In the First Circle Read online

  The Germans were dismissed and replaced by zeks just like those already in the sharashka, except that their clothes were ragged and dirty and they were not given white bread. What could be heard under the limes now, in and out of season, was the steady buzz of healthy Gulag obscenities, reminding the zeks in the sharashka of their unchanging motherland and their inescapable fate. Bricks flew from trucks like leaves in the wind, so that scarcely one reached the ground whole. Zeks chanting, “One, two, and down she comes” tipped the plywood cover over the back of the truck and saved the guards work by crawling under it themselves, merrily embraced the foully swearing wenches, and were carried away through the streets of Moscow back to their camp for the night.

  So in this enchanted castle, separated from the capital and its unwitting inhabitants by barbed wire and bullets, ghosts in black quilted jackets wrought fabulous changes: Marfino acquired piped water, sanitation, central heating, and neat flower beds.

  Meanwhile the establishment so auspiciously founded grew and expanded. Another institute, already engaged in similar work, was merged with Marfino, arriving with its own desks, chairs, cabinets, loose-leaf files, apparatus that would be obsolete in a matter of months, not of years, and its own head, Engineer Major Roitman, who became Yakonov’s deputy. Alas, the creator of the newly arrived institute, its inspirer and protector, Colonel Yakov Ivanovich Mamurin, head of Special and Secret Communications in the Ministry of the Interior, an outstanding servant of the state, had met his end in tragic circumstances before all this.

  One day the Leader of All Progressive Mankind, on the telephone to the Chinese province of Yenan, had been annoyed by interference and crackling in the receiver. He called Beria and said in Georgian:

  “Lavrenty! What sort of idiot is in charge of communications in your department? Remove him.”

  Mamurin was duly removed, but only as far as the Lubyanka. No one knew what to do with him next. The usual instructions were missing. Was he to be put on trial? If so, on what charge? And how long should his sentence be? If he had been an outsider, they could have slapped a “quarter” (of a century!) on him and packed him off to Norilsk. But the big wheels of the MVD knew how true it was that “where you go today I may follow tomorrow,” and held on to Mamurin until they felt sure that Stalin had forgotten him. So there was no investigation and no trial. He was simply relegated to his country home outside Moscow.

  One summer evening in 1948, a new zek was delivered to the Marfino sharashka. Everything about his arrival was unusual: He was brought in a passenger car, not in a prison car; he was escorted not by a common guard but by the head of the Prisons Department of the MVD; and to cap it all, his first supper was served under a butter-cloth cover in the office of the prison governor.

  They heard the new arrival (zeks are supposed to hear nothing but hear everything) say that he “didn’t want any sausage” and the head of the Prisons Department urging him to “take nourishment.” A zek who had gone to the doctor for some medicine overheard this through a partition. After discussing this hair-raising news, the basic population of the sharashka decided that the new arrival was nevertheless a prisoner and went to bed satisfied.

  Where the new man spent that first night is a question that historians of the sharashka have not resolved. But one rather primitive zek, a ham-fisted fitter, came face-to-face with the newcomer in the small hours on the wide marble porch (later out-of-bounds to prisoners).

  “Hi there, pal,” he said, with a friendly punch in the chest, “where’ve you come from? What did you get done for? Sit down and let’s have a smoke.”

  But the new arrival shied away from the fitter in disgust. His pale, lemony face twisted in a grimace. The fitter looked hard at the pale eyes, the thinning fair hair on the balding skull and said angrily: “The hell with you, then! Vermin! Like something out of a lab jar! You’ll be locked up with the rest of us after lights out, and you’ll sure as hell find your tongue then!”

  But the “creature out of a lab jar” never was in fact shut up in the main prison. They found him a little third-floor room, on the same hallway as the laboratories, and wedged into it a bed, a table, a cupboard, a flowering plant in a pot, and a hotplate, and tore down the cardboard blocking the barred window, which however looked out not on God’s world but on a landing on the rear stairway. The stairway itself was on the northern side of the building, so that even in the daytime there was scarcely a glimmer of light in the privileged prisoner’s cell. The bars could of course have been removed, but after some hesitation the prison staff decided to leave them there. They themselves did not understand this mysterious affair and could not decide on the safest line to take.

  The newcomer was promptly christened “the Man in the Iron Mask.” For quite a time no one knew his name. Nor could anyone talk to him. They saw him through the window, sitting dejectedly in his solitary cell, or wandering like a pale ghost under the lime trees, at times when ordinary zeks were not allowed out. The Man in the Iron Mask was as sallow and emaciated as any “goner” after two good years of processing by interrogation officers, but his foolhardy rejection of sausage made that scenario improbable.

  Much later, when the Man in the Iron Mask started turning up for work in Number Seven, the zeks learned from the free workers that he was in fact the very same Colonel Mamurin who had forbidden his subordinates in the Communications Department of the Ministry of the Interior to put their heels down when they walked along the corridor: If anyone failed to walk on tiptoe, he would rush out through his secretary’s room in a fury yelling: “Do you know whose office you’re stamping past, you oaf? What’s your name?”

