The Russian Interpreter

by Michael Frayn

  ‘You want me to tell Raya to remove herself?’

  ‘No, no, no. I want us all to sit down to a round-table conference and discuss the situation like sensible people.’

  Manning looked at Raya. She looked gravely back at him. He supposed that he should want to turn his back on her and never see her again. But he felt a great desire to remain in the same room as her, on any terms whatever. Besides, her decision to move in on Proctor-Gould was no doubt a pure caprice. It would pass, and she would return to him as suddenly and strangely as she had abandoned him, provided he was still at hand.

  ‘All right,’ said Manning. ‘Just this once. Don’t think I shall come running every time you crook your finger.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘Once we’ve got these few basic points straightened out we shan’t need you, anyway.’

  Manning pointed at the table in the centre of the room. ‘Round-table conference,’ he said to Raya. At once she sprang off the bed and set a chair for herself.

  Now that the moment for communication had come, Proctor-Gould seemed suddenly abstracted. He sat down at the table, but almost immediately stood up again, and cleared his throat.

  ‘Firstly …’ he began.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Manning. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Proctor-Gould, sitting down, but not abandoning the sleepwalker’s air that men have when they are about to tell a joke or make a speech.

  ‘Firstly, Paul,’ he began again, and the slightly hesitant way in which he said ‘Paul’ made it sound like a special concession to informality, ‘will you tell Raya what very great pleasure it gives me to have her here in this room?’

  Manning winced, and Proctor-Gould at once began to giggle and pull at his ear

  ‘I hope I can rely on you, Paul,’ he said humorously, ‘to remove any unfortunate double meanings as you translate.’

  ‘He’s glad you’re here,’ said Manning to Raya.

  ‘I’m glad I’m here, too,’ said Raya. She got up and kissed Proctor-Gould on the ear. He put his arm round her and giggled again.

  ‘What did she say?’ he asked.

  ‘Glad to be here.’

  ‘Tell her I think she’s an absolute sweetie,’ demanded Proctor-Gould, giving her hips a squeeze, and rubbing his hand briskly up and down her further thigh, as if to restore circulation.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  ‘Go on, tell her.’

  ‘It’s not a logistical point.’

  Proctor-Gould thought about this for some time in silence. Then he gave Raya’s thigh a couple of final rubs.

  ‘I suppose not,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to business, then.’

  He gave Raya a dismissive pat on the bottom, rested his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together, and leaned forward with a serious air.

  ‘Now, the first point is this,’ he said, hammering it into the air with his clasped hands. ‘Can we establish what Raya’s plans are? Does she intend to remain here tonight?’

  Manning translated.

  ‘Yes,’ said Raya.

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘I’m very pleased. Delightful. Now could you, Paul, with the utmost tact, find out approximately – or even exactly – how long she intends to remain after tonight? Is she anxious to get home tomorrow? Or would she want to stay, say, another night? But put it with the utmost delicacy.’

  ‘How long are you staying altogether?’ translated Manning.

  ‘Until we are tired of each other.’

  ‘I see,’ said Proctor-Gould when Manning had translated it to him. ‘Yes. I see that. But do you think she realizes the position she may be putting herself in vis-à-vis the authorities?’

  ‘Of course she does. If she didn’t have some understanding with the authorities she wouldn’t be here in the first place.’

  ‘Ask her anyway.’

  Raya shrugged.

  ‘Why ask, Paul? I know you’ve always thought I was a police spy.’

  ‘Look, Raya, you must have some understanding with someone or you wouldn’t be here, would you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’d get into trouble.’

  ‘I might. I might not.’

  ‘You’d be mad to risk it.’

  ‘That depends how one wants to live. In this country one has only two alternatives. Either one must behave with an absolutely scrupulous regard for one’s personal safety; or else one must totally ignore it and do exactly as one pleases, in the hope that one will be thought to be a member of some different species, not subject to the rules at all.’

