In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  “I’m not afraid of that, Innokenty. Carrying water, chopping wood, digging, as long as you don’t overdo it—that’s the normal way for a person to live. You’re more likely to suffocate in one of those five-story egg boxes, sharing a flat with the leading class.”

  “Which class is that?”

  “The proletariat.”

  The old man eyed him speculatively again. “The domino bashers, the ones who keep the radio on from early morning till late at night. They only leave themselves five hours and fifty minutes to sleep. They break bottles where passersby can tread on the glass; they dump their trash out there in the middle of the street. Have you ever wondered why they’re supposed to be the leading class?”

  Innokenty shook his head. “Hmm . . . well . . . that’s something I’ve never understood.”

  “They’re the most barbarous class!” his uncle said angrily. “Peasants commune with the soil, with nature, and learn their morality from it. Intellectuals are engaged in the noble work of thinking. But these people spend all their lives within dead walls making dead things with dead machines. How can they ever learn anything?”

  They walked on and sat down for a while, looking around them.

  “No, I don’t find it hard work. Everything I do here I do with a clear conscience. When I empty the slops, it’s with a clear conscience. I scrape the floor with a clear conscience. If I rake out the ashes and light the stove, there’s nothing bad in that. But if you’ve got a position to hold down, you can’t live like that. You have to truckle . . . and you have to be dishonest. I beat a retreat every time. I couldn’t even stand being a librarian, let alone a teacher.”

  “What’s so hard about a librarian’s job?”

  “Just go and try it. You have to trash good books and praise bad ones. You have to mislead undeveloped minds. What job would you say can be done with a clear conscience?”

  Innokenty knew too little about other jobs to say anything. The only job he had held was against his conscience,

  The house, it seemed, was Raisa Timofeevna’s and had been for a long time. She was the one who had a job, as a hospital nurse. She had grown-up children who had set up house elsewhere. She had taken Uncle Avenir under her wing when he was physically and mentally in a poor way and destitute. She had set him on his feet again, and he was eternally grateful to her. She worked double shifts. Uncle Avenir didn’t mind a bit preparing their meals, washing dishes, and doing all the housework.

  Behind the bushes up against the fence there was, as there should be in every real garden, a secluded bench, its legs set in the ground. Uncle and nephew sat down.

  No, it was no hardship, Uncle Avenir insisted, developing his theme with the stubbornness of old age. His was the natural way to live, not on asphalt but on a piece of land that would let a spade in. Never mind that the whole plot was only three spades long and two spades wide. He had been living that way for ten years and was glad of it; he could ask for no better lot. However rickety and full of gaps, those fences were his protection, his fortifications. Only bad things came from outside—the din of radios, tax demands, orders to carry out community service. Every unexpected knock at the door meant something unpleasant. So far nobody had come bearing good news.

  No, it was no hardship. There were much greater hardships.

  Such as?

  The old man in the patched clothes and the flat cap was less and less mistrustful, but he gave Innokenty a cautious sideways look. There were things you shouldn’t venture into with strangers after two years, let alone two hours. Still, this boy seemed to have some idea, he was kin, so . . . keep it up, boy, keep it up!

  “The hardest thing of the lot,” Uncle Avenir said, burning with indignation, “is having to hang the flag out on public holidays. Householders have to hang out flags.” (Say it now or never!) “Compulsory show of loyalty to a government that perhaps you don’t respect.”

  Look out! Is he madman or sage, this emaciated and bedraggled creature blurting out his thoughts to you? Sleek from good living, draped in an academic gown and speaking unhurriedly, he would by general consent be a sage.

  Innokenty did not recoil, did not instantly protest. But his uncle took refuge behind a reliably broad back.

  “Have you read anything by Herzen? Read him properly?”

  “Yes . . . I think so.”

  His uncle bore down on him, thrust the crooked shoulder at him (he had acquired a spinal curvature poring over books in his youth).

  “Herzen asks what are the limits of patriotism. Must love for your native land extend to any and every government it may have? Must you go on abetting it in destroying its own people?”

