In the First Circle Read online

  As senior students, Simochka and her friends admitted to themselves with dismay that they still had no great liking for their chosen profession and indeed found it tiresome. But it was too late to change. Simochka shuddered at the thought of working in a factory.

  Then, suddenly, she found herself at Marfino. What pleased her about the place from the start was that she was given no independent work assignment.

  But you didn’t have to be a frail little thing like Simochka to feel uneasy entering the confines of this isolated fortress beyond the city limits, where handpicked guards and security officers kept watch over major political offenders.

  They had all been briefed together—all ten girl graduates of the Institute of Communications Engineering. They were informed that they had landed in a place worse than any battlefield—a snake pit, in which one careless move could mean disaster. They were told that they would be meeting the dregs of humanity, people unworthy of the Russian language that they so unfortunately spoke. They were warned that these people were especially dangerous because they never bared their fangs but invariably wore a false mask of politeness and good breeding. And if you questioned them about their crimes (which was expressly prohibited!), they would try by an ingenious tissue of lies to represent themselves as innocent victims. The girls were instructed that they in turn should not vent their hatred on these reptiles but make an outward show of politeness—without, however, entering into discussions of anything except the work at hand, never accepting messages for the outside world. And at the very first breach of regulations, suspicion of a breach, or possibility of suspecting a breach, they must hurry along to the security officer, Major Shikin.

  Major Shikin—a short, dark-complexioned, self-important man with bristly graying hair on his large head and small feet in boy-size shoes—added the thought that although the reptilian interior of these malefactors was as clear as could be to experienced people like himself, there might possibly be among inexperienced girls like these new arrivals one who in the mistaken kindness of her heart could commit a breach of regulations by, for instance, lending a prisoner a book from the employees’ library. (Not to mention mailing a letter, because any letter, whatever Maria Ivanovna it was addressed to, would inevitably be sent on to an American spy center.) Major Shikin earnestly begged the girls, if they saw one of their number fall, to come to her rescue like true friends by frankly informing Major Shikin what had happened.

  In conclusion, the major did not conceal the fact that a liaison with a prisoner was punishable under the criminal code, which, as everyone knows, is sufficiently elastic to include sentences of twenty-five years’ hard labor.

  It was impossible to contemplate the joyless years ahead of them without a shudder. Some of the girls indeed had tears in their eyes. But the seeds of distrust had been sown, and as they left the briefing session they talked about other matters, not about what they had just heard.

  More dead than alive, Simochka had followed Engineer Major Roitman into the Acoustics Lab, at first hardly daring to open her eyes.

  That was six months ago, and since then something strange had happened to Simochka. No, her belief in the dark machinations of imperialism had not been shaken. Nor was it any less easy for her to suppose that the prisoners working in all the other rooms were bloodstained criminals. But in the dozen zeks whom she met daily in the Acoustics Lab—people gloomily indifferent to freedom, to their own lot, to the ten years or the quarter-century of imprisonment before them, the scholars, the engineers, and designer-fitters preoccupied day in and day out with nothing but the work that was not their own, pointless work, which would bring them not a penny in earnings or a smidgen of fame—in these people she strove in vain to detect the notorious international criminals so easily recognized by the moviegoer and so deftly ferreted out by Soviet counterespionage.

  Simochka had no fear of them. Nor could she find it in herself to hate them. These people inspired in her nothing but unqualified respect—for the range of their knowledge and the stoicism with which they bore their misfortune. And for all the alarm bells of her Komsomol conscience,** however much love of the fatherland nagged at her to report every trick and misdemeanor on the part of prisoners to the security officer—for some inexplicable reason Simochka had begun to feel that it would be unthinkably mean to do so.

  It was even more obviously impossible where her nearest neighbor and fellow worker was concerned—Gleb Nerzhin, who sat facing her over their two desktops. Simochka had worked closely with him ever since her arrival, assigned to assist him in carrying out experiments on articulation. The Marfino sharashka was required from time to time to assess the quality of voice reproduction over particular telephone circuits. Excellent as their equipment was, no instrument had yet been invented which would indicate this by the movement of a needle. Only the voice of a speaker reading out separate syllables, words, and phrases, and the ears of listeners trying to pick up the text at the other end of the line, could provide a measurement in terms of the incidence of error. These experiments were what they called “articulation tests.”

  Nerzhin was busy—at least he was meant by his superiors to be busy—looking for the optimum mathematical programming of these tests. They were going well, and Nerzhin had even put together a three-volume monograph on their methodology. When he and Simochka had a great accumulation of work to get through, Nerzhin would establish priorities and give firm instructions. His face looked so youthful as he did so that Simochka, who thought of war as it was shown in the movies, pictured Nerzhin at such moments in his captain’s uniform, in the midst of cannon smoke, his light brown hair windblown, shouting out “Fire!” to his battery. A scene seldom omitted in war movies.

  But if Nerzhin wanted things done in a hurry, it was in order to put the obvious tasks behind him and avoid further effort for as long as possible. He had once said as much to Simochka: “I’m active because I hate activity.”

