The Russian Interpreter

by Michael Frayn

  Certainly a public life sprang up around them wherever they went in Moscow. On the slightest pretext, at even quite small receptions, Proctor-Gould would make a speech. The phrases which came rolling so steadily and emphatically out on these occasions – ‘the cultural treasure-house we share’, ‘setting our barren suspicions and fears behind us’, ‘practical steps to increase our mutual confidence’ – were not exactly clichés. They were units of the public language. At first their abstraction and generality appalled Manning as he translated them. Yet he could see them have their effect on the audience – the limited effect of public language on a public audience, but an effect nonetheless. People listened and applauded with genuine respect and interest. An attempt at some more personal form of communication, conceded Manning grudgingly, might have had no effect at all without the framework of a real personal relationship to give it meaning.

  It was at an occasion of this nature that Sasha first met Proctor-Gould. A reception was being held for Proctor-Gould in a lecture-room in the History Faculty. It was early evening. The air was full of chalk dust from the blackboard, and the level rays of the setting sun through a western window cut golden swathes across it. Proctor-Gould was speaking when Manning, standing by his side on the dais translating, caught sight of Sasha’s wind-lifted tangle of hair glowing like an aureole in one of the bars of light. For a moment he stumbled in his translation. But Sasha was not looking at him. His worried eyes were fixed on Proctor-Gould, screwed up a little as though to peer through the glare of outer appearances into the dark soul within.

  After the speeches and presentations were over Manning introduced them. They gazed into each other’s sincere brown eyes, crushed each other’s hand in a mutually destructive grip, and took to each other immediately. They were evidently pleased by each other’s moral seriousness, and after a little preliminary banter, they began to speak with an unashamed earnestness which neither of them would have attempted with Manning, for whose corrupted taste they both assumed the convention of self-deflating humour.

  Afterwards the three of them went on to dinner in a restaurant. Manning felt very much the third of the three. He was not needed as an interpreter, since Proctor-Gould and Sasha were speaking English together, and he was lumbered with a large silver-plated model of the university skyscraper with which Proctor-Gould had been presented at the reception. It was he who had to drop back when there was not enough room for three abreast on the pavement, then run a couple of steps to catch up again. It was he who had to interrupt to insist that they decided on a restaurant, as the other two strode towards nowhere, completely absorbed in recalling their mutual childhood passions for stamps, railways, and wireless sets. Manning’s relief that his mentor and his employer approved of each other changed to an obscure irritation. It was as if one’s parent and one’s teacher had taken to each other too readily; a threatening coalition.

  In the restaurant the band played ‘Ochi Chorniye’, Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’, and ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’, and they had to wait an hour before they were served. Manning sank into a stupor. When he focused his attention on the conversation again, Proctor-Gould was inviting Sasha to come to England as one of his personalities.

  ‘It’s kind of you to ask me, Gordon,’ Sasha was saying. ‘But really, I’ve no distinction at all in any field of life.’

  ‘I don’t want distinguished people, Sasha. I want authentic ones.’

  ‘You mean honest people? Good people?’

  ‘That’s not the point. I want people people, to quote a phrase I’ve had occasion to use before.’

  The skin at the corners of Sasha’s eyes crumpled anxiously.

  ‘People who are in some way representative of the society they live in?’

  ‘No. People who are in some way representative of themselves.’

  They gazed at each other. Proctor-Gould was leaning forwards across the empty tablecloth, and there was a slight smile about the corners of his lips. He was enjoying Sasha’s mystification, in the way that some men enjoy mystifying women with the esoteric illogicality of masculine concepts of sport and business.

  ‘You see, Sasha,’ he explained, ‘it’s been discovered that certain people have something about them which makes them interesting to their fellow men. Some of them are unusual people – some of them are very ordinary. Some of them are liked – some of them are disliked. But whatever they do, whether it’s in character or out of character, it makes news. People feel they have some sort of relationship to them. It’s almost as if they felt the personalities were their children. One’s interested in whatever one’s children do, just because they are one’s children. Do you see?’

  Sasha ran his finger cautiously down the silver skyscraper, which stood between them on the table like a giant salt-cellar.

  ‘I can understand,’ he said, ‘that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one’s experience of life is valueless.’

  Proctor-Gould glanced at Manning.

  ‘You see it,’ he said, ‘don’t you, Paul?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Manning. ‘I suppose it’s something to do with the need to establish one’s concept of identity, by concrete examples. Is that right?’

  ‘On the right lines, anyway,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘I think it’s something that anyone in the West would understand immediately. I’m not preaching, Sasha, but in a sense our interest in personalities is the ultimate expression of our belief in respect for the individual.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sasha, ‘we have had the so-called cult of personality here….’

  ‘Our personalities are not in positions of power, Sasha. A respect for pure personality without function – that’s what we are aiming at.’

  Sasha blinked rapidly.

  ‘In this country,’ he said, ‘as I believe I once told Paul, a man feels needed. Surely to need someone is the greatest respect you can pay him?’

