In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Shattered by his meeting with his wife the day before, Gerasimovich had stayed in bed all day on Sunday, as if sick. Her cry as she left had shaken him badly.

  He could no longer just wait quietly for his sentence to run its course. Those last three years would be too much for Natasha. He had to do something about it. “You could do something right now if you wanted to!” she had said reproachfully, knowing how clever he was.

  Yes, there was something he could use, but it was too precious to put into those hands in return for crumbs from their table.

  If only he could come up with something . . . something trivial, but enough to earn him remission. But things don’t happen like that. Neither science nor life gives us anything gratis.

  He felt no better the next morning. It had cost him an effort to come out for exercise. He was well wrapped up but chilled to the bone, and he wanted to go back inside immediately. But he had run into Kondrashov-Ivanov, walked once around the circuit with him, and was his captive for the rest of the exercise period.

  “What? You mean to say you don’t know about Pavel Dmitrievich Korin?” Kondrashov sounded surprised, as if this was something every schoolboy knew. “Well, well, well! They say he’s got this remarkable picture—only nobody’s seen it—Vanishing Russia, it’s called. Some say it’s six meters, some twelve. He’s kept on a tight rein, his work is never exhibited, he’s painted this picture in secret, and when he dies, they’ll probably impound it.”

  “Why, what does it show?”

  “I only know what I’ve been told; I can’t vouch for it. It’s said to show an ordinary road in central Russia, in a hilly place, with clumps of trees. People are streaming along the road, looking preoccupied. Each individual is painted in painstaking detail. The sort of faces we find in old family photographs but don’t see around us anymore. Radiant Old Russian faces—peasants, plowmen, craftsmen—with high foreheads and full beards, people whose complexions, eyes, and thoughts were still clear and youthful in their seventies. The faces of girls whose ears are protected from foul language by invisible golden pendants, girls you couldn’t imagine in the Gadarene mob around the dance floor. Dignified old women. Silver-haired priests walking along in their vestments. Monks. Duma deputies. Overripe students in double-breasted jackets. Schoolboys in quest of universal truths. Haughty beauties in early-twentiethth-century town clothes. Somebody greatly resembling Korolenko. Then more peasants, and more, and more. . . . The most terrible thing is that these people are not in separate groups! Chronological order no longer exists. They are not talking to one another! They don’t look at one another; perhaps they can’t even see one another. They carry no travelers’ bundles on their backs. They simply . . . go on and on. And they’re not just walking along that particular highway; they are walking away altogether. Departing. . . . We are seeing the last of them. . . .”

  Gerasimovich halted abruptly.

  “I’m sorry, I must be alone for a while!”

  He turned sharply on his heel, left the artist in mid-gesture, and walked off in the opposite direction.

  He felt feverish. Not only could he see the picture as vividly as if he had painted it himself; he couldn’t help thinking that. . . .

  Morning had set in.

  A guard went around the yard shouting that the exercise period was over. As they went in through the underground hallway, the other prisoners found themselves jostling a morose Rubin, his grim beard emphasizing the sickly pallor of his face. He was trying to push through in the opposite direction. He had overslept and was too late not only for woodchopping (that was unthinkable anyway after his quarrel with Sologdin) but for his morning walkabout. After his brief, artificial sleep Rubin’s body was limp and numb. He felt that hunger for oxygen that is unknown to those who can breathe freely whenever they want. He was trying to fight his way out to the yard for a single gulp of fresh air and a handful of snow to rub himself with.

  But the guard standing at the head of the steps would not let him pass.

  Rubin stood in the concrete pit down below. A little snow had found its way down there, and there was a refreshing draft. He performed three slow, circular movements with his arms, taking deep breaths, then collected some snow from the floor of the pit, rubbed his face with it, and wandered back into the prison.

  Spiridon, now wide awake and very hungry after clearing a path for cars all the way to the guardhouse, went the same way.

  In the prison HQ the two lieutenants—the one with the two little squares of mustache, who was going off duty, and the new arrival, Lieutenant Zhvakun—opened a large envelope and studied the orders left for them by Major Myshin.

  Lieutenant Zhvakun, a dense, fat-faced ruffian, had risen to the rank of sergeant major during the war, serving as a divisional executioner (or, in the official terminology, “executive officer attached to the military tribunal”), and he had earned further promotion as a result. He greatly valued his position in Special Prison No. 1, and since literacy was not his strong suit, he perused Myshin’s instructions twice to be sure of getting them right.

  At 8:50 the two of them went around the prisoners’ rooms to inspect and to announce, as instructed: “All prisoners are to submit to Major Myshin in the course of the next three days a list of their immediate relatives set out as follows: number of relatives in list, name of relative (surname, given name, patronymic), degree of affinity, place of work, home address. ‘Immediate relatives’ means mother, father, legal wife, sons and daughters of a legal registered marriage. Other relatives—brothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, grandchildren, and grandmothers—do not count as immediate relatives. As of January first, prisoners will be allowed to correspond with or receive visits from immediate relatives as defined in this list and no one else.

