In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  In the spring of ’45, triumphant salvos every evening hailed the capture of city after city: Königsberg, Breslau, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague.

  But no letter came. The world grew dark. She had no wish to do anything. But she could not let herself go. If he was alive and if he came back, he would reproach her for wasting her time. So she spent her days working for a higher degree in chemistry, studying foreign languages and dialectical materialism, and wept only at night.

  Suddenly the Ministry of Defense stopped paying her allowance as an officer’s wife.

  That could only mean that he had been killed.

  The four-year war ended immediately afterward! People crazed with joy ran through the delirious streets. Pistols were fired into the air. Every loudspeaker in the Soviet Union blared out victory marches over the battle-scarred and famished country.

  Nadya was notified not that he was dead but that he was missing. Ever eager to arrest people, the state had always shied away from admitting it.

  The human heart does not easily reconcile itself to the irremediable, and Nadya found herself indulging in comforting fantasies. Perhaps he had been sent to reconnoiter deep in enemy terrain? Could he be carrying out some “special mission”? A generation brought up to be suspicious and secretive could imagine mysteries where there were none.

  There was a heat wave in southern Russia that summer, but the sun did not shine on the young widow. Still, she went on studying chemistry, languages, and dialectical materialism (diamat), for fear of disappointing him when he returned.

  Four months after the war ended, it was surely time for her to accept that Gleb was no longer living. But that was when the crumpled triangle of paper arrived from Krasnaya Presnya: “My only love! It’s going to be another ten years!”

  Her family and friends could not understand her; she learns that her husband is in jail, and all at once she’s bright and cheerful! How lucky that it wasn’t twenty-five years, or even fifteen! It is only from the grave that people never return; from prison they do! There was even something romantic about their plight; a commonplace student marriage had become something noble, something sublime.

  Nadya no longer needed to fear that he was dead or that his feelings had treacherously changed, and she felt a new uprush of strength. He was in Moscow, so she must go to Moscow to save him! (Her presence at his side would be enough to save him, or so she thought.)

  But how could she get there? Posterity will never be able to imagine how difficult travel, and especially traveling to Moscow, was in those days. As in the thirties, a citizen had to produce documentary proof that official duties compelled him to become a burden on public transportation rather than sitting quietly at home. If he succeeded, he was given a docket entitling him to hang about in lines at railway stations, sleeping right there on a spittle-splashed floor, or else to slip someone a timid bribe at the back door of the booking office.

  Nadya’s excuse was that she intended to study for a higher degree in Moscow. She bought a ticket at three times face value and hurried to Moscow with a briefcase full of textbooks on her lap, together with a pair of felt boots for a husband whom the taiga awaited.

  It was one of those supreme moments in life when good powers help us and we succeed in all we undertake. The country’s finest graduate school accepted an unknown provincial girl with no money, or connections, or even a telephone number to her name. It was a miracle, but getting to see her husband in Krasnaya Presnya transit prison proved harder! No visits were allowed while the channels of the Gulag were choked by the incredible spate of prisoners from Europe.

  But as she was standing by the timbered guardhouse, waiting for an answer to yet another futile application, Nadya saw a column of prisoners marched through the unpainted wooden gates of the prison to work on the docks of the Moscow River. One of those flashes of insight that prove so often accurate told Nadya that Gleb was among them.

  Two hundred men were marched out. They were all at that transitional stage when a man is gradually shedding his “free” clothing and assuming the slovenly dark gray costume of the zek. Every one of them still had about him some memento of his past: a soldier’s peaked cap with a colored band but without strap or star, or else calfskin boots not yet traded for bread or appropriated by the professional criminals, a silk shirt split down the back. . . . They were all close-cropped (some of them tried to shield their heads from the summer sun), all unshaved, all thin, some to the point of emaciation.

