In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Muza didn’t even answer.

  “Oh, come on! It’s miserable here!”

  “I’m not going. Find yourself something to do.”

  The lightbulb suddenly dimmed, and there was only the dull red glow of the filament.

  “That’s all we need. . . .” Dasha groaned. “Power cut. You could hang yourself in a place like this.”

  Muza sat like a statue.

  Nadya was just as still on her bed.

  “Muza, darling, let’s go to the movies!”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Dasha looked out and came back saying, “Nadya! Shchagov’s here. Are you getting up?”

  Chapter 51

  Fire and Hay

  NADYA CRIED AND CRIED, gripping the blanket between her teeth to try and stop herself. Her head was damp under the pillow.

  She would have liked to go out, to get away from that room till late night. But in the huge city of Moscow, she had nowhere to go.

  It wasn’t the first time her roommates had used such wounding words, called her “old hag,” “misery guts,” “the nun.” What hurt most was the unfairness of it. She used to be so cheerful! But five years of lying leaves its mark. Five years of continually wearing a mask that cramps and pinches your face, hardens your voice, and numbs your thought. Maybe she really was by now an insufferable old maid? It was so difficult to see yourself clearly. It was only in a dormitory, where you couldn’t stamp your foot at mother as you did at home, only there among your peers that you learned to recognize what was bad in yourself.

  Apart from Gleb no one, no one at all, would ever understand her. . . .

  But even Gleb did not really understand.

  He had not told her what she ought to do, what she should be making of her life.

  He had only said that he would not be released.

  Her husband’s swift and sure blows had shattered all the hopes that fortified her from day to day, bolstered her faith, gave her the strength to wait and preserve her independence.

  He would never be released!

  That meant that he had no need of her . . . that she was ruining her life . . . for nothing.

  Nadya was lying face downward, staring fixedly through the gap between pillow and blanket at the patch of wall before her, and she could not, did not try to understand where all the light was coming from. She had thought that it was very dark, but suddenly she could make out the pimples in the crude whitewash on the familiar wall. Then suddenly Nadya heard, through her pillow, fingers beating a rhythm she recognized on the plywood panel of the door. When Dasha said, “Shchagov’s here, are you getting up?” Nadya had already whipped the pillow from her head, jumped off the bed in her stockings, straightened her rumpled skirt, and tidied her hair while her feet felt for her shoes.

  Muza, watching her in the wan half-light, was taken aback by her eagerness.

  Dasha darted over to Lyuda’s bed and quickly tucked in the bedclothes.

  The visitor was then admitted.

  Shchagov had draped an old army overcoat over his shoulders. He had not lost his soldierly bearing; he could bend, but he could not stoop. His movements were precise.

  “Greetings, good people. I’ve come to see what you’re up to with the light out so that I can try it myself. I’m bored stiff.”

  What a relief! In the yellowish gloom he could not see that her eyes were swollen and tearful.

  Dasha answered him in the same tone. “So if the lights hadn’t dimmed, you wouldn’t have come?”

  “Certainly not. Women’s faces lose their charm when brightly lit. You see the spiteful looks, the envious glances”—he should have been there a little while ago!—“the wrinkles, the overdone makeup. If I were a woman, I’d get a law passed that lights should never be on full. That way they’d all be married in no time.”

  Dasha looked at him sternly. He always talked like that, and she didn’t like his well-rehearsed facetiousness.

  “May I sit down?”

  “Please do,” Nadya said, coolly hospitable. There was no trace of her recent tiredness, her anguish, her tears in her voice.

  Unlike Dasha, she liked his self-assurance, his air of superiority, his low, steady voice. His presence was soothing. She even liked his jokes.

  “I’d better sit down quickly. I may never get another invitation from these people. So then, what are you studious young ladies doing?”

  Nadya was silent. She couldn’t say much to him because they had quarreled the day before yesterday, and she had unthinkingly poked him in the back with her briefcase, which suggested a greater degree of intimacy than actually existed between them, then run away. It was stupid, childish; and she was glad that they were not alone now.

  Dasha answered. “We’re just going to the movies. We don’t know who with.”

  “What’s the picture?”

  “The Indian Tomb.”

  “Aha! Not to be missed! As a hospital nurse once said to me, ‘There’s lots of shooting, a lot of killing, and it’s a simply marvelous picture.’ ”

  Shchagov had made himself comfortable at the common table.

  “But if you don’t mind my saying so, good people, I expected to find singing and dancing here, and it’s more like a funeral. Bumpy patch with parents? Latest ruling of Party Committee bothering you? I don’t think it applies to graduate students.”

  “What ruling?” Nadya asked in a subdued voice.

  “What ruling? That the social forces must check up on the social origins of students and make sure that they have indicated their parentage correctly. There’s a wealth of possibilities here; somebody may have confided in somebody, or blurted out something in his or her sleep, or read somebody else’s letter . . . things of that sort.”

  (More prodding and prying! How sick of it she was! How she longed to get away from it all!)

  “What about you, Muza Georgievna? Have you been hiding something?”

  “Despicable!” Muza exclaimed.

