In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  It was thawing outside, but Khorobrov, Nerzhin, and others with felt boots thrust their feet into them—partly to lighten their burden but mainly to feel that reassuring warmth all the way up their legs—and strutted around the empty room. This, although for the present they were going no farther than Butyrki Prison, where it was not the least bit colder than in the institute. Fearless Gerasimovich was the only one with no clothes of his own. The stockroom man had given him a “previously used” prison-issue jacket too large and loose to fasten around him and with long, dangling sleeves, together with a pair of blunt-toed, cloth-legged boots, also “previously used.”

  This costume looked all the more comical because he was wearing pince-nez.

  Nerzhin emerged from the search pleased with himself. Anticipating an early transfer, he had equipped himself yesterday afternoon with two sheets of paper and penciled them over with a closely written text incomprehensible to anyone else—simply omitting vowels or using Greek words or a medley of Russian, English, German, and Latin words, often abbreviated. To make sure of getting them past the searchers, Nerzhin had torn each sheet slightly, crumpled it, as people sometimes crumple paper for its secondary use, and stuffed it into a pocket of his camp trousers. The guard searching him had seen these pieces of paper but drawn the wrong conclusion and left them with him. Now, if he didn’t take them into the cell in Butyrki but left them with his belongings, they might survive even longer.

  These sheets of paper contained in succinct form some of the facts and thoughts consigned to the flames earlier that day.

  The search was over, and all twenty prisoners were herded into the empty waiting room with the things they were permitted to take along. The door closed behind them, and a sentry was posted outside it while they waited for the prison truck. Yet another guard was detailed to patrol the slippery patch under the windows and shoo away anyone who turned up during the lunch break to say good-bye.

  Thus, all ties between the 20 departing prisoners and the 261 staying behind were severed.

  The transferees were still there, yet they were there no longer.

  At first, seating themselves randomly on the benches or on their belongings, they were all silent.

  Their minds were still on the search, each man going over what had been taken from him and what he had managed to get through.

  And on the institute: all the blessings they were leaving behind with it, how much of their sentence they had served there, and how much remained to be served.

  Time checks are the prisoner’s hobby: calculating how much of his life has been lost and how much is still destined to be lost.

  They were thinking, too, of their families, with whom they would be out of touch at first and whose help they would need to seek again; the Gulag is a country in which a grown man working twelve hours a day cannot earn enough to feed himself.

  And thinking of the blunders or deliberate actions that had earned them transportation.

  Wondering where they would be sent, what awaited them in their new place, and how they would adjust to it.

  Each of them had his own thoughts, but all were equally somber.

  Every one of them was in need of reassurance, of hope.

  So when some of them began discussing again the possibility that they would be sent not to a camp but to another special prison, even those who did not for one moment believe it listened.

  Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, though he knew for sure that he must drain the bitter cup, nonetheless hoped and prayed.

  Khorobrov, trying to repair the handle of his suitcase, which kept coming away from its fastening, was swearing loudly.

  “The bastards, the swine can’t even make a simple suitcase in this country. The shift in honor of May Day takes up half the year, the shift in honor of October the other half. They have to do everything in a frantic rush. Look at this—some bastard’s labor-saving idea—they just bend a bit of wire at both ends and shove it through the handle. It’ll hold when the case is empty, but wait till you fill it! They’ve developed heavy industry—damn and blast it!—but the humblest old-time village craftsman would die of shame if he made this stuff!”

  Khorobrov picked up two lumps of brick that had come away from a stove built in the same slapdash way and tried viciously to hammer the ends of the handle into the lug.

  Nerzhin understood Khorobrov very well. Whenever he ran into a humiliation, a slight, an insult, a rebuff, Khorobrov was furious, but how could anyone be calm and reasonable about such things? Could a man under torture howl politely? At that very moment, arrayed in his prison-camp costume and on his way to the Gulag, Nerzhin himself felt as if he were regaining an important constituent of masculine freedom: the right to make every fifth word an obscene one.

  Romashov was talking quietly to the novices, telling them by what routes prisoners were usually taken to Siberia, comparing the Kuybyshev, the Gorky, and the Kirov transits and highly recommending the first.

  Khorobrov stopped hammering and angrily hurled his brick to the floor, reducing it to red crumbs.

  “I can’t bear to listen!” he yelled at Romashov, with an agonized look on his lean, hard-bitten face. “Gorky was never in prison in the place named after him, nor Kuybyshev in the other; otherwise, they’d both have been buried twenty years earlier. Be a man and call them by their proper names: Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, and Vyatka transit prisons! You’ve chalked up twenty years—why truckle to our masters?”

  Khorobrov’s vehemence was catching. Nerzhin rose, summoned Nadelashin through the sentry, and declared in a ringing voice, “Junior lieutenant! We can see through the window that it is now twelve thirty, and lunch is in progress. Why aren’t they bringing us any?”

  The junior lieutenant shuffled uneasily and answered sympathetically.

  “You’ve been . . . taken off the ration strength today.”

  “What do you mean, taken off?” And encouraged by the buzz of discontent behind him, Nerzhin rapped out: “Report to the prison commandant that without lunch we go nowhere! And we won’t let them load us forcibly!”