  Manning stared at her, absolutely undecided what to think about her. She looked pleased by his uncertainty, as uncompromising as any god in her refusal to dispel his doubt by supernatural demonstration.

  ‘Give poor Gordon some sort of report on the conversation,’ she ordered. ‘He’s looking terribly worried.’

  Manning reported, and Proctor-Gould leaned forward across the table to listen, his brown eyes very wide open, his thumb and index finger fondling the lobe of his ear incessantly.

  ‘Ah,’ he said when Manning had finished. ‘I go part of the way with Raya. But I think that if one is flouting the generally accepted rules of behaviour one must exercise discretion. Undoubtedly the authorities know that Raya is here. If last night’s anything to go by, they seem to be prepared to overlook it. But we must make it easy for them to overlook it. We must make sure that we don’t create a public scandal which could be ignored only by deliberate choice. We must limit ourselves to an inconspicuous irregularity which people could argue afterwards, if they were challenged, was merely overlooked in error.

  ‘Now, here is my schedule of regulations, if Raya is to stay. One: she must leave the room in the morning, separately from me. Two: she must not normally come up to the room during the day while I am out of it. Three: she must not leave her personal possessions lying about. Four: she must not be seen taking meals with me in the hotel restaurant. Five: if anyone knocks on the door while she is in the room she must withdraw to the bathroom.’

  Manning translated these conditions to Raya in his most neutral voice, waiting to be interrupted at each moment by the laughter with which she would greet them. But she did not laugh. She sat doodling abstractedly on a piece of paper she had found on the table, saying nothing, with no expression on her face. It irritated Manning to watch her. He realized gloomily that he had never at any time even begun to understand her, and he suddenly doubted that he ever would.

  ‘Well?’ said Proctor-Gould to Manning.

  ‘He says “Well?”’ translated Manning to Raya.

  She sighed.

  ‘Would it really make Gordon happy if I agreed to all these conditions?’ she asked.

  Manning inquired.

  ‘If Raya would agree to stay on the terms I have mentioned,’ said Proctor-Gould, his great brown eyes very wide, ‘it would be both a matter of personal satisfaction to me and, I think, a very valuable and interesting experiment in co-existence at the personal level.’

  When Manning had translated this to Raya she held up her drawing for them to see. It was a girl doll, like the ones around the walls. Her peg limbs were bent in a ridiculous curtsy, and in a balloon from her mouth were the two letters EC, followed by an exclamation mark.

  ‘What does EC mean?’ asked Proctor-Gould.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not Russian.’

  He frowned, trying over the two Cyrillic letters on his tongue.

  ‘“Ye-S”,’ he repeated stupidly. ‘“Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” I don’t know.’

  Proctor-Gould watched him patiently, waiting for him to decipher it. But the paper was shaking about in front of Manning’s eyes. Raya was laughing at them.

  17

  Manning and Katerina stopped on one of the bridges over the Moskva, and leaned on the parapet, looking absently down into the water. Behind them two-car trams ground slowly across from the city side to the eastern suburbs, stil
l packed with people bound for the noisy dark courtyards and the shabby tenement stairs.

  ‘I can see why Raya pleased you,’ said Katerina. ‘If I’d met her I might have been attracted to her, too.’

  ‘Spiritually?’

  ‘Perhaps physically as well. There’s no real difference. All relationships are fundamentally political. One dominates; one is dominated; one rules by consent. There’s nothing mysterious about physical attraction. It’s just an expression of one’s desire for a particular form of political relationship.’

  ‘I’m not sure that men always want to dominate, or women to be dominated.’

  ‘I agree. Or perhaps one might say that some men are women, and some women are men. You and I are two of the world’s natural women. We love people because of what makes them people – their will and their freedom – and we expect to be used ourselves as objects – as the raw material on which the volition of others is exercised. Raya must be a natural man. She uses you. She uses Proctor-Gould. She does it not by strength or command, but by caprice, by taunting you and teasing you. It amounts to the same thing. You both delight in being used. So should I if the situation had arisen.’

