In the First Circle Read online

  “At five meters? Couldn’t if I tried. Bet you tomorrow’s compote?”

  “You take your shoes off on the bottom bunk. Add another meter.”

  “Six meters, then. The things those swine think up just to aggravate the zeks. I can feel it pressing on my eyeballs all night long.”

  “What, the blue light?”

  “Blue or not blue, light exerts pressure. Lebedev proved that. Aristipp Ivanych, you asleep? Do me a favor, hand up one of my shoes.”

  “I can pass you a shoe, Vyacheslav Petrovich, but tell me first what you’ve got against the blue light.”

  “For one thing it has a short wavelength and so more quanta. The quanta hit me in the eye.”

  “It sheds a gentle light and reminds me personally of the blue nightlight my mother used to put on for me when I was little.”

  “Mama’s got blue shoulder boards now! But let me ask you, can people ever be trusted with real democracy? In every cell I’ve been in, whenever a problem arises, if it’s only about washing the mess tins or sweeping the floor, every imaginable shade of opinion is expressed. Freedom would be the ruin of human beings. Only the big stick, alas, can teach us the truth.”

  “D’you know what ? An icon lamp would be just right here. After all, that used to be an altar.”

  “Not an altar, the baldachin over the altar. They’ve built over the altar.”

  “Dmitri Aleksandrych! What are you doing? Opening windows in December! Give us a break!”

  “Gentlemen! It’s oxygen that makes the zek immortal! In this room there are twenty-four people, and outside it’s neither freezing nor blowing. See this book? It’s an Ehrenburg. I’ll open the window just one Ehrenburg.”

  “Make it one and a half! It’s suffocating on these top bunks.”

  “When you say one Ehrenburg, do you mean sideways?”

  “No, lengthwise. It fits the frame beautifully.”

  “It’s enough to drive anybody crazy. Where’s my camp overcoat?”

  “I’d send all these oxygen fiends to Oy-Myakon. After twelve hours’ hard labor at sixty below, they’d crawl into a goat pen as long as it was warm.”

  “I have nothing against oxygen in principle, but why does it always have to be cold? I’m all for warmed-up oxygen.”

  “Why the devil is it always so dark in this room? Why do they switch the white light off so early?”

  “Valentulya, you’re a twit! If you had your way, you’d be wandering around till one o’clock. Who needs light at midnight?”

  “And you’re a fop!

  “In a cobalt jumpsuit

  Above me’s a fop.

  In the cozy camp zone

  Everything’s so good.”

  “Who’s smoking again? Why do you all smoke? Filthy habit. . . . Damn, the teapot’s cold as well.”

  “Val, where’s Lev?”

  “Isn’t he on his bunk?”

  “I can see a couple of dozen books, but no Lev.”

  “So he’ll be by the bathroom.”

  “Why by?”

  “They’ve screwed a white bulb in, and the wall is warm from the kitchen. I dare say he’s there reading. I’m just going for a wash. Any messages?”

  “. . . Yes, well, she puts some bedclothes on the floor for me, and lies on the bed herself. She was a juicy piece, I can tell you. Really juicy!”

  “Friends, I beg you, talk about something else, anything except women. With all the meat we eat in the sharashka, that’s antisocial talk.”

  “Now then, all you heroes! Leave it off! Lights out has sounded!”

  “Never mind lights out, I think I hear the national anthem somewhere.”

  “I dare say you’ll sleep when you’re ready.”

  “Where’s their sense of humor? They’ve been blaring out that anthem for five solid minutes. It’s gut-wrenching! When will it ever end? Why on earth couldn’t they make do with one verse?”

  “One verse and the call sign, for a country like Russia?”

  “. . . I fought in Africa. Under Rommel. What was bad about that? Well, it was very hot, and there was no water.”

  “There’s an island in the Arctic Ocean, Makhotkin Island. It’s named after the polar aviator Makhotkin, who is now doing a stretch for anti-Soviet agitation.”

  “Mikhail Kuzmich, why do you keep tossing and turning?”

  “Can’t I turn over if I want to?”

  “Of course you can, but just remember that every little turn down below is enormously amplified when it reaches me up here.”

