In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  But although Innokenty was progressive and humane and dedicated and purposeful (purposefulness was what all his contemporaries most prized and cultivated in themselves), sitting there on a low stool by the cabinets he felt that something he had lacked was stealing into his heart.

  There were also albums of old photographs, clear and sharply defined. Several separate bundles consisted of Moscow and Petersburg theater programs. There was the theatrical daily Spectator. And the Cinema Herald. (He hadn’t realized that they went back so far.) And piles and piles of magazines, all sorts of magazines—their names alone were enough to make a man dizzy: Apollo, Golden Fleece, The Hyperborean, Pegasus, World of Art. There were reproductions of unknown paintings and sculptures (not a trace of any of them in the Tretyakov Gallery) and of stage sets. Poems by unknown poets. Innumerable magazine supplements, with dozens of European writers of whom Innokenty had never heard. But it wasn’t just individual writers; there were whole publishing houses long forgotten, as if the earth had swallowed them: Gryphon, Dogrose, Scorpion, Musagetes, Halcyon, Northern Lights, Logos.

  He sat there for days on end, on the little stool by the wide-open cabinets, breathing their air, intoxicated with it and with his mother’s little world, which his father had once entered, wearing a black raincoat, girded with hand grenades, and bearing a Cheka search warrant. Early twentieth-century Russia, with its ideological battles, its dizzy proliferation of trends and movements, its unbridled imagination, and its anxious forebodings, looked out at Innokenty from these yellowing pages—Russia of the last pre-Revolutionary decade, which he had been taught at school and in the institute to regard as the most shameful and most barren in Russia’s history, a decade so hopeless that if the Bolsheviks had not come to the rescue, Russia left to itself would have rotted and collapsed.

  It had, indeed, been a garrulous decade, too sure of itself at times, yet somehow impotent. But what a proliferation of new growth! What a burgeoning of new ideas!

  Innokenty realized what he had been robbed of till now.

  Dotnara had arrived to carry her husband off to some official reception. Innokenty had stared at her uncomprehendingly, then frowned, picturing that pompous assembly where everybody would unreservedly agree with everybody else, where all would spring to their feet with alacrity to drink the first toast—“To Comrade Stalin!”—then eat and drink a great deal with no further thought of Comrade Stalin and then play cards like idiots.

  His eyes returned from an unfathomable distance to his wife, and he begged her to go alone. That anyone should prefer poking about in old albums to real life at a reception seemed crazy to Dotnara. Innokenty’s finds in the cabinets were bound up with vague but never-dying recollections of his childhood, and they meant a great deal to him but nothing to his wife.

  His mother had triumphed; she had risen from the grave and taken her son from his bride.

  Once launched, Innokenty could not stop. If he had been misled about one thing, perhaps there were others.

  For some years now, he had lacked both the wish and the energy to study. (His fluent French, which had been such a help in his career, he had acquired in childhood from his mother.) But now he began reading avidly. His blunted and jaded appetites gave way to this new passion for reading.

  He found, though, that even reading was a special skill, not just a matter of running your eyes along the lines. He discovered that he was a savage, reared in the caves of social science, clad in the skins of class warfare. His whole education had trained him to take certain books on trust and reject others unread. From boyhood he had been sheltered from erroneous books and had read only those that were warranted sound, so that he had got into the habit of believing every word, of submitting without question to the author’s will. When he began to read authors who contradicted one another, his resistance was low, and he could not help surrendering to whichever of them he had read last. What he found most difficult of all was to lay down his book and think for himself.

  Why, he wondered, had the February Revolution disappeared from Soviet calendars, as though it was an insignificant detail in the chronology of 1917? Why, indeed, were they so reluctant to call it a revolution? Perhaps only because it made no work for the guillotine? But the tsar had been overthrown, and with him a regime six centuries old, at a single push; and nobody rushed to pick up the crown, everybody sang and laughed and exchanged congratulations, yet there was no place for this day in a calendar that meticulously noted the birthdays of greasy swine like Zhdanov and Shcherbakov.

  Whereas October 1917, which all Soviet books in the twenties called a coup, was magnified as the greatest Revolution in the history of mankind. What were Zinoviev and Kamenev accused of in October 1917? Of betraying the “Secret of the Revolution” to the bourgeoisie. But can you prevent a volcano from erupting by looking into the crater? Can you block the path of a hurricane when you receive a weather report? Could they have “betrayed the secret”? Only the secret of a narrow conspiracy! And that tells us everything. There was no elemental, nationwide flare-up in October; all that happened was that the conspirators assembled at a given signal.

  Shortly afterward, Innokenty was posted to Paris. There he had access to all shades of world opinion and to all Russian émigré literature (though, of course, he had to look over his shoulder at bookstores). He could read and read and read! Though his duties, of course, got in the way.

  Until then he had thought that his job was the best and his lot the luckiest he could possibly have hoped for. But now he began to feel that there was something sordid about it. Being a Soviet diplomat meant not only delivering, day in and day out, statements at which people with their heads screwed on right were bound to laugh. The other part of the job was more important, the secret part: meeting characters with code names, collecting information, passing on instructions and money.

