The Russian Interpreter

Certainly a public life sprang up around them wherever they went in Moscow. On the slightest pretext, at even quite small receptions, Proctor-Gould would make a speech. The phrases which came rolling so steadily and emphatically out on these occasions – ‘the cultural treasure-house we share’, ‘setting our barren suspicions and fears behind us’, ‘practical steps to increase our mutual confidence’ – were not exactly clichés. They were units of the public language. At first their abstraction and generality appalled Manning as he translated them. Yet he could see them have their effect on the audience – the limited effect of public language on a public audience, but an effect nonetheless. People listened and applauded with genuine respect and interest. An attempt at some more personal form of communication, conceded Manning grudgingly, might have had no effect at all without the framework of a real personal relationship to give it meaning.

It was at an occasion of this nature that Sasha first met Proctor-Gould. A reception was being held for Proctor-Gould in a lecture-room in the History Faculty. It was early evening. The air was full of chalk dust from the blackboard, and the level rays of the setting sun through a western window cut golden swathes across it. Proctor-Gould was speaking when Manning, standing by his side on the dais translating, caught sight of Sasha’s wind-lifted tangle of hair glowing like an aureole in one of the bars of light. For a moment he stumbled in his translation. But Sasha was not looking at him. His worried eyes were fixed on Proctor-Gould, screwed up a little as though to peer through the glare of outer appearances into the dark soul within.

After the speeches and presentations were over Manning introduced them. They gazed into each other’s sincere brown eyes, crushed each other’s hand in a mutually destructive grip, and took to each other immediately. They were evidently pleased by each other’s moral seriousness, and after a little preliminary banter, they began to speak with an unashamed earnestness which neither of them would have attempted with Manning, for whose corrupted taste they both assumed the convention of self-deflating humour.

Afterwards the three of them went on to dinner in a restaurant. Manning felt very much the third of the three. He was not needed as an interpreter, since Proctor-Gould and Sasha were speaking English together, and he was lumbered with a large silver-plated model of the university skyscraper with which Proctor-Gould had been presented at the reception. It was he who had to drop back when there was not enough room for three abreast on the pavement, then run a couple of steps to catch up again. It was he who had to interrupt to insist that they decided on a restaurant, as the other two strode towards nowhere, completely absorbed in recalling their mutual childhood passions for stamps, railways, and wireless sets. Manning’s relief that his mentor and his employer approved of each other changed to an obscure irritation. It was as if one’s parent and one’s teacher had taken to each other too readily; a threatening coalition.

In the restaurant the band played ‘Ochi Chorniye’, Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’, and ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’, and they had to wait an hour before they were served. Manning sank into a stupor. When he focused his attention on the conversation again, Proctor-Gould was inviting Sasha to come to England as one of his personalities.

‘It’s kind of you to ask me, Gordon,’ Sasha was saying. ‘But really, I’ve no distinction at all in any field of life.’

‘I don’t want distinguished people, Sasha. I want authentic ones.’

‘You mean honest people? Good people?’

‘That’s not the point. I want people people, to quote a phrase I’ve had occasion to use before.’

The skin at the corners of Sasha’s eyes crumpled anxiously.

‘People who are in some way representative of the society they live in?’

‘No. People who are in some way representative of themselves.’

They gazed at each other. Proctor-Gould was leaning forwards across the empty tablecloth, and there was a slight smile about the corners of his lips. He was enjoying Sasha’s mystification, in the way that some men enjoy mystifying women with the esoteric illogicality of masculine concepts of sport and business.

‘You see, Sasha,’ he explained, ‘it’s been discovered that certain people have something about them which makes them interesting to their fellow men. Some of them are unusual people – some of them are very ordinary. Some of them are liked – some of them are disliked. But whatever they do, whether it’s in character or out of character, it makes news. People feel they have some sort of relationship to them. It’s almost as if they felt the personalities were their children. One’s interested in whatever one’s children do, just because they are one’s children. Do you see?’

Sasha ran his finger cautiously down the silver skyscraper, which stood between them on the table like a giant salt-cellar.