The Russian Interpreter

by Michael Frayn

  And I don’t think I would recognize the city. For one thing a little man on a bicycle has evidently been round covering up the Soviet street names that I knew with the ones they’d had long before I was born, Gorky Street included (now Tverskaya again). The old Moscow that I tried to give some picture of in this book was part of my own past as well as Russia’s, and, as everyone says, you can’t go back.

  Except, perhaps, in a novel.

  MICHAEL FRAYN

  1

  Manning’s old friend Proctor-Gould was in Moscow, and anxious to get in touch with him. Or so Manning was informed. He looked forward to the meeting. He had few friends in Moscow, none of them old friends, and no friends at all, old or new, in Moscow or anywhere else, called Proctor-Gould.

  All the same, Proctor-Gould was beginning to seem familiar. Chylde, at the Embassy, who sometimes used to invite Manning to the sad cocktail parties which he and his wife gave for the British community, had met him. So had one of the Reuters people, and Pylny, a walrus-moustached old man who edited an English-language propaganda sheet, and frequented Western visitors with dogged wistfulness. They all said that Proctor-Gould had large brown eyes, and kept pulling his ear as he talked. They would demonstrate, and try to recall him to Manning’s mind, and as they demonstrated they would smile, as if the picture of him they had before their minds was somehow a little touching. They knew he was staying at the Hotel National and that he was in Moscow on business. But with none of them had he left any message for Manning to contact him.

  He came closer. One morning Hurwitz said he had seen him. Hurwitz, a shambling bio-chemist from Czechoslovakia, had the room next to Manning in Sector B, the wing reserved for foreigners in the university skyscraper on the Sparrow Hills. He came into Manning’s room in his pyjama-trousers, cleaning his teeth and spattering specks of toothpaste over Manning’s walls and carpet.

  ‘Saw an old friend of yours last night,’ he said, his curious Czech Russian made more indistinct by bared teeth and toothbrush.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Manning. He and Hurwitz did not get on very well. Manning lived with almost fanatical tidiness, trying to create around himself a small stronghold of order in the vast confusion of Russia. Hurwitz and his habits were part of the confusion, and the two worlds overlapped disagreeably in the bathroom, which they had to share.

  ‘He was at the desk here when I came in last night,’ said Hurwitz. ‘You weren’t in, so of course they wouldn’t let him through.’

  He went out of the room, spat into the basin, and returned.

  ‘He couldn’t speak Russian,’ he said. ‘We tried in German, but he couldn’t say much. Anyway, he asked me to give you this.’

  He handed Manning a business card, now spattered with toothpaste and soggy from Hurwitz’s wet fingers. On it was printed in Cyrillic characters:

  Gordon Proctor-Gould M.A. (Cantab.)

  Manning looked at it with distrust. Why did his old friend Gordon Proctor-Gould have a Russian visiting card? Why had he not written any message on it?

  ‘I think your friend had something wrong with his ear,’ said Hurwitz. ‘He kept pulling it, like this – poum, poum.’

  ‘Yes. Anyway, thanks.’

  ‘There was a girl with him. He had his arm round her. She was crying.’

  After Hurwitz had gone Manning sponged the spots of toothpaste off the carpet and set off for work. Gloomily, he walked along the miles of blue-carpeted corridors, down the triumphal staircases, and across the echoing marble foyers. The Proctor-Gould business was typical, he thought. Everything in Moscow was like this – unnecessarily complicated, never more than half-explained. The simplest of life’s arrangements had to be heaved into place against the gravitational pull of indifference and muddle. There were always two left shoes, and one finger too many to go in the holes of the glove. He felt, as he often did, that he would like to lie down, exhausted.

  Outside, when at last he got outside, the complexity increased. It was a brilliant day; the last of the snow had melted almost everywhere. The mild, wet winter had collapsed suddenly into the first marvellous warmth that sometimes precedes the spring. Manning felt suspicious; not even the winters were unambiguous and straightforward.

