In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  “When you’ve been around a bit, you’ll know,” Lyuda said, looking in the mirror. All her curlers were out now, and a mass of tight blond ringlets trembled as she tossed her head. Any one of them would be enough to ensnare a poetic youth.

  “Listen, girls, I’m coming to the conclusion—” Erzhika began but broke off as she noticed the strange, downcast look on Muza’s face. She seemed to be staring at something on the floor near Erzhika. Erzhika drew her legs up onto the bed and cried out, looking horrified, “Did one just go by?”

  The girls burst out laughing. Nothing had gone by.

  There, in Room 318, sometimes in broad daylight but more impudently still at night, fearsome Russian rats ran around squeaking, their paws beating a neat tattoo on the bare floor. Through all the years of struggle against Horthy, Erzhika had never dreaded anything as she now dreaded the thought that these rats might jump onto her bed and run over her body. In daylight the laughter of her friends helped to drive these fears away, but at night she tucked her blanket in tightly, covering herself from head to foot, and vowed that if she lived till morning she would leave Stromynka. Nadya, a chemistry student, occasionally brought poison and sprinkled it in the corners. The rats subsided for a while but were soon up to their old tricks again. Two weeks ago, Erzhika’s vacillations came to an end. It had to be Erzhika, and not one of the other girls, who went one morning to draw water from the pail and brought up a drowned baby rat in the mug. She shuddered in disgust whenever she remembered the look of grave resignation on its little pointed face. Erzhika went that very day to the Hungarian Embassy and asked them to find her a home in a private apartment. The embassy addressed a request to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs passed it to the Ministry of Higher Education, which passed it on to the rector of the university, who referred it to his Student Accommodation Department. Its reply was that (a) there were no private lodgings available at present and (b) the complaint alleging that there were rats at Stromynka was the first of its kind. The correspondence went full circle and returned to the embassy, which nonetheless encouraged Erzhika to believe that she would be given a room.

  Sitting there in her Brazilian flag, hugging her knees to her chest, Erzhika looked like an exotic bird.

  “Girls, girls,” she wailed. “I like you all so much, I wouldn’t dream of leaving you if it weren’t for the rats.”

  It was both true and false. She did like the other girls, but there was no one with whom she could share her acute anxieties about the destiny of Hungary. Isolated as it was in Europe, something incomprehensible had been happening in her country ever since the trial of László Rajk. Rumors reached her that Communists she had known in the underground had been arrested. Rajk’s nephew, also at Moscow University, and other Hungarian students had been recalled, after which no letters had been received from any of them.

  They heard the secret knock at the door (“Friends! No need to hide the iron!”). Muza rose and, limping slightly (young as she was, she suffered from rheumatism in her knee), went to lift the latch. Dasha, a tough girl with a large, crooked mouth, entered in a hurry.

  “Girls, girls, girls!” She was laughing loudly but did not forget to fasten the door behind her. “I’ve got a suitor, and I nearly didn’t escape his clutches! Which one, you ask? Go on, guess!”

  “You mean to say you’re so well provided?” Lyuda, rummaging in her suitcase, sounded surprised.

  The university was in fact only slowly recovering from its wartime torpor. There were few male graduate students, and somehow none of them was the real thing.

  “Hold on!” Olenka threw up her hands and fixed Dasha with a hypnotic stare. “Was it ‘Jaws’?”

  “Jaws” was a postgraduate student who had failed in dialectical and historical materialism three times running and been written off as a hopeless dunce.

  “No, the Snackman!” crowed Dasha, pulling her earflapped hat from her neatly piled dark hair and hanging it on a peg. She stood just as she was by the door, in no hurry to remove the cheap coat with the lambskin collar made to look like beaver fur, which she had obtained with coupons from the university store three years ago.

  “What, him?”

