In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  “Bring your things.”

  “Eh?”

  “Bring your things.”

  “What things?”

  “Your gear—what d’you think?”

  Innokenty rose, holding his overcoat and cap, which were especially precious to him now because they had not been ruined in the sterilizer. Around the door, shouldering the corridor man aside, came the smart, swarthy sergeant major (where did they recruit these guardsmen? for what heavy duties?) with the light blue epaulets, who consulted a piece of paper and asked:

  “Name?”

  “Volodin.”

  “First name and patronymic.”

  “Innokenty Artemievich.”

  “Year of birth?”

  “1919.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Leningrad.”

  “Bring your things. Walk!”

  He went ahead, clicking as prescribed.

  This time they went outside and in the dark, covered end of the yard, down a few more steps. Were they, he wondered, taking him to be shot? Execution by shooting, so people said, always took place in cellars and always at night.

  His momentary anxiety was relieved by the thought that they would hardly have given him those receipts if they meant to shoot him. It wouldn’t be just yet, anyway!

  (Innokenty still believed that the Ministry of State Security’s tentacles were cleverly coordinated.)

  Still clicking his tongue, the dashing sergeant major conducted him into the building and through a dark lobby to an elevator. A woman with a pile of freshly ironed yellowish gray linen stood to one side and watched as Innokenty was installed in the elevator. This young washerwoman was unattractive, socially inferior, and looked at Innokenty with the same inscrutable stony indifference as did all the other clockwork-doll people in the Lubyanka, but Innokenty felt just as he had in the presence of the storeroom girls who had presented him with receipts pink, blue, and white—hurt that she should see him so stricken, so humiliated, and perhaps think of him with insulting compassion.

  This thought, too, vanished as quickly as it had come. “Keep permanently!” After that, nothing mattered.

  The sergeant major closed the door of the elevator and pressed the button. The numbers of the floors were not marked.

  The moment the elevator started moving, Innokenty recognized the humming of the mysterious machine he had heard grinding bones beyond the wall of his box.

  He smiled wanly.

  But he was glad to have been mistaken and was somehow reassured.

  The elevator stopped. The sergeant major led Innokenty onto the landing and at once into a broad corridor, where he glimpsed many guards wearing blue epaulets with white bars. One of them locked Innokenty in an unnumbered box, a roomy one this time, about ten square meters, dimly lit, with walls painted an unrelieved dark green. This box, or cell, was empty, looked not very clean, had a scuffed cement floor, and a chill in the air made it still more forbidding. There was the usual spy hole.

  Many pairs of boots could be heard shuffling past outside. Guards seemed to be continually coming and going. The inner prison had a busy nightlife.

  Innokenty had thought earlier that he would be permanently housed in narrow, overheated, blindingly lit Box No. 8 and had suffered agonies because there was no leg room, the light hurt his eyes, and breathing was difficult. Now he realized his mistake, realized that he would be living in this big, uncomfortable, unnumbered box, and he was suffering in anticipation: The cement floor would be cold to his feet; the incessant shuffling out in the corridor would irritate him; the poor light would be depressing. What a difference a window would make! Even the littlest of windows! A window like those in prison vaults on the operatic stage! But there was not even that.

  The memoirs of émigrés would give you no idea of what it was like: the corridors, the stairways, the doors, doors, doors, the comings and goings of officers, sergeants, auxiliary staff—the Great Lubyanka was teeming with life in the middle of the night, yet there was no longer a single prisoner in sight; you could not possibly meet someone like yourself, could not possibly hear an unofficial word, and even official ones were few and far between. It was as if the whole enormous ministry were going without its night’s sleep just for your sake, exclusively preoccupied with you and your crime.

  During his first hours inside, a prisoner is at the mercy of a single murderous idea: The newcomer must be kept apart from other prisoners so that no one can encourage him, so that he feels in isolation the full weight of the brute force that sustains the whole many-tentacled apparatus.

