In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  “But what if I feel ill? If I need to call somebody?”

  “And don’t raise your voice! What you do if you need to call somebody,” the guard explained in his sullen drawl, “is you wait till the peephole opens and raise a finger without speaking.”

  He backed out and locked the door.

  The machine beyond the wall started up, then fell silent.

  The door opened again, this time with a clatter. It dawned on Innokenty that they were trained to open doors noisily or quietly as required.

  The guard gave him a mug of water.

  “Listen,” said Innokenty, taking the mug. “I’m unwell, I need to lie down.”

  “Not allowed in the box.”

  “Where? Not allowed where?” (He needed to talk to somebody; even this blockhead would do.)

  But the guard had already backed out of the cell and was closing the door.

  Innokenty pulled himself together.

  “Listen, call your superior officer! Why have I been arrested?”

  The door was locked.

  (“In the box,” he had said, using the English word. So that’s their cynical term for this sort of cell? Accurate enough, I suppose.)

  Innokenty took a sip of water. He lost his thirst at once. The mug’s capacity was three hundred grams; it was enameled, greenish, with a strange picture of a cat wearing glasses, pretending to read a book, but furtively eyeing a cheeky bird hopping around nearby.

  They couldn’t, surely, have chosen this picture especially for the Lubyanka? But how apt it was! The cat was the Soviet regime, the book the Stalin Constitution, and the sparrow a thinking individual.

  Innokenty could not suppress a wry smile, and this suddenly brought home to him the immensity of the disaster that had befallen him.

  He would never have believed himself capable of smiling after less than a half hour in the Lubyanka’s dungeons.

  (It was worse for Shchevronok in the neighboring box; it would have taken more than that cat to raise a smile from him right then.)

  Moving his overcoat to make room, Innokenty put the mug on the table.

  The lock clattered. The door opened. A lieutenant entered holding a piece of paper. The sergeant’s joyless face could be seen behind him.

  Innokenty, in his dove gray diplomatic uniform embroidered with gold palm leaves, rose unhurriedly to meet him.

  “Listen, Lieutenant, what is this all about? Is there some misunderstanding? Let me see the warrant; I didn’t read it properly.”

  “Surname?” the lieutenant asked tonelessly, looking glassy-eyed at Innokenty.

  “Volodin,” Innokenty conceded, eager to clarify the situation.

  “First name, patronymic?”

  “Innokenty Artemievich.”

  “Year of birth?” The lieutenant kept referring to his piece of paper.

  “1919.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Leningrad.”

  And with that, just when the time for explanations had arrived and the counselor, second class, was expecting them, the lieutenant withdrew and the door closed, almost pinching the counselor.

  Innokenty sat down and shut his eyes. He was beginning to feel the power of those mechanical claws.

  The machine started humming.

  Then silence.

  Things great and small came into his mind, all of them so urgent an hour ago that his legs ached to be up and doing.

  Here in the box there was no room to take a single full step, let alone to run.

  The flap of the spy hole moved. Innokenty raised a finger. The door was opened by the woman with blue epaulets and a stupid, heavy face.

  “I want to . . . you know,” he said meaningfully.

  “Hands behind your back! Move it!” the woman snapped, and Innokenty, obeying her nod, went out into the corridor, which seemed pleasantly cool after the stuffiness of the box.

  After a short walk the woman nodded at a door.

  “In here!”

  He went in. The door was locked behind him.

  There was an aperture in the floor and two iron footrests. Otherwise, the minimal floor space and the walls of this little cell were covered with red tiles. Water splashed refreshingly in the depths.

  Glad that here at least he would get a rest from uninterrupted surveillance, Innokenty squatted.

  But he heard a click from the other side of the door, looked up, and saw that here, too, there was a conical spy hole and that the importunate eye was watching him closely, not at intervals but continuously.

  Embarrassed, Innokenty stood up. The door was flung open before he could raise his finger to say “Ready.”

