In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Abramson’s eyes were on his book but not reading, when Nerzhin came and sat on the edge of his bed.

  They had met first in a cell in Butyrki Prison three years before. Potapov was in the same cell. Abramson was nearing the end of his first ten-year jail sentence at the time, and his cellmates were impressed by this experienced prisoner’s air of ice-cold authority, his deep-rooted skepticism about prison matters; but secretly he cherished the insane hope that he would shortly return to his family.

  They had gone their different ways. Abramson was in fact shortly released, by some oversight, and was free just long enough for his family to pull up stakes and move to Sterlitamak, where the militia was willing to give him a residence permit. But no sooner had his family moved than they pulled him in, subjected him to a single interrogation, in which he was asked whether he was indeed the Abramson who had been in exile from 1929 to 1934 and since then in jail. Having established that he had in fact served and completed and even somewhat exceeded the term to which he had been sentenced, the Special Tribunal rewarded him for it with a further ten years. Those in charge of the special prisons (sharashkas) discovered from the main All-Union card index that their former employee was inside again and promptly yanked him out to work for them. Abramson was transported to Marfino, where, as you always do in the convict world, he met old acquaintances, Nerzhin and Potapov among them. When they stood together on the stairway smoking, Abramson felt as though he had not spent a year as a free man, at home with his family, had not rewarded his wife with an additional daughter, felt that it had all been the sort of cruel dream that breaks a prisoner’s heart and that prison was the only concrete reality in this world.

  Nerzhin had sat down by Abramson to invite him to his birthday party. Abramson belatedly wished him many happy returns and, squinting from under his glasses, asked who would be there. The realization that he would have to struggle into his overalls, ruining the Sunday hours that would have been so pleasantly and profitably spent in his underwear, and that he would have to abandon an entertaining book for what they called a birthday party gave Abramson no pleasure at all. The worst of it was that he did not expect to have a good time but was more or less certain that a political argument would flare up, as futile and as unrewarding as ever, and that it would be impossible not to get involved and equally impossible to let himself be involved, because revealing his most private thoughts to “junior” prisoners would be like exhibiting his wife in the nude.

  Nerzhin went through the guest list. Rubin was the only one in the sharashka who was on close terms with Abramson, though he would have to be told off for today’s farce, which was unworthy of a true Communist. Sologdin and Pryanchikov Abramson did not like. Though, strangely enough, Rubin and Sologdin were supposed to be friends, perhaps because they had been neighbors on the bedboards at Butyrki. The prison administration made little distinction between them and, when the November anniversary celebrations came around, whisked them off to Lefortovo for a holiday away from it all.

  Still, Abramson could not refuse the invitation. He was informed that the merrymaking would begin in half an hour’s time. Between Potapov’s and Pryanchikov’s beds. Just as soon as Andreich had made the artificial cream.

  While they were talking, Nerzhin noticed what Abramson was reading and said: “As it happens, I once started rereading Monte Cristo in prison but didn’t finish it. I couldn’t help noticing that although Dumas tries to make the reader’s flesh creep, the Château d’If as he portrays it is a thoroughly patriarchal prison. Never mind his disregard of such nice little details as the daily carrying out of the night bucket—Dumas doesn’t mention it because, being a free man, he never thinks of it—just ask yourself why Dantes succeeded in escaping? Because, of course, there were no cell searches for years on end, although they are supposed to be carried out weekly. Consequently their tunneling went undiscovered. Then again, the screws in charge of them were not relieved regularly, though, as we know from experience of the Lubyanka, they should be changed every two hours, so that the next guard can look for signs that the one before has been negligent. Furthermore, nobody entered or peeped into the cells at the Château d’If from one morning to the next. There weren’t even any spy holes in the doors. In short, it wasn’t a prison but a seaside holiday resort! They thought nothing of leaving a metal saucepan in a cell, and Dantes used it to scoop a hole in the floor. To cap it all, they trustingly sewed the dead man up in a sack, without first branding his body with a red-hot iron in the morgue, then failed to pierce it with a bayonet in the guardhouse. Dumas should have worried less about atmosphere and more about elementary procedure.”

