In the First Circle Read online

  In fact, he had been only in Prussia, and only with the army.

  As a major in the Department of Psychological Warfare, he had singled out in prisoner-of-war camps Germans reluctant to remain behind barbed wire and willing to assist him. He carried them off and housed them comfortably in a special school. Some of them would be passed back through the lines equipped with TNT and forged reichsmarks, leave passes, and army paybooks. They might blow up bridges, or they might just roll on home and enjoy themselves until they were caught. With others he talked about Goethe and Schiller and discussed the broadcasts they would make through megaphones, urging their brothers-in-arms to turn their weapons against Hitler. Some of his collaborators with a flair for ideology found it particularly easy to switch from Nazism to Communism, and they were transferred in due course to various “Free German Committees,” where they prepared themselves for the socialist Germany of the future. The simple soldiers among them—and Rubin himself with them—by the end of the war had twice crossed the ruptured front lines and taken fortified positions by force of persuasion, so as to save Soviet manpower.

  But in his efforts to convert Germans, he had inevitably begun to feel close to them, gotten to like them, and, once Germany was prostrate, to pity them. That was what had landed Rubin in prison. His enemies in the administration accused him of speaking out against the slogan “Blood for blood, a death for a death” after the offensive of January 1945.

  It was more or less true. Rubin did not try to refute it. It was infinitely more complicated than it might appear from a newspaper report or the wording of the charge against him.

  By the stool with the illuminated Christmas tree, two lockers had been pushed together to serve as a table. They began serving one another. There was canned fish (prisoners in the sharashka were allowed to make purchases from Moscow shops), there was lukewarm coffee, and there was homemade cake. The conversation was sober and subdued. Max steered it onto peaceful subjects: old folk customs, sentimental Christmas Eve stories. Alfred, the bespectacled Viennese physics student whose course had been interrupted by the war, spoke with a comical Austrian accent. Gustav, a moonfaced youngster with a piglet’s pink transparent ears, stared wide-eyed at the Christmas lights, scarcely daring to join in the conversation of his elders. (A member of the Hitler Jugend, he had become a prisoner of war one week after the war ended.)

  The conversation, however, took a wrong turn. Somebody mentioned Christmas 1944, five years back, and the Ardennes offensive. The Germans, to a man, were proud of this glorious piece of ancient history: The vanquished had routed the victors. And they remembered how on that Christmas Eve Germany had listened to Goebbels.

  Rubin, one hand toying with a strand of his bristly black beard, confirmed what they said. He remembered that speech. It had been a great success. Goebbels had spoken as though it cost him a great mental effort, as though he bore on his own shoulders all the burdens that were bringing Germany to its knees. He probably had already a presentiment of his own end.

  SS Obersturmbannführer Simmel, whose long body could scarcely fit in between the table and the double bunk, did not appreciate Rubin’s politeness. He couldn’t bear the idea that this Jew would dare to express any opinion of Goebbels at all. He would never have demeaned himself by sitting at the same table with Rubin if he had felt able to forgo Christmas Eve with his compatriots. But the other Germans were all insistent that Rubin should be there. For this little group of German exiles, storm blown into the gilded cage of a sharashka in the heart of barbarous and chaotic Muscovy, there was only one person with whom they felt any kinship, only one they understood: this major in the enemy’s army, who had spent the whole war sowing the seeds of discord and moral collapse among them. Only he could make comprehensible the customs and mentality of the natives, advise on behavior, and translate the latest international news from Russian.

  Casting around for a remark that would really sting Rubin, Simmel said that, anyway, there were hundreds of pyrotechnic orators in Germany—why, he wondered, was it the rule with the Bolsheviks to read out speeches submitted for approval beforehand?

