In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  So that agreeing to cooperate with the godfather was as dangerous in the long term as was refusal in the short term.

  But quite apart from all these calculations, Ruska was a virtuoso adventurist. As he read the intriguing bits of paper upside down under Shikin’s glass desktop, he shivered in pleasurable anticipation of an exciting game. He had wearied of inactivity in the claustrophobic comfort of the sharashka!

  Inquiring exactly how much he would be paid, in order to make it look convincing, Ruska enthusiastically agreed.

  When he had left, Shikin, well satisfied with his psychological acuteness, walked about his office rubbing tiny palm against tiny palm. Such an enthusiastic informant gave promise of a rich harvest of denunciations. Meanwhile, a no-less-complacent Ruska made the rounds of those zeks in whom he had confidence, confessing that he had agreed to become an informer for the sake of the sport, because he wanted to study MGB methods, and also to expose the real stoolies.

  Even the older zeks could remember no similar confession. They asked Ruska doubtfully why he was risking his head by boasting. His answer was, “When there’s a Nuremberg trial for this dog pack, you will give evidence in my defense.”

  Each of the twenty zeks who heard his news told one or two others, yet no one went and reported it to the godfather! This in itself put some fifty people safely beyond suspicion.

  Ruska’s adventure caused a stir in the sharashka. People trusted the boy. And went on trusting him. But, as always, the course of events had a logic of its own. Shikin demanded “material.” Ruska would have to give him something. He made the rounds of his confidants and complained to them. “Gentlemen! You can imagine how much telling all the others are doing! I’ve only had the job a month, and Shikin is really putting the pressure on! Look at it from my point of view, and slip me a scrap of material!”

  Some of them didn’t want to know about it, but others slipped him something occasionally. It was unanimously decided to ruin a certain female who only worked out of greed, boosting the thousands her husband took home. She treated the zeks with contempt, frequently voiced her opinion that they should all be shot (she only talked like this among the female free employees, but the zeks soon got to know about it), and she herself had thrown two of them to the wolves, one for an affair with a female employee, the other for making a suitcase from material belonging to the state. Ruska told a pack of shameless lies about her; she posted letters for zeks, stole condensers from the store cabinet. . . . Although he could not offer Shikin a shred of proof and although the lady’s husband, an MVD colonel, protested emphatically, nothing could prevail against such a secret denunciation. The lady was dismissed and left in tears.

  Sometimes Ruska informed on prisoners, too, reporting innocuous trifles and with due warning. But then the warnings stopped. He kept his intentions to himself. No one questioned him, but they could not help knowing that he was still bearing tales of a sort he could not own up to.

  So Ruska was overtaken by the fate of all double-dealers. As before, no one gave his game away, but everyone began to steer clear of him. The scraps of information he passed on about the timetable under Shikin’s glass desktop, showing when each of his informers could pop into his office unsummoned and thus showing when they could be caught in the act, did not altogether compensate for his own membership in the stoolie fraternity.

  Nerzhin was fond of Ruska in spite of his intrigues and did not suspect him of telling Shikin about the Yesenin volume. Losing the book had hurt Gleb in a way that Ruska could not foresee. He had assumed that it was Gleb’s property and that, once this was made clear, it would not be taken from him. In the meantime, Shikin could be kept happy with a report that Nerzhin had a book hidden in his case, no doubt brought in by one of the girls.

  WITH THE FRAGRANCE of Klara’s kiss still on his lips, Ruska went out into the yard. The lime trees, white with snow, seemed to him to be in bloom, and the air seemed warm and spring-like. In his two-year game of hide-and-seek, he had been so preoccupied with boyish schemes to fool the sleuths that he had given no thought to the love of women. He had gone to prison a virgin, and now his evenings were a torment for which he found no solace.

  Now, as he went out into the yard and saw the long, low headquarters building, he remembered that he meant to put on a show there at dinnertime next day. The time had come to advertise it. (To do so earlier might have ruined everything.) Still under Klara’s spell and feeling three times as clever and sure of himself because of it, he looked around, spotted Rubin and Nerzhin at the far side of the exercise ground, and made straight for them. His cap was pushed back to one side, so that his whole brow, part of his crown, and a lock of hair were trustingly exposed to the not very cold air.

  As Ruska approached, he could tell from Nerzhin’s stern look and the frown that Rubin turned on him that he had interrupted a serious conversation. Obviously for his benefit, they switched to something unimportant.

  Still, he swallowed his resentment and said his piece. “You are, I hope, familiar with the general rule in just societies that all labor must be remunerated? Well, tomorrow is the day when each of the Judases will receive his thirty pieces of silver for the third quarter of this year.”

  Nerzhin feigned indignation. “You mean to say those tightfisted so-and-sos are just paying them for the third quarter? They’ve worked four quarters, surely.”

  “The payroll needs a lot of signatures,” Ruska explained apologetically. “I will be one of those collecting.”

  “You mean you get paid for the third quarter, too? You’ve only been on the job half a quarter.”

  “Ah, but I’ve distinguished myself!” Ruska treated them both to a disarming smile.

