The Russian Interpreter

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.

3

In the untidy little office on the first floor, beneath the portrait of Lenin with the brown stain gradually spreading outwards from the bottom left-hand corner, sat Sasha Zaborin. He looked up even before Manning was through the door, his quick, sensitive face already giving every possible care and attention to whomever it might turn out to be. When he saw it was Manning he smiled. It was a warm, anxious, parental smile.

‘Paul,’ he said. ‘You’re late. I thought you were going to Romm’s lecture this morning?’

‘I went for a walk in the sun instead.’

‘That must have been pleasant.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry, Sasha.’

‘There’s no need to apologize to me, Paul. It was for your good I recommended it, not mine.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

They spoke English together. Sasha spoke English at least as well as Manning spoke Russian, and he felt it was his duty to insist on putting himself out rather than the university’s guest. He was a youngish man, only a few years older than Manning. He was tall, with a high forehead topped by a sparse crop of dry, dark hair which never lay down, and which had blown into a complex tangle in the wind on the way to the Faculty. There were lines of habitual conscientiousness at the corners of his eyes. He looked like a dark, anxious Eisenstein. It was easy, for that matter to imagine him wearing a cassock, and striding through some poverty-stricken parish surrounded by adoring small children. Manning sometimes called him Father Zaborin, a joke which he didn’t much like.

‘Anyway,’ said Sasha, ‘how’s it going?’

‘Not all that well.’

‘No? What’s wrong?’

Manning put his brief-case down and went across to the window. He gazed out at the familiar sight – a wall, streaked with long tongues of damp like dangling vegetation, bisected by a drain-pipe as wide as a dust-bin which dribbled continuously into the mud floor of a little courtyard. You could just see the blue sky if you put your face next to the glass and craned your neck round.

‘I don’t know. General dissatisfaction with life.’

‘You’re easily dissatisfied, Paul. But on a day like this, when you can almost feel summer in the air …’

‘It brings it on.’

‘Paul, you must realize that your dissatisfaction is not an objective phenomenon. It is a subjective state which you can control if you really want to. After all, a man is master of himself. Remember Bazarov. “He who scorns his suffering inevitably conquers it.’”

‘And look what happened to him – he died.’

There was a silence, and Manning, turning from his study of the dribbling drainpipe in the courtyard, found that Sasha was gazing at him in a special worried way. He had suspected it.

‘You’re concerned about me again, aren’t you, Sasha?’