The Russian Interpreter

by Michael Frayn

  He asked the warders who came to unlock him, or to inspect him through the peep-hole, where the prison was, but they never answered. He asked them if Proctor-Gould was in the same prison. They ignored that, too. He asked them what he was charged with. He asked to see someone from the British Embassy. He asked for paper to write to his mother. He asked for a towel. The warders went on with what they were doing as if they had not heard. The questions began to sound foolish even to Manning.

  He wondered if the Embassy knew about their arrest. Unless the police had notified them, he thought probably not – at any rate, not yet. There was no one who could have told them. Sasha or Konstantin might have been prepared to, but Russians would not normally be able to communicate with a Western embassy. It was possible, anyway, that Konstantin had been arrested himself at the end of the Faculty dinner. As if from a dream Manning could remember him standing in a corridor … shaking his head at something Manning was saying….

  Proctor-Gould’s disappearance would soon be noticed, of course, even if his own was not. Manning tried to remember if he had mentioned any appointments with Embassy people, or with people who might be expected to inform the Embassy if he failed to turn up. Proctor-Gould had too many links and contacts for his absence to go unremarked for more than a day or two at most. Then the Embassy would take action. It was the sort of job they would give to Chylde, who used to invite Manning to his parties. Manning tried to imagine Chylde taking action. He pictured Chylde’s face, all pink and smooth, and heard Chylde’s voice, humbly distributing the alms of his benevolent interest to all those less fortunate creatures in the world who through some unfortunate deficiency of taste, education, nationality, or character had not been selected for the British Foreign Service. It was not an entirely reassuring thought.

  Manning struck up some sort of acquaintance with the warder on night duty. He was older than the other warders, and he had sagging shoulders, with a crumpled face set in an expression of permanent apology. When he came on duty in the evening he would slide back the peep-hole and ask:

  ‘All right, son?’

  Manning was encouraged by these few words in the silence. He took to asking to be let out to the lavatory each evening; constipated by the impersonal stares of the day warders, he found he could manage to empty his bowels in the night man’s more sympathetic presence. One evening, as he sat on the lavatory, the night man took a cigarette out of his tunic pocket, cut a third of it off with his pocket-knife, lit the two pieces in his own mouth, and gave the smaller one to Manning.

  ‘Stop the smell,’ he said. ‘Always light up in the lavatory myself.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Manning. He was moved by the gesture.

  ‘What have they got you for, son?’ asked the night man.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The night man chuckled humourlessly.

  ‘“I don’t know”,’ he mimicked.

  They smoked in silence. The night man stood with his head turned to one side, as if listening for some faint, distant sound. Manning took the opportunity to repeat his various requests. ‘Mother,’ ‘Embassy,’ ‘towel,’ – the words echoed away ridiculously down the corridor from the doorless lavatory, under the weak, bare bulbs in their wire guards. The night man did not even look at Manning. Whatever the sounds were that his ear was cocked to catch, they were not Manning’s complaints.

  But one point had got through, at any rate. When Manning had reached the stage of washing his hands, and drying them on the sodden handkerchief, the night man took the end of his cigarette out of his mouth between his second finger and thumb, and flushed it carefully away down the lavatory. Then he said:

  ‘Should have a towel. To dry yourself.’

  ‘Can you get me one?’

  ‘Not my job, son.’

  ‘Couldn’t you tell someone …?’

  ‘No one to tell on this shift.’

  Some of the time, as Manning sat on the bed in his cell, watching the patch of sunlight from the window creep millimetre by millimetre across the wall, lengthening, then at last reddening, fading, and disappearing, he felt despair. He was abandoned. No one knew where he was. He had fallen off the edge of the world.

  But more often he worried. Not so much about whether a charge would be brought against him, or what sentence he would get if it was. These eventualities still seemed remote and improbable. He worried about what would happen when he was taken out of his cell, as he assuredly soon would be, and questioned.

