The Russian Interpreter

There was a silence. The music from the loud-speakers had stopped. Was it the end of the slow movement? Or had the last movement gone by as well, unnoticed?

‘So you take the present?’ said Manning.

‘You may well decide to.’

‘And perhaps bring one back?’

‘Possibly.’

‘How many presents have you taken back and forth?’

‘That doesn’t concern you, Paul.’

The music started again. It was the Komsomol march, ‘Brave Boys.’ The poignant late spring light changed. The day became brisk.

‘I see your difficulty, Gordon,’ said Manning.

‘I’m glad you do, Paul.’

‘But there’s no reason why I should cooperate in your undertaking.’

‘You’re not expected to cooperate, Paul.’

‘Yes, I am, Gordon. I’m expected to return you your books from the Kiev Station. As you remember, I have the ticket.’

Proctor-Gould stared at Manning, his eyes infinitely lugubrious.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Manning, ‘if you really are in the business you might as well bring a few presents in for Konstantin. I think they might stand a better chance of doing some good.’

Proctor-Gould went on staring at Manning in silence. Manning looked up, caught his eye, and looked away again awkwardly.

‘You’re not thinking of hugging that cloakroom ticket to yourself, are you?’ said Proctor-Gould.

‘No,’ said Manning, ‘I’m thinking of giving it to Konstantin.’

35

Manning had got about four or five hundred yards from the gates of the Park of Culture and Rest when Proctor-Gould’s black Chaika caught up with him. Proctor-Gould held the door open.

‘Jump in, Paul,’ he said.

‘I’ll walk, thanks, Gordon.’

He began to walk again. The driver let in his clutch and cruised along level with him, the door still open like an outspread wing, sweeping people out of the way.

‘There’s something I want to explain to you, Paul,’ said Proctor-Gould.

‘You’ve explained already.’

‘This is something else altogether.’

Manning stopped.

‘Well, for God’s sake get out of that car,’ he said. ‘The whole street’s staring at us.’

Proctor-Gould scrambled out, and planted himself squarely in front of Manning, his hands in his blazer pockets, his great eyes fixed anxiously on Manning’s face.

‘What is it, then?’ said Manning.

‘Paul, I’m afraid I wasn’t really telling you the truth back there in the park.’

‘Oh, Gordon …’

‘I had a very good reason for keeping the real situation to myself, as you’ll see….’

He stopped, and looked round. A small crowd was beginning to collect about them, staring intently into their faces, perhaps thinking, from the manner in which Manning was edging away, and Proctor-Gould crowding in upon him, that they were about to fight. The more private Proctor-Gould’s disclosures became, thought Manning, the more public were the surroundings in which he chose to make them. He would end up telling the ultimate secrets of his heart from the top of the university skyscraper through a public address system. Manning looked round.

‘There’s a beer house just down the road,’ he said. ‘Let’s go there.’

It was crowded inside the beer house. There were no chairs or stools, and the customers stood at shelves along the wall eating bread and cheese and drinking out of paper cups. In one corner two men were embracing each other with laughter and tears. ‘We haven’t seen each other for twenty years,’ they kept explaining to the other customers, who smiled, and wagged their heads, and winked.

‘Abstemious lot here,’ said Proctor-Gould as they queued at the counter. ‘They’re all buying fruit juice.’

‘You haven’t been inside one of these places before?’ said Manning, surprised.

Proctor-Gould shook his head. He looked vaguely round the room. Under the signs saying: ‘It is forbidden to bring and consume spirits,’ the customers were busy emptying their paper cups of fruit juice into the ash-trays, and refilling them from half-bottles of vodka they carried in their pockets. But Proctor-Gould Was already thinking about something else.

‘Paul,’ he said, in a low voice which made several men in the queue turn round and gaze at them expressionlessly. ‘You didn’t really believe all that stuff I told you about getting involved with British intelligence, did you?’

Manning looked at him carefully.

‘Yes, I did,’ he said.

Proctor-Gould smiled.

‘Rather cloak-and-dagger for your taste, I should have thought,’ he said.

‘It sounded about right to me.’

‘I obviously have a career as a story-teller. Because it wasn’t the truth, Paul. The truth is rather simpler. If I may give you a tip, it usually is.’

They collected two paper cups of beer, and found themselves a space at the shelf.

‘Go on, then,’ said Manning. ‘Let’s have the new version.’

‘It’s soon told, Paul,’ said Proctor-Gould, leaning along the counter towards Manning and talking in the same low voice. ‘As you know, there are a number of what are called “underground” writers in this country. They work in secret, and their manuscripts are smuggled out of the country and published in the West.’

Manning looked up from his beer, met Proctor-Gould’s unblinking gaze, and looked away again, disconcerted.