In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Rubin came in from his top-secret group. He looked sad, and there were bags under his eyes. Surveying his books, Nerzhin said, “I’d make you a present of Yesenin if you liked him.”

  “How ever did you manage to get him back?”

  “Only he’s too remote from the proletariat.”

  “You haven’t got a shaving brush,” Rubin said—producing from his pocket a brush with a shiny plastic handle, which any prisoner would find luxurious—“and I’ve vowed never to shave till I get my pardon, so take this one!”

  Rubin never said “till I’m released,” which might simply mean till he’d served his sentence, but always “till I get my pardon,” never doubting that someday he would.

  “Thanks, old man, but you’ve become such a ‘special prison prisoner’ that you’ve forgotten how things are in the camps. What makes you think they’ll let me shave myself where I’m going? Will you help me take the books back?”

  They collected the books and magazines into neat piles. The other prisoners drifted away.

  “Well, how’s your protégé?” Gleb asked quietly.

  “I’ve heard the two main ones were arrested last night.”

  “Why two?”

  “They’re both suspects. History demands victims.”

  “How do you know you’ve got the right one?”

  “I think we’ve caught him. They’ve promised to send us the interrogators’ tapes by dinnertime. We’ll compare them.”

  Nerzhin finished stacking books and straightened up.

  “What does the Soviet Union want with the atomic bomb anyway? That fellow had his head screwed on right.”

  “A Moscow airhead, a no-good troublemaker, take my word for it.”

  Heavily laden with library books, they left the laboratory and walked up the main staircase.

  In the window space along the upper corridor, they stopped for a rest and to get a better grip on their collapsing bundles of books.

  Nerzhin’s eyes, lit with feverish excitement while he was making his final arrangements, were now fixed in a lackluster stare.

  “You know what?” he said. “You and I have been together less than three years, spent most of that time arguing and trashing each other’s beliefs—and now that I’m losing you, forever, I realize clearly that you are one of those I most—”

  His voice broke.

  Rubin’s large brown eyes, which many people had only seen flashing with anger, shone now with shy kindliness.

  “I know what you mean. . . . Give me a kiss, you brute.”

  And he smothered Nerzhin in his piratical black beard.

  After that, they went straight to the library, where Sologdin caught up with them. He looked very worried. He carelessly slammed the door so that the glass panes rattled, and the librarian looked round in annoyance.

  “Well, Gleb, my boy! That’s it, then!” Sologdin said. “It has come to pass! You are leaving us.”

  Ignoring the “Old Testament fanatic,” Sologdin looked only at Nerzhin.

  Rubin, equally disinclined to make peace with the “boring hidalgo,” looked the other way.

  “Yes, you’re leaving us. A pity. A great pity.”

  They had found so much to say to each other across the sawhorse, argued so passionately in the exercise yard. Now it was too late, and not the place, for Sologdin to teach Gleb, as he had always meant to, the rules that governed his own thinking and his life.

  The librarian vanished among the stacks, and Sologdin said quietly, “But you really must stop being such a skeptic. It’s just a facile excuse for refusing to fight.”

  Nerzhin replied just as quietly. “But what you were saying yesterday about this hopeless, cockeyed country—that’s even more facile. I don’t know what to think.”

  Sologdin’s blue eyes flashed, and his white teeth gleamed in a brilliant smile.

  “You and I should have talked more; you still have so much to learn. Remember—time is money. It still isn’t too late. Tell them you’re willing to stay here as a designer, and maybe I can get you kept on. In a group we’ve set up here.” (Rubin darted a look of surprise at him.) “But I give you fair warning—you’ll have to put your back into it.”

  Nerzhin sighed.

  “Thanks, Dmitri, old man. I could have done something like that, but while I’m putting my back into it, would I ever have time for self-improvement? I’ve more or less made up my mind to try an experiment. There’s a proverb that says, ‘It’s not the sea that drowns you, it’s the puddle.’ I want to try a dive into the sea.”