  “Hands behind! Move!” the woman said calmly.

  Back in the box, Innokenty felt a sudden need to know the time. Unthinkingly, he pulled back his cuff, but “the time” was no longer there.

  He sighed and began studying the cat on the mug, but before he got lost in thought, the door was unlocked, and someone new, a fat-faced, broad-shouldered fellow in a gray smock, asked him his name.

  “I’ve already answered that!” Innokenty said indignantly.

  “Name?” the newcomer repeated tonelessly, like a radio operator calling another station.

  “Oh, well—Volodin.”

  “Pick up your things. Walk,” Gray Smock said impassively.

  Innokenty took his overcoat and cap from the little table and walked. He was pointed toward the room he had entered first and in which his epaulets had been ripped off and his watch and notebooks taken from him.

  The pocket handkerchief was no longer lying on the floor.

  “Listen, my belongings have been taken from me,” he complained.

  “Undress!” was the reply from the guard in the gray smock.

  Innokenty was flabbergasted. “What for?” he asked.

  The guard looked him sternly in the eye.

  “You Russian?” he asked harshly.

  “Yes.” Innokenty, never at a loss for words, could think of nothing else to say.

  “Undress!”

  “Don’t non-Russians have to, then?” A dismal attempt at humor.

  The guard maintained a stony silence and waited.

  Innokenty assumed a contemptuous smile, shrugged, sat down on the stool, took off his shoes, then his uniform, and offered it to the guard. He attached no ritual importance to uniforms, but nonetheless felt a certain respect for his gold-trimmed garments.

  “Drop it!” said Gray Smock, pointing to the floor.

  Innokenty hesitated. The guard wrested the tawdry uniform from him, flung it on the floor, and barked: “Naked!”

  “What d’you mean, naked?”

  “Naked!”

  “But that’s completely impossible, Comrade. It’s cold here, you know!”

  “You’ll be stripped forcibly,” the guard warned him.

  Innokenty thought awhile. They had assaulted him once, and it looked as though they would assault him again. Shivering with cold and disgust, he removed his silk underwear and obediently tossed it onto the same heap.

  “Socks off!”

  Innokenty removed his socks and stood barefoot on the wooden floor. His legs were hairless and a delicate white, like the rest of his unresisting body.

  “Open your mouth. Wider. Say ‘Aah.’ Again, longer—‘Aaa-aaa-aaah!’ Now raise your tongue.”

  As though Innokenty were a horse for sale, the guard’s dirty fingers plucked at one of his cheeks, then the other, the pouch under one eye, the pouch under the other, reassured himself that nothing was hidden under the tongue, inside the cheeks, or in the eyes, tipped Innokenty’s head back with a firm push, so that the light shone into his nostrils, inspected both ears, tugging at the lobes, ordered him to spread his fingers, ascertained that there was nothing between them, and made him flap his arms to check that there was nothing under his armpits either. Then, in the same unanswerable robotic voice: “Take your member in your hands. Turn back the skin. Farther. Right, that’s enough. Move your m
ember to the right and upward. To the left and upward. Right, let go. Stand with your back to me. Legs apart. Wider. Bend over and touch the floor. Legs wider apart. Part your buttocks with your hands. Right. Good. Now squat. Quickly! Once more!”

  Whenever he had thought about being arrested, Innokenty had visualized a furious intellectual dual with Leviathan—the state. He was keyed up, ready to defend heroically his life and beliefs. He had never imagined that it would all be so crude, so stupid—and so ineluctable. The people waiting for him in the Lubyanka, low-ranking, obtuse people were uninterested in him as an individual and in the act that had brought him there but had a zealous concern for trivialities that took him by surprise and left him helpless. And anyway, what form could resistance take, and where would it get him? The repeated demands they made on him seemed so insignificant compared with the great battle ahead that it was not worth digging his heels in—but the details of this nonsensical procedure taken together served to break the will of the newly arrested prisoner.