  The taunt was all the more hurtful for being justified. There was no point in trying to explain to an enemy and a murderer that oratory, wonderful oratory, had once existed in Russia but that Party Committees had stamped it out. Rubin felt only disgust for Simmel, nothing more. He remembered Simmel’s arrival in the sharashka after years in Butyrki Prison, wearing a creaking leather tunic: There were still marks on the sleeve where the insignia of the SS (the civilian SS, the worst of the lot) had been picked off. Even prison had not softened the expression of hardened cruelty on Simmel’s face. Simmel was the reason why Rubin had not wanted to come to tonight’s supper party. But the others had begged him so earnestly, and he felt so sorry for them, lost and lonely as they were, that he could not cast a cloud on their celebration by refusing.

  Rubin suppressed his urge to explode and translated into German Pushkin’s advice not to judge a shoe by its uppers.

  Max mildly interrupted what might have developed into a quarrel with his own version of a dubiously relevant line from Pushkin. Under Lev’s guidance, he said, he could now spell out poems by Pushkin in the original. But why hadn’t Reinhold taken any whipped cream with his cake? Where, though, had Lev been that Christmas Eve? Lev recalled that he had been in his dugout near Rozhan in the Narev bridgehead.

  And just as the five Germans recalled their torn and trampled Germany, piously painting it in the brightest colors, Rubin, too, found vivid memories returning of the Narev bridgehead, then of the sodden forests along the Ilmen.

  The Christmas tree lights were reflected in moist eyes.

  As usual, they asked Rubin for the latest news. But he would have felt awkward offering a review of the past month. He could not let himself become a neutral purveyor of information, could not give up hope of reeducating these people. Yet he could not convince them that in our complicated age socialist truth sometimes forces its way forward by a tortuous path. All he could do was to select for them, as he did for History (and, without realizing it, for himself), only those current events that confirmed that the high road had been accurately predicted, ignoring those that seemed likely to divert it into a quagmire. But December had been a month in which, apart from the Sino-Soviet negotiations and the Boss’s seventieth birthday, nothing positive seemed to have happened. He would feel ashamed—and it would serve no educational purpose—to tell the Germans about Traicho Kostov’s trial, at which the foreign correspondents had been confronted rather late in the day with a sham recantation, allegedly written by Kostov in his death cell, so that the whole crude judicial farce had come apart at the seams.

  On this occasion, Rubin dwelled mostly on the historic victory of the Chinese Communists. The amiable Max listened to Rubin and nodded encouragement. His eyes were guileless. He was attached to Rubin but, since the Berlin blockade, had begun to distrust much of what he said, and (unknown to Rubin) in the shortwave lab where he worked, he had occasionally risked his neck by assembling, listening to, and then dismantling a miniature receiver that looked nothing at all like a receiver. He had heard, from Cologne and on the German service of the BBC, not only how Kostov had retracted the self-incriminating statements that his interrogators had obtained by torture but also about the consolidation of the Atlantic alliance and the new prosperity of West Germany. He had, of course, passed all this on to the other Germans, and they lived for the day when Adenauer would free them.

  Still, they nodded politely as Rubin talked.

  Anyway, it was high time for him to be gone; he had not been released from the evening shift. He praised the cake (Hildemuth, the fitter, bowed in gratification) and asked the company to excuse him. His hosts politely delayed his departure; then they thanked him for coming, and he thanked them for having him. After which the Germans settled down to sing Christmas carols sotto voce.

  Just as he was, with a Mongolian-Finnish dictionary and a slim volume of Hemi
ngway in English under his arm, Rubin went out into the hallway. The hallway was broad, with an unpainted and scuffed wooden floor. There were no windows, and the electric light was on day and night. It was the same hallway in which, during the supper break an hour earlier, other lovers of novelty had interviewed the new zeks fresh from the camps. Of the doors along the hallway, one opened onto the inner prison stairway, and several others belonged to “room-cells.” They were “rooms” because the doors had no locks, but they were also “cells” because spy holes, little glass windows, had been set in the doors. The guards here had no use for these peepholes, but they had been adopted in accordance with the regulations for real prisons, simply because the name given to the sharashka in official documents was “Ministry of State Special Prison No. 1.”

  Through one such peephole could be seen a Christmas Eve party like the one he had left, for the Latvian fraternity, who had also been given time off.