  “I was on the trolley and he got on,” Dasha said, laughing. “He recognized me right away. ‘Where do you get off?’ he asks. There was no escape; we got off together. ‘Don’t you work at the baths now?’ he says. ‘I’ve been I don’t know how many times, and you weren’t there.’ ”

  “You should have told him. . . .” Dasha’s laughter had enveloped Olenka like a spreading flame. “You should have . . . you should have told him. . . ,” but she simply couldn’t finish. Roaring with laughter, she sank onto the bed, taking care not to crease the two-piece outfit she had laid out there.

  “What ‘Snackman’? What baths?” Erzhika wanted to know.

  “You should have said . . .” Olenka made a great effort, but another fit of laughter convulsed her. She stretched out her hands and tried to convey by twiddling her fingers the message that refused to pass her larynx.

  Lyuda, too, burst into laughter, as did the uncomprehending Erzhika, and even Muza’s somber and homely features softened in a smile. She took her glasses off to clean them.

  “ ‘Where are you going?’ he says. ‘Who do you know on the campus?’ ” Dasha was choking with laughter. “I said I know one of the women janitors. She knits mittens.”

  “Mi . . . mi . . . mit . . . tens!”

  “Kni . . . kni . . . knits . . . mittens!”

  Olenka was patted on the back, and they suppressed their laughter. Dasha took her coat off. One look at her, so sturdy and lissome in her close-fitting sweater and her tight-waisted skirt, told you that she could do any job, bending and stretching all day long, without tiring. Turning back the flowery bedspread, she perched cautiously on the edge of her bed, which was as neat and pretty as any shrine, with its painstakingly plumped-up pillows, its lacy pillowcases, and the embroidered antimacassars on the wall above it. She told Erzhika the story.

  “It was last autumn, while it was still warm, before you came. . . . I didn’t know where to look for a boyfriend. There was nobody to introduce me to one. So Lyudka advised me to go for a walk at Sokolniki, only by myself. Girls only spoil their chances when they go around in pairs.”

  “It never fails!” Lyuda confirmed. She was carefully wiping a spot from the toe of her shoe.

  “So off I went,” Dasha continued. There was no trace of merriment in her voice now. “I walked about a bit, sat down, looked at the trees. And sure enough, after a bit somebody came and sat by me, not too bad to look at. What was he, I wondered. Turned out he worked in a snack bar. I didn’t want to tell him I was a graduate student. Men are terrified of educated women as a rule.”

  “Don’t say that!” Olenka protested. “That’s enough to drive anybody to despair!”

  When the iron monster of war was forced out, it left the world drastically denuded. Where there should have been men their own age, or ten to fifteen years older, moving and smiling, the war had left nothing but gaping black holes. Education was the one bright hope left for that ill-fated generation of women, and crude, senseless gibes could not be allowed to extinguish it.

  “So I told him I was a cashier at a bathhouse. He wanted to know which one and what shift I worked. I thought I would never get away. . . .”

  Dasha’s cheerfulness had vanished. There was a wistful look in her dark eyes. She had worked all day in the Lenin Library, eaten a meager and unappetizing meal in the dining hall, and come home despondently anticipating a Sunday evening with nothing to do and nothing to look forward to.

  In the wood-built schoolhouse of her native village, her intermediate schooling had been enjoyable. And going on to university had enabled her to detach herself from the kolkhoz and obtain a Moscow residence permit. But now she was a lot older; she had eighteen years of education behind her, without a break. She was sick of studying till her head throbbed pai
nfully . . . and what was the point of it all? She wanted what any woman needs to make her happy, to bear a child. But there was no one to give her a child, no one for whom she could bear a child.

  Pensively rocking herself, Dasha uttered her favorite saying in the now silent room: “No, girls, life isn’t like in books.”

  There was an agronomist who worked in the Machine and Tractor Station back home. He wrote to Dasha, begging her to marry him. But any day now she would have a higher degree, and the whole village would say, Why did the silly girl need all that schooling? Just to marry an agronomist? Any work-team leader can do that. At the same time, Dasha felt that even with a higher degree she would be out of place, tied hand and foot: A teaching job in a university would be a dead end; she would never break into those higher circles where scholars enjoyed more freedom.

  Women who entered the world of learning were praised to the skies, promised the earth—which made it all the more painful when they collided with hard reality.