  “You do? Well, just be careful. It’s a great pity, Gleb, my boy, a great pity.”

  Sologdin, looking preoccupied, was in a hurry but forced himself not to hurry away.

  The three of them stood waiting while the librarian, herself a lieutenant in the security service, with dyed hair and heavily made up, lazily checked Nerzhin’s library card.

  Gleb, upset by the ill feeling between his friends, said, lowering his voice in the hushed library, “Listen, you two! You must make up!”

  Neither Sologdin nor Rubin looked around.

  “Mitya!” Gleb insisted.

  Sologdin raised his piercing, cold blue eyes. “Why are you addressing me?”

  He sounded surprised.

  Gleb tried again: “Lyova!”

  Rubin looked at him wearily.

  “Do you know why horses live so long?” He paused briefly and went on. “Because they never try to explain their feelings.”

  ONCE HE HAD FINISHED handing in the prison’s property and his work notes, Nerzhin was ordered by a guard to go on to the prison and get ready to leave. As he went along the hallway clutching several packs of cigarettes, he met Potapov, hurrying somewhere with a box under his arm. Potapov at work walked quite differently from Potapov in the exercise yard; in spite of his limp, he moved quickly, head jerking backward and forward on his stiff neck, eyes screwed up, gazing into the distance, as if his head and eyes were trying to outpace his no-longer-young legs. Potapov was anxious to say good-bye to Nerzhin and the others who were leaving, but the moment he entered the laboratory that morning he was gripped by the inner logic of his work and had no thought or feeling for anything else. This capacity for total absorption in his work, forgetting all else that was happening in his life, was the basis of his success outside as an engineer, one of the Five-Year Plan’s indispensable robots, and it had helped him to withstand the hardships of prison life.

  Nerzhin barred his way.

  “That’s it, then, Andreich,” he said. “The deceased was in good spirits and wore a smile.”

  Potapov made an effort, and his eyes lit up with ordinary human comprehension. The hand not holding the box reached for his neck as if to scratch it.

  “Er . . . er . . . er. . . .”

  “I’d give you my Yesenin, only apart from Pushkin you don’t. . . .”

  “We will all end up there,” Potapov said sadly.

  Nerzhin sighed.

  “Where will we meet next? In the Kotlas transit prison? On the Indigir goldfields? Somehow I don’t believe that we will ever meet walking freely down a city street. Do you?”

  Half closing his eyes, Potapov declaimed: “I have closed my eyes to phantom joys. But distant hopes trouble my heart at times.”

  Markushev, beside himself with excitement, stuck his head out through the door of Number Seven.

  “You, Potapov!” he shouted impatiently. “Where are the filters? You’re holding up the work.”

  The coauthors of “The Buddha’s Smile” embraced awkwardly. Packs of White Sea Canal cigarettes fell to the floor.

  “You know how it is,” Potapov said. “We’re busy spawning—no time for anything else.”

  “Spawning” was Potapov’s word for the rush and muddle prevalent in the Marfino Institute and in all the activities of the Soviet state, as newspapers reluctantly admitted when they spoke of “shock work” and “last-minute-ism.”

  “Write to me!” Potapov said
in conclusion—and they both burst out laughing. Those words, so natural when people say good-bye, sound in prison like a cruel joke. There was no postal service between the islands of the Gulag.

  Holding his box of filters under one arm, Potapov dashed off along the hallway again, with his head bobbing backward and forward. His limp was barely discernible.

  Nerzhin, too, hurried off—to the semicircular cell, where he began assembling his belongings, acutely aware of the cruel surprises that might await him when he was subjected to body searches at Marfino and later on in Butyrki.

