In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  But then Spiridon’s case was reopened. The charge of “economic counterrevolution” was changed to “dereliction of duty,” and as a result he became a “class ally” instead of a “class enemy.” He was called in and informed that he would now be entrusted with a rifle to stand guard over his fellow prisoners. Only yesterday Spiridon, like any decent zek, had abused the escort troops with the vilest of language and the convicts among them with words even stronger, but he now took the proffered rifle and marched out his comrades of yesterday under escort, because this shortened the term of his imprisonment and gave him forty rubles a month to send home.

  Before long, the camp commandant was congratulating him on his release. Spiridon got his documents made out, not for a kolkhoz but for a factory at Pochep. He collected Marfa and the children and was soon appearing on the factory honors board as one of the best glassblowers. He did all the overtime he could to recoup his losses from the fire. Husband and wife began to think about a little cottage with a garden and further schooling for their children. The children were fifteen, fourteen, and thirteen when the war broke out. The front moved quickly toward the settlement in which they lived. The authorities evacuated everybody they could to the East, the whole population of Pochep included.

  At every turning point in Spiridon’s life story, Nerzhin awaited the next surprise with bated breath. He half expected to hear that Spiridon, resenting as he must his years in camp, had stayed behind to await the Germans. Not at all. Spiridon had behaved at first as people do in the best patriotic novels: He buried his belongings, and as soon as the factory equipment was evacuated by rail and the workers given carts, he put his wife and three children on one of them and—“It isn’t my horse and it isn’t my whip, so off we go and I’ll never say ‘whoa’ ”—retreated from Pochep all the way to Kaluga, with thousands of others.

  But near Kaluga something went wrong, and their column broke up. There were now only hundreds of them rather than thousands. Moreover, the men were to be enlisted at the first recruiting office along the route and their families sent on without them.

  As soon as it became clear that he faced separation from his family, sure as ever that he was doing the right thing, Spiridon took to the woods, waited till the front had rolled past, put his family on the same old cart, pulled by the same horse, except that it was no longer state property but his very own to keep, and took them all the way back to Pochep and from there to his native village, where he settled in a deserted hut. He was told to take as much of the former kolkhoz land as he could work—and to work it. Spiridon plowed and sowed with no qualms of conscience, ignoring the war bulletins, working steadily and confidently, as though he was back in the far-off years when there was no kolkhoz and no war.

  Partisans came to him and said, “Pull yourself together, Spiridon; you should be fighting, not plowing.” “Somebody has to plow,” Spiridon answered and refused to leave the land. They tried to force people to join the Partisans. As he explained it now, it wasn’t enough that young and old would just as soon be creeping up on the Germans, knife between teeth, as sit at home chewing their crusts; no, what happened was that instructors from Moscow were parachuted in to drive the peasants out with threats or fatally compromise them.

  The Partisans managed to kill a German dispatch rider right in the middle of the village. They knew the German rules. The Germans drove in immediately, turned the people out of their houses, and burned the whole village to the ground.

  Once again Spiridon did not hesitate. The time had come to settle accounts with the Germans. He took Marfa and the children to her mother and hurried off to join the same group of Partisans in the forest. He was given an automatic rifle and, working just as conscientiously and methodically as he had in the factory and on the land, he picked off Germans patrolling the railway line, attacked convoys, helped to blow up bridges, and visited his family at holiday times. In spite of everything, he still had his family.

  But the front was rolling back their way. They flattered themselves that Spiridon would get a Partisan medal when Soviet troops arrived. It was even announced that Partisans would be incorporated into the regular army and that their days in the forest would soon be over.

  Then a lad came running with the news that the Germans had moved all the inhabitants from the village where Marfa was living.

  Spiridon was not waiting for the Red Army or for anything else. Without a word to anyone, he abandoned his gun and his two drums of ammunition and rushed off to find his family. He merged with the flood of displaced people, pretending to be a civilian, walking beside the same old cart, flicking the same little horse with his whip. Sure as always that he was doing what was right and proper, he trudged along the congested road from Pochep to Slutsk.

