The Russian Interpreter

‘Oh,’ said Manning, rubbing his shoulder, and confused to find that she had been watching him.

‘Why didn’t you ask me what my name actually was?’

‘You didn’t seem very keen to talk.’

‘Oh,’ said Raya. She bit thoughtfully at the birch twig. ‘I thought I was being flirtatious.’

‘I see. I didn’t realize.’

‘Perhaps I didn’t do it right.’

‘Oh – yes, yes.’

‘When I went away I thought you’d follow me.’

‘I didn’t grasp that at all, I’m afraid.’

She chewed the twig for some moments.

‘I obviously wasn’t going about it the right way,’ she said. ‘Do you want to know what my job is?’

‘All right. What is it?’

‘I teach Diamat.’

‘Diamat? Dialectical materialism?’

‘Why do you say it in that tone of voice?’

‘Well, I don’t know – you don’t look much like a teacher of dialectical materialism.’

‘Oh? What do teachers of dialectical materialism look like, in your experience?’

‘Well, not blonde, somehow.’

Raya pulled a handful of her hair forward and squinted at it.

‘It’s not really blonde,’ she said. ‘I bleached it. Do you like it?’

‘Very much.’

‘You wouldn’t prefer to see it red, or black?’

‘Certainly not.’

Raya reflected.

‘I’m being flirtatious now,’ she said. ‘Do you realize? There’s a terrible coyness about the conversation that you couldn’t account for in any other way. Let’s go for a walk.’

They walked slowly through the woods, stepping over fallen branches and skirting patches of brambles.

‘You left your friend to sing on his own,’ said Raya.

‘You left your friends to listen on their own.’

‘My friends?’

‘Your colleagues in the Faculty.’

‘Not my colleagues – not my Faculty. I teach in the Journalism Faculty.’

‘What on earth are you doing on the Admin-Uprav outing, then?’

‘That’s not a very hospitable attitude.’

‘I meant, did someone bring you?’

‘I brought myself.’

‘Brought yourself?’

‘Why not? The railways are a public utility. The forest belongs to the state.’

Manning felt curiously irritated by her self-confidence.

‘The millet porridge belonged to Admin-Uprav,’ he said.

‘I admit,’ said Raya, ‘I obtained a helping of millet porridge by false pretences.’

They walked along in silence, Raya flicking at the trees with her birch twig.

‘But why did you particularly want to come on the Admin-Uprav expedition, then?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘No.’

Raya danced two steps, held out her hand in front of her, and kicked it, like a ballet-dancer.

‘No idea?’ she said.

‘Not the slightest.’

‘Shall I give you a clue?’

‘All right.’

She leaned over and kissed him on the ear.

He put his hand up to the ear, as if it had been struck. What curious organisms human beings were, he reflected. How odd and unfamiliar were the relations between them, like the interactions of half-understood particles beneath the microscope.

‘Was that the clue?’ he asked. His own voice seemed no less strange to him that Raya’s behaviour.

‘The clue? Comrade Interpreter, it was practically the solution.’

He should no doubt kiss her back. He turned towards her, but she stepped away from him. He lunged at her – she leapt out of reach. He chased her up the path – she doubled back round a tree, and in the ensuing jinking and bobbing to left and to right they cracked their heads together painfully.

‘Oh God!’ she cried, as they both rubbed their skulls. ‘What a pastoral idyll!’

They started to walk along the path again. He took her hand, but after a little while she withdrew it.

‘Well,’ he said.

‘Everyone in Moscow seems to be talking about your friend Proctor-Gould,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to see what sort of people you were.’

‘Why didn’t you kiss Proctor-Gould’s ear?’

‘I can’t speak English.’

‘You don’t have to speak to kiss someone’s ear.’

‘There seems to be a terrible lot of explanation to go through before the appropriate moment arrives.’

‘I could interpret.’

Raya glanced at Manning ironically.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘A love affair through an interpreter. That’s a very cultured prospect.’

They came to a clearing covered with brambles and rank grass. Among the vegetation the half-obliterated remains of trenches and banks were just visible.

‘Zhukov made his stand before Moscow in the forest here,’ said Raya.’ ‘It’s an odd place to come for picnics, really.’

She wandered moodily about the clearing, kicking at the grass, then bent down and picked something up. It was an old steel helmet, thick with rust, a jagged hole in the side.

‘You still find these all over the woods,’ she said. ‘I’m not even sure whether it’s Russian or German.’

She turned it slowly over and over in her hands, crumbling more of the rusty metal off. Then she hurled it away, and brushed the rust off her hands. The helmet hit a tree, bounced off in a shower of rust, and fell into a bramble bush, where it perched on a branch, bobbing up and down like some great brown bird alighting. Raya seemed to be abashed by the ridiculousness of it, and picked it out of the bush. They sat down side by side on a fallen tree trunk, sodden, like everything else, with the stored wetness of winter. Raya turned the helmet over in her hands again, feeling its texture curiously.