  “You’ve managed to miss the camps so far, Ivan Ivanych. They sleep four to a bunk there. When one man turns over, the other three are seasick. Sometimes a man down below rigs up a curtain and brings a woman in, and you get a magnitude-twelve earthquake! People still manage to sleep.”

  “Grigory Borisych, when did you first land in a sharashka?”

  “I’m thinking of putting in a pentode and a little rheostat there.”

  “He was a man who knew how to look after himself, a methodical man. When he kicked his shoes off at night, he wouldn’t leave them on the floor; he’d put them under the pillow.”

  “You couldn’t leave anything on the floor in those days!”

  “I was in Auschwitz. The terrible thing there was that they marched people straight from the train to the gas chambers with a band playing.”

  “The fishing there is marvelous, and so is the hunting. Go out for an hour in the autumn, and you can come back adorned with pheasants. Step into the reed beds, and you’ve got boar. Walk out onto the plain, and you’ve got rabbits.”

  “All these sharashkas date from 1930, when they started rounding up engineers in droves. The first was on Furkasov. That’s where they planned the White Sea Canal. Then there was the Ramzin outfit. The experiment caught on. Outside, you can never get two great engineers or two great scientists to work together on the same project. They’re rivals for fame, for a Stalin Prize, and sooner or later one of them will squeeze out the other. That’s why outside every project planning team is a pale penumbra around one brilliant head. But what happens in a sharashka? Nobody needs to worry about fame or money. If Nikolai Nikolaich gets half a glass of sour cream, Pyotr Petrovich gets the other half. A dozen bears can live amicably in the same den because there’s nowhere else for them to go. They play a little chess, smoke a few cigarettes, and when they get bored, somebody says, ‘I know, let’s invent something!’ ‘Good idea!’ Many of our scientific advances were made that way. And that’s the whole point of the sharashkas.”

  “I’ve got news for you, boys! Bobynin’s been driven off somewhere!”

  “What d’you mean, driven off?”

  “The junior lieutenant came and said, ‘Get your hat and coat on.’ ”

  “Did he have to take his gear?”

  “No gear.”

  “One of the top brass must have sent for him.”

  “Foma, maybe?”

  “Foma would have come here. Aim a bit higher!”

  “The tea’s gone cold. It’s a dog’s life!”

  “Val, boy, you’re always rattling that spoon in your glass after lights out! I’m sick and tired of it!”

  “So how am I supposed to stir my tea?”

  “Noiselessly.”

  “Nothing happens noiselessly. Except cosmic catastrophes, because sound doesn’t travel in outer space. If a nova exploded right behind us, we wouldn’t hear it. Ruska, your blanket’s falling off. Why don’t you tuck it in? You asleep? Do you realize that our sun is a nova and that the earth is doomed to destruction in the very near future?”

  “I refuse to believe it. I’m still young, and I want to live!”

  “Ha-ha! How primitive! . . . Such cold tea! C’est le mot! . . . Wants to live!”

  “Val, boy, where’ve they taken Bobynin?

  “How should I know? To see Stalin, maybe.”

  “What would you do if Stalin sent for you, Val?”

  “Me? Boy, oh boy! I would presen
t him with a full list of complaints.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’ve told you—every single one. Par exemple, why do we have to do without women? It cramps our creative potential.”

  “Pryanchik! Put a sock in it! Everybody’s fast asleep. Why are you shouting your head off?”

  “What if I don’t want to sleep?”

  “Anybody smoking? Keep it out of sight. The junior lieutenant’s coming.”

  “What’s the bastard want now? . . . Mind you, don’t trip, Citizen Junior Lieutenant; you might get a bloody nose!”

  “Pryanchikov!”

  “Eh?”

  “Where are you? Not asleep yet?”

  “Yes, I’m asleep.”

  “Get dressed quickly.”

  “What for? I want my sleep.”

  “I said get dressed. Get your hat and coat on.”

  “What about my things?”

  “Never mind your things. Transport’s waiting. Hurry up.”

  “Am I going with Bobynin?”

  “Bobynin’s gone already. Another one’s come for you.”

  “Another what, lieutenant? Meat wagon?”

  “Come on, hurry up. No, it’s a Pobeda.”

  “Who’s sent for me?”

  “Come on, Pryanchikov. That’s enough questions. I don’t know the answer myself. Get a move on.”

  “Give them an earful, Val!”

  “Tell them about visits!”