  “What do you like, then?” she asked timidly.

  “Thinking.”

  And, in fact, once the flurry of work abated, he would sit for hours, hardly changing his position, looking old, gray-faced, and haggard.

  Where was his self-assurance now? He was slow and irresolute; he pondered lengthily before adding a sentence or two to the minutely written notes that Simochka could, not for the first time, see among the untidy heap of reference books and technical articles. She had even noticed that he tucked them away somewhere on the left-hand side of his desk but not, apparently, in a drawer. Simochka felt faint with curiosity: What was he writing, and for whom? Nerzhin had unwittingly become the focus of her compassion and rapt admiration.

  Simochka’s girlhood had held nothing but unhappiness so far. She was not pretty: Her looks were spoiled by a nose much too long and hair that had refused to grow out, gathered now into a skimpy bun at the back. She was not just small, she was extremely small, and her figure was that of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl rather than a grown woman. She was, moreover, straitlaced, averse to jokes and frivolity, which made her still less attractive to young men. So it was that in her twenty-third year no one had ever courted her, hugged her, or kissed her.

  Then, just a month ago, something had gone wrong with the microphone in the testing booth; Nerzhin called Simochka over to fix it, and she had come into the booth holding a screwdriver. In the soundproof and airless confined space, where there was scarcely room for two people, she had bent over the microphone that Nerzhin was already inspecting, and her cheek had brushed against his. Their cheeks touched—and she froze in horror: What would happen next? She should have pulled away from him, but she continued stupidly inspecting the microphone. It dragged on and on, this most terrifying moment in her life—their cheeks, close together, were burning—and he didn’t move! Then, suddenly, he took her head in his hands and kissed her on the lips. A blissful weakness flooded Simochka’s body. What she said at the moment had nothing to do with the Komsomol or the motherland. . . .

  “The d
oor isn’t locked!” A flimsy blue blind fluttered between them and the noise outside, the people walking about and talking, who might draw the blind aside and walk in. The prisoner Nerzhin was risking nothing except ten days in the punishment cells, but the girl was putting at risk her clean record, her career, perhaps even her freedom; yet she hadn’t the strength to break loose from the hands that tilted back her head.

  For the first time in her life she had been kissed by a man!

  So the steel chain forged with such reptilian cunning snapped at the link that had been fashioned from a woman’s heart.

  * * *

  * Krupskaya: Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and an active revolutionary in her own right.

  ** Komsomol: The League of Young Communists, the youth arm of the Communist Party.

  Chapter 8

  “Oh, Moment, Stay!”

  “WHOSE BALD HEAD IS THAT, rubbing the back of mine?”

  “I’m in a poetic mood, my child. Let’s have a chat.”

  “Actually, I’m busy.”

  “Come off it! Busy! I’m upset, Glebochka! Sitting by that improvised German Christmas tree, I started talking about my dugout in the bridgehead north of Pultusk, and suddenly it all came rushing back. The war! Life at the front! So vivid! So nostalgic! . . . Listen, war has its good points. . . . Wouldn’t you say?”

  “You aren’t the first I’ve heard say so. I’ve read in those magazines for German soldiers that sometimes came our way: the cleansing of the soul, Soldatentreue.*

  “Swine. But if you like, there’s a rational kernel in all that—”

  “I refuse to believe it. The Taoist ethic says that ‘weapons are the instruments of misfortune, not honor. The wise man wins reluctantly.’ ”

  “What’s this I hear? The ex-skeptic has signed up with the Taoists now?”

  “I haven’t quite decided.”

  “I started by remembering my favorite Fritzes—how we used to make up captions for leaflets. A mother embracing her children, a flaxen-haired Margarita weeping, that was our main leaflet, with the message in verse.”

  “I remember it. I used to come across them.”

  “And suddenly it all came back in a rush. . . . Did I ever tell you about Milka? She graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages in ’41, and they posted her to our unit as a translator. A snub-nosed girl, moved a bit awkwardly—”

  “Hold on. . . . Was she the one who went with you to receive the surrender of Graudenz?”

  “Aha! Extraordinarily vain little thing she was. Loved being complimented on her work, and woe betide anyone who told her off—loved being recommended for decorations. Remember the woods just beyond Lovat, to the south of Podtsepochie as you go from Rachlitsy toward Novo-Svinukhovo?”

  “It’s all woods around there. This side of the Redya or the other?”

  “This side.”

  “Right, got it.”

  “Well, she and I went rambling in those woods. We were there all day. It wasn’t spring yet. March. You squished about in water, sloshed through the puddles in your felt boots, your head was drenched with sweat under your fur cap, but there was that wonderful smell—you know—that air. We wandered about like young lovers, like newlyweds. Well, if a woman’s new to you, you relive it all together from the very beginning, you blossom and ripen like a young lad, and . . . you know. . . . That never-ending forest! Just occasionally smoke from a dugout, a battery of seventy-sixes in a clearing. We avoided them. We went on wandering till evening, a damp, pink sunset. I’d been aching for her all day. And suddenly a ‘crate’ started circling overhead. And Milka decided she didn’t want to see it shot down—‘It’s doing no harm, and if it isn’t shot down, fine, we’ll spend the night out here in the forest.’ ”

  “That meant she’d surrendered! Who ever saw our antiaircraft gunners hit a crate?”