  Nerzhin never read just for amusement. What he looked for in a book were allies and enemies. He reached a precisely formulated verdict on every book he read and liked to force it on others.

  Abramson, who knew this tiresome habit of his, listened without raising his head from the pillow, observing him calmly through his square glasses.

  “All right, I’ll be there,” he said, then made himself more comfortable and went on with his reading.

  Chapter 57

  Prisoners’ Petty Matters

  NERZHIN WENT TO HELP Potapov make the cream. His hungry years in German prison camps and Soviet prisons had convinced Potapov that the process of mastication was not something to be ashamed of or treated lightly but one of the most delectable things in life and one in which its true meaning is revealed.

  I count the hours to dinner, I count the hours to tea,

  But perhaps the hour of supper is dearer still to me

  was a favorite quotation of this outstanding Russian power-station engineer, who had devoted his whole life to transformers with a capacity of thousands and thousands and thousands of kilowatts.

  Potapov was one of those engineers whose hands are as nimble as their brains, so he quickly became an uncommonly good cook. In the Kriegsgefangenenlager he used to bake an orange cake using nothing but potato peelings, and in the sharashkas he had specialized in desserts and become an expert.

  At that moment he was at work over two lockers placed together in the dimly lit passage between his own bed and Pryanchikov’s; a pleasant twilight was created by the mattresses on the upper bunks, which obstructed the light from the bulbs in the ceiling. Since the room was a semicircle and the beds stood along its radii, the passage was narrow at its entrance and broadened out toward the window. Potapov was also making full use of the enormous windowsill (its width was four and a half thicknesses of brick); tin cans, plastic containers, and basins stood there in close array. Potapov was performing his rite, trying to whip condensed milk, cocoa concentrate, and two eggs (Rubin had slipped some of these gifts to him; he regularly received parcels from home and always shared their contents) into something with no name in human speech. He chided Nerzhin for meandering around and ordered him to improvise some extra glasses (one was the cap of a Thermos bottle, two were small chemical beakers from the labs, and Potapov had molded two from greaseproof paper). Nerzhin suggested converting two shaving mugs into additional glasses and undertook to rinse them conscientiously with hot water.

  A restful Sunday atmosphere descended on the semicircular room. Men perched on the beds of recumbent friends for a chat. Men read and exchanged casual remarks with neighbors. Yet others lay doing nothing, with their hands behind their heads and their eyes fixed unblinkingly on the white ceiling.

  Conversations merged in a general hubbub.

  Zemelya, the vacuum man, was taking his ease. He lay on his upper bunk, wearing only his underpants (it was rather hot up there), stroking his shaggy chest, smiling his invariable benevolent smile, and telling Mishka the Mordvin, two yards away by air, the following story:

  “If you really want to know, it all began with that half kopeck.”

  “What half kopeck?”

  “In those days—1926, 1928, you were only a boy—there was a sign over every cash desk saying, ‘Ask for your half kopeck change.’ There was such a coin,
a half kopeck. The girl at the desk handed it over without a word. Anyway, we had the NEP then; it was just like peacetime.”

  “You mean there wasn’t a war?”

  “I’m not talking about war, you dope! When I say peacetime, I mean before Soviet power. Oh yes. . . . Under the NEP, people in government offices worked six hours, not like now. And they managed all right. And if they kept you behind as much as fifteen minutes, they paid you overtime. Now what do you think was the first thing to vanish? The half kopecks. And that’s when it all started. After that the copper coins vanished. Then in ’30 the silver, and there wasn’t any small change at all. You could ask till you were blue in the face; you wouldn’t get any change. Since then things have never been right. There was no small change, so they started counting in rubles. Take a beggar—he doesn’t ask nicely for ‘a kopeck for the love of Christ’ anymore; it’s more of a demand: ‘Citizens, give me a ruble!’ When you pick up your pay at the office, the kopecks are shown on the stub, and that’s it. If you ask for them, they only laugh—what a cheapskate! But they’re the idiots! When you give a man his half kopecks, you’re showing respect for him; if they don’t change your ruble at sixty kopecks, they’re shitting on you. People didn’t hold out for their half kopecks, so they lost half their lives.”