  In his carefree youth, before his crisis, Innokenty had seen nothing reprehensible about this backdoor business; he had thought it fun and made light work of it. Now it was distasteful, repellent.

  The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.

  Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.

  A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience.

  But there was no one, no one at all in Innokenty’s circle, not even his wife, to whom he could tell all these new thoughts. She had not understood or sympathized with the belated affection he had felt for his dead mother; nor did she understand why anyone would take an interest in events that were over and done with, never to return. If she had known that he had begun to despise his job, she would have been horrified; this job of his was the foundation of their glittering prosperity.

  The gap between them had widened so far in the past year that he could no longer risk revealing himself.

  But even on leave in the USSR, Innokenty had no intimates. Touched by Klara’s naive story about the cleaner on the stairway, he had hoped for an instant that here at last was someone he could talk to freely. But from the first steps they took, the first words they exchanged on their walk, he saw that he was mistaken. Impassable thickets lay between them, too dense to disentangle and tear asunder. And although it would have been quite natural for him to complain about his wife to his wife’s sister and although that would have brought them closer together, he was disinclined to do it.

  Why? For one thing, a strange law decrees that it is futile trying to develop an understanding with a woman if she is not physically attractive to you; somehow your lips are sealed; you are paralyzed by the hopelessness of trying to say all you need to say; frank and simple words elude you.

  Then again, he had not gone to see his uncle, had made no effort to go when he should have. What was the good? A complete waste of time. There would be nothing but tedious, pointless interrogation and exclamations of wonder about “abroad.”

  Another year went by, in Paris and in R
ome. He arranged to go to Rome without his wife. Only to learn on his return that he had shared her with an officer on the General Staff. She was unrepentant, indeed stubbornly self-righteous about it, and shifted all the blame onto Innokenty; he should not have left her by herself.

  Yet he felt no pain, no sense of loss, but rather relief. Since then he had been at a desk in the ministry for four months, in Moscow the whole time, but they lived like strangers. Divorce was out of the question, however; it would ruin a diplomat’s career. And Innokenty was marked out for posting to the UN Secretariat in New York.

  This latest posting pleased him but also frightened him. He liked the United Nations as an idea, not its charter but what it could be, given a general willingness to compromise and to avoid malicious point scoring. He was very much in favor of world government. What else could save the planet? But that was the spirit in which Swedes or Burmese or Ethiopians could go to the UN. He was propelled by an iron fist at his back. Once again he was packed off with a secret mission, an undeclared purpose, a double memory, and a poisonous hidden brief.

  During those months in Moscow, he did at last find time to visit his uncle at Tver.

  Chapter 61

  The Uncle at Tver

  INNOKENTY HAD NOTED with surprise that his uncle’s address included no apartment number. It proved unnecessary. He did not take long looking for it: a sagging, one-story wooden house among others like it on a paved side street without trees or fences. Innokenty was not sure at first whether to knock at the lopsided front door with patterned panels or the wicket in the yard gate. He tried both, but no one opened up or called out. He shook the wicket. It was nailed shut. He pushed the front door. It wouldn’t budge.

  The poverty-stricken look of the house made him surer than ever that he should not have come.

  He looked up and down the lane for someone to ask, but the whole place was deserted under the noonday sun. Until an old man came round the corner carrying two full buckets. He carried them with stiff caution, caught his foot once, but did not stop. One of his shoulders was slightly higher than the other.

  He was heading that way, diagonally, following his own shadow, and he was aware of the visitor, although his eyes never left the ground. Innokenty took one step away from his suitcase, then another.

  “Uncle Avenir?”

  Bending his knees more than his back, Uncle Avenir set the buckets down neatly, without spilling a drop. He straightened up, removed the dirty yellow pancake of a cap from his close-cropped gray head, and wiped away the sweat with the same clenched hand. He struggled to say something but opened his arms instead, and before he knew it, Innokenty was bending down (his uncle was half a head shorter) and pricking his smooth cheek on his uncle’s unshaved face. His hand had somehow found the jutting shoulder blade that made his uncle’s shoulder crooked.

  Uncle Avenir raised both hands to Innokenty’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length for inspection.

  He meant to say something suitably solemn, but what came out was “You’re rather thin.”

  “So are you.”

  His uncle wasn’t just thin, he obviously had all sorts of ailments and disabilities, but as far as Innokenty could see in the bright sunlight, Uncle Avenir’s were not the dim and apathetic eyes of an old man.

  He grinned lopsidedly.

  “Me! I don’t go in for banquets. What are you here for?”

  Innokenty was glad that he had taken Klara’s advice and bought sausage and smoked fish, which could probably not be had in Tver for love or money. He sighed.

  “I’ve got worries, Uncle.”

  His uncle looked him over with lively eyes that had kept their power.

  “Maybe you have. Maybe you only think so.”

  “Do you have to go far for your water?”

  “One block, two blocks, and another half block. But they aren’t very big blocks.”

