In the First Circle Read online

  You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.

  But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats you.

  There are common soldiers whose company commanders fear them. Laborers whose foremen tremble before them. Prisoners who strike fear into their interrogators.

  Bobynin knew all this and deliberately took such a stand with his superiors. Whenever Yakonov talked to him, he felt a cowardly urge to pander to this zek, to avoid upsetting him. He was angry with himself, but he noticed that everybody who talked to Bobynin behaved in the same way.

  Yakonov interrupted Mamurin and took off his earphones.

  “It’s better, Yakov Ivanovich, definitely better! I would like Rubin to listen in a bit; he has a good ear.”

  Somebody, once upon a time, had gotten from Rubin the answer he wanted and had remarked upon his “good ear.” Others had repeated this unthinkingly and come to believe it. Rubin had landed in the sharashka by chance and earned his salt as a translator. His left ear was like everybody else’s, but he was a little deaf in his right as a result of shell shock; he had to conceal this after his hearing had been praised. The fame of his “good ear” had given him a firm footing in the sharashka, and he had subsequently dug himself in still more securely with his magisterial work on “The Audio-Synthetic and Electro-Acoustic Aspects of Russian Speech.”

  Rubin was summoned from the Acoustics Laboratory by telephone. While they were waiting, they listened in again, some of them for the tenth time. Markushev, eyes strained, brow knitted, held the receiver briefly and abruptly pronounced it “better, much better.” (He had known it would be: Readjusting to every sixteenth impulse had been his idea.) Bulatov could be heard all over the lab shouting that they must arrange with the encoders to readjust to thirty-two impulses. Two obliging electricians, Lyubimichev and Siromakha, shared a pair of earphones, almost pulling them apart: Each of them listened with one ear and enthusiastically confirmed that it had indeed become more distinct.

  Bobynin went on measuring his oscillogram without raising his head.

  The black hand of the big electric clock on the wall jumped to 10:30. In every lab except Number Seven, they would shortly be finishing work and handing in secret journals to be put in safes; the zeks would be going off to bed and the free employees running to catch buses, which were infrequent at this late hour.

  Ilya Terentievich Khorobrov, keeping to the back of the lab where the bosses could not see him, lumbered over to Potapov behind his shelf-rack. Khorobrov was a native of Vyatka, from its most godforsaken corner, near Kai, bordering on the land of the Gulag, thousands upon thousands of versts** of marsh and forest, an expanse greater than France. He had seen and understood more than most, and things had sometimes become so unbearable that he felt like standing under one of the loudspeakers out in the street and banging his hand on the iron post. The unremitting need to conceal his thoughts, to stifle his sense of injustice, had bowed him, given him a forbidding look, etched deep lines around his mouth. The time came when he could no longer suppress his longing to speak his mind: At the first postwar elections he had crossed out the candidate’s name and written a crude obscenity on the ballot form. That was a time when houses could not be rebuilt and fields went unsowed for lack of working hands. But a whole team of ace sleuths spent a month studying the handwriting of every elector in the district, and Khorobrov was arrested. He went off to the camp naively rejoicing that there at any rate he would be able to speak his mind. But the camp was no free republic either! With stool pigeons all around him, Khorobrov learned to hold his tongue there, too.

  Common sense demanded that he should bustle about as busily as the others in the anthill that was Number Seven and earn, if not his release, at least a comfortable existence. But the loathing inspired in him by injustice, even when it did not affect him directly, had reached such a pitch that he no longer wanted to live.

  He slipped behind Potapov’s shelf-rack, bent over his table, and quietly suggested that they should leave.

  “Andreich! It’s time we cleared off. It’s Saturday.”

  Just at that moment Potapov was fixing a pale pink catch to the translucent red cigarette case. Head on one side, he admired his work and asked:

  “What do you think, Terentich? Do the colors match?”

  Receiving no reply, neither approving nor negative, Potapov gave Khorobrov a grandmotherly look over his wire-framed spectacles.

