In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  His monthly salary came to many thousands. A personal Pobeda could always be summoned by phone.

  But he stood there, his elbows resting on dead stones, and he did not want to live. His soul was so empty of hope that he had not the strength to stir hand or foot. He was not moved to look around at the beauty of the morning.

  It was getting light.

  There was a solemn purity in the chilly air. A shaggy coat of hoarfrost had furred the enormous stump of the felled oak, the cornices of the half-ruined church, the intricately patterned lattices of its windows, the wires that ran down to the little house nearby, and the top of the long fence circling the site of a future skyscraper.

  * * *

  * Decembrists: Revolutionaries who in December 1825 rebelled against Tsar Nicholas I as he succeeded Tsar Alexander I to the throne. Although they were easily routed in a showdown in St. Petersburg, their gesture of defiance inspired subsequent generations of Russian revolutionaries.

  Chapter 26

  Sawing Wood

  IT WAS GETTING LIGHT.

  Thick frost had trimmed with white the fence posts of the prison area and the outer security zone, the barbed wire in tangles of twenty strands at a time, bristling with thousands of spiky asterisks, the sloping roof of the watchtower, and the weeds running wild on the wasteland beyond the wire.

  Dmitri Sologdin admired this miracle with unshaded eyes. He was standing near the sawhorse. He was wearing a padded jacket, prison-camp issue, over blue overalls, and his head, on which the first traces of gray could be seen, was uncovered. He was a nonentity, a slave without rights. He had been inside for twelve years, but because he had been sentenced to a second term, there was no knowing when, if ever, his imprisonment would end. His wife had wasted her youth waiting in vain for him. To avoid dismissal from her present job, as from so many others, she had pretended that she had no husband and had stopped writing to him. Sologdin had never seen his only son—his wife had been pregnant when he was arrested. Sologdin had gone through the forests of Cherdynsk, the mines of Vorkuta, two periods under investigation, one of six months, one of a year, tormented by lack of sleep, drained of his strength, wasting away. His name and his future had long ago been trampled into the mud. All he possessed was a pair of well-worn padded trousers and a tarpaulin work jacket, kept at present in the storeroom in expectation of worse times to come. He was paid thirty rubles a month—enough for three kilos of sugar—but not in cash. He could breathe fresh air only at stated times authorized by the prison authorities.

  And in his soul there was a peace that nothing could destroy. His eyes sparkled like those of a young man. His chest, bared to the frost, heaved as though he were experiencing life to the full.

  LONG AGO, when he had been under interrogation, his muscles were shriveled ropes, but they had expanded and grown firm again, and they demanded exercise. That was why, quite voluntarily and for no reward, he went out every morning to chop and saw wood for the prison kitchen.

  But ax and saw can be terrible weapons in a convict’s hands, and they were not readily entrusted to him. The prison authorities were paid to suspect that the convict’s most innocent act is a treacherous ruse; they judged others by themselves, refused to believe that a man would volunteer to work for nothing, stubbornly suspected Sologdin of planning his escape or armed mutiny, especially as there were hints of both in his record. Standing orders therefore provided that a guard should position himself five paces away from Sologdin while he worked, out of range of his ax but watching every movement. There were guards willing to perform this dangerous duty, and the prison authorities, reared in the admirable ways of the Gulag, did not think one watcher to one worker a waste of manpower. But Sologdin turned obstinate and aggravated their suspicions by declaring that he would not work in the presence of a “screw.” That was the end of his woodchopping for a time. (The prison governor could not coerce prisoners. This was not a prison camp. The inmates here were engaged in intellectual labor and did not come under his ministry.) The real trouble was that the planners and accountants had made no provision for this work, and the women who came from outside to cook the prisoners’ food refused to chop wood because they were not paid extra for it. The authorities tried detailing off-duty guards to do the job, tearing them away from their dominoes in the orderly room. The guards were all blockheads, handpicked as young men for their physical fitness. But during their years of service in prisons, they seemed to have lost the habit of work—their backs soon started aching, and the pull of the dominoes was strong. They just couldn’t produce enough firewood, so the governor had to give in and authorize Sologdin and any other prisoners who turned up (usually Nerzhin and Rubin) to chop and saw without additional surveillance. The sentry on the watchtower could in any case see them clearly, and the duty officers, too, were told to keep an eye on them.