  Nadya had no eyes for the rest of them. She sensed where Gleb was and spotted him immediately; he was walking along in his worsted tunic. Its collar was unbuttoned, the red piping was still there on his cuffs, and an unfaded strip on his chest showed where his medal ribbons had once been. He kept his hands behind his back, as they all did. He did not look, as they went downhill, at the sunlit spaces that you would expect to attract a prisoner, nor sideways at the women with parcels (no letters reached prisoners in transit, and he could not know that Nadya was in Moscow). He was just as yellow, just as emaciated as his comrades, but he was beaming as he listened with delighted approval to the dignified gray-bearded old man beside him.

  Nadya ran alongside and called his name, but he could not hear her above the buzz of conversation and the frantic barking of the guard dogs. She ran on, gasping for breath, greedily drinking in the sight of him. How sorry she felt for him, rotting away month after month in dark, stinking cells! What happiness it was to see him, so near to her! How proud she was that his spirit was not broken! And how vexed that he was evidently not grieving, that he had forgotten his wife! And suddenly her pain was all for herself, as though he had robbed her of happiness, as though she, not he, were the victim!

  But it was all over in a moment. A guard yelled at her, the dogs, red-eyed man-eaters, trained to terrify, strained at their leashes, barking and glaring. Nadya was driven away. The column filed down a narrow slope, and there was no room to squeeze in alongside. The last of the guards hung back to seal off the forbidden area, and Nadya, following behind, had no hope of overtaking the column, which disappeared from sight behind another blank fence.

  In the evening and at night, when the inhabitants of Krasnaya Presnya, a district of Moscow famous for its fight for freedom, could not see them, special trains made up of cattle trucks pulled in at the transit prison; parties of convoy guards with unsteady lamps, raucously barking dogs, peremptory shouts, curses, and blows loaded prisoners forty to a truck and shipped them by the thousand to Pechora, Inta, Vorkuta, Sov-Gavan, Norilsk, to the camps of Irkutsk, Chita, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Central Asia, Karaganda, Dzhezkazgan, Pribalkhash, the Irtysh, Tobolsk, the Urals, Saratov, Vyatka, Vologda, Perm, Solvychegodsk, Rybinsk, Potma, Sukhobezvodninsk, and many nameless smaller camps. Groups of a hundred or two were carried off by day in the backs of trucks to Serebryanny Bor, to Novy Yerusalim, to Pavshino, to Khovrino, to Beskudnikovo, to Khimki, to Dmitrov, to Solnechnogorsk, or by night to various places in Moscow itself, so that, hidden from view by blank billboards and safe behind barbed-wire entanglements, they could build a capital befitting an invincible great power.

  Fate sent Nadya an unexpected but well-deserved reward: As luck would have it, Gleb was not packed off to the Arctic Circle but dumped in Moscow itself, in an elegant prison camp engaged in building accommodations for the senior staff of the Ministries of State Security and the Interior, a crescent-shaped building at the Kaluga Gate.

  When Nadya hurried there to visit him for the first time, she felt as though he were halfway to freedom already.

  Elegant cars, some with diplomatic license plates, drove up and down Great Kaluzhskaya Street. Buses and trolleys stopped where the railings around Neskuchny Park ended, and there was the guardhouse, looking like the shack at the entrance to any ordinary building site. The people swarming high up on the face of the new building wore torn and dirty clothes, but builders always look like that, and passersby never guessed that these were prisoners. Or if they did, they kept quiet about it.


  Those were the days of cheap money and expensive bread. Things were sold at home, and Nadya handed in parcels for her husband. The parcels were always accepted, but permission to see him was rarely granted. Gleb was not fulfilling his quota of work. When she did see him, she hardly recognized him. Adversity always changes arrogant people for the better. Gleb was gentler; he kissed his wife’s hands; he watched the changing light in her eyes. He felt as though he were no longer in prison. Camp life, which surpasses in savagery all that we know about the lives of cannibals or rats, had almost broken him. But he had by conscious effort risen above self-pity, and now he struggled to make her see reason.

  “My dearest! You don’t know what you are letting yourself in for. You will wait for a year, maybe three years, five years even; but the nearer the end, the harder waiting will become. The last few years will be the hardest. We have no children, so don’t ruin your young life; give me up; marry somebody else!”