  The junior lieutenant caved in—“All right, I’ll inform him”—and hurried off guiltily to tell his superior officer.

  No one in the room paused to ask himself whether it was worth getting involved. The niggling self-respect of the free and well-fed is alien to the zek.

  “Good for you!”

  “Keep them on the run!”

  “Stingy bums!”

  “Skinflints! I work three years, and they begrudge me one lunch!”

  “We just won’t leave! It’s that simple! What can they do to us?”

  Even those who were meek and docile with the prison staff day in and day out plucked up their courage. The free wind of the transit prisons was blowing in their faces. This farewell meal with meat was not only their last chance to eat their fill before the months and years of thin gruel ahead; it was an assertion of their human dignity. And even those whose throats were so dry with anxiety that they could not have forced themselves to eat—even they forgot their misery for a while and eagerly demanded that meal.

  The path connecting Prison HQ with the kitchen was visible from the window. They could see, too, a truck backing toward the wood yard, carrying a big Christmas tree, with its boughs jutting out over the sides. The prison officer in charge of supplies and stores alighted from the cab, and a guard sprang down from the back.

  Yes, the lieutenant colonel had kept his word. Tomorrow or the next day, they would put the tree up in the semicircular room; prisoners—fathers without their children transformed into children themselves—would trim the tree with toys (lavishing the state’s time on their preparation), Klara’s little basket, a bright moon in a glass cage; and men with beards and mustaches would join hands and dance around the tree with wry laughter and try to drown the wolf’s howl of their own fate with their singing.

  A Christmas tree was born in the woods,

  In the woods a tree grew. . . .

&nb
sp; They could see the guard on patrol outside shooing Pryanchikov away—he was trying to break through to the windows under siege, shouting something and raising his hand to the heavens.

  They saw the junior lieutenant trotting anxiously to the kitchen, back to HQ, back to the kitchen again, back to HQ again. . . .

  They saw, too, that Spiridon had been turned out before he could finish his lunch to help unload the tree, wiping his mustache and adjusting his belt as he went.

  The junior lieutenant finally almost ran to the kitchen and shortly after led out two cooks carrying between them a large can and a ladle. A third woman followed them with a stack of deep bowls. Afraid of slipping and breaking them, she came to a stop. The junior lieutenant turned back and took some of the bowls from her.

  Everyone in the room shared the excitement of victory.

  Lunch appeared in the doorway. The women began ladling out soup immediately. Zeks carried their dishes to their own corners, to windowsills, or to their suitcases. Others stood, leaning over the table where there were no benches in their way.

  The junior lieutenant and the soup dispensers went out. Silence reigned, the pristine silence that should always accompany eating. They were thinking—here’s a soup with some fat in it, a bit watery, but you can smell the meat: first one spoonful, then another, then a third with little spangles of fat in it and shreds of meat boiled white. I’m pouring it all into myself; the warm wetness passes through my gullet, down into my stomach, and my blood and muscles rejoice in anticipation of replenishment and new strength.

  Nerzhin remembered an old saying: “A woman marries for meat; a man marries for soup.” He took this to mean that the man would have to find the meat and the woman would use it to make the soup. There were no pretenses and no lofty pretensions in the common people’s proverbial sayings. The folk were even more frank about themselves in their huge stock of proverbs than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in their confessions.

  The soup was nearly finished, and the aluminum spoons were scraping the bottoms of the dishes, when someone sighed: “Ye-e-e-es.”

  And a voice from the corner answered: “Now comes the big fast, lads.”

  Some faultfinder chimed in: “They ladled it from the bottom of the pot, but it was pretty thin stuff. I reckon they fished the meat out for themselves.”

  But someone else called out dolefully: “Will we live to eat the like of it again?”

  Then Khorobrov tapped his empty plate with his spoon and said, almost choking with resentment: “No, friends! Bread and water is better than tart and trouble!”

  Nobody answered him.

  Nerzhin started banging on his plate and demanding the main course.

  The junior lieutenant appeared immediately.

  “Finished?” he asked, surveying the transferees with a friendly smile. And satisfied with the amiable looks produced by being full, he made an announcement that his experience of prisons had suggested would be better not made earlier.

  “There’s no second course left. They’re washing the pot now. Sorry.”

  Nerzhin looked around at the prisoners, wondering whether it was worth making a fuss. But Russians are easily mollified, and they had all cooled off.

  “What was the second course?” a deep voice boomed.

  “Stew,” the junior lieutenant said, with a diffident smile.

  They sighed.

  They somehow forgot all about the third course.

  Outside, an engine was sputtering. A shouted command set the junior lieutenant free. Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev’s stern voice could be heard in the corridor.

  They were led out one by one.

  There was no roll call with identity check because the prison institute’s own convoy guards would be escorting the zeks as far as Butyrki and handing them over there. But they were counted, each of them checked off as he took that all too familiar and always fateful step from the ground onto the high footboard of the police truck, lowering his head so as not to bump it on the steel lintel, bent double under the weight of his belongings, and clumsily banged them against the sides of the doorway.

