In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Ernst heard her out and answered unhesitatingly, as though he had thought it over before. “There are, of course. That’s inevitable, with any penal system.”

  Klara didn’t want to think about systems. She was in a hurry to append the glassblower’s conclusion. “But Ernst! That’s as good as saying ‘they can do what they want to.’ That is horrible!”

  Her strong tennis player’s hand closed into a fist on the red velvet of the barrier in front of them. Golovanov laid his own short-fingered hand flat on the barrier nearby but did not cover Klara’s hand; he did not take such liberties uninvited.

  “No,” he said, gently but firmly. “It isn’t like that. Who is doing these things? Who is it who wants to do them? It is history. History does what it wants. You and I sometimes find it horrible, Klara, but it’s time we were used to the fact that there exists a law of large numbers. The more material involved in a historical event, the greater the likelihood of individual incidental errors—judicial, tactical, ideological, economic, or whatever. We grasp the process only in its basic and determining outlines, and what matters most is the conviction that the process itself is necessary and inevitable. Yes, people sometimes suffer through no fault of their own. What about those killed in battle? Or those who perished quite senselessly in the Ashkhabad earthquake? Road victims? As traffic increases, the number of fatal accidents must grow. The wise philosophy of life is to accept that it is an evolutionary process and that there will be victims at every stage.”

  This explanation seemed to make sense. Klara became thoughtful.

  The second bell had rung, and the audience reassembled.

  In the third act, Roek, playing Vassa’s younger daughter, suddenly rang true—rang loud and clear—and bade fair to drag the whole play out of the abyss.

  KLARA DID NOT REALIZE HERSELF that what concerned her was not just any innocent man, wherever he might be, someone, say, who might already have rotted away beyond the Arctic Circle in accordance with the Law of Big Numbers, but this youngest vacuum man with the blue eyes and the dark golden complexion, hardly more than a boy in spite of his twenty-three years. Whenever he saw Klara and ever since their first meeting, the look of joyous adoration had never left his eyes, and it always excited and confused her. She could not know what allowances had to be made for Rostislav’s two years in a camp, where he had never seen a woman. All she knew was that for the first time in her life she felt herself an object of enraptured admiration.

  Admiration of Klara did not, however, dominate his thoughts exclusively. Confined as he was, spending almost his whole day under electric light in a dim laboratory, the young man somehow lived a full, indeed, a hectic life; when he was not busy on some contrivance that was not for the bosses’ eyes or surreptitiously studying English in working hours, he would be calling up friends in the other laboratories and dashing off to socialize in the hallways. His movements were always impetuous, and at any given moment he seemed to be in the grip of something passionately interesting. Admiring Klara was one of his passionately interesting occupations.

  As busy as he was, he never neglected his appearance; there was always something immaculately white to be seen beneath the gaudy tie tucked into his overalls. (Klara did not know that this was the famous “dickey,” Rostislav’s invention, one-sixteenth of a prison-issue sheet.)

  The young people whom Klara met outside (Ernst Golovanov in particular) were already on their way up in the world, and in everything they did or said—in their dress, their deportment, their conversation—they were careful not to let themselves down. In Rostislav’s company Klara felt that a weight was lifted from her, that she, too, wanted to behave mischievously. She studied him discreetly, and her sympathy for him grew. She did not believe for a moment that he, of all people, and the good-natured Zemelya were among those running dogs of imperialism against whom Major Shikin had warned her. She was eager to discover what crime Rostislav in particular had been punished for and whether he had a long sentence to serve. (That he was unmarried she could see for herself.) She hesitated to ask him directly, imagining that such questions would be traumatic because they would resurrect his repugnant past, which he needed to shake off in order to rehabilitate himself.

  Another two months or so went by. Klara was by now at home with them all, and they often discussed in her presence all sorts of idle topics that had nothing to do with their work. Rostislav made a habit of waiting until she was alone in the lab, when the prisoners on the evening shift went to dinner, and looking in to collect something left behind or to study a bit while it was quiet.

  During these evening visits Klara forgot all the operations officer’s warnings. . . .

  The night before, impetuous words had burst from them, sweeping away the pathetic barriers that divide people, as floodwater breaks a dam.

  The young man had no hideous past to live down. There was nothing to discover, except that he had been wantonly robbed of his youth and that he had an eager appetite to know and to experience all that he had missed.

  She learned that he had lived with his mother in a village outside Moscow on a canal-side. He had just left school when some Americans from the embassy rented a country home in the village. Ruska and two of his friends were curious (and rash) enough to go fishing with the Americans twice. They thought that they had gotten away with it, and Ruska was admitted to Moscow University. But that September he was arrested on his way there, quietly, so that his mother did not know for some time where he had gone. (The Ministry of State Security, apparently, always tried to arrange things so that the person arrested would not have time to hide anything and his family and friends could not receive any cryptic message or signal.) They put him in the Lubyanka. (It was there, in Marfino, that Klara first heard of the prison with that name.) The interrogators tried to make Rostislav tell them what assignment American intelligence had given him and to what secret address he was supposed to report. He was, in his own words, still just a silly kid; he couldn’t understand what they were getting at, and he cried all the time. Suddenly a miracle occurred; no one is ever released from the Lubyanka scot-free, but Ruska was.

