In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Khorobrov woke up from his debate with the unseen partner and spun around as though he had been stung.

  “That’s the Old Testament; it belongs to your rotten generation. You were meek and mild, so they polished the lot of you off.”

  The taunt could not have been more unfair. It was men imprisoned at the same time as Abramson who had organized a strike, and a hunger strike, at Vorkuta. But it had made no difference in the end. The precept caught on because it made sense.

  Abramson merely shrugged. “If you act up, they’ll pack you off to a hard-labor camp.”

  “That’s what I want, Grigory Borisych! I don’t mind going to a blasted hard labor camp; at least I’ll have good company. Maybe you can speak freely there, without stoolies all around you.”

  Rubin, with his beard disheveled and his tea unfinished, was standing by the bunk bed that held Potapov and Nerzhin and making a friendly speech to its upper story:

  “Congratulations, my young Montaigne, my infant Pyrrhonist.”

  “I’m very touched, my dear Lev, but why. . . ?”

  Nerzhin was kneeling on his top bunk holding a writing case. It was a prisoner’s spare-time handiwork, which meant that it was the most carefully executed work in the world, since prisoners have nowhere to hurry to. Neatly tucked inside a deep-red calico cover were pockets, fastenings, press studs, and packets of excellent paper looted from Germany. All this, of course, had been made on the state’s time and with the state’s materials.

  “Anyway, we aren’t allowed to write anything much in this sharashka except denunciations.”

  “My birthday wish for you”—Rubin’s large, thick lips shaped themselves into a comic trumpet—“is that the light of truth may illuminate your skeptical and eclectic brain.”

  “You and your truth! Who knows what truth is?” Gleb sighed. His face, which had looked youthful while he was busy preparing for his wife’s visit, had become haggard and ashen. And his hair was all over the place again.

  On the neighboring top bunk, above Pryanchikov, a plump, bald-headed, middle-aged engineer was using the last few seconds of free time to read the newspaper borrowed from Potapov. He held it wide open, at some distance from his eyes, occasionally frowning and moving his lips as he read. When the electric bell shrilled in the hallway, he looked annoyed and folded the newspaper untidily.

  “What’s all this damned nonsense about world domination? They keep blathering on about it all the time.”

  He looked round for a suitable place to f ling the newspaper.

  At the far end of the room, the enormous Dvoetyosov had struggled into his overalls and was standing with his enormous behind sticking out, smoothing and straightening his bed into shape on the top bunk.

  “Who keeps on about it, Zemelya?” he called out in his bass voice.

  “They all do.”

  “What about you? Are you out to dominate the world?”

  “What, me?”

  Zemelya sounded surprised, as though he took the question seriously. “No-o-o.” He smiled broadly. “Why the hell would I want to? I have no such ambition.” He climbed down, grunting.

  “In that case, let’s go and work ourselves sick!” Dvoetyosov said, launching his bulk from the bed and landing with a resounding thud. He was going to his Sunday work uncombed, unwashed, and unbuttoned.

  The bell rang lengthily. It was ringing to announce that inspection was over and that the “royal gates” were open. Prisoners were already thronging through them onto the stairway of the institute.

  Doronin was first out. Sologdin, who kept the window closed while he was getting up and having his tea, now wedged it open with the Ehrenburg volume and hurried into the hallway to catch Professor Chelnov as he emerged from the “professor’s cell.” Rubin, as usual, had managed to get nothing done in the early morning. He hurriedly put what he had not eaten and drunk into his locker, upsetting something inside it, and flapped around his lumpy, rumpled, impossible bed vainly trying to straighten it enough not to be brought back to make it again.

  Nerzhin, meanwhile, was trying on his “fancy dress.” At one time, long, long ago, prisoners in a sharashka wore smart suits and overcoats every day and went to meet their visitors in the same clothes. Now they had been made to wear blue overalls, so that the tower sentries could distinguish them from free workers. But the prison authorities made them change when they had visitors, handing out used shirts and suits confiscated, perhaps, from private wardrobes when an inventory was made upon arrest. Some prisoners liked seeing themselves well dressed, if only for a few brief hours; others would gladly have avoided this dressing up in dead men’s clothes, but the authorities flatly refused to take them in overalls: Relatives must not get a bad impression of prison life. And no one was stiff-necked enough to forfeit a relative’s visit. So dress up they did.

