The Russian Interpreter

31

Under one of the street-lamps on the highway Konstantin banged the dust off his cap and bent the frame of his spectacles straight. Manning rubbed his chest where Konstantin’s shoulder had hit it. They avoided meeting each other’s eye.

‘Well,’ said Konstantin, with a short, embarrassed laugh, ‘a negative conclusion. A turn of events not fully in accord with the dignity of Soviet man.’

Manning smiled foolishly, unable to think of anything to say. He felt ludicrously pleased to see someone he knew.

‘An unusual way for a visitor to our country to behave,’ said Konstantin. ‘Running about state construction sites in the dark.’

‘I lost my head.’

‘One moment you were walking down the street, like a normal bourgeois intellectual. Next moment – ptut! – gone. Then five minutes later you come shooting out from nowhere like a policeman after a bribe. An untypical phenomenon.’

He threw the words away casually, almost surreptitiously, as if they were old sweet wrappers he was disposing of in the street. He settled his cap carefully back on to his head, jiggling it back and forth to get the exact fit. It occurred to Manning why Konstantin was so different in appearance from most of the other men he knew in Moscow. The others had reached 1935 in their style of dressing. Konstantin had not yet got beyond 1918.

They began to walk along the highway together. It seemed to Manning infinitely less threatening now.

‘Why were you following me?’ he asked.

Konstantin shrugged.

‘Wanted to keep abreast of any new developments in Western book distributing technique,’ he said. ‘I congratulate you on getting your books back, by the way. Intelligent. Who thought of it – you or Proctor-Gould?’

‘Proctor-Gould.’

‘My mistake, of course, giving you the address. Mind must have steamed up a little after an hour in the dietary dining-room. Didn’t strike me till we were on our way out of the National with the second case of books. Never mind – we’ve still got that. I need hardly say, they’re not at Kurumalinskaya Street, so don’t come round and break the place up again.’

‘Case number one, equally, is no longer at the National.’

‘Exactly. The stage of pure banditry is now at an end.’

They strode along companionably. Manning began to feel cheerful; he and Konstantin rather took to each other, he thought.

‘Konstantin,’ he said, ‘what’s all this business about?’

Konstantin looked at him sharply.

‘Proctor-Gould hasn’t told you?’

‘He doesn’t know either.’

‘I think he does.’

‘He says not.’

‘You must have deduced, anyway.’

‘I’ve made one or two guesses.’

Konstantin wrinkled up his nose to lift his glasses back on to the bridge of his nose.

‘Guessed myself in the first place,’ he said. ‘I can remember the exact moment. It was at an evening reception in the History Faculty. You probably recall it. Pale sunshine slanting through the learned windows, lighting up the chalk dust in the air. Professors inclining their heads to listen to their colleagues’ remarks. First this way, then that, like metronomes. The Rector himself with his hands behind his back, nodding and smiling and raising his eyebrows, and raising his eyebrows and smiling and nodding. Nothing unusual. Everything in the highest degree normal.

‘Then up jumps a tiny professor with a drooping eyelid. “Comrade historians,” he says, “extend so to speak the courtesy of your attention to the Englishman Proctor-Gould who is going to tell us of his belief in peaceful co-existence.”

‘Applause. And up stands the Englishman Proctor-Gould, smiling benevolently and attempting to unscrew his right ear. And yourself, the Englishman Manning, inspecting the quality of workmanship in your boots.

‘All right, then. Speech is spoken. And elegantly translated. I listen. “Peaceful co-existence.” “Common cultural heritage.” “On the one hand Shakespeare, on the other, Chekhov.” “Lermontov and Balmont – descended from Scotsmen.” And so on.

‘Stormy applause. Stormily applaud myself. Everything the Englishman Proctor-Gould says is true. Free from negative characteristics. Couldn’t be better.

‘And filled with a practical desire to forge the bonds of friendship then and there, the English comrade suddenly rounds on the little professor with the drooping eyelid and presents him with a handsomely bound volume of dialectically incorrect bourgeois history. “Take,” he says, “this simple volume of imperialist lies as a token of the English people’s eternal esteem.”

‘The dwarf professor accepts it with deep gratitude and a long pair of tongs. Applause. Photographers’ flashes. And before the bond of friendship has had time to cool, the professor is brandishing a silver-gilt model of Moscow University. “Be so good,” he says, “as to condescend to accept this worthless, thirty-centimetres high, silver-gilt facsimile of our humble skyscraper.” Thunderstorm of clapping and electronic flashes.

‘And at that moment it struck me.

‘“Holy God!” I thought. “This tiny brigand is handing over the precious secrets of our Soviet state for foreign gold! I can tell by the look on their faces!”’