In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  So, then, the list was posted, and prisoners stood in line for their letters. With them stood others who wished to dispatch the one letter each of them was allowed for December. This, too, had to be handed to the godfather. Under cover of these operations Major Myshin could summon his stoolies for unscheduled meetings and talk to them without fear of interruption. So that it would not be obvious which interviews were most important to him, he sometimes detained an honest zek or two and kept the others guessing.

  This meant that everyone in the line was suspected by someone. Sometimes, however, they knew exactly who was putting their lives “in pawn” and smiled at him ingratiatingly.

  Soviet penal practice, though not based directly on the experience of Cato the Elder, faithfully followed his injunction not to let slaves be too friendly with one another.

  As the lunch bell rang, zeks rushed up from the basement and across the yard without coats and caps—the wind was damp but not cold—and darted through the door of the prison HQ. Because new regulations governing correspondence had been announced that morning, the line was unusually long—some forty men—and there was no room for all of them in the hallway. The duty officer’s assistant, a martinet sergeant major, brought all the resources of a ripe physique into play, counted off twenty-five men, and told the rest to take a walk and come back during the supper break. Those allowed in he lined up against the wall, well away from the bosses’ offices, and he paced the hallway continually to keep order. Each zek in turn walked past several doors, knocked at Major Myshin’s office, and awaited permission to enter. When he emerged, the next man was admitted. The sergeant major directed the traffic throughout the lunch break.

  Spiridon had begged to be given his letter early in the morning, but Myshin had been adamant. He would get it, like all the others, in the lunch break. But half an hour before lunch Major Shikin had summoned him for questioning. If Spiridon had made the required statement and admitted everything, who knows, he might have been in time to get his letter. But he had dug his heels in. Major Shikin could not let him leave unchastened. So he had sacrificed his lunch break (and anyway, he preferred to avoid the crush in the free workers’ dining room) to continue his interrogation.

  First in the line for letters was Dyrsin, an engineer from Number Seven, a key member of its staff, and a wreck of a man. It was more than three months since he had received a letter. He kept asking Myshin, but “Nothing for you” and “Nobody’s writing” were all the answers he got. He asked Mamurin to send somebody to look. Waste of breath. Nobody was sent. But today his name was on the list, and fighting against the pain in his chest, he had rushed to be first in line. He had no family left except for a wife as worn-out by ten years of waiting as he was.

  The sergeant major waved Dyrsin in, and Ruska Doronin was now next. Ruska, with his devil-may-care grin and floppy blond forelock. Seeing the Latvian, Hugo, one of his confidants, behind him in line, tossed his hair back, winked, and said in a whisper, “I’m here to collect my money. Money I’ve earned.”

  “Move up,” the sergeant major ordered.

  Doronin shot forward, passing Dyrsin as he returned dejected.

  “Well?” Amantai Bulatov, his workmate, asked Dyrsin, once they were out in the yard.

  Dyrsin’s face, always unshaved, always doleful, looked even longer.

  “I don’t know. He says there is a letter, but come back after the break and we’ll talk.”

  “Bastards!” Bulatov said, with a flash of anger through his horn-rimmed glasses. “I keep telling you they hold our letters back. Refuse to work!”

  “They’d pin a second sentence on me,” Dyrsin said with a sigh. He was always hunched, his head drawn down into his shoulders, as though he had been struck sharply from behind with something heavy.

  Bulatov sighed with him. If he was so militant, it was because he still had so much time to do. A zek becomes less and less sure of himself as the day of release draws nearer. Dyrsin was into his last year.

  The sky was an unrelieved gray, with no darker clouds and no gleam of light. It had no depth; it was not vaulted; it was like a dirty tarpaulin stretched above the earth. The snow had settled into a porous mass under the keen wet wind, and its morning whiteness was beginning to look rusty. It hardened into slippery brownish hillocks under the feet of men taking exercise.

  But the constitutional went on as usual. The weather would never be foul enough to make prisoners wilting for lack of air in the sharashka forgo their walk. After long confinement they enjoyed being buffeted by gusts of damp wind that blew the stale air and stale thoughts out of a man.