  The semicircular room had emptied. Left behind were twelve pairs of beds welded into twelve double-decker bunks and made up hospital fashion, with the sheets turned back over the blankets to catch the dust and get dirty first. This system could only have been thought up by a bureaucratic and, surely, masculine brain; even the inventor’s wife would not use it in her own home. However, this was what the Prison Health inspectorate demanded.

  A pleasant silence, rare in this place, had settled on the room, and no one felt like breaking it.

  There were four of them left behind. Nerzhin, costuming himself, Khorobrov, Abramson, and a balding designer.

  The designer was one of those timid zeks who spend years inside without beginning to acquire the cool cheek a prisoner needs. He would never have dared to stay away from work even on Sunday, but, feeling poorly, he had armed himself in advance with permission from the prison doctor to take what in any case should be his day off. Now he had laid out on his bed a number of socks with holes, some darning wool, and a cardboard mushroom of his own making, and was wondering, with knitted brows, where to begin.

  Grigory Borisovich Abramson, who had duly completed one ten-year sentence (not counting six years of banishment beforehand) and was now serving a second, couldn’t always avoid turning out on Sundays, but he did his best. At one time, in his Komsomol days, wild horses couldn’t have kept him away from voluntary work on Sundays. But Sunday shifts were thought of then as a headlong rush to get the economy right; in a year or two, everything would be going splendidly, and thereafter all gardens would bloom as one. But as the decades went by, voluntary work on Sundays ceased to be exciting and became mere drudgery. The trees that were planted refused to blossom and indeed were mostly pushed over and mangled by tractors. Long years of imprisonment and reflection had changed Abramson’s mind; he had come to believe that man was by nature averse to work and would not do it unless poverty or a big stick compelled him to. So despite the fact that—all things considered, and keeping in mind the still-valid and only possible goal of mankind (Communism)—all these endeavors, including even Sunday shifts, were undoubtedly necessary, Abramson no longer felt strong enough to take part in them. He was one of the few men in the place who had served, and more than served, ten full, ten terrible years, and he knew that it was not a myth, not wild twaddle on the part of the court, not a bad joke till the first general amnesty (as new boys always believed); ten years meant ten, if not twelve or fifteen, exhausting years out of a man’s life. He had learned long ago to economize on muscular movement, to cherish every minute of relaxation. And he knew that the best way to spend Sunday was to lie still in bed, stripped to your underwear.

  So now he pulled out the book with which Sologdin had wedged the window open, shut the window, unhurriedly removed his overalls, lay down under the blanket, wrapped it around himself, cleaned his glasses with a scrap of chamois leather kept for the purpose, put a piece of hard candy in his mouth, straightened his pillow, and got out from under his mattress a rather fat book, wrapped in paper as a precaution. Just to look at him would make you feel comfortable.

  Khorobrov, on the other hand, was in torment. He wa
s lying fully dressed on top of his made bed, his feet, in shoes, resting on the bedrail, miserable in his idleness. He felt keenly, and took a long time to get over, things that others treated lightly. In accordance with the well-known voluntary principle, all prisoners were listed every Saturday, without necessarily being asked, as volunteers for Sunday work, and the prison was duly notified. If registration had indeed been voluntary, Khorobrov would have put his name down every time and gladly spent his days off at his workbench. But because registration was a blatant farce, he felt bound to stay in bed and vegetate in the locked prison.

  Prisoners in camps can only dream of a Sunday spent lying down in a warm, closed room. But in a sharashka the prisoner’s ache is not in his back.