  Innokenty felt more and more sorry for himself. His telephone call no longer seemed like a great feat that would be recorded in all histories of the twentieth century but, instead, a thoughtless and—worst of all—pointless suicidal act. He could still hear the arrogantly casual voice of the American attaché mispronouncing the Russian for “Who are you?” Idiot, idiot! He had probably not even informed the ambassador. It had all been in vain. What fools they were! Prosperity breeds idiots!

  There was room to walk about in this box, but exhausted and demoralized by all the formalities, Innokenty felt too weak. He made two attempts, then sat down on the bench with his arms dangling.

  So many noble aspirations, locked away in these boxes, entombed within these walls, would remain unknown to posterity!

  Accursed country! All the bitter pills it swallowed were medicine only for others. Never for itself!

  Other countries were luckier. Australia, for instance, tucked away at the back of beyond, getting along nicely without air raids, without Five-Year Plans, without discipline.

  Why, oh why, had he set off in pursuit of the bomb thieves? He should have headed for Australia and stayed there as a private person.

  Today or tomorrow Innokenty should have been flying to Paris, then on to New York!

  He imagined himself not just traveling abroad but setting out within the next twenty-four hours, and his heart sank; he would never be free again! He could have vented his frustration with his bare fingernails on the walls of his cell!

  The opening of the door forestalled this breach of prison rules. Once again his “particulars” were checked (Innokenty answered as if in his sleep) and he was ordered out—“with his things.” He had felt a little chilly in the box, so his hat was on his head and his overcoat was draped over his shoulders. He tried to leave the box like that, not realizing that he could possibly have been carrying two loaded pistols or two daggers under his coat. He was ordered to slip his arms through the sleeves and then put his bare hands behind his back.

  More tongue clicking as he was taken to the head of the stairs near the elevator, then downstairs. Innokenty’s main concern in his present position might have been to memorize how many turns he took and how many steps there were between them so that he could try to understand the layout of the prison when he had time. But he was by now so disoriented that he walked along absentmindedly, not noticing how far down they had gone; then, suddenly, another hefty guard emerged from yet another corridor to confront him, clicking just as insistently. The guard who had brought Innokenty tugged open the door of a green plywood booth, which blocked much of a smallish landing, bundled Innokenty in, and pulled the door closed behind himself. Inside, there was just room to stand, and a diffused light filtered down from above. The booth evidently had no roof; light found its way there from the stairwell.

  The normal human reaction would have been to protest loudly, but Innokenty, who was getting used to senseless harassment and the Lubyanka’s monastic silences, was mutely compliant, in other words, behaved just as the prison required him to.

  Of course! That probably explained all the clicking: It was to warn people that a prisoner was being taken somewhere. One prisoner must not meet another. Must not be heartened by the fellow feeling in his eyes!

  One man was led past, then another, and Innokenty was let out of the booth and taken farther.

  Only here, as he descended the last fli
ght, did Innokenty notice how worn these steps were! He had never seen anything like it in his life. Between the two sides of each step there was an elliptical hollow, and at the midpoint the step was worn to half its original thickness.

  He shuddered: In thirty years how many feet, how many times, must have shuffled their way down to wear the stone away like that? And of every two walkers one would be a guard, the other a prisoner.

  On one landing there was a locked door with a ventilation panel, shut tight, behind a grating. Here a new trial awaited Innokenty: He was made to stand with his face to the wall. He could still see his escort out of the corner of his eye, pressing a button. An electric bell rang, and the panel cautiously opened, then closed again. A key turned noisily in the lock; the door opened; someone came out and, unseen by Innokenty, began questioning him.

  “Name?”

  Innokenty naturally looked around, as people usually do when they speak to each other, and saw a face that was neither masculine nor feminine, a flabby, boneless face with a big red scald mark, and lower down a lieutenant’s golden epaulets. Pausing only to yell “No turning around!” the man reeled off the sickeningly familiar questions, and Innokenty addressed his answers to the patch of white plaster in front of him.

