The Russian Interpreter

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Now,’ said Sasha, ‘let’s have a song from our two English friends.’

  Proctor-Gould looked at Manning. Manning shook his head firmly.

  ‘In that case,’ said Proctor-Gould, getting to his feet and addressing the company, ‘I shall have to ask for your forbearance and offer my humble services as a soloist. With your kind permission I should like to sing you a rather light-hearted little song entitled, “My Father Was the Keeper of the Eddystone Light”.’

  He sang. It was considerably worse than Manning had expected. Proctor-Gould hunted about for each note uncertainly, and did not often find it. Manning looked round at the girl and smiled. She gazed at Proctor-Gould seriously, no doubt baffled by the strange modes of English song.

  ‘Incidentally,’ whispered Manning, leaning close to her ear, ‘my name is Paul.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘You’re Glad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Manning tried the name over to himself. Rada – Glad. He had never heard of anyone called Rada before.

  ‘It suits you,’ he whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your name – Glad. It’s beautiful.’

  She stared at him. Then she whispered:

  ‘Do you know what I think, Paul?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I think you’re a buffoon.’

  Proctor-Gould reached the end of his song, and there was a certain amount of polite, baffled clapping. The girl got up and walked away to the other side of the clearing.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘Your very generous response encourages me to go on and sing you another very old favourite in England, “Green Grow the Rushes Oh”.’

  A stupid-looking man next to Manning who had been trying for some time to open a bottle of fizzy fruit-juice by thumping it up and down against the ground at last succeeded. The cap exploded off the bottle, and contents rose into the air like a geyser, then fell as a fine, sticky rain over Manning.

  ‘“I’ll sing you one-oh”,’ sang Proctor-Gould. ‘No, no, I’ll start again. Might as well begin on the right note. “I’ll sing you –” No. “I’ll –” Hm. “I’ll –” H’hgm. “I’ll sing you one-oh …”’

  Manning slipped away into the woods out of earshot. The whole expedition was intolerable.

  10

  Manning relieved himself gloomily in a quiet corner of the forest. As he finished, something struck him sharply on the shoulder. It was a piece of dead wood. He looked round. About twenty feet away stood the girl with fair hair. She was looking round a birch tree at him, resting her head against the trunk, and biting at a twig she had bent down from the branch above her so that she showed her teeth. She looked like a shot out of a silent film.

  ‘My name’s Raya,’ she said, taking the twig out of her mouth. ‘If you’re interested.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Manning, rubbing his shoulder, and confused to find that she had been watching him.

  ‘Why didn’t you ask me what my name actually was?’

  ‘You didn’t seem very keen to talk.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Raya. She bit thoughtfully at the birch twig. ‘I thought I was being flirtatious.’

  ‘I see. I didn’t realize.’

  ‘Perhaps I didn’t do it right.’

  ‘Oh – yes, yes.’

  ‘When I went away I thought you’d follow me.’

  ‘I didn’t grasp that at all, I’m afraid.’

  She chewed the twig for some moments.

  ‘I obviously wasn’t going about it the right way,’ she said. ‘Do you want to know what my job is?’

  ‘All right. What is it?’

  ‘I teach Diamat.’

  ‘Diamat? Dialectical materialism?’

  ‘Why do you say it in that tone of voice?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know – you don’t look much like a teacher of dialectical materialism.’

  ‘Oh? What do teachers of dialectical materialism look like, in your experience?’

  ‘Well, not blonde, somehow.’

  Raya pulled a handful of her hair forward and squinted at it.

  ‘It’s not really blonde,’ she said. ‘I bleached it. Do you like it?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘You wouldn’t prefer to see it red, or black?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  Raya reflected.

  ‘I’m being flirtatious now,’ she said. ‘Do you realize? There’s a terrible coyness about the conversation that you couldn’t account for in any other way. Let’s go for a walk.’