  Simple and cogent. Innokenty repeated it, to see if he had got it right.

  “Must love for your native land extend to. . . ?”

  But by now they were at the opposite fence, and Uncle Avenir’s eyes scanned the cracks at which neighbors might be eavesdropping.

  Their conversation had gotten off to a good start. Back inside the house, Innokenty no longer felt that he was suffocating and no longer thought of leaving. Strangely, he did not notice the hours go by; it was all so interesting. Uncle Avenir bustled about to the kitchen and back. They reminisced about Innokenty’s mother. They looked at old snapshots, and Uncle made him a present of some of them. He had, however, been a lot older than his sister, and they had not been children together.

  Raisa Timofeevna came home from work. She was a severe woman of fifty, and she returned Innokenty’s greeting grudgingly. He shared his uncle’s embarrassment and also felt a strange fear that she would ruin everything for them. They sat down at a table covered with dark oilcloth to what might have been either dinner or supper. It was difficult to see what sort of meal they would have had if Innokenty had not brought half a suitcase full of food with him and sent his uncle out to get vodka. The hosts did pick a few of their tomatoes. And supplied the potatoes.

  Still, their kinsman’s generosity and the fine fare put a sparkle in Raisa Timofeevna’s eyes and relieved Innokenty of any feeling of guilt—for all the times when he had not come in the past and for coming now. They drank a shot, then another, and Raisa Timofeevna began airing her grievances against the good-for-nothing Avenir: He’d made a mess of his life; he couldn’t get on with people in any place of work because of his awkward character, but that wouldn’t matter so much if he would just stay quietly at home! But oh no, he couldn’t resist spending his last few kopecks on newspapers. He even bought New Times now and then; that was expensive, and he didn’t buy them to enjoy them; in fact, he got furious with them, and sat up night after night dashing off answers to articles, then never sent them in but rather burned them after a day or two because even keeping them in the house was unthinkable. This pointless scribbling occupied half of his time. He also went to hear visiting lecturers talk about the international situation, and she was always terrified that he would get up and ask a question and never come home. He didn’t ask questions, though, and always got home safe and sound.

  Uncle Avenir made little effort to defend himself. He laughed apologetically, but his lopsided grin gave no hope of amendment! And anyway, Raisa Timofeevna’s complaints were halfhearted; she seemed to have given up hope long ago. And she obviously didn’t begrudge him those “last few kopecks.”

  Their dark house with its unpainted walls and its bare rooms became cozier as soon as they closed the shutters. That soothing seclusion from the world outside is something our age has forgotten. Each shutter was held to by a strip of iron, from which a flange protruded through an opening into the house, where a peg was inserted in its eyehole. They didn’t need this to keep thieves out; they could have left the windows wide open; there was no loot to be had. But once the bolts were shot, the soul could relax its vigilance. They could not have managed any other way; the footpath ran under their windows, and passersby seemed to be barging into the room with their heavy tread, their loud voices, and their foul language.

  Raisa Timofeevna
went to bed early, and Uncle Avenir, moving and speaking quietly in the middle room (his hearing too was unimpaired), revealed yet another of his secrets: the swatches of yellowed newspaper hung up out of the sun and dust were just a noncriminal way of preserving the most interesting news from times past. (“Why are you keeping that particular newspaper, Citizen?” “I’m not keeping it; it just happens to be there.”) He couldn’t mark them, but he knew by heart what he could find in any one of them. They were hung up in such a way that the interesting bits could be got at without undoing a whole bundle every time.

  They stood side by side on two chairs, Uncle Avenir wearing his glasses, and read what Stalin had to say in 1939: “I know how the German people loves its Führer, and I therefore drink to his health!” In a 1924 newspaper over the window, Stalin was defending “the loyal Leninists Kamenev and Zinoviev” against the accusation that they had tried to sabotage the October coup.