  Dasha had finished her zealous inspection of her lighthearted and fortunate neighbor. “Lyuda, dear,” she said, “I would wash my feet if I were you!”

  Lyuda looked round. “Should I?”

  Unenthusiastically she retrieved a hotplate from its hiding place and attached it to the “cheat” plug instead of the iron.

  Dasha was never still. She had to be doing something—anything—to shake off her misery. She remembered that she had bought a new article of underwear. Not her size, but you grabbed whatever was going. She found the thing and began taking it in.

  Now that they had all quieted down, Muza could concentrate on her letter. Alas, it refused to be written! She reread her last few sentences, altered one word, and inked over a few illegible letters . . . but she was still getting nowhere. Her mother and father would sense at once that the letter was a lie. They would realize that their daughter was unhappy, that something nasty had happened, and wonder why she couldn’t come straight out with it. Why was she lying for the first time ever?

  If there had been no one else in the room, Muza would have groaned aloud. She would have simply howled, and perhaps that would have given her some slight relief. As it was, she threw down her pen and propped herself up on her elbows, hiding her face in her hands. So this was what it had come to! She had to make a choice that would affect her whole life, and there was no one to advise her, no one she could turn to for help now that she had signed that pledge of secrecy. And on Tuesday she would have to appear again before those two, so sure of themselves, with their well-rehearsed lines and their clever tricks. Life had been so good just the day before yesterday! And now all was lost. Because they would not give way. But neither could she. How could she discuss the “Hamlet and Don Quixote principles in man,” remembering all the time that she was an informer, that she had a code name—Daisy, maybe, or Little Darling—and she had to collect information about the girls in the room here or about her professor?

  Muza tried to wipe the tears from her tight-shut eyes without anyone noticing.

  “Where’s Nadya, then?” Dasha asked.

  Nobody replied. Nobody knew.

  But Dasha had thought of something to say about Nadya while she was sewing. “What do you think, girls, how long can she keep it up? ‘Missing in action,’ she says. The war’s been over nearly five years now. Shouldn’t she cut the cord?”

  Muza threw up her arms and cried out in anguish. “How can you talk like that?” The wide sleeves of her gray checked dress slipped back to her elbows, baring her pudgy white forearms. “That’s what real love means! True love doesn’t stop short at the grave!”

  Olenka pursed her ripe lips in a wry smile.

  “Lasts beyond the grave? That’s mystical nonsense, Muza. You don’t forget, you have tender memories, but . . . love?”

  “Of course,” Dasha insisted, “how can you love a person who simply doesn’t exist?”

  “Honestly, if I could I’d send her a certificate of burial myself,” Olenka said warmly. “Tell her he’s dead, dead, dead and laid in the ground. Blasted war! It’s five years ago now, and we still can’t get away from it.”

  “During the war,” Erzhika put in, “many, many people were driven far away, over the ocean. Maybe he’s still alive, somewhere over there.”

  “It’s just possible,” Olga agreed. “Anyway, she can hope so. Still, Nadya has one tiresome characteristic. She’s obsessed with her own sorrows and doesn’t care about anybody else’s. In fact, if she didn’t have her sorrow, her life would be pretty empty.”

  Dasha waited until they had finished and then slowly drew the point of the needle along the hem, as though sharpening it. She knew, when she had started this conversation, how astonished they would shortly be.

  “Listen, now, girls,” she said weightily. “Nadya is just fooling us. What she says isn’t true. She doesn’t think her husband’s dead at all. She isn’t waiting for a missing man to return. She knows that her husband’s alive. And she knows just where he is.”

  They all spoke at once: “What makes you think so?”

  Dasha looked at them triumphantly. Her powers of observation had long ago earned her a nickname among her roommates: “the investigator.”

  “You have to know how to listen, darlings! Did she ever forget herself and speak as if he were dead? Ne-ever. She doesn’t even like saying ‘he was’ this or that. She takes care not to say either ‘he was’ or ‘he is.’ If he really were missing, surely she would occasionally speak of him as though he were dead, wouldn’t she?”