  They walked slowly through the woods, stepping over fallen branches and skirting patches of brambles.

  ‘You left your friend to sing on his own,’ said Raya.

  ‘You left your friends to listen on their own.’

  ‘My friends?’

  ‘Your colleagues in the Faculty.’

  ‘Not my colleagues – not my Faculty. I teach in the Journalism Faculty.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing on the Admin-Uprav outing, then?’

  ‘That’s not a very hospitable attitude.’

  ‘I meant, did someone bring you?’

  ‘I brought myself.’

  ‘Brought yourself?’

  ‘Why not? The railways are a public utility. The forest belongs to the state.’

  Manning felt curiously irritated by her self-confidence.

  ‘The millet porridge belonged to Admin-Uprav,’ he said.

  ‘I admit,’ said Raya, ‘I obtained a helping of millet porridge by false pretences.’

  They walked along in silence, Raya flicking at the trees with her birch twig.

  ‘But why did you particularly want to come on the Admin-Uprav expedition, then?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘No.’

  Raya danced two steps, held out her hand in front of her, and kicked it, like a ballet-dancer.

  ‘No idea?’ she said.

  ‘Not the slightest.’

  ‘Shall I give you a clue?’

  ‘All right.’

  She leaned over and kissed him on the ear.

  He put his hand up to the ear, as if it had been struck. What curious organisms human beings were, he reflected. How odd and unfamiliar were the relations between them, like the interactions of half-understood particles beneath the microscope.

  ‘Was that the clue?’ he asked. His own voice seemed no less strange to him that Raya’s behaviour.

  ‘The clue? Comrade Interpreter, it was practically the solution.’

  He should no doubt kiss her back. He turned towards her, but she stepped away from him. He lunged at her – she leapt out of reach. He chased her up the path – she doubled back round a tree, and in the ensuing jinking and bobbing to left and to right they cracked their heads together painfully.

  ‘Oh God!’ she cried, as they both rubbed their skulls. ‘What a pastoral idyll!’

  They started to walk along the path again. He took her hand, but after a little while she withdrew it.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  ‘Everyone in Moscow seems to be talking about your friend Proctor-Gould,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to see what sort of people you were.’

  ‘Why didn’t you kiss Proctor-Gould’s ear?’

  ‘I can’t speak English.’

  ‘You don’t have to speak to kiss someone’s ear.’

  ‘There seems to be a terrible lot of explanation to go through before the appropriate moment arrives.’

  ‘I could interpret.’

  Raya glanced at Manning ironically.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘A love affair through an interpreter. That’s a very cultured prospect.’

  They came to a clearing covered with brambles and rank grass. Among the vegetation the half-obliterated remains of trenches and banks were just visible.

  ‘Zhukov made his stand before Moscow in the forest here,’ said Raya.’ ‘It’s an odd place to come for picnics, really.’

  She wandere
d moodily about the clearing, kicking at the grass, then bent down and picked something up. It was an old steel helmet, thick with rust, a jagged hole in the side.

  ‘You still find these all over the woods,’ she said. ‘I’m not even sure whether it’s Russian or German.’

  She turned it slowly over and over in her hands, crumbling more of the rusty metal off. Then she hurled it away, and brushed the rust off her hands. The helmet hit a tree, bounced off in a shower of rust, and fell into a bramble bush, where it perched on a branch, bobbing up and down like some great brown bird alighting. Raya seemed to be abashed by the ridiculousness of it, and picked it out of the bush. They sat down side by side on a fallen tree trunk, sodden, like everything else, with the stored wetness of winter. Raya turned the helmet over in her hands again, feeling its texture curiously.

  ‘Poor old helmet,’ she said. ‘Manufactured and issued and worn and punctured and lost and rusted by the forces of historical necessity. Found and touched and lost again by Raissa P. Metelius, lecturer.’

  She jumped up restlessly, dropping the helmet, and pulled Manning to his feet.