  Having verified that the prisoner still claimed to be the person designated on the card and still remembered the year and place of his birth, the flabby lieutenant rang the doorbell himself—the door had been locked behind him for safety. The panel slid open cautiously once more, someone looked through the aperture, the panel was closed, the key turned noisily in the lock, and the door opened.

  “Walk!” the flabby lieutenant with the red scald mark said sharply.

  They stepped inside, and the door was noisily locked behind them.

  Ahead, a gloomy corridor branched out in three directions. It had several doors, and to the left, by the entrance, stood a desk, pigeonholes, and still more guards. Innokenty caught no more than a glimpse of all this before the lieutenant’s voice, subdued but clearly audible in this hushed place, commanded, “Face the wall! Don’t move!”

  A ludicrous situation to be in—staring closely at the border between dark green paneling and white plaster, all the time feeling several pairs of hostile eyes on the back of your head.

  They were obviously consulting his index card. The lieutenant then ordered, almost in a whisper but quite audibly in the profound silence: “Third box!”

  A guard detached himself from the desk and, careful not to jingle his keys, set off along the strip of carpet in the right-hand corridor.

  “Hands behind! Walk!” he said very quietly.

  On one side of their path, the same dark olive green wall wound around three turns; on the other side, they passed several doors, bearing highly polished oval number plates: 47, 48, 49, and beneath them lids over the spy holes. Warmed by the feeling that friends were so near, Innokenty felt an urge to disturb the lid over one of the spy holes, put his eye to it for a moment, and take a look at the secluded life of the cell. But the guard drew him briskly on, and, anyway, Innokenty was already inured to prison discipline—though it was difficult to see what a man who had joined the battle over the atom bomb still had to fear.

  Fortunately for governments, mere humans (unfortunately for them) are so constructed that as long as they live, there is always something to take away from them. Even a man imprisoned for life, deprived of movement, of the sight of the sky, deprived of a family and property, can be transferred to a damp punishment cell, denied hot food, and beaten with canes; and these minor punishments are just as keenly felt as his earlier dislodgment from the peak of freedom and prosperity. It is to avoid these vexatious later punishments that a prisoner duly complies with abhorrent and degrading prison regulations that gradually destroy his humanity.

  The doors around the next turn were close together, and the glazed disks bore the numbers 1, 2, 3.

  The guard unlocked the door of the third box and, with a hospitable flourish that looked rather comical in the circumstances, held it wide open for Innokenty. Innokenty noticed the humorous touch and looked closely at the guard. He was a short young man with smooth black hair and slant eyes like oblique saber cuts. He looked unfriendly, his lips and eyes alike were unsmiling, but after all the dozens of impassive Lubyanka faces seen that night, the mean face of this last guard was somehow rather likable.

  Locked in his box, Innokenty took a look around. He had been able to compare several boxes in the course of the night and could consider himself an expert. This box was heavenly: three and a half steps wide, seven and a half long, with a parquet floor. A long and fairly wide wooden bench built into the wall almost filled the cell, and there was a small, free-standing hexagonal wooden table near the door. The box, of course, was windowless, with just a black grille for ventilation high up in the wall. The box was also very high, three and a half meters of wall, every meter of it whitewashed and reflecting the glare from a two-hundred-watt bulb in a wire cover over the door. The light warmed the box but hurt the eyes.

  Prison skills are soon learned and not easily forgotten. This time Innokenty did not delude himself. He had no hope of staying long in this comfortable box. He realized as soon as he saw the bench, a long, hard bench—for the mollycoddled Innokenty was toughening up by the hour—that his first and most important object now must be to get some sleep. And just as a young animal, uninstructed by its mother, is taught by the promptings of its own nature all the skills it needs to survive, so Innokenty quickly contrived to spread his overcoat over the bench and bundle the astrakhan collar and rolled-up sleeves together to serve as a pillow. He lay down immediately. It felt very comfortable. He shut his eyes and got ready to sleep.