  Nerzhin clutched his head and rocked from side to side.

  “Dear oh dear oh dear! What extraordinary things you tell me, Spiridon Danilych! I can’t take it all in. You went over the ice to Kronstadt; you were one of those who set up this Soviet regime of ours; you forced people into the collective farms. . . .”

  “Well, didn’t you help to set it up?”

  Nerzhin was at a loss for an answer. The conventional view was that his father’s generation had established the regime and that in 1917, at that solemn moment, every one of those heroes clearly realized what he was doing.

  The smile on Spiridon’s lips grew broader.

  “You helped set it up, all right. Didn’t you realize?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Nerzhin whispered, going over in his mind his three years as an officer at the front.

  “Well, it’s like that sometimes; we plant rye, and what comes up is goosegrass.”

  But Nerzhin wanted to get on with his sociological investigation.

  “What happened next, Spiridon Danilych?”

  What happened next?!

  He could, of course, have made a break for the forest yet again. He tried it once, but there was a hair-raising encounter with bandits, and he narrowly saved his daughter from them. So he stayed with the column. Besides, he had begun to realize that the Soviet authorities would not believe him, would remember that he hadn’t joined the Partisans right away and that he had deserted. He decided that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb and went all the way to Slutsk. There they were put on trains and given food coupons to last them as far as the Rhineland. At first, the whisper went around that children could not be taken, and Spiridon started looking for a chance to turn back. But everyone was accepted, so he abandoned his horse and cart without a second thought and joined the train. He and the two boys were assigned to a factory near Mainz, and his wife and daughter were sent to work for farmers.

  One day at the factory a German foreman struck Spiridon’s younger son. Without stopping to think, Spiridon jumped up and threatened the foreman with an ax. Under German law Spiridon could have been shot. But the foreman calmed down, went up to the mutineer, and, as Spiridon now told the story, said: “I myself—Vater, I you—verstehe.”

  He did not report the matter, and Spiridon learned soon afterward that the foreman had that very morning received notification of his son’s death in Russia.

  Remembering that foreman in the Rhineland, the case-hardened Spiridon was not ashamed to wipe a tear away with his sleeve.

  “Since then I’ve never been angry with the Germans. They burned my house down and did all those other bad things, but that Vater wiped the slate clean. He had a heart, that man! There’s another sort of German for you!”

  That was one of the rare, the very rare, events to shake the redheaded peasant’s dogged certainty that he was always right. Otherwise, through all the difficult years, through all the cruel vicissitudes, self-doubt had never unmanned Spiridon at the decisive moment. Spiridon Yegorov was horrifyingly ignorant, his mind was closed to the highest creations of the human spirit and human society, but his actions and decisions were marked by a steady and unwavering common sense. For instance, knowing that the Germans would have sh
ot all the village dogs, he calmly buried the severed head of a cow in light snow, something he would never have done ordinarily. Needless to say, he had never studied geography or German, but when they were digging trenches in Alsace and things started getting rough (to top it all, the Americans were raining down bombs on them), he took his older son and ran away. He couldn’t read German signs or ask anyone the way. He lay low in the daytime and traveled only by night, over unknown country, as the crow flies, avoiding roads, covered ninety kilometers, and crept from house to house till he found the farm near Mainz where his wife was working. There he and his son holed up in a bunker in the orchard until the Americans arrived.

  Spiridon had never been teased by any of the eternally unanswerable questions—whether sensory perception supplies true knowledge, whether we are capable of knowing “things in themselves.” He was sure that he saw, smelled, and understood things without possibility of error.

  Spiridon’s moral code was just as uncomplicated and quietly confident. He spoke ill of no one. He never bore false witness. He used foul language only when necessary. He killed only when at war. He had got into fights only for his bride. He wouldn’t steal a crumb or a rag from any other person, but he robbed the state whenever opportunity offered, with a cool conviction that it was right. He had, as he said, “sampled a few women” before his marriage—but didn’t the great Aleksandr Pushkin confess that he found the commandment “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” a particularly hard one to keep?