  ‘To need him, Sasha? To need him for some purpose? For what he can do? For the contribution he can make?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Isn’t that a rather sordid interest, Sasha? To need a man because you can make use of him is to treat him as a tool, as an object. It’s exploitation. We say that a man is to be respected not for what he can do for us, but for being the man he is.’

  ‘And you believe this of all men?’

  ‘In theory. In practice we take certain public personalities as symbols of mankind in general, and we attach our respect and interest to these representatives.’

  Sasha brooded until the soup arrived.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘the important thing is whether you’d like to come over to England yourself and let me handle you.’

  ‘You really think I’m one of your personalities?’

  ‘I think I could make you one.’

  Sasha sighed.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘I wonder. I should like to visit England. But at first sight, I must tell you frankly, being a personality in your sense seems to me a little like being a prostitute.’

  ‘A prostitute, Sasha?’

  ‘Offering my person for hire.’

  Proctor-Gould’s soup spoon had halted half-way to his mouth in astonishment at ‘prostitute’. Now he put it carefully back in the soup and fixed Sasha with his special gaze.

  ‘I honestly don’t think that’s right, Sasha,’ he said. ‘If it’s like anything, it’s like an artist offering himself to the public through his art.’

  ‘Would you agree to become a personality yourself, Gordon?’

  Proctor-Gould stared at Sasha for some moments, pulling at his ear. Then he suddenly lowered his gaze to the silver university.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘but no one’s ever asked me that before. I’ve never thought about it.’

  He gazed at the skyscraper for a long time, pulling at his ear as if he would drag it out by the roots. Sasha and Manning watched him over their soup spoons.

/>   ‘I think I would,’ he said at last. ‘I think I would. But I see it’s not an entirely straightforward choice.’

  ‘No,’ said Sasha, ‘it’s not. But your ideas are certainly interesting, Gordon. I should like my colleagues in the Faculty to meet you. Perhaps I could arrange a little dinner some time?’

  ‘I should like that, Sasha. Very much.’

  ‘Perhaps towards the end of term? Will you still be here then?’

  ‘Until June at least, Sasha.’

  ‘All right. Meanwhile I shall think about your offer.’

  Afterwards, Manning walked back with Proctor-Gould towards his hotel through the cool spring night.

  ‘You won’t get him, you know,’ said Manning.

  ‘I think I will, Paul.’

  ‘He’ll always put his obligations first.’

  ‘But what will he consider his obligations to be? He’s an ambitious man, you know.’

  ‘Ambitious?’

  ‘I think so, Paul. I should know – I am myself. That’s why we get on so well together. Anyway, we shall get that dinner out of him, if nothing else. It’s rather convenient, as a matter of fact – I have a number of messages and presents for people in your Faculty.’

  ‘You never said.’

  ‘No.’

  They were outside the Hotel National.

  ‘Will you come up for a late-night Nescafé?’ asked Proctor-Gould. Manning shook his head.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about Sasha being ambitious,’ he said, as they hesitated on the pavement. ‘But he’s a good man, you know.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Are you good, do you believe, Gordon?’

  Proctor-Gould shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It’s a question I ask myself,’ he said.

  9

  Manning fell in love, in a way. It was on a suburban train, on the Mozhaisk line, and the girl was sitting in the seat opposite him. She was not, as he had envisaged, sunburnt and wearing a slight cotton dress. She was pale, with very fair hair, and she was wearing a quilted anorak and thick trousers. So was Manning himself, and almost everybody else in the carriage. They were going on a rally or ramble organized by the Faculty Sport Club in the forest outside Moscow under Sasha’s leadership.

  ‘Which is it, Paul?’ Proctor-Gould had asked Manning when Sasha invited him. ‘A rally or a ramble?’

  ‘It depends how far they walk,’ Manning had explained gloomily. ‘If it’s over about ten kilometres it will be rather less of a rally and rather more of a ramble.’

  ‘Ten kilometres? They might go as far as that?’

  ‘Easily. It’ll be freezing cold, too, and I should think at this time of year the woods are a sea of mud.’

  Proctor-Gould had fingered his ear dubiously. Manning, anxious to avoid the occasion, had urged another drawback.

  ‘They’ll sing songs, Gordon.’

  Proctor-Gould had at once ceased to finger his ear.

  ‘They’ll sing songs, will they, Paul?’

  ‘They’ll probably expect you to sing them something, too.’

  Proctor-Gould’s attitude had changed entirely.

  ‘I rather enjoy a bit of a sing-song, Paul. If the company’s congenial. I used to be rather in demand at parties in college. “My Father was the Keeper of the Eddystone Light” – that kind of thing. Top of the hit parade at John’s, setting all false modesty to one side.’