  ‘The strong and the weak again.’

  ‘Yes. Kanysh is a natural man. He had a tiny room in a block off Baumann Street. I used to visit him when he wanted me to; stay away when he wanted me to. If he chose, we would sit in silence for a whole afternoon, he sitting on the end of the bed, I in the only chair. He would sit with his head in his hands, thinking his own thoughts. I would sit watching him, labouring to think not my thoughts but his. Or he would tell me about his life. Not for me to break in and say: “Yes, yes, I know exactly how you must have felt. When I was a child …” and so on, as people do. But for me just to listen, scarcely daring to breathe, while he talked on and on about the wrongs and sufferings which obsessed him, hardly noticing I was there. Or else he would make me tell him about my life, so that he could wrap it about his own wounds – the way country people do with cobwebs. That’s how I felt my life was on those days – cobweb, a nothing, thin shreds of nothing. But enough to give him some consolation. We never had a conversation, in the way that you and I have conversations, each giving and each taking, treating each other as free and equal beings. I should have hated that with him. Perhaps he depended on me – but only like one depends upon potatoes and bread. He was subject and I was object. It was absolute and complete. You and I – we’re hopeless. Just two runaway slaves – two women away from their men, chattering on companionably and vacuously, getting nothing done. But it’s cosy. I like it, Paul….’

  She was crying. Manning put his hand on her arm.

  ‘Oh, Katya,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry, Katya.’

  She wiped her eyes on a large crumpled handkerchief, and blew her nose clumsily.

  ‘Kanysh hasn’t written to me for three weeks now,’ she said. ‘I think he’s in trouble. I don’t know. I just have a feeling that something’s happened.’

  She took a deep breath, stopped crying, and put the handkerchief away. They began to walk again.

  Just in front of them was a man with a shaven head, carrying a small, broken attaché-case. He walked more and more slowly, as if he was coming to the end of a journey. At the great bend in the street beyond the bridge, where the trams came grinding round on the curve, he stopped, set his bag down on the pavement beside him, and gazed at the district ahead. Manning looked at his face in the light from the street lamps as they passed him. There was no expression on it, but his head slowly turned, his eyes taking in everything before him. Inch by inch he examined it all – the bend in the street, a blank wooden fence with missing boards, a shuttered kiosk, two concrete telegraph standards at slightly different angles to the vertical – as if he was recognizing a place seen in a dream. A man returning. From where? After how long? With nothing but what would go into that small attaché-case? The prodigies and portents of Manning’s walks with Katya. Manning turned round and looked again just before they lost him to sight round the bend. He was still standing there, still gazing.

  18

  Raya remained in Proctor-Gould’s room, her presence unchallenged by the hotel, the police, or anyone else. The floor clerk nodded at her when she came in and went out, the chambermaid folded her pyjamas and put them beneath the pillow. Otherwise no one remarked on her existence at all. To Proctor-Gould’s code of rules she paid not the slightest attention, coming and going from the room when she chose, arranging her belongings neatly on top of the chest of drawers and in the bathroom, and if she felt like it silently accompanying Proctor-Gould to the restaurant for dinner.

  Proctor-Gould became increasingly preoccupied. In the middle of a rather difficult lunch with some officials of the Moscow public health department he leaned over to Manning and said in a low voice:

  ‘Bolvan.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What does it mean? “Darling”? “Sweetheart”?’

  ‘It means “numbskull”.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There was less and less for Manning to interpret between Proctor-Gould and his official contacts, more and more between him and Raya. Manning’s earnings declined; it was somehow tacitly agreed between them that it would be improper for Manning to be paid for interpreting Proctor-Gould’s dealings with his mistress. Each day Manning swore that he would have nothing more to do with them; but each time the message came he hurried round, certain that this time she was going to leave him.

