The Russian Interpreter

by Michael Frayn

  ‘I don’t see it like that, Katya.’

  ‘I know. That evening we met Korolenko I could feel the questions you were burning to ask. How did Korolenko know my name? Which of us was telling the truth? What had happened to make me so frightened of him?’

  ‘I didn’t ask them, Katya.’

  ‘Only out of consideration. You thought them. You shouldn’t have been interested in such things. What happened in the past has nothing to do with what I am now. Don’t you know that God washes out the past each evening, as if it had never been, and that we are born again each morning? What happened yesterday is just gossip, Paul, just empty gossip.’

  Manning didn’t reply. Katerina’s habit of projecting aspects of the truth across the whole screen of the universe suddenly irritated him. Somewhere far away the siren of a train wailed, and there was a crash of shunted trucks. He longed to leave Moscow.

  ‘I’m glad Raya has left you in peace, anyway,’ said Katerina. ‘She brought out the worst in you. Her friend Konstantin Churavayev is like you, incidentally.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘His world is bounded by what? who? when? where? He is addicted to information.’

  ‘What else do you know about him?’

  ‘Nothing. In any case, it’s not important. Don’t gossip.’

  Somewhere behind them a shoe scraped on the uneven roadway. Manning turned round. There was a man silhouetted against one of the yellowy patches of lamplight about thirty yards away. He was walking quietly in the same direction as themselves – the only person in the whole silent length of the street.

  ‘Stop a moment, Katya,’ said Manning.

  He listened. There was silence in the road behind them. The man had stopped, too.

  ‘What is it?’ said Katya.

  They began to walk again. So did the man. Now that he was listening for them, Manning could hear his footsteps fairly distinctly. He was walking close up against the concrete fence, where the cushioning clumps of weedy grass were thickest. Manning waited until he guessed the man was near a street-lamp.

  ‘Stop,’ he said quietly to Katerina.

  ‘Now what …?’

  ‘Sh!’

  Again the man had stopped. Manning could see him bending down and doing something to his shoe. The light fell on a cap and an overcoat with upturned collar.

  They walked on.

  ‘Are we being followed?’ said Katerina in a low voice.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  Katerina sighed, and pressed a handkerchief to her mouth nervously. Manning realized she had begun to walk more quickly. He had to hurry to keep up with her.

  ‘Now, don’t be silly, Katya,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter if anyone sees where we’re going. We’re not doing anything wrong.’

  ‘Please hurry.’

  ‘It’s silly to panic, Katya. It makes it look as if we’ve got something to hide.’

  She hurried along without replying. She had begun to catch her breath in little gasps. Manning could hear the footsteps of their shadow keeping pace with theirs. He scuffed grit and macadam; he had evidently moved out from the rough grass to make better speed.

  ‘Katya!’ said Manning.

  ‘Please, Paul!’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t want them to see us together.’

  ‘We’re not worth anyone’s attention, Katya.’

  ‘They’ll think I’ve been telling you about my troubles. They’ll say I’ve been telling you lies.’

  ‘Oh, Katya!’

  ‘And God knows what you’re mixed up in, with Proctor-Gould and his affairs. They’ll ask me about it. I know they will. They asked me questions before. Asked and asked. I can’t go through all that again.’

  Katya was almost running. However much he hurried, Manning was always a step behind her. He tried to breathe without panting, as if panting were a confession of guilty haste.

  The dark street turned, and they merged into a broad, well-lit suburban highway, bordered as far as the eye could see in either direction by grey apartment blocks in various stages of construction, standing as plain and bald as shoe boxes among the desolation of builders’ waste. On two or three of the blocks in the distance there was the glare of arc-lights where a night shift was working. There was no one else about. A car went by at speed. Then there was silence.

  They found a bus stop, and Manning persuaded Katerina to wait there while they caught their breath. He hoped their shadower would suppose they had been hurrying for a bus. Katerina was sobbing. Manning offered her his handkerchief.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, pushing it away. ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  Over her shoulder he could see the man in the overcoat. In the brighter light of the highway he had dropped back and stopped about a hundred yards away. He appeared to be studying one of the official notice-boards where small advertisements were exhibited.

