The Russian Interpreter

25

There was only one room in the apartment. It was about twelve feet wide by fifteen feet long, and it looked out not on the courtyard but a derelict back-street running behind the block, lined with shuttered single-storey buildings which sagged in the middle, and plots of waste land covered with old boxes and rusty oil drums. Against one wall of the room was an unmade bed; in the corner, a primus stove standing on an asbestos sheet, and a dirty frying-pan; under the window a solid mahogany desk, covered with a confusion of books, papers, pencils, protractors and luxuriant pot plants.

There was scarcely any wall to be seen. Almost every inch of it was covered with books, crammed on to thin makeshift shelves which sagged under the weight, giving the room an odd impression of being hung with swagged draperies. On the shelves in front of the books was a confusion of objects for which there was no room anywhere else – framed photographs of people in the fashions of thirty years before, pen-and-ink sketches, a marble bust of Lomonosov, a compass, a cheap icon, a jar of feathers, pebbles, birds’ eggs, pieces of quartz, dried flowers, solid projections of mathematical functions, a metronome, a gramophone with a home-made amplifier and a dusty stack of long-playing records without envelopes. It was a dark, overstuffed, sympathetic room, a young man’s room that had gone to seed. The air smelt of frying and paraffin and sleeping.

Manning picked up a single nylon stocking which was lying across the back of a chair.

‘Wife? Girl friend?’ he said, showing it to Proctor-Gould.

Proctor-Gould threw back the bedclothes to look under the bed. It revealed an assortment of women’s shoes, all well-worn, standing in a silent grey desert of dust.

‘She doesn’t seem to have done much housework recently,’ he said.

Manning sat down at the desk, on an ancient swivel-chair with stuffing leaking out of its torn upholstery. There were crumbs among the papers on the desk, and a plate covered with cold grey grease. There was also a mirror on a swivel stand. Manning adjusted it slightly so that he could see himself. What on earth did Konstantin want a mirror on his desk for? It was difficult to believe from his appearance that he had ever examined his reflection in his life. But of course, it was for the woman; the desk/dining-table was also her dressing-table. He lifted some papers, and found a lipstick without a top, a broken eyebrow pencil, and a small jar of cold cream.

He tried to imagine Konstantin’s woman sitting there, among all the books and the masculine curiosities. Were some of the books and papers hers? Did she work at the desk, too, and own a share of the room’s character? Or was she indifferent to it, creating a small life in the midst of it all with her own props – the shoes, the cold cream, the broken eyebrow pencil? He pictured them getting up in the morning. He saw Konstantin, not her, putting the coffee on the primus. She would be sitting in the swivel-chair in her underwear, gazing at herself expressionlessly in the mirror, rubbing cream into her skin. She was self-contained, indifferent to him. If he asked her a question, she would let a minute go by before she answered. There was total confusion in the room; her clothes were scattered everywhere.

But somehow the room didn’t quite fit the picture. There should have been more confusion, more traces of her. A stocking, a few pairs of shoes – why were there no dresses lying around? Why was there no underwear hanging up to dry? One lipstick, one jar of cold cream, one eyebrow pencil – why was the eyebrow pencil broken?

He looked closely at the cold cream jar. It was covered in a fine film of dust. It hadn’t been opened for – how long? A week? Two weeks? A month? How quickly did dust collect in Moscow? He went across to the bed. There was a pair of men’s pyjamas mixed up in the bedding. But no nightdress. Nothing to indicate that a woman had slept there.

‘I think she’s left him,’ he said.

Proctor-Gould was searching among some clothes crammed behind a dusty curtain in the corner.

‘She expects to come back, then,’ he said. ‘She’s left some of her clothes on the rail here. Look at this.’

He held up a pale blue evening dress, with silk flounces and sequins. The colour had faded – the silk was almost brown in places – and a number of sequins were missing.

‘Rather a museum piece, isn’t it?’ he said, giggling. ‘Konstantin must have a pretty curious taste in lady friends.’

But the sight of the dress softened Manning towards the girl.

‘I expect her parents bought her that when she was about seventeen,’ he said. ‘It’s rather touching she should have kept it. Incidentally, they must have moved in exalted circles. There aren’t many places in Moscow where you wear long evening gowns.’

Proctor-Gould hung the dress up again.

‘Perhaps they quarrelled,’ said Manning, ‘and she walked out without having time to pack everything.’

Proctor-Gould shrugged.

‘She’s probably gone off on some sort of business trip,’ he said. ‘Or living with someone else for a month. Some of these Soviet girls are pretty casual, you know. But never mind her – where’s the suitcase?’