  He crossed the great empty plaza in front of the university, watched impassively by the gigantic gimcrack statues thirty floors above of women grasping hammers and cog-wheels. Everything seemed enormous and out-of-scale, like one’s fingers ballooning beneath one’s touch in a fever. Beyond the plaza, in the formal vista of the ornamental gardens, solitary pedestrians moved like bedouin, separated from one another by Saharas of empty brown flower-bed and drying tarmacadam. They were so small they seemed to be merely an infestation. The authorities should have put human-being powder down and got rid of them.

  He walked through the gardens. The air was mild. On the marble benches here and there the old women gardeners lay asleep in the sun, their rakes and forks propped up beside them. Manning found the sight of them curiously moving.

  There were more of them beside the little white church at the far end of the vista, stretched out on the wet grass itself. The church stood on the very lip of the high ground. Beyond it, the grass slopes and birch woods dropped steeply away, down to the great flashing silver arc of the river, and beyond, as if caught and contained by that long meander, the cathedrals, skyscrapers, parks, stadiums, and smoking factory chimneys of Moscow. Manning gazed at it. God, it was an intolerable city! And yet his feelings about it were never entirely simple. On the river below two dazzlingly white steamers were passing each other in midstream. A train with a thousand trucks shunted slowly across the south of the city, puffing brilliant snowballs of smoke up into the sunshine. The evocative railway sounds came and went distantly in the breeze.

  Manning thought of summer, and tears of longing pricked at his eyes. He thought of long journeys, and drinks at tables in the sun, and girls with white silk scarves over their piled hair, and slight cotton dresses over their delectable sunburnt bodies. He would go away somewhere. He would fall in love. Yes, this summer without fail he would have an affair with a sunburnt girl in a white cotton dress, who looked at him sometimes with troubled eyes, and held his hand against her face….

  2

  A great morning for the comedians on the underground.

  ‘Don’t squeeze me like that, comrades,’ begged a small man caught in the crowd that packed aboard the train at Frunzenskaya. ‘I’m not an accordion.’

  ‘For God’s sake stop groaning, then,’ said the large man who was pinning him against the doors.

  Some days it was comedians. Some days everyone was reading serious books. Manning had to commute because he worked in one of the Faculties which had still not been moved out of the centre of the city for interment in that vast mausoleum on the Sparrow Hills. He had a brief moment of panic when his brief-case, which contained the precious fragments of his thesis, ‘The Experience of Decentralization in the Administration of Public Utilities’, became trapped on the far side of two more comedians, and was almost torn out of his grasp. It was a painful and frightening thought, which came to him from time to time, that the only tangible evidence for his eighteen months’ hard labour in the city might somehow disappear before his eyes, like water into sand. It made him feel protective towards it. However unattractive it seemed, he would cherish it and feed it up and watch it grow to maturity. It looked like being his life’s work. He had given birth to it at Cambridge, nursed it for a year at the London School of Civic Studies, brought it to Moscow for its health. But it was still poorly. Next year he would take it away to somewhere with a warm climate – Berkeley, perhaps, or Accra. It was a terrible burden, a sickly thesis. But when at last it had grown up and become a Ph.D. perhaps it would keep him in his old age.

  He got out at Lenin Library, and walked up Mokhovaya Street into Manyezh Square, a vast parade ground without a parade. Tiny buses and taxis performed their evolutions in the sunshine, almost lost in the great distances. Flocks of pi
geons fluttered, settled, and strutted about the central provinces of the asphalt plain, and beyond it the dark red walls of the Kremlin rose like a remote range of mountains. At the edge of these wastes the pavement was crowded. Authorized peddlars sold ice-cream, kvass, hot pies. A man in a stained blue suit tottered towards Manning, his arms hanging down, his eyes closed. He opened them at the last moment, saw Manning, and stopped. Then he took a pace backwards, side-stepped elaborately, tripped over the low wall in front of the History Faculty, and fell through the hedge. He stayed down, invisible but for his boots, which stuck out motionless over the pavement. No one paid any attention to him.