  “Why tease the dragon?” he asked. “Time is on our side; any Pravda lead article will tell you that. We’ll evaporate as soon as Anton leaves.”

  He had a habit of separating his syllables and reinforcing the important word in a sentence with a gesture.

  By this time Rubin had arrived in the lab. Rubin had not been in the mood for work all evening, and right then, at 11:00 p.m., the only thing he wanted was to get back to the prison as quickly as possible and to lap up some more Hemingway. But he arranged his features to express keen interest in the improved quality of Number Seven’s circuit and would have no one but Markushev as his reader, because his high-pitched voice with its basic tone of 160 hertz would come across less clearly. (This approach put his expertise beyond doubt.) Rubin donned the earphones and repeatedly commanded Markushev to read louder or more quietly or to repeat phrases that he himself had invented to check particular sound sequences. In the end he gave it as his verdict that by and large there was a tendency to improvement, that the vowels came across just marvelously, that the unvoiced dentals were not quite so good, that he was still worried about the fuzzy edges of zh, and that the consonant group vsp, so characteristic of the Slavic languages, didn’t come across at all and needed a bit more work.

  There was an immediate chorus of delighted voices. So the circuit was an improvement. But Bobynin looked up from his oscillogram, and his deep voice boomed a mocking comment.

  “Nonsense! It’s one step forward, one step back! What we need is method!”

  His unwavering stare reduced them all to embarrassed silence.

  Behind his shelf-rack Potapov was gluing the pink catch to the cigarette case. Potapov had spent every day of his three years in Germany in prison camps. He had survived mainly thanks to his skill in making attractive lighters, cigarette cases, and holders from garbage and without tools.

  Nobody was in any hurry to leave work! And this on the eve of their stolen Sunday!

  Khorobrov straightened up. He placed on Potapov’s table the things that had to be put in the safe, emerged from behind the rack, and moved unhurriedly toward the door, passing the crowd around the clipper.

  Mamurin paled and barked angrily after him.

  “Ilya Terentich! Why don’t you have a listen? Where do you think you’re going, anyway?”

  Khorobrov, just as unhurriedly, turned around and answered with a twisted smile, stressing each syllable. “I would have preferred not to mention it out loud. But since you insist, I am at present on my way to the lavatory, or shall I say the john. If all goes well there, I shall proceed to the prison and go to bed.”

  In the scared silence that followed, Bobynin, who was hardly ever heard to laugh, guffawed.

  This was mutiny on the high seas! Mamurin took a step toward Khorobrov, as though about to strike him.

  “What do you mean, sleep?” he shrilled. “Everybody else is working, and you want to sleep?”

  With his hand on the door handle, and scarcely containing himself, Khorobrov answered, “That’s right. I just want to sleep! I’ve worked my twelve hours according to the Constitution, and that’s enough!” He was about to explode and add something irremediable, when the door opened and the duty officer addressed Yakonov.

  “Anton Nikolaich! You’re wanted urgently on the outside phone.”

  Yakonov rose hurriedly and went out ahead of Khorobrov.

  Shortly afterward, Potapov also turned off his desk lamp, transferred his own and K
horobrov’s confidential papers to Bulatov’s desk, and limped neither quickly nor slowly toward the door. A motorcycle accident before the war had left him lame in his right leg.

  The call for Yakonov was from Vice Minister Selivanovsky summoning him to the ministry, to the Lubyanka, at twelve o’clock, midnight.

  A dog’s life!

  Yakonov went back to his office, dismissed Nerzhin, offered Verenyov a lift, put on his street clothes, returned to his desk with his gloves on, and under “Nerzhin—write off” added “Khorobrov ditto.”

  * * *

  * Kolkhoznik: A kolkhoz is a Soviet collective farm; a worker on it was known as a kolkhoznik.