  The guard looked in twice to hurry him up. The others had already left of their own accord or been chased out to Prison HQ. Just as Nerzhin was finishing his preparations, Spiridon came into the room, wearing his black, belted tunic and bringing a breath of outdoor freshness. Removing the ginger cap with the big earflaps, he carefully turned back the bedding (tucked into a white comforter) on a bunk close to Nerzhin’s and lowered his dirty padded trousers onto the steel frame.

  “Spiridon Danilych!” Nerzhin said, holding out the book to him, “I’ve got my Yesenin!”

  “The snake gave it back, did he?” Spiridon’s gloomy features, which seemed more deeply wrinkled than ever, brightened momentarily.

  “What matters to me is not so much the book, Danilych,” Nerzhin explained. “What’s important is that they mustn’t treat us like dirt.”

  Spiridon nodded.

  “Here, take it. Something to remember me by.”

  “Don’t you want to take it with you?” Spiridon asked, embarrassed.

  “Wait a minute.” Nerzhin took the book back and started looking for a page.

  “I’ll find it in a minute, you can read it for yourself. . . .”

  “Better be on your way, Gleb,” Spiridon said gloomily. “You know what it’s like in labor camps; your heart wants to be working and making, but your feet drag you to the sickbay.”

  “I’m not new at the game, Danilych. I’m not afraid. I want to try a bit of real work. You know what they say: The sea won’t drown you, the puddle will.”

  Only then did Nerzhin look closely at Spiridon and realize that he was very upset—more than he would be if he were simply parting from a friend. The events of the day before—the harsh new regulations, the unmasking of the informers, Ruska’s arrest, the scene with Simochka, his discussion with Gerasimovich—had made him forget completely that Spiridon should have received a letter from home.

  “What about your letter? Did you get your letter, Danilych?”

  Spiridon was clutching the letter in his pocket. He took it out. The envelope was frayed in the middle where it had been folded.

  “Here . . . but you haven’t got time. . . .”

  Spiridon’s lips trembled.

  That envelope had been folded and unfolded over and over again since yesterday! The address was written in the large, bold hand of Spiridon’s daughter, Vera, acquired in the five years of schooling that were all she had received.

  As he and Spiridon usually did, Nerzhin began reading the letter aloud.

  “My Dear Daddy!

  I don’t know how I can carry on living let alone write to you. What bad people there are in the world; they tell you things, and then they let you down. . . .”

  Nerzhin’s voice failed him. He glanced at Spiridon and met his wide-open, steady, almost blind eyes under their bushy red eyebrows. But he was not allowed a second to think and try to find a word of consolation that would not ring false. The door was flung open, and Nadelashin rushed in looking furious.

  “Nerzhin!” he yelled. “If people treat you decently, this is what they can expect! All the others are ready and waiting—you’re the last!”

  The guards were in a hurry to get the transferees into headquarters before the lunch break so that they would meet none of the other prisoners.

  Nerzhin embraced Spiridon with one arm around his unshaved neck.

  “Get on with it!” the junior lieutenant yelled. “I’m not waiting a minute longer!”

  “Dear old Spiridon!” Nerzhin said, embracing the red-haired yardman.

  Spiridon sighed hoarsely and waved his hand.

  “Good-bye, Gleb, boy.”

  “Good-bye forever, Spiridon Danilych!”

  They kissed. Nerzhin picked up his things and rushed out, followed by the duty officer.

  With hands from which washing would never remove years of ingrained dirt, Spiridon picked up from the bed the open book with the maple leaves on its jacket, put his daughter’s letter in it as a marker, and went off to his room.

  He did not notice that he had knocked his shaggy cap off the bed with his knee, and it stayed there on the floor.

  Chapter 96

  Meat

  AS THE RELEGATED PRISONERS were gradually herded into Prison HQ, they were frisked, and as the search was completed, they were shunted into an unoccupied room where there stood two bare tables and a crude bench. Major Myshin in person was present throughout the search, and Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev looked in from time to time. Bending down to look into sacks and suitcases would have overtaxed the corpulent, purple-faced major (and anyway it was beneath his dignity), but his presence could be relied on to encourage the screws. They zealously undid all the prisoners’ bundles and parcels and were particularly quick to pounce on anything written. There was a standing order that men leaving the special prison had no right to take with them the merest scrap of paper with anything written, drawn, or printed on it. So most of the zeks had burned all their letters, destroyed their professional notebooks, and given away their books in advance.

