When he finished, Lenin lowered his hands.
The theremin wailed and screamed. I dashed in to silence the device as Lenin yelped and everyone laughed, and he shook his head with a mixture of embarrassment and self-satisfaction. There was a twinkle in his eye, maybe in everyone’s eyes, that comes from a moment that is ridiculous and excellent. “I didn’t know you had been practising,” Nikolayev said.
Lenin stayed behind when the others went out for medianyky, slices of melon. He peered inside the theremin’s cabinet, asked me questions about the circuits. He wanted to know if controls like the theremin’s could be used to manipulate an automobile or a telephone. He had ideas I had never even considered: that devices like these could be used by men who had injuries to their hands, soldiers or farmers. “The most powerful application of electricity is not for the strong,” Lenin said. “It’s for the weak.”
Soon we were discussing prostheses — artificial arms and legs, even an artificial heart, powered through the air. “The body itself is electric,” I explained. “Our neurons, our brains—”
“Like vacuum tubes,” Lenin said.
He asked me about my other projects; we discussed chemistry, physics, astronomy. If my laboratory needed any assistance, he said, I should contact him. “And we must show these inventions to the people.”
It was so easy to talk to this man, to ask and answer as Lenin’s gaze darted, as he nodded and considered. It was not as if we were friends, but perhaps like old partners, colleagues. Like comrades.
Before I left, at the doorway to his office, Lenin took my hands in his.
“I said earlier that our minds are like vacuum tubes.”
“Yes.”
“We must remember, Comrade Termen: they are more than this.”
It was the first and last time I saw him.
TWO WEEKS LATER, I received an envelope in the mail. Lydia F. had written my name and address in her unadorned hand. Lenin had sent me a Mandat—a card entitling the bearer to unrestricted travel on all of Russia’s railways. It carried a letter with his signature. Go out, he said in his note. Show your works in Archangelsk, Kem and Samara. I was instructed to lead a scientific tour, bringing electricity to the people.
Two months later, in May 1922, he suffered his first stroke.
On the night of January 22, 1924, I was working late at the institute. I had travelled by rail to Pskov, Minsk and Yaroslavl, showing the people my inventions. I had come home. The sky was inky in the windows. A charwoman appeared in the laboratory doorway.
She said, “Lenin is dead.”
She was ashen.
“What?”
“Lenin is dead.”
My mouth closed and opened. I felt as if winter had been let into the room. She held up a sheaf of newsprint. A drawing of his face, partly in shadow, bordered in black.
“Last night,” she said.
I put my hands flat on the bench. “Thank you,” I said. My eyes watered. The laboratory was quiet except for the buzz from one of the machines.
That night, instead of sleeping, I devised a plan to bring Lenin back to life. It was based on ideas I had had for years. We would freeze his body; we would perfect our techniques until we could repair the organs that had failed. I read and reread the reports of his death. His heart, his brain. We would proceed in a careful, considered fashion. In the morning I rang Rem Sarevko, a former graduate student who now lived in Gorky, where Lenin had expired. “We must save his body,” I said. “You must go to the place they are keeping him and explain.”
“It’s impossible,” Sarevko said.
“You are mistaken.”
But they had already removed his brain, Sarevko told me. They had cut open Lenin’s head and ripped out his mind and put it in a jar, covering it in poison, in alcohol.
“Why would they do this?” I asked.
“They wish to preserve it,” Sarevko said.
ON THE TRAIN THAT brought me from Butyrskaya prison to Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast, we were loaded like dead animals. They had brought us to the railway in a supply truck marked BREAD. The train car was wrapped in razor wire. They ordered us inside, told us to lie down on three stinking shelves. When no one else could fit, they sealed the door. We lay in darkness. We lay forever, as if in a mass grave. At last, with a sickly sway, the train began to move. A pale light bulb clicked and went on. Around me, several men began to cry.
We were going east, across the entire country, through Omsk and Irkutsk, under mountain and over desert, past Ulan Bator, past China’s northern wilderness, forever, to the edge.
For thirty-eight days the rails went clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack and then we reached the sea and things got much worse.
They use boats to take prisoners to Kolyma. These boats are the most terrible places in the entire world. I did not know they would be terrible. I did not know the train would be worse than the prison, that I would ride for five thousand miles in thirst and suffocation, in a car of dying men. I did not know that the transit camp, Vtoraya Rechka, would be worse than the train, that I would squat in the dirt under sheer searing sunlight with ten thousand prisoners, ringed by dogs; that in Vtoraya Rechka you would be shot for standing, shot in the stomach, and dogs with red mouths would lap at your intestines. I did not know that the boats would be worse than the camp, that they are the most terrible places in the entire world. I left the mainland gladly, gliding away from Vtoraya Rechka’s wild, roaming cruelty. I thought I was leaving the gangs and the human, inhuman screams. Rifles pointed us up the gangways and onto the cargo ship and, through my wracking thirst, I was glad. I thought I was fleeing something. I was not fleeing anything. I was being poured down a horror’s maw.
Lenin’s Mandat was one of the items taken from me when I arrived at Butyrskaya prison. Just a piece of card. If it was not burned, it is in Moscow somewhere, with a handful of buttons. May his memory be illuminated.
The steamer Tovarishch Stalin was originally an American vessel. It was covered in painted English words, PORT, AFT, DANGER, messages from a different time. The deck was mopped clean. There were little platforms for men and machine guns. A hatch led down to the hold. That is where the guards took us. At least a thousand prisoners pointed into the darkness. Because of the smell, several people began to vomit. There was very little air. The walls were slick wet metal or slimy grille, splitting the hold into sections. Already, experience had taught us habits: most of us sat or lay on the ground, setting out personal space. The floor was smeared with pitch, mud, feces, and vomit. More and more people were forced into the hold. We spread our legs, so other people could sit in front of us. We could hear the sound of men and women throwing up. There were no women in my section of the hold but you could hear them through the grille. As my eyes accustomed to the darkness I also realized that there was an upper level, a row of plank bunks raised over the floor. The zeks on these bunks did not look like the other men. They were urki—professional criminals. Prisoners like us, human cargo, but allowed to rule the camps. Power and deprivation turned these men into animals: cruel, powerful creatures, with tattoos on their chests. As I squinted in the darkness I watched an urka unfasten his belt and begin masturbating. He ejaculated onto the prisoners below. The journey from Vladivostok to Nagayevo took eight days. During this time, the urki spat and urinated onto those of us who sat on the floor. When we complained, they spilled down buckets of shit, fish heads, threats. I watched as a group of urki grinned under their peaked caps, nodding to one another, and slipped down like silverfish to steal a man’s coat, his boots, to break his collarbone.