In the First Circle Read online

  The ghastly blue light made the disillusionment trembling on those young lips more painful to see.

  It was partly Nerzhin’s doing that Ruska had begun to think this way, but hearing it from Ruska now made him want to protest. Among his older friends Gleb’s role was destructive criticism, but he felt some responsibility toward this young prisoner.

  “A word to the wise, Rostislav,” he replied very quietly, leaning over so that he was almost speaking into his neighbor’s ear. “However clever and ungainsayable such philosophical systems as skepticism or agnosticism or pessimism may be, you must remember that they are in their very nature condemned to impotence. They cannot govern human activity, because people cannot stand still and so cannot do without systems that affirm something, that point to some destination.”

  “Even if the goal is a quagmire? Anywhere, just as long as we press on?” Ruska retorted.

  “Even if . . .” Gleb hesitated. “Hell, I don’t know. Look, I myself think that mankind has a great need of skepticism. We need it to crack open rock-hard heads, to choke fanatical throats. It is needed here more than anywhere, yet it establishes itself on Russian soil with more than usual difficulty. But skepticism cannot give a man a firm footing. And that is something he must have.”

  “Give me another cigarette.”

  Ruska lit up and puffed nervously.

  “You know, it’s a good thing the MGB didn’t let me go on studying. And end up as a historian.”

  He pronounced each word distinctly, in a loud whisper.

  “Suppose I’d graduated, and gone on to do postgraduate work, like an idiot. Say I had become a scholar, and maybe not a venal hack, though that’s a big maybe. Say I’d written a fat book taking a fresh look (the eight hundred and third) at ancient Novgorod’s administrative system, or Caesar’s war with the Helvetians. . . . There are so many cultures in the world! So many languages! So many countries! So many clever people, and still more clever books, in every one of them! What sort of idiot would want to read it all? What was that quotation of yours? ‘The conclusions arrived at by experts with such difficulty will be shown by other, still greater, experts to be illusory.’ Was that it?”

  “Steady now,” Nerzhin admonished him. “You’re cutting the ground from under your feet. You’re leaving yourself nothing to aim at. We can doubt, we must doubt. But we must have something to love, don’t you think?”

  Ruska seized on the word. “To love! Yes, something to love,” he crowed. “But not history, not theory—a girl.” He leaned over toward Nerzhin’s bed and seized his elbow. “What is the most important thing they’ve deprived us of, would you say? The right to attend meetings? Politics classes? The right to subscribe to State Loans? The one and only thing that the Big Chief could do to hurt us was to deprive us of women! So that’s what he has done. For twenty-five years! The swine! I wonder if anybody realizes,” he said, beating his breast, “what a woman means to a prisoner?”

  “You can go mad that way!” Nerzhin protested, but a sudden warmth welled up in him when he thought of Sima and her promise for Monday evening. . . . “Get it out of your head! Or your mind will black out altogether.” (Ah, but on Monday . . . the thing that comfortable married people take for granted, but that becomes a raging, feverish animal need in a desperate prisoner!) “What does Freud call it?” His voice was getting weaker as his own thoughts grew muddled. “Sublimation—that’s it! Switch your energy to other matters! Study philosophy, and you’ll need neither bread nor water nor a woman’s caresses.”

  (But he shivered as he pictured in detail what it would be like the day after tomorrow. This unbearably delicious thought robbed him of speech.)

  “My mind is fogged already! I won’t get to sleep all night! A girl! Everybody needs a girl! To hold her in your arms. To . . . oh, what’s the use?” Ruska carelessly dropped his cigarette onto the bedding, turned over abruptly, flopped on his belly, and tugged the blanket over his head, exposing his feet.

  Nerzhin grabbed the smoldering cigarette just as it was about to slip between the bunks onto Potapov down below and stubbed it out.