  On the other side, another prisoner, also on a top bunk, looked up from his book and said to his neighbor, “Absolutely useless, the tsarist government! Listen to this, Sasha my friend: A woman Revolutionary went on hunger strike for eight days to make the prison governor apologize to her, and the clown did just that. Try making the big chief at Krasnaya Presnya apologize!”

  “Our lot would have been feeding the stupid woman through a pipe on the third day and slapping a fresh sentence on her for provocation. Where did you get that from?”

  “Gorky.”

  Dvoetyosov, who was lying not far away, shot up.

  “Who’s reading Gorky?” he asked in a menacing bass.

  “I am!”

  “What the hell for?”

  “What else is there to read?”

  “You’d be better off in the shithouse, communing with your soul. World’s full of damned readers, damned humanists—dirty bums, the lot of you.”

  Below them a debate was in progress on that age-old prison theme: When’s the best time to get thrown in? The wording of the question fatalistically assumed that imprisonment was unavoidable. (There is a general tendency among prisoners to exaggerate their own numbers. When there were only twelve to fifteen million of them, they were convinced that there were twenty or thirty million. Zeks felt sure that their rulers and the MVD were almost the only male persons at liberty.) When’s the best time to go inside? means Is it better when you’re young? Or in your declining years? Some (usually younger men) cheerfully argued that it was better early in life: It gave you time to learn what life was all about, what was precious and what was shit, so that at the age of thirty-five or so, a man with a “tenner” under his belt could build his life on sound principles. Whereas, they argued, a man who went inside later in life would be tearing his hair because he had not lived as he should, because the life he had led was one long chain of mistakes and it was now too late to put them right. Others (usually older men) on such occasions no less cheerfully argued that, on the contrary, if a man goes inside later in life, it is very much like retiring on a pension or withdrawing to a monastery, after taking from life all that it has to offer (this “all” in the reminiscences of zeks narrows down to enjoyment of the female body, smart clothes, rich food and drink), and there isn’t much they can do to an old man in a camp. Whereas they can knock the stuffing out of a young man and leave him such a wreck that he’ll never want to “have a go at a woman” again.

  This was how they argued in the semicircular room that day, and how prisoners always argue, some to console themselves, some rubbing salt in their own wounds, but their arguments and anecdotes were husks that held no kernel of truth. On Sunday evening it turned out that the right time to go inside is . . . anytime, but when they got up on Monday morning, it was obvious that there is never a good time.

  Yet that isn’t quite true either.

  The “best time to go inside” argument was one of those that do not exasperate the debaters but pacify them, soothe their souls with philosophic melancholy. These debates never ended in explosions.

  Thomas Hobbes says somewhere that if the truth that “the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees” threatened anyone’s interests, blood would be shed for it.

  But Hobbes did not know the convict mentality.

  The argument in progress on the end bunk by the door was in fact one of those that can lead to blows or bloodshed, although it affected nobody’s interests. A turner had come to spend the evening with his friend, an electrician. They began by talking for some reason about Sestroretsk and then went on to talk about the stoves in houses at Sestroretsk. The turner had spent a winter there and remembered clearly what the stoves were like. The electrician had never been there himself, but his brother-in-law was a stove installer, a first-class workman, and had built stoves right there in Sestroretsk, and what he used to say about them was just the opposite of what the turner remembered. They began by simply contradicting each other, but the quarrel reached the stage of quivering voices and personal insults, and the noise began to drown out all other conversations in the room. Each man felt humiliated by his inability to prove beyond doubt that he was right. They looked in vain for an arbitrator among those around them until they suddenly remembered that Spiridon, the yardman, knew about stoves, enough at any rate to tell one of them that the crazy sort of stove he was talking about didn’t exist in Sestroretsk or for that matter anywhere on earth. To the great relief of everybody in the room, they hurried off to find him.

