In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  A stout, weirdly twisted willow growing on their bank leaned out to span the stream, and its twisted branches were like the handrails of a bridge.

  Klara clapped her hands. “A baobab! What a beauty! Let’s go across it! It looks like better footing on the other bank.”

  Innokenty shook his head doubtfully, but Klara had already jumped boldly onto the slanting trunk. She extended a firm hand to him: “Come on!”

  She felt sure that they were doing the right thing; surely on the other bank something would happen, something would be said, that would give meaning to this whole excursion.

  Innokenty hesitantly held out his soft hand. The willow slanted gradually but rose high. Innokenty followed, taking short steps and apparently trying not to look down. But then a branch he took hold of barred his way, and he had to clamber over it. He did all this with a look of concentration and in complete silence. They landed without a scratch, but Ink had obviously not enjoyed the crossing.

  Things were no better on this side. They had nothing much to say to each other. They heard the clatter of a tractor somewhere higher up. Very soon it became impossible to walk close to the water. They had to leave the shade and make for higher ground by the only possible path. Innokenty’s limp was more and more pronounced.

  They came out on a spacious yard with a single small building and a single open shed. The small building was probably an office; a pale pink flag with a ragged edge stirred feebly above it. The shed was just wide enough to accommodate in a single line the slogan “Forward to the Victory of Communism,” exhorting a multitude of rusty red, blistery blue, and scabby green machines of unknown function, water wagons, a field kitchen, trailers with shafts erect, trailers with shafts earthward, all haphazardly abandoned over an expanse of land so scarred and rutted that it was almost impassable even on foot. There was no one in sight except a man in grubby overalls, wandering from one machine to another, bending down to look at something and straightening up again.

  A single tractor was at work on a hillside.

  There was no other path. Picking their way among the potholes as best they could, they crossed the yard. Innokenty was limping. It was hot again. They went back down to the stream.

  At that point it flowed under a concrete bridge. A solid, prosaic bridge leaving nothing to choose between the two banks, the two destinies. They seemed to have arrived at a highway.

  “Shall we try to get a ride?” Innokenty said. “We don’t want to go back to the station again.”

  The day was only half over, but their outing was at an end.

  Why was there always this hermetic screen between people? They could so nearly see, so nearly hear how to help each other.

  But it was not to be. It could not be.

  They found a little spring under the bridge, sat down, drank from it, and were about to wash their feet when they heard a heavy rumbling up above. They went out and looked up at the road from the bottom of the embankment.

  A file of identical new-looking trucks with new-looking tarpaulin covers was rolling along the road. The end of the column was out of sight over the hill, and its head had reached the top of another hill.

  There were trucks with aerials, breakdown trucks, trucks with barrels marked “Inflammable,” and trucks with field-kitchen trailers. They carefully kept their distance, driving at intervals of precisely twenty meters, and the concrete bridge was not silent for a moment. In every cab an officer or sergeant sat beside an army driver. Soldiers, lots of them, huddled under tarpaulin covers; their faces could be seen through the window flaps and from the rear of each vehicle, looking indifferent, it seemed, to the place they had left, to the scene speeding past them, and to the place to which they were being driven, in suspended animation for the term of their service.

  From the time they left their shelter, Klara and Innokenty counted one hundred trucks before the noise died away.

  They walked back to where water gurgled around the sawed-off piles of a previous, wooden bridge.

  Innokenty lowered himself onto a stone and said helplessly:

  “My life is . . . in ruins.”

  “But why, Ink? Why is it in ruins?” Klara burst out in despair. “You keep promising to explain, but you don’t tell me anything.”

  He looked at her with suffering eyes. Holding a broken stick like a pencil, he drew a circle on the damp ground.

  “You see this circle? That’s our country. That’s the first circle. Now here’s the second.” A circle with a larger diameter. “That is mankind at large. You would think that the first forms part of the second, wouldn’t you? Not in the least! There are barriers of prejudice. Not to mention barbed wire and machine guns. To break through, physically or spiritually, is well-nigh impossible. Which means that mankind, as such, does not exist. There are only fatherlands, everyone’s fatherland alien to everyone else’s. . . .”