  One prisoner, the engineer Romashov, who had only six more months to serve (he had chalked up nineteen years and a half), openly carried a fat file containing clippings, notes, and calculations accumulated over many years on the construction of hydroelectric power stations. (He was expecting to be sent to the Krasnoyarsk region and counted on being allowed to practice his profession there.) Although Engineer Colonel Yakonov had personally inspected this folder and authorized its release, and although Major Shikin had already sent it to the ministry, where they had also given their approval, Romashov’s foresight and unremitting efforts over many months went for nothing: Major Myshin now announced that he knew nothing about this file and impounded it. It was seized and carried away, and Engineer Romashov’s eyes, which had gotten used to everything, followed it unseeingly. In his time, he had survived a death sentence, transportation in a cattle wagon from Moscow to Sovgavan, and a broken shin down a pit at Kolyma—he had let a coal tub run over his leg so that he could rest up in the hospital and escape certain death as a general laborer in Arctic conditions. So the destruction of ten years’ work was no reason for shedding tears.

  Another prisoner, the small, bald-headed designer Syomushkin, who had put so much effort into darning his socks on Sunday, was, by contrast, a raw recruit. He had been inside barely two years, in prison, then at Marfino, and was now terrified at the thought of a labor camp. But scared and miserable as he was, he tried to hang on to a small volume of Lermontov that was a sacred object to him and his wife. He implored Major Myshin to return the little volume, wringing his hands—strange behavior in a grown man, which the old-line zeks found offensive. He was prevented from bursting into the lieutenant colonel’s office but suddenly, with unexpected strength, snatched the book from the godfather (who recoiled toward the door in a fright), wrenched off the tooled green covers, flung them away, and began tearing the pages into strips, weeping convulsively, screaming—“Here then! Gobble it up! Gorge yourselves!”—and scattering what was left of Lermontov around the room.

  The search continued.

  When they emerged, the prisoners scarcely recognized one another. As ordered, they had made one pile of their blue overalls, another of their prison-issue underwear with the official stamp, a third of their overcoats, if these were not too threadbare, so that they were all now wearing either their own old clothes or a substitute provided for them.
Their years of work for the institute had not earned them enough to buy clothes. Not because the prison authorities were spiteful or miserly. They were answerable to the bookkeepers—“the watchful eye of the government.” So, in the depths of winter, some were left without warm underwear and had pulled on short pants and mesh undershirts that had lain moldering in their knapsacks in the stockrooms, as unlaundered as they had been on the day of the prisoner’s arrival from some camp. Some were shod in clumsy prison-camp boots (if a man had camp boots in his sack, his “civvy” half boots with galoshes were confiscated), others now had boots with cloth legs attached to leather soles, and the lucky ones had felt boots.

  Felt boots! The convict. That most desolate of earth’s creatures—with less inkling of his future than a frog, a mole, or a field mouse—has no defense against fate’s perversities. In the warmest and deepest of holes, the convict cannot rest assured that once night comes, he will be safe from the horrors of winter, that an arm with a blue-cuffed sleeve will not seize him and drag him off to the North Pole.

  Woe, then, to feet not shod in felt boots! Two frosted icicles are what he will set down on Kolyma as he emerges from the back of a truck. A zek without felt boots of his own will make himself scarce all through the winter, lie, dissemble, put up with insults from the lowest of the low, or himself bully others—anything to avoid transportation in winter. But the zek wearing felt boots of his own is dauntless! He looks authority defiantly in the eye and accepts his marching orders with a stoical smile.