The Russian Interpreter

2

A great morning for the comedians on the underground.

‘Don’t squeeze me like that, comrades,’ begged a small man caught in the crowd that packed aboard the train at Frunzenskaya. ‘I’m not an accordion.’

‘For God’s sake stop groaning, then,’ said the large man who was pinning him against the doors.

Some days it was comedians. Some days everyone was reading serious books. Manning had to commute because he worked in one of the Faculties which had still not been moved out of the centre of the city for interment in that vast mausoleum on the Sparrow Hills. He had a brief moment of panic when his brief-case, which contained the precious fragments of his thesis, ‘The Experience of Decentralization in the Administration of Public Utilities’, became trapped on the far side of two more comedians, and was almost torn out of his grasp. It was a painful and frightening thought, which came to him from time to time, that the only tangible evidence for his eighteen months’ hard labour in the city might somehow disappear before his eyes, like water into sand. It made him feel protective towards it. However unattractive it seemed, he would cherish it and feed it up and watch it grow to maturity. It looked like being his life’s work. He had given birth to it at Cambridge, nursed it for a year at the London School of Civic Studies, brought it to Moscow for its health. But it was still poorly. Next year he would take it away to somewhere with a warm climate – Berkeley, perhaps, or Accra. It was a terrible burden, a sickly thesis. But when at last it had grown up and become a Ph.D. perhaps it would keep him in his old age.

He got out at Lenin Library, and walked up Mokhovaya Street into Manyezh Square, a vast parade ground without a parade. Tiny buses and taxis performed their evolutions in the sunshine, almost lost in the great distances. Flocks of pigeons fluttered, settled, and strutted about the central provinces of the asphalt plain, and beyond it the dark red walls of the Kremlin rose like a remote range of mountains. At the edge of these wastes the pavement was crowded. Authorized peddlars sold ice-cream, kvass, hot pies. A man in a stained blue suit tottered towards Manning, his arms hanging down, his eyes closed. He opened them at the last moment, saw Manning, and stopped. Then he took a pace backwards, side-stepped elaborately, tripped over the low wall in front of the History Faculty, and fell through the hedge. He stayed down, invisible but for his boots, which stuck out motionless over the pavement. No one paid any attention to him.

Manning turned up a narrow private alley between a postcard stall and a hot-pie concession. It led into a yard which was surrounded irregularly by the backs of buildings and occupied by two large wooden sheds and a stack of logs for the furnaces. Here the sun scarcely penetrated, and the walk were wet with long-stored winter moisture.

In one corner of the yard was a door, painted a blistered chocolate brown. The upper half of the door was glazed with dusty panes, and the small brass handle drooped in-effectually, worn loose and shiny over the years. Next to the door was fixed a plaque with old-fashioned gilt lettering on a shiny black background which announced:

FACULTY OF ADMINISTRATIVE-MANAGEMENT SCIENCES

The sign was cracked from top to bottom.

Manning went in, and the heavy door slipped from his fingers behind him and slammed shut with a crash which rattled all the panes of glass in their crumbling putty. The inner door escaped from him, too, and crashed shut in its turn. In the corridor just inside was a sour-faced old woman sitting on a broken chair, her thick glasses askew, her hands tucked into her sleeves. Manning tried, as he always did, to walk straight by her.

‘Pass,’ she demanded, as she always did.

‘You know me,’ said Manning.

‘I don’t know anyone.’

Manning fumbled in his pocket, sighing to indicate his irritation. Once he had shouted at her each time he came in. Now he had been worn down to mere sighs.

‘Someone came looking for you last night,’ said the old woman, while she waited to find out who Manning was.

‘An Englishman?’

‘How should I know? He didn’t speak Russian.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Chased him off. He hadn’t got a pass.’

He showed her his university identity card, and walked up the bare wooden stairs to the first floor. The fourth, fifth, seventh, and eleventh stairs creaked as he trod on them. The building was alive with the quiet academic noise of Admin-Uprav at work. There was the uninterrupted monotone of one lecturer – Ginsberg, no doubt, on labour law; the little rushes and hesitations of another, Rubeshchenskaya, the Professor of Social Statistics, who could never manage to work out her statistical examples on the board; the relentless, steady pulse of Korolenko, the Dean of the Faculty, giving his well-known lecture on the Essential Attributes of the Soviet Administrator. There was the shuffling of feet on bare boards. Respectful laughter, needling laughter, and pervading everything, the Admin-Uprav smell, the weary, ancient smell of weak cabbage soup and greasy pirozhki, filtering up from the canteen in the basement.

Certainly I must get away, thought Manning. Perhaps I could afford to go to Finland for a few days? I wonder if they’d let me? He tried to recall the brownness of the limbs he had visualized on the Sparrow Hills, and the slightness of the cotton dresses which scarcely seemed to hide them. But they eluded him. There was no direct daylight on the staircases and in the corridors of Admin-Uprav. You couldn’t have told that outside it was the first warm day of the year.