In the First Circle Read online

  “Who are you, anyway? How do I know you’re speaking the truth?”

  “Do you know what a risk I’m taking?” Innokenty shot back. Somebody seemed to be knocking on the glass behind him. The attaché was silent. Perhaps taking a long puff at his cigarette.

  “The atomic bomb?” he repeated dubiously. “But who are you? Tell me your name.”

  There was a muffled click, and dead silence followed, unbroken by crackling or buzzing.

  They had been cut off.

  Chapter 2

  A Miscue

  THERE ARE ESTABLISHMENTS in which you suddenly come across a dull red lamp over a door marked “Staff Only.” Or, more recently, it may be an imposing plate-glass sign: “Strictly No Entrance for Unauthorized Persons.” There may even be a grim security guard sitting at a little table and inspecting passes. As always, when confronted with the forbidden, your imagination runs away with you.

  In reality, the door opens onto another unremarkable corridor, perhaps a bit cleaner. A strip of cheap red carpet, standard government issue, runs down the middle. The parquet floor has been more or less polished. Spittoons are stationed at fairly frequent intervals.

  But there are no people. There is no movement out of one door and into another. And these doors are all covered with black leather, black leather stuffed with padding, pinned down by white studs, and bearing shiny oval number plates.

  Even those who work in one such room know less about what goes on in the room next door than they do about the day’s gossip on the island of Madagascar.

  On the same gloomy frost-free December evening, in the building of the Moscow Central Automatic Telephone Exchange, on one of those forbidden corridors and in one of those inaccessible rooms, known to the superintendent of the building as Room 194 and to Department XI of the Sixth Administration of the Ministry of State Security as Post A-1, two lieutenants were on duty. Not in uniform, however: They could enter and leave the telephone exchange with greater anonymity in civilian dress. One wall was occupied by a switchboard and acoustic apparatus—black plastic and shiny metal. A long schedule of instructions, on dingy paper, hung on the other.

  These instructions anticipated and warned against every imaginable breach of or departure from routine in monitoring and recording calls to and from the U.S. Embassy, stipulating that two persons should be on duty at all times, one listening in continuously, never removing the earphones, while the other should never leave the room except to go to the bathroom, and that they should alternate duties at half-hour intervals.

  If you followed these instructions, mistakes were impossible.

  But such is the fatal incompatibility of officialdom’s perfectionism with man’s pitiful imperfection that these instructions had for once been disobeyed. Not because the men on duty were novices, but because they were experienced enough to know that nothing special ever happened, least of all on the Western Christmas Eve.

  One of them, the flat-nosed Lieutenant Tyukin, was certain to be asked in next Monday’s politics class “who are ‘the friends of the people’ and how do they fight against the social democrats,” why we had to break with the Mensheviks at the Second Congress and had been right to do so, why we had reunited at the Fifth Congress, again acting correctly, then at the Sixth Congress had again gone our separate ways and yet again had been right to do so.

  Tyukin wouldn’t have dreamed of starting his reading on Saturday, with little hope of memorizing anything then, except that after duty on Sunday he and his sister’s husband intended to do some serious drinking. He would never be able to take in any of that crap with a hangover on Monday morning, and the Party organizer had already rebuked him and threatened to bring him before the Party bureau. The important thing was not answering in class but being able to present a written summary. Tyukin hadn’t been able to find time all that week and had been putting it off all day, but now he had asked his colleague to keep working for a while, made himself comfortable in a corner by the light of a desk lamp, and started copying into his exercise notebook selected passages from the Short Course.*

  They hadn’t yet gotten around to switching on the overhead light. The auxiliary lamp by the tape recorders was on. Kuleshov, the curly-haired lieutenant with the chubby chin, sat with his earphones on, feeling bored. The embassy had phoned in its shopping orders in the morning, and from lunchtime onward seemed to have fallen asleep. There hadn’t been a single call.