  There was absolutely nothing to do! Such newspapers as there were he had read the day before. Books from the special prison’s library lay in a heap, open or shut, on the stool by his bed. One was a collection of articles by eminent writers. Khorobrov, after some hesitation, opened it at an article by the Tolstoy who, if he had had any conscience, would not have dared to publish under that name. The article, written in June 1941, said that “German soldiers, driven by terror and madness, have run up against a wall of iron and fire at the frontier.” Khorobrov slammed the book shut with a whispered obscenity and put it aside. Whenever he looked into a book, he chanced on some sore point because his world was made up of nothing but sore points. These rulers of men’s minds in their lavishly appointed out-of-town houses heard nothing except the radio and saw nothing but their flowerbeds. A semiliterate peasant knew more about life than they did.

  The other books in the heap were “artistic literature,” but reading them sickened Khorobrov just as much. One was a bestseller called Far from Moscow, which everybody outside was avidly reading. Khorobrov had read a bit of it the day before and tried again now, but it made him feel queasy. It was a pie without filling, a hollow egg, a stuffed bird. It was about the use of convict labor on building sites. But the camps were not given their proper names; the builders were not called zeks; nothing was said about short rations or punishment cells. The zeks became Komsomols, well dressed, well shod, and bursting with enthusiasm. An experienced reader sensed immediately that the author knew, had seen, had touched the truth, that he might well have been an operations officer in a camp himself, but that he was a barefaced liar.

  His one and only oath turned up on schedule, with its three words differently arranged, and Khorobrov tossed the bestseller aside.

  Another of the books was the Selected Works of the famous Galakhov. Vaguely remembering him and expecting something better, Khorobrov had started reading this volume but had given up, feeling that it was the same sort of insult as the list of Sunday “volunteers.” Galakhov had written passable love stories but had long ago slipped into the approved manner, writing as though his readers were not normal people but imbeciles who could be kept happy with meretricious trash. Anything deeply troubling was missing from these books. Except for the war, their authors would have been left with nothing to write except hymns of praise. The war had given them access to feelings that all could understand. But even so they concocted unreal personal problems, like that of the Komsomol who derails munitions trains by the dozen behind enemy lines but agonizes day and night because he is not paying his dues and so may not be a genuine Komsomol.

  Khorobrov rang the changes on his favorite oath again and felt a little better.

  Another of the books on the locker was American Short Stories by progressive writers. Khorobrov could not check these stories against real life, but the selection surprised him; every story inevitably contained something very nasty about America. This poisonous collection, taken together, gave such a nightmarish picture of their country that you could only wonder why the Americans hadn’t all fled or hanged themselves long ago.

  No, there was nothing to read!

  Khorobrov decided to have a smoke. He took out a cigarette and rolled it between his fingers. In the dead silence he could hear the tight-packed paper. He wanted to smoke without leaving the room, right there, with his feet up on the bedrail. Prisoners who smoke know that the cigarette you really enjoy is the one you smoke lying down, on your own strip of bedboard or your own bunk—a leisurely smoke, with your eyes fixed on the ceiling and the pictures from the irrecoverable past and the unattainable future that float across it.

  But the bald-headed designer was a nonsmoker and didn’t like smoke, and Abramson, though a smoker, subscribed to the fallacious theory that the air in the room should be fresh. While in prison Khorobrov had come to believe firmly that respect for the rights of others is the beginning of freedom, so he lowered his feet to the ground with a sigh and made for the door. On the way he saw the thick book in Abramson’s hands, decided that it was not from the prison library and must have come from outside—and nobody would ask for rubbish to be brought in.

  He was not foolish enough to ask Abramson out loud, “What are you reading?” or “Where did you get that from?” (The designer, or Nerzhin, might overhear the answer.) He went very close to Abramson and spoke quietly.

  “Grigory Borisych, can I take a peek at the title page?”

  “Go ahead,” said Abramson, rather grudgingly.

  Khorobrov opened the book and read, The Count of Monte Cristo.

  He was so staggered he could only give a whistle.

  “Borisych,” he asked tenderly, “is there anybody after you? Can I have it later?”

  Abramson took his glasses off and thought a bit.

  “We’ll see. Can you give me a haircut today?”

  The prisoners didn’t like the visiting Stakhanovite barber. Enthusiastic amateur barbers from among their own number would cater to every whim, taking their time because they had plenty of it ahead of them.

  “Who can we get a pair of scissors from?”

