In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  “I don’t think so,” he said with a miserable laugh. “Even you can’t do that.”

  “There’s nothing I can’t do,” she insisted in a low voice. “What good would it be loving you if I couldn’t make you forget your troubles?”

  And Innokenty found himself pressing his lips to hers, as in the time he liked best to remember.

  The relentless dread in his soul was overwhelmed by a feeling of bliss.

  They went through the flat, still entwined, and with no thought of a trap.

  Innokenty was lost in a universe of warm maternal love.

  No longer shivering.

  Dotty was his universe.

  Chapter 71

  Let’s Agree That This Didn’t Happen

  THE SHARASHKA WAS ASLEEP AT LAST. Zeks, 280 of them, slept in the bluish lamplight, hugging their pillows or flat on their backs, some breathing soundlessly, some snoring horribly, some crying out incoherently from time to time, curled up to keep warm or sprawling to seek relief from the stifling heat. They slept on two stories of the building and on two-tiered bunks, and they dreamed: old men of their families, young men of women. They dreamed of lost possessions, a train, a church, their judges. . . . Their dreams were all different, but whatever they dreamed, the sleepers were miserably aware that they were prisoners. If in their dreams they roamed over green grass or through city streets, it could mean only that they had tricked their jailers and escaped or had been released in error and were now wanted men. That total, blissful forgetfulness of their shackles imagined by Longfellow in “The Prisoner’s Dream” was denied them. The shock of wrongful arrest, followed by a ten- or twenty-year sentence, the baying of guard dogs, the sound of escort troops priming their rifles, the nerve-racking jangle of reveille in the camps, seep through all the strata of ordinary experience, through all their secondary and even primary instincts, into a prisoner’s very bones so that, sleeping, he remembers that he is in jail before he becomes aware of smoke or the smell of burning and gets up to find the place on fire.

  Mamurin the has-been was asleep in his solitary cell. The off-duty shift of guards was sleeping. So was the shift now supposedly on watch. The female medical orderly on duty, after resisting the lieutenant with the two tabs of mustache all evening, had yielded some little time ago, and they, too, were now both asleep on the narrow couch in the sickbay. And, finally, the dim little guard posted on the main stairway by the chained iron door to the prison, once he saw that no one was coming to check up on him, cranked his field telephone a time or two without result and fell asleep in his chair, resting his head on a locker and forgetting that he was supposed to peek from time to time through the little window into the hallway of the special prison.

  The 281st prisoner had lain low till the hour when the Marfino prison routine ceased to operate. He then quietly left the semicircular room, screwing up his eyes at the bright light outside and treading on the cigarette ends littering the hallway. He had put his boots on without foot rags and draped his threadbare army overcoat over his underwear. His grim black beard was disheveled, his thinning hair had strayed in all directions, and there was a look of suffering on his face.

  He had tried in vain to fall asleep and had gotten up to pace the hallway. He had tried this remedy before. It always calmed him down and brought relief from the burning pain at the back of his head and the tearing pain near his liver.

  He had left the room to stretch his legs but, insatiable reader that he was, had brought a few books with him and inserted the first draft of his “Project for Civic Temples” in one of them, together with a blunt pencil. All these things, together with a pack of light tobacco and his pipe, he laid out on the dirty table and began walking down the hallway and back, clasping his overcoat.

  He was aware that all prisoners suffered, enemies of the state jailed by their enemies no less than those who were jailed for nothing. But he regarded his own position (and Abramson’s, too) as tragic in the Aristotelian sense. The blow had been struck by the hands of those he loved most. Soulless bureaucrats had jailed him for loving the common cause with indecent ardor. The prison guards and their superiors gave expression in their activities to the infallible law of progress, but because of a tragic misunderstanding Rubin was at loggerheads with them day in and day out. Whereas his fellow prisoners were no comrades of his. In every cell he had been in, they had reproached him, abused him, been ready almost to bite him, because they saw only their own misery and were blind to the great design. They persecuted him not for truth’s sake but to take out on him what they could not take out on their jailers. They baited him, little caring that every such attack tied his insides in knots. And in every cell, at each new encounter, in every discussion, it was his duty to try to convince them, with unflagging enthusiasm and in disdain of their insults, that, overall and in the main, things were going as they should: industry flourishing, agriculture highly productive, science abubble with new ideas, the world of the arts dazzling in its rainbow brilliance.