  “Furthermore, as of January first, the size of a prisoner’s monthly letter must not exceed one double page of an exercise notebook.”

  This order, so mean and inexorable, defied understanding. No exclamations of despair or indignation sped Zhvakun on his way, only sarcastic cries of “Happy New Year!” and “Cuckoo!”

  “Denounce our relatives?”

  “You mean the sleuths can’t find them?”

  “Why doesn’t it say whether we should write in small letters or capitals?”

  Zhvakun, counting heads, tried simultaneously to memorize who had shouted, so that he could report them to the major.

  Treat them well or treat them badly, prisoners are never satisfied.

  Chapter 75

  Four Nails

  THE ZEKS DISPERSED to their workplaces in a daze.

  Even the old hands were stunned by the savagery of these new regulations. They were doubly cruel. To begin with, it would be impossible in the future to preserve the tenuous lifeline to their loved ones without betraying them to the police. And many of those outside had thus far managed to conceal the fact that they had relatives behind bars. Otherwise, their jobs and their homes would not be safe. Just as cruel was the exclusion of unregistered wives and children, as well as brothers and sisters. (And of course cousins. After the war—the air raids, the evacuations, the famine—many zeks had no closer surviving relatives.) When you’re about to be arrested, you aren’t given time to go to confession and Holy Communion and to put your affairs in order. So many men had left behind loyal partners whose passports were not smudged with a registry office stamp. Such a partner was now officially “no relation.”

  An Iron Curtain encircled the whole, vast country, and within it another one—of steel, tight and impenetrable—was being lowered around Marfino.

  Even the most incorrigible enthusiasts for the daily grind were demoralized. When the bell went, they took their time moving out, blocking the hallways, smoking, talking. Seated at their workplaces, they went on talking and smoking. One question exercised them above all others: Surely it could not be true that the Ministry of State Security had so far failed to collect and systematize in its central card-index information about all relatives of prisoners
? Newcomers and simple souls considered the ministry omnipotent and omniscient; it could not possibly need this “census by denunciation.” Long-timers shook their heads knowingly, explaining that the security services, like the rest of the state machine, were grossly overstaffed and muddleheaded, that the register of relatives in the ministry was chaotic, that personnel departments and security officers sat tight behind their black-leather-upholstered doors, not attempting to “catch mice” (their official rations sufficed), and failing to analyze the answers to innumerable questionnaires. Nor did prison administrators forward promptly the required excerpts from their records of visitors and parcels received. All of this meant that if you now gave Klimentiev and Myshin the list they were asking for, you could inflict a fatal blow on your relatives.

  The more they talked like this, the less they felt like work.

  As it happened, this was the first morning of the last week of the year, and the bosses had decreed that the institute must put on a heroic spurt to fulfill the monthly plan for December and the plan for 1949. It would also draft and formally adopt its annual plan for 1950, its quarterly plan for January–March, an interim plan for January, and finally a plan for the first ten days of January. The paperwork involved would be done by the bosses themselves. The real work was left to the prisoners. Today, of all days, it was important that they should show enthusiasm.

  The officers in charge of the institute knew nothing at all about the destructive announcement made that morning by the prison command in accordance with its own annual plan.

  Nobody could accuse the Ministry of State Security of living according to holy writ! But biblical language aptly described one of its characteristics: Its right hand did not know what the left was doing.

  Major Roitman, with no trace of his overnight anxieties on his freshly shaved face, had assembled all the prisoners and free workers in the Acoustics Laboratory to exchange ideas on the new plans. Roitman had a long, intelligent face and protruding negroid lips. He was wearing an incongruous and quite unnecessary shoulder belt over a rather baggy tunic.

  He wanted to put a brave face on it himself and encourage the zeks, but the odor of failure already hovered under the vaulted ceiling. The middle of the room looked bare and forlorn now that the vocoder bench had been taken out. Pryanchikov, that pearl in the Acoustics Lab’s crown, was missing. So was Rubin, now behind a locked door with Smolosidov on the third floor. Roitman himself was in a hurry to get it over with and go upstairs to join them.

  Of the free workers Simochka was missing. She had replaced a colleague on the after-dinner shift. That was something to be thankful for! Some slight relief to Nerzhin in his present mood. He would not have to exchange notes and signals with her.

  He sat in the discussion group lolling against the comfortably pliant back of his chair with his feet on the lower stave of another chair. Most of the time he was looking through the window. Outside, a westerly and obviously wet wind had sprung up. It had given a leaden look to the cloudy sky, and the snow on the ground would soon be loose and crunchy. Yet another senseless sloppy thaw was on the way.

  After a poor night’s sleep, the skin of Nerzhin’s face was slack, and in the gray morning light it looked deeply furrowed. He was experiencing that Monday-morning feeling familiar to many prisoners. It was as if he lacked the strength to move or even to live.

  One visit a year! And he had been allowed his one visit only yesterday. He had thought that all that was most urgently necessary had been said, that it sufficed for a long time ahead! But now . . . ?

  When will I be able to tell her? Will I write? But how can I mention it in a letter? How can I mention your place of work? After yesterday it’s obviously impossible anyway.