  So Innokenty bore all these indignities in dejected silence.

  The searcher silently indicated a stool nearer the door, on which Innokenty, still naked, was to sit. He disliked the idea of contact between his naked body and this new cold object. But as soon as he sat down, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the wooden stool seemed to impart some warmth.

  Innokenty had experienced many acute pleasures in his life, but this was something new. Pressing his elbows to his chest and drawing his knees up higher, he felt still warmer.

  While he sat like that, the searcher stood over the heap of clothing, shaking, probing, holding things up to the light. He was kind enough not to detain the underpants and socks for long. With the underpants he just felt along the ribs and seams, pinch by pinch, then tossed them at Innokenty’s feet. The socks he detached from their elastic garters, turned inside out, and tossed to Innokenty. After feeling the seams and folds of the undershirt, he tossed that, too, in the direction of the door, so that Innokenty could now dress, making his body still more blissfully warm.

  The searcher then took out a big pocket knife with a crude wooden handle, opened it, and got to work on the shoes. He disdainfully ejected the fragments of pencil and repeatedly flexed the soles with a look of intense concentration, searching for anything hard concealed there. Slitting the insole with his knife, he did in fact tease out a small piece of steel and placed it on the table. Then he picked up an awl and drove it right through one heel.

  Innokenty watched him intently as he worked and was able to think how sick he must get of fingering other people’s underwear, cutting up their footwear, and peering into their back passages year after year. That must be why the searcher had such a grim, forbidding look on his face.

  But the misery and tedium of watching and waiting snuffed out these flickerings of ironic thought. The searcher began stripping the gold facings, the service buttons, and collar tabs from Innokenty’s uniform. Then he slit open the lining and felt under it. He took as long again over the creases and seams of Innokenty’s trousers. The winter overcoat gave him still more trouble; deep down in the padding he seemed to hear a rustle, not that of padding (a note sewn in there? addresses? an ampoule of poison?), and ripping open the lining, he searched lengthily, wearing a look of such concentration and concern that he might have been operating on a human heart.

  The search took a long time, perhaps over an hour. At last, the searcher gathered up his trophies: braces, elastic garters (he had already told Innokenty that these were not allowed in prison), tie, tiepin, cuff links, the piece of steel from the welt of his shoe, two fragments of pencil, the gold facings, all the decorations from the uniform, and several buttons. Only then did Innokenty fully realize how thoroughly the man had done his destructive work. Of all the indignities heaped upon him that evening, the worst was not the slits in the soles of his shoes, not the ripped lining, not the padding sticking out from the armpits of his overcoat; no, the absence of almost all of his buttons when they had already deprived him of suspenders was the affront that Innokenty felt most acutely.

  “Why have you cut off my buttons?” he exclaimed.

  “Not allowed,” the guard growled.

  “What do you mean? How am I supposed to go around, then?”

  “Tie yourself up with string,” the man answered sullenly, already at the door.

  “What nonsense is this? What string? Where am I supposed to get it from?”

  But the door was slammed and locked.

  Innokenty refrained from knocking and arguing. He had to think himself lucky that they had left him buttons on his overcoat and one or two elsewhere.

  He was proving to be a quick learner.

  He had not had long to enjoy the spaciousness of his new quarters, clutching his trouser tops as he walked around to stretch his legs, when the key grated in the lock again and a new guard appeared. This one wore a white smock—not, however, of the first freshness. He looked at Innokenty as if he were some long-familiar object that had always been in this room and abruptly ordered him to strip naked.

  Innokenty wanted to answer indignantly, to sound threatening, but he was choking with resentment and could only utter a feeble squawk of protest.

  “But I’ve just stripped once! Couldn’t somebody have warned me?”

  Obviously not, because the new arrival simply waited with a blank, bored look for him to carry out the order.

  What surprised Innokenty most in those he met here was their ability to remain silent where normal people usually respond.

