In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Gleb smiled and shook his head as though he found it hard to believe.

  “Well, it was a Trade Union evening, and it just happened that way . . . but still. And do you know, it was really funny they said my best dress was no good; I couldn’t go on the platform in that. So they rang the theater and got another one sent, a lovely one, down to my heels.”

  “And when you’d played your piece, they took it off you?”

  “Well. . . . Anyway, the girls say rude things about me because I’m mad about music, but I say it’s better to be mad about something than somebody.”

  This wasn’t just idle talk. She said it loud and clear. It was a clever way of letting him know the new rules she had made for herself. She leaned forward as though she expected a pat on the head.

  Nerzhin looked at his wife, gratefully and anxiously. But for the moment he couldn’t find the words of praise and approval she expected.

  “But what about the special topic?”

  Nadya lowered her eyes and hung her head.

  “I was going to tell you. . . . But you won’t take it to heart—nicht wahr? You once insisted that we should . . . get a divorce. . . .” Her last words were very quiet.

  (This was the third possibility, the only one that promised her some chance of making a life for herself: Her dossier must contain not the word “divorced,” because she would still have to give her ex-husband’s name, his present address, the names of his parents, and even their birth dates, occupations, and address; no, it must say “unmarried.” And for this she would have to get a divorce in another town and keep it quiet.)

  Yes, he had once insisted on it. . . . But now he was of two minds. Only now did he notice that the wedding ring she had never been without was not on her finger.

  “Yes, of course,” he said very firmly.

  Nadya rubbed the table with the palm of that same ringless hand, as though she was rolling stiff dough into a flat cake.

  “Well then . . . would you object . . . if I have to do it?” She raised her head. Her eyes were wide. The pinpoints of her gray pupils implored him to understand and forgive. “It would be a sham,” she added, in a single, almost inaudible breath.

  “Good for you! It’s about time!” Gleb agreed emphatically. In his heart he was far less positive, but he was putting off any attempt to make sense of it all until the visit was over.

  “I may not have to do it!” she said, still pleading with him. She pulled her coat back over her shoulders, and at that moment she looked care-worn and exhausted.

  “I wanted to know whether you agree, just in case. It may not be necessary.”

  “No, you’re right, of course, it’s a good idea,” Gleb said mechanically. His mind was already on the main point he had written down on his list, and which it was now time to spring on her.

  “It is important for you to be clear about things, my dear. You mustn’t bank on my release when my sentence is over.”

  He himself was fully prepared for a second sentence and an indefinite term in jail. It had already happened to many of his comrades. This was something he couldn’t put in a letter, and he had to speak out now.

  Nadya looked apprehensive.

  “The sentence you’re given is nominal,” Gleb said in a quick hard voice, misplacing the stresses on words so that the guard wouldn’t keep up with him. “It can escalate in a spiral. History provides a wealth of examples. And if by some miracle my sentence does come to an end, you mustn’t think that we can return to our own town and our old life. You must realize, get it firmly into your head; you can’t buy a ticket to the land of the past. What I most regret, for instance, is that I’m not a shoemaker. How badly needed that sort of thing is in a settlement out in the taiga, in Krasnoyarsk, say, or on the lower reaches of the Angara! That’s the sort of life we ought to prepare ourselves for!”

  He had achieved his end. The retired gangster did not stir. He could only blink as the sentences sped past him.

  But Gleb had forgotten, or rather failed to understand (as they all did), that those who are used to walking on warm gray earth cannot be expected to scale icy mountains at short notice. He did not realize that his wife went on, as she always had, methodically, meticulously counting the days and weeks of his sentence. For him his term was a bright, cold infinity; for her there remained 264 weeks, 61 months, a little over 5 years—a much shorter time than had passed since he went to the war from which he would not return.

  As Gleb went on, the fear in Nadya’s face turned to ashen terror.

  Her words tumbled over one another. “No, no, no! Don’t tell me that, my dearest!” (She had forgotten all about the guard and her inhibitions.) “Don’t take away my hope! I refuse to believe it! I mustn’t believe it! It simply can’t be like that! You didn’t think, surely, that I would really leave you?”

  Her upper lip quivered; her face was contorted; her eyes expressed nothing but devotion, endless devotion.

  “I do believe you, I do, my little Nadya!” Gleb said in a different voice. “That’s what I thought.”

  She sank back in her chair and was silent.

  The sprightly, dark-haired lieutenant colonel appeared in the doorway, cast a sharp eye on the three heads so confidentially close, and quietly called the guard aside.

  The bull-necked gangster moved reluctantly, as though he were being dragged away from a delicious dessert, and went over to the lieutenant colonel. They were only four steps behind Nadya’s back and exchanged only a sentence or two, but Gleb had time to ask in a muffled voice: “Do you know Sologdin’s wife?”

  Nadya had plenty of practice and was not left behind by this sudden switch.

  “Yes.”

  “Know where she lives?”

  “Yes.”

  “They won’t allow him a visit. Tell her he—”

  The gangster was back.