  So Manning found himself on the Mozhaisk train, sitting opposite the girl with fair hair. He was not entirely right about the weather. The air temperature was low, but the woods on either side of the train were filled with the most brilliant spring sunlight. Already, however, people had begun to sing. They sang different songs in different parts of the carriage. Manning could hear Sasha’s clear, sweet tenor cutting through the confusion of sound, and Proctor-Gould, uttering the curious tuneless booming that comes from a man doing his best to join in a song he has never heard before. Manning hoped he would soon be allowed to get back to his home ground on ‘The Eddystone Light’.

  The girl with the very fair hair was singing, too. Manning watched her covertly. She had a broad face, with distinct cheekbones and clearly defined eyebrows which were much darker than her hair. She looked as if she might be a postgraduate student or a lecturer, but Manning knew them all, and he had never seen her about the Faculty before. She caught his eyes, and at once stopped singing and lowered her eyelids.

  The sight of her disturbed Manning. It threatened him with the necessity for making decisions and taking initiatives. The long and involved processes of human courtship might be about to start. If he made a move … If she responded at all … He hedged himself about with conditions and concessions. Already he could see how stupid the things would be that he would tell her to try and impress her. Already he could feel the terrible uncertainty he would go through about whether to take her hand, whether to put his arm round her and kiss her. As if it was already past history he knew exactly what he would feel on the days when she said she couldn’t see him, and how irritatingly plain she would look as she came towards him along the street. He shifted uneasily in his seat at the thought of it. This really was the worst moment in the whole awful business of courtship, the moment before it started. If indeed it did start.

  He caught her eye again. They both quickly looked away. He turned his head slowly from the view out of the left-hand window to the view out of the right-hand one, so that he could let his eyes travel over her face in passing. Almost immediately he had to turn his head back from right to left to take another look at her. Once more their eyes met, and hastily parted again. He stared out of the window at the telegraph poles going by, knowing his face was loaded with a meaningless frown. What a stupid business! Did he really have to go ahead with it? He could have groaned aloud, he felt such a fool. And yet, beneath all the confusion and indecision, the current of sweet excitement ran on. It was like a brook one could hear rippling unseen beneath tangled undergrowth.

  They all got off the train at a small country station surrounded by open fields, and in the confusion of identical anoraks Manning lost sight of the girl. On the horizon to the north the fields were bounded by the dark green line of the forest. Straggling like a column of deserters they set off towards it along a muddy farm track, skirting the long puddles of water in the ruts. From a group of farm buildings in the distance came the sound of loudspeakers playing a march, fading and returning in the cool breaths of wind. Gradually the snatches of music grew fainter and ceased. The great stillness of the country settled over them.

  In the way that drinkers find themselves, to their surprise, in bars, Manning found himself walking beside the girl with the fair hair.

  ‘Hallo again,’ he said smoothly.

  ‘Hallo,’ said the girl, glancing at him, and then dropping her eyes.

  They walked along in silence; Manning couldn’t think of anything else to say. People tried to get the singing going again, but it quickly died away. They were all too put out, in spite of themselves, by the change from effortless and tidy locomotion to propelling themselves by their own efforts along the uneven and slippery track.

  The girl stopped to pick up a snail shell. Manning saw that she was already holding a number of objects – a pearl-grey wing feather, a pebble, a chalk-white segment from some animal’s backbone.

  ‘I like your collection,’ he said.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Perhaps I could help you find some more things?’

  ‘Perhaps you could.’

  Manning felt pleased with himself. He had made plenty of worse opening moves than that. An assured and worldly note had been struck, he felt.

  ‘You just look at the ground, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As you go along?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Manning gazed seriously at the ground, looking for topics of conversation. Almost without their noticing it, the o
utskirts of the forest closed in around them.

  ‘Do you like rambles?’ asked Manning.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘What about rallies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which do you prefer?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, and gave a small laugh.

  They were getting on quite well, thought Manning. A very uncomplicated, idyllic relationship was being established.

  ‘A crow,’ he said, pointing at one.

  ‘Yes?’ she said expectantly.

  ‘I said, a crow.’

  ‘What about the crow?’

  ‘I was just remarking that it was a crow.’

  She gave another little laugh.

  ‘I see,’ she said.

  Inside the forest the country was broken, and no two acres of it were alike. At one moment they would be walking over dry pine needles, across long slopes that revealed nothing but ranks of dark conifer trunks in every direction. At the next they would be in birch country, following water-logged clay tracks which twisted down through sudden pockets of open valley filled with sunshine. Speckled patches of snow lit the shadows and northern slopes. People got their second wind, and began to sing again.

  ‘I’ve never seen you around the Faculty,’ said Manning.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  They had been walking for about an hour when pungent woodsmoke drifted towards them through the trees, and the sound of resinous timber crackling and spitting in the fire. They came to a clearing hazy with the smoke. There were shouts of recognition – it was the advance party, roasting potatoes and boiling millet porridge.

  They sat down and ate. The black from the potatoes got over their faces, and the millet porridge tasted of nothing. Presently they sang. Manning watched the girl as she took the time from Sasha. He was definitely getting off with her – he really was doing very well. An agreeable feeling of confidence and experience seized him.