  After sitting like this for some time, Kuleshov decided to take a look at the sores on his left leg. They kept breaking out again and again for unknown reasons. They had been dressed with “brilliant green” zinc ointment and a streptocidal preparation, but instead of healing, the sores had spread under the scabs. The pain had begun to make walking uncomfortable. The MGB clinic had made an appointment for him with a professor. Kuleshov had recently been given a new flat, and his wife was expecting a child. And now these ulcers were poisoning what should have been a comfortable life.

  Kuleshov removed the tight earphones, which pressed on his ears, moved to a brighter spot, rolled up the left leg of his trousers and his long underwear, and began cautiously feeling and picking at the edges of the scabs. Dark pus oozed out under the pressure of his fingers. The pain made his head spin and blotted out all other thoughts. For the first time the thought shot through his mind that perhaps these were not just sores but . . . he tried to remember a terrible word he had heard somewhere: gangrene? . . . And . . . what was that other thing?

  So he did not immediately notice the bobbins start noiselessly spinning as the tape recorder automatically switched itself on. Without taking his bare leg from its support, Kuleshov reached for the earphones, put one ear to them, and heard:

  “How do I know you’re speaking the truth?”

  “Do you know what a risk I’m taking?”

  “The atomic bomb? But who are you? Tell me your name.”

  The atomic bomb! Obeying an impulse as instinctive as that of a man who grabs the nearest object to break his fall, Kuleshov tore the plug from the switchboard, disconnecting the two telephones—and only then realizing that, contrary to instructions, he had not intercepted the caller’s number.

  The first thing he did was look over his shoulder. Tyukin was scribbling his summary and had eyes for nothing else. Tyukin was a friend, but Kuleshov had been warned to keep an eye on him, which meant that Tyukin had received similar instructions. As he turned the Rewind knob of the recorder and plugged the spare recorder in to the embassy loop, Kuleshov thought at first of erasing the recorded message to conceal his blunder. But he remembered at once that his chief had often said that the work of their post was duplicated by automatic recording in another place, and he dropped that silly idea. Of course the recording was duplicated, and for suppressing a conversation like that you’d be shot!

  The tape had rewound itself. He turned the Play knob. The criminal was in a great hurry and very agitated. Where could he have been speaking from? Obviously not from a private apartment. And hardly from his place of work. It was always from public phone booths that people tried to get through to embassies.

  Opening his directory of phone booth numbers, Kuleshov hurriedly dialed a telephone located on the steps of the entrance to the Sokolniki metro station.

  “Genka! Genka!” he croaked. “Emergency! Call the operations room! They may still be able to catch him!”

  * * *

  * Short Course: The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)—Short Course. The central catechism under Stalin, required reading for all Soviet citizens from 1938 to 1956, allegedly authored by Stalin.

  Chapter 3

  Sharashka

  “NEW BOYS!”

  “They’ve brought us some new boys!”

  “Where are you from, comrades?”

  “Friends, then, where are you from?”

  “What are those patches on your chests and on your caps?”

  “That’s where our numbers were. We had them on our backs and
our knees as well. They ripped them off when they sent us out of the camp.”

  “What do you mean, numbers?”

  “What century are we living in? Numbers sewn on human beings? Tell me, Lev Grigorievich, is this what you call progress?”

  “Valentin, old buddy, don’t try starting anything; go and get your supper.”

  “I don’t feel like supper when I know that people are walking around somewhere with numbers on their foreheads!”

  “Friends! You’re getting nine packs of Belomors apiece for the second half of December. You’re in luck.”

  “What sort of Belomors? Java or Ducat?”

  “Half and half.”

  “Dirty bums. It’s poison gas, that Ducat. I’ll complain to the minister—I give you my word I will.”

  “What are those overalls you’re wearing? Why are you all decked out like parachutists?”

  “It’s a sort of uniform they’ve introduced. They used to issue worsted suits and good overcoats, but the bastards are cutting back on us now.”

  “Look! New boys!”