  He did not altogether mean what he was saying, but he had to make the offer. And she protested without really meaning what she was saying: “Are you looking for an excuse to get rid of me?”

  The prisoners lived in an unfinished wing of the house they were building. The women who brought them parcels could look over the fence as they got off the trolleys and see the faces of men crowding around two or three windows. Sometimes they could see “love-girls” among them. One “love-girl” standing at the window embraced her camp “husband” and shouted over the fence at his lawful wife: “Why don’t you stop chasing him, you slut! Hand the parcel over, make it the last, and get lost! If I see you at the guardhouse again, I’ll scratch your ugly mug to bits!”

  The first postwar elections to the Supreme Soviet were approaching. Moscow prepared for them zealously, as if it were really possible for a voter to abstain or a candidate to fail. The authorities wanted to keep the “politicals” in Moscow (they were good workers) but had qualms; vigilance could be blunted. To give the rest a scare, some of them must be sent away. Alarming rumors of imminent transfer to the Far North went round the Moscow camps. Prisoners who had potatoes baked them to eat on the journey.

  So that nothing could dampen the enthusiasm of the electorate, visits to prisoners in Moscow camps were prohibited pending the elections. Nadya took along a towel for Gleb with a note stitched onto it:

  “My beloved! However many years go by, whatever storms may gather over our heads” (Nadya affected a high-flown style), “your little girl will be true to you as long as she lives. They say that your category is to be sent out of Moscow. You will be in distant places, cut off from any chance of a visit or even an exchange of stolen glances across the wires. If in that life of unrelieved gloom any distraction can lighten the burden on your heart, I shall resign myself. I authorize you, indeed I insist on it—be unfaithful to me; take up with other women. Do whatever you must to keep your spirits up! I am not afraid. I know that, whatever happens, you will come back to me, won’t you?”

  Chapter 39

  Fine Words, Those, “To the Taiga!”

  NINE-TENTHS OF THE CITY was still strange to her, but Nadya had mastered the geography lesson that so many Russian women have learned to their sorrow, the location of Moscow’s prisons. They were, she found, numerous, and thoughtfully dotted about the capital at regular intervals, so that you need never be very far from one. Delivering parcels for Gleb, inquiring after him, visiting him, she had learned to distinguish the Big Lubyanka, which catered to the whole Soviet Union, from the Little Lubyanka, which served only the Moscow oblast. She learned, too, that every station had its detention cells; she had been in Butyrki and Taganka Prisons a time or two and knew which trams to take (the timetables were no help) for Lefortovo and Krasnaya Presnya. She herself lived hard by Matrusskaya Tishina, a prison abolished at the time of the Revolution, but reestablished and reinforced later on.

  Since Gleb had been sent back from a distant prison camp to Moscow, and not to a camp this time but to a remarkable institution called a “special prison,” where they were well fed and employed on scientific research, Nadya had started seeing her husband again from time to time. But wives were not supposed to know where exactly their husbands were kept—so husbands were brought in for these rare meetings to one or another of the Moscow prisons.

  Visits to the Taganka were the cheeriest. This was a prison for common criminals, not political prisoners, and the regimen there was easygoing. Prisoners and visitors met in the guards’ club. Prisoners were brought along the deserted Street of the Masons in an open bus, wives would be waiting for them on the pavement, and before the visit officially began, a man could embrace his wife, remain with her, tell her things not allowed by the rules, and even pass things to her. Arrangements during the visit were just as casual. Husbands and wives sat side by side; there was only one pair of guard’s ears for every four couples.

  Butyrki was another cheerful, easygoing prison. It struck a chill into the wives, but prisoners who ended up there after the Lubyanka were delighted by the general laxity. The light in the “boxes” was not blinding; you could walk along hallways without keeping your hands behind your back, talk in a normal voice in your cell, look out under the “muzzles” on windows, lie on the plank bed in the daytime, or even sleep underneath it. Butyrki was soft in other ways, too; you could sleep with your hands under your overcoat, your glasses were not taken away for the night, matches were allowed in cells, they didn’t gut every cigarette of its tobacco, and loaves sent in by your family were only cut in four, not into little pieces.

