Sound 7
I havenât done any public-facing work on this in some time, but Iâm still very much in the middle of writing a sequel to Soon. Hereâs a piece of it. When last we checked in on our intrepid Russian translator and her beloved violinist (and child), it was 1963, and they were finding their shared life in New York rewarding in many ways, while difficult to negotiate in othersâwhich, I must say, describes my own feelings about this project. Writing is sometimes like pushing an overloaded sled in the weight room: if you can budge it a yard, thatâs a victory. This maybe moves Sound along less than a foot, but even so. (No links to the other parts of Sound, or to Soon, but the former are findable here on Tumblr and the latter is both here and, in improved version, on AO3.)
Sound 7
1964
The device is crafted to appear innocuous.
It hides inside a dictating machine, a Philips, the newest model. The machine works just fine, both while concealing the device and not, and Myka has to learn to use it; she has to commit to it, so that its presence in her possession will appear natural. She finds that she likes recording her thoughts this way, though sheâs embarrassed by how awful she sounds when she plays it back; even at normal speed, her voice is pitched higher than she ever imagined. Has she heard herself like this before? Sheâs listened to so many peopleâs speaking voices on tapeâRussian-speaking voices, back in those daysâbut never her own.
Christina is fascinated by the Philips and begs to dismantle it. Helena wrinkles her nose at its sound quality: she complains of a high hiss and tells Myka she can find her a far better piece of equipment if she is committed to making notes in this way.
Myka has kept from Helena the real reason she has taken up dictation.
She tries a fast translation of a page of the text sheâs working on now, Bryusovâs âV zerkaleâââIn the Mirrorââby reading Cyrillic on the page, then speaking it in English into the machine. Itâs difficult to keep from simply reading the Russian aloud, so she imagines it spoken in someone elseâs voice, leaving her to translate simultaneously, UN-style. She tries Helenaâs voice... too distracting. Her grandfatherâs and grandmotherâs are too familiar, and thus untranslatable. Lullabies. Max? He has a lovely voice, but the problem with imagining him speaking is that she senses him also whispering his own translation right along with himself, and thatâs no help. She settles on a departmental colleague, a native Russian speaker whom she knows not well but well enough; his quiet, measured tones turn out to be Goldilocks-correct. âHeâ reads her the Bryusov story, and she tells it to the machine: âI have loved mirrors from my very earliest years...â
Sheâd been baffled when Abigail first handed her the machine and explained what it contained, for she couldnât imagine she knew anyone Abigail would possibly have an interest in bugging. Myka doesnât have that kind of access, and she certainly doesnât have the expertise needed to secure this thing in place and make sure it works. Or the nerve, she tells herself, but while that might have been true in the past, she isnât sure itâs true now. She feels a certainty in herself when she goes to Russia now. This reason, this deal sheâs made, it defines her. Itâs a mission, a discipline. Like Helena practicing her violin, though Myka doesnât know what the honing of her nerve is preparing her for. What her performance will be.
âYou arenât planting it,â Abigail had told her. âAnd anyway itâs just a piece. Youâre passing it along.â
Mykaâs flicker of disappointment at this news frightened her.
She practices taking the Philips apart, removing the device, hiding it on her person, and putting the recorder back together again: quickly, silently. Itâs useful to need to keep this activity from Christina, though equating Christina with KGB, even in this little way, makes Myka morally queasy.
Myka knows KGB officers listen to the hotel rooms that she and other foreigners stay in; she knows her movements are tracked; she knows that everyone to whom she speaks might be an informer. She doesnât know how much time sheâll have when the moment comes to hand over the equipment, and she doesnât know where it will happen.
âWhy canât I just carry it on me?â she asks Abigail. âThe thing itself?â
âThis is safer. Trust me.â The donât ask why wall in Abigailâs voice: whatever she knows about what might happen to Mykaâarrest, search, worse?âMyka will need not to know itâs coming. Abigail has told her in the past that an expression of genuine surprise is difficult to fake, and similarly hard for other humans to dismiss.
âOh,â Abigail also says, offhand but not, âyou may run into someone you know. Donât react.â
Be surprised; donât be surprised.