  “Shouldn’t Section 58 prisoners get one visit a year?”

  “Tell them about exercise periods.”

  “And letters!”

  “And our uniforms!”

  “Workers of the world, unite! Ha-ha! Adieu!”

  “. . . Comrade Junior Lieutenant, where on earth is Pryanchikov?”

  “I’m bringing him, Comrade Major! Here he is!”

  “Sock it to them, Val boy. Every bit of it! Don’t be shy!”

  “The filth are mighty busy in the middle of the night!”

  “Wonder what’s happened?”

  “Never saw anything like this before!”

  “Maybe war’s broken out? Maybe they’re taking them to be shot?”

  “Idiot! D’you think they’d take us one at a time? When war comes, they’ll mow us down wholesale. Or put something in the mush to infect us with plague, like the Germans did in concentration camps in ’45.”

  “Leave it now, let’s get some sleep. We’ll hear all about it in the morning.”

  “I remember Beria sending for Boris Sergeevich Stechkin in 1939–40. He never came back to the sharashka empty-handed. Either the prison governor would be replaced, or exercise periods would be prolonged. . . . Stechkin couldn’t stand the differential rationing system: Academicians were bribed with cream and eggs, professors got forty grams of the best butter, and ordinary workhorses only twenty. . . . A good man, Boris Sergeevich, God rest him.”

  “Is he dead, then?”

  “No. He was released. He got a Stalin Prize.”

  Chapter 15

  A Girl! A Girl!

  AT LAST EVEN ABRAMSON, who had served two sentences and learned all about sharashkas the first time around, tired of murmuring. In two places whispered stories were nearing their end. Somebody was snoring loudly, horribly, sounding at times as if he was about to burst.

  The blue light over the four-paneled door set in the vaulted entrance shed a dim light on a dozen double bunks, fastened together in pairs and arranged fanwise around the large semicircular room. This room, probably the only one of its kind in Moscow, was twelve good masculine strides in diameter. Up above, there was a spacious dome, at the base of a hexagonal tower. Around the dome there were five elegant arched windows. The windows were barred but not “muzzled” (fitted with inverted awnings), so that in daytime you could see the wilderness that passed for a park on the other side of the highway, and on summer evenings the plaintive singing of husbandless girls in a Moscow suburb troubled the prisoners’ minds.

  Nerzhin, on the top bunk by the central window, was not even trying to sleep. Down below, Potapov, the engineer, had been sleeping the untroubled sleep of an honest workingman for some time. On the next bunk to the left, the moonfaced vacuum-tube expert, Zemelya, sprawled and snuffled contentedly, with Pryanchikov’s empty bed beneath him, while to the right, on a bunk set right against Nerzhin’s own, Ruska Doronin, one of the youngest zeks in the sharashka, was sleeplessly tossing and turning.

  As the conversation in Yakonov’s office receded, Nerzhin saw more and more clearly that his refusal to join the cryptographic group was not just an episode in his professional career but the turning point in his life as a whole. It was bound to earn him, probably very soon, a long and grueling trek to somewhere in Siberia or the Arctic. It would mean death—or victory over death.

  He needed to think about this abrupt change of direction. What had he achieved during this three-year breathing space in the sharashka? Was he now tough enough to stand being tossed back into the abyss of the camps?

  As it happened, the following day was Gleb’s thirty-first birthday. (He did not, of course, feel like reminding his friends of it.) Was he at the midpoint of his life? Near the end? Just beginning?

  His thoughts blurred. At one minute he found himself weakly imagining that it was not too late; he could put things right, agree to join the cryptographers. Then he began remembering his grievance—that they had kept postponing his wife’s visit for eleven months now—and wondering whether they would let him see her before he left.

  But then his other self awoke and flexed its muscles. The breadlines of the First Five-Year Plan had transformed a diffident boy into a different Nerzhin, brash and defiant, and the life he had led since, especially in the camps, had left him still tougher. His sturdy inner self was already busily calculating how often he would be searched—as he left Marfino, on admission to Butyrki, on admission to Krasnaya Presnya; how to conceal fragments of pencil lead in his jacket; how to smuggle his old overalls out of the sharashka (every extra layer is precious to a working stiff); how to prove that the aluminum teaspoon he had carried around ever since he had been inside was his own, not stolen from the sharashka, which had almost identical ones.