  After a while a bus did in fact appear, creeping towards them with unbelievable slowness out of the gigantic suburban emptiness.

  ‘Get on this bus, Katya,’ said Manning. ‘I’ll wait behind at the stop. It’s me he’s following, not you. You go straight home, and don’t get in touch with me again until I tell you it’s all right.’

  He bundled her aboard like a helpless bag of washing.

  ‘Good-bye, Katya,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Katya said nothing. Manning saw her through the window as the bus drew away, fumbling with her purse in front of the conductor’s desk, her lower lip still pressed tremblingly outwards and upwards to contain her distress.

  30

  For some minutes after the bus had gone Manning remained by the stop, uncertain what to do. The man in the overcoat had made no attempt to catch the bus. He was still examining the notice-board a hundred yards away, bending close to decipher the cramped handwriting of the cards. There were just the two of them in the great formal emptiness of the prospect.

  Manning shivered. He began to walk slowly along the broad pavement beside the highway in the direction Katya’s bus had gone, back towards the centre of the city. He looked out of the corner of his eye. Unhurriedly, as if reluctant to stop reading, the man in the overcoat was turning away from the notice-board and following him.

  Manning had never been followed before, so far as he knew. When he had first arrived in Moscow he had expected it. On his way to meet people whom he felt might have been compromised by a foreign acquaintance he had taken pains to double back on himself, to jump in and out of underground trains at the last moment. It had quickly come to seem very silly.

  Now that he knew he was being followed he couldn’t think what to do about it at all. He felt self-conscious about each step. It was like having a load on his back that he couldn’t put down, that made the distance to be walked along the highway seem interminable.

  He looked discreetly behind him. The man was still there. Every now and then a car or a lorry would go by along the road, and in the silence that followed he could hear the footsteps, quiet, distinct, unhurried.

  He tried to work out why he was being followed. Evidently the authorities were interested in Proctor-Gould’s affairs. What conclusion would they have come to? They would presumably know what had taken place in Proctor-Gould’s room, and no doubt Proctor-Gould’s chauffeur had reported the visits to the public dining-room and Kurumalinskaya Street. But had their bargaining in the dining-room been overheard? Had they been seen in Konstantin’s apartment? What sort of reading of the events could it be that made his movements of interest?

  He half-turned his head. The man was still there. No nearer. No farther away.

  He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed. How long had the man been following him? Had he been there even before he had met Katya? Had the man watched him as he looked at the stills outside the cinema on Vorontzovskaya Street and brushed the dandruff off his shoulders? As he stopped in the doorway on Chkalovskaya, took off his shoe
, and hopped about while he struggled to push a nail down with a fifty-kopeck piece?

  And what could he do with this passenger on his back? He could not visit anyone, because it would implicate them. He could not run, or hide, or try to shake the man off, because it would seem suspicious. He could only behave normally. Or rather, make gestures of normality – bold, unambiguous, theatrical gestures that signalled normality to a man a hundred yards away. He could do nothing but walk, not too slowly, not too fast, down this enormous highway, between the hugely-spaced grey blocks and their attendant tower cranes, then continue through more vast, empty boulevards and prospects, until he returned to the great rhetorical remoteness of the university, and his own tiny room, there to go through the gestures of falling into an untroubled sleep.

  Two long black cars sped by, one after another, their engine notes mingling and gradually dying. Silence again. And the footsteps.

  Why follow him? The unreasonableness of it appalled him. What could he do that would illuminate anything for them? Where could he lead them that it would interest them to be? What fragment of information could he be expected to provide?

  Then he remembered the crumpled slip of paper in his wallet – the receipt for the suitcase at the Kiev Station. Could they possibly know about that?