  Much later they learned the reason for Mamurin’s sufferings. The world of free men had rejected him, and he was too fastidious to join the world of zeks. At first, he read a great deal in his solitude: The Struggle for Peace; Knight of the Golden Star; Russia’s Glorious Sons; then the verses of Prokofiev and Gribachev and . . . he underwent a miraculous transformation: He began writing verse himself! It is well known that poets are born of unhappiness and spiritual torment, and Mamurin’s torments were more agonizing than those of any other prisoner. After two years inside, without examination or trial, the latest Party directives were still his meat and drink, and the Wise Leader was still his god. Mamurin confided to Rubin that the really terrible thing was not prison food (his meals, incidentally, were prepared separately), or separation from his family (he was, incidentally, driven home once a month to spend a night in his own apartment), or the denial of primitive animal needs—no, it grieved him to think that he had forfeited the trust of Iosif Vissarionovich; it hurt to feel himself no longer a colonel but cashiered and dishonored. That was what made imprisonment so much harder to bear for Communists like themselves than for the unprincipled scum around them.

  Rubin was indeed a Communist. But after receiving the confidences of his would-be kindred spirit and reading his verses, Rubin recoiled from this happy find and began avoiding Mamurin, hiding from him in fact, spending his time among people who unfairly attacked him but were his equals in misfortune.

  Mamurin was nagged by an ambition as importunate as toothache: to vindicate himself in the eyes of the Party and the government. Alas, what this director of communications knew about communications went no further than the handling of a telephone receiver. Strictly speaking he was not capable of work but only of management. But as manager of an operation patently doomed to failure, he would hardly return to favor with the Communications Engineers’ Best Friend.

  He must manage something assured of success. By then two such promising projects had taken shape in the Marfino institute: the Scrambler and Number Seven. People either take to each other or line up against each other at first sight, obeying some impulse that defies logic. Yakonov and his deputy Roitman had not taken to each other. Month by month they found each other more and more insufferable. Harnessed as they were to the same chariot, by some heavier hand, they could not break free; all they could do was pull in
opposite directions. When work on the secret telephone reached a stage at which alternative experimental programs were possible, Roitman conscripted everyone he could get for the Acoustics Laboratory to work on the “vocoder.” (The name was derived from the English “voice coder.” An attempt was made to substitute a Russian name meaning “artificial speech apparatus,” but it had not caught on.) Yakonov’s riposte was to denude all the other groups: The cleverest engineers and the finest imported equipment were concentrated in Number Seven. Other projects wilted and died in the unequal struggle.

  Mamurin had chosen Number Seven for two reasons. For one thing, he could not subordinate himself to his own former subordinate, Roitman. And for another, the ministry, too, thought it was just as well that Yakonov, a non-Party man with a past, should have an unsleeping fiery eye at his back.

  From that day on, Yakonov could please himself whether or not he spent the night in the institute. The cashiered MVD colonel, suppressing his poetic passion for the sake of his country’s technical progress, the lonely prisoner with the feverish pale eyes and the hideously sunken cheeks renouncing food and sleep, burning himself out like a candle, kept Number Seven on a fifteen-hour day and remained at his post till 2:00 a.m. Such a conveniently long working day was possible only in Number Seven, for there was no need for free employees to work nights in order to supervise Mamurin.

  It was to Number Seven that Yakonov had gone when he left Verenyov and Nerzhin together in his office.

  Chapter 12

  Number Seven

  JUST AS ORDINARY SOLDIERS KNOW, without being shown the battle orders from headquarters, whether they are part of the main offensive or a supporting action, so the three hundred zeks in the Marfino sharashka had correctly deduced that Number Seven was the decisive sector.

  No one was supposed to know Number Seven’s real name, but everybody in the institute did. It was the “Clipped Speech Laboratory.” “Clipped” was an English word. Not only the engineers and translators in the institute but the fitters, the turners, the grinders, perhaps even the deaf and slow-witted carpenter, knew that the original models for the installation were American, though officially they were “ours.” This was why American journals with diagrams and theoretical articles about clipping, which were on sale on newsstands in New York, were here given serial numbers, stapled, classified, and, to frustrate American spies, sealed up in fireproof safes.

  Clipping, damping, amplitude compression, electronic differentiation, and integration of random speech—it produced an engineer’s parody of human speech. It was as if someone had taken it into his head to dismantle New Athos or Gurzuf, put the material in little cubes in matchboxes, mix them all up, fly the lot to Nerchinsk, sort them out, and reassemble them precisely as they were before, reproducing the subtropics, the sound of the surf, the southern air, and moonlight.

  This was just what had to be done with the speech reduced to little packages of electrical impulses, and what is more, it had to be reproduced not only so that it could be understood but so that the Boss could recognize the voice at the other end.

  While prisoners in the camps gritted their teeth in the struggle for existence, those in the sharashkas lived in something like luxury. And the authorities had long ago made it a rule that if a project was successful, the zeks most closely concerned with it received all that they could desire—their freedom, a clean passport, an apartment in Moscow—while the others received nothing, not a single day’s remission of sentence, not even a hundred grams of vodka in honor of the victors.

  There was nothing in between.