  “You mean even that doesn’t cheer you up? Maybe you’d like to hear a very funny story about a secret ballot at yesterday’s meeting of the Mechanics and Mathematics Board?”

  Shchagov was addressing them all, but his eyes were on Nadya. He had been wondering for some time what she wanted from him. Her interest was more obvious every time they met. If he was playing chess with someone, she would hover over the board and ask him to give her a game and teach her the openings. (It was just that chess is a marvelous way of killing time!)

  Or she would invite him to hear her perform at a concert.

  (Perfectly natural! You want to hear your playing praised by some not entirely indifferent listener!)

  Then there was the day when she had a “spare” ticket for the cinema and invited him.

  (She wanted to indulge in a fantasy . . . just for one evening . . . to be seen with an escort . . . have someone to take her arm.)

  Then she had given him a little notebook for his birthday—but did it rather awkwardly, slipped it into his jacket pocket and almost ran away. What an odd way to behave—why run away?

  (She was shy, that was all!)

  He had caught up with her in the hallway and started wrestling with her, pretending that he was trying to return her present, and had even put his arms around her. She had been in no hurry to free herself but had let him hold her for a moment.

  (It was so many years since she had experienced it that her arms and legs were paralyzed.)

  And just now, that playful tap with the briefcase?

  In his dealings with Nadya—as with everybody, absolutely everybody—Shchagov exercised iron self-control. He knew how easy it was to get involved with a woman and how difficult to extricate yourself. But when a lonely woman begs for help, simply begs for help, who could be so stiff-necked as to refuse?

  When Shchagov left his room to walk over to 318, he knew for sure that he would find Nadya at home and felt a certain excitement.

  His funny story about the secret ballot earned on
ly a polite laugh or two.

  “Are we or are we not going to get any light?”

  Even Muza had lost patience.

  “However, I note that you don’t find my stories the least bit amusing. Especially Nadezhda Ilyinichna. From what little I can see of her, she looks as black as a thundercloud. And I know why. She was fined ten rubles the day before yesterday, and she misses them unbearably.”

  Nadya’s immediate reaction to his jest was to seize her handbag, wrench it open, snatch the first thing she found, tear it up hysterically, and fling the pieces onto the common table in front of Shchagov.

  “Muza! I won’t ask you again!” Dasha wailed, grabbing her coat. “Are you coming or aren’t you?”

  “Oh, all right,” Muza mumbled, and made for the coat hooks, limping slightly.

  Shchagov and Nadya did not look around to see them go.

  But when the door closed behind them, Nadya felt a little frightened.

  Shchagov picked up the scraps of paper and looked at them closely. They were the crackling remnants of another ten-ruble note.

  He rose, letting his overcoat fall onto the chair, and walked unhurriedly round the table to face Nadya, towering over her. He clasped her small hands in his large ones.

  “Nadya!” It was the first time he had called her by her given name alone.

  She stood stock-still, feeling helpless. The spurt of anger that had made her tear up the note was over as suddenly as it had begun. A strange thought flashed through her mind: There was no guard beside them bending his bovine head to listen. They could talk about anything they liked. And decide for themselves when to part.

  She was close enough to his strong regular features to see that the left and right sides of his face were identical. She found the regularity of his features attractive.

  He unclasped his hands and ran them along the sleeves of her silk blouse.

  “Nadya!” he said coaxingly.

  “Let me go!” she answered, but weakly, reluctantly.

  “What am I to think?” he said, sliding his hands from her elbows to her shoulders.

  “Think about what?” she asked faintly.

  But she made no attempt to free herself.

  He gripped her by her shoulders and drew her toward him.

  The flame in her cheek could not be seen in the dim, yellowish light.

  She put her hands on his chest and pushed him away.

  ”Whatever makes you think that—”

  “I’m damned if I know what I’m supposed to think!”

  He released her and walked past her to the window.

  Water gurgled in the radiator.

  Nadya straightened her hair with trembling hands.

  Shchagov’s hands trembled, too, as he lit a cigarette.

  “You . . . know, don’t you,” he asked, pausing between words, “how dry hay burns?”

  “Yes. The flame shoots up to the sky, and then there’s just a heap of ash.”

  “Right up to the sky!” he said.

  “And then—a heap of ash,” she repeated.

  “So why do you keep throwing fire onto dry hay?”

  (Had she really been doing that? Could he really not understand? See that she wanted to feel attractive once in a while? Feel just for a minute that someone liked her better than other women, that she was still the best?)

  “Let’s go out somewhere! Anywhere!” she pleaded.

  “We aren’t going anywhere; we’re staying here.”

  He was smoking in his usual calm fashion, gripping the holder between his strong lips, a little to one side. Nadya liked this habit of his, too.

  “No, please, let’s go out somewhere!”

  “It’s here or nowhere,” he said peremptorily. “And I must warn you—I’m engaged.”

  Chapter 52

  To the Resurrection of the Dead!

  NADYA AND SHCHAGOV had felt drawn to each other because neither of them was from Moscow. The Muscovites whom Nadya met in graduate school and in laboratories carried within themselves the poison of their imagined superiority, or what they themselves called their “Moscow patriotism.” However pleased her professor was with her work, in their eyes Nadya was an inferior being.