  That was in 1945. And that was as far as he had gotten last night.

  The unfinished story had kept Klara in a state of suspense all night. This afternoon, ignoring all the rules of vigilance, not to mention the limits set by decorum, she had boldly sat down with Rostislav by his quietly humming pump, and they had resumed their conversation.

  When the dinner break came, they were like children, taking alternate bites from the same big apple. It seemed strange to them that in all those months they had never really talked before. They had so much to say and so little time. When he impatiently interrupted her, he would touch her hands, and she did not object. But when the others had all left the room, sitting shoulder to shoulder with hands touching suddenly took on a new meaning. Klara saw those yearning blue eyes looking straight into her own, and Rostislav’s voice faltered as he spoke.

  “Klara! Who knows whether we will ever sit together like this again? For me this is a miracle. I adore you.” (By now he was holding and caressing her hand.) “I may have to spend my whole ruined life in one prison or another. Make me happy; give me a moment that I can cherish even in solitary confinement! Let me kiss you!”

  Klara felt like a goddess descending into a dungeon where a prisoner lay in chains. Rostislav drew her toward him and pressed his lips to hers in a violent kiss, the kiss of a prisoner for whom restraint had become torture. And she responded. . . .

  After a time she freed herself and turned away. She was shaken, and her head was spinning.

  “Please go away,” she begged him.

  Rostislav rose and stood before her uncertainly.

  “Please leave me alone for now,” Klara insisted.

  He hesitated. Then he obeyed. He turned around in the doorway, looked at her piteously, imploringly, then almost lurched out of the room.

  They all came back from the dinner break shortly
afterward.

  Klara dared not raise her eyes to look at Ruska or anyone else. That burning sensation. Was it shame? Not just shame. Happiness, then? If so, a troubled happiness.

  She heard people saying that the prisoners were to be allowed a New Year’s party.

  She sat still for three hours, only her fingers moving as she braided a little basket for the tree from brightly colored plastic flexible cord.

  By now Ivan the glassblower had returned from seeing his wife, and he blew two funny glass imps, armed with what might be rifles, then fashioned a cage from glass rods and hung inside it a bright moon, also of glass, which tinkled mournfully as it swung on its silver thread.

  Chapter 46

  The Castle of the Holy Grail

  FOR HALF THE DAY a dull cloud hung low over Moscow, and it was not cold. But when the seven prisoners stepped out of the blue bus into the exercise yard, just in time for dinner, the first impatient snowflakes were making their lonely flight.

  One of them, a regular hexagonal ministar, fell on the sleeve of Nerzhin’s rusty old army coat. He stood still in the middle of the yard gulping fresh air.

  Senior Lieutenant Shusterman happened to be there and warned him that since this was not an exercise period, he had better go indoors. Nerzhin was put out. He did not wish to, he simply could not, talk about his wife’s visit, didn’t want to confide in anybody or seek anybody’s sympathy. Did not want to talk at all or to listen. All that he wanted was to be alone and to rerun through his mind all the impressions he had brought back with him before they blurred and became mere memories.

  But solitude is the last thing you are likely to find in a sharashka or any other prison camp. Everywhere you went—in the cells, the “convicts’ compartments” and cattle trucks on trains, huts in the camps, hospital wards—there were always people, people, people: people you knew and people you didn’t want to know, thin people, fat people . . . but always people and more people.

  On his way into the building (by the special entrance for prisoners, down wooden steps and along the basement hallway), Nerzhin paused to think where he should go next.

  He had an idea.

  He took the back stairs, which hardly anybody used, and went up past the broken chairs stacked there to the top landing on the third floor.

  This landing had been converted to a studio for a prisoner named Kondrashov-Ivanov. He had no connection with the general work of the sharashka and was kept on as a sort of serf-artist. The vestibules and halls of the main building were spacious and needed pictorial adornment. Less spacious but more numerous were the private apartments of Deputy Minister Foma Guryanovich and his close colleagues, and these were still more urgently in need of large, beautiful, cost-free pictures.

  Not that Kondrashov-Ivanov really satisfied these requirements: The pictures he painted were big, all right, and cost nothing, but beautiful they were not. The colonels and generals who came to view his gallery wasted their breath dinning into him how he ought to paint and what colors he should use, then accepted with a sigh what was on offer. Besides, his pictures improved greatly when mounted in gilt frames.

  On his way up, Nerzhin passed a large canvas commissioned for the vestibule of the main building: A. S. Popov Demonstrates the First Radio-Telegraph to Admiral Makarov. As he turned onto the last flight and before he saw the artist, he caught sight of a painting high up on a blank wall: The Blasted Oak. A finished picture two meters high, which for some reason none of the artist’s patrons had wanted.

  Other canvases hung along the walls of the stairwell. There were some on easels. The light came from two windows, one on the north, the other on the west side. The Iron Mask’s little window, with its grating and its little pink curtain, looked out on the landing itself, which was as near as it got to the light of day.