  So those prisoners who had successfully acquired that special tenacity that seems to enable a prisoner to cling to a mirror with his fingernails tried to get into Number Seven as a springboard to freedom.

  One who succeeded was the brutal engineer Markushev, whose knobbly face radiated readiness to die for the ideas of Engineer Colonel Yakonov. Others of the same stripe also found their way there.

  But the perspicacious Yakonov also recruited zeks who had not volunteered. One such was Amantai Bulatov, a guileless Kazan Tatar with big horn-rimmed glasses and a deafening laugh who was serving ten years as an ex-POW and for his alleged link with Musa Dzhalil, an “enemy of the people.” (They jokingly called Amantai the firm’s oldest employee. After graduating from the Radio Institute in June 1941, he was tossed into the Smolensk debacle. Because he was a Tatar, the Germans extracted him from the POW camp, and he began his practical work on the shop floor of the Lorenz company when its management was still signing letters with a “Heil Hitler!” Then there was Andrei Andreevich Potapov, an expert on ultrahigh voltages and the construction of power stations. He had landed in Marfino because an incompetent bureaucrat had made a mistake when consulting the Gulag’s card index. But Potapov, a real engineer and an indefatigable workhorse, soon found his way around at Marfino and was irreplaceable in the handling of apparatus for the precise measurement of radio frequencies.

  There was also engineer Khorobrov, an outstanding radio expert. He had been assigned to Number Seven at its inception, when it was just one team among others. He had wearied of it recently and made no effort to keep up with its furious tempo. Mamurin was getting just as tired of him.

  Finally a special order as swift and urgent as a lightning flash had produced from a punitive brigade in a hard-labor camp near Salekharda a gloomy prisoner and engineer of genius, Aleksandr Bobynin, who was immediately set over all the others. Bobynin had been plucked from the jaws of death. And now Bobynin was first in line for release if their project succeeded. So Bobynin worked hard, keeping it up after midnight, but with such an air of dignified disdain that Mamurin was afraid of him and did not dare make the sort of remarks to him that no one else was spared.

  Number Seven was the same sort of room as the Acoustics Lab, but on the floor above it. It, too, was littered with apparatus and a medley of furniture, but there was no ramshackle soundproof box in a corner.

  Since Yakonov appeared in Number Seven several times a day, it did not treat his arrival as a descent from on high. All that happened was that Markushev and other toadies made sure that he saw them and bustled around more briskly and cheerfully than ever, while Potapov, to make himself invisible, used a frequency meter to stop a gap among the apparatus on a rack that screened him from the rest of the laboratory. He had worked without a break, paid all his debts, and was now quietly fashioning a lump of transparent red plastic into a cigarette case, intended as a Christmas present for someone.

  Mamurin rose to meet Yakonov as his equal. He was not wearing blue overalls like the other zeks but a suit of expensive cloth, yet even this made his haggard features and his bony frame no handsomer.

  The expression on his sallow brow and his bloodless lips, the lips of one not long for this world, was meant to signify pleasure, and Yakonov read it right.

  “Anton Nikolaich! We’ve readjusted to every sixteenth impulse, and it’s much better. Come and listen in. I’ll read you something.”

  “Reading” and “listening in” were the usual way of testing the quality of a telephone circuit: The circuit would be changed several times a day by the addition or subtraction of a unit, and adjusting the articulation every time was laborious, too slow to keep up with the ideas of the engineers on design, and it was not worth trying to get rough figures from the forbidding science now monopolized by Roitman’s foster child Nerzhin.

  Mamurin and Yakonov, obedient as usual to a single thought, had no need of questions or explanations. Mamurin went first to the far corner of the room, turned his back, pressed the receiver to his cheekbone, and started reading from a newspaper into the telephone, while Yakonov stood by the stand with the control panels, put on the earphones plugged in to the other end of the circuit, and started listening. Something dreadful was going on in the earphones; the sounds made by Mamurin were fragmented by crackling, rumbling, and howling. But just as a mother gazes lovingly at her ill-favored babe, Yakonov, instead of tearing the earph
ones from his tortured ears, listened harder and decided that this new horrible noise seemed rather better than the horrible noise he had heard before dinner. The new noise was not live colloquial speech but a measured and exaggeratedly precise recital: Mamurin was reading an article about the high-handedness of Yugoslav frontier guards and the effrontery of the butcher Rankovich, who had turned a freedom-loving country into one great dungeon, so that Yakonov easily guessed the bits he couldn’t hear, realized and as quickly forgot that he was guessing, and became more and more certain that audibility had improved since dinner.

  He naturally wanted to share his joy with Bobynin. The heavily built, thickset prisoner with the defiantly shaved head (you could please yourself how you wore your hair in the sharashka) was sitting nearby. He had not turned around when Yakonov entered the lab, but instead crouched over a long strip of photo-oscillogram film, measuring something with a pair of dividers.

  This Bobynin was the least of God’s creatures, a nonexistent zek, the lowest of the low, with fewer rights than a kolkhoznik.* And Yakonov was a bigwig.

  Yet Yakonov could not bring himself to distract Bobynin, however much he wanted to.