  They were an odd couple, and became no less odd as time went on. They quarrelled endlessly, with Manning’s assistance, chiefly about Raya’s failure to observe the regulations Proctor-Gould had laid down. Or rather, Proctor-Gould quarrelled, and she did not, like one hand clapping.

  ‘Will you tell her,’ Proctor-Gould would say with a curious mixture of indulgence and exasperation, ‘that when I came up after lunch today I found the bath full of underwear and stockings to soak?’

  ‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ Raya would reply.

  ‘She’s always sorry. Now, point one, she must have come back to the room in her free period, between eleven and twelve. Point two, the chambermaid must have seen those things in the bath. Now I know Raya often comes back to the room while I’m out, though she won’t admit it, and I know the chambermaid can see two pairs of high-heeled shoes in the wardrobe anyway. But it’s the principle of the thing. Can you try and make that clear to her?’

  Raya would solemnly promise not to do it again.

  ‘She promises?’ Proctor-Gould would cry despairingly when this had been translated. ‘But she always promises. Every day she lies there on the bed and solemnly promises not to do whatever she has been doing. And every day she continues to do it just the same.’

  ‘I don’t see what more I can do,’ Raya would tell Manning regretfully. ‘I’ve given my solemn word of honour.’

  ‘I think this time he wants you to keep it.’

  ‘All right. I give my solemn word of honour that this time I will keep my solemn word of honour.’

  It was, thought Manning, the consistent failure of his attempts to deal with her by means of reason which were visibly debilitating Proctor-Gould. He was a man who believed deeply in the reasonableness of reason.

  Manning wondered whether they made love at night. They certainly shared the bed. He found it difficult to imagine them so helpless and exposed before each other. But then, thought Manning, it was difficult to imagine anybody one knew socially engaged in the sincere and serious labour of intercourse. There were less likely couples than Proctor-Gould and Raya. Not many. But some.

  In spite of everything, Proctor-Gould still refused all Manning’s suggestions that Raya should move out. ‘I’m not sure that she’d go even if I told her to,’ he said – and the thought made him giggle. Manning suspected that he took a certain pleasure in being so helpless in her hands. He was proud to possess her, and proud that she was so untamed by possession, like a man who is pleased with his new car because it goes fa
st enough to frighten him.

  Soon she went even faster. She began to steal his belongings.

  At first Proctor-Gould didn’t guess it was her.

  ‘Paul,’ he said one afternoon, in a puzzled voice. ‘You remember that silver skyscraper Professor Kornyukov gave me at the History Faculty reception? Well, it’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘It was with some other presents in the bottom of the chest of drawers. Now it’s vanished. I’ve searched the whole room. Not a sign of it.’

  ‘Have you reported it to the management?’

  ‘Not yet. Do you think I should, Paul? I mean, the situation in this room being what it is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ask Raya what she thinks.’

  Manning asked her.

  ‘She doesn’t think it’s really necessary to report it,’ he told Proctor-Gould.

  ‘Doesn’t she?’

  ‘No. She took it herself.’

  Proctor-Gould stared at her, or at any rate at the top of her head, since she was bending over one of his shirts, sewing a button on.

  ‘What’s she done with it, then, Paul?’

  ‘She says she’s sold it.’

  Raya looked up and saw Proctor-Gould frowning at her and pulling at his ear.

  ‘Tell him I bought the dress I’ve got on at the moment with the proceeds,’ she said to Manning. ‘The trouble with your friend Gordon is that he doesn’t notice what I’m wearing.’

  ‘Tell her,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘tell her … Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure what you’d better tell her.’

  Next day she stole all the other presents in the drawer.

  ‘Gordon couldn’t possibly have wanted all that junk, could he?’ she asked Manning, when he arrived to translate at the subsequent inquiry.

  ‘The people in England I was supposed to be taking it back to might have liked it,’ said Proctor-Gould heavily. ‘But seriously, Paul, what on earth is she up to? The silver skyscraper might have been worth something. But the rest of the stuff can’t have fetched more than five or six roubles together.’