  There was nothing else to be seen, not even a chair. Instead, there were two logs standing on end, one higher than the other.

  The stairway was inadequately heated, the studio was always damp and cold, but Kondrashov-Ivanov’s sleeveless jacket lay on the floor, and he himself stood motionless, tall and erect, with his arms and his legs sticking out of his skimpy overalls, not, apparently, freezing. The big glasses, which made his face large and stern, were pressed firmly down over his ears to allow for his abrupt twists and turns at a picture, brush in one hand, palette in the other, held at arm’s length.

  He looked around when he heard cautious steps.

  Their eyes met, but their minds were still elsewhere.

  The artist was not altogether pleased to see a visitor; just now he needed solitude and silence.

  Yet he was more pleased than not, and there was no falsity in his hearty welcome. “Gleb Vikentich! Welcome!” Hospitable hands flourished brush and palette.

  Good nature is a dubious asset for an artist; it enriches his imagination but wrecks his routine.

  Nerzhin hesitated in embarrassment on the next-to-last step. He spoke almost in a whisper, as though there were some third person whom he feared to awaken.

  “No, please, Ippolit Mikhalych! I’ve only come. . . . I hope you don’t mind. . . . I wanted to be quiet for a bit.”

  “Yes, yes, of course!”

  The artist nodded and said no more, perhaps remembering or reading in his eyes that Nerzhin had been to see a visitor. He retreated with a sort of bow, pointing with brush and palette to one of the stumps.

  Nerzhin gathered up his coattails, which he had saved from shortening in the camp, and sank onto the stump, leaning back against the banisters. As much as he wanted to, he did not light a cigarette.

  The artist’s gaze was fixed again on the same spot in his picture.

  They were silent.

  Reawakened affection for his wife was a faint, pleasurable ache in Nerzhin’s breast.

  He felt as though his fingers, where they had touched her hands, her neck, her hair in farewell, were dusted with some precious pollen.

  Year after year, you live deprived of what should be every man’s right on this earth.

  You are left with your mind (if any), your beliefs (if you are mature enough to have acquired any), and you are chock-full of concern for the general good. You might be a citizen of ancient Athens, a complete human being.

  Only, the one thing needful is missing.

  That one thing, the love of a woman, of which you are deprived, seems more momentous than all the world besides.

  Those simple words—“Do you love me?” “Yes. Do you love me?”—unspoken except in looks or soundless movements of the lips, now fill your heart with quiet rejoicing.

  At that moment Gleb could not remember or imagine any fault in his wife. She had all the virtues. And above all—loyalty.

  A pity he had hesitated to kiss her at the beginning of the visit. Now that kiss was lost beyond recall.

  Her lips were slack; she had forgotten how to kiss. She looked exhausted, like a hunted creature. How desperate she must be, to talk of divorce!

  A legal divorce? Gleb had no objection. Tearing up a piece of officially stamped paper would mean nothing to him. The union of souls was no concern of the state. Nor, for that matter, was the union of bodies.

  But he had been bruised and battered enough by life to know that events have their own inexorable logic. People never dream what the perverse consequences of their routine actions may be. Take Popov. When he invented radio, did he realize that he was letting loose pandemonium, inflicting torture by loudspeaker on solitary thinkers? Or take the Germans, who let Lenin through to bring down Russia and thirty years later found their own country split in two. Or take Alaska; they had been stupid enough to sell it for a song, and now Soviet tanks could not reach America over land! Such trivialities could determine the fate of the planet.

  Or take Nadya. She wanted a divorce to escape from persecution. But once divorced, she would be married again before she knew it.

  His heart had sunk when her ringless fingers had waved good-bye to him. That was how people said good
-bye forever.

  Nerzhin sat there in silence, and the excessive joy he had felt after the visit, the joy that had filled him to overflowing in the bus, gradually ebbed, banished by sober and gloomy thoughts. But this restored his mental equilibrium, and he was soon Nerzhin the old zek again.

  “It suits you here,” she had said.

  Prison suited him!

  It was true.

  He did not really regret the five years he had spent inside. Even now, before he could see them in perspective, Nerzhin recognized that they were a uniquely necessary part of his life.

  Where could you get a better view of the Russian Revolution than through the bars it had set in place?

  What better place to get to know people?

  And yourself.

  Only the iron-hard path ordained for him could have spared him so many false steps, so much youthful vacillation.

  This dreamer, Kondrashov-Ivanov, so impervious to the cruel jokes of the age, what had he lost by being imprisoned? He could not of course wander about the Moscow countryside with his paintbox. He had no table for still lifes. Exhibitions? He had never known how to “arrange” one for himself and in half a century had never shown a single picture in a reputable gallery. Money for his pictures? He had never been paid, even outside. Appreciative viewers? He probably attracted more of them here. A studio? Outside, he hadn’t had anything as good as this. A single long, narrow room like a hallway had served him as studio and living quarters. To make room to work, he had to stack chair upon chair and roll up the mattress, so that callers asked whether he was moving. They had had only one table, so when a still life was set up on it, he and his wife ate off chairs until the picture was finished.