  “They’ve brought us a new batch!”

  “What’s the matter with you supermen? Never seen a real live zek before? What are you blocking the hallway for?”

  “Well, well! Who’s this I see? Dof-Donskoy!? Where’ve you been all this time, Dof? I looked all over Vienna for you in ’45—all over Vienna!”

  “Never seen such a ragged, unshaven lot. Which camp have you come from, friends?”

  “From different camps. Rechlag . . .”

  “. . . Dubrovlag. . . .”

  “Never heard of them, and I’ve been inside nine years.”

  “They’re new ones—special camps, they’re called. They were only started in ’48.”

  “They grabbed me and slung me into the meat wagon right outside the entrance to the Prater in Vienna.”

  “Hang on, Mitya, let’s hear what the new boys have to say.”

  “No, let’s get some exercise! And a breath of fresh air! Lev will debrief the new boys, never fear.”

  “Second shift! Suppertime!”

  “Ozerlag, Luglag, Steplag, Kamyshlag. . . .”

  “Makes you think there’s some unrecognized poet sitting in the Ministry of State Security. He hasn’t got the stamina for whole poems, can’t get it together, so he thinks up poetic names for prison camps.”

  “Ha-ha-ha! It’s a funny world, men, a mighty funny world! What century are we living in?”

  “Keep it down a bit, Valentin, boy!”

  “Excuse me—what’s your name?”

  “Lev Grigorievich.”

  “Are you an engineer as well?”

  “No, I’m a linguist.”

  “Linguist? They even have linguists in this place?”

  “Better ask who they don’t have here. There are mathematicians, physicists, chemists, radio engineers, telephone engineers, designers, artists, translators, bookbinders—they even shipped in a geologist by mistake.”

  “So what does he do?”

  “He’s all right; he got himself fixed up in the photography lab. There’s even an architect. A pretty special one at that! Stalin’s personal architect. Built all his dachas for him. Now he’s inside with us.”

  “Lev! You pose as a materialist, but you’re always ramming spiritual pabulum down people’s throats! Listen, friends! When they march you into the mess hall, we’ve set out about thirty plates for you on the last table by the window. Chow down all you can hold; just make sure your bellies don’t burst!”

  “Thanks very much, but aren’t you robbing yourselves?”

  “Costs us nothing. Anyway, who eats pickled herring and millet mush nowadays? Too, too common!”

  “What did you say? Millet mush common? It’s five years since I saw any!”

  “It probably isn’t millet but magara.”

  “Magara? Are you crazy? Just let them try magara on us, and see what we’d do to them!”

  “What’s the food like in transit prisons nowadays?”

  “Well, in Chelyabinsk—”

  “The old prison or the new one?”

  “I can see you’re an expert. The new one—”

  “Are they still economizing on bathrooms upstairs? Do they still make the zeks carry garbage buckets three stories down?”

  “Yes, it’s just the same.”

  “You said this place is a sharashka? What’s that mean—sharashka?”

  “How much bread do you get here?”

  “Who hasn’t had supper yet? Second sitting!”

  “We get four hundred grams of white bread per man, and there’s black bread on the tables.”

  “What d’you mean, on the tables?”

  “What I say. It’s there on the tables, ready cut. If you want it you can take it; if you don’t you needn’t.”

  “You mean we’re in Europe here or what?”

  “Not quite Europe. You get white bread on the table there, not black.”

  “Ah, but we break our backs working twelve or fourteen hours a day for those Belomor cigarettes and a bit of butter.”

  “Sitting at a desk all day? Call that backbreaking work? Swinging a pick, now that’ll give you a backache!”

  “Sitting in this sharashka, God knows, is like being stuck in a swamp. You’re cut off from the land of the living. Did you hear that, gentlemen? It seems they’ve taken a firm line with the baddies, and you don’t get mugged even in Krasnaya Presnya nowadays.”

  “Professors get forty grams of the best butter, engineers twenty. From each according to his ability, to each according to what is available.”

