In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  After some time Sologdin asked curtly: “Where are they all?”

  “I was going to ask you that,” Yemina trilled.

  He shot her a quick glance, moving only his head, and said sarcastically, “All I can tell you is where the four unpersons who work in this room are. Make the most of it. One of them has been taken to see a visitor. Hugo Leonardovich has got his Latvian Christmas party. I’m here, and Ivan Ivanovich has begged off to darn his socks. What I would like to know in return is where our sixteen free, and so much more important, comrades are.”

  He was standing in profile to Yemina, and she could see the condescending smile between his neat little mustache and his neat goatee.

  “You mean you don’t know that our major arranged with Anton Nikolaevich last night to give the design office a day off? Just my bad luck to be duty officer.”

  Sologdin frowned. “A day off? In honor of what?”

  “Because it’s Sunday, of course.”

  “Since when has Sunday been a nonworking day around here?”

  “Well, the major said we have no urgent work at the moment.”

  Sologdin spun around to face her squarely.

  “We have no urgent work?” he exclaimed almost angrily. “I like that! We have no urgent work!” Sologdin’s pink lips twisted in an impatient grimace. “Would you like me to see to it that all sixteen of you sit here copying day and night from tomorrow onward? What do you say to that? All sixteen!” His voice rose to a shout of malicious glee.

  Unmoved by the awful prospect of days and nights at the drawing board, Yemina preserved the calm that went so well with her placid large-scale beauty. That morning she hadn’t even picked up the tracing paper that lay across her slightly inclined board. The key with which she had let herself in still lay on it. Propping herself comfortably against the desk (her knitted sleeve, pulled taut, emphasized the rounded fullness of her upper arm), Yemina rocked herself very gently and gazed at Sologdin with big, friendly eyes.

  “God forbid! Are you really capable of anything so wicked?”

  Sologdin stared at her coldly and asked: “Why do you use the word God? Aren’t you the wife of a Chekist?”

  “What of it?” She sounded surprised. “We bake Easter cakes, too. So what?”

  “Easter cakes?”

  “That’s what I said!”

  Sologdin gazed down at the seated Yemina. The green of her knitted two-piece attire was vivid, audacious. Skirt and jacket hugged and emphasized the lines of her opulent figure. The jacket was unbuttoned at the neck, and the collar of a flimsy white blouse was turned out over it.

  Sologdin made a check on the sheet of pink paper and said aggressively: “I thought you said your husband was a lieutenant colonel in the MGB?”

  “Well, that’s my husband! But me and my mother are . . . well . . . just women!”

  She smiled disarmingly. Her thick flaxen braids were wound into an imposing crown around her head. She smiled and was indeed like a peasant woman—as portrayed by a great actress.

  Sologdin said no more but sat sideways at his board, so as not to see Yemina, and studied the drawing pinned to it, squinting. He felt as though he was still sprinkled with the flowers of triumph, as though they still clung to his shoulders and chest, and he did not want to dispel this blissful feeling.

  He would, sometime, have to begin his real life, the Great Life.

  And the time was now. He was at the very zenith.

  Though there was still some lingering doubt. . . . Yes, that was it. Insensitivity to low-energy impulses and the shortfall in spin momentum could be taken care of, Sologdin felt instinctively, although of course he would have to double check. But Chelnov’s last remark, about randomness becoming a fixed pattern, was worrying. It did not imply that there was anything intrinsically wrong with his work, only that it fell short of the ideal. At the same time, he had a vague awareness that somewhere in his work there was an imperfection, a neglected “final inch,” which Chelnov had not sensed and he himself had not detected. It was important to locate it and start putting it right in the course of this quiet Sunday that had come around just when he needed it. Only then could he show his work to Anton and start using it to breach the concrete walls.

  He made an effort to shut Yemina out of his mind and concentrate on Professor Chelnov’s suggestions. Yemina had been sitting near him for six months, but they had never talked much. For that matter, they had never been alone together. Sologdin occasionally teased her a bit when his schedule allowed him a five-minute break. Her official position was that of copyist, so that she was his subordinate, but socially she belonged to the ruling class. The only natural and dignified relationship between them was enmity.

