The Russian Interpreter

8

Manning’s life became a round of parties, receptions, conferences, congresses, reunions, exhibitions – all the various bends and corners in life at which a sediment of people might be deposited for inspection. For his purely commercial dealings in balalaikas and Repin prints Proctor-Gould continued to use Soviet interpreters. But there turned out to be a third aspect to his activities which he had not mentioned before, and for which he preferred Manning. He was an export-import agent in goodwill. He had commissions, Manning discovered, from a number of organizations in Britain which wished to maintain or improve their contacts with the Soviet Union. Manning spent hours with him calling on government offices, university departments, and cultural agencies to convey greetings from British counterparts. They shook hands, drank toasts, smiled smiles. Often they delivered gifts, usually books from the stock which Proctor-Gould had referred to as his beads.

‘I accept commissions of this sort only from organizations with the right sort of standing,’ he explained. ‘I help them – their reputation helps me.’

‘You do it for nothing?’ asking Manning.

‘No, no – I charge a modest fee. They’re happy to pay it, I can tell you – it costs them far less than it would to send a man of their own over here. And I don’t want to boast, but I probably make rather a better job of it than they would themselves. I know from long experience how Russians like these things to be done.’

‘You seem to have struck quite a little goldmine,’ said Manning.

They were walking down a crowded shopping street as they talked, back to the black Chaika saloon which the government had put at Proctor-Gould’s disposal. At Manning’s remark Proctor-Gould stopped among the crowds, and fixed Manning with that gaze of curious intensity and levelness which indicated that the subject was so important to him that it took up the whole of his attention.

‘Paul,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t like you to get the wrong impression about my work here. There’s nothing cynical about my attitude, I assure you. I happen to believe that there’s nothing more important in the world today than the establishment of trust and understanding between Russia and the West. If I can feel that I’m making some small contribution to this end by my professional services, that’s my real reward. The money is of secondary importance. I should like you to get that quite clear, Paul.’

Manning believed he was sincere. Proctor-Gould had that patent sincerity directed towards unsubtle objectives which is the strength and hallmark of public men. That was what he was, thought Manning – a public man. He was not interested, as Manning was, in making his contacts with the world around him personal and intimate. Towards his parents, thought Manning, he would make generous formal gestures, as if they were not so much his parents as the emissaries of parents as a social class; towards women, gestures of generalized concupiscence, as if they were not Lucinda or Sally-Anne, but representatives of Lucindahood and Sally-Annity.

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.