Manning went slowly along the bookshelves, running his eye along the titles. There were all the standard Russian classics, and a number of foreign ones in translation. Farther on there were shelves full of books on Russian history and Russian economic geography, then a row of textbooks on mechanics, mathematics, and aircraft construction, tables of engineering constants, and forty or fifty issues of a learned journal devoted to high-temperature metallurgy.

Manning was surprised to find a number of philosophical works in French and German, expounding existentialism and positivism. At random he took down Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt. There was a tram ticket between pages nine and ten. Before the ticket the margins were full of scribbled translations of even quite simple words. After the ticket they were empty. On another shelf were books about the Soviet Union written by foreigners who had visited it. Manning noticed Gide’s Retour de I’URSS. The margins were full of translation notes all the way through. He wondered how much it had cost Konstantin on the black market.

‘Well?’ said Proctor-Gould.

‘No luck so far.’

He went on looking; it upset and offended him to think that this intelligent and coherent library had been assembled by a petty criminal. Perhaps it was all stolen property.

Among a small selection of books on Borodin and Glinka he came across a copy of A Hero of Our Time. An odd place for it to be – particularly since there was another copy of it among the rest of Lermontov’s works. It occurred to him that he had passed two separate copies of An Economic History of the R.S.F.S.R. in different places. A moment later he saw The Behaviour of Aerofoils in Lateral Turbulence for the second time round, and two copies of The Nimzovich Defence.

Puzzled, he stared at the spines of the two Nimzovich Defences. They seemed to be the same edition. The only difference between them was that one was in a dust-jacket and one was not. He looked back to the two copies of The Behaviour of Aerofoils. Again, they were the same edition. Again, the only difference was that one was dust-jacketed and one was not.

He saw the explanation suddenly and completely, as if it had been held up on a card in front of him. He took out the copy of The Behaviour of Aerofoils with the dust-jacket and opened it. Inside the jacket was a copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems.

‘One of yours?’ asked Manning.

‘Ah!’ said Proctor-Gould.

They began to pull out all the other dust-jacketed books they could see on the shelves one after another, throwing them down on the floor if the jackets did not conceal volumes belonging to Proctor-Gould, until they had recovered some twenty books.

‘I wonder where the suitcase is?’ said Manning.

‘Somewhere on that waste lot outside the window, I should think.’

‘Any more to come?’ asked Manning. ‘I think it’s about time we left.’

‘There should be one or two. What’s that one you’ve got there?’

It was the Proceedings of the Institute of Civic Studies. Proctor-Gould took it out of Manning’s hands and flicked through it.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s call it a day.’

‘Just a moment,’ said Manning. He put his hand into the gap left by the Proceedings and pulled out something which had been concealed behind the row of books. It was a tin of Nescafé.

They both stared at it without a word. Then Manning pulled out all the other books on the shelf. There, lined up against the wall at the back, were four more tins of Nescafé.

‘You lost six, didn’t you?’ asked Manning.

‘She brought one back.’

They picked up the tins and examined them. One of them was almost empty, as it had been when it disappeared from Proctor-Gould’s room. The others were still full. But they had all been opened and unsealed.

‘What do you make of it?’ asked Manning.

Proctor-Gould shrugged.

‘I suppose he opened them to make sure they were genuine.’

Manning thought.

‘Would you have opened them,’ he said, ‘if you’d been buying them?’

‘I might.’

‘You wouldn’t, Gordon. Not if you’d wanted to sell them again.’

‘If I had a suspicious nature …’

‘You might have opened one at random as a sample, Gordon. But not all of them.’

Proctor-Gould fixed Manning with his great brown gaze.

‘What’s your explanation then?’ he asked.

‘I think he was looking for something.’

‘Looking for something? What?’

‘I don’t know, Gordon. Do you?’

Proctor-Gould went on gazing at Manning for some moments. But the focus of his eyes shifted, so that he seemed to be looking right through Manning’s head at the wall beyond. Finally a great sigh heaved his shoulders up and dropped them again.

‘No, Paul,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’

There was a conclusion about another matter that the tins suggested to Manning. He caught Proctor-Gould’s eye.

‘I wonder if you’re thinking what I’m thinking,’ he said.

‘What about, Paul?’

‘Who the girl is who shares Konstantin’s room.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Proctor-Gould. He sighed again. ‘Yes, that did occur to me.’

‘No mystery about her any longer.’

‘No.’

‘Nor where she’s been for the past few weeks.’

‘I suppose not.’

Proctor-Gould picked up the single nylon stocking and rubbed it softly between finger and thumb, then put it in his pocket. He noticed Manning watching him.

‘She’s probably looking for it,’ he said.