  IT WAS ABOUT THEN that the Special Section sent Klara some forms to fill in. She had no difficulty with them: Her origins were impeccable; her life story was not long in the telling; it was lit by the even glow of prosperity; it was free from acts that might compromise a Soviet citizen.

  The forms were in circulation for some months, and they gave complete satisfaction.

  In the meantime, Klara had graduated from the institute and passed through the guarded gates of the mysterious Marfino complex.

  Chapter 45

  The Running Dogs of Imperialism

  KLARA AND THE OTHER GIRLS from the institute were subjected to a hair-raising briefing by the saturnine Major Shikin.

  She learned that she would be working among most dangerous spies, running dogs of world imperialism and the American Intelligence Service, who had sold their motherland for a song.

  Klara was assigned to the Vacuum Laboratory. This was the name given to the laboratory that made to order the numerous electronic tubes required by the other labs. The tubes were blown first in the little glassblowing shop next door, then emptied of air by three humming vacuum pumps in the Vacuum Laboratory proper, a large, dim room facing north. The pumps divided the room like a row of cabinets. Electric bulbs burned there even in the daytime. The floor was paved with flagstones, and the clatter of shoes and scraping of chair legs never ceased. Each pump had its own vacuum man (a prisoner) sitting or pacing beside it. Other prisoners sat at little desks in two or three places. The only free employees were a girl named Tamara and the captain in charge of the laboratory.

  Klara had been introduced to this boss of hers in Yakonov’s office. He was a plump, middle-aged Jew with an apathetic air. He made no attempt to frighten Klara further, just nodded to her to follow him.

  “You, of course, know nothing and can do nothing?” he asked her, out on the stairway.

  Klara mumbled something. As if being frightened was not enough, she would now be put to shame, exposed at any moment as an ignoramus and made a laughingstock.

  She entered the lab inhabited by monsters in blue overalls as though it were a cage of wild animals. She was afraid even to raise her eyes.

  The three vacuum men really did look like caged animals, pacing beside their pumps; they had an urgent order and had been denied sleep for two days running. But the prisoner by the second pump, a man in his forties with a bald spot and in need of a shave, stopped, beamed, and said:

  “Hey! Reinforcements!”

  Her fears vanished at once. There was so much simple good nature in this exclamation that Klara had to make an effort not to smile in return.

  The youngest of the vacuum men, the one with the smallest pump, also stopped. He was hardly more than a boy, with a mischievous face and innocent eyes. The look he gave Klara was that of a man taken aback. No young man had ever looked at her like that before.

  The oldest of the vacuum men was Dvoetyosov, whose pump, the huge one farther down the room, hummed loudest of all. He was tall, ungainly, lean except for his pendulous belly. He threw Klara a contemptuous glance from a distance and retreated behind his cabinet, as
though to spare himself the sight of anything so disgusting.

  Klara discovered later that there was no need to feel offended by this; he was the same with all the free staff, and when any of the bosses came in, he would deliberately switch on something noisy so that they would have to shout above the din. He was unashamedly careless of his appearance, could turn up with the last of his trouser buttons dangling loose at the end of a long thread or with a hole in the back of his overalls, and would thrust his hand inside his overalls to scratch with women present. He liked to say: “Look, this is my own country! Why should I worry what anybody else thinks?”

  The prisoners, even the young ones, called the middle vacuum man simply Zemelya, which he didn’t seem to mind in the least. His was a “sunny nature,” and he never stopped grinning from ear to ear. Watching him closely in the weeks that followed, Klara noticed that he showed no regret for whatever was lost beyond recall, whether it was an irretrievable pencil or his blighted life. He was never angry about anything or with anyone; nor was he afraid of anyone. He was a really good engineer, but his expertise was airplane engines. He had been delivered to Marfino in error, had made himself at home, and was in no hurry to move on, rightly considering that the next place was unlikely to be better.