  ** Verst: Pre-Revolutionary unit of distance equal to 0.6629 miles.

  Chapter 13

  He Should Have Lied

  NERZHIN WALKED BACK to the Acoustics Laboratory knowing that something irreparable had happened but unaware as yet how serious it was. When he got there, Rubin was missing. The others were all there, and Valentin, who was busy in the passageway with a panel studded with dozens of radio valves, flashed a glance at him.

  “Steady there!” he said, one hand up, palm outward, like a policeman stopping a car. “Why is there no current in my third stage? Maybe you can tell me.”

  Then he remembered: “Ah, yes, why did they send for you? Qu’est-ce qu’est passé?”

  Nerzhin was sullenly unforthcoming. “Cut the clowning, Valentin.” He could not confess to this single-minded devotee of his own science that he had just that moment renounced mathematics.

  “If you have worries, let me prescribe dance music! Anyway, what have we got to be miserable about? You’ve read that guy . . . what’s his name? The one with the cigarette between his teeth—smoke a yard, throw two away . . . never handles a spade himself, but urges everybody else to dig . . . you know who I mean.

  With police of my own to keep watch over me

  Safe behind bars is the best place to be.

  But another thought had claimed Val’s attention, and he was already giving orders.

  “Vadka! Plug in the oscilloscope, quick!”

  Nerzhin went to his desk. He noticed, before sitting down, that Simochka was agitated. She stared at him openly, and her faint eyebrows twitched.

  “Where’s the Beard, then, Serafima Vitalievna?”

  “Anton Nikolaevich sent for him as well. He wanted him in Number Seven,” Simochka answered out loud. She moved over to the switchboard and spoke still louder, so that everyone could hear: “Gleb Vikentich, come and check the new word lists with me; we’ve still got half an hour.”

  Simochka was one of the readers on the articulation project. There was a standard measurement of audibility, and they were supposed to ensure that all readers kept to it.

  “How can I check you in all this noise?”

  “Let’s go into the box.” She gave Nerzhin a significant look, picked up her lists, which were written on drawing paper in India ink, and went over to the box.

  Nerzhin followed her.

  He bolted the hollow yard-thick door, then squeezed through the little inner door, and before he could pull down the blinds, Sima had thrown her arms around his neck and was standing on tiptoe to kiss his lips.

  He picked her up—she was very light; there was so little room that the toes of her shoes knocked against the wall—sat on the only chair, in front of the microphone, and lowered her onto his knees.

  “Why did Anton send for you? What was wrong? How bad was it?”

  “The amplifier isn’t on, is it? We don’t want this relayed over the loudspeaker.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “What makes you think it was something bad?”

  “I felt it must be the moment they rang for you. And I can tell by your face.”

  “When are you going to call me Gleb?”

  “I haven’t got used to the idea yet.”

  The warmth of her unknown body flowed into his knees, through his hands, and upward. Unknown, mysterious as any woman’s body would be to him after so many years of soldiering and prison. And not everyone has a wealth of youthful memories.

  Simochka was remarkably light: Her bones might have been filled with air; she could have been made of wax—she was as weightless as a bird that looks bigger because of its feathers.

  “Yes, my little girl. It looks as if . . . I will be moving shortly.”

  She twisted around in his arms, letting her shawl slip from her shoulders, and hugged him as hard as she could.

  “Where to?”

  “Why ask? We are people of the abyss. We disappear into the hole from which we surfaced . . . back to the camp,” Gleb explained, as though teaching a child.

  “But why-y-y?” she wailed.

  Gleb looked wonderingly into the eyes of this plain little girl whose love he had won so unexpectedly and with so little effort. She was more anxious for him than he was himself.

  “Maybe I could have stayed on. But it would have been in another lab. We still wouldn’t be together.”

  As though this had been his reason for refusing in Anton’s office! But he was stringing sounds together as mechanically as the Scrambler. In reality a prisoner’s situation was so desperate that if Gleb had been transferred to another lab, he would have tried to form a relationship with some other woman working beside him, and if he had remained in the Acoustics Lab, any other woman at the next desk, whatever she looked like, would have done just as well as Simochka.