  Sologdin looked at his drawing, and Yemina, still propped on her elbow and swaying slightly, looked at him. Suddenly she asked in a loud voice: “Dmitri Aleksandrovich! What about you? Who darns your socks?”

  Sologdin’s eyebrows rose. He didn’t even understand.

  “Socks?” He went on looking at his drawing. “Oh, I see. Ivan Ivanovich wears socks because he’s still a new boy. Been in less than three years. Socks are a relic of what they call”—compelled to use “bird language,” he choked on the word—“capitalism. I just don’t wear socks!”

  He made a mark on the white sheet.

  “What do you wear, then?”

  Sologdin couldn’t help smiling.

  “You are overstepping the bounds of modesty, Larisa Nikolaevna. I wear that proud article of Russian attire, the foot rag!”

  He pronounced the words with relish, as though he was beginning to enjoy the conversation. His sudden transitions from sternness to jest always alarmed and amused Yemina.

  “I thought it was soldiers who wore foot rags.”

  “Soldiers and two other groups: prisoners and collective farmers.”

  “Well, they have to be washed and mended, don’t they?”

  “You’re mistaken! Who ever washes foot rags nowadays? People just wear them for a year without washing them, then throw them away and ask the authorities for new ones.”

  “Do they really?” Yemina looked almost alarmed.

  Sologdin burst into carefree youthful laughter.

  “At any rate that’s one way of looking at it. And where would I get the cash to buy socks? You’re an MGB tracing woman. How much do you get a month?”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  “Aha!” Sologdin exclaimed triumphantly. “Whereas I, a fashioner of things”—in the Language of Utter Clarity this meant “engineer”—“get thirty little old rubles! Can you see me splurging on socks?”

  Sologdin’s eyes twinkled merrily. It had nothing to do with Yemina, but she glowed.

  Larisa Nikolaevna’s husband was an oaf. His family had long ago become nothing more to him than a soft cushion, and he was nothing more to his wife than a piece of furniture. When he got home from work, he ate at length, with great enjoyment, then slept. After his snooze he read the papers and twiddled the knobs on the radio (he periodically sold his old set and bought one of the latest make). A soccer match (true to his calling, he was a Dynamo fan) might arouse some excitement and even passion in him, but nothing else could. He was as dim and as dull as could be. The other men in her circle were much the same: They spent their leisure boasting about their successes and their medals, playing cards, drinking themselves purple, then drunkenly pestering and pawing her. . . .

  Sologdin fixed his eyes on his drawing again. Larisa Nikolaevna went on staring at his face, eyeing his mustache, his beard, his full lips. . . .

  She would have liked to rub her face against his prickly beard.

  She broke the silence again. “Dmitri Aleksandrovich! Am I disturbing you?”

  “Yes, you are a bit. . . ,” Sologdin answered. The “last few inches” required deep and uninterrupted thought. But her proximity was distracting him. He abandoned his drawing for the time being, turned around to his desk and toward Yemina, and began looking through unimp
ortant papers.

  He could hear the faint tick of her wristwatch.

  A group of people walked along the hallway, talking quietly. Mamurin’s sibilant voice was raised in Number Seven, next door. “How long’s that transformer going to be?” Followed by an irate shout from Markushev: “You shouldn’t have let them have it, Yakov Ivanovich!”

  Larisa Nikolaevna folded her arms on the desk before her, rested her chin on them, and let her languishing gaze play on Sologdin.

  Sologdin went on reading.

  “Every day! Every hour!” She spoke reverently, almost in a whisper. “Working so hard . . . in prison! You’re a remarkable man, Dmitri Aleksandrovich!”

  This observation brought Sologdin’s head up sharply.

