.

What were you lifting, wherever you were?

I took off my headset. I sat motionless. I stared at the squared blue lines in my notebook, then I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand.

I wondered if my faculties were failing, hearing a faraway girl in the static of a secret recording.

I took my head in my hands. Yes, my faculties were failing. The air was duping me. You were not there; your voice was not there.

Voices do not stray across the world.

I slid the headset back over my ears, rewound, pushed play.

Lift it, you said.

I WAS NOT ALLOWED TO
keep the tape with your voice, nor could I make a copy. Every recording was accounted for, collected by Beria’s men at the end of the day. There is no carelessness to espionage. And so I did not leave the laboratory until late that night, listening and relistening to your intonation, your
inflection, your sound. I wanted to memorize your voice as I had never done in New York.

                    Lift it,

              lift it,

        lifted.

I could not explain how your voice had come to Russia. Acoustic waves can be amplified; electrical fields can be used as catapults. But the calculations were not realistic. Did the Americans have a new kind of loudspeaker? Were you visiting some physics lab at NYU? Perhaps it was a trick of frequencies, an aural illusion?

I rewound the tape.

No. You were there, Clara.

Perhaps you were not so far away, in Sofia or Wien, talking on a radio program. “Lift it,” you told the talk show host. And then this signal was caught by a receiver in Moscow.

I did not know.

Finally, it was too late and I stood up from my desk. The free worker took my tapes and placed them in a locked steel container. A guard took the container when we left. I went down the stairs to the dormitory, along the wall, to my bed. I sat there. I had missed dinner. My ears hurt where the headset had pressed against them. I could not stop imagining your clear straight look.

IT WAS NOT LONG
after this incident that Beria brought me to the lake.

I do not know which lake it was. Maybe Glubokoye. Maybe Pirogovo. They brought me in a Black Maria. Once again I believed I was being taken to my death. Then the car stopped, the door opened, and I stepped out onto moist grass. There were
wide woods and the lake reflected everything, and the sky itself seemed green.

Beria stood in the weeds. “Come here,” he said. I padded toward him, into soft mud. It has been months since I was outside, years since I had been in open air like this, wet and open air, with arrowheads of birds running south. There were rich and earthen smells, smells I scarcely remembered, wild raw smells that evoked gardens, boating, my parents’ cellar. Battery Park, after horses have scraped up the sod. The low touches of sex. Beria wore a trench coat tied shut. I shivered. They had not given me anything to wear over my overalls. Far behind us, where the driver waited in his compartment, an engine rumbled.

“Citizen Termen,” Beria said. He made a sound with his tongue.

I did not say anything.

I wondered if he planned to kill me with his small hands. Would I fight back? After all this, would I fight back? “You have done excellent work.”

I did not thank him. I looked at the beautiful straight line of the horizon and clasped my hands. The lake was interrupted only with minuscule stirrings, fish rising underneath. There was the barest suggestion of fog.

“So, now, something new,” he said.

He explained he wanted a bug that did not even require a bug. A way of listening from outside a room, outside the building, without even smuggling something inside. “Microphones on exterior walls,” I said, immediately.

“No, no. From a distance. It must be from a distance.”

“You could easily conceal a small microphone …”

Beria turned. There was a secret in his appeasing smile. “We all have places we cannot go, Termen.” His lips twitched. “And we wonder: what is going on inside?”

THERE WAS STILL MUD
on my shoes, blades of grass, when I returned to the laboratory. I sat at my desk with a blank sheet of paper. The free worker watched me from across the empty space. A new curiosity hid in his sandy eyes.

I looked at the stray headset, the empty Spaso tape machine. They had taken the last set of recordings away. I knew I was already forgetting the sound of your voice. I felt a hole in my chest. I smoothed the page with my hand.

I told myself you had always been unknowable. Even in New York, when I thought I saw you, when I thought I was listening at your chest, I never knew.

So many signs are meaningless.

I picked up my pencil and began to sketch an idea, in arcs and squares.

How do you listen to a closed room?

MAYBE YOU LIFTED A THEREMIN
, maybe a suitcase, maybe a chandelier, maybe a chest, maybe an infant’s heavy pine crib.

IT TOOK JUST OVER A WEEK
. I handed in my request for materials and watched the free worker’s eyes flick down the list. “All right,” he said.

A crate arrived. Radio emitters, dishes, lenses, plywood, two thick sheets of glass, in different sizes. I erected the glass in a little room—like a telephone booth, a vestibule. “Could I ask your help?” I asked my guard. “Stand here. Speak.”

He stood on the other side of the glass, observed me through the pane. The most difficult part was the fragility of what I was observing: the tiniest changes, smaller than the drawing of breath, the tilt of a head.

“Testing, test,” said the lanky, sandy-eyed free worker.

“Yes, like that,” I said.

I was not listening to a voice; I was listening to the reflection of the stirrings of a voice.