  Innokenty bent down and lifted the buckets to carry them inside. They were heavier than he had expected. They might have had iron bottoms.

  His uncle walked behind, laughing.

  “What a worker you’d make! I can see you aren’t used to it.”

  He took the lead and unlocked the door. In the narrow passageway he put his hands on the yoke and steadied the buckets onto a bench. The natty blue suitcase was put down on a crooked floor of wobbly, ill-fitting boards. The door was bolted immediately, as though Uncle expected intruders.

  The hallway had a low ceiling, a small window looking onto the yard gate, two closet doors, and two for people. Innokenty began to feel ill at ease. He had never before let himself in for anything like this. He regretted coming and tried to think of an excuse to rush off toward evening, not to stay the night.

  The doors to the rooms and between rooms were all crooked; some were lined with felt; others were double doors with old-fashioned ornamentation. You had to bend your head at every doorway and take care not to bump it on the ceiling lamps. The air in the three small rooms was stale because the second window frames were a permanent fixture, wedged in with cotton and colored paper. Only the ventilation panes opened, but strips of shredded newspaper hung fluttering before them to scare the flies away.

  The dispiriting poverty of it all—this squat and crooked shack, ill-lit and airless, with not a stick of furniture standing squarely on the floor—was something Innokenty had read about but never seen for himself. Not all of the walls were even whitewashed; in places the timbers were daubed with dark paint. Dusty, yellowing newspapers hung everywhere, serving as “wall carpets.” Several thicknesses of newspaper hid the glass doors of cabinets, the niche in the sideboard, the tops of windows, and the wall behind the stove. Innokenty felt trapped. He must get away before the day was over!

  His uncle, though, seemed proud rather than ashamed as he showed Innokenty various desirable features: the homely earth closet for summer and winter use, the washstand, the arrangements for catching rainwater. Needless to say, vegetable peelings did not go to waste.

  Innokenty could imagine what sort of wife would shortly appear! And what the bed linen would be like!

  But still, this was his mother’s brother; he knew about her life from childhood on and was in fact Innokenty’s only blood relation. Bolt now, and he would never learn all he needed to know, never even be able to think his own problem through.

  And anyway his uncle’s directness and his one-sided grin pleased Innokenty. In those first few words he sensed that there was more to the man than had appeared in the two short letters.

  In times of general mistrust and treachery, kinship gives at least an initial hope that the man you are dealing with has not been thrown in your way for some underhanded purpose, that his route to you was a natural one. You can tell a kinsman, even a dim one, things that you could not discuss with the most luminous of sages.

  Uncle Avenir was not just thin; he had withered away till there was only the indispensable minimum left on his bones. But such people are long-lived.

  “How old are you, exactly, Uncle?”

  (Innokenty hadn’t even a rough idea.)

  His uncle looked at him hard and answered enigmatically: “I’m his contemporary.”

  “Whose?”

  “The Man himself.”

  His gaze was unwavering.

  Innokenty smiled readily. This was familiar ground. Even in the years when he had cheered in unison with everybody else, the Man’s vulgar manner, his crass speeches, his glaring stupidity had left a bad taste.

  When his remark was met neither with polite incomprehension nor with lofty disapproval, Uncle Avenir brightened and risked a little joke.

  “Ahem! You must admit that it would be presumptuous of me to die first. If I can squeeze into second place in the line, I will.”

  They both laughed. The first spark had leaped between them. After that it was easier.

  Uncle Avenir’s clothes were dreadful. The shirt under his jacket didn’t bear looking at. The ragged collar, lapels, and cuffs of his jacket ha
d been mended and were fraying again. His trousers had been patched so often that there was little of the original material to be seen, and the patches were of different colors, some plain gray, some checkered, some striped. His shoes had been repaired and restitched so often that they looked like a convict’s clogs. Uncle Avenir, however, explained that these were his working clothes and that he never went farther than the pump and the bread shop in them. He was, however, in no hurry to change.

  He did not waste much time on the rooms but took Innokenty to see the yard. The day was now very warm, cloudless, and windless.

  The yard was only thirty meters by ten, but it belonged entirely to Uncle Avenir. He was separated from his neighbors by ramshackle sheds and gappy fences, but they served their purpose. There was room for a paved area and a paved path, a tank for rainwater, a feeding trough, a woodpile, a summer stove, and there was still room left for a garden. Uncle Avenir took him around and introduced him to every tree and plant; just from their leaves, without flowers or fruit, Innokenty would have recognized none of them. There was a Chinese rosebush, a jasmine, a lilac, a flower bed with nasturtiums, poppies, and asters. There were two luxuriantly leafy black-currant bushes; Uncle Avenir complained that although they had blossomed abundantly, they had produced hardly any berries because there had been a sudden frost at pollination time. There was one cherry tree and one apple tree, with props to bear the weight of the latter’s branches. The weeds had all been pulled up, and only the plants that should have been there were there.

  There must have been a lot more crawling on the knees and work with fingers than Innokenty could appreciate. But he understood sufficiently to say, “It must be very hard for you, Uncle! How do you manage all that bending and digging and carrying?”