  All the other zeks were at work, and Rubin was worried that he might be stopped at the exit and dragged off to the security officer to give an explanation in writing. At both ends of the hallway there were doors that filled its whole width: At one end a wooden four-paneled folding door under a semicircular arch led to what had once been the sanctuary of the seminary’s church, and was now also a “room-cell.” At the other there was a locked two-panel door reinforced from top to bottom with sheet iron. This door, which led to their place of work, the prisoners called the “royal gates.”

  Rubin walked up to the iron door and knocked on the Judas window. A guard’s face pressed against the glass on the other side.

  The key turned quietly in the lock. As luck would have it, the guard was easygoing.

  Rubin went out onto the grand stairway of the ancient structure, crossed the marble landing, walked past two ornate wrought-iron lamps, which no longer gave light. Still on the second story, he entered a hallway and pushed open a door marked “Acoustics Laboratory.”

  Chapter 5

  Boogie-Woogie

  THE ACOUSTICS LABORATORY occupied a lofty, spacious room with several windows that was chaotically cluttered with wooden racks and dazzling bright white aluminum counters loaded with apparatus, assembly benches, newish plywood cabinets from Moscow workshops, and comfortable writing desks that had seen better days in the Berlin building of the Lorenz Radio Company.

  Big bulbs in frosted fixtures shed a pleasant, diffused white light.

  There was a soundproof acoustic chamber, with sides short of the ceiling, in the far corner of the room. It looked unfinished: Its exterior was upholstered with ordinary sacking stuffed with straw. The door, which was a yard thick but hollow, like a circus clown’s dumbbells, was open at present, and the cloth door curtain was thrown back to air the booth. Near the booth, rows of copper sockets gleamed in the black lacquered panel of the central switchboard.

  A diminutive fragile girl with a pale unsmiling face sat at a desk with her back to the booth, holding a goat’s-hair shawl tight around her narrow shoulders.

  There were perhaps ten other people in the room, all men, all in identical blue overalls, busying themselves by the light of the overhead fixtures and the pools of brightness from swivel desk lamps (also of German origin), walking back and forth, hammering, soldering, sitting at assembly benches and writing desks. Three makeshift receivers mounted on aluminum panels, without casing, provided a medley of jazz, piano music, and songs from the Eastern European democracies.

  Rubin walked slowly across the laboratory to his desk, holding the Mongolian-Finnish dictionary and Hemingway down low. White cake crumbs had lodged in his wavy beard.

  The overalls issued to the prisoners were all cut from the same pattern, but there were different ways of wearing them. One of Rubin’s buttons was missing, his belt was slack, and loose folds sagged over his belly. A young prisoner stood in his way. He was wearing exactly similar overalls but was something of a dandy. His blue cloth belt was drawn tight around his slim waist, and the top button of his overalls was undone to reveal a light blue silk shirt, faded after many washes but held together around his neck by a bright tie. This young man occupied the whole width of the side passageway on Rubin’s route. His right hand lightly waved a hot soldering iron; he had rested his left foot on a chair and his left elbow on his knee as he pored over the diagram of a radio in an English-language journal that lay open on his bench, simultaneously singing

  Boogie-woogie, boogie-woogie.

  Samba! Samba!

  Rubin could not get by and stood there for a moment with an exaggeratedly meek look on his face. The young man appeared not to notice him.

  “Val, my friend, do you think you could pull in your rear foot a bit?”

  Val answered, without looking up from his diagram, in short, sharp bursts.

  “Lev Grigorievich! Back off! Get lost! Why do you turn up here in the evening? What is there for you to do?”

  He raised his light, boyish eyes to look at Rubin wonderingly. “What the hell do we need a philologist for, anyway? Ha! ha! ha!” (three carefully separated syllables). “You’re no engineer, after all! It’s a scandal!”

  Comically protruding his fleshy lips and widening his eyes, Rubin lisped: “Baby mine! I’ve known engineers who kept a soda-pop stall.”