  He had recommended philosophy to Ruska as a refuge, but it was one in which he heard himself howling like a caged animal. Ruska’s youth had been spent on the run with the whole Soviet police force behind him, and now prison had him in its clutches. But what about me? Gleb asked himself. What held me back when I was seventeen, or nineteen, and hot gales of passion darkened my mind? He had curbed himself, suppressed his urges, wallowed in the dialectic like a piglet burying its snout in muck, grunting and guzzling, afraid of missing something. The years before his marriage, his irrecoverable misspent youth, were now, in prison after prison, his bitterest memory. He had been helplessly ignorant, had no idea how to relieve his fits of madness, lacked the words with which to draw someone close, the tone of voice that women yield to. He was also inhibited by an old-fashioned concern for female virtue, and there was no older and wiser woman to lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. Or rather, one such woman had called to him, and he had not understood. Later, on the floor of a prison cell, he had gone over it all in his mind, remembered that lost chance and all those wasted years, and these memories were like red-hot needles in his brain.

  Never mind—less than forty-eight hours to get through until Monday evening.

  Gleb leaned over and whispered in his neighbor’s ear. “Ruska! What about you? Is there somebody?”

  “Yes, there is.” He spoke in a painful whisper, lying flat on his back and clutching his pillow. He was breathing into it, and the heat returned by the pillow, and all the heat of his youth that was wasting away so uselessly in prison fevered the trapped young body that cried out for and had no hope of relief. He had said, “Yes, there is,” and he wanted to believe that there was a girl; but what he had was something elusive, indefinable . . . not a kiss, not even a promise, only the memory of how one evening a girl had listened to his stories about himself with a look of compassion and fascination, and her look had made Ruska for the first time feel that he was a hero and his life story a remarkable one. Nothing had happened between them as yet, but enough had happened for him to say that he did indeed have a girl.

  Gleb continued questioning him. “So who is she?”

  Rostislav peeked from under the blanket and answered in the darkness.

  “It’s . . . it’s Klara.”

  “Klara? The prosecutor’s daughter?”

  Chapter 16

  A Troika of Liars

  THE HEAD OF the Department of Special Assignments was near the end of his report to Minister Abakumov. It dealt with the timing of lethal acts abroad in the coming year, 1950, and who exactly should carry them out. The program of political assassinations had been approved in principle by Stalin before he went on vacation.

  Abakumov, a tall man made taller by elevator shoes, with black hair slicked back from his brow, was wearing the shoulder boards of a colonel general. He sat with his elbows planted masterfully on his imposing desk. He was large but not fat (he took care of his figure and even played tennis from time to time). His eyes were quick, shrewd, and suspicious.

  He dictated the necessary corrections to the department head, who hastened to write them down.

  Abakumov’s office, though not quite a hall, was more than just a room. There was a disused marble fireplace and a tall mirror, the ceiling was high and molded, nymphs and amoretti chased each other across it, and there was a chandelier (the minister had ordained that all should remain as before, except that the green parts were painted over, since that was a color he couldn’t stand). There was a balcony door, bolted and barred winter and summer. Nor were the big windows looking out on the square ever opened. Timepieces on view were one grandfather clock with an exquisite case, one chiming mantelpiece clock with a figurine, one electric wall clock of the sort seen at railway stations. These were somewhat at odds as to the time, but Abakumov was never misled, because he also had two gold watches on his person: one on his hairy wri
st and one (with an alarm) in his pocket.

  Offices in this building grew larger as occupants rose in rank. So did desks. So did the conference tables with their dark blue, scarlet, or blush pink cloths. But nothing grew with such zealous haste as the portraits of the Inspirer and Organizer of Victories. Even in the offices of simple investigators he was portrayed much larger than life, and in Abakumov’s office the Leader of Mankind had been painted by a member of the school of Kremlin realists on a canvas five meters high, full length from his shoes to his marshal’s cap, ablaze with all his decorations, which in real life he never wore, most of them conferred on himself by himself, some few the gift of kings and presidents, no longer, however, including the Yugoslav orders, which had been skillfully dabbed out with paint matching his tunic.