****
The session is intended to produce a simple demo.
Helena is in the hallway just outside the booth when she hears the sound engineer take a call. She is about to leave for the day; she has just checked in, on that very telephone, with her booking service, but nothing other than the brief rehearsal she just attended is scheduledânot a surprise, here on this relatively quiet Saturday morning.
âHey, H.G.!â the engineer calls to her. âWant some more practice?â
She takes the phone from him. The bleary voice of Ben Cone, in whose booth she had lately sat while he produced a song that swiftly hit number three in the nation, tells her that he is supposed to be putting together a demo, but his hangover is too fierce; can she fill in? He knows she knows what to do, he says, and anyway, itâs just a demo. Everybody should be there in a half hour or so, bye. Oh, but sheâll have to find her own singer; his passed out only a couple hours ago, still sleeping it off. In no shape, you know?
She thinks of Rudy Lewis: âIâm your man for demo vocals,â heâd told her, years ago. âDonât you call nobody else.â His sugar voice. She would have called him; he would have done it. Cruel of fate to hand her this chance, so short a time after... well. She should not dwell on that, not now.
But then she does think about it, when the songâs writer, who shows up to play piano on the trackâwhereâs Ben; hung over; no surpriseâhands her the music.
The song is titled âIâll Pass.â âItâs simple,â he says. âJust a âthanks a lot but no thanksâ lyric.â
Helena canât discern his real intent here, for the lyric strikes her as... multilayered. The verses suggest that the singerâs beloved finds the singer inadequate, inappropriate, in response to which, the singer says in the refrain, âIâll pass, baby; Iâll pass.â A rejection? Or a sincere, bleak promise to show a different self to the world? Rudy would have sung it with the full range of meanings right there to be heard. But it isnât Helenaâs job to care about the meanings. Itâs her job to produce a demo.
She is to do it with this songwriter-pianist, plus a guitarist, a drummer, a bassist... and a young saxophonist. Helena tries to send the latter home, but he says he needs the money. He says also that he would be happy to play anything she wants, if saxophones arenât her bag, so she hands him a triangle from a box of orphan percussion and regrets to inform that the middle eight will not belong to him after all. He looks at the triangle, looks at her, pronounces this the screwiest session heâs ever seenâhow many can he possibly have seen?âand then starts asking about when to ring, when to muffle, how much shimmer, and is there a brass beater anywhere in this studio because everybody knows the sound from stainless is too cold. (Helena takes his name and his number and files them away for the future.)
The musicians run through loose takes, tight takes; Helena likes the loose takes, despite the songwriter hitting an off note or several. Itâs just a demo, and the looser renditions give a better sense of the songâs potential. She considers sitting down with them in the studio to add her violin, but thereâs no string arrangement, and inventing one, even something simple, would begin to define the song. The demo should suggest no strictures, just a loose sense of what this melody and lyric could become.
She tries calling a few vocalists, butâagain no surprise for a Saturdayâshe canât find anyone, and no singer she knows well is in the building, so she asks each of the musicians to try a few bars. The guitarist wins the brief talent competition, with a soar of a tenor that Helena canât believe hasnât been put on record before. (She is filing him away too.) He says nobody ever asked, that he only ever sang in churchâbut he never goes to church anymore, which vexes his mama. Further, he notes, âI canât sing and play at the same time,â and while Helena is outwardly expressing sympathy for his mother, she is also worrying about her ability, even with experienced engineering help, to lay in a vocal right on such a spare arrangement.
Can the now-trianglist take over the guitar part? âNo strings, sorry,â he says, and doesnât that just fit the day.
And indeed it isnât quite right, in the end, the way the vocal lies against the music. But Helena rationalizes it, intellectualizes itâitâs trying to pass as a right part of the track. âIâll pass, babyâ? Some can. But: for only so long. The length of a pop song, perhaps.
âI was thinking about Rudy today,â she tells Christina when she finally arrives home, far later than sheâd imagined, after the lengthy mixdown. âItâs just a demo,â the engineer had complained. âHow rough would you be on me if it was a real track?â Which had made Helena think of Phil, but that association, and its implications, were too much for an already overloaded day.