  Over and over again he tried to visualize the scene. He imagined that the questioner would be in uniform, but hatless, sitting at a desk in a small room. However the external circumstances changed in his imagination, the questioner’s face remained the same. It was someone exactly like Sasha – anxious, courteous, scrupulous, demanding, personally wounded by any deviation from his own standards of honesty and frankness. Or so, at any rate, he would seem.

  At first he would be sympathetic and amiable. He would shake hands. Offer Manning a cigarette. Ask how he was being treated. Manning imagined that he might tell him about not having a towel. The man would apologize. Would promise to get him one.

  Then he would ask Manning when he had first met Proctor-Gould. What was the exact nature of the duties he had accepted? What financial arrangement had they come to? Whom had he met in the course of his work as Proctor-Gould’s interpreter? On which dates? Where? The answers to all these questions would be known to the interrogator already, since it had all been done in public, in front of witnesses, within range of microphones. Manning would tell the truth so far as he could remember it. It would tally with the record. The interrogator would remain sympathetic and amiable.

  Then, at some stage, he would be asked if Proctor-Gould had ever told him the nature of the secret work upon which he was engaged.

  What would he say?

  If he said yes he would incriminate not only Proctor-Gould but himself, as Proctor-Gould’s accessory.

  If he said no …

  Manning could see the puzzled, hurt look come into the interrogator’s eyes, as it did sometimes into Sasha’s. Manning had never asked Proctor-Gould what he was up to? – No. He had helped Proctor-Gould force an entry into the apartment on Kurumalinskaya Street in order to recover his books by force, and he had not asked for any explanation? – Well, Proctor-Gould had said it was because the books had been entrusted to his care by his clients. Who were his clients? – Proctor-Gould hadn’t specified. Manning had accepted that explanation? – Yes.

  The interrogator would get up from his desk and go across to the window. With his back to him he would ask quietly: was there nothing that Manning wished to add to his answer? No. And thereafter the questioner’s sympathy and amiability would be gone. Thereafter Manning would be treated, rightly, as a liar.

  Manning felt his palms moisten at the thought. No doubt, if they felt he was concealing something really important, they would proceed to harsher methods of questioning. They would bully him. They would keep him awake at night, reduce his diet, make threats. They might very well go further. But already Manning doubted if he had the moral fortitude to resist such complete isolation from sympathy and approval. Wouldn’t it be better to tell them the whole truth in the first place? To be cooperative, to admit he had been wrong? To say he had done it only so as not to betray a comrade? To be ashamed, to ask for clemency?

  He did not think he owed any further loyalty to Proctor-Gould, or to the ridiculous oath he had been made to swear. Proctor-Gould had involved him without his consent. He had tried to compel his continued cooperation by telling him two entirely different stories, both of which could not be true. And what version was he offering his interrogators even now, wherever he was? Perhaps it was one which attempted to make Manning out to be the principal. It was impossible to know – he might be trying to exculpate Manning entirely. Manning built structures of indignation and guilt on each hypothesis in turn. But it did not help with the practical question of what he was going to tell the interrog
ator. He could not guess how Proctor-Gould was likely to behave. Under the shifting sands of explanation and counter-explanation, he realized, he had no idea what sort of person Proctor-Gould was at all.

  ‘When are they going to question me?’ Manning asked the night man as he sat on the lavatory smoking another third of a cigarette.

  ‘Impatient, are you?’ said the night man.

  ‘I’d like to know.’

  ‘We’d all like to know a lot of things. Have they issued you with a towel yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to get the towel straight first, son. If you can’t even get a towel to dry yourself on there’s not much point in worrying your head about legal matters.’