  Innokenty was carried away by the excitement of the chase, and even in the feeble light of a forty-watt bulb, they would have gone on scrambling about the walls and rustling paper, trying to decipher the smudged and faded lines; but his wife’s reproachful cough on the other side of the wall worried Uncle Avenir, and he said: “Let’s call it a day. You aren’t leaving tomorrow, are you? We’d better put the light out; it uses a lot of juice. Why, I ask you, do they charge so much for electricity? However many power stations we build, it doesn’t get any cheaper.”

  They put the light out. But they didn’t feel like sleeping. In the small third room, a bed had been made up for Innokenty; his uncle perched on the edge of it, and they went on whispering for an hour or two like enraptured lovers who need no light for their billing and cooing.

  “It was all done by fraud,” Uncle Avenir insisted. In the dark you would never have taken his firm voice for that of an old man. “Instead of a government true to its word—‘Peace to the people! Bayonets into the ground!’—a year later deserter squads were hunting peasants in the woods and shooting them as a lesson to the rest! The tsar never did that. ‘Workers’ Control of Production’? Nowhere did it last a single month. The central government got a stranglehold on everything. If they’d said in 1917 that production norms would be raised year in and year out, who would ever have followed them? ‘An end to secret diplomacy and secret appointments,’ and in no time they were stamping everything ‘Secret’ or ‘Top Secret.’ Was there ever a country in which the people knew less about their government than we do?”

  Skipping from decade to decade and subject to subject was somehow easier in the dark, and Uncle Avenir was soon telling Innokenty that throughout the war large contingents of NKVD troops were garrisoned in all big provincial towns and never moved up to the front. Whereas the tsar had put all his guard regiments through the grinder and was left with no internal troops to put down Revolution. As for the muddleheaded provisional government, it had no troops at all at its disposal.

  “Another thing, about this last war between the Soviet Union and Germany. How do you see it?”

  Talking to him was so easy! Innokenty unhesitatingly found words that would never have occurred to him but for this dialogue.

  “I see it as a tragic war. We defended our country, and we lost it. It became the private estate of the Man with the Big Mustache and nothing more.”

  “We lost a lot more than the seven million they talk about,” his uncle said. “Of course we did. And for what? Just to draw the noose tighter around our necks. It’s the most unfortunate war in Russian history.”

  Then he went backward again, to the Second Congress of Soviets. Only three hundred out of the nine hundred deputies were present, there was no quorum, and so the congress had no power to confirm the Council of People’s Commissars.

  “I never knew that!”

  They had said good night twice, and Uncle Avenir had asked whether he should leave the door open because it was a bit stuffy; but then for some reason the atomic bomb surfaced, and he came back to whisper fiercely, “They’ll never make it themselves!”

  “They may. In fact, I’ve heard that the first bomb will be tested very shortly.”

  “Nonsense!” Uncle Avenir said confidently. “They’ll announce it, but who can check? They haven’t got the industrial base for it. It would take them twenty years.”

  He turned to leave the room and came back yet again.

  “But if they do succeed in making it, we’re done for, Inok. We will lose all hope of freedom.”

  Innokenty lay on his back, his eyes drinking in the thick darkness.

  “Yes, it will be dreadful. . . . They won’t let it lie idle. . . . And without the bomb they’ll never dare go to war.”

  “War is never the way out.” (Uncle Avenir was back again.) “It isn’t the advancing armies, the fires, and the bombing that make war terrible; it’s terrible mainly because it gives stupidity legitimate power over intelligence. Still, that’s the way it is with us even without war. . . . Now, go to sleep.”

  Household chores will not stand neglect. All that Uncle Avenir had skimped on that day awaited him the next morning, in addition to his usual routine. Before he left for the market, he took down two wads of newspaper, and Innokenty, knowing by now that it would be impossible to read them in the evening, hastened to look at them by daylight. The dried-out and dust-laden pages were unpleasant to the touch and left nasty smudges on the tips of his fingers. At first he kept washing or wiping the dirt off, but after a while he stopped noticing it, as he had stopped noticing all the house’s defects—the uneven floors, the poor light from the windows—and his uncle’s shabbiness. The earlier the year, the stranger it was to read about. He knew now that he would not be leaving that day either.