Christinaâs reaction to Rudyâs name is a quiet âoh.â
****
It had been an unremarkable day in late May, and Helena and the rest of the musicians who had assembled for a Drifters session were waiting, smoking, and growing a little irritated, for they all had additional bookings, and the more sweet time the singers and production took to arrive, the more likely the musicians were to be late for those other sessions.
Irritation turned to blank incredulity when Bert Berns, who was to produce, and the other men walked in, for Bert said, with no preliminaries, âRudy died last night.â He added, âOverdose.â
They recorded four tracks that session. Helena could not have said, afterward, what any of them were, save the final one, a song that had been intended for Rudy to sing: a ballad called âI Donât Want to Go On Without You.â Charlie sang it instead... that he could do so said something about professionalism, or shock, or both of them together.
Who, hearing any of those tracks on the radio, would discern that they were documents of grief? They would seem like the simple pop songs they were, and was that an obscenity, or was it just an extreme version of the work that pop music was designed to do?
âHow do I tell Christina?â Helena asked Myka. âWhat do I tell her?â
âI donât knowâI donât know anything. My only thought is âthe truth.ââ Myka said this as if it really was the only thought she had right then, the only thought she knew how to think about anything.
But Myka was right, so the truth was what Helena told Christina: Rudy took too many drugs, and he died. Christina asked why, and Helena thought she was asking a medical question, about what the body could and couldnât tolerate. âNo,â Christina clarified. âWhy did he want to?â
Helena did try not to lie to Christina. Shield her, but not lie to her. So she said, âI thinkââbecause she did not, in fact, knowââI think it was because he thought the world had no good place for him. He wanted a place, yet there was no place. I think that at times he wanted to let himself forget all of that. All of what surrounded him.â
Christina said a weary, âMisinformed beliefs,â and Helena could answer only with âThatâs right.â
Helena had assumed she would attend the funeral alone, but Christina asked to go, then asked if Myka would go too. But Myka said, âThatâs not a picture we should make.â At this, Christina nodded, and Helena could not hold back a small internal push of pride at that knowing assent. While Christina took great satisfaction in being far more American than Helena herself was, she was persistently British in her understanding of appearances.
They went out to buy her a black dress.
âIs it for a very special occasion?â the saleslady asked, because Christina was unsatisfied with the first three she tried.
âYes and no,â Christina told her. Helena felt the push of pride again. She looked at Myka, who wore a âwhat is she becoming?â face, and Helena wanted to take her hand and echo âI donât knowâI donât know anything,â then follow that with âBut isnât it miraculous that weâll both find out?â
That miracle meant Helena would not need to find her consolation in a needle.
The night after the service, she would have been desperate to hold any woman in the dark, but instead she was lucky enough to hold the woman she loved. âIâm sorry I wasnât there,â Myka said in that dark, the same words sheâd said to Christina in her new black dress, afterward. Sheâd also said, to Christina, âHow was it?â
Christina hadnât cried at the service, but rather sat, eyes wide, holding Helenaâs hand. She hadnât even spoken until just now, and Helena was certain that only to Myka would she have broken her silence: âThey said nice things about him,â Christina responded. Then sheâd leaned against Myka, as if to reassure, as if Myka were the one in need of comfort, and said, âNot the right nice things.â
****
Tonight, late at night, Myka clearly expects Helena to be pleased, both about having been asked to produce the track, and about having done it. Instead, Helena says a bitter, âItâs just a demo,â and she doesnât quite cry about Rudy, how he was not there but should have been, why he was not there to sing a song he should have sung.
âNothing you do is just anything,â Myka says, kissing the corners of Helenaâs almost-wet eyes.
âIt was the work of just one afternoon,â Helena says, trying to shake off the sadness, yet also irrationally resentful of how Myka makes her want to shake off the sadness. âIâll be surprised if I or anyone hears of it again.â
****
Mykaâs handoff is easy. Like this: A week into her two-week stay, her two weeks of lecturing and researching, she is reading in Moscow Universityâs library. She is heavily supervised, of course, and she has already been told that she will be gaining no access to certain authorsâ work: âSorry, not available.â (The âto youâ is implied.) The librarians are happy to hand her as many issues of Novy Mir as she wants, however, particularly since she is able to show them that she herself, Myka Bering, translator of many Russian works, was mentioned in a commentary written by its editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, in 1960. She does not point out to them that Novy Mir publishes several of those authors who are considered forbidden.
