The Russian Interpreter

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, still 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.