  Every such cell, every such argument, was a sector of the front, on which Rubin stood alone in defense of socialism.

  His opponents often took advantage of their superior number to pass themselves off as “the people” and represent Rubin and his like as a handful of oddities. But he knew that this was a lie! The people was out there, beyond those prison walls, beyond the barbed wire. The people had taken Berlin, met the Americans on the Elbe; trainloads of discharged soldiers had poured eastward to reconstruct the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, set the Donbass to work again, rebuild Stalingrad. It was his feeling of oneness with those millions that sustained Rubin in his claustrophobic struggle single-handed against dozens of fellow prisoners at a time.

  Rubin rapped on the pane set in the iron doors—once, twice, and the third time loudly. At the third knock the dim screw, still half asleep, rose and put his face to the window.

  “I feel unwell,” Rubin said. “I need medicine. Take me to the medical orderly.”

  The guard thought a bit, then said, “All right. I’ll give them a call.”

  Rubin resumed his pacing.

  He was altogether a tragic figure.

  He had passed through prison gates before any of those now locked up here.

  A grown-up cousin, whom sixteen-year-old Lev idolized, had given him some type to hide. Young Lev jumped at the chance. But he had not been on his guard against the boy next door, who had spied on him and denounced him. Lev had not given his cousin away; he had spun a yarn about finding the type under the stairs.

  That solitary confinement cell in the Kharkov “investigation prison” twenty years earlier came back to him as he tramped with measured tread back and forth along the hallway.

  The prison had been built on the American model. It was like an open well, several stories deep, with iron landings connected by iron stairs. At the bottom of the well sat a traffic controller with little flags. Every sound echoed loudly through the prison. Young Lev heard someone being dragged noisily up a flight of stairs, and suddenly an earsplitting yell shook the prison: “Comrades! Greetings from the icebox! Down with Stalin’s torturers!”

  They beat him (that unmistakable sound of blows on soft flesh!), held his mouth shut, stifling his shouts until they stopped altogether, but then three hundred prisoners in three hundred solitary cells rushed to their doors to bang on them and scream:

  “Down with the murdering dogs!”

  “Drinking the workers’ blood!”

  “We’ve got another tsar on our backs!”

  “Long live Leninism!”

  And suddenly from some of the cells passionate voices struck up the “Internationale”: “Arise, ye starvelings of oppression!”

  The whole invisible throng of prisoners, oblivious of all else, roared out, “And the last fight let us face. . . .”

  Lev could not see them, but he felt sure that many of the singers had tears of exaltation in their eyes, as he did.

  The prison had buzzed like a disturbed
hive. A bunch of guards with keys cowered terror-stricken on the stairs, silenced by the immortal proletarian hymn. . . .

  The pain in the back of his head came in waves. The ache in the small of his back was excruciating.

  Rubin rapped on the window again. At his second knock the sleep-sodden face of the same guard swam into view. He opened the hinged pane and muttered, “I called, but they aren’t answering.”

  He made as if to close the window, but Rubin gripped the frame to prevent it. Suffering agonies, he raised his voice in exasperation.

  “So why not use your legs! Can’t you understand? I’m sick! I can’t sleep! Call the medical orderly.”

  “Oh, all right,” the screw said.

  And shut the window.

  Rubin resumed his desperate pacing, along a hallway fouled with spittle, littered with cigarette butts, getting nowhere, and feeling that he was making just as little progress through the hours of night.

  His vision of the Kharkov jail, which he always recalled with pride—though those two weeks of solitary confinement had blackened his record, complicated his life ever since, and aggravated his present sentence—was followed by other memories, galling memories always kept to himself.