  For the first time, Manning felt frightened. It was an indefinite fear, of being small and vulnerable among large forces that were indifferent to him. He thought of being questioned in bare rooms by men who saw him as nothing but an information-bearing object, uninteresting in itself. He thought of living for a great part of his life among hard, alien surfaces and clanging doors, unloved, unesteemed. He could not go on with this charade when possibilities like that opened out from it. He could not pretend to behave normally. The fragile pretensions of normality were crushed under the weight of such threats.

  A line of tall evergreen bushes bordered the pavement. Just in front of Manning there was a break in the bushes, where muddy wheelmarks across the footway led to a track disappearing into the darkness of the construction site beyond. Without premeditation Manning turned off on to the track, and as soon as he was hidden by the bushes, began to run.

  His own behaviour instantly terrified him. Oh God. be thought, I’ve done a stupid thing. How can I undo it? Oh God, how can I undo it?

  He looked about him as he ran. Dimly, in the light filtering through from the highway, he took in the paraphernalia of construction – a shed, a heap of wooden scaffolding, a trailer covered with a tarpaulin. He must hide. But where? Somewhere darker. He ran on. The side of a building loomed vaguely, with unglazed windows. A doorway without a door. Into it. Inside it was completely dark. His footsteps reverberated about the bare concrete walls. A smell of cement and damp. Stop panting! Quiet, quiet.

  Silence. Oh, you fool, you fool! No, stop. Not even think. Press against wall. Try not to be.

  Wait for the man.

  Not a sound. What’s he doing? Would have run to gap in bushes – must have reached it by now. Looking cautiously round corner?

  What’s happening? Why silence so long?

  Suddenly, the footsteps – running. Coming along the track towards the building, louder and louder. Now outside the door!

  Now stopped. Not five feet from the door. Can hear him panting. Can hear soles of shoes on the ground – shirrrrrr. Pause. Shirrrrrr. He’s turning to look, first one way, then the other.

  Then step, step, step – coming nearer. The echoing crunch of a step on the concrete floor of the doorway. He was inside the room. The whole room was suddenly full of his breathing, of the scurring of his shoes on the concrete. Oh God! Don’t breathe! Don’t even look at him! Keep face pressed against concrete wall! Just wait.

  And wait.

  He must be looking this way. The darkness dissolves in his presence. Any moment … any moment….

  Two decisive steps on the concrete, and quieter steps going away on the beaten earth outside. Silence.

  Gone.

  Breathe. Wait. Complete silence outside. Wait longer. Still silence. Now what?

  What indeed?

  Slip back to the highway? Then what? Run? Run down that endless road – run and run and run until the breath gave out? The hopeless futility of it appalled him. But what else was there to do? He had panicked. The consequences stretched before him like a progression of rooms in a dream, each opening inexorably off the last.

  With infinite precaution he crept to the door and edged his head slowly round the lintel. After the darkness inside the building, the dim light outside from the street-lamps on the highway seemed like day. He made out odd planks lying on the ground, flattened drums, torn sheets of tarred paper. Nothing moved. There was the noise of a lorry passing on the highway. Then silence.

  If he could get to the road without being seen he would be hidden behind the evergreens. He stepped outside, stopped, and listened. Nothing. Keeping one hand on the wall, and feeling the ground with each foot before he put it down, he began to work his way slowly along the outside of the building.

  Then – a noise. A foot banging against a metal drum. He froze. He couldn’t tell which direction it had come from. He waited. His blood was beating so hard in his veins that he shook with it. He took another step. Somewhere, muffled by the mass of the building, there was the noise of a small piece of wood falling to the ground.

  He ran.

  Must get to the road! Oh God, oh God, oh God!

  Something tearing out from around corner of building in opposite direction. Can’t avoid!

  ‘Ugh!’

  ‘Ai!’

  Warding-off arms tangle, overcoat shoulder crashes into chest, knee cracks into knee. A cloth cap falling. Steel-rimmed spectacles flashing as they swing out from one earpiece. Dark, anxious, short-sighted eyes closing to guard against impact. Hand groping to recover glasses.