  She could not remain indifferent to Shchagov, who was also a provincial but who cut his way through that milieu as an icebreaker cleaves clear water. She was in the reading room one day when a youngish senior research student, hoping to make Shchagov look small, asked him, with an arrogant toss of his snake’s head: “Let me see . . . what locality do you come from exactly?”

  Shchagov, who was taller than the questioner, stared at him with bored compassion, rocking slightly on his feet.

  “You’ve never been there,” he said. “It’s a locality called the front line. I’m from a hamlet called Dugout.”

  No man’s life proceeds at an even tenor through the years. There will always be a time when he realizes himself most fully, feels most deeply, makes the greatest impression on others—and on himself. All that happens afterward, however significant on the face of it, is most likely to be an abatement, the ebbing of that high tide. We never forget that time; we endlessly ring the changes on it. For some people it may even be their childhood, and they remain children all their lives. For others it is the time of first love, and it is they who have spread the myth that we love only once. There are those for whom the great time was when they were richest, most esteemed, most powerful; and they will still be mumbling without a tooth in their gums about their departed greatness. For Nerzhin the decisive period was prison. For Shchagov, life at the front.

  Shchagov had experienced all the horrors of war. He was called up in its first month and returned to civilian life only in 1946. Through all four years of the war, there was hardly a morning when Shchagov could be sure he would live till evening. He never held an important staff job and was out of the front line only when in the hospital. He had retreated from Kiev in 1941 and on the Don in 1942. Even when the war was taking a turn for the better, Shchagov had to run for it in 1943 and again at Kovel in 1944. In roadside ditches, in flooded trenches, in burned-out buildings, he learned to appreciate a mess tin of soup, an hour of peace, the meaning of true friendship, and the meaning of life generally.

  It would be decades before the marks left on Engineer Captain Shchagov healed completely. For the present he was incapable of dividing people into more than two categories: soldiers and the rest. Even on the streets of Moscow, where memory is short, he had kept his belief that the word “soldier” is the only guarantee of candor and goodwill. Experience had taught him not to trust anyone who had not undergone the ordeal by fire in battle.

  When the war ended, Shchagov had no family left, and the little house they had lived in had been razed to the ground by a bomb. His possessions were what he had on and a suitcase packed with booty from Germany. True, to soften the impact of civilian life, newly demobilized officers received twelve months’ pay “according to rank,” which was a wage for doing nothing.

  Like many soldiers returning from the front, Shchagov did not recognize the country he had spent four years defending. Young memories still preserved the mirage of equality, but at home its last pink wisps had disappeared. The country had become callous, utterly unscrupulous, and a great gulf had opened up between abject poverty and brazenly rapacious wealth. Soldiers returning from the front were, for a time at least, better men than they had been. They came back cleansed by the proximity of death, and they were hit all the harder by the changes at home, changes that had matured far from the battle zones.

  These veterans were all back now, walking the streets, riding in the metro, but dressed any old way, so that they no longer recognized one another. And they had to accept the prevalence of the code they found here over their own, the code of the front line.

  A man might clutch his head and wonder what he had been fighting for. Many in fact asked that question but quickly found themselves behind bars.

  Shchagov did not ask. He was not
one of those recalcitrants who never tire in the quest for universal justice. He knew that there was no changing the course of things; you could only choose whether to jump on board or not. It was clear that nowadays the daughter of a local officeholder was destined by birth never to dirty her hands, never to work in a factory. It was impossible to imagine the secretary of a district Party Committee, dismissed from his job, settling for one at a factory bench. The people who set norms in industry were not those who had to fulfill them; just as those who gave the order to attack were not those who had to carry it out.

  None of this was new to our planet, only to a Revolutionary country. The galling thing was that years of service without ever removing his boots might seem to entitle Captain Shchagov to a share in the good life he personally had helped to win, but nobody recognized this right. He had to establish his right to it all over again; in bloodless battle this time, without gunfire, without grenades, he had to fight his way through the serried ranks of bureaucracy to get his claim stamped with the seal of official approval.

  And through it all he had to keep smiling.

  Shchagov had been in such a hurry to get to the front in 1941 that he had not troubled to complete his final year and graduate. Now, after the war, he had to catch up and struggle to obtain a higher degree. His subject was theoretical mechanics; he had thought of devoting himself entirely to it before the war. Things were easier then. He had returned to find that enthusiasm for learning—learning anything and everything—had become an epidemic since salary scales had been adjusted sharply upward.

  So he had steeled himself for another long campaign. He had sold off the German booty bit by bit. He made no effort to keep up with the changing fashions in men’s clothes and shoes but defiantly went on wearing the things he was discharged in—army boots, army breeches, a coarse tunic with four rows of medal ribbons and two wound stripes. But because of this, he had not lost the allure of the wartime soldier, and it gave him in Nadya’s eyes an affinity with just such another, Captain Nerzhin.

  Nadya, who was easily hurt by any little misfortune or affront, looked up to Shchagov, with his armor-plated worldly wisdom, like a little girl and regularly asked his advice. But even with him she stubbornly stuck to the lie that her Gleb had been reported missing in action.