  It appeared, however, that Abakumov found this five-meter image inadequate, that he felt a need to be inspired at every minute by the sight of the Counterespionage Agent’s Best Friend, even when he had his eyes on his papers, for on his desk he also had an upright slab of rhodonite with a bas-relief of Stalin.

  Furthermore, a portrait of Abakumov’s immediate superior, a simpering person in pince-nez, was roomily accommodated on one wall.

  When the head of the Death Department had left, three men entered in single file, and in single file they crossed the patterned carpet: Deputy Minister Selivanovsky, the head of the Special Technology Department; Major General Oskolupov; and the chief engineer of that department, Engineer Colonel Yakonov.

  In strict order of seniority, and with a meticulous show of respect for the occupant of the office, they marched forward in step, so that only Selivanovsky’s feet were heard.

  Selivanovsky, a lean old man with close-cropped grizzled hair, wearing a gray suit of unmilitary cut, occupied a unique position among the minister’s ten deputies: He was in charge not of security officers or investigators but of communications and delicate secret technology. This meant that his master’s anger was less frequently visited on him, in conference and in ministerial orders. He was more at ease in this office than the others and promptly sat down in the overstuffed leather armchair facing Abakumov’s desk.

  With Selivanovsky seated, Oskolupov was front man. Yakonov stood close behind him, apparently trying to conceal his bulk.

  Abakumov saw Oskolupov thus suddenly revealed to him, perhaps for the third time in his life, and found the man rather to his liking. Oskolupov was on the plump side, his neck strained at the collar of his tunic, and his chin, obsequiously drawn in, would soon be a double one. His leathery face, more heavily pockmarked than that of the Leader himself, was the simple, honest face of a man who carries out orders, not that of a know-it-all intellectual with crackpot ideas.

  Abakumov squinted over Oskolupov’s shoulder at Yakonov and asked who he was.

  “Me?” Oskolupov was dismayed to find himself unrecognized.

  “Me?” Yakonov said, bending slightly sideways. He drew in his rebellious soft belly as best he could—for all his efforts it kept growing—and his big blue eyes were blank as he presented himself.

  “Yes, you,” the minister said sniffily. “Marfino’s your outfit, is it? Right, sit down.”

  They sat.

  The minister picked up a ruby red Plexiglas paper knife, scratched himself behind the ear with it, and spoke again.

  “Let’s see . . . how long have you been pulling the wool over my eyes? Two years, is it? And the plan allowed you fifteen months, was it? When will the two prototypes be ready?” He shook his fist in warning. “No lies! I don’t like lies!”

  This was the very question for which the three high-placed liars had prepared themselves when they learned that they were to appear together. Oskolupov spoke first, as they had arranged. Bracing his shoulders as though to catapult himself at the all-powerful minister, and gazing triumphantly into his eyes, Oskolupov said: “Comrade Minister! Comrade Colonel General!” (Abakumov preferred this to “Commissar General.”) “Permit me to assure you that the personnel of my department will spare no efforts—”

  “What do you think this is? A public meeting? What am I supposed to do with your efforts? Wrap my backside in them? I’m asking you for a date.”

  He took out a gold-nibbed fountain pen and aimed it at a seven-day calendar.

  Yakonov then intervened, according to plan, his subdued voice emphasizing that he spoke as a technician, not an administrator.

  “Comrade Minister! Within a frequency range of up to 2,400 hertz, at an average transmission level of zero point nine nepers . . .”

  “Hertz, hertz, hertz—that’s all I ever get from you—zero point nine hertz, might as well be the square root of zilch. I want those instruments! Two of them! Whole ones! When do I get them? Eh?”

  He eyed the three of them in turn.

  Selivanovsky now took the floor, speaking slowly, stroking his gray-and-white crew cut.

  “May I inquire what exactly you have in mind, Viktor Semyonovich? Two-way conversations can’t yet be perfectly encoded. . . .”