  In the evening they all dined together again. Uncle Avenir was lively and cheerful, reminiscing about his student years, the Philosophy Department, noisy and jovial student Revolutionary circles in the days when there was no more interesting place than prison. He had never joined a political party, because all party programs, as he saw it, did violence to man’s free will, and he did not acknowledge the prophetic superiority of party leaders to the rest of mankind.

  Raisa Timofeevna interrupted his reminiscences from time to time to talk about her hospital and all the snapping and snarling that was part of her (and everybody else’s) life.

  Once more they closed the shutters and bolted them. Then Uncle Avenir opened a chest in one of the storerooms and with the aid of an oil lamp (there was no wiring there) pulled out some warm clothes smelling of mothballs, some of them just rags. Then he held the lamp high and showed his nephew his treasure: the smooth, painted bottom of the chest was lined with a copy of Pravda from the second day of the October Revolution. The banner headline read: COMRADES! WITH YOUR BLOOD YOU HAVE INSURED THAT THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, THE RIGHTFUL MASTER OF OUR LAND, WILL BE DULY CONVENED.

  “That was before there had been any elections, of course. They didn’t know yet how few would vote for them.”

  He repacked the chest slowly and neatly.

  It was in the Constituent Assembly that the paths of Innokenty’s father and uncle had crossed. Artem, his father, was one of the leaders of the land-based sailors who had dispersed the unspeakable Constituent Assembly, while Uncle Avenir had demonstrated in support of that long-promised and eagerly awaited body.

  The demonstration with which Uncle Avenir had marched had gathered at the Troitsky Bridge. It was a mild, overcast winter day without wind or snow, and many of them wore open-necked shirts under their sheepskin coats. There were many students, high school pupils, and young ladies. Post office workers, telegraphers, civil servants. And miscellaneous individuals like Uncle Avenir. There were red flags carried by socialists and Revolutionaries and one or two green and white Kadet flags. A second demonstration, starting from the factories over the Neva, was entirely Social Democratic but also carried red flags.

  This story was told last thing at night, and in the dark again, so as not to annoy Raisa Timofeevna.
The house was shut up tight and in uneasy darkness, as all houses in Russia used to be in the far-off and forgotten time of feuds and murders, when people listened anxiously to the menacing sound of footsteps in the street and, if there was a moon, peered out through cracks in the shutters. There was no moon that night, and the streetlight was some way from the house. There were no gaps in these shutters, but a faint light struggling through the unshuttered window in the hallway and the wide-open door of their room occasionally allowed Innokenty to distinguish the movements rather than the contours of his uncle’s head against the surrounding blackness. Unsupported by the shine of his eyes and the tormented lines of his face, his voice asserted itself all the more youthfully and assuredly.

  “We marched grimly, in silence, not singing. We understood the importance of the occasion, but perhaps we didn’t fully understand. This was the one and only day of a free Russian parliament, something that had not existed in the preceding five hundred years and would not exist in the one hundred years ahead. Who wanted this parliament anyway? How many of us had gathered, from all over Russia? Five thousand. . . . They opened fire on us from gateways, from rooftops, and then from the sidewalks, and they weren’t shooting in the air but aiming point-blank at the demonstrators, chest high. Two or three fell out with each volley; the rest marched on. . . . None of us returned their fire; we didn’t have a single revolver between us. They wouldn’t let us get as far as the Tauride Palace. It was densely surrounded by sailors and Latvian sharpshooters. The Latvians decided our fate, little knowing what was in store for Latvia. On the Liteiny the Red Guards barred the way: ‘Break it up! Get on the pavement!’ They opened fire in short bursts. Red Guards tore one of the red flags out of our hands; I could tell you a thing or two about those Red Guards. . . . They broke the pole and trampled the flag underfoot. . . . Some of the demonstrators scattered; some ran back the way they’d come. The Red Guards fired on them from behind and killed some. They found it so easy, those Red Guards, shooting peaceful demonstrators in the back. Just imagine it, and remember that the Civil War hadn’t begun yet! But their code of behavior was already worked out.”