  Then again, even if he decided what to say about Proctor-Gould, it didn’t end his difficulties. Supposing he was asked about Konstantin and Raya? The security people must have realized that Raya was stealing the books as well as exchanging them. And Proctor-Gould had probably told his interrogator everything that Manning had relayed to him of Konstantin’s activities. Was there any possible point for Manning in trying to deny all knowledge of those activities? Wouldn’t it just make his own position worse without in any way helping Konstantin or Raya? Raya’s father could probably protect them more effectively than he could hope to.

  From his own experience it was always better in the end to be honest. Indeed, he had almost no experience of attempting anything but honesty. All ethical aspects apart, wasn’t he simply too unpractised to resort to deceit now? Anyway, if he was not whole-hearted in his attempt to deceive – and he was not – he would not have the slightest chance of being believed. And by being detected in deceit he would make things worse not only for himself, but for all four of them….

  He worried, and drowsed on his bed. When he awoke the problems were still there to be worried about, more concrete, more complex and interconnected hour by hour. He would have liked to talk about them with the night man, and because he could not, their evening conversations languished, and became one-sided and single-track. They talked about almost nothing but the towel; Manning’s continued failure to provide himself with one provoked ever more pained and eloquent admonitions.

  ‘You want to exert yourself, you know,’ the night man would say. ‘Make a formal complaint through the proper channels. If that doesn’t work, make another complaint. Take it up to the central administration, if necessary. You’ve got rights, you know, son. We’re not living under the cult of personality now. It’s not healthy, wiping your hands on that little handkerchief all the time. Ah, you’re all the same, you youngsters – you just won’t make the effort.’

  On some days Manning was resolved to say nothing that might incriminate anyone. On other days he made up his mind to tell the whole truth and save his skin as best he could. Then there were times when he settled on a more pragmatic approach. He would say nothing incriminating until it definitely became clear from the course of the interview that this was doing him more harm than good. But by then, of course, he would have destroyed his credit. He became obsessed with the fear that even if he told his questioners the truth they would not believe it, or would not accept it as being complete, and would go on pressing him for information which he did not have.

  After a while he found it difficult to keep track of the days. The warders were taken off his section, replaced by fresh men, and then brought back, according to some rota that he could not follow. The night man was off for five nights, back for four, then off for three. Some days Manning was taken to the bath-house, at a time when no one else was using it, and allowed to take a supervised bath. Twice this happened on a Tuesday. After his third bath it took him an hour to work out that it was not a Tuesday at all this time but a Monday.

  In the bath-house he was always issued with a towel to dry himself, but each time it had to be handed in again, in spite of his protests. He did his best to keep the handkerchief in his cell clean, and to get it dried out, but his face and hands became chapped, and the chaps became sores.

  ‘I told you it was a disgusting habit,’ said the night man, shaking his head. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, son.’

  Then he got some form of stomach trouble, and had to shout for the warder two or three times an hour to take him to the lavatory. The smell of his motions drove even the night man away, in spite of his cigarette. He ran a temperature, and his anxieties boiled up inside his head. They seemed like vessels driven round in a maelstrom, spinning and swirling and colliding, appearing, and disappearing, changing their shape entirely. He asked repeatedly to see a doctor, and eventually one came. But by that time the fever had subsided. All the same, it was a pleasure to see someone who wasn’t a warder. And afterwards a series of orderlies arrived in his section, bringing a tonic for him to take, an ointment for his sores, a stack of English classics in Russian translation with half their pages torn or missing – and a towel. He lay on his bed feeling very low, taking the tonic three times a day after meals, listlessly reading the books, and planning how to make the towel last. The weather was fine. The tiny patch of sky he could see through the high window was blue every day, and the cell became uncomfortably hot in the afternoons. His anxiety about what he would say when he was questioned faded from his mind, and became entirely forgotten. He settled into a quiet round of unhappiness, sweeping out his cell and exercising once a day, bathing once a week, dreaming of his mother’s house and talking about it each evening to the night man. The night man listened only perfunctorily; now that Manning had got a towel he had rather lost interest in him.

  It was the night man who woke him one morning at dawn, switching on the light in his cell while the high rectangle of the window was still pale grey.