  Manning turned up a narrow private alley between a postcard stall and a hot-pie concession. It led into a yard which was surrounded irregularly by the backs of buildings and occupied by two large wooden sheds and a stack of logs for the furnaces. Here the sun scarcely penetrated, and the walk were wet with long-stored winter moisture.

  In one corner of the yard was a door, painted a blistered chocolate brown. The upper half of the door was glazed with dusty panes, and the small brass handle drooped in-effectually, worn loose and shiny over the years. Next to the door was fixed a plaque with old-fashioned gilt lettering on a shiny black background which announced:

  FACULTY OF ADMINISTRATIVE-MANAGEMENT SCIENCES

  The sign was cracked from top to bottom.

  Manning went in, and the heavy door slipped from his fingers behind him and slammed shut with a crash which rattled all the panes of glass in their crumbling putty. The inner door escaped from him, too, and crashed shut in its turn. In the corridor just inside was a sour-faced old woman sitting on a broken chair, her thick glasses askew, her hands tucked into her sleeves. Manning tried, as he always did, to walk straight by her.

  ‘Pass,’ she demanded, as she always did.

  ‘You know me,’ said Manning.

  ‘I don’t know anyone.’

  Manning fumbled in his pocket, sighing to indicate his irritation. Once he had shouted at her each time he came in. Now he had been worn down to mere sighs.

  ‘Someone came looking for you last night,’ said the old woman, while she waited to find out who Manning was.

  ‘An Englishman?’

  ‘How should I know? He didn’t speak Russian.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Chased him off. He hadn’t got a pass.’

  He showed her his university identity card, and walked up the bare wooden stairs to the first floor. The fourth, fifth, seventh, and eleventh stairs creaked as he trod on them. The building was alive with the quiet academic noise of Admin-Uprav at work. There was the uninterrupted monotone of one lecturer – Ginsberg, no doubt, on labour law; the little rushes and hesitations of another, Rubeshchenskaya, the Professor of Social Statistics, who could never manage to work out her statistical examples on the board; the relentless, steady pulse of Korolenko, the Dean of the Faculty, giving his well-known lecture on the Essential Attributes of the Soviet Administrator. There was the shuffling of feet on bare boards. Respectful laughter, needling laughter, and pervading everything, the Admin-Uprav smell, the weary, ancient smell of weak cabbage soup and greasy pirozhki, filtering up from the canteen in the basement.

  Certainly I must get away, thought Manning. Perhaps I could afford to go to Finland for a few days? I wonder if they’d let me? He tried to recall the brownness of the limbs he had visualized on the Sparrow Hills, and the slightness of the cotton dresses which scarcely seemed to hide them. But they eluded him. There was no direct daylight on the staircases and in the corridors of Admin-Uprav. You couldn’t have told that outside it was the first warm day of the year.

  3

  In the untidy little office on the first floor, beneath the portrait of Lenin with the brown stain gradually spreading outwards from the bottom left-hand corner, sat Sasha Zaborin. He looked up even before Manning was through the door, his quick, sensitive face already giving every possible care and attention to whomever it might turn out to be. When he saw it was Manning he smiled. It was a warm, anxious, parental smile.

  ‘Paul,’ he said. ‘You’re late. I thought you were going to Romm’s lecture this morning?’

  ‘I went for a walk in the sun instead.’

  ‘That must have been pleasant.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Sasha.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologize to me, Paul. It was for your good I recommended it, not mine.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  They spoke English together. Sasha spoke English at least as well as Manning spoke Russian, and he felt it was his duty to insist on putting himself out rather than the university’s guest. He was a youngish man, only a few years older than Manning. He was tall, with a high forehead topped by a sparse crop of dry, dark hair which never lay down, and which had blown into a complex tangle in the wind on the way to the Faculty. There were lines of habitual conscientiousness at the corners of his eyes. He looked like a dark, anxious Eisenstein. It was easy, for that matter to imagine him wearing a cassock, and striding through some poverty-stricken parish surrounded by adoring small children. Manning sometimes called him Father Zaborin, a joke which he didn’t much like.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Sasha, ‘how’s it going?’