  “I’ll get Zyablik’s.”

  “All right, I’ll do it.”

  “Good. The bit up to page 128 comes out. I’ll give it to you shortly.”

  Noting that Abramson was on page 110, Khorobrov went into the hallway for his smoke in a more cheerful frame of mind.

  Gleb was fuller all the time of the holiday spirit. Somewhere, probably in the student dormitory at Stromynka, Nadya, too, would be feeling excited in this last hour before their meeting. When you meet, you can’t collect your thoughts; you forget all that you meant to say. Better write it down, memorize it, burn the scrap of paper; they wouldn’t let me take it in with me. Just remember that there are eight points. Point 1: I may be going away. Point 2: My sentence won’t end when it’s supposed to; there will be a period of exile to follow. Point 3. . . .

  He hurried down to the clothes storeroom and ironed his dickey. The dickey, Ruska Doronin’s invention, had been adopted by many others. It was a piece of white material (obtained by tearing a sheet into sixteen pieces, but the orderly in charge of the linen closet did not know that) with a white collar stitched onto it. This bit of cloth was just big enough to fit into the opening at the neck of your overalls and conceal the “MGB Special Prison No. 1” stamp on your undershirt. There were, in addition, two strings, to be tied behind your back. The dickey helped to create the generally desired appearance of well-being. It was simple to wash, it served faithfully on workdays or holidays, and you were not ashamed to be seen in it by the females among the institute’s free employees.

  Next, Nerzhin stood on the stairs and tried in vain to give his scuffed shoes a shine, using somebody’s dried-up and crumbling polish. (The prison did not provide a change of shoes on visiting days; shoes could not be seen under the table.)

  When he went back into the room to shave (even straight razors were allowed in this place, so haphazard were the regulations), Khorobrov was already reading avidly. The designer’s extensive darning operations had spread from the bed to the floor. Abramson, turning his head slightly away from his book, peered down from his pillow to give instructions.

  “Darning is only effective
when it is carried out conscientiously. God forbid that you should adopt a formal attitude to it. Don’t hurry; keep your stitches close together; go over every place cross-darning twice. Another common error is using the broken stitches around the edges of a ragged hole. Don’t try to do it on the cheap; don’t worry about a few odd snippets; trim the edges of the hole neatly. Have you ever heard the name Berkalov?”

  “Who? Berkalov? No.”

  “You do surprise me! Berkalov was an old-time artillery officer, the inventor of the BS-3 cannon—you know, that marvelous cannon with the simply crazy muzzle velocity. Well, then, Berkalov was sitting one Sunday, just as you are now, in a sharashka darning his socks. Somebody turned the radio on: ‘Berkalov, Lieutenant General—Stalin Prize, First Class.’ He’d only been a major general when he was arrested. Well, he finished darning his socks and started making himself some fritters on a hotplate. In came a guard, caught him at it, took the illegal hotplate away from him, and made out a report to the commandant recommending three days in the hole. But at that very moment the commandant himself ran in like an excited schoolboy: ‘Berkalov! Get your things together! You’re off to the Kremlin! Kalinin is asking for you!’ That’s the sort of thing that can happen to a man in Russia.”

  Chapter 32

  On the Path to a Million

  OLD PROFESSOR CHELNOV, a mathematician well known in many sharashkas, who used to enter in the “nationality” column not “Russian” but “zek” and who in 1950 was nearing the end of his eighteenth year of imprisonment, had applied the fine point of his pencil to many technical inventions, from the continuously operating boiler to the jet engine, and had invested a bit of his soul in some of them.

  Incidentally, Professor Chelnov maintained that the expression “invest one’s soul” should be used with care, since only zeks certainly had immortal souls, which were denied to “frees” because of their worldliness. In friendly conversation with other zeks over a bowl of ice-cold congealing porridge or a steaming glass of cocoa, Chelnov did not disguise the fact that he had borrowed this thought from Pierre Bezukhov. When the French soldier would not let Pierre cross the road, he, as everybody knows, burst out laughing. “Ha ha! The soldier wouldn’t let me cross! Me? He wouldn’t let my immortal soul cross!”