  ‘Come on!’ she said.

  She was excited and nervous. Manning put his arms round her and kissed her mouth, but after a few seconds she broke away and ran off into the trees. Now she was laughing. He caught up with her and kissed her again. They fell into the wet grass together. Laughing and laughing, Raya sat up and stuffed handfuls of dead leaves into his mouth.

  He was sitting up and spitting out the leaves when an unhappy thought occurred to him. It was too good to be true. That was what was wrong with it. She had joined the expedition uninvited – sat opposite him in the train – followed him into the forest – kissed him. The whole thing was being organized not by him but by her. Wasn’t it all somewhat reminiscent of those cases one heard about, where foreigners in Russia were compromised, and then blackmailed into working for Soviet intelligence? The idea was ridiculous. All the same … He stopped where he was, on one knee, a leaf still hanging on his chin. It was a horribly anaphrodisiac thought.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Raya, alarmed by the expression on his face. She ran back and knelt beside him.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Manning. ‘I was just wondering …’

  ‘Wondering what?’

  ‘If all this wasn’t just some sort of trick.’

  ‘How do you mean, a trick?’

  ‘You know, to compromise me. Or Proctor-Gould. The way it’s done sometimes. So the authorities can have some kind of lever against us.’

  She stared at him, her hand on his arm, as if he was telling her he had some sort of pain. Then she began to smile.

  ‘You think I might be working for the K.G.B.?’

  ‘It was just a sudden thought.’

  Raya jumped up and clapped her hands.

  ‘It was a good thought,’ she said. ‘From the historical-dialectical point of view it was a fruitful and positive thought.’

  ‘It’s happened, Raya.’

  ‘Certainly. And will again. I have photographers concealed behind the trees waiting to snap the slightest lewd gesture.’

  ‘People have been photographed, Raya.’

  Suddenly she swung round and shouted across to a thicket of birches some twenty yards away. ‘Quick, Misha – now! While his trousers are still undone!’

  Manning’s hand flashed down to his trousers. They were done up. Raya started to laugh, and he began to laugh too. They sat on the ground looking at one another and laughing. She pushed him down, and seized his ears, and banged his head gently up and down on the dead leaves, still laughing helplessly.

  11

  They walked soberly through the woods, holding hands.

  ‘All the same,’ said Manning. ‘I don’t know, do I?’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘What’s the good of my answering? It would be meaningless.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘You want a meaningless answer?’

  ‘It’s better than none’

  ‘All right, then. I am leading you into a trap.’

  ‘Don’t joke, Raya.’

  ‘You see?’

  ‘I know perfectly well you’re not.’

  ‘All right – I’m not.’

  They walked in silence, looking at the ground.

  ‘You wouldn’t think we’d only set eyes on one another about four hours ago,’ said Manning.

  ‘Judging by some of the things that have been said, I’m astonished it’s more than four minutes.’

  ‘You see my point, though.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  They became silent again.

  ‘Would you mind if people knew you’d held my hand in the woods?’ asked Raya.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘But we might do more than just hold hands.’

  ‘Might we?’

  ‘Well, mightn’t we?’

  They stopped and looked at each other gravely. Then Raya lowered her eyes and began to play with the button on his jacket.

  ‘Am I acting in good faith?’ she asked quietly.

  He did not reply.

  ‘Go on,’ she insisted, still quietly, running her hands over the fabric of his jacket, as she had over the helmet. ‘Tell me what you think. Am I?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘To hell with you, then!’ she said, suddenly angry, and pushed him away. He stepped back to keep his balance, caught his heel against the root of a tree, and fell full length into a bramble patch, discarded like the rusty helmet. He shouted with surprise, and with pain, as the thorns scratched his hands and his ears. He thrashed wildly about, trying to find a thornless patch to lever himself up from. When he looked up he saw that Raya was leaning against a tree silently weeping – no, silently laughing, reduced to the helpless silence of laughter. He struggled to his feet and rushed at her in a fury, though he was unclear exactly what he intended to do. But she ran away, shouting with laughter, dodging among the trees, always keeping just ahead of him. In the end she leapt into the fork of a birch and climbed swiftly out of reach. He leaned against the trunk and looked up at her, panting too hard to reproach her. She squatted on her branch and gazed down at him, panting too hard to laugh at him. She was just a child, thought Manning, a silly, teasing child. Suddenly he did not think he understood her at all, and he seized the tree and shook it with all his might, trying to shake her down like an apple.