  When the pumps were quieter in the evening, Zemelya liked to reminisce or listen to someone else’s stories.

  “You just took your five-kopeck piece and bought whatever you wanted,” he said, smiling broadly. “Every step you took, there were people offering you something. It was all good stuff. Nobody tried to sell you crap. If you bought boots, they really were boots; they’d last ten years without a repair, or fifteen repaired. They didn’t snip off the leather at the toecaps like they do now; they took it under the welt so that it went right around the foot. Then there were those fancy red boots—what did they call them?—with the crepe soles; it was a treat to wear them.” He dissolved into smiles and screwed up his eyes, as though he were looking at a warm but not very bright sun. “Or take railway stations. . . . You never saw anybody lying on the floor, or sweltering all day and night outside the ticket office. . . . It took you just one minute to buy a ticket and get a seat; there was always room in the cars. They made the trains go fast; they weren’t out to save coal. . . . That’s how it was; living was simple, very simple in those days.”

  The oldest vacuum man would waddle out of the dark corner where his desk was safely hidden from the bosses, hands deep in pockets, to listen to these stories. He would take his stand in the middle of the room, his protuberant eyes looking quizzically at the speaker over his glasses.

  “Zemelya, d’you mean to say you remember the tsar?”

  “Just about,” Zemelya said, with an apologetic smile.

  Dvoetyosov shook his head. “Well, you shouldn’t. We’re supposed to be pumping for socialism.”

  Zemelya timidly demurred. “We’ve been told socialism’s built already, Kostya.”

  “Eh?”

  The senior vacuum man was popeyed with amazement.

  “Yes, since 1933, or thereabouts.”

  “You mean when there was that famine in the Ukraine? Wait a bit, though, what are we slogging away for day and night now?”

  “Building Communism, I suppose,” said Zemelya, beaming.

  “You don’t say? So tha-at’s what it is!” the senior vacuum man said in an idiotic nasal whine, and shuffled off back to his corner.

  Klara wasn’t sure whether they talked like this for their own amusement or for her benefit, but she didn’t report them.

  Her duties were uncomplicated; she and Tamara worked alternate shifts: from morning till 6:00 p.m. one day, and from after dinner until 11:00 p.m. the next. The captain was always there in the morning because the brass might want him in the course of the day; he never turned up in the evening, since he did not aspire to promotion. The girls’ main task was to act as “duty officers,” or, in other words, to keep an eye on the prisoners. By way of training, their boss also gave them little jobs about which there was no urgency. Klara and Tamara saw each other for only about two hours a day. Tamara had been working in the establishment for over a year and was at ease with the prisoners. Klara in fact suspected that Tamara was on quite intimate terms with one of them and brought him books, which, however, changed hands when no one was looking. Apart from this, Tamara went to an English class there in the institute, in which the pupils were free workers and the teachers (unpaid, of course, that was the great advantage) were prisoners. Tamara quickly dispelled Klara’s fears that these people might do something awful.

  In the end, Klara started talking to one of the prisoners herself. Not, to be sure, a political offender but a petty lawbreaker, one of the very few in Marfino. This was Ivan the glassblower, a superb craftsman, unfortunately for him. His old aunt used to say that he was a golden workman but a still more golden drunkard. He used to earn a lot, spend a lot on drink, and, when drunk, beat his wife and pitch into the neighbors. None of this would have mattered if his path hadn’t crossed that of the MGB. An important comrade with no badges of rank summoned him in writing and offered him a job with a salary of three thousand rubles. Ivan, as it happened, worked in the sort of place where his basic wage was less but where he could bump it up by piecework. So he forgot who he was dealing with and asked for four thousand a month. His highly placed interlocutor offered an extra two hundred, but Ivan dug his heels in. He was sent packing. The next payday he got drunk and started making a row in the yard. In the past, the militia had turned a deaf ear to complaints, but this time they turned up in force and took Ivan in. He was tried the next day, given one year, and taken straight from the court to see the same important person without badges of rank, who explained that Ivan would be working in the place previously intended for him, only now they would not be paying him for it. If these terms did not suit him, he could go and mine coal in the Arctic Circle.

