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.
PART TWO
Twelve months of winter
The rest is summer.
ONE. UNICORN
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.
I REMEMBER I WAS once a man who conducted the ether.
I am no longer the conductor.
TWO. A PERSON ISN’T SAFE ANYWHERE THESE DAYS
WHEN I RETURNED FROM the United States, eight years ago, I found Leningrad empty. It was the end of 1938. It was a brilliant winter’s day and a huge albino sailor brought me out of my cabin, onto the deck, where the air stung my lungs. The city was like an elegant miniature. Waves skimmed the harbour. I remember seeing the embraces of unfamiliar men and hearing the sound of grinding metal, then later watching a crane hoist my crates from the ship. I remember my fear as the boxes swung in the air, so perilously high: the vision of an overcorrection, a mistake, a slipped hook. For one instant I could see them falling and then the crates would splinter against the ground, explode, all my past destroyed.