  The engraver darted to and fro among the strollers, took one zek after another by the arm, and asked his advice. His plight, as he saw it, was singularly dreadful. He had been unable to formalize his marriage in prison, and now his partner (his first) was not regarded as his legal wife. He had no right to correspond with her and, since he had used up his allowance of letters for December, no means of letting her know that he would not be writing. People sympathized with him. His position was indeed absurd. But each of them felt his own pain more keenly than the next man’s.

  Kondrashov-Ivanov, tall, stiff as a ramrod, and hypersensitive, moved slowly along, gazing over the heads of the walkers, and informed Professor Chelnov in an ecstasy of pessimism that when your dignity was trampled underfoot, to go on living was to debase yourself. Any man with courage had a simple way to escape this chain of humiliations.

  Professor Chelnov, wearing his eternal woolen hat and his plaid shawl around his shoulders, contented himself with a quotation from Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae.

  A group of volunteer stoolie hunters had gathered near the entrance to HQ: Bulatov, whose voice carried right across the yard; Khorobrov; Zemelya, the amiable fellow from the Vacuum Lab; Dvoetyosov, sporting his Gulag jacket on principle; quick-witted Pryanchikov, who had a finger in every pie; Max, the leader of the Germans; and one of the Latvians.

  “The country needs to know who its stoolies are!” Bulatov repeated, encouraging them in their determination not to disperse.

  “We’ve got a pretty good idea already,” Khorobrov answered, standing in the doorway and running his eyes over the men standing in line. He could be fairly sure of some of those lining up for their thirty pieces of silver. But of course it was only the least clever among them who aroused suspicion.

  Ruska rejoined the company. It cost him an effort not to flourish his money order. Heads together, they all hurriedly inspected it. It was from a mythical Klavdia Kudryavtseva, addressed to Rostislav Doronin, and for 147 rubles!

  Returning from lunch, Artur Siromakha, supersquealer and stoolie supreme, took his place at the end of the line and ran his lackluster eyes over the stoolie hunters. He looked the group over because he made a habit of noting everything, but for the moment he attached no importance to it.

  Ruska retrieved his money order and left the group, according to plan.

  The third man to enter the godfather’s office was the forty-year-old electrical engineer who, in the privacy of the old sanctuary the night before, had opined that ministers and sewers were more or less the same thing, then had become a child again and started a pillow fight on the upper bunks.

  The fourth to enter, with his quick, light step, was Viktor Lyubimichev. Always hail-fellow-well-met, he would bare his teeth in a winning smile and address young and old alike as “Old pal.” This easy cordiality hinted at a guileless nature.

  The electrical engineer reappeared in the doorway with an open letter. He was so absorbed in his reading that he almost missed the step. Still unseeing, he descended sideways, and no one in the group of hunters bothered him. He was lightly dressed and bareheaded, with the wind ruffling his hair, which was still that of a young man in spite of all he had been through. He was reading his first letter, after eight years of separation, from his daughter Ariadne, a fair-haired six-year-old clinging around his neck when he had left for the front en route to POW camp a
nd then a Soviet jail. When he had heard prisoners of war crunching layers of typhus-carrying bugs underfoot in their huts and stood in line for four hours or more for a ladleful of foul-smelling dishwater soup, the memory of that precious little bundle of brightness drew him on, as Ariadne’s thread had drawn Theseus, to survive and return. But back in his native land, he had gone straight to jail without seeing his daughter. She had been evacuated with her mother to Chelyabinsk. They had remained there. Ariadne’s mother had found another partner, and it was a long time before she told the girl that her father still existed. In a painstaking, slanting schoolgirl hand, Ariadne had written, without blots:

  Dear Papa, hello!

  I didn’t answer before because I didn’t know where to start and what to write. I can be forgiven for that because I had gotten used to thinking that my father had died. It seems quite strange that I suddenly have a father.