It is so easy: they do not want her to take notes, so she says, âMay I use my dictating machine?â It is such a novelty that all the librarians must come and look at it, speak into it, hear snippets of their own voices. After all that, how can they say no? Myka promises to be quiet with it, but there is really no need. The library is libraryesque only in that books are on offer.
So easy: when a man approaches the table and points at the machine, her first thought is that he, like the librarians, wants to acquaint himself with the dictating technology. Instead he says the correct code word, and Myka answers him in kind. She demonstrates the Philips for him, and he thanks her. He then sits at a table of his own, not far from hers, and proceeds to ignore her completely.
She asks to visit the ladies room, which is of course in an isolated location, and she is given one of âthe girlsââwomen who fetch books from the stacks for the mostly male scholarsâas an ostensible guide. Ostensible because no American can be left to roam unattended, yet this particular girl wants only to go outdoors and smoke cigarettes. She doesnât care in the slightest about Myka, who may be American but is just a woman, and old besides. So Myka goes into the washroom, calmly disassembles the Philips, removes the device, and puts it in the pocket of her suit jacket. She then just as calmly reassembles the machine, collects her watcher (who exhibits far more care in putting out her half-smoked cigarette, to save for later, than for her Myka-watching task), goes back to the reading room, reads and dictates for another hour, then goes to the man at his table. âI forgot to show you,â she says, âthat the machine plays back at two speeds.â She hands him the machine and the device at the same time, listens to her own voice weirdly manipulated, and then it is done.
An hour more she reads and dictates, then she prepares to depart. The librarians, and Mykaâs heedless escort who likes to smoke outdoors, wave her goodbye. She feels no need to look over her shoulder.
The summertime sidewalks of 1964 Moscow are full and bright. The weather is fine, just right for the young women to wear sundresses, for the young men to sport shirtsleeves. Their conversations are animated. They direct their eyes high, up at billboards, particularly film advertisements, and Myka tries not to read too much into the title of one: Denâ schastâya, Day of Happiness. A girl in a lime-green shift pulls at the hand of her male companion and directs his attention to an elaborate wooden model train in a shop window; they both laugh. The train carsâ colors are washed out, too long exposed to light in that window, no buyers. While such a sight would have been sad in New York, here, for the young and sundressed and laughing, Myka infers that itâs a mark of all they believe they are leaving behind. The faded past; who needs it?
On these same sidewalks, though, as if they have been imported from that faded past, an older generation walks heavier. Silent. They dress as if they must wear all they own or lose it, no matter the weather. They find no distraction in advertisements, and they donât bother with window displays. The past is always there; why be reminded?
Myka tries to remind herself, and keep in the front of her mind, that she has more in common with those who walk with weight. She is doing dangerous work. She will become careless if she forgets about risk and consequences. But a sharp lightness has come to attend her time in Russia... she keeps secrets all the time, no matter where she is, but the secret she keeps here, while she is here, is distinct: the threat of its revelation accrues to her and no one else.
The most salient secret she keeps at home is vastly different, in that its discovery would damage Myka, but reverberations from that discovery would very likely destroy Helena and Christina.
Walking down a summertime sidewalk of Moscow, responsible only for her own safety, affords Myka a guilty freedom. That such freedom should be one through which she is constantly followed and watched and listened to should be ironic, but instead it seems like part of a mistaken-identity comedy, one in which Russians have been told to follow and watch and listen to Myka Bering, but they are following and watching and listening to a person who feels free, and that cannot possibly be Myka Bering, so they are following and watching and listening to the wrong person after all. Who do they think she is?
Who does she think she is?
