The Russian Interpreter

1

Manning’s old friend Proctor-Gould was in Moscow, and anxious to get in touch with him. Or so Manning was informed. He looked forward to the meeting. He had few friends in Moscow, none of them old friends, and no friends at all, old or new, in Moscow or anywhere else, called Proctor-Gould.

All the same, Proctor-Gould was beginning to seem familiar. Chylde, at the Embassy, who sometimes used to invite Manning to the sad cocktail parties which he and his wife gave for the British community, had met him. So had one of the Reuters people, and Pylny, a walrus-moustached old man who edited an English-language propaganda sheet, and frequented Western visitors with dogged wistfulness. They all said that Proctor-Gould had large brown eyes, and kept pulling his ear as he talked. They would demonstrate, and try to recall him to Manning’s mind, and as they demonstrated they would smile, as if the picture of him they had before their minds was somehow a little touching. They knew he was staying at the Hotel National and that he was in Moscow on business. But with none of them had he left any message for Manning to contact him.

He came closer. One morning Hurwitz said he had seen him. Hurwitz, a shambling bio-chemist from Czechoslovakia, had the room next to Manning in Sector B, the wing reserved for foreigners in the university skyscraper on the Sparrow Hills. He came into Manning’s room in his pyjama-trousers, cleaning his teeth and spattering specks of toothpaste over Manning’s walls and carpet.

‘Saw an old friend of yours last night,’ he said, his curious Czech Russian made more indistinct by bared teeth and toothbrush.

‘Oh, yes?’ said Manning. He and Hurwitz did not get on very well. Manning lived with almost fanatical tidiness, trying to create around himself a small stronghold of order in the vast confusion of Russia. Hurwitz and his habits were part of the confusion, and the two worlds overlapped disagreeably in the bathroom, which they had to share.

‘He was at the desk here when I came in last night,’ said Hurwitz. ‘You weren’t in, so of course they wouldn’t let him through.’

He went out of the room, spat into the basin, and returned.

‘He couldn’t speak Russian,’ he said. ‘We tried in German, but he couldn’t say much. Anyway, he asked me to give you this.’

He handed Manning a business card, now spattered with toothpaste and soggy from Hurwitz’s wet fingers. On it was printed in Cyrillic characters:

Gordon Proctor-Gould M.A. (Cantab.)

Manning looked at it with distrust. Why did his old friend Gordon Proctor-Gould have a Russian visiting card? Why had he not written any message on it?

‘I think your friend had something wrong with his ear,’ said Hurwitz. ‘He kept pulling it, like this – poum, poum.’

‘Yes. Anyway, thanks.’

‘There was a girl with him. He had his arm round her. She was crying.’

After Hurwitz had gone Manning sponged the spots of toothpaste off the carpet and set off for work. Gloomily, he walked along the miles of blue-carpeted corridors, down the triumphal staircases, and across the echoing marble foyers. The Proctor-Gould business was typical, he thought. Everything in Moscow was like this – unnecessarily complicated, never more than half-explained. The simplest of life’s arrangements had to be heaved into place against the gravitational pull of indifference and muddle. There were always two left shoes, and one finger too many to go in the holes of the glove. He felt, as he often did, that he would like to lie down, exhausted.

Outside, when at last he got outside, the complexity increased. It was a brilliant day; the last of the snow had melted almost everywhere. The mild, wet winter had collapsed suddenly into the first marvellous warmth that sometimes precedes the spring. Manning felt suspicious; not even the winters were unambiguous and straightforward.

He crossed the great empty plaza in front of the university, watched impassively by the gigantic gimcrack statues thirty floors above of women grasping hammers and cog-wheels. Everything seemed enormous and out-of-scale, like one’s fingers ballooning beneath one’s touch in a fever. Beyond the plaza, in the formal vista of the ornamental gardens, solitary pedestrians moved like bedouin, separated from one another by Saharas of empty brown flower-bed and drying tarmacadam. They were so small they seemed to be merely an infestation. The authorities should have put human-being powder down and got rid of them.

He walked through the gardens. The air was mild. On the marble benches here and there the old women gardeners lay asleep in the sun, their rakes and forks propped up beside them. Manning found the sight of them curiously moving.

There were more of them beside the little white church at the far end of the vista, stretched out on the wet grass itself. The church stood on the very lip of the high ground. Beyond it, the grass slopes and birch woods dropped steeply away, down to the great flashing silver arc of the river, and beyond, as if caught and contained by that long meander, the cathedrals, skyscrapers, parks, stadiums, and smoking factory chimneys of Moscow. Manning gazed at it. God, it was an intolerable city! And yet his feelings about it were never entirely simple. On the river below two dazzlingly white steamers were passing each other in midstream. A train with a thousand trucks shunted slowly across the south of the city, puffing brilliant snowballs of smoke up into the sunshine. The evocative railway sounds came and went distantly in the breeze.

Manning thought of summer, and tears of longing pricked at his eyes. He thought of long journeys, and drinks at tables in the sun, and girls with white silk scarves over their piled hair, and slight cotton dresses over their delectable sunburnt bodies. He would go away somewhere. He would fall in love. Yes, this summer without fail he would have an affair with a sunburnt girl in a white cotton dress, who looked at him sometimes with troubled eyes, and held his hand against her face….