The Russian Interpreter

‘Yes. Kanysh is a natural man. He had a tiny room in a block off Baumann Street. I used to visit him when he wanted me to; stay away when he wanted me to. If he chose, we would sit in silence for a whole afternoon, he sitting on the end of the bed, I in the only chair. He would sit with his head in his hands, thinking his own thoughts. I would sit watching him, labouring to think not my thoughts but his. Or he would tell me about his life. Not for me to break in and say: “Yes, yes, I know exactly how you must have felt. When I was a child …” and so on, as people do. But for me just to listen, scarcely daring to breathe, while he talked on and on about the wrongs and sufferings which obsessed him, hardly noticing I was there. Or else he would make me tell him about my life, so that he could wrap it about his own wounds – the way country people do with cobwebs. That’s how I felt my life was on those days – cobweb, a nothing, thin shreds of nothing. But enough to give him some consolation. We never had a conversation, in the way that you and I have conversations, each giving and each taking, treating each other as free and equal beings. I should have hated that with him. Perhaps he depended on me – but only like one depends upon potatoes and bread. He was subject and I was object. It was absolute and complete. You and I – we’re hopeless. Just two runaway slaves – two women away from their men, chattering on companionably and vacuously, getting nothing done. But it’s cosy. I like it, Paul….’

She was crying. Manning put his hand on her arm.

‘Oh, Katya,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry, Katya.’

She wiped her eyes on a large crumpled handkerchief, and blew her nose clumsily.

‘Kanysh hasn’t written to me for three weeks now,’ she said. ‘I think he’s in trouble. I don’t know. I just have a feeling that something’s happened.’

She took a deep breath, stopped crying, and put the handkerchief away. They began to walk again.

Just in front of them was a man with a shaven head, carrying a small, broken attaché-case. He walked more and more slowly, as if he was coming to the end of a journey. At the great bend in the street beyond the bridge, where the trams came grinding round on the curve, he stopped, set his bag down on the pavement beside him, and gazed at the district ahead. Manning looked at his face in the light from the street lamps as they passed him. There was no expression on it, but his head slowly turned, his eyes taking in everything before him. Inch by inch he examined it all – the bend in the street, a blank wooden fence with missing boards, a shuttered kiosk, two concrete telegraph standards at slightly different angles to the vertical – as if he was recognizing a place seen in a dream. A man returning. From where? After how long? With nothing but what would go into that small attaché-case? The prodigies and portents of Manning’s walks with Katya. Manning turned round and looked again just before they lost him to sight round the bend. He was still standing there, still gazing.

18

Raya remained in Proctor-Gould’s room, her presence unchallenged by the hotel, the police, or anyone else. The floor clerk nodded at her when she came in and went out, the chambermaid folded her pyjamas and put them beneath the pillow. Otherwise no one remarked on her existence at all. To Proctor-Gould’s code of rules she paid not the slightest attention, coming and going from the room when she chose, arranging her belongings neatly on top of the chest of drawers and in the bathroom, and if she felt like it silently accompanying Proctor-Gould to the restaurant for dinner.

Proctor-Gould became increasingly preoccupied. In the middle of a rather difficult lunch with some officials of the Moscow public health department he leaned over to Manning and said in a low voice:

‘Bolvan.’

‘What?’

‘What does it mean? “Darling”? “Sweetheart”?’

‘It means “numbskull”.’

‘Ah.’

There was less and less for Manning to interpret between Proctor-Gould and his official contacts, more and more between him and Raya. Manning’s earnings declined; it was somehow tacitly agreed between them that it would be improper for Manning to be paid for interpreting Proctor-Gould’s dealings with his mistress. Each day Manning swore that he would have nothing more to do with them; but each time the message came he hurried round, certain that this time she was going to leave him.

They were an odd couple, and became no less odd as time went on. They quarrelled endlessly, with Manning’s assistance, chiefly about Raya’s failure to observe the regulations Proctor-Gould had laid down. Or rather, Proctor-Gould quarrelled, and she did not, like one hand clapping.

‘Will you tell her,’ Proctor-Gould would say with a curious mixture of indulgence and exasperation, ‘that when I came up after lunch today I found the bath full of underwear and stockings to soak?’

‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ Raya would reply.