  But wives knew nothing of these indulgences. They saw a fortress wall four times the height of a man, stretching a whole block along Novoslobodskaya Street. They saw iron gates between mighty concrete pillars, and no ordinary gates at that, opening automatically in a slow yawn to admit prison trucks and automatically closing behind them. Women visitors passed on admission through an opening in a stone wall two meters thick and were conducted around the grim Pugachev Tower between walls several times a man’s height. Ordinary zeks saw their visitors through two sets of bars, with a guard pacing between them as though he himself were caged, while zeks of the higher category, “sharashka” people, and their visitors faced each other across a wide table with a solid partition underneath it so that feet could not touch and exchange signals, and with a guard standing like an unblinking effigy at the side of the table, listening to the conversation. But the most oppressive feature of Butyrki was that husbands seemed to materialize from the depths of the jail, exhaled by those thick, damp walls for half an hour to reassure their wives, like smiling ghosts, that they were comfortable and wanted for nothing, and then melting into those walls again.

  This was the first time Nadya had visited Gleb in Lefortovo.

  The senior guard checked off her name on his list and pointed toward an annex.

  Several women were waiting already in a bare room with two long benches and a bare table. A wicker basket and shopping bags, evidently full of eatables, stood on the table. Although prisoners in the sharashka were adequately fed, Nadya, who had brought only some light pastry straws in a paper bag, felt resentful and ashamed that she couldn’t treat her husband to something tasty even once a year. She had gotten up early, while the others in the dormitory were still asleep, to make these straws with all that was left of her flour, sugar, and butter rations. She hadn’t had time to buy sweets or cakes and anyway had very little money until she could draw her grant. Visiting day coincided with her husband’s birthday, and she had nothing to give him! A good book? She couldn’t even do that after her last visit. She had brought him a little volume of Yesenin’s poems, gotten hold of by a miracle. He had had an identical copy at the front, and it had disappeared when he was arrested. Alluding to this, Nadya had written on the title page, “So shall all else that you have lost return to you.” But Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev had ripped the inscribed page out in her presence and returned it to her, remarking that nothing in writing could be passed to prisone
rs; “texts” must go through the censor separately. When Gleb heard this, he ground his teeth and asked her not to bring any more books.

  Four women sat around the table, one a young woman with a three-year-old girl. Nadya didn’t know any of them. They acknowledged her greeting and continued their animated conversation. A woman of thirty-five or forty, in a fur coat that was far from new and a threadbare headscarf, sat on a short bench against the opposite wall with her legs crossed and arms folded. Her whole pose expressed her determination to avoid all contact and conversation. There was nothing resembling a parcel anywhere near her.

  The company at the table would have made room for Nadya, but she did not feel like joining them. She, too, wanted to be alone with her thoughts that morning. She went over to the woman sitting by herself and said, “Do you mind?” There was barely room for two on the bench.

  The woman raised her eyes. They were quite colorless. They showed no understanding of Nadya’s question. They looked at Nadya and beyond her.

  Nadya sat down, tucked her hands into her sleeves, inclined her head to one side so that her cheek sank into her imitation astrakhan collar, and sat as still as her neighbor. At that moment she didn’t want to think about anything except Gleb, the conversation they would shortly be having, and something extending from the dim past into the invisible future, something that was not Gleb or Nadya but the two of them together, something usually called by the hackneyed word “love.”

  But she was unable to shut out the talk around the table. They were telling each other what their husbands were given to eat morning and evening, how often underwear was washed in prison. . . . How did they know? Surely they didn’t waste the precious minutes of a visit on such things? They enumerated the foodstuffs they had brought—so many grams of this, so many kilos of that. All this was an example of that stubborn womanly solicitude that makes a family a family and keeps the human race going. But Nadya’s thought was different—that it was an insult to reduce what should be great moments to the humdrum, the miserable small change of everyday. Did it never occur to these women to ask themselves who had dared to imprison their husbands? After all, their husbands need never have been behind bars, need never have been forced to eat prison food!