Even as this was happening, we met with the air force, with Boeing, modelling new versions of my altimeter. Their decision came by telegram. The U.S. Army Air Corps would have Theremin’s magic aeroplane dial. We met with fire departments about fire alarms, railroad officials about railroad signalling, telegraph bigwigs about my ideas for intercity typewriters. I called up the office of Henry Ford, told them that their cars could have automatic indicators for dwindling batteries, engines needing oil. I had plans for naval signalling, wireless microphones, policemen’s private radio sets. As I sketched science, Pash pushed paper, and everyone invited the Russians into their drawing rooms.
FROM THE SKY, CALIFORNIA made me think of a vast, intricate map. A map at seventy percent scale, and me high above it, holding binoculars. It was my first flight and I felt a combination of terror and elation. The reason for the elation was obvious: seventeen thousand pounds of metal, lifted into the air, the earth-bound gone flying. I have rarely felt more alive than in that dizzy moment when the aeroplane’s wheels left the ground, as if the aluminum craft had simply been picked up. But I was also filled with an engineer’s trepidation. Here was a device of great intricacy, a thousand screws, and any number could be loose. In the great fraternity of engineers the shameful central secret is this: we err. We botch and fumble. These words seem funny, harmless, but our failures are not always trifling. There are mistakes we never forgive.
My aeroplane flew from New York to San Francisco and did not crash. I landed and staggered from the genius machine and there was a man with a sign, THEREMIN. “Welcome to California,” he said. He handed me an orange. As I took the gift I was caught by an unexpected memory: the clear, clear gaze of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (may his memory be illuminated), on the day that we met. I cradled the orange in my right hand. My mission continued.
I was here to go to Alcatraz; I went to Alcatraz. A cruel rock floating in the San Francisco Bay. The ferry brought us dumbly, without comment, yet my fingers tightened on the handrail. This was a hideous destination. The engine droned and there was blue in the clouded sky, but I could feel the doom in this grey masonry, the haunted garden that lay in its centre. Our boat came alone.
“Hello, Dr Theremin,” the functionaries said. Hello, hello, hello. I did not know if it was my imagination seeing pairs of eyes in the high-up grilles. “Hello, Dr Theremin, welcome!” I knelt beside a metal detector, checking the circuits, trimming a wire, guarded by a circle of officials. They laughed, cracked jokes. Beyond their perimeter there was no sound, no movement. I only knew because I had read it: three hundred men, locked in, forbidden from speaking. Pash had asked me to find out about Alcatraz’s block assignments — whether the murderers were kept with the spies, the rapists with the bombers, Al Capone sharing a wall with Machine Gun Kelly. This was not an idle curiosity: it was at the heart of this journey, the sort of information that we had built these machines to obtain. But in those hours at Alcatraz I could not bring myself to pry into the affairs of its lodgers; there was no way I could sneak down a hallway to slip files from folders. I snipped the wire. I tested the voltage. I listened for the breathing of the men in their cells. I do not believe in a reckoning, but in the heart of this prison I knew I was tempting fate. I was a murderer and a thief, unshackled, with hands that smelled of orange oil.
Until the ferry took me back to the mainland, and I climbed back into the aeroplane, and I flew away, I kept waiting for a voice that would say, Hello, Dr Theremin. A voice that was barbed. It would lead me to a cell. I would lie in my cot, counting hours, until the day I died.
It is different, here on this ship. Here I allow myself to miss you, Clara. To remember every part. I cannot leave my room. Food is brought to me by a stranger. But this journey will not be long. Soon we will arrive at a port whose signs are in my mother tongue. The sailors will unlock my cabin and I will walk the gangplank into Russia, my homeland, where I can enact every dream, if I wish to, and I can openly serve a noble cause. All good things will come, somehow. It is the first law of thermodynamics. Nothing is destroyed.
BOTH OF THE KARLS had notebooks out.
“Centimetres or inches?” asked the one with a moustache.
“Inches,” I replied. My hands were palms down on the table.
“How high?”
“Six inches.”
They nodded. They were taking these figures down — the dimensions of the mufflers used in Douglas O-43 monoplanes, on contract to the United States Army Air Corps. I was providing Douglas with altimeter prototypes; in the course of this work, I acquired certain aeroplane plans.
The Karl with the beard scrutinized me. “Are you certain of these measurements?”
“Yes.”
“You are not even consulting notes.”
I nodded in agreement.
“How do you remember the measurements?”
“By remembering,” I said.
The Karls did not smile.
One of them took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. His eyes flicked down its length. There was a long pause.
“Lev, do you wish to stay in the United States?”
I raised my eyes in surprise.
“Yes,” I said.
“There is a visa issue,” he said.
“Can it be resolved?”
Karl pursed his lips.
“I have much more work to do for our country,” I said.
The men exchanged a look. Finally one of them said: “Do you have a woman?”
“A woman?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” I replied, defensively, reflexively. I clasped my hands in my lap.
“Then get married,” said the Karl with the beard. “It would make matters much easier.”
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.”