  ‘Clothes on, son, and get your belongings together,’ he said, in his companionable voice. ‘I want you outside in the corridor ready for transfer in two minutes.’

  38

  The night man took him out of his private section and through the main body of the prison, unlocking and re-locking each door they passed through. They crossed an open yard, the night man silently leading the way. Slopping along in his unlaced shoes, Manning had some difficulty in keeping up with him. In the grey half-light he could see odd groups of men in prison overalls slouching away towards the other side of the yard – perhaps on their way to the kitchens to start preparing breakfast. The air was cold. Manning shivered.

  They went into a large office with a stone floor, and a bare electric bulb shining down on ugly brown tables and filing cabinets. There were a number of men in the room, some in uniform, some wearing civilian clothes; some sitting down at the tables, some standing with their hands in their overcoat pockets.

  ‘Hallo, Paul,’ said one of them in English. Manning had difficulty for a moment in distinguishing which of them had spoken. Then he saw; it was Sasha. He opened his mouth to reply, but his vocal chords seemed to be inert.

  A man sitting at a table pushed a slip of paper and a pen across to Manning.

  ‘Sign this,’ he said.

  Manning signed, blindly. It could have been a fictitious deposition, or his own death warrant. The man slid a rough brown paper parcel across to him and opened it briefly for him to see. Manning caught a glimpse of his tie, his watch, and a pile of loose change. The man pulled out a pair of shoe laces and tossed them to Manning.

  ‘Lace up your shoes,’ he said.

  Fumblingly, Manning crammed the laces through the holes, conscious of nothing but the indifferent gaze of everyone in the room. Then one of the men in civilian clothes opened the door for him, and he was taken out into a dark, echoing archway. A picket door was unlocked with a tremendous clatter. Manning looked round to see if he could see the night man among the figures about him, to say good-bye, but in the poor light he couldn’t pick him out. He stumbled as he stepped through the picket.

  They were in the street. A modest Pobyeda saloon stood at the kerb, and they got into it, one man on either side of Manning on the back seat, and Sasha next to the driv
er.

  Sasha at once turned round and gazed at Manning in the twilight. He compressed his lips, then leant over and squeezed Manning’s hand.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Paul,’ he said in Russian. He sounded moved, and he was blinking awkwardly. Manning nodded back, for some reason still unable to say anything. Sasha looked away.

  ‘Was it bad in there?’ Sasha asked. Manning began to shake his head, then nodded once. Suddenly he was seized by the dawn coldness, and began to shudder violently. Without a word Sasha struggled out of his overcoat and pulled it round Manning’s shoulders.

  ‘All right?’ said the driver.

  ‘All right,’ said Sasha.

  The car moved off, and drove slowly up the empty street. They passed women sweeping the gutters, and at the corner a dozen people waiting for a bus, their faces all turned the same way in expressionless expectation.

  ‘We’re going to Sheremetyevo,’ said Sasha. ‘You have a seat booked aboard the 8.30 a.m. flight to London.’

  ‘I’m being deported?’

  ‘Yes. You’ll be at London by half past ten. We collected all your stuff from your room and packed it up – it’s in the boot. Your thesis and all your notes are in the small brown case. Is there anything you want me to collect from anywhere else to send on later?’

  Manning shook his head. They drove slowly through the eastern suburbs into the centre of Moscow, not talking. The sky was growing light. Manning caught a glimpse of the university skyscraper floating over the city on the Sparrow Hills, already brilliantly sunlit, the illuminated red star on its pinnacle extinguished against the perfectly cloudless summer sky. At an intersection in the north of the city the sun burst into the car, shining straight down a long boulevard opening from their right, dazzling them. To Manning the streets and the sunlight looked as ordinary and expected as the walls of his cell. He had not yet adjusted to his sudden release. All he felt was a certain dull irritation that he had not been given time to shave before leaving.