  One day he was called to the Party office at the tractor plant. Lev thought of himself as one of the founders of the factory; he was on the editorial staff of its newsletter. He ran around the workshops encouraging the young, bucking up the older workers, pinning up “news flashes” about the achievements of shock brigades, about delays, and about slovenly work.

  A lad of twenty in a Russian shirt, he went into the Party office as confidently as he had once entered the office of the secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee. On that occasion he had said, quite simply, “Good day, Comrade Postyshev,” and the First Secretary had held out his hand. So now he behaved in just the same way to a forty-year-old woman with close-cropped hair tied up in a red headscarf.

  “Good day, Comrade Pakhtina! You sent for me?”

  “Good day, Rubin.” She shook his hand. “Sit down.”

  He sat.

  There was a third person in the room, not a worker by the look of him, wearing a tie, a suit, and low yellow shoes. He sat on one side, looking through some papers and ignoring the new arrival.

  The Party office was as austere as a confessional, decorated and furnished throughout in flame red and workaday black.

  The woman talked halfheartedly to Lev about factory business, which they ordinarily discussed enthusiastically. Then suddenly she sat back in her chair and said firmly, “Comrade Rubin! You must not hold things back from the Party!”

  Lev was astounded. What could she mean? Didn’t he work with all his might, damage his health, turn night into day for the Party?

  No! That wasn’t enough!

  So what more was expected of him?

  At this point the outsider politely intervened. He addressed Lev with an old-fashioned formality that grated on a proletarian ear. He said that Lev must, honestly and without reservation, tell all he knew about his married cousin: Was it true that he had been an active member of an underground Trotskyist organization and now tried to conceal this from the Party?

  Both pairs of eyes were fastened on him, and he had to say something immediately.

  Lev had learned to look at the Revolution through that very cousin’s eyes and knew from him that it was not always as neat and festive as a May Day parade. Yes, the Revolution was springtime, and that was why there was so much mud for the Party to flounder in until it found a firm footing.

  But that, after all, was four years ago. The controversies within the Party had petered out. People hardly remembered the Bukharinites, let alone the Trotskyists. Stalin was slavishly, unimaginatively copying all the proposals for which the great heresiarch had been banished from the Soviet Union. Like a thousand coracles cobbled together to make an ocean liner, a thousand peasant holdings were amalgamated and called a collective farm. The furnaces of Magnitogorsk were already smoking, and tractors from the four pioneer factories were tilling the kolkhoz soil. The ambitious slogans of the First Five-Year Plan would soon be out of date. Objectively, all this had been accomplished to the greater glory of World Revolution, so was it worth fighting now over the name to be attached to these great deeds? (Lev had forced himself to love the new name, too. Yes, Lev had come to love HIM!) So why arrest now, why take vengeance on those who had dissented earlier?

  “I don’t know; he was never a Trotskyist,” Lev heard himself saying, but that was the young Lev. His reason told him that he must speak like an adult, without puerile romanticism; refusal to cooperate was now pointless.

  The Party secretary spoke, chopping the air for emphasis. “The Party! Is it not the most important thing in our lives? How can we withhold anything from the Party? Refuse to open our hearts? To the Party? The Party does not punish! The Party is our conscience! Remember what Lenin said. . . .”

  Ten pistol barrels staring him in the face would not have intimidated young Lev Rubin. Threats of the icebox or banishment to Solovki would not have wrested the truth from him. But the Party! He was incapable of lying or prevaricating in that red-and-black confessional.

  Rubin revealed what group his cousin had belonged to, and when, and what he had done.

  The woman preacher was silent. It was the polite stranger in the yellow shoes who spoke: “Let me see if I’ve understood you correctly.” He read out what he had written. “Now sign. Right here.”

  Lev recoiled. “Who are you? You’re not the Party!”

  “Why do you say that?” The visitor was offended. “I, too, am a member of the Party. I’m an investigating officer of the GPU.”

  RUBIN RAPPED ON THE WINDOW AGAIN. The guard appeared, obviously torn from his sleep and breathing heavily.

  “What are you knocking for now? However many times I call, there’s no answer.”