  He even felt a restless urge to get up then and there, in the dim light, and begin his preparations, start rearranging and hiding.

  All this time Ruska Doronin kept impatiently changing his position. One minute he was lying on his stomach, burying himself in his pillow, and pulling the blanket over his head so that his feet were uncovered; the next he would be flat on his back, flinging off the blanket and exposing a white bedspread and a dingy sheet. (One of the two sheets was changed every bath day, but by December the sharashka had overspent its yearly soap allowance, and bath day was delayed.) Suddenly he sat up in bed, hoisted himself, pillow and all, up against the iron back, and opened a hefty volume of Mommsen’s History of Rome. Noticing that Nerzhin was awake and staring up at the blue bulb, Ruska asked in a hoarse whisper:

  “Gleb, have you got any cigarettes handy? Give me one.”

  Ruska did not smoke as a rule. Nerzhin reached over to the pocket of his overalls, which was hanging on the back of the bunk. He took out two cigarettes, and they both lit up.

  Ruska concentrated on his smoking and did not look at Nerzhin. His face, which was always changing its expression—at one moment it was naive and boyish, at the next the face of a trickster of genius—under its mop of unruly dark-blond hair looked attractive even in the ghastly light from the blue bulb.

  “Here,” said Nerzhin, putting an empty Belomor pack where Ruska could use it as an ashtray.

  They tapped their ash into it.

  Ruska had been in the sharashka since summer. Nerzhin took an immediate liking to him and felt an urge to protect him.

  But it was soon evident that Ruska, though only twenty-three (and with twenty-five years of imprisonment hanging over him), needed no protector. His character and outlook had been fully formed by the vicissitudes
of a short but turbulent life—not so much by his four weeks of university education, two in Moscow, two in Leningrad, as by two years on the run, with forged documents and the whole Soviet police force on his trail (he had sworn Gleb to absolute secrecy when he told him), and most recently by two years of prison. With his gift of instant mimicry, he had quickly mastered the wolfish law of the Gulag: He was always on his guard and confided in very few people, though on the surface he was childishly candid. He was feverishly active and tried to pack a great deal into a short time. Reading was just one of his many activities.

  Gleb, wearying of his muddled thoughts, was still not ready for sleep and judged that Ruska was even less so. He whispered a question in the hushed room:

  “Well, how’s the theory of cycles going?”

  They had been discussing this theory not long ago, and Ruska had meant to look for confirmation of it in Mommsen.

  Ruska turned around at Nerzhin’s whisper but looked blank. He wrinkled his brow, struggling to make sense of the question.

  “I mean, how’s the theory of historical cycles going?”

  Ruska sighed, and as he released his breath, his face and his restless mind also relaxed. He leaned sideways, shifted his weight onto his elbow, tossed his cigarette, which had gone out half smoked, into the empty pack Nerzhin had put next to him, and said dully: “I’m sick of everything. Books and theories included.”

  They were silent again. Nerzhin was about to turn onto his other side when Ruska gave a laugh and began whispering, gathering speed as he warmed to his subject:

  “History is so monotonous that it makes you sick to read it. It’s as bad as Pravda. The nobler and more honorable a man is, the dirtier the treatment his fellow countrymen hand out to him. Spurius Cassius wanted to get land for the common people, and the common people let him be put to death. Spurius Melius wanted to give bread to the hungry people, was suspected of wanting to be king, and was executed. Marcus Manlius, the one who was awakened by the cackling of the geese in all the schoolbooks and saved the Capitol, was executed for treason! What do you think of that?”

  “You amaze me!”

  “Read enough history, and you’ll want to be a villain yourself. It pays better. If it hadn’t been for the great Hannibal, we would never have heard of Carthage, but the wretched place banished him, confiscated his property, and razed his dwelling to the ground! There’s nothing new under the sun. All that time ago, Gnaeus Naevius was put in the stocks for writing daring plays. The Aetolians, long before we thought of it, proclaimed a false amnesty to entice émigrés back home and put them to death. The Romans had already arrived at a truth that the Gulag keeps forgetting: It’s uneconomic to let a slave go hungry; you must feed him. The whole of history is one unmitigated fuck-up. It’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. There’s neither truth nor error, no progress, no future.”