  He was getting used to the rhythmic routine of implicit and automatic obedience. He took off his shoes and undressed.

  “Sit!”

  The guard pointed to the stool on which Innokenty had sat for so long already.

  The naked prisoner sat submissively without wondering why. (The free man’s habit of thinking over his actions before performing them was atrophying fast, now that others were thinking so effectively for him.) The guard’s fingers gripped the nape of the prisoner’s neck roughly. The cold cutting edge of a machine was pressed hard against the top of his head.

  Innokenty winced.

  “What are you doing?” he said, making a feeble effort to free himself from the clutching fingers. “What right have you to do this? I’m not under arrest yet.” (He meant that he had not been formally charged.)

  But the barber did not relax his grip. He went on shearing. The spark of rebellion fizzled out. The proud young diplomat, used to alighting nonchalantly from intercontinental aircraft, gazing absently through half-closed eyes at the daytime dazzle of bustling European capitals, was now merely a naked male person, all skin and bones, and with a half-shaven head.

  Innokenty’s silky light-brown hair fell as sadly and soundlessly as snowflakes. He caught one wisp and rubbed it gently between his fingers. He was full of love for himself and the life that was leaving him.

  He remembered deciding that submissiveness would be interpreted as an admission of guilt. He remembered resolving to resist, to protest, to argue, to demand to see the prosecutor, but against all reason he was helpless, paralyzed by the pleasurable indifference of a man freezing in the snow. The barber finished shaving his head, then made him stand and raise his arms, one by one, and shaved his armpits. He then squatted and began shaving off Innokenty’s pubic hair. This was a new sensation. It tickled. Innokenty involuntarily shrank, and the barber made an impatient noise.

  “May I dress now?” Innokenty asked when the procedure was over.

  But the barber left without a word, locking the door behind him.

  A crafty inner voice told Innokenty not to get dressed in a hurry this time. He felt an unpleasant prickling in the newly shaved tender spots. Running his hand over a head that seemed unfamiliar (he could not remember being close-cropped since childhood), he felt a strange prickly stubble and bumps on his skull that he had not known about.

  He decided to put on his underwear, after all, and was about to slip int
o his trousers when the lock rattled and yet another guard came in, one with a purplish fleshy nose. He was carrying a large piece of cardboard.

  “Name?”

  “Volodin,” the prisoner answered. He had given up resisting these senseless, sickening repetitions.

  “First name and patronymic?”

  “Innokenty Artemievich.”

  “Year of birth?”

  “1919.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Leningrad.”

  “Strip naked.”

  Scarcely realizing what was happening, he took off the rest of his clothes. His undershirt, which he had placed on the edge of the table, fell onto the dirty floor, but he did not stoop to pick it up.

  The purple-nosed guard inspected Innokenty minutely from various angles, systematically recording his findings on his index card. His close attention to birthmarks and facial details told Innokenty that these characteristics were now a matter of record.

  This one left in turn.

  Innokenty sat limply on his stool and made no effort to dress.

  The door rattled again. A stout, dark-haired woman in a snow-white smock came in. Her face was coarse and forbidding, her comportment that of an educated person.

  Innokenty pulled himself together, reached quickly for his underpants and half concealed his nakedness. But the woman darted a contemptuous, utterly unfeminine glance at him and, thrusting even further her jutting lower lip, asked, “You—have you got lice?”

  Innokenty, offended, looked straight into her black eyes and, still holding his underpants together in front of him, said, “I’m a diplomat.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? Do you have any complaints?”

  “I want to know why I’ve been arrested! I want to read the warrant! I want to see the prosecutor!” Innokenty blurted out.

  The woman frowned.

  “You misunderstood my question,” she said wearily. “No venereal diseases?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever had gonorrhea, syphilis, or soft chancre? Leprosy? Tuberculosis? Any other complaints?”

  She left without waiting for an answer.