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on January 24. I performed in the Plaza Hotel’s ballroom for scientists, academics, journalists and the rich. Many of the attendees’ names were familiar from Pash’s quizzes: Edsel Ford, Charles S. Guggenheimer, Vincent Astor. I spent much of the evening hiding from Szigeti behind piles of oysters, wedged into corners by Mr Downes from the
Times
or Mr Klein from the
Evening Post
. At the demonstration, Sergei V. Rachmaninoff and Arturo Toscanini sat in the same row, and my eyes were drawn to the composers’ faces. These faces were grim. I watched them as I played Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Offenbach’s “Musette.” From all around—gasps, murmurs, applause. But Rachmaninoff and Toscanini did not smile, did not yawn. They were imagining, I am certain, the chopping and splintering of ten thousand cellos, violins, and trumpets, rendered obsolete by the theremin’s ethereal tone.
    Later, outside the ballroom, the composers greeted me like an old friend. Rachmaninoff called the performance “singular.” Toscanini said it was “magnificent.” Yet in both men’s voices there was this faint faraway tremor, the shiver of men who are shaking hands with their executioner.
    I spent much of the next three months on tour: deep winter in Cleveland, Akron, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago. Back to New York, where I removed my mittens and made my first appearance at Carnegie Hall. For every demonstration, I brought three or four different devices as well as the Y-shaped loudspeakersI call the cypresses, for their shape. I usually began with an introduction to electric conductivity, passing current through solutions in large crystal bowls. Charged with electricity, the acid chromate changed from summer orange to emerald green; the tourmaline pink permanganate solution went instantly as clear as glass. My apothecary vials were like a jeweller’s cache.
    I also rigged up a basic music-stand theremin whose antennas are hidden within the stand itself, invisible. (Although the instrument’s sensitivity is dramatically reduced, it’s an elegant illusion.) I brought my illumovox, with its spinning wheel of coloured slides, and set it beside an electric lantern at the foot of the stage, tilted up like a footlight. When connected to a theremin, it responds according to movements around the pitch antenna. As the music changes, the illumovox whirs, colour wheel spinning, and throws different shades of light onto the player’s face. The low notes are bathed in burgundies, the highs in glimmering grass greens.
    Throughout this early tour, I was frustrated by one unavoidable fact: there were just two thereminists in all of North America—Pash and me. We would roll into town with a small truck full of devices and yet I was forced to work with traditional accompanists—pianists and string quartets. The music was fine, certainly, but I was hampered by a lack of human resources. Pash’s itinerary did not allow me to pause and recruit theremin pupils, let alone to train them.
    He planned it this way, I think, because he liked being on stage. Pash was a manic-depressive spy, shunning and craving the spotlight. He could spend all week slinking in alleyways, in telephone boxes, but come Friday night he would put on his tuxedo and stride into the clouds of applause. He would introduce himself as Julius, or Yuri, or George, or Goreff, or Goldberg. I still called him Pash. Depending on whom we were speakingto, he was variously my business partner, my assistant, my friend, my cousin, or my ambiguous “liaison.”
    I do not know who taught Pash to play the theremin. I suppose he taught himself. The day we met, in Berlin, he already knew. I arrived in the cavernous basement of the Deutsche Oper, celestes and concertinas under heavy canvas sheets, and there was a man in a chocolate-brown suit leaning on one of my space-control devices. His grin sparkled in the electric lights. The man from the consulate didn’t seem to want to touch him. “Call