  “Right. . . . Every ack-ack gun on either side of the Lovat blazed away at it for a good hour—and never touched it. So we found an empty bunker.”

  “A surface bunker?”

  “Yes. Remember them? They’d built a lot of them the year before, like dens for wild animals.”

  “The ground was too wet to dig in.”

  “Right. The floor inside was strewn with pine branches; there was a smell of resin from the walls, and of smoke from previous fires. There were no stoves; you had to make your fire right there on the floor. There was a little hole in the roof. No light, of course. As long as the fire was burning, it cast shadows on the timbered walls. . . . That’s living, eh, Gleb?”

  “I’ve noticed that if one of the characters in a story told by a prisoner is a maiden, all the listeners, including me, are desperately anxious for her to be a maiden no longer when the story ends. In fact, that constitutes the main interest of the story for the zek. This shows a need to know that there is justice in the world, don’t you think? A blind man needs to be reassured by the sighted that the sky is still blue and the grass still green. The zek needs to believe that, theoretically, there are still real, live attractive women in this world and that they give themselves to lucky men. . . . Some evening you’ve remembered! Making love, and in a pine-scented shelter at that, with no shooting going on. Some kind of war that is! Only that same evening your wife was changing her sugar coupons for a sticky mess of sweets squashed into the paper and planning to ration them so that they’d last your daughters thirty days.”

  “Go on, then, reproach me. . . . A man mustn’t know just one woman, Glebka; if he does, he knows nothing at all about them. It impoverishes the human spirit.”

  “The spirit as well? Didn’t somebody say ‘If you’ve really known one woman . . .’ ”

  “That’s rubbish.”

  “What about two, then?”

  “Two will get you nowhere either. Only by comparing many can you begin to understand. It’s no vice, no sin—it’s nature’s design.”

  “Coming back to the war. In cell No. 73 in Butyrki . . .”

  “. . . along a narrow corridor on the second floor . . .”

  “Just so! A young Moscow historian, Professor Razvodovsky, who had just been put inside and had never of course been at the front, argued cleverly, passionately, and cogently, on social, historical, and ethical grounds, that war has its good side. There were ten front-line soldiers in the cell, some ours, some Vlasovites,** but all desperate characters, wild cats. They’d fought in every spot you can think of, and they almost tore that professor apart; they furiously denied that there was the least little smidgen of good in war! I listened—and said nothing. Razvodovsky’s arguments were strong ones; at moments I thought he was right, and my own recollections sometimes suggested that there was good there, but I didn’t dare argue with those soldiers: the ‘something’ on which I was ready to agree with a civilian professor was the same something which made me, a heavy artilleryman, different from the infantry. Just think, Lev, except for the time when you took that fortress you were just a desk soldier at the front, never in a close engagement from which retreat would have been more than your life was worth. I wasn’t much more of a soldier myself; I was never in the first wave of an offensive, and I never had to rally the men. You know how it is: Memory is treacherous, and all the honors sink to the bottom —”

  “Look, I’m not saying—”

  “—and only the pleasant things remain. But ever since Junker dive-bombers nearly made mincemeat of me one fine day at Orel—sorry, I just can’t recapture the pleasure. No, Lyovka, war is best when it’s farthest away.”

  “Well, I’m not saying that war itself is good, only that we can have good memories of it.”

  “So maybe we’ll have good memories of the camps one of these days. And of the transit prisons.”

  “Transit prisons? Gorky? Kirov? N-n-no. . . .”

  “Just because the administration there swiped your suitcase, you refuse to look at it objectively. Ask a VIP—with a job in the clothes storeroom, say, or the bathhouse, and shacked up with a love-girl. He’ll t
ell you there’s no place like a transit prison. What it comes down to is that happiness is a relative concept; it’s all in the mind.”

  “Etymologically the Russian word for happiness has unmistakable connotations of ‘transience’ and ‘insubstantiality.’ Schast’e comes from se-chas’e, meaning ‘this hour,’ ‘this moment.’ ”

  “Sorry, my learned friend, it doesn’t. Look it up in Dahl. It comes from so-chast’e, the share a person wrests from life. Its peculiar etymology gives us a pretty sordid conception of happiness.”

  “Just a minute. My explanation also comes from Dahl.”

  “You surprise me. So does mine, I tell you.”

  “This calls for research in all languages. I’ll make a note!”

  “Madman!”

  “It’s an idiot who says so! Let’s do a bit of comparative philology.”

  “Like Marr, you mean? Everything derives from the word for ‘hand’?”

  “You bum, you! Listen, have you ever read Goethe’s Faust, part 2?”

  “Why don’t you ask whether I’ve read part 1? Everybody says it’s a work of genius, but nobody reads it. Some people rely on Gounod’s version!

  “No, part 1 is quite straightforward. What’s the problem?”

  “ ‘Of sons and worlds I cannot speak;