  You want to know what sort of life I have. It’s the same as everybody else’s. You can congratulate me on joining the Komsomol. You ask me to tell you if there’s anything I need. I need lots of things, of course. Right now I’m saving up for some boots, and to get a light overcoat made. Papa! You say come and visit you. But is it really urgent? To travel some place a long way off looking for you wouldn’t be very nice, would it? You’ll come here when you’re able. I wish you success in your work. So long for now.

  I kiss you.

  Ariadne

  Papa, have you seen the movie First Glove? It’s marvelous. I never miss a single movie.

  “Shall we check up on Lyubimichev?” Khorobrov asked.

  “Forget it, Terentich,” they protested. “Lyubimichev’s one of us.”

  But, deep down, Khorobrov sensed that there was something wrong with the man. And right now he had been closeted too long with the godfather.

  Viktor Lyubimichev had big, wide-open eyes. Nature had endowed him with the supple body of an athlete, a soldier, and a lover. Life had plucked him from the running tracks of the Young Athletes’ Stadium and planted him in a Bavarian concentration camp. In that deathtrap, into which their enemies herded Russian soldiers whose own Soviet government denied the Red Cross access to them—in that small, jam-packed hellhole—only those who most decisively renounced narrow, class-conditioned notions of virtue and conscience survived: the man who acted as interpreter and betrayed his comrades, the man who became a camp orderly capable of striking fellow countrymen in the face with his stick, the man who worked as a bread cutter or a cook and ate the bread of the starving. There were two other possible routes to survival: working as a gravedigger or as a sanitary orderly. For digging graves and for cleaning out latrines, the Nazis allowed an extra ladleful of porridge. Two men could manage the latrines, while fifty or so went gravedigging every day. Day in and day out, a dozen hearses carted the dead away to be dumped. Summer 1942 was approaching, and with it the turn of the gravediggers themselves. Viktor Lyubimichev, with the ardor of an organism that had lived too little, longed to go on living. He resolved that if he was to die, he would die last, and showed himself willing to become a camp orderly. But by a lucky chance a shady character who appeared to have once been a Soviet political officer turned up in the camp, urging them to go and fight the Communists. Men signed on, Komsomols among them. There was a German army cookhouse outside the camp gate where volunteers were allowed to “eat their bellyful” of gruel. Afterward, Lyubimichev had fought in France, hunting down Resistance fighters in the Vosges, then defending the Atlantic Wall against the Western Allies. During the great trawl of ’45, he somehow slipped through the net, went home, married a girl as bright-eyed and lissome as himself, and left her behind in their first month when his past caught up with him. The prison population at the time included Russians who had served with the very same Resistance movement that Lyubimichev had hunted in the Vosges. In Butyrki, prisoners played dominoes furiously, reminisced about life and battles in France, and hoped for parcels from their families. Then they were all given a level ten years. So Viktor Lyubimichev’s whole life had conditioned him to believe that nobody, from the man in the street to the man in the Politburo, ever had, or ever could have, principles; nor could those who presumed to judge them.

  Clear-eyed and suspecting nothing, he made no attempt to avoid the hunters but walked straight up to them, holding what looked very much like a postal money order.

  “Brothers, who’s eaten? What’s the main course? Is it worth going?”

  Khorobrov nodded at the piece of paper in Viktor’s lowered hand.

  “Get much?” he asked. “Enough to go without lunch?”

  Lyubimichev shrugged it off.

  “No, not a lot,” he said, trying to stuff the receipt into his pocket. He hadn’t bothered to hide it sooner because they all feared his strength, and he thought that no one would dare to challenge him. But while he was talking to Khorobrov, Bulatov, as if in fun, bent down, craned his neck, and pretended to read: “Hey! One thousand four hundred and seventy rubles! You can tell Klimentiadis where to stick his grub now!”

  If it had been any other zek, Viktor would have made a joke of it, shoved his face away, and hidden the money order. But Amantai could not be left thinking that his subordinate was rolling in money. Gulag rules forbade it. So Lyubimichev pleaded not guilty. “Where’s the thousand? Look for yourself!”

  They all saw that the order was in fact for 147 rubles.