  “What has prison got to do with it, Larisa Nikolaevna! I’ve been inside since I was twenty-five, and I’m supposed to get out when I’m forty-two. But I don’t believe it. They’re sure to add another bit on. I will have spent the best part of my life in the camps, the years when my powers are at their height. A man shouldn’t knuckle under to external circumstances—that’s too humiliating.”

  “You seem to do everything according to plan!”

  “Whether he’s free or in prison, it makes no difference; man must cultivate firmness of purpose and put it at the service of reason. I lived on nothing but porridge for seven years in a camp, and my brainwork was done without sugar or phosphorus. If I were to tell you. . . .”

  But you had to have gone through it to understand it.

  The camp’s interrogation cell was a hole scooped out of a hillside. The godfather, Lieutenant Kamyshan, had spent eleven months preparing Sologdin for his second sentence, a further tenner. He hit you on the lips with a stick, so that you spat blood and teeth. On days when he rode into the camp on horseback (he was an excellent rider), he would hit you with the handle of his riding crop.

  The war was still on. Even the free population had nothing to eat. And those in the camps? Still less. What could you expect, then, in that cage in the mountain?

  Sologdin’s first interrogation had taught him his lesson, and this time he signed nothing. He got the scheduled tenner just the same. He was taken straight from the courtroom to the hospital. He was dying. His body was doomed to disintegration; it would accept neither bread nor gruel nor porridge.

  There came a day when they tipped him onto a stretcher and carried him off to the morgue, where they would break his head open with a big wooden mallet before carting him to the burial ground. But he had suddenly stirred. . . .

  “Tell me about it!”

  “No, Larisa Nikolaevna! It’s absolutely impossible to describe!” he assured her.

  He could say it easily, cheerfully now.

  And from there, from that terrible place, thenceforth . . . what remarkable powers of renewal he had! With all those years of captivity, all those years of work behind him, to what heights had he soared!

  “Please tell me about it!”

  The well-nourished woman looked up at him imploringly, her head on her folded arms.

  There was one thing she might be able to understand: A woman had also been involved in the story. Kamyshan had picked on him all the sooner because he was jealous of Sologdin’s relations with a female prisoner, a nurse. And not without reason. Sologdin’s body still glowed with gratitude when he thought of her. It had almost been worth serving a second term for her sake. There was in fact some resemblance between the nurse and this copyist. Both were as ripe and plump as full ears of corn. Small, thin women were freaks as far as Sologdin was concerned. Nature’s mistakes.

  Yemina’s index finger, with its neatly manicured, pink-polished nail, toyed idly with the crumpled corner of her tracing paper. Her head was almost resting on her folded arms, so that the towering crown of thick braids was turned toward Sologdin.

  “I owe you a big apology, Dmitri Aleksandrovich. . . .”

  “What for?”

  “When I was standing by your desk once, I looked down and saw that you were writing a letter. It was quite accidental; you know how it can happen. Then there was another time—”

  “When you, again quite by chance, took another squint. . . ?”

  “And saw that you were writing a letter again, and it looked like the same one.”

  “What, you could even make out that it was the same one? What about the third time? Was there a third time?”

  “Yes.”

  “So-o-o. . . . If this goes on, Larisa Nikolaevna, I will have to dispense with your services as a copyist. Which would be a pity, because your drawing is not at all bad.”

  “But it was a long time ago. You haven’t written anything since.”

  “But I dare say you immediately informed Major Shikinidi?”

  “Why do you call him Shikinidi?”

  “Shikin, then. Did you?”

  “How could you think such a thing?”

  “It doesn’t take much thought. Major Shikinidi must surely have given you the job of spying on my actions, words, and even thoughts.” Sologdin took a pencil and made a mark on the white sheet. “Didn’t he? Be honest!”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “And how many bad reports have you put in?”

  “Dmitri Aleksandrovich! On the contrary. I always give you the very best reports!”

  “Hmm . . . well, we’ll believe it for the time being. But my warning remains in force. We obviously have here a harmless case of purely womanly curiosity. I will satisfy it. It was back in September. I spent not three but five days on end writing a letter to my wife.”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you, whether you have a wife. Is she waiting for you? Do you always write her such long letters?”

