The Russian Interpreter

‘From some friends of mine. You’ll be in the library, will you, if he calls again today?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps I could invite you both out for dinner some time? You know I’m always pleased to meet any friend of yours, Paul.’

‘Yes,’ said Manning. ‘I know.’

‘Particularly a very old friend like Gordon Proctor-Gould.’

‘Quite. You’re not the last person in Moscow to meet him, Sasha, I assure you. I’ve never set eyes on him myself.’

Manning shut the door and walked down the corridor towards his habitual place in the Faculty library. He already felt slightly guilty. Sasha would worry about Proctor-Gould now all morning.

4

Another diamond-bright day was ending. Luminous shadows reached across the great central squares; devoured them entirely; left only the skyscrapers still shining in the pale gold light.

By the fountains in Sverdlov Square Katerina was already waiting for Manning, darting little nervous glances about her like a bird. She was still wearing her winter overcoat and her brown woollen stockings. Beneath the blonde plait looped up around her head her face was all pink-and-white – a winter face. She saw Manning while he was still crossing the roadway, and ran to meet him between the traffic lanes, putting her hand on his arm for a second and giving him a quick, shy smile.

‘You look so tall and dark and discontented,’ she said, letting him watch out for the traffic and guide her by the elbow. ‘You must learn to accept yourself.’

‘It’s the circumstances around me that make me discontented.’

‘The circumstances around you are part of you. People carry their lives about with them like tortoises carry their shells.’

Manning found the grave aphorism a solace. Though he supposed that she might equally well have said: ‘One’s circumstances are insignificant. People shed their lives like snakes slough their skins.’ He supposed he would have found that equally comforting.

They began to walk about the city, at a steady pace but in no particular direction, companionable but not touching each other, and for some time saying nothing. They left the crowded pavements of the centre, and lost themselves in streets fronted by peeling brown apartment blocks, and small basement workshops whose pavement-level windows exhaled heat, clatter, and the smell of oiled machinery.

Manning thought that Katerina was somewhat younger than himself, but he did not know. He knew very little about her or the life she carried around with her; they never talked about such things. He didn’t even know where she lived. He wrote to her by way of a box number in the Central Post Office, suggesting a meeting-place. Then they would walk the streets for an hour or two, sometimes talking, sometimes silent.

‘Look up at the sky,’ she said. ‘Blue and gold from horizon to horizon. Now you’re looking into the iris of God’s eye.’

‘Literally, Katya?’

‘Oh, yes. The sky is God’s iris. But it is also God’s sadness, and God’s great age. All God’s attributes are every part of Him.’

‘And yet I’ve heard you say, Katya, that God is within us?’

‘Yes – He within us, and we within Him. We are God, Paul.’

‘But we’re free to please or displease Him.’

‘Of course. We are entirely free in every possible way. But our liberty must be comprehended in God’s Liberty. That’s obvious.’

Katerina often talked about God. She had apperceptions of Him at every corner, feeling His presence in the air she drew into her lungs, seeing His hands pierced by the skyscrapers. Manning liked to hear her speak of God, and led her on with questions. He liked to think of the hot lathes in the basement workshops and the inert masonry of the public buildings as being in some way impregnated with human attributes and sensibilities, just as he liked to try to see the whole visible world, including himself, Katya, and the people crowding off the trolley-buses on their way home from work, as nothing but a complexly interbalanced network of electrical charges. It was an astonishing vision – like suddenly catching a glimpse of oneself from behind in a double mirror.

‘As you know,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand what you say about God at all.’

‘Nor do I. We couldn’t expect to. All we can do is to venture descriptions of Him which give rise to unfathomable infinities and unresolvable contradictions, and to contemplate these with humility.’