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me Pash,” Pash said. He smacked me on the shoulder. He said, “We are two men at the beginning of our careers.”
    He asked me if I wanted to hear a song. I did not know what to say. “What kind of song?” I said.
    “Your kind of song.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He hit the switch on the side of the theremin.
DZEEEEOOOoo
. I took a step back. I had never met another thereminist before. I had thought there were no other thereminists. He waggled his fingers like a magician.
    He played Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan.” It was as if a stranger was lifting a pen to a clean white piece of paper and replicating my signature. I could not move. This time “The Swan” did not sound melancholy or serene; it sounded mortal. Like something that will die.
    “Well?” he asked when he was finished. He had ruffled black hair, pale eyes; he played without vibrato.
    I was still in shock. “When did you learn?”
    “Sometime between seeing you perform for the second and third times.”
    I did not ask him which organization had obtained one of my devices for him to practise on. I asked him simply who he was.
    “I am your temporary friend,” he said.
    In America, Pash was my accompanist. But behind closed doors he remained the man who gave me papers to sign, who interrogated me about whose hands I had shaken and how forcefully, who mucked about with seals and photographs and cheques and who announced one evening, just as we were polishing off two bowls of apricot compote, that he had extended our visas.
    “How long?” I asked.
    “Six months,” he said, swallowing. “Aren’t you going to thank me?”
    Katia would not have thanked him. She would have stared at him with her gaze like drawing pins. Our parting had been so stilted it was almost theatre. I wondered how I would tell her I was staying. I wondered what Sasha was working on, with Ioffe, in Leningrad. I imagined them staying late at the laboratory, graphing the curves of new data, uncovering secrets of space and air, becoming closer, like father and son, while I rummaged in the pockets of America.

    IN THE SUMMER OF 1928, I opened the first Theremin Studio at New York’s Plaza Hotel, on West 59th Street. When I moved in, the suite consisted of a pair of bedrooms, a kitchen, a study, a dining room and a parlour. The place was full of air, well ventilated, like small gusts of wind were moving through the rooms. Everything was mauve, from the wallpaper to the lampshades. I could step to the bay window and see into Central Park, watch the swarms of insects that rose up from the woods at sunset.
    Pash insisted that my home be my workspace: the personal and professional hidden behind the same heavy curtains. I used the study as my primary research site, an array of hanging wiresand whirring instruments, manuals piled on the floor as they arrived from Leningrad. The dining room became our storage area: we set our plates on top of theremin cabinets, used the cypresses as a buffet. I stripped the apartment’s largest closet, a walk-in pantry off the kitchen, of shelves, then nailed an etching of Leung Jan to the wall—an old man, kicking the sky. I used it as my private kwoon, twice and thrice daily, lunging into the corners where a previous tenant had piled potato sacks. I had intended to keep the parlour free for receiving guests, but its large size made it the place for real tinkering. Pash would arrive most nights before midnight, carrying an attaché case like a cake box in both hands, with papers to sign. I would be on hands and knees in the parlour, wrestling with a mechanism, grease congealing in the mauve carpet. The chandelier glimmered above us. This was America.
    I slept in the second bedroom, in its king-sized bed. On one night table I had a jar filled with nuts and bolts. On the other, I had a jar of screwdrivers. The top shelf of my armoire held wire. I kept the most important electrical equipment piled under the window. Every morning I woke up, opened my eyes,