‘You wouldn’t think we’d only set eyes on one another about four hours ago,’ said Manning.
‘Judging by some of the things that have been said, I’m astonished it’s more than four minutes.’
‘You see my point, though.’
‘Oh, yes.’
They became silent again.
‘Would you mind if people knew you’d held my hand in the woods?’ asked Raya.
‘Of course not.’
‘Well, then.’
‘But we might do more than just hold hands.’
‘Might we?’
‘Well, mightn’t we?’
They stopped and looked at each other gravely. Then Raya lowered her eyes and began to play with the button on his jacket.
‘Am I acting in good faith?’ she asked quietly.
He did not reply.
‘Go on,’ she insisted, still quietly, running her hands over the fabric of his jacket, as she had over the helmet. ‘Tell me what you think. Am I?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘To hell with you, then!’ she said, suddenly angry, and pushed him away. He stepped back to keep his balance, caught his heel against the root of a tree, and fell full length into a bramble patch, discarded like the rusty helmet. He shouted with surprise, and with pain, as the thorns scratched his hands and his ears. He thrashed wildly about, trying to find a thornless patch to lever himself up from. When he looked up he saw that Raya was leaning against a tree silently weeping – no, silently laughing, reduced to the helpless silence of laughter. He struggled to his feet and rushed at her in a fury, though he was unclear exactly what he intended to do. But she ran away, shouting with laughter, dodging among the trees, always keeping just ahead of him. In the end she leapt into the fork of a birch and climbed swiftly out of reach. He leaned against the trunk and looked up at her, panting too hard to reproach her. She squatted on her branch and gazed down at him, panting too hard to laugh at him. She was just a child, thought Manning, a silly, teasing child. Suddenly he did not think he understood her at all, and he seized the tree and shook it with all his might, trying to shake her down like an apple.
‘That’s right,’ she cried. ‘Break the tree down. Cause damage to plant life in the state forest.’
Eventually she jumped down, kissed his scratches better, put her arm in his, and walked on through the forest with him. They walked with their eyes on the ground six feet in front of them, the way people do, as if for ever contemplating the measure of earth they must one day become.
Their path joined a track, and over the track, where it entered the mouth of a little valley, there was an arch formed of two bare birch trunks and a roughly painted sign between them which said: ‘Rest and Holiday Centre “Forest Lake”’.
They followed the track down to the lake – a large pond, really, trapped in the valley bottom. The water sparkled in the sun. On the shore was a settlement of shabby wooden cabins, all shuttered and deserted, with sky-blue paintwork which was blistered and peeling. Raya and Manning wandered among the cabins, moved by such silence and stillness in a place where human beings had lived. They squatted on the little wooden landing stage and peered into the dark water. A fish glided, flicked, and was gone.
In that sheltered corner of the woods it was warm. They stretched out on the boards and lay quietly with their faces to the sun. After a little while Raya lifted her head and looked about her sleepily, like a cat.
‘Do you like swimming?’ she asked.
‘Not in water as cold as this.’
‘We could swim across the lake and back, as fast as porpoises.’
‘We’d freeze, Raya.’
‘No, we shouldn’t. We’d jump out, and rub each other dry, and lie here in the sun on the landing stage, and stroke each other till we were warm.’
They looked at each other softly, taunting each other with the uncertainty of what could or could not happen.
There was a cry from the other side of the lake. They turned round. It was Sasha. He waved to them anxiously.
‘I suppose they’ve been looking for us,’ said Manning. ‘I’d forgotten all about them.’
‘I suppose I had, too,’ said Raya. She gazed sadly across the water at Sasha, and waved a small wave back at him. He turned and began to hurry round the lake towards them, his shock of dark, thin hair sweeping anxiously, responsibly back in the wind of his passage.
12
Walking in the twilight with Katerina. Somewhere. Along some narrow busy street lined with decrepit old apartment houses. As they passed each entry the excited screaming of the children playing in the darkened courtyard within for a moment joined the roar of the buses and lorries stinking by at Manning’s elbow. Along the narrow pavement people were streaming home from work, tired; looking down, their faces in shadow. Constantly they passed between Manning and Katya, forcing him to stop or to step off the kerb, and then run a step to catch up.
Manning was surprised that there were still streets left in Moscow that he did not know. He felt as if he and Katya had walked down every single one of them – a hundred miles of asphalt, of concrete slabs, of beaten earth, of packed, trodden snow. He wondered how many of the people they passed were walking for the same reason as themselves, that the public street was the only private place to talk. All over Moscow the streets must have been alive with communal intimacy. Two by two the talkers walked, passing, overtaking, and intersecting, as if the city were some vast, complex cloister. Visions of a new society were exchanged, love affairs were pursued and broken off, arrangements to circumvent the law and defraud the state were entered into. As he ran along the gutter to catch up with Katya, Manning laughed out loud at the ridiculous discomfort of their accommodation. Katya, hurrying along in her winter overcoat, gave him one of her quick, mistrustful glances. She said something, but it was drowned in the sudden high coloratura of a bus with bad brakes.
‘I said,’ she repeated, ‘I’m happy for your happiness.’
‘I was just laughing at us.’
‘Oh. Is Raya beautiful?’
Manning considered. Would being beautiful count for or against Raya in Katya’s eyes? He was frightened of her judgement. He could see Raya through Katya’s eyes, and she became insignificant – as insignificant as Katya herself would certainly seem to Raya.
‘I think perhaps she is,’ he said cautiously.
‘Would I think she was?’
‘You might.’
‘I wonder.’
‘I’m surprised you’re interested.’
‘I like to think of a woman being beautiful, since I’m not myself. I like to think that you should find a beautiful woman.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m not jealous, Paul. You wouldn’t like me to be, would you? I thought I might feel jealous of Raya when you first began to describe her. Or rather, not of her, but of your feeling for her. It’s easy to be jealous of love, even when it’s experienced by someone with whom one’s not in love oneself. You are a little jealous of my love of God. It makes you wonder whether you have that same capacity yourself. You think you don’t want to love God or be loved by Him, but you cannot help wondering whether you could if you did. Was Sasha jealous?’
‘Sasha? How could he be? You don’t think he’s in love with Raya?’
‘I meant jealous of her hold on you.’
‘You think he’s in love with me?’
‘He’s like a conscientious father with a delinquent son. He doesn’t much like you. But he has an obsessiveness about you which might count as a sort of love.’
‘Perhaps he was a bit jealous.’
‘He became very polite and withdrawn and solicitous?’
‘Yes. When he found us by the lake he said they’d been looking for us for over an hour. I hadn’t realized we’d been gone more than ten minutes. He’d wanted to go to the police. I felt like a badly behaved child, as usual.’