  ‘That’s right,’ she cried. ‘Break the tree down. Cause damage to plant life in the state forest.’

  Eventually she jumped down, kissed his scratches better, put her arm in his, and walked on through the forest with him. They walked with their eyes on the ground six feet in front of them, the way people do, as if for ever contemplating the measure of earth they must one day become.

  Their path joined a track, and over the track, where it entered the mouth of a little valley, there was an arch formed of two bare birch trunks and a roughly painted sign between them which said: ‘Rest and Holiday Centre “Forest Lake”’.

  They followed the track down to the lake – a large pond, really, trapped in the valley bottom. The water sparkled in the sun. On the shore was a settlement of shabby wooden cabins, all shuttered and deserted, with sky-blue paintwork which was blistered and peeling. Raya and Manning wandered among the cabins, moved by such silence and stillness in a place where human beings had lived. They squatted on the little wooden landing stage and peered into the dark water. A fish glided, flicked, and was gone.

  In that sheltered corner of the woods it was warm. They stretched out on the boards and lay quietly with their faces to the sun. After a little while Raya lifted her head and looked about her sleepily, like a cat.

  ‘Do you like swimming?’ she asked.

  ‘Not in water as cold as this.’

  ‘We could swim across the lake and back, as fast as porpoises.’

  ‘We’d freeze, Raya.’ />
  ‘No, we shouldn’t. We’d jump out, and rub each other dry, and lie here in the sun on the landing stage, and stroke each other till we were warm.’

  They looked at each other softly, taunting each other with the uncertainty of what could or could not happen.

  There was a cry from the other side of the lake. They turned round. It was Sasha. He waved to them anxiously.

  ‘I suppose they’ve been looking for us,’ said Manning. ‘I’d forgotten all about them.’

  ‘I suppose I had, too,’ said Raya. She gazed sadly across the water at Sasha, and waved a small wave back at him. He turned and began to hurry round the lake towards them, his shock of dark, thin hair sweeping anxiously, responsibly back in the wind of his passage.

  12

  Walking in the twilight with Katerina. Somewhere. Along some narrow busy street lined with decrepit old apartment houses. As they passed each entry the excited screaming of the children playing in the darkened courtyard within for a moment joined the roar of the buses and lorries stinking by at Manning’s elbow. Along the narrow pavement people were streaming home from work, tired; looking down, their faces in shadow. Constantly they passed between Manning and Katya, forcing him to stop or to step off the kerb, and then run a step to catch up.

  Manning was surprised that there were still streets left in Moscow that he did not know. He felt as if he and Katya had walked down every single one of them – a hundred miles of asphalt, of concrete slabs, of beaten earth, of packed, trodden snow. He wondered how many of the people they passed were walking for the same reason as themselves, that the public street was the only private place to talk. All over Moscow the streets must have been alive with communal intimacy. Two by two the talkers walked, passing, overtaking, and intersecting, as if the city were some vast, complex cloister. Visions of a new society were exchanged, love affairs were pursued and broken off, arrangements to circumvent the law and defraud the state were entered into. As he ran along the gutter to catch up with Katya, Manning laughed out loud at the ridiculous discomfort of their accommodation. Katya, hurrying along in her winter overcoat, gave him one of her quick, mistrustful glances. She said something, but it was drowned in the sudden high coloratura of a bus with bad brakes.