  ‘Not all that well.’

  ‘No? What’s wrong?’

  Manning put his brief-case down and went across to the window. He gazed out at the familiar sight – a wall, streaked with long tongues of damp like dangling vegetation, bisected by a drain-pipe as wide as a dust-bin which dribbled continuously into the mud floor of a little courtyard. You could just see the blue sky if you put your face next to the glass and craned your neck round.

  ‘I don’t know. General dissatisfaction with life.’

  ‘You’re easily dissatisfied, Paul. But on a day like this, when you can almost feel summer in the air …’

  ‘It brings it on.’

  ‘Paul, you must realize that your dissatisfaction is not an objective phenomenon. It is a subjective state which you can control if you really want to. After all, a man is master of himself. Remember Bazarov. “He who scorns his suffering inevitably conquers it.’”

  ‘And look what happened to him – he died.’

  There was a silence, and Manning, turning from his study of the dribbling drainpipe in the courtyard, found that Sasha was gazing at him in a special worried way. He had suspected it.

  ‘You’re concerned about me again, aren’t you, Sasha?’

  ‘I can’t help being a little anxious at times, Paul. I feel that these unconstructive moods of yours must affect your work. And naturally I feel that they are to some extent a reflection on myself.’

  ‘Now, Sasha, don’t start all that again.’

  ‘I know it’s not entirely easy, living in a foreign country. It’s up to me to make you feel happy here.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, Sasha. It’s not up to you – it’s up to me. All you have to do is leave me in peace, and not fuss, fuss, fuss around all the time.’

  ‘Paul, you were feeling out of sorts when you walked through that door!’

  ‘Well, now I’m feeling worse.’

  Sasha went on gazing anxiously at Manning. Then he smiled.

  ‘I prescribe more relaxation. I’ll get us some seats for the theatre.’

  Manning felt like a spoiled child. He would have liked to stamp his foot.

  ‘I don’t want to go to the theatre,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing but rubbish to see.’

  Sasha was hurt. His whole face tensed for a moment before, as Bazarov recommended, he scorned his suffering and mastered it, and forgave Manning. He was always hurt by Manning’s contempt for national institutions of which he had been taught to be proud. Once he had been unable to bring himself to speak to Manning for two days because Manning, irritated by some skirmish with the bureaucracy, had told him that pigs were treated with more respect in England than men in Russia. In the end, his eyes full of a special bewilderment with which he
sometimes softened the pain, he had told Manning: ‘It’s just not true, Paul. In the Soviet Union a man feels he is needed, which is the greatest respect that anyone can be paid.’

  Now he suggested a concert.

  ‘I don’t want to go to a concert, either,’ said Manning. ‘I want to get away from Moscow for a bit.’

  ‘All right. I’ll organize something. Perhaps we could go to Zagorsk again. Or if the weather stays as warm as this it might be possible to take a picnic up the Oka.’

  ‘I want to get right out of the country. I want to go to Finland for a week.’

  ‘What – now?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘I don’t know whether that could be arranged, Paul. Why not wait until the summer vacation? I don’t know what the committee would say about your leaving the country now.’

  ‘You could ask them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’d do whatever you recommended. You could let me off the leash for a bit.’

  Sasha looked more anxious than ever,

  ‘You see, Paul,’ he said, ‘I’m personally responsible for you to the committee. I’m responsible for seeing that your research goes well while you are in our country. Now, it’s not true to say that I keep you on a leash. You are perfectly free. I ask only that you give me some account of where you have been, and that you consult me before you make any major trips. Isn’t that the truth?’

  It was close to the truth. Manning let his annoyance expire in a long sigh. It was very difficult to complain of the way Sasha treated him. He felt ashamed of himself for returning all Sasha’s kindness and thoughtfulness with ungrateful petulance.