  “Not me!” Valentulya snapped. “I’m a first-class engineer, and don’t you forget it!” He laid his soldering iron down on its wire stand and straightened up, tossing back an unruly mass of silky hair the same color as the lump of rosin on his bench. He was fresh complexioned, his face was unmarked by experience, and his movements were boyish. It was impossible to believe that he had graduated before the war, been in a German POW camp, spent some time in Europe, and was now in his fifth year of imprisonment back in his homeland.

  Rubin sighed. “Without a duly witnessed reference from your Belgian boss, our administration cannot—”

  “Reference, nothing.” Valentin made a convincing show of indignation. “How dense can you be? Surely you realize I’m mad about women!”

  The grave little girl couldn’t help smiling.

  Another prisoner in the place by the window to which Rubin was trying to make his way stopped work and listened to Valentin approvingly.

  “Your love, I think, is purely theoretical,” answered Rubin, his jaws moving as though languidly chewing.

  “And I madly love spending money!”

  “Of which, however, you have—”

  “So how can I be a bad engineer? Just think: To love women—different ones all the time—you have to have a lot of money! To have a lot of money, you have to earn a lot! To earn a lot of money, if you’re an engineer, you must have a brilliant command of your special field! Ha-ha! You grow pale!”

  Valentin’s elongated face was tilted provocatively at Rubin.

  “Got it!” exclaimed the zek by the window, whose desk faced the young woman’s.

  “Got it, Lyovka! I’ve finally caught Valentin’s voice! It’s bell-like, that’s what it is! I’ll write it down, shall I? A voice like that you could recognize over any telephone. However much interference there was.”

  He opened out a big sheet of paper, on which there were columns of names with ruled squares beside them, and a tree diagram.

  “God, what a load of bull!” Valentin made a gesture of disgust, seized his soldering iron, and set the rosin smoking.

  The passageway was clear. Rubin took his seat and also applied himself to the classification of voices.

  For some time they examined the chart together without speaking.

  “We’re making progress, Glebka,” Rubin said at last. “Used in conjunction with ‘visible speech,’ we’ve got a useful weapon here. Before very long we shall know, you and I, what determines the quality of a voice on the telephone. . . . What’s that on the radio?”

  The loudest noise in the room was jazz, but where they were, a torrent of piano music from the homemade receiver on the windowsill could be heard above it. A single melody surfaced repe
atedly, was swept away in the flood, and reemerged only to be overwhelmed again.

  “Beethoven’s Sonata No. 17,” Gleb replied. “One I’ve never really . . . Just listen.”

  They bent their heads toward the receiver, but the jazz made listening very difficult.

  “Valen-tine!” Gleb said. “Do us a favor! Show us how bighearted you are!”

  “I’ve shown you already,” Valentin snapped. “Who set up that receiver for you? If I unsolder your coil, that’ll be the end of it!”

  The slip of a girl raised her eyebrows sternly and intervened. “Valentin Martynych! It really is impossible! We can’t listen to three radios at once. Switch yours off—please.”

  (As it happened, Valentin’s radio was playing a slow foxtrot, and the girl was enjoying it.)

  “Serafima Vitalievna! This is monstrous!” Valentin bumped into an empty chair, tilted it at an angle, and gesticulated as if he were addressing a public meeting. “How can a normal healthy human being not like lively, invigorating Western popular music? You are poisoned here with all sorts of rubbish. You must, surely, have danced the “Blue Tango”? Surely you’ve seen Arkady Raikin’s reviews? Ah, but you’ve never been in Europe either! How could you possibly learn how to live? I do most earnestly advise you to fall in love with somebody soon!”

  He held forth over the chair back, not noticing the bitter lines round the young woman’s mouth. “Somebody, anybody—ça dépend! Lights twinkling in the night! The rustle of silken gowns!”

  “He’s out of sync again!” Rubin said in alarm. “We must exercise our authority.”

  He reached behind Valentin’s back and switched off his radio.

  Valentin spun around as if he had been stung.

  “Lev Grigorievich! What gives you the right—?”

  The limpid melody of Sonata No. 17 poured out unhindered, competing now only with the rather crude song from the far corner.

  Rubin’s frame was blissfully relaxed; his face was a pair of mild hazel eyes over a beard with cake crumbs.