The Russian Interpreter

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.