  “What d’you think has become of him, then?”

  “Can you really not guess?” cried Dasha, laying her sewing down altogether.

  No, they couldn’t.

  “He’s alive, but he’s left her! And she’s ashamed to admit it! So she’s invented this ‘missing’ story.”

  “Now that I can believe!” said Lyuda, splashing away behind the curtain. “Yes, indeed!”

  “So she’s sacrificing herself for his sake,” Muza exclaimed. “There’s obviously some reason for her to keep quiet and not marry again!”

  Olenka couldn’t see that. “Why, what’s she waiting for?”

  “You’re absolutely right, Dasha! You’re so clever!” said Lyuda, popping out from behind the curtain in her slip, without her dressing gown, and barelegged, which made her look taller and more shapely than ever. “She feels humiliated, so she’s pretending to be a goody-goody, faithful forever to her dead husband. She isn’t sacrificing a damn thing; she’s aching for somebody to be nice to her, but nobody wants her! You know how it is; you can walk down the street, and everybody looks around at you, but nobody would want her if she threw herself at them.”

  She disappeared behind the curtain.

  “Shchagov comes to see her, though,” said Erzhika. The “shch” gave her some difficulty.

  “Comes to see her! That doesn’t mean a thing,” the invisible Lyuda retorted. “He hasn’t taken the bait.”

  Erzhika was puzzled.

  “What does that mean, the bait?” she asked.

  They all laughed. Dasha stuck to her theme. “No, listen. Maybe she’s still hoping to get her husband back from the other woman?”

  They heard the secret knock again: “Friend—don’t hide the iron.”

  They all stopped talking. Dasha took the hook off. Nadya came in, dragging her feet, looking old and drawn, as if she wanted to confirm Lyuda’s sneers. Surprisingly, she didn’t address a single word of casual politeness to the others, not so much as an “It’s only me,” or “What’s new, girls?” She hung up her fur coat and went silently to her bed.

  Erzhika resumed her reading. Muza hid her face in her hands again. Olenka was stitching the pink buttons to her new blouse more securely.

  Nobody had anything to say. To ease the awkward silence, Dasha said weightily, as though summing up, “So you see, girls, life isn’t like in books.”

  Chapter 50

  The Old Maid

  AFTER THE VIS
IT, Nadya wanted to see only others whom fate had treated badly and to talk only about those behind bars. So she had gone from Lefortovo right across Moscow to Krasnaya Presnya to see Sologdin’s wife. She was not at home. (It would have been strange if she had been. Sunday was when she did the errands that she and her son had no time for during the week.) Nor could Nadya leave a note with the neighbors. She knew from Sologdin, and could easily imagine anyway, that the neighbors were hostile to his wife and spied on her.

  She had climbed the steep stairs, dark even in daytime, excitedly anticipating the pleasure of talking to that sweet woman who shared her private sorrow.

  She went down again. She was not just disappointed; she was shattered. And just as on a photographic film placed in colorless and innocent-looking developer the latent contours of a picture begin inexorably to appear, so all the dark forebodings lurking in the depths of Nadya’s mind since the visit began to force themselves painfully upon her.

  “Don’t be surprised if I’m moved from here and my letters stop,” he had said. If he went away, even these once-yearly meetings would come to an end. What would she do then?

  He had said something about the upper reaches of the Angara. . . .

  She remembered something else. Had he perhaps begun to believe in God? . . . Something he had let drop. . . . Prison would make a spiritual cripple of him, seduce him into mysticism, train him to be meek and submissive. His character would change. He would return a complete stranger.

  Worst of all were those ominous words: “Don’t bank on my release. The sentence they hand down is just a formality.” Nadya had cried out, “I don’t believe it! That can’t be true!” But that was hours ago. Since then, she had retraced her steps across Moscow, deep in thought all the way from Krasnaya Presnya to Sokolniki. Now these thoughts stung like a swarm of wasps, and she had no defense against them. What was the good of waiting? Was it right to turn her own life into an appendage of her husband’s? To sacrifice the precious gift of existence for a future that held nothing?