  Now Ivan sat in Marfino blowing cathode-ray tubes of all shapes and sizes. His year was nearly over, but his conviction remained on his record; and to avoid being sent away from Moscow, he was begging the authorities to keep him on in the same job as a free worker, at fifteen hundred rubles if they liked.

  Nobody else in the sharashka would have found such an artless tale with such a happy ending at all interesting; there were people in the sharashka who had spent fifty days in the death cell, and there were people who had known the pope and Albert Einstein personally. But Klara was shaken by it. It showed that, as Ivan said, “they can do just what they like.”

  She was distrustful of the political prisoners, and her cautiously official manner kept them at a distance. But even the glassblower’s story was enough to awaken in her mind the suspicion that among these blue-overalled people others, too, might be completely innocent. If that was so, could her own father have condemned an innocent man in his time?

  But once again there was no one to whom she could put this question, either in the family or at work. Her friendship with Innokenty, and that outing of theirs, had led to nothing, probably because he and Nara had gone abroad again soon afterward.

  However, in the course of the year, Klara did at last make a friend, Ernst Golovanov. It wasn’t at work that she met him. He was a literary critic, and Dinera brought him home one day. He wasn’t much of a beau. Scarcely taller than Klara (and standing by himself he looked shorter), he had a rectangular forehead and a rectangular head on a rectangular trunk. He was only a little older than Klara, but he looked middle-aged; he had a paunch and had obviously never gone in for sports. (To tell the truth, the name in his passport was Saunkin, and Golovanov was a pseudonym.) But he was a well-read, intellectually mature, and interesting man and already a candidate member of the Writers Union.

  They had gone to the Maly Theater together. The play was Vassa Zheleznova. It was a dismal affair. The theater was less than half full, which may have been why the actors seemed half dead. They came on looking bored, like clerks arriving at the office, and cheered up
only when it was time to leave. It was almost humiliating to perform to such a poor house; the makeup and the characters became a silly joke unworthy of adults. At any moment somebody, speaking quietly as though in his own sitting room, might break the silence of the audience and say, “Why don’t you good people stop this tomfoolery?” and the play would collapse in ruins. The humiliation of the actors was contagious. The whole audience felt as though they were taking part in some deed of shame and were too embarrassed to look at each other. It was just as quiet during the intermissions. Couples exchanged whispered remarks and walked noiselessly about the foyer.

  Klara and Ernst were among those who trod this measure in the first intermission. Ernst stood up for Gorky, indignantly declaring that the performance was an insult to him, abusing People’s Artist Zharov as—on this occasion at least—a shameless ham and, more daring still, condemning the bureaucratic inertia of the Ministry of Culture, which was sapping the vitality of the Soviet theater, with its marvelous tradition of realism and undermining the theatergoer’s confidence in it. Ernst spoke as he wrote, in precise and well-rounded prose, never at a loss for words, and never leaving a sentence unfinished even when he was excited.

  In the second intermission, Klara suggested that they should stay in their seats.

  “I’ll tell you why I’m sick of seeing both Ostrovsky and Gorky,” she said. “It’s because I’m sick of seeing the power of capital and parental oppression exposed, sick of seeing young girls forced to marry old men. I’m sick and tired of this war against phantoms. Fifty years, a hundred years on, we’re still exorcising, still exposing things long vanished. You never see a play about things that do exist.”

  “There’s some truth in what you say.” Ernst looked at Klara curiously and with a kind smile. He had not been mistaken in her. This girl was nothing much to look at, but you’d never be bored with her. “What sort of thing do you mean?” There was nobody in the seats next to them or in the orchestra immediately below. Lowering her voice and trying not to betray any important state secret or the secret of her own sympathy for those people, she told Ernst that she worked with prisoners who had been represented as running dogs of imperialism, but that when she had got to know them better, they had turned out to be . . . such and such. The question that tormented her . . . maybe Ernst could tell her . . . could there, did he think, be innocent people among them?