Her final event in Russia, a week later, is a reception for all the universityâs visiting American scholars. Myka is one of only three lecturers who have come for these two-weeks; several more have spent the entire now-concluding summer term here in exchange for some Soviets who are probably at similar receptions on U.S. campuses. Different hors dâoeuvres, same receptions. More than a few are scientists, which helps to explain the heavy presence of people at this party who are clearly not academics. Myka meets several American diplomats, most of whom are probably straightforwardly State; some, though, must be CIA under official cover. Similarly, there are some actual Soviet diplomatic eminences, but also, plenty of KGB making their power known.
Myka finds herself chatting with two junior diplomatsâor âdiplomatsââone American whose name she did not quite catch, and one Russian, his name Nikolai. Nikolai will no doubt be reporting back to his superiors everything about his American interlocutors, regardless, but in this conversation he is just a young man, dark with a softness about his mouth. âWhat is happening in New York?â he asks her, and his English is all right, nearly full-speed, but she tells him he should feel free to speak Russian with her.
âWant practice,â he demurs. But he flashes her a small smile as he does so. In that soft mouth, his teeth are wolf-white. Nikolai has never skipped out to smoke, outdoors or anywhere else. He is clean.
The American glimpses someone across the room and makes a âcome hereâ motion. Myka looks over to see who is approaching... and she understands why Abigail told her not to react. âProfessor Bering,â the American says, âand Nikolai, Iâd like to introduce you to Joseph Holden, the famous Olympic wrestler.â
Joseph has received the same instructions Myka has; he shakes her hand and says âA pleasure, professor.â Then he shakes hands with Nikolai. The clean Russian shows his wolf teeth again, more widely.
Myka does not know anything about this, whatever âthisâ might be. Her fizz of ire at Abigail for not being forthcoming is probably inappropriate and definitely fruitless in this moment, but she feels it. She looks at Joseph, who always seems to make easy situations less so, and she directs that fizz at him, too.
Myka and Joseph have one moment together during which they are unobserved, or at least less closely attended to. âWhy are you here?â she asks him, because she canât stop herself.
He laughs. âOh, Iâm finding Moscow really something,â he says, his voice fully corn-fed, but that is not the end of it. Quick, quiet, he adds, âIâm bait.â
Myka has no time or space to get more from him. Nikolai reappears, and Joseph turns back to him, his charm wide, open.
The burden of risk.
****
Myka returns home from her two weeks in Russia to find... difference. Her own blood is colder, because it always is after Russia, but also because she doesnât know the contours of the operation she brushed past. Sheâll find out soon enoughâshe wonât let Abigail fail to read her in, not on thisâbut she is still shivering.
Helena, meanwhile, is hot: her demo version of âIâll Passâ is charting.
Sheâd had no idea, she tells Myka, that the demo was being cut for Lester Sillâheâd been Philâs partner at Philles Records, but their relationship had soured. âAs it would,â Helena said, and Myka recognized that little curl of lip. Sill was now at Colpix, hungry for talent... Helena had been told that when the demo was played for him, heâd listened through, then stood up and walked out of his office. âWeâre done,â heâd said as he left. âRelease it. Itâs a hit.â Helena admits to Myka that she imaginesâworries?âthat all he had heard was some vestige of Philâs style, some oddity that Helena had unknowingly reproduced. That that was what caught his ear.
âItâs just one hit,â Helena says, as if in apology, and Myka canât understand why she isnât thrilled to have doneâon her first try!âexactly what she has always intended to do. Then Helena says, âIt was an accident.â This gives Myka clarity: Helena doesnât know how to make it happen again.
After any time in Russia, Myka is always a bit more Russian than she was before. Which is not to say that she will ever understand or feel with fullness what it is to be Russian... but some not-quite-Russian lives inside her, some unschooled child of all these: her grandfather, her grandmother, all the voices she has heard on tapes, all the words on the pages she has translated, KGB, dissidents, victims, perpetrators, even young girls in sundresses. They all wrestle for pride of place within her. Those real Russians never explain themselves, never step up and tell her, never sit her down and bleed into her bones. But those Russians, and even the not-quite-one who doesnât fill her skin, they all know: there are no accidents.
TBC