  But in the heat of the moment, they forgot to close the door, and another, no less excruciating, argument overflowed from the hallway: Should the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century correctly be celebrated on January 1, 1950, or January 1, 1951? The debate had evidently started some time ago and was bogged down in arguments about the year in which Christ was born on December 25. Somebody slammed the door. The head-splitting noise ceased, and in the sudden silence Khorobrov could be heard talking to the bald-headed designer above him.

  “When we begin the first flight to the moon, a meeting will of course be held around the rocket before blastoff. The crew will make a solemn commitment to economize fuel, to exceed the cosmic speed record in flight, not to stop the spaceship for repairs en route, and to pass their landing test on the moon with top marks. One of the three crew members will be the political officer. On the way, he will conduct uninterrupted mass-indoctrination work with the pilot and the navigator, explaining the importance of space travel and soliciting comments for the wall newspaper.”

  This was overheard by Pryanchikov as he darted across the room with towel and soap. A balletic leap brought him to Khorobrov’s bed, and he assumed an awesome frown.

  “Ilya Terentich!” he said. “I can put your mind at rest. It will not be like that.”

  “How will it be then?”

  Pryanchikov put his finger to his lips like someone in a detective film.

  “The first to reach the moon . . . will be the Americans.”

  He burst into ringing, childish laughter and ran off.

  The engraver was sitting on Sologdin’s bed. They were engrossed in a conversation about women. He was forty and, although his face was young, quite gray. This made him very good-looking.

  He was on top of the world today. True, he had made a mistake that morning; he had scrunched his latest story up into a ball and swallowed it, although, as it turned out, he could have got through the body search with it and passed it to his wife. But to make up for this, she had told him that she had shown his previous stories to a few trusted friends, and they were all thrilled with them. Praise from friends and relations might of course be exaggerated and not a
ltogether deserved, but damn it, where could he get a fair assessment? Whether it was done well or badly, the engraver was preserving the truth for all time, the cries of tortured souls, what Stalin had done to millions of Russian POWs. And now he was proud, happy, fulfilled, and determined to go on with his writing. Today’s visit had been satisfactory in other ways, too; he had a devoted wife waiting for him, working to obtain his release, and her efforts would soon prove successful. He was seeking an outlet for his elation in the long story he was telling to this unremarkable, though not exactly stupid, man Sologdin, whose past and future were drab and colorless in comparison to his own.

  Sologdin was lying stretched out on his back with an open book facedown on his chest, bestowing on the speaker an occasional flashing glance. With his little blond beard, his bright eyes, his high forehead, and his regular features, Sologdin was like an Old Russian knight—and unnaturally, indecently handsome.

  He, too, was on top of the world. He heard within himself a sort of triumphant chant celebrating a cosmic victory—his own victory over the whole world, his omnipotence. His release could not be more than a year away. After which a dizzy career perhaps awaited him. Moreover, his body was not aching for a woman, as it usually did; it was appeased and purged of its turbid longings.

  So seeking an outlet for his elation and for amusement, he let his attention glide lazily along the meanderings of a story that meant nothing to him, a story told by this not-at-all stupid but perfectly ordinary man, to whom nothing so wonderful could possibly happen.

  He often listened to people, as if patronizing them, trying not to let it show only out of politeness.

  The engraver began by telling him about his two wives in Russia, then went on to reminisce about Germany and the charms of the German women with whom he had been intimate. He drew a comparison between Russian and German women that was new to Sologdin. He said that having lived with both, he preferred the Germans. Russian women were too sure of themselves, too independent, too demanding in love. They loved with eyes wide open, studying the loved one’s failings, discovering that he was not as noble, not as courageous, as they could wish. If you loved a Russian woman, you always had the uncomfortable feeling that she was your equal, whereas a German woman was as pliant as a rush in her lover’s hands, for he was her god, the greatest and best man on earth; she surrendered herself unreservedly to his tender mercy. She dreamed only of how best to please him, and because of this, the engraver had felt more of a man, felt that he was “lord and master” with German women.