  “Funny they couldn’t send a level 150,” Amantai said coolly. “Off you go then, schnitzel for seconds.”

  But before he had finished speaking and before Lyubimichev could move on, Khorobrov was up in arms. He had forgotten that he was supposed to contain himself, smile, and ride on with the hunt. Forgotten that what mattered was identifying stoolies; destroying them was impossible. He had suffered too much from them, seen so many others come to grief because of them. He hated those snakes in the grass more than honest hangmen. Now somebody young enough to be his son and handsome enough to be a sculptor’s model had turned out to be one of those volunteer reptiles.

  “Scumbag!” Khorobrov blurted out. “Buying remission with our blood!”

  Lyubimichev, a fighter and always ready for a fight, flinched and drew his fist back for a short-arm jab.

  “Bog-trotting half-wit,” he said menacingly.

  But Bulatov forestalled him. “Cut it out, Terentich,” he said, restraining Khorobrov.

  While Dvoetyosov, a clumsy giant in a Gulag donkey jacket, seized Lyubimichev’s raised right fist with his own left hand and held it tight.

  “Buddy, buddy,” he said, with a contemptuous smile. His voice was so tense that it might have been a lover’s whisper. “No politics here!”

  Lyubimichev turned abruptly, and his clear, wide eyes were very close to Dvoetyosov’s myopic stare.

  He did not raise his other fist. Those owl-like eyes and the grip of a peasant hand told him that if a blow was struck, one or the other of them would not just fall over but would drop dead.

  “Buddy, buddy,” Dvoetyosov said again. “The main course is schnitzel. Go eat your schnitzel.”

  Lyubimichev wrenched himself free and made for the basement steps with his head in the air. His satin-smooth cheeks were aflame. He was wondering how to get even with Khorobrov. He still didn’t realize how seriously the accusation had damaged him. He would allow no one to question his worldly wisdom. But he evidently had a lot to learn.

  How could they have guessed? Where had they gotten it from?

  Bulatov watched him go and held his head in his hands.

  “Mother, oh Mother!” he said. “Who can you trust after that?”

  This whole scene had involved little movement, so that neither the promenading zeks nor the two guards stationed on the boundaries of the exercise yard had noticed anything. Only Siromakha, standing in line and looking back through the doorway, had seen it all through half-closed, tired eyes—and understood!

  “Listen, boys,” he said to those ahead of him, “I’ve left a circuit sw
itched on. Could you let me go first? I’ll be quick.”

  They laughed. “Everybody’s left something switched on! We’ve all got babies to mind!”

  They wouldn’t let him pass.

  “I just want to go and switch it off!”

  Siromakha sounded worried.

  He rounded the hunting party, vanished into the main building, and ran up to the third floor without pausing to get his breath. But Major Shikin’s office door was locked from inside; the key was in the lock. An interrogation? A tryst with the gawky secretary? Siromakha withdrew, defeated.

  He should have rejoined the line, but the instinct of a hunted animal was stronger than his need to earn his keep. The thought of walking back past that group of infuriated men terrified him. They could lay hands on him without provocation. He was only too well known in the sharashka.

  Meanwhile, Doctor of Chemical Sciences Orobintsev, a small bespectacled person wearing the expensive fur coat and hat he had worn when free (he had arrived at Marfino without seeing the inside of a transit prison and had not yet been “unloaded”), had emerged from his interview with Myshin and assembled a group of simple souls like himself, including the bald-headed designer. He had an announcement to make. A man, of course, believes mainly what he chooses to believe. Those who wanted to believe that submitting a list of relatives was not the same as denouncing them but rather a sensible regulatory procedure formed Orobintsev’s present audience. He had already presented his own list of names, arranged in neat columns, and spoken to Myshin. Now he was authoritatively relaying the major’s clarification of certain points: where to enter the names of minors and what to do if you were not their natural father. Myshin had offended the professor’s sense of propriety only once. When Orobintsev had said regretfully that he could not remember exactly where his wife was born, Myshin had bared his fangs and said, “Pick her up in a whorehouse, did you?”