  “So you worked on the Dnieper Dam?”

  “Yes, I worked for Winter. It’s the Dnieper Dam that landed me inside.”

  “How did that happen, then?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. I sold it to the Germans.”

  “The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station?”

  “Come on—it was blown up!”

  “So what? I sold it to them after it was blown up.”

  “Honestly, it’s like a breath of fresh air! Transit camps! Prison trucks! Camps! Keep moving! Sovietskaya Gavan, here I come!”

  “And back again. Val boy, right back here.”

  “Yes! Back in a hurry, of course!”

  “Do you know, Lev Grigorievich, this rush of impressions, this change of scenery is making my head spin. I’ve lived fifty-two years, recovered twice from fatal illnesses, been married twice to rather pretty women, fathered sons, been published in seven languages, received academic prizes, and never have I been so blissfully happy as today! What a place! To think that tomorrow I won’t be driven into icy water! I’ll get forty grams of butter! There’ll be black bread on the tables! Books aren’t forbidden! You can shave yourself! Guards don’t beat zeks! What a great day! What radiant heights! Maybe I’m dead? Maybe I’m dreaming? I feel as though I am in heaven!”

  “No, my dear sir, you are still in hell, only you’ve ascended to its highest and best circle—the first. You were asking what a sharashka is. You could say it was invented by Dante. He was at his wits’ end as to where to put the ancient sages. It was his Christian duty to consign those heathens to hell. But a Renaissance conscience couldn’t reconcile itself to lumping those luminaries in with the rest of the sinners and condemning them to physical torment. So Dante imagined a special place for them in hell. Let’s see. . . . It goes something like this:

  “We reached the base of a great Citadel . . .

  “Look around at the old arches here!

  “Circled by seven towering battlements . . .

  Through seven gates I entered with those sages. . . .

  “You came here in the Black Marias, so you didn’t see the gates—”

  “There with a solemn and majestic poise

  stood many people gathered in the light . . .

  with neither joy nor sorrow in their bearing. . . .

  I half-saw, half-sensed,

  what quality of souls l
ived in that light. . . .

  What souls are these whose merit lights their way

  even in Hell? What joy sets them apart?”

  “Ach, Lev Grigorievich, I can explain it in a way that the professor will much more readily understand. You need only read Pravda’s front page: ‘It has been shown that a good fleece of wool depends on the feeding and general care of the sheep.’ ”

  Chapter 4

  A Protestant Christmas

  THE CHRISTMAS TREE was a pine twig stuck in a crack in the top of a stool. A multicolored string of low-wattage bulbs was wound around it twice. Milk white vinyl-covered wires connected them to an accumulator on the floor.

  The stool stood in a corner of the room, in the passage between two double bunks. The mattress from one of the upper bunks screened the whole corner and the tiny Christmas tree from the glare of the overhead lights.

  Six men in thick dark blue denims, of the sort worn by parachutists, had taken their stand by the tree and were listening gravely, heads bowed, as one of their number, brisk Max Adam, said a Protestant Christmas prayer.

  There was no one else in the whole large room, which was densely furnished with identical double bunks, welded together by the frames. After supper and an hour to stretch their legs, all the others had gone to work the evening shift.

  Max finished his prayer, and all six sat down. Five of them were overwhelmed by bittersweet nostalgia for their homeland—their beloved, orderly, and reliable Germany, under whose tiled roofs this first festival of the year was so joyous and so moving. The sixth, a big man with a bushy black beard, was a Jew and a Communist.

  Fate had intertwined Lev Rubin’s fortunes with those of Germany, in peace and war.

  In peacetime he had been an expert on the German language; he spoke impeccable modern Hoch Deutsch, but could when necessary have recourse to several dialects. Every German who had ever put his name to a published work he remembered as effortlessly as if he had been a personal acquaintance. He spoke of little towns on the Rhine as though he had often strolled about their well-washed shady streets.