  She, poor thing, pressed her little body to his and kissed him.

  Why, all those weeks since their first kiss, had he spared Simochka, begrudged her the illusion of future happiness? She was unlikely to find anyone to marry her, and someone was sure to take advantage of her. She had thrown herself at him . . . afraid and eager at once. Why shouldn’t he . . . before he plunged back into the camps, where there would never be the slightest chance . . .

  “I wouldn’t like to go away without. . . . I want to take with me the memory of. . . . What I mean is, I want to leave you with my child. . . .”

  Embarrassed, she lowered her head and resisted his efforts to raise it with his fingers.

  “Little bird . . . don’t hide from me. Look up. Say something. Don’t you want that?”

  She threw back her head and spoke from deep inside herself. “I’ll wait for you. How many years have you still got to do? Five? Well, I’ll wait five years for you! But will you come back to me when you’re released?”

  She was deliberately misunderstanding him, speaking as though he were not already married. The long-nosed little thing was determined to marry him!

  Gleb’s wife was living right there. In Moscow somewhere, but it might as well have been on Mars.

  Gleb had something else to think of, as well as Simochka, there on his knees, and his wife on Mars—those reflections on the Russian Revolution hidden away in his desk. They had cost him so much labor. Tentative sketches, but they had evoked some of his finest thoughts.

  They didn’t allow the smallest scrap of paper with writing on it to be taken out of the sharashka. And if anything was found when they frisked him in transit prison, he was bound to get an extra few years.

  He had to lie. Make lying promises, as people always do. Then when he left Marfino, he could leave his notes with Simochka for safekeeping.

  But with those eyes fixed hopefully on him, he could not lie. He ignored her question, avoided her gaze, opened her blouse, and began kissing her angular shoulders.

  “You asked me once what I keep writing all the time,” he said hesitantly.

  “What is it, then?” Simochka asked curiously.

  If she hadn’t chimed in, hadn’t seemed so eager, he would probably have confided in her then and there. But her eagerness put him on guard. He had lived so long in a world full of booby traps with cunningly concealed tripwires.

  Those loving, trustful eyes might well be working for the security officer.

  He remembered how it had all started. She had put her
cheek to his! It could all be a put-up job!

  “It’s just history,” he answered. “About the days of Peter the Great. But it’s precious to me. I will carry on writing till Anton slings me out. But where can I put it all when I leave?”

  His eyes searched hers suspiciously.

  “Why do you ask? You can give it to me. I’ll keep it safe. Keep on writing, my dear.”

  She had another question for him. “Tell me, is your wife very beautiful?”

  The magneto-telephone connecting the booth with the lab rang suddenly. Sima pressed the knob so that she could be heard at the other end but held the receiver away from her mouth. Flushed, and with her clothes in disarray, she began reading from the test card in a flat, expressionless voice.

  “D’yer . . . fskop . . . shtap. . . . Yes, hello, what is it, Valentin Martynych? Double diode-triode? There aren’t any G-G-7s, but I think there’s a 6-G-2. Let me just finish this list, and I’ll be out there.”

  She put down the phone and snuggled up to Gleb.

  “I must go. Somebody will notice. Please let me go.”

  But her plea was halfhearted.

  He tightened his hold and pressed her whole body to his own.

  “No! I let you go before, and I shouldn’t have. This time I’m not going to!”

  “Please! They’re waiting for me! I have to close the lab!”

  “I want you now! Right here!”

  He kissed her.

  “Not today, though!”

  “So when?”

  “Monday,” she said submissively. “I will be on duty, instead of Lira. Come during the supper break. We will have a whole hour together. . . .”

  By the time Gleb had opened the inner and unbolted the outer door, Sima had buttoned herself up and combed her hair.

  She went out first, looking cold and remote.

  Chapter 14

  The Blue Light

  “I WILL THROW a shoe at that blue bulb one of these days. It gets on my nerves.”

  “You’ll miss.”