  There was no one to see them off: The break was over, and the zeks had been shepherded back indoors from the exercise yard.

  The truck had been backed right up to the threshold of the HQ building. The prisoners were spared the frenzied barking of guard dogs while they were boarding, but there was the usual crush, the usual jostling. The guards, as always, were eager to get it over with, which made no difference to anyone except themselves, but their haste inevitably affected the prisoners, so that they had no opportunity to look around and take stock of their situation.

  Of the first eighteen seated, not one looked up to say good-bye to the tall, graceful lime trees that had shaded their sorrows and their joys for so many years past.

  The two who did contrive to look about them, Khorobrov and Nerzhin, looked not at the lime trees but at the side of the truck itself, for a particular reason: They wanted to know what color it was painted.

  It was as they expected.

  They thought back to the times when lead-gray-and-black police trucks scoured the streets, striking terror into the citizens. There was a time, long ago, when this was judged necessary. But in the golden epoch that followed, even police trucks were required to mirror its smiling face. Some genius had an inspiration: Police trucks would be designed to look exactly like food delivery trucks, painted with the same orange and light blue stripes, and bearing the legend in four languages:

  Khleb Pain Brot Bread

  or

  Myaso Viande Fleisch Meat

  Nerzhin, as he climbed into the truck, managed to twist around and read the word “Meat”; then it was his turn to squeeze through the narrow door and the even narrower second door, walk over somebody’s feet, drag his case and sack over somebody’s knees, and take his seat.

  Inside, this three-ton truck was not “boxed,” that is to say, not divided into ten iron boxes, into each of which one single prisoner would be squeezed. No, this was a truck of the “general” type, meaning that it was meant for the transport not of prisoners under investigation but those already sentenced, which greatly increased its “live freight” capacity. In its rear section, between the two iron doors with their small ventilation grilles, the truck had a narrow space for the guards. They could lock the inner doors from the outside and the outer doors from the inside and communicate with the driver by means of a speaking tube running through the bodywork of the truck. There was barely room for two guards with their legs tucked up under them. The rear compartment was further reduced in size by a single small box to house any refractory prisoner. Otherwise, the rear of the truck was one single low-roofed metal box, a single communal mousetrap, and the prescribed number of men to be squeezed into it was, in fact, twenty. (If you kept the iron door latched by wedging two pairs of booted feet against it, you could squeeze a few more in.)

  A bench ran around three walls of the mousetrap, leaving only a small space in the middle. Those who managed to find a place sat down, but they were not the luckiest; when the truck was crammed full, other people and other people’s belongings landed on their cramped legs. Neither protests nor apologies had any point in this crush, and it would be an hour or so before they could change positions. The guards had put their shoulders to the door and locked it after shoving the last man in.

  But they had not yet slammed the outer door of the guard’s compartment. Someone else set foot on the rear step, and a new shadow obscured the view through the ventilation grille.

  “Hey, guys!” Ruska’s voice. “I’m due at Butyrki for investigation! Who are these? Who’s being moved?”

  There was an immediate explosion of voices: all twenty zeks answering him, both guards telling Ruska to shut up, and Klimentiev calling out from the doorway of HQ ordering the guards to keep their minds on the job and prevent the prisoners from calling out to one another.

  “Be quiet, you. . . ,” somebody said, using an obscene word
.

  It was quiet again, and the guards could be heard rearranging their legs so that they could stuff Ruska into the box quickly.

  “Who told on you, Ruska?” Nerzhin called out.

  “Siromakha!”

  Several voices chorused, “The rat!”

  “How many of you are there?” Ruska shouted.

  “Twenty.”

  “Who’s there altogether?”

  But this was where they shoved him into the box and locked it.

  “Keep your chin up, Ruska,” they shouted. “We’ll meet in the camp!”

  As long as the outer door was open, a little light reached the interior of the truck. But then it was closed with a bang, and the heads of the guards prevented the last faint light from reaching them through the grilles in both doors. The engine rumbled, the truck shuddered and began moving, and now as it jolted along, only occasional gleams of reflected light played on the zeks’ faces.

  A brief exchange of shouts from cell to cell, like a hot spark leaping between flint and iron, always excites prisoners.

  “What are the elite supposed to do in a labor camp?” Nerzhin spoke loudly but close to Gerasimovich’s ear, so that no one else could hear him.

  “The same as everybody else, only working twice as hard,” Gerasimovich answered in another loud whisper.

  The truck stopped when they had gone a little way. Obviously at the guardhouse.

  “Ruska,” a prisoner called out, “did they beat you up?”

  A muffled reply came after some delay. “Yes, they did.”

  “Damn and blast all Shishkin-Myshkins!” Nerzhin shouted. “Don’t let them get you down, Ruska!”

  Several voices were raised at once, and no one could make himself heard above the hubbub.

  The truck moved on again, past the guardhouse; then they were all rocked sharply to the right, which meant that they were turning left onto the highway.

  Gerasimovich and Nerzhin swayed toward each other, shoulders touching, at the turn. They looked around, trying to distinguish each other’s faces in the half dark. It was not just their cramped quarters that made them feel so close.