  Will I say, Since I don’t want to give information about you, we must stop corresponding? The address on the envelope would amount to a denunciation!

  What if I don’t write at all? What would she think? Only yesterday I was smiling at her. Can I stop talking to her forever the very next day?

  He felt as if a vise, not the vise of poetic metaphor but a huge, metalworker’s vise with notched lips and gaping maw, was closing around his trunk and squeezing the breath out of him.

  There was no way out of it! Whatever he did would be wrong.

  Roitman, soft-spoken and shortsighted, peered mildly through his pebble glasses and spoke of plans, plans, and still more plans, but not in the voice of authority. There was a hint of fatigue in his voice, and he seemed to be pleading with them.

  His words, however, were falling on stony ground.

  Nerzhin sat hemmed in by chairs and workbenches, clamped in the metal jaws so that he could neither breathe nor move. His despondency showed in the downturned corners of his lips. His eyes were fixed unseeingly on the dark fence and the guard tower with a screw up top, exactly in line with his window.

  Angry thoughts raced behind that meekly passive face.

  The years would go by, and all those who had listened with him to that morning’s announcement, all those who were now morose or indignant or despondent or seething with fury would . . . well, some of them would be in their graves, some would become feebly complacent, some would forget the whole thing, disavow their experience, ease their minds by suppressing their prison memories, while yet a fourth group would stand the truth on its head and say that what had been done was not ruthless but merely sensible. He doubted whether a single one of them would want to make today’s torturers regret what they had done to the human heart!

  People had an astounding capacity to forget! Forget the solemn vows made in 1917. Forget what was promised in 1928. Year after year, they had descended, dazed and docile, step by step, losing their pride and freedom, accepting ever lower standards in dress and nutrition, and as a result their memories had become shorter, and the longing to creep meekly into some hole, to live out their lives as best they could in some hole, some crevice, some crack in the floor, had grown on them.

  This only reinforced Nerzhin’s feeling that he had a duty to discharge, a mission to carry out, for all of them. He knew that it was not in his own obstinate nature to be deflected, to cool off, to forget.

  For all the cruel things they had done—interrogations under torture, prisoners dying of starvation in the camps, this morning’s announcement—let four nails crucify their memory! Nail them, through palms and shins, to the cross, and let them hang there with their lies and stink until the sun grows cold and life on planet Earth is extinct.

  If nobody else could be found to do it, Nerzhin would drive in those four nails himself.

  A man in the grip of a metalworker’s vise could not wear the skeptical smile of a Pyrrho.

  His ears heard, though they were not listening to what Roitman was saying. It was only when the lieutenant began to use the words “socialist obligations” over and over again that Nerzhin shuddered in disgust. He had more or less reconciled himself to “plans.” He was an ingenious drafter of plans himself. He could contrive to slip into the annual plan a dozen imposing items involving little work; the work would have been partly done already, or it would demand no great effort, or it might be an optical illusion. Every time he submitted a beautifully crafted plan, it was approved and accepted as the limit of what could be expected of him, but then his superiors immediately contradicted themselves and showed their contempt for the feelings of a political prisoner by suggesting from month to month that Nerzhin should go one better with a supplementary “scientific socialist obligation” of his own.

  Roitman was followed by other speakers, first a free worker, then a zek, after which he asked, “What do you have to say, Gleb Vikentich?”

  Nerzhin did not turn a hair.

  In the dark recesses of his mind, he gripped those four iron nails.

  These people were as ruthless as wild beasts, and he must show animal cunning in his dealings with them.

  As though he had only been waiting for Roitman’s challenge, Nerzhin rose with alacrity, his face a picture of
ingenuous interest.

  “The articulation group’s plan for 1949 has been fulfilled in all particulars ahead of time. At present, I am engaged on working out the application of probability theory to the articulation of interrogative sentences, and I plan to finish this by March, which will make it possible to analyze interrogative sentences scientifically. In addition to this, even if Lev Grigorievich is busy elsewhere, I will carry on with the classification of human voices both by the subjective-descriptive method and by objective measurement with apparatus.”

  “Yes, yes, yes! The voices! That’s very important,” Roitman interrupted, thinking of his plans for phonoscopy.

  The austere pallor of Nerzhin’s face and his tousled hair spoke of a life as a martyr to science, the science of articulation.

  “We must also step up socialist competition; that will be a big help,” he concluded confidently. “We, too, will announce our socialist obligations by January 1. Our duty, as I see it, is to work harder and better in the coming year than we did last year.” (When he had done nothing at all.)

  Two other zeks spoke up. The most natural thing for them to do would have been to confess to Roitman and the whole assembly that they could not turn their minds to plans or their hands to work because they had just been finally robbed of the illusion that they still had families, but that was not what their boss expected of them, keyed up as he was for a great burst of productive effort. Even if someone had said such things, Roitman would merely have blinked in hurt dismay, and the meeting would have continued along predetermined lines.

  It ended. Roitman sprinted up to the third floor, taking the stairs two at a time, and knocked on the door of Rubin’s top-secret room.

  Conjecture was already raging there. The magnetic tapes were being compared.