  And now, fifty years old, a prisoner, almost blind, and obviously doomed to die right here in prison, Spiridon showed no inclination to play the saint, to despond, to repent, or—least of all—to “reform.” He simply took his busy broom in his hands and swept the yard from dawn to dusk, day in and day out, in a life-and-death struggle against the commandant and the operations officers.

  Whoever the power holders were, Spiridon was always at odds with them.

  What Spiridon loved was the land.

  What Spiridon possessed was his family.

  Concepts such as homeland, religion, and socialism, little used in ordinary everyday conversation, might have been completely unknown to Spiridon. His ears were deaf to them; he could not get his tongue around them.

  To him, homeland meant family.

  Religion meant family.

  Even socialism meant family.

  To all the disseminators of the rational and good and eternal, all the writers who had called Spiridon and his like “God bearers” (though he was unaware of it), the priests, the Social Democrats, the volunteer agitators and professional propagandists, White landowners and Red kolkhoz chairmen who had themselves dealt with Spiridon in the course of his life, he had just one angry, but of necessity silent, message: “Why don’t you all go . . . !”

  Chapter 68

  Spiridon’s Criterion

  THE TREADS OF the wooden staircase creaked and groaned as feet tramped and shuffled overhead. Now and then, fine dust and scraps of rubbish rained down on them, but Spiridon and Nerzhin hardly noticed.

  They sat, clasping their knees, on the unswept floor, in greasy, worn-out blue overalls, their seats stiff with dirt. It was rather uncomfortable sitting like that, leaning back on the sloping boards lining the underside of the stairs. They looked straight ahead, their eyes fixed on the peeling side wall of the bathroom.

  Nerzhin chain-smoked, as he always did when he was trying to work something out, placing his crushed cigarette ends in a row by the rotting baseboard underlining the triangle of dirty whitewashed wall beneath the stairs. Spiridon, like everybody else, received his allowance of White Sea Canal cigarettes—with a picture on the pack to remind him of the murderous work he had done in that murderous part of the world which had almost been his grave—but he was a strict nonsmoker, obeying the orders of the German doctors who had given him back three-tenths’ vision in one eye, given him back light.

  Spiridon had kept his grateful respect for German doctors. When he was blind beyond hope of recovery, they had driven a long needle into his spine, put ointment in his eyes, kept them bandaged for a long time, then removed the bandages in a half-darkened room and said, “Look!” And the world was lit up again! The dim nightlight seemed to Spiridon like bright sunshine. Spiridon could make out with his one eye the silhouette of his savior’s head, and he bent to kiss his hand.

  Nerzhin imagined the Rhenish doctor’s tense, preoccupied face softening at that moment. Looking at the redheaded savage from the eastern steppes, liberated from his bandages, hearing that warm voice choked with gratitude, perhaps he would be thinking that the savage was meant for better things and was not to blame for being what he was.

  From the German point of view, his behavior had been worse than that of a savage.

  Immediately after the war, Spiridon and his family were living in an American camp for displaced persons. He met a man from his own village, a relative by marriage and a “dirty dog,” said Spiridon, because of something he had done when they were cobbling together the kolkhoz. Spiridon and he had traveled as far as Slutsk together but had been separated in Germany. So of course they had to celebrate their reunion, and all they had was a bottle of raw alcohol brought along by the in-law. The spirits weren’t proofed, and they couldn’t read the German label; but it was costing them nothing. Evidently, even the wary Spiridon, whose circumspection had saved him from a thousand dangers, still had his share of his fellow countrymen’s reckless fatalism. So . . . pull the cork, brother! Spiridon knocked back a tumblerful, and his pal downed the rest in one swig. Luckily, Spiridon’s sons weren’t there, or they would have been given a shot apiece. When he woke up shortly after midday, Spiridon was alarmed to find the room in darkness so early. He put his head out the window, but there was no more light outside, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why the American staff building across the street and the sentry outside it had no upper halves. He hoped to conceal this disaster from Marfa, but by evening he was completely blind.