  As darkness retreated and the waning lamplight merged with the light of day, the rotund figure of Spiridon the yardman appeared from around the corner of the building. He was wearing a fur hat with earflaps—no other prisoner had been given one—and a quilted jacket. The yardman was also a convict but one subordinate to the commandant of the institute, not to the prison authorities. To keep the peace, he sharpened the axes and saw for the prison, too. As he got nearer, Sologdin could see the missing saw in his hands.

  Spiridon Yegorov walked around the yard, which was guarded by machine guns, at all hours from reveille to lights out, without escort. One reason why the authorities felt able to relax the rules was that Spiridon was blind in one eye and had only thirty percent vision in the other. The sharashka’s budget provided for three yardmen because the yard was really several yards joined together, two hectares in area, but Spiridon, unaware of this, did the work of all three and felt none the worse for it. What mattered was that here he could “eat his bellyful,” at least a kilo and a half of black bread, because there was plenty of bread and to spare, and the men let him have some of their gruel. Spiridon was conspicuously fitter, and plumper, than he had been in Sev-Ural-Lag, where he had acted as nanny to many thousands of logs.

  “Hey, Spiridon!” Sologdin called out impatiently.

  His face, with its graying ginger mustache and graying ginger eyebrows, was very mobile and, when he was answering someone, often expressed eagerness to oblige. As it did now. Sologdin did not know that this exaggerated show of helpfulness was often derisive.

  “What d’you mean what’s the matter? The saw won’t cut!”

  “I can’t think why,” Spiridon said, sounding surprised. “You’ve complained about it I don’t know how many times this winter. Let’s have a try.”

  He held the saw by one handle.

  They began sawing. The saw jumped out once or twice, trying to change its place because it wasn’t lying comfortably, but then it sank its teeth in and was on its way.

  “You grip it awful hard,” Spiridon cautiously advised him. “Just get three fingers around the handle like around a pen and move nice and easy, smooth like . . . that’s it . . . you’ve got it! Only when you pull it toward you, don’t tug at it.”

  Each man believed himself superior to the other: Sologdin because he knew all about mechanics, the resistance of metals, and other scientific matters, and also because of his broad grasp of social issues; Spiridon because material objects always obeyed him. Sologdin, however, patronized the yardman openly, whereas Spiridon hid his feelings.

  Even halfway through the thick log, the saw never seemed to be sticking; it cut away with a thin whine, sputtering pine shavings onto the two men’s overalls.

  Sologdin burst out laughing.

  “You’re a wizard. Spiridon! You had me fooled. You sharpened the saw and set it yesterday.”

  Spiridon complacently chanted in time to the saw. “She chews and chews and never swallows, but all her sawdust gives to others.”

  And before the saw was through, the butt of the log fell off under the pressure of his hand.

  “I didn’t sharpen i
t at all,” he said, turning the saw over so that Sologdin could see the cutting edge. “You can see the teeth are just the same today as they were yesterday.”

  Sologdin bent down to look at the saw and could see no file marks. But the rascal had certainly done something to it.

  “Come on, Spiridon, let’s cut another length.”

  Spiridon held his back. “No, I can’t. I’m all worn-out. All the work my grandfathers and great-grandfathers didn’t do has landed on me. Anyway, your pals will be here soon.”

  Sologdin’s friends, however, were in no hurry.

  It was now broad daylight. A morning magnificently adorned with hoarfrost stood revealed. Even the drainpipes, and the ground itself, were decked with hoarfrost, and in the distance the tops of the lime trees in the exercise yard wore splendid silvery gray manes.

  “How did you land in the sharashka, Spiridon?” Sologdin asked, looking closely at the yardman.

