The Russian Interpreter

He walked through the gardens. The air was mild. On the marble benches here and there the old women gardeners lay asleep in the sun, their rakes and forks propped up beside them. Manning found the sight of them curiously moving.

There were more of them beside the little white church at the far end of the vista, stretched out on the wet grass itself. The church stood on the very lip of the high ground. Beyond it, the grass slopes and birch woods dropped steeply away, down to the great flashing silver arc of the river, and beyond, as if caught and contained by that long meander, the cathedrals, skyscrapers, parks, stadiums, and smoking factory chimneys of Moscow. Manning gazed at it. God, it was an intolerable city! And yet his feelings about it were never entirely simple. On the river below two dazzlingly white steamers were passing each other in midstream. A train with a thousand trucks shunted slowly across the south of the city, puffing brilliant snowballs of smoke up into the sunshine. The evocative railway sounds came and went distantly in the breeze.

Manning thought of summer, and tears of longing pricked at his eyes. He thought of long journeys, and drinks at tables in the sun, and girls with white silk scarves over their piled hair, and slight cotton dresses over their delectable sunburnt bodies. He would go away somewhere. He would fall in love. Yes, this summer without fail he would have an affair with a sunburnt girl in a white cotton dress, who looked at him sometimes with troubled eyes, and held his hand against her face….

2

A great morning for the comedians on the underground.

‘Don’t squeeze me like that, comrades,’ begged a small man caught in the crowd that packed aboard the train at Frunzenskaya. ‘I’m not an accordion.’

‘For God’s sake stop groaning, then,’ said the large man who was pinning him against the doors.

Some days it was comedians. Some days everyone was reading serious books. Manning had to commute because he worked in one of the Faculties which had still not been moved out of the centre of the city for interment in that vast mausoleum on the Sparrow Hills. He had a brief moment of panic when his brief-case, which contained the precious fragments of his thesis, ‘The Experience of Decentralization in the Administration of Public Utilities’, became trapped on the far side of two more comedians, and was almost torn out of his grasp. It was a painful and frightening thought, which came to him from time to time, that the only tangible evidence for his eighteen months’ hard labour in the city might somehow disappear before his eyes, like water into sand. It made him feel protective towards it. However unattractive it seemed, he would cherish it and feed it up and watch it grow to maturity. It looked like being his life’s work. He had given birth to it at Cambridge, nursed it for a year at the London School of Civic Studies, brought it to Moscow for its health. But it was still poorly. Next year he would take it away to somewhere with a warm climate – Berkeley, perhaps, or Accra. It was a terrible burden, a sickly thesis. But when at last it had grown up and become a Ph.D. perhaps it would keep him in his old age.

He got out at Lenin Library, and walked up Mokhovaya Street into Manyezh Square, a vast parade ground without a parade. Tiny buses and taxis performed their evolutions in the sunshine, almost lost in the great distances. Flocks of pigeons fluttered, settled, and strutted about the central provinces of the asphalt plain, and beyond it the dark red walls of the Kremlin rose like a remote range of mountains. At the edge of these wastes the pavement was crowded. Authorized peddlars sold ice-cream, kvass, hot pies. A man in a stained blue suit tottered towards Manning, his arms hanging down, his eyes closed. He opened them at the last moment, saw Manning, and stopped. Then he took a pace backwards, side-stepped elaborately, tripped over the low wall in front of the History Faculty, and fell through the hedge. He stayed down, invisible but for his boots, which stuck out motionless over the pavement. No one paid any attention to him.

Manning turned up a narrow private alley between a postcard stall and a hot-pie concession. It led into a yard which was surrounded irregularly by the backs of buildings and occupied by two large wooden sheds and a stack of logs for the furnaces. Here the sun scarcely penetrated, and the walk were wet with long-stored winter moisture.

In one corner of the yard was a door, painted a blistered chocolate brown. The upper half of the door was glazed with dusty panes, and the small brass handle drooped in-effectually, worn loose and shiny over the years. Next to the door was fixed a plaque with old-fashioned gilt lettering on a shiny black background which announced:

FACULTY OF ADMINISTRATIVE-MANAGEMENT SCIENCES

The sign was cracked from top to bottom.