  But he could not get to sleep! He had so longed to sleep when there was no possibility of it! He had gone through all the stages of tiredness and twice lost consciousness, dozing off for a single second—and now, when sleep suddenly was a possibility, he could not sleep! Whenever his overstrained nerves seemed about to relax, they suddenly became as tense as ever. Fighting off forebodings, regrets, and speculations, Innokenty tried breathing rhythmically and counting. It was most annoying not being able to sleep when his whole body was warm, his ribs were on a level surface, his legs were stretched out full length, and the guard for some reason was not keeping him awake!

  He lay that way for about half an hour. His thoughts were finally becoming incoherent, and a drowsy warmth was stealing over him from his feet upward.

  But suddenly Innokenty felt that he could not possibly go to sleep with that insanely bright light in the cell. The light not only filtered through his closed eyelids in an orange glare; it pressed upon his eyeballs. The pressure of light, which Innokenty had never noticed before, was now driving him to distraction. Tossing and turning in the vain hope of finding a position where the light would not be oppressive, Innokenty finally sat up and lowered his legs from the bench.

  He had repeatedly heard the faint sound as the cover was displaced from the spy hole. Next time it was moved he quickly raised a finger.

  The door opened noiselessly. The squint-eyed guard looked at Innokenty without speaking.

  “Please, please switch off the light,” Innokenty implored.

  “Not allowed,” the squint-eyed one answered calmly.

  “Change the bulb, then! Put in a dimmer one! Why such a bright bulb for such a small . . . box?”

  “Don’t speak so loudly,” Squint-eyes said very quietly. Behind him the main corridor and the whole prison were indeed silent as the grave. “The light is as ordered.”

  And yet there was some slight sign of life in this dead face! Left with nothing to say and expecting the door to close at any moment, Innokenty asked for a drink of water.

  Squint-eyes nodded and locked the door noiselessly. Innokenty did not hear him walking away or returning along the strip of carpet outside the box. There was just a little jingle as the key was inserted, and Squint-eyes stood in the doorway with a mug of
water. Like those on the ground floor of the prison, the mug was decorated with a picture of a cat, but this one was without spectacles, book, or bird.

  Innokenty drank heartily and, in between swallows, took a look at the guard still standing there. Keeping one foot outside, he half closed the door, leaving just room for his shoulders, and, with a distinctly nonregulation wink, asked in a low voice:

  “Who were you?”

  How strange it sounded! Being addressed like a human being, for the first time that night! The natural tone of voice in which the question was asked (quietly, so that the man’s superiors could not overhear it) and the unintentionally cruel word “were” seemed to involve Innokenty in a sort of conspiracy with the guard.

  “Diplomat,” he whispered. “State counselor.”

  Squint-eyes nodded sympathetically and said: “Well, I was a sailor once—Baltic Fleet!” Then, after some hesitation: “What are you in for?”

  “I don’t know myself,” Innokenty said cautiously. “For no particular reason.”

  Squint-eyes nodded sympathetically.

  “That’s what they all say to start with,” he said, and added coarsely, “Want to go for a . . . you-know-what?”

  “Not just yet,” Innokenty said. The unenlightened newcomer did not know that the offer made to him was the greatest favor in the power of a guard to give and one of the greatest blessings on earth, normally accessible to prisoners only at prescribed times.

  After this absorbing conversation, the door closed, and Innokenty stretched out on the bench again, trying in vain to escape the pressure of the light through his unprotected eyes. He tried covering his eyes with one hand, but the hand became numb. It occurred to him that it would help a lot if he twisted his handkerchief into a sort of blindfold—but where was it? It had remained on the floor where it had fallen. What a stupid young pup he had been last night!

  Such small items as a handkerchief, an empty matchbox, a bit of coarse thread, a plastic button are the prisoner’s best friends! He never knows when one or another of them may become indispensable and save the day!