  His drinking companion died.

  After the first operation the eye doctors told him to take it easy for a year, then they’d operate again, and he’d recover the sight in his left eye in full and his right eye in part. This was a firm promise. All he had to do was wait.

  “But our lot—the dirty bums—filled our ears with lying tales, told us there were no collective farms anymore, that all was forgiven, our brothers and sisters were expecting us, all the bells were ringing. . . . Enough to make you slip out of your American shoes and run home barefoot.”

  This was too much for Nerzhin. “Danilych!” he said urgently, as if it were not too late for Spiridon to reconsider. “You knew things were never like they said! It was you who talked about planting corn and goosegrass coming up! What on earth possessed you? Surely you didn’t believe them?”

  Spiridon laughed, fine wrinkles around his eyes.

  “Who, me? I knew for sure they’d slip the hard collar on me, Gleb, my boy. I was in the lap of luxury with the Americans; I’d never have come back willingly.”

  “We know the bait they generally used. Men came back because their families were here. But yours was right there under your wing. Who enticed you back to the Soviet Union?”

  Spiridon sighed. “I said to Marfa Ustinovna right away, ‘They’ll promise us a lake, old girl, but who knows whether they’ll let us lap from a stinking puddle?’ She just ruffled my hair a bit and said, ‘Let’s just wait till you’ve got your eyes back; then we’ll see. Let’s wait for the other operation.’ But the three kids were so excited, they just couldn’t wait; they kept on at us: ‘Daddy! Mama! let’s go home! Back where we belong! Anybody would think there aren’t any eye doctors in Russia. We smashed the Germans, didn’t we? Somebody must have looked after the wounded. Our doctors are better than theirs!’ They said they had to finish school in Russia; my older boy only had two more classes to take when we left. My little girl, Vera, never stopped sniveling and blubbering. ‘D’you want me to m
arry a German?’ she kept saying. As if there weren’t plenty of Russians for her on the Rhine; but no, the silly girl thought she’d miss her number-one suitor if she didn’t come back here. . . . They had me scratching my head. ‘Children, children,’ I told them, ‘there are doctors in Russia, all right, but life there is murder; your father’s already had one narrow escape; why are you so desperate to get there?’ But no, it’s only the burned child that fears the fire.”

  So Spiridon had joined the ranks of those destroyed by their children.

  His mustache, ginger bristles touched with gray, quivered as he remembered. “I didn’t believe their leaflets for one second: I knew I would go straight to jail. Still, I thought they’d heap all the blame on me and leave the children out of it. It wasn’t their fault. I’d be locked up, but the kids could lead their own lives. Only, those scoundrels had their own ideas; they laid hands on the family as well.”

  Men and women had been separated at the frontier and sent on in different trains. Spiridon’s family had held together all through the war, but now it fell apart. Nobody asked whether you were from Bryansk or Saratov. His wife and daughter were deported, without trial, to the Perm oblast, where his daughter now worked on a power saw in a lumber camp. Spiridon and his sons were whisked behind the wires; the boys, as well as their father, were tried for treason and given ten years each. Spiridon landed in the camp at Solikamsk with his younger son and was at least able to mother him a bit for the next two years. The other son was thrown into one of the remote Kolyma camps.

  This, then, was home. So much for his daughter’s dream suitor and his sons’ education.

  What with the ordeal of interrogation and malnutrition in camp (he gave half his daily ration to his son), Spiridon’s eyesight did not improve; indeed, he began to lose the sight of his good, left eye. Out there in the depths of the forest, with all around him snarling and snapping like wolves, asking the doctors to restore his sight would have been almost like asking to be taken alive up to heaven. What passed for a hospital in camp could not have told him whether there was treatment for his eyes to be had in Moscow, still less, set about treating them itself.