  “Loves! Worships! Adores!” Gleb said, in his presence, speaking very distinctly. Precisely because the gangster was there, Sologdin’s words somehow did not sound too extravagant.

  “Loves—worships—adores,” Nadya repeated with a sad sigh. She looked closely at her husband. She had scrutinized him in the past as closely as only a woman can, though because of her youth she might have missed something; she had thought that she knew him, but she saw now a new man, a man she did not know.

  She nodded her head sadly. “It . . . suits you.”

  “What does?”

  “You know. This place. All this. Being here,” she said, slightly varying her tone of voice to disguise her meaning—“being in prison suits him!”—from the guard.

  But seeing him in a new light brought him no closer. It made him more of a stranger.

  She, too, was saving up what she had learned until after the visit, when she could think it over and decide what it all meant. She did not know what her conclusions would be, but her heart went ahead of her mind, and she looked now for signs of weakness, weariness, illness, a plea for help—something to make a woman sacrifice the remainder of her life, wait another ten years if need be, and go to join him in the taiga.

  But he was smiling! Smiling just as complacently as he had at Krasnaya Presnya! He was always so independent; he never needed sympathy from anyone. He even seemed to be comfortable on that small, bare stool; he seemed to be looking around with some enjoyment, collecting material for his history even in this place. He looked well, and his eyes sparkled with amusement at his jailers. Did he really need a woman’s loyalty?

  Nadya, however, had not yet thought all this.

  And Gleb did not realize what she was close to thinking.

  Klimentiev was at the door.

  “Time’s up!”

  “Already?” said Nadya in surprise.

  Gleb frowned in an effort to remember the most important items left on his list of “things to tell her,” learned by heart before the visit.

  “Oh yes! Don’t be surprised if they move me to some place a long way from here and letters stop altogether.”


  “Might they? Where to?” Nadya cried.

  Such frightening news. And he’d kept it to himself till now!

  “God knows,” he said with a shrug, but as if he meant it to be taken literally.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve started believing in God?”

  (They hadn’t managed to talk about anything!)

  Gleb smiled. “Why not? Pascal, Newton, Einstein—”

  “Weren’t you told not to mention names?” the guard bawled.

  “Time’s up now!”

  Husband and wife rose together, and now that there was no danger of the visit ending prematurely, Gleb reached over the table, put his arms around Nadya’s slender neck, kissed it, and pressed his mouth to her lips. He had forgotten how soft they were. He had no hope of being in Moscow in a year’s time to kiss them again. His voice shook with tenderness: “Do whatever is best for yourself. I shall always. . . .”

  He didn’t finish.

  They looked into each other’s eyes.

  “What do you call this, then? I’m terminating the visit!” roared the guard, tugging at Nerzhin’s shoulder.

  Nerzhin broke away.

  “So terminate it, damn you,” he muttered barely audibly.

  Nadya backed toward the door, waving good-bye to her husband with the fingers of one raised hand. A hand without a ring.

  Still waving, she disappeared from the doorway.

  Chapter 41

  And Another One

  GERASIMOVICH AND HIS WIFE KISSED.

  He was short, but his wife was no taller.

  They had been lucky with their guard, a decent, easygoing young fellow who didn’t in the least mind their kissing. Indeed, it embarrassed him to have to intrude on them. Had it been possible, he would have turned away and looked at the wall for half an hour. But Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev had given orders that the doors of all seven interrogation compartments should be left open so that he could keep watch on the guards from the hallway.

  Not that he himself minded these people kissing. He knew that no state secret could leak as a result. But he was wary of his own guards and prisoners. There were informers among them who might “drip” on Klimentiev himself.

  Husband and wife kissed. But it was not like the kisses that had thrilled them when they were young. This kiss, in defiance of fate and authority, was a kiss without color, taste, or odor, the pale kiss a ghost might bestow in a dream.

  They sat down, separated by an interrogation table with a warped plywood top.

  That clumsy little table had more of a history behind it than many a human life contains. Generations of prisoners, men and women, had sat there sobbing, numb with fear, fighting against murderous sleeplessness, some still proudly defiant, some signing trivial denunciations of family and friends. They were not usually allowed to handle pencils or pens, except for the few required to make depositions in their own handwriting. Those few had contrived to leave their marks, those peculiar absentminded scribbles and scratches that mysteriously preserve the tortuous workings of the unconscious.

  Looking at his wife, Gerasimovich thought how unattractive she had become. There were deep hollows under her eyes, wrinkles around her eyes and mouth; her skin was slack—Natasha had obviously stopped caring about it. Her coat was prewar and should at least have been turned long ago; its fur collar had molted; that headscarf was from time immemorial, bought, he seemed to remember, with coupons in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, long ago, and worn by Natasha in Leningrad when she went to get water from the Neva.

  But Gerasimovich suppressed the base thought that his wife was ugly. The woman before him was the only woman in the world for him, half of himself. He was looking at the woman with whom all his memories were entwined. However fresh and pretty a young girl might be, she could not overshadow Natasha; her memories would be too shallow, her experience too superficial.