  He was killing time. In all his years in the camps, he had associated only with educated people, expecting to glean nothing worthwhile from less cultured prisoners.

  Spiridon smacked his lips. “You may well ask. You’re all learned folk, you and all the others they’ve lumped together in this place, and here am I thrown in with you. On my card it says I’m a glassblower. Well, I was a glassblower once, at our factory near Bryansk. But that’s a long time ago, and now my eyesight’s gone, and the work I did is no use in this place; what they want here is a really clever glassblower, like Ivan. There wasn’t another like him in our whole factory, and never had been. But they just took a peek at my card and brought me here. Then they took a good look at me and were going to send me packing, but the commandant, God bless him, took me on as a yardman.”

  Nerzhin came around the corner from the direction of the exercise yard and the one-story staff building. He was wearing unbuttoned overalls, a padded jacket draped around his shoulders, and a towel, prison issue, as broad as it was long, around his neck.

  He greeted them abruptly—“Morning, friends”—shedding garments, stripping off the upper part of his denims, and removing his undershirt as he came.

  Sologdin looked askance at him. “Gleb, my boy, are you crazy? Where’s the snow?”

  “Right here,” Nerzhin retorted, scrambling onto the roof of the woodshed, where there was a virgin layer of something fluffy that was partly snow and partly hoarfrost. He scooped up handfuls of it and began vigorously rubbing chest, back, and sides. He rubbed himself with snow down to the waist all through the winter, although any guard who chanced to be near would try to stop him.

  Spiridon shook his head: “Look what a sweat you’re in now.”

  “Still no letter, Spiridon Danilovich?” Nerzhin called out.

  “This time there was a letter for me.”

  “So why haven’t you brought it for me to read? Is everything all right?”

  “There was a letter, but I can’t get it. The Snake’s kept it.”

  “Myshin? Won’t he hand it over?” Nerzhin stopped rubbing himself.

  “He put my name on the list, but the commandant had me cleaning out the attic, and before I knew it, the Snake had shut up shop. It’ll be Monday now.”

  “The scoundrels!” Nerzhin sighed, baring his teeth.

  Spiridon waved it away.

  “Don’t damn the priests—leave it to the devil,” he said, with one eye on Sologdin, whom he didn’t know well. “All right, I’m off.”

  In his big fur hat, with its flaps untied, Spiridon looked like a comically flop-eared mongrel as he set off for the guardroom, to which no other prisoner was admitted.

  “Spiridon!”

  Sologdin suddenly remembered and called after him. “What about the ax? Where’s the ax?”

  “The duty guard will bring it,” Spiridon shouted back, and vanished.

  “Well,” said Nerzhin, vigorously rubbing his chest and back with his scrap of terry toweling. “I didn’t come up to Anton’s expectations. He says I treat Number Seven like ‘a drunk’s corpse under Marfino’s fence.’ Then yesterday evening he offered me a transfer to the cryptography group, but I refused.”

  A slight movement of Sologdin’s head and a grin perhaps expressed disapproval. Between his neatly clipped graying ginger mustache and matching beard, his smile revealed sparkling white teeth, sound teeth untouched by decay. The gaps had been made by outside forces.

  “You’re behaving more like a bard than a reckoner,” he said.

  Nerzhin was not surprised: “Mathematician” and “poet” had been replaced, in accordance with Sologdin’s well-known whimsical habit of speaking the Language of Ultimate Clarity and not using “bird language,” that is, foreign words.

  Still half naked, unhurriedly toweling himself, Nerzhin gloomily agreed.

  “Yes, it’s not like me. But I suddenly felt so sick of it all that I didn’t care anymore. If I go to Siberia, I go to Siberia. . . . I’m sorry to find that Lyovka is right—I’m a failure as a skeptic. Obviously skepticism isn’t just a system of ideas; it’s mainly a matter of character. I want to intervene in what goes on. May even give somebody a smack in the chops.”

  Sologdin found a more comfortable position against the sawhorse.