  Konstantin.

  31

  Under one of the street-lamps on the highway Konstantin banged the dust off his cap and bent the frame of his spectacles straight. Manning rubbed his chest where Konstantin’s shoulder had hit it. They avoided meeting each other’s eye.

  ‘Well,’ said Konstantin, with a short, embarrassed laugh, ‘a negative conclusion. A turn of events not fully in accord with the dignity of Soviet man.’

  Manning smiled foolishly, unable to think of anything to say. He felt ludicrously pleased to see someone he knew.

  ‘An unusual way for a visitor to our country to behave,’ said Konstantin. ‘Running about state construction sites in the dark.’

  ‘I lost my head.’

  ‘One moment you were walking down the street, like a normal bourgeois intellectual. Next moment – ptut! – gone. Then five minutes later you come shooting out from nowhere like a policeman after a bribe. An untypical phenomenon.’

  He threw the words away casually, almost surreptitiously, as if they were old sweet wrappers he was disposing of in the street. He settled his cap carefully back on to his head, jiggling it back and forth to get the exact fit. It occurred to Manning why Konstantin was so different in appearance from most of the other men he knew in Moscow. The others had reached 1935 in their style of dressing. Konstantin had not yet got beyond 1918.

  They began to walk along the highway together. It seemed to Manning infinitely less threatening now.

  ‘Why were you following me?’ he asked.

  Konstantin shrugged.

  ‘Wanted to keep abreast of any new developments in Western book distributing technique,’ he said. ‘I congratulate you on getting your books back, by the way. Intelligent. Who thought of it – you or Proctor-Gould?’

  ‘Proctor-Gould.’

  ‘My mistake, of course, giving you the address. Mind must have steamed up a little after an hour in the dietary dining-room. Didn’t strike me till we were on our way out of the National with the second case of books. Never mind – we’ve still got that. I need hardly say, they’re not at Kurumalinskaya Street, so don’t come round and break the place u
p again.’

  ‘Case number one, equally, is no longer at the National.’

  ‘Exactly. The stage of pure banditry is now at an end.’

  They strode along companionably. Manning began to feel cheerful; he and Konstantin rather took to each other, he thought.

  ‘Konstantin,’ he said, ‘what’s all this business about?’

  Konstantin looked at him sharply.

  ‘Proctor-Gould hasn’t told you?’

  ‘He doesn’t know either.’

  ‘I think he does.’

  ‘He says not.’

  ‘You must have deduced, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve made one or two guesses.’

  Konstantin wrinkled up his nose to lift his glasses back on to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Guessed myself in the first place,’ he said. ‘I can remember the exact moment. It was at an evening reception in the History Faculty. You probably recall it. Pale sunshine slanting through the learned windows, lighting up the chalk dust in the air. Professors inclining their heads to listen to their colleagues’ remarks. First this way, then that, like metronomes. The Rector himself with his hands behind his back, nodding and smiling and raising his eyebrows, and raising his eyebrows and smiling and nodding. Nothing unusual. Everything in the highest degree normal.

  ‘Then up jumps a tiny professor with a drooping eyelid. “Comrade historians,” he says, “extend so to speak the courtesy of your attention to the Englishman Proctor-Gould who is going to tell us of his belief in peaceful co-existence.”

  ‘Applause. And up stands the Englishman Proctor-Gould, smiling benevolently and attempting to unscrew his right ear. And yourself, the Englishman Manning, inspecting the quality of workmanship in your boots.

  ‘All right, then. Speech is spoken. And elegantly translated. I listen. “Peaceful co-existence.” “Common cultural heritage.” “On the one hand Shakespeare, on the other, Chekhov.” “Lermontov and Balmont – descended from Scotsmen.” And so on.

  ‘Stormy applause. Stormily applaud myself. Everything the Englishman Proctor-Gould says is true. Free from negative characteristics. Couldn’t be better.