  The minister shot him a glance.

  “Do you take me for an idiot? What’s it mean, can’t be encoded?”

  Fifteen years ago, when Abakumov was not a minister, and neither he nor anyone else foresaw that he ever would be (he was in fact a sergeant major in the NKVD, being a big, strapping fellow with long arms and legs), his four years of elementary education had sufficed. He sought to improve his qualifications only in jujitsu. All his training was done in the gymnasiums of the Dynamo Sports Club.

  Then, in the years when the ranks of the interrogation service were drastically thinned, while the need for interrogators grew just as rapidly, Abakumov was found to have a talent for the job, his long arms making deft and damaging contact with a prisoner’s ugly mug. That was the beginning of a great career. Within seven years he was head of the counterespionage agency, SMERSH, now he was a minister, and not once in his steep ascent had he felt undereducated. And even here, at the top of the tree, he was too shrewd to be bamboozled by subordinates.

  Abakumov was getting angry and was about to bring down on his desk a clenched fist the size of a cobblestone, when the high door opened and Mikhail Dmitrievich Ryumin came in without knocking. Ryumin was a short, rotund cherub with nice rosy cheeks whom everyone in the ministry called Minka—few of them, however, to his face.

  He walked as noiselessly as a kitten. Drawing near, he turned his innocent light eyes on those seated there, shook hands with Selivanovsky (who rose slightly from his chair), went to the side of the minister’s desk, and, inclining his head and lightly stroking the grooved edge of the desktop with his plump little hands, purred reflectively: “You know, Viktor Semyonovich, I think this is a job for Selivanovsky. We don’t pay the Special Technical Department for nothing, do we? Surely they can identify a voice from a tape? If they can’t, we should send them all packing.”

  He smiled as sweetly as if he were offering a little girl chocolate. And gave each of the department’s three representatives an affectionate look.

  Ryumin had lived for many years in complete obscurity as a bookkeeper in a consumers’ cooperative in the Archangel oblast.* A pink and puffy man with a peevish mouth, he had needled his ledger clerks with every malicious remark he could think of, sucked fruit drops incessantly and offered them to the warehouse manager, talked to truck drivers diplomatically, to cart drivers arrogantly, and submitted documents for the chairman’s signature on time.

  But during the war he had been drafted into the navy and trained as a Special Department interrogator. That was where Ryumin had come into his own. He had eagerly and successfully mastered the art of the frame-up. (Perhaps he had always had half an eye on this great advance?) In fact, his zeal had once proved excessive. He had concocted such a crude case against a newspaper correspondent attached to the Northern Fleet that the prosecutor’s office, always so subservient to the “Organs,” balked—and did not, of course, put a stop to it but did get up the nerve to alert Abakumov. Abakumo
v summoned the little SMERSH investigator to discipline him. He entered the office timidly, expecting to lose his bulbous head. The door closed. When it opened again an hour later, Ryumin emerged full of importance, henceforth senior investigator of special cases at SMERSH headquarters. His star had risen steadily ever since (ominously for Abakumov, but neither of them knew that as yet).

  “I’ll send the lot of them packing anyway, Mikhail Dmitrich, believe you me! When I’ve finished with them, they’ll wonder what hit them!” Abakumov said, looking angrily at all three.

  They lowered their eyes guiltily.

  “But,” Abakumov went on, “I just don’t understand. I mean, how can you identify somebody from a voice over the telephone? An unknown person? Where do you start looking?”

  “Well, I’ll give these three the taped call. They can play about with it, and compare it . . .”

  “You mean you’ve made an arrest?”

  “What do you think?” Ryumin said with his sweet smile. “Four men were picked up near the Sokolniki metro station.”

  A shadow flitted over his face. He knew in his own mind that by the time they were picked up, it was too late. But once arrested, they couldn’t just be released. One of them might have to be processed so that the case would not remain officially unsolved.

  There was a hint of irritation in Ryumin’s obsequious voice: