In the First Circle Read online

  “Engineer Pryanchikov! Do you remember the Atlantic Charter? Have you made your will yet? To whom have you left your bedroom slippers?”

  Valentin’s face grew serious. He stared into Rubin’s eyes and asked quietly: “Listen, what the hell d’you think you’re doing? Can’t a man feel free even in prison? If there’s no freedom there, where can he expect to find it?”

  One of the fitters called him over, and he went off despondently.

  Rubin sank noiselessly into his chair, back-to-back with Gleb, and settled down to listen, but the soothing cadences broke off suddenly, like a speech interrupted in mid-sentence—and that was the modest and unostentatious conclusion of Sonata No. 17.

  Rubin swore obscenely, for Gleb’s ears only.

  “Spell it,” Gleb answered, still sitting with his back to Rubin. “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said just my luck,” Rubin answered hoarsely, also without turning round. “Now I’ve missed that sonata. I’d never heard it before.”

  “Because you’re so disorganized, shall I ever get it into your head!” his friend grumbled. “And a very good sonata it is, too! Did you notice how it ends? No noise, not a whisper. It breaks off abruptly—and that’s that. Just like in real life. . . . Where were you earlier?”

  “With the Germans. Christmas party,” said Rubin with a laugh.

  They carried on their conversation, invisible to each other, but almost resting the backs of their heads on each other’s shoulders.

  “Good for you.” Gleb thought a while. “I like your attitude to them. You spend hours teaching Max Russian, though you’d be perfectly entitled to hate them.”

  “Hate them? No. But of course, the love I used to feel for them is clouded. Max is a gentle chap, and no Nazi, but doesn’t even he share responsibility with the hangmen? After all, he didn’t try to stop them, did he?”

  “No. Just as you and I do nothing to stop Abakumov or Shishkin-Myshkin.”

  “You know, Glebka, when you come to think of it, I’m as much Russian as Jew. And as much a citizen of the world as I am a Russian.”

  “I like that. Citizens of the world! It has a clean, unbloodied sound!”

  “In other words we’re cosmopolitans. So they were right to lock us up.”

  “Of course they were. Although you keep trying to convince the Supreme Court of the opposite.”

  The radio on the windowsill announced: “Logbook of Socialist Emulation in half a minute.”

  Half a minute was long enough for Gleb’s hand to move with unhurried efficiency to the receiver and, before the announcer could get a single croak out, switch it off as though wringing his neck. His face, no longer animated, looked gray and tired.

  Pryanchikov was grappling with another problem, calculating how to mount a serial amplifier—and lightheartedly singing, “Boogie-woogie, boogie-woogie. Samba! Samba!”

  Chapter 6

  A Peaceful Existence

  GLEB NERZHIN WAS THE SAME AGE as Pryanchikov but looked older. His auburn hair, parted in the middle, was still thick, but there were crow’s feet around his eyes, little wrinkles around his mouth, and furrows across his brow. His skin was affected by the lack of fresh air, and his face had a wilted look. But what above all made him seem older was the economy of his movements: that economy by which nature conserves the flagging strength of prisoners in the camp. In the sharashka, with meat on the menu and work that overstrained no one’s muscles, Nerzhin, with the length of his sentence in mind, was nonetheless trying to make a habit of minimal movement.

  At present, Nerzhin’s desk was barricaded with piles of books and files, and the working space in between had also been taken over by files, typescripts, books, and journals, Russian and foreign, all left open. Any unsuspecting outsider would have seen the stillness after a hurricane of scientific thought.

  But it was all camouflage. Nerzhin always put up a front in the evening in case one of the bosses looked in.

  In fact, he had no eyes for anything before him. He had pulled back the light silk curtain and was staring through the dark windowpane. In the depths of the vast night, big patches of light marked the outskirts of Moscow, and from the city itself, hidden behind a hill, rose an immense haze of diffused, pale light, which gave the sky above it a dull reddish glow.

  Nerzhin’s special chair, with its flexible back, his rolltop desk—something not made in the Soviet Union—and his comfortable place by the south window would have revealed him to anyone familiar with the history of the Marfino sharashka as one of its founding members.

  The sharashka had taken its name from what had once been the village of Marfino but was now territory within the city limits. The sharashka had been inaugurated some three years ago on a July evening. A dozen or so zeks, summoned from the camps, were driven to what had once been a seminary, just outside Moscow. The building had been fenced around with barbed wire in readiness. That was remembered as an idyllic age: You could switch on the BBC loud in the prisoners’ living quarters (no one yet knew how to jam it), you could stroll about the “zone” in the evening without asking permission, you could lie in the dewy grass, left uncut, contrary to regulations (it is supposed to be cropped close so that you cannot crawl through it to the wire), and you could observe the eternal stars or the perishable Sergeant Major Zhvakun on night duty and all in a sweat, steal timber from a building under repair and slide it under the barbed wire to take home for firewood.

  The sharashka did not yet know what direction its research was to take and occupied itself unpacking numerous crates, three trainloads of them from Germany, staking claims to comfortable German chairs and desks, and sorting out equipment for telecommunications, ultrashortwave radio, and acoustics. Much of it was obsolete or had been damaged in transit. And the sharashka gradually realized that the Germans had purloined or destroyed the best of the equipment and the most recent documentation, while the MVD* captain sent to “relocate” the Lorenz factory, an expert on furniture but not on radio or the German language, spent his time in and around Berlin searching out elegant pieces for his own Moscow apartment and those of his superiors.

  The grass had been mowed long ago, the doors now opened for the prisoners to take exercise only when a bell rang, and the sharashka, transferred from Beria’s to Abakumov’s jurisdiction, had been put to work on scrambler telephones. They had hoped to complete the assignment within a year, but it had dragged on for two years, expanding and becoming more and more complicated as new lines of inquiry multiplied. On Rubin’s and Nerzhin’s desks it had reduced itself to the problem of identifying voices on the telephone, which meant determining what makes a person’s voice unique. Apparently no one had done anything of the sort before. At any rate, they had come across no relevant published work. They had been given six months to complete their task, then another six, but they had still made little progress, and the deadline was alarmingly close.

  Uncomfortably aware as he was of this pressure, Rubin nonetheless grumbled over his shoulder: “I somehow don’t feel a bit like working today.”

  “You amaze me,” Nerzhin retorted. “A mere four years at the front and not quite five in jail, am I right? And already you’re tired! Better put in for a Crimean rest cure.”

  They were silent for a while.

  “Working on your own thing, aren’t you?” Rubin asked quietly.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So who’s going to work on the voices?”

  “To tell the truth, I was counting on you.”

  “What a coincidence. I was counting on you.”

  “You have no conscience. How many books have you checked out of the Lenin Library, supposedly for this job? Speeches of famous lawyers. Koni’s memoirs. Improve Your Acting. And to crown it all you brazenly called for a work on Princess Turandot. Can any other zek in the Gulag boast of such a varied collection of books?”

  Rubin’s thick lips protruded, which always made him look stupid:

  “Strange. With whom did I read all those boo
ks during working hours—including the one about Princess Turandot? Could it have been you?”

  “Well, I do want to work. I could lose myself completely in my work today but for two little things. Number one, I’m agonizing over the parquet floors question.”

  “What parquet floors?”

  “In the MVD house, on Kaluzhskaya Zastava, the semicircular building with the tower. Our camp helped build it in ’45, and I was employed as a parquet floor layer’s apprentice. I learned today that Roitman happens to live in that very house. And I began to feel an artist’s pangs of conscience, or maybe I’m just worried about my reputation. What I wonder is whether my floorboards creak or not. If they do, it may mean that I did a slovenly job. And I’m powerless to put it right!”

  “D’you know, that would make a good play!”

  “For a socialist-realist playwright. The second thing is: Isn’t it infuriating to be working on Saturday evening when you know that only the free employees get Sunday off?”

  Rubin sighed. “The frees have already peeled off to various places of entertainment. Making pigs of themselves.”

  “But do they choose the right places of entertainment? Do they get more out of life than we do? That’s a moot point.”

  Prisoners, of necessity, learn to talk quietly, and even Serafima Vitalievna, sitting opposite Nerzhin, was not supposed to hear them. They had both turned their backs to the room and sat facing the window, the lights in the prison grounds, the guard tower dimly discernible in the darkness, scattered lights in distant greenhouses, and the whitish haze over Moscow.

  Nerzhin was a mathematician but no stranger to linguistics, and ever since the phonology of Russian speech had become the subject of the Marfino sharashka’s research, he had been paired with Rubin, the only linguist in the place. For two years they had sat together, back-to-back, twelve hours a day. They had discovered at once that they had both fought at the same time first on the northwestern front, then on the Belorussian front; both possessed the “gentleman’s junior medal set”; both had been arrested in the same month by the very same SMERSH**; both of them had been charged under the universally popular point Ten; and both had been given a “tenner” (not that this made them different from anyone else). There was a slight age difference—six years—and Nerzhin, a captain, was one step lower in rank.

  Rubin was favorably disposed to Nerzhin because he had not been jailed as a former prisoner of war and so was not infected with the anti-Soviet spirit of “abroad.” Nerzhin was “one of us,” a Soviet man, only he had spent his whole youth poring over books, reading himself silly, and had got it into his muddled head that Stalin had distorted Leninism. No sooner had Nerzhin recorded this conclusion on a scrap of paper than he was arrested. Shell-shocked by jail and labor camp, Nerzhin had nonetheless remained at bottom “one of us,” and so Rubin had the patience to listen to the confused and nonsensical thoughts that were all he had for the time being.

  They looked out into the darkness again.

  Rubin made an impatient noise.

  “You really are an intellectual pauper. It worries me.”

  “I’m not competing. There’s a lot of cleverness in the world but not much goodness.”

  “Well, here’s a good book for you. Read it.”

  “Another one about the poor bamboozled bulls?”

  “No.”

  “About stalking lions, then?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “I can’t make sense of people. What do I want with bulls?”

  “You have to read it!”

  “I don’t have to do anything! For anybody! For you or anybody else! Duties duly discharged, as Spiridon says.”

  “You pathetic person! It’s one of the best books of the twentieth century!”

  “And will it really tell me what we all need to know? Where humanity went wrong?”

  “He’s a clever, goodhearted, infinitely honest writer—soldier, hunter, fisherman, drunk, womanizer—coolly and sincerely contemptuous of all that’s false, a stickler for simplicity, utterly humane, with the naïveté of genius. . . .”

  “Spare me the rest!” Nerzhin said with a laugh. “You’ll give me an earache with your spiel. I’ve lived for thirty years without Hemingway, and I expect to go on a bit longer. My life’s in tatters anyway. I need to limit myself! Find my own way. . . .”

  He turned back toward his own desk.

  Rubin sighed. He still did not feel like working.

  He began studying a map of China propped up against a shelf at the back of his desk. He had cut this map out of a newspaper and pasted it onto a piece of cardboard. Throughout the past year, he had marked with a red pencil the advance of the Communist forces, and now that their victory was complete, he kept the map upright before him to cheer him at moments of weariness and depression.

  But today Rubin was in the grip of a sadness so acute that not even the enormous red expanse of victorious China could overcome it.

  Meanwhile Nerzhin, pausing now and then for a thoughtful suck at the sharp tip of his plastic pen, was writing, in a script so minute that it looked more like the work of a needle, on a tiny page lost in the camouflaging billows of learned paper.

  “The history of 1917 holds no surprises for a mathematician. A tangent soaring at ninety degrees toward infinity at once plunges into the abyss of minus infinity. In the same way, Russia, taking off for the first time toward a freedom never before seen, immediately came to an abrupt stop and plunged into the worst of tyrannies. No one has ever managed it at the first attempt.”

  The big room of the Acoustics Laboratory was living its peaceful everyday life. The electrician fitter’s little engine hummed. Orders were shouted: “Switch on!” “Switch off!” The radio was dishing out the usual sentimental pap. Somebody loudly demanded a “6-K-7” valve.

  Taking advantage of moments when no one could see her, Serafima Vitalievna looked intently at Nerzhin, who was still covering his scrap of paper with writing like tiny embroidery.

  Major Shikin, the security officer, had instructed her to keep an eye on this prisoner.

  * * *

  * MVD: MVD, MGB, NKVD, GPU, and KGB, all of which are mentioned in the present novel, are acronyms for the Soviet security agencies at different periods and are successors to the Cheka, instituted by Lenin in 1917. More alike than unlike, they represent the fundamental continuity of the system of political police and intelligence services throughout the Soviet period.

  ** SMERSH: The acronym for SMERt SHpionam (Death to Spies), the Soviet agency for military intelligence during World War II.

  Chapter 7

  A Woman’s Heart

  SERAFIMA VITALIEVNA, a young woman so small that it was difficult not to call her Simochka, was an MGB lieutenant. She wore an orange blouse and a warm shawl around her shoulders.

  The free personnel in this building were all MGB officers.

  In accordance with the Constitution, free personnel had a great variety of rights, among them the right to work. This right, however, was limited by the eight-hour day and by the fact that their labor created no added value, consisting solely in watching prisoners. Whereas the prisoners, though deprived of all other rights, had an ampler right to work—up to twelve hours a day. During the additional hours—from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m., including the supper break—the free personnel of each lab had to take turns supervising the prisoners’ work.

  Today it was Simochka’s turn. All power and all authority in the Acoustics Lab was for the present vested in this small, sparrowlike girl.

  She was supposed to see to it that the prisoners worked and did not slacken, that they did not make use of the workplace to manufacture weapons or try to tunnel out, and that they did not avail themselves of the radio parts abundantly provided to rig up shortwave transmitters. At 10:50 she had to take all secret documentation from them, put it in a big safe, and seal the door of the laboratory.

  It was not quite six months since Simochka had graduated from the Institute of
Communications Engineering and, on the strength of her spotless record, been appointed to this special, secret scientific research institute, known only by a number but called by prisoners in their irreverent vernacular a “sharashka.” Free personnel were given officer’s rank as soon as they were taken on and paid twice the salary of an ordinary engineer (in recognition of their rank and for their uniform), and all that was asked was devotion to duty and vigilance, literacy and professional skills being of secondary importance.

  This suited Simochka very well. She, and many of her classmates with her, had carried away no knowledge when she left the institute. For a number of reasons. The girls had arrived from school knowing no mathematics and no physics (they had found out in the higher classes that teachers who gave low marks were upbraided by the headmaster at staff meetings, so that you could get your graduation certificate without studying at all). Then, in the institute, if there was ever time for it, the girls sat down to work at their math and radio technology as if they were lost in a bewildering, pathless, alien forest. More often than not, there just wasn’t time to study. For a month and more every autumn, students were whisked off to collective farms to dig potatoes, so that for the rest of the year they had eight or even ten lectures a day, with no time to go over their notes. Monday was political education day, and there would be another compulsory meeting of some sort later in the week. Then “social work”: wall newspapers, amateur concerts . . . help out at home, do the shopping, wash, change your clothes . . . an evening at the movies, the theater, the club. If you can’t have fun, can’t dance a bit in your student days, you may never get another chance. Young people aren’t meant to work themselves to death.

  To Simochka and her friends, preparation for exams meant preparing a lot of crib sheets, hiding them in articles of female attire inaccessible to males, then retrieving the necessary piece of paper in the exam room, smoothing it out, and pretending that it was rough work produced on the spot. The examiners could, of course, have shown up the inadequacy of their students’ knowledge by supplementary questions, but they were overburdened themselves with committee work, open meetings, proliferating plans, progress reports to the dean and to the rector, so that redoing the exam would have been one chore too many. What is more, they would have been under attack for a high failure rate, just as though they had turned out defective goods in a factory: Someone would have quoted Krupskaya* (was it?) to the effect that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. The examiners therefore did their best not to shoot the candidates down but to bring the exam to the quickest and most favorable conclusion.