  Rubin’s eyes were hot with indignation. “I asked you to go down there, not to call. My heart is bothering me! I may die!”

  “Now don’t you go and die on me.” The screw’s drawling voice sounded conciliatory, almost sympathetic. “You’ll last till morning. You know I can’t go away and leave my post.”

  “What sort of idiot d’you think would run off with your post?” Rubin shouted.

  “It isn’t that; it’s against regulations.”

  Rubin himself almost believed that he was about to die, his head was throbbing so violently. The guard looked at his agonized face and made up his mind.

  “Oh all right, get away from the peephole and don’t knock anymore. I’ll pop down. “

  Rubin assumed that he had gone, and the pain abated slightly.

  He began pacing the hall again. Memories that he had no wish at all to awaken drifted through his mind. Things that he must forget if he wished to be made whole again.

  Rubin had been anxious shortly after his first spell in jail to atone for his sin against the Komsomol and he was in a hurry to prove to himself and to the only Revolutionary class how useful he could be. So he set off with a Mauser over his shoulder to help collectivize a village.

  He had run three versts barefoot, firing as he went, to escape from a crowd of infuriated peasants—and what had it meant to him at the time? “Now I’ve had a taste of civil war.” That was all.

  Blow up the pits in which grain is hidden. Stop peasants grinding corn and baking bread. Don’t let them draw water from the well. If a peasant child is dying—go ahead and die, you villains, you and your children with you; you’re not going to bake bread! That solitary cart pulled by a drooping horse through the deathly hush of the village at dawn caused no twinge of pity. It was a sight as unremarkable as a tram-car in town. The handle of a whip knocks on a shutter: “Any dead in there? Out with them.”

  On to the next shutter.

  “Any dead? Out with them.”

  And before long it’s “Hey! Is there anybody alive in there?”

  Now all this was imprinted on his
brain in red-hot letters. It burned. And sometimes he imagined that he had been wounded—for that! Imprisoned—for that! His illnesses were for that!

  That was only fair. But now that he knew how horrible it had been, knew that he could never do it again, now that he had paid for it all, how could he cleanse himself of it? Who was there to say it never happened? We will now assume that it never happened! Behave as though it never happened!

  What excruciating torment a sleepless night can be for a soul grieving over past mistakes.

  THIS TIME THE GUARD SLID BACK the windowpane unasked. He had finally steeled himself to leave his post and go down to the staff room. He found them all asleep. There was nobody to answer the phone. He had roused the sergeant major, who listened to his report, gave him a dressing-down for leaving his post, and, knowing that the medical assistant was sleeping with the lieutenant, did not take the liberty of awakening them.

  “Nothing doing,” the guard said through the gap in the window. “I went myself and reported. They said they couldn’t do anything. Said leave it till morning.”

  “But I’m dying! I’m dying,” Rubin said hoarsely. “I’ll break the pane! Call the duty officer right away! I’m going on hunger strike!”

  “How can you go on hunger strike? Nobody’s offering you anything to eat,” the screw very reasonably retorted. “Breakfast time tomorrow, that’s the time to go on hunger strike. . . . Oh, well . . . keep waiting a bit, and I’ll give the sergeant major another call.”

  Rankers, sergeants, lieutenants, colonels, generals—with their fat jobs and their fat pay envelopes—none of them cared one little bit what became of the atom bomb . . . or a prisoner at his last gasp.

  Last gasp or not, he must try to rise above it all!

  Struggling against pain and nausea, Rubin tried to keep up his measured pacing. Suddenly he remembered Krylov’s fable “The Damascene Blade.” It had meant nothing to him as a free man, but in jail. . . .

  A sharp saber was thrown onto a scrap heap, taken with the rest of the old iron to market, and sold to a peasant for a song. The peasant used the blade to strip bark and to chip tapers from logs. The blade became jagged and rusty. One day, under a bench in the peasant’s hut, a hedgehog asked the blade if it wasn’t ashamed. The blade’s answer was that which in his thoughts Rubin had often given himself: “The shame is not mine; the shame is his who lacked the wit to understand the feats I can perform.”