  When they first met at a house in Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street, by the Lion Bridge, Natasha was not yet eighteen. It was a New Year’s party, 1930. Twenty-five years ago, in six days’ time. Looking back, you could see clearly what 1919, and 1930, had done to Russia. But every new year, as it arrives, is seen in rosy colors. You cannot know what associations that date will acquire in the people’s memory. As always, they had believed in 1930.

  But that was the year when Gerasimovich was arrested for the first time. As a ‘‘wrecker.”

  Illarion Pavlovich had begun work just as the word “engineer” was becoming synonymous with “enemy” and when proletarian pride demanded that every engineer be suspected as a wrecker. To make it worse, the young Gerasimovich’s upbringing compelled him always to bow courteously and say “Excuse me, please” in a very gentle voice, to the right people and to the wrong people. At meetings he lost his voice and sat quiet as a mouse. He had no idea how irritating people found him.

  But though the case against him was concocted with great skill, it would not stretch to more than five years. When he got to the Amur, he was immediately excused from close confinement, and his sweetheart joined him and became his wife.

  There were not many nights when husband and wife did not dream of Leningrad. The day came when they were due to return. But it was 1935, and they were swept back by the tidal wave of arrests after Kirov’s assassination.

  Natalia Pavlovna was scrutinizing her husband just as closely. She had once watched the changes in his face, the hardening of his mouth, the cold and at times fierce glint through his pince-nez. Illarion had stopped bowing, stopped constantly apologizing. His past was always held against him, he was dismissed from job after job or employed on work below his qualifications, and they had traveled from place to place, always hard up; they had lost a daughter, lost a son. In the end, in desperation, they had risked going back to Leningrad. As it happened, in June 1941. In Leningrad they had even less chance of a tolerable existence. Her husband’s record dogged him everywhere. But these experiences, instead of weakening the laboratory wraith, toughened him. He survived an autumn of trench digging. When the first snow fell, he became a gravedigger. In the besieged city, no profession was more essential or more remunerative. Survivors paid their last respects to the departed by giving away their beggarly cubic centimeter of bread.

  Who could eat that bread without shuddering? Illarion’s justification was that “our fellow citizens showed us no pity; we’ll show them none!”

  The couple came through their ordeal. Only for Illarion to be arrested again, before the siege ended. This time for “intending” to betray his homeland. Many arrests were made in Leningrad for treasonable intent—people who hadn’t been in occupied territory could not be accused of actual collaboration. But if someone like Gerasimovich, a former convict, had come to Leningrad at the outbreak of war, it was obviously with the intention of joining the Germans. They would have arrested his wife as well, but she was dangerously ill at the time.

  Natalia Pavlovna scrutinized her husband and, strangely, found that the years of suffering had left no deep mark on him. The gaze behind his gleaming pince-nez was as intelligent and steady as ever. His cheeks were not sunken; there were no wrinkles; he was wearing an expensive suit and a carefully knotted tie.

  Anyone might think that she, not he, was the jailbird.

  Her first, unkind thought was that he was having a fine old time in the special prison. He was obviously not bullied; he was working in his own field; his wife’s suffering meant nothing to him.

  But she stifled this spiteful thought and asked in a weak voice: “How are you getting on there?”

  As if she had waited twelve months for this visit, spent 360 nights thinking of her husband on her chilly widow’s couch, just to ask, “How are you getting on?”

  And Gerasimovich, holding tight inside his narrow, constricted breast a whole life that had cramped and stunted his mental powers, a whole world as a prisoner in the taiga and the desert, in solitary confinement in between interrogations, and now in the comfort of a special prison, answered, “All right.”r />
  They had been given only half an hour. The sands were trickling away in an unstemmable stream down the glass throat of Time. Dozens of questions, wishes, complaints, struggled to be heard first, but all Natalia Pavlovna managed to ask was:

  “When did you hear about the visit?”

  “The day before yesterday. And you?”

  “On Tuesday. The lieutenant colonel has just asked me whether I’m your sister.”

  “Because of your patronymic?”

  “Yes.”

  When they were engaged and on the Amur, everyone had taken them for brother and sister. There was between them the sort of external and internal resemblance that makes husband and wife more than just a married couple.

  “How are things at work?” Illarion Pavlovich asked.

  She started. “Why do you ask? Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  He knew something but didn’t know if she had the same thing in mind.

  He knew that prisoners’ wives were always given a hard time outside.

  But how could he know that she had been dismissed from her post the previous Wednesday because of her connection with him? She had already been told that she could visit him and had not immediately started looking for a new job. She was waiting until she saw him, as though a miracle might happen and their meeting might illuminate her life and show her what to do.

  But how could he give her any practical advice, when he had spent so many years in prison and was unskilled in the ways of the world outside?

  What she must decide was whether or not to renounce him.

  Visiting time was running out in that drab, inadequately heated room, dimly lit through a barred window, and her hope of a miracle was ebbing with it.

  Natalia Pavlovna realized that she could not convey her loneliness and her suffering to her husband in that miserly half hour, that he ran on rails of his own, lived a life as regular as clockwork, and would understand nothing. It would be better not to upset him.

  The guard moved away to study the plaster on the wall.