  “Do you get paid in cash?”

  “God forbid! You get a phony money order, and its face value is credited to you. They asked what name I wanted them to use for the sender? How about Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov? I was flabbergasted. How corny can you get? Can’t you make it out as from Klava Kudryavtseva? I said. It’s nice to think that some woman cares about you.”

  “So how much do you get a quarter?”

  “That’s the really clever bit. Officially an informer is allowed 150 rubles a month. But to make it look respectable, it’s sent by mail, and the heartless post office takes three rubles in postal charges. The godfathers are too miserly to make it up from their own pockets and too lazy to suggest a three-ruble raise for stoolies. So the money orders will all be for 147 rubles. Since no normal person ever sends a money order for such a sum, those missing thirty ten-kopeck pieces are the mark of Judas. At dinnertime tomorrow you must crowd around headquarters and examine the money orders of those who’ve been to see the operations officer. The motherland should know who its stoolies are, don’t you think, gentlemen?”

  Chapter 49

  Life Is Not a Novel

  AT THAT SAME MOMENT, as a few sparse snowflakes reluctantly fell on the dark roadway of Matrosskaya Tishina Street, from which the wheels of cars had licked the last traces of recent snow, life for the girls in Room 318 of the Graduate Student Building on the Stromynka went on as it usually did on a late Sunday afternoon.

  The big square window of Room 318 looked out on Matrosskaya Tishina. The long sides of the room went from window to door, and on each side three iron beds, head to foot, hugged the wall, with three rickety sets of wicker bookshelves between them. Two tables stood in line in the middle of the room, leaving only a narrow passage on each side between themselves and the beds. The one nearer to the window, heaped with books, exercise books, drawings, and reams of typescript, was the “dissertation” table; the other was for general purposes and at that moment was occupied by Olenka, who was ironing; Muza, who was writing a letter; and Lyuda, who was taking her curlers out with the aid of a mirror. All this left room for a washbasin, curtained off against the wall by the door (the girls were supposed to wash at the end of the hallway, but it was uncomfortable, cold, and too far away).

  On the bed nearest the wash
basin, Erzhika, the Hungarian girl, lay reading. She was wearing the robe known to her roommates as the “Brazilian flag.” She had other exotic robes, which delighted the girls, but dressed very soberly when she went out, almost as though she were trying not to attract attention. She had got into the habit during her years in the Communist underground in Hungary.

  The next bed in the row, Lyuda’s, was a mess—Lyuda had just gotten up, and the blanket and sheet were trailing on the floor—but her blue silk dress, freshly ironed, and her stockings were carefully draped over the headboard and the pillows. A Persian mat hung above her bed. Lyuda herself, seated at the table, was loudly telling everybody how a certain Spanish poet, deported from his motherland in his boyhood, had paid court to her. She recalled in detail the decor of the restaurant, the orchestra, the menu, all the trimmings, what they had drunk. . . .

  Olenka’s iron was connected by a cord and “cheat” plug to the light fixture over the table. (To prevent waste of electricity, irons and electric hotplates were strictly forbidden in the Stromynka dormitory. There were no outlets, and the whole maintenance staff went around checking for “cheat” plugs.) Olenka listened to Lyuda, laughing occasionally, but paid close attention to her ironing. That jacket and the skirt that went with it meant everything to her. She would sooner have scorched her own flesh with the iron than that two-piece outfit. Olenka had only her grant to live on and never ate anything but potatoes and gruel; she saved the twenty kopecks of her trolley fare whenever she could get away with it and had nothing to decorate the wall above her bed except a map; but at least her evening finery was of good quality, and she had no need to be ashamed of any part of it.

  Muza, who was far too plump and looked more than her thirty years with her rather coarse features and glasses, was having difficulty writing her letter on a table rocked by Olenka’s ironing, and with Lyuda’s tiresome story making her feel inferior. She would always have thought it rude to ask another person to stop talking. Trying to shut Lyuda up would simply have encouraged her to behave even more brazenly. Lyuda, a new arrival, was not studying for a higher degree. Having just graduated from the Institute of Finance, she was there ostensibly to attend a few classes in political economy but mainly to amuse herself. Her father, a retired general, sent her a lot of pocket money from Voronezh.

  Lyuda had a primitive belief that only her encounters with men and her relations with them gave meaning to a woman’s life. But the story she was now telling had a piquancy all its own. After three months of marriage at home in Voronezh and affairs with various other men, Lyuda had begun to regret that her virginity seemed to have passed in a twinkling. So, from the very first words exchanged with her Spanish poet, she had played the part of an ingénue, starting and prudishly shying away from the lightest touch on shoulder or elbow, and when the smitten poet’s entreaties were at last rewarded with a kiss—“the first in her life”—she shuddered, oscillated between ecstasy and despair, and inspired twenty-four lines of verse, unfortunately not in Russian.

  Muza was writing to aged parents in a remote provincial town. Papa and Mama were still just as much in love as newlyweds. Every morning as he left for work, Papa kept looking back and waving to Mama until he turned the corner, and Mama waved to him from the ventilation pane. Their daughter loved them just as dearly and had got into the habit of writing often and describing all her experiences in detail.