  “Yes, I have a wife,” Sologdin answered slowly and thoughtfully, “but I might just as well not have one. I can’t even write to her now. When I did, they weren’t long letters; it just took a long time getting them right. The art of letter writing, Larisa Nikolaevna, is a very difficult one. We often write our letters carelessly, and then we’re surprised when we lose people dear to us. My wife hasn’t seen me, hasn’t felt the touch of my hand for many years now. Letters are the only tie by which I’ve held on to her for the past twelve years.”

  Yemina stirred. She slid her elbows to the edge of Sologdin’s desk and propped herself up there, cupping her bold face in her hands.

  “Are you sure you’re still holding on to her? And if so, why, Dmitri Aleksandrovich? It’s been twelve years already, and there are still another five left! Seventeen years! You’re robbing her of her youth! Why? Let her live!”

  Sologdin said gravely: “There are, Larisa Nikolaevna, women of a special kind. They are the consorts of Vikings, the bright-faced Isoldes with adamantine souls. You cannot have known them; your life has been one of comfortable stagnation.”

  “Let her live!” Larisa Nikolaevna urged him.

  She was no longer the grande dame who sailed so majestically along hallways and up stairways in the sharashka. She sat clinging to Sologdin’s desk. He heard her breathing loudly, saw her face flushed brightly with concern for his wife, whom she had never met, and thought that now she did indeed look almost like a peasant woman.

  Sologdin looked at her quizzically. All women, he knew, were quick to spot the male in the ascendant, to catch the scent of success. Every single one of them craved the attention of the victor. Yemina could not possibly know about his conversation with Chelnov, about the results of his work, but she had somehow sensed it all. And she was beating her wings against the iron-meshed barrier of discipline between them.

  Sologdin peeked into the depths of her open-necked blouse and made a mark on the pink sheet.

  “Dmitri Aleksandrovich! That’s another thing. I’ve been tortured by curiosity for several weeks now. What are those marks you keep making? And why do you cross them out after a few days? What does it mean?”

  “I’m afraid you’re showing your surveillance leanings again.” He took up the white sheet. �
��But I don’t mind telling you. I make a mark here every time I use a foreign word in Russian when it isn’t unavoidable. The number of such marks is the measure of my imperfection. This one is for the word ‘capitalism,’ which I would have replaced with ‘moneygrubbing’ if I’d had my wits about me. ‘Surveillance’ in my slovenly haste I failed to replace with ‘watch-keeping.’ So I’ve given myself two bad marks.”

  “And those on the pink paper?”

  “Ah, you’ve noticed that I make marks on the pink paper, too.”

  “Yes, and more frequently than on the white. Is that also a measure of your imperfection?”

  “Yes,” said Sologdin curtly. “On the pink paper, I fine myself, penalize myself, in your language, and afterward I punish myself accordingly. I work off my punishment by chopping wood.”

  “But what do you penalize yourself for?” she asked quietly.

  It was bound to happen! No sooner had he reached the zenith than capricious fate had even sent him a woman, with apologies for the delay. Give everything or rob you of everything; that was fate’s way.

  “Why do you want to know?” he asked as sternly as before.

  “Tell me, what are they for?” she repeated quietly, stubbornly.

  This would be his revenge on them all, on the whole MVD clan!

  “Haven’t you noticed when I make those marks?”

  “I have,” she said faintly.

  The door key, with its aluminum tag, lay on her tracing paper.

  A big warm green woolen ball stood breathing hard before Sologdin.

  Awaiting his orders.

  Sologdin squinted and gave the command.

  “Go and lock the door! Quick!”

  Larisa sprang back from the desk, and her chair fell over with a crash as she stood up abruptly.

  What had he done, impertinent slave? Was she on her way to complain?

  She swept up the key, walked to the door, hips swaying, and locked it.

  Sologdin made five hasty marks in a row on the pink paper.

  All he had time for.