  “It gives me deep joy, my friend. Your hardened unbelief” (meaning what was called “skepticism” in the Language of Seeming Clarity) “was unavoidable on the road away from . . . the satanic drug” (he meant “Marxism,” but he couldn’t think of a Russian synonym for it) “to the world of truth. You are no longer a boy” (Sologdin was six years older); “you must find yourself spiritually, understand the relation between good and evil in human life. And you must choose.”

  Sologdin looked meaningfully at Nerzhin, who, however, showed no inclination to choose between good and evil then and there. He put on his shirt, which was too small, and answered back as he thrust his arms into his overall sleeves.

  “That’s a weighty statement. But shouldn’t you also be reminding me that ‘reason is feeble’ and that I myself am the ‘source of error’?”

  He rounded on his friend as though struck by a new thought.

  “Look, you’re supposed to have the ‘light of truth’ in you, yet you say that prostitution is morally beneficial, and that Dantes was in the right when he fought his duel with Pushkin.”

  Sologdin smiled complacently, baring a defective set of longish teeth with rounded edges.

  “Well, didn’t I successfully defend those propositions?”

  “Yes, but the thought that in the same skull, the same breast. . . .”

  “That’s life. You must get used to it. I freely admit that I’m like one of those wooden eggs you can take apart. I am made up of nine spheres, one inside the other.”

  “ ‘Sphere’ is bird talk!”

  “Sorry. You see how uninventive I am. I am made of nine roundnesses. It is not often that I let anyone see the inner ones. Don’t forget that we live with our visors down. We have been forced to. And anyway, we are more complex than the people depicted in novels. Writers try to explain people completely, but in real life we never get to know anyone completely. That’s why I love Dostoevsky. Stavrogin, Svidrigailov, Kirillov. What are they really like? The closer you get, the less you understand them.”

  “Stavrogin? Which book is he in?”

  “The Possessed. Haven’t you read it?” Sologdin was astonished.

  Nerzhin draped his damp, skimpy towel around his neck like a muffler and pulled on his officer’s service cap, which was so old that it was coming apart at the seams.

  “The Possessed? Come off it. Where d’you think my generation could get hold of it? It’s counterrevolutionary literature! Too dangerous!”

  He put on his jacket.

  “Anyway, I don’t agree. When a new arrival crosses the threshold of your cell, you hang down from your bunk and your eyes bore into him—is he friend or enemy? You size him up in a flash. And, surprisingly, you’re never mistaken. Is it really as difficult as you say to und
erstand a man? Remember how you and I first met. You arrived in the sharashka when the washbasin was still out on the main stairway, right?”

  “Right.”

  “It was morning, and I was on my way downstairs, whistling some silly little tune. You were drying yourself, and you suddenly raised your face from the towel in the half darkness. I was rooted to the spot. It was like looking at the face in an icon. Later on I looked more closely, and you were by no means a saint—I don’t mean to flatter you. . . .”

  Sologdin laughed.

  “. . . Your face isn’t at all gentle, but it is unusual. I felt at once that I could trust you, and after five minutes I was telling you. . . .”

  “I was staggered by your rashness.”

  “But a man with eyes like yours can’t be a stoolie!”

  “It’s too bad if I’m so easy to read. In a camp you need to look nondescript.”

  “Then that same day, when I’d been listening to your evangelical revelations, I tempted you with a question. . . .”

  “Of the Karamazov variety.”

  “Ah, you remember! I asked you what should be done with professional criminals. Remember what you said? ‘Shoot the lot!’ Right?”

  Nerzhin, now as then, looked hard at Sologdin, as though giving him a chance to retract.

  But the bright blue of Dmitri Sologdin’s eyes was untroubled. He folded his arms picturesquely over his chest, one of his most becoming poses, and loftily declared, “My friend! They who want to destroy Christianity, and only they, would have it become the creed of eunuchs. But Christianity is the faith of the strong in spirit. We must have the courage to see the evil in the world and to root it out. Wait a while—you, too, will come to God. Your refusal to believe in anything is no position for a thinking man; it’s just spiritual poverty.”