  But now Muza was at a loss for words. Something had happened last Friday evening that for two days now had overshadowed her tireless labor, day in and day out, on Turgenev, the work that was her substitute for all else in life. What she felt was deep disgust, as though she had smeared herself with something obscene that could not be washed away or concealed or shown—something that made existence impossible.

  What had happened was that on Friday evening, when she got back from the library and was getting ready for bed, she had been called into the dormitory’s office and told to “step into the next room, please.” In the next room sat two men in civilian clothes. They were very polite to begin with and introduced themselves as Nikolai Ivanovich and Sergei Ivanovich. Quite unconcerned that it was so late at night, they kept her there for an hour, two hours, three hours. They began by asking the names of her roommates and fellow students in the department (although of course they knew them as well as she did). Then followed a leisurely discourse on patriotism, which focused on the patriotic duty of all in the world of learning not to shut themselves up in their own particular subjects but rather to serve their people with all their resources and in every way possible. Muza saw no need to contradict; what they said was absolutely correct. But then the Ivanovich brothers invited her to “assist” them, meaning to meet one or the other of them at fixed intervals in this same office or at a site where political agitators gathered or in a club or perhaps in the university itself, the venue to be arranged, and there to answer specific questions or report in written form what she had observed.

  That was the beginning of a long nightmare! They began talking more and more rudely, yelling at her, addressing her with insulting familiarity: “Why are you such a pigheaded fool? Anybody would think we were foreign spies trying to recruit you!” “She’d be as much use to a foreign spy as a fifth leg to a horse!” Then they told her straight out that they wouldn’t let her present her thesis (she had only a month or two to go, and the thesis was nearly finished) and that they would ruin her academic career because sniveling ninnies like her were not the sort of scholars the country needed. This frightened her very much: It would be only too easy for them to get her expelled from graduate school. But then they took out a gun, “accidentally” pointing it at Muza as it was passed between them. The effect was the opposite of that intended. Her fear vanished. To be expelled from the university with a black mark against her would be worse than dying. The Ivanoviches released her at one in the morning, giving her until the following Tuesday, December 27, to think things over, and first making her sign a statement not to divulge any of this. They assured her that they got to know everything and that if she told anybody about their conversation or the document she had signed, she would be arrested and imprisoned immediately.

  By what unlucky chance had the choice fallen on her? Now she was waiting hopelessly for Tuesday, incapable of working, remembering how so very recently she had no need to think about anything except Turgenev, when she had no oppressive weight on her mind but had stupidly failed to realize how lucky she was.

  Olenka listened to Lyuda with a smile on her face. At one point she burst out laughing with her mouth full of water and nearly choked. Olenka had waited rather a long time because of the war, but now at twenty-eight she was as happy as could be and could forgive everybody everything—let them all find their happiness wherever they could; she had a lover, also a graduate student, and he would be coming to take her out that evening.

  “I said to him, you Spaniards attach so much importance to honor, but now you have kissed me on the lips and I am dishonored!”

  Fair-haired Lyuda’s attractive if rather hard face expressed the despair of a girl dishonored.

  All this time, skinny Erzhika lay reading Galakhov’s Selected Works. This book was her introduction to a world of lofty, noble characters whose flawless integrity astounded Erzhika. Galakhov’s personages were never shaken by doubt as to whether they should serve their country, whether or not they should sacrifice themselves. Erzhika still had a rather poor knowledge of the country’s language and customs, which must be why she had yet to see such people for herself, but that only made it all the more important to learn about them from books.

  All the same, she lowered her book, rolled on to her side, and joined Lyuda’s audience. Here, in Room 318, she sometimes heard the most extraordinary and paradoxical things, such as that an engineer had refused to go work on a fascinating development site in Siberia and stayed on in Moscow selling beer instead, or that someone had presented a successful thesis and was now doing nothing at all. (“Can there really
be unemployment in the Soviet Union?”) Or that to obtain a Moscow residence permit, you had to bribe the militia heavily. “Surely that’s just a momentary phenomenon?” asked Erzhika. (She meant “temporary.”)

  Lyuda continued the story of herself and the poet by saying that if she married him, there would be nothing for it but to put on a convincing show of being a virgin. And she went on to confide in them just how she intended to act the part on their first night.

  Muza’s brow was creased by suffering. It wouldn’t be polite to put her hands over her ears with others looking. She made an excuse to turn away to her bed.

  Olenka, though, sang out gaily, “You mean that the heroines of world literature had no need at all to confess their guilt to their bridegrooms and finish themselves off?”

  “Of course the silly things didn’t have to,” Lyuda said with a laugh. “It’s really very simple!”

  However, Lyuda wasn’t at all sure whether she should marry the poet.

  “He isn’t a member of the Writers Union, and he only writes in Spanish, so what sort of royalties will he be getting? He can’t expect anything much!”

  Erzhika was so shocked that she swung her feet to the floor. “You mean people in the Soviet Union marry for money, too?”