In the First Circle Read online

  human toil is all I see.’

  “Now that does something for me!

  “Or there’s this:

  “ ‘What we don’t know is just what we needed;

  What we know is no use to us.’ ”

  “That’s great!”

  “Part 2, I admit, is heavy going. But what a profound idea. You know the contract between Faust and Mephistopheles: Mephistopheles will take possession of Faust’s soul only when Faust cries: ‘Stay, fleeting moment, thou art beautiful!’ But whatever Mephistopheles lays before him—the return of his youth, Margarita’s love, easy victory over his rival, boundless wealth, knowledge of all the secrets of existence—nothing can wring from Faust’s breast the fateful exclamation. Many years have passed; by now Mephistopheles himself is worn-out, trailing after this insatiable being; he sees that there is no way of making the man happy and is ready to abandon this barren sport. Faust, by now aged and blind all over again, gives orders for thousands of workers to be summoned to dig canals and drain the marshes. His brain, senile for the second time and—or so the cynic Mephistopheles thinks—crazed and clouded, is aglow with a grand idea: to make mankind happy. At a signal from Mephistopheles, hell’s servants appear and start digging Faust’s grave. Mephistopheles has lost all hope of winning his soul and simply wants to bury him, to be rid of him. Faust hears the sound of many shovels. ‘What is that?’ he asks. The spirit of mockery has not deserted Mephistopheles. He paints Faust a false picture of the draining of the marshes. Soviet critics like to interpret this passage in the spirit of socialist optimism: As they would have it, Faust, feeling that he has benefited mankind, and finding in this his supreme joy, exclaims: ‘Stay, fleeting moment, thou art beautiful!’ But we have to ask ourselves whether Goethe was not ridiculing the idea of human happiness. Because in reality nothing whatsoever has been done for mankind. Faust pronounces the long-awaited sacramental phrase one step from the grave, deluded and perhaps truly insane, and the lemurs immediately hustle him into the hole. Is this Goethe’s hymn to happiness, or is he ridiculing it?”

  “Ah, this is the Lyovochka I love—reasoning from the heart, talking wisely, and not sticking abusive labels on things.”

  “You miserable latter-day Pyrrho! I knew I would make you happy! And I haven’t finished yet. In one of my prewar lectures—they were devilishly daring!—I developed this excerpt from Goethe into the elegiac idea that there is no such thing as happiness, that it is either unattainable or illusory. Then, suddenly, a note was passed to me, a page torn out of a miniature notebook—squared paper:

  “ ‘But I’m in love—and I am happy! What do you say to that?’ ”

  “What did you say?”

  “What can anybody say?”

  * * *

  * Soldatentreue: Soldierly loyalty; a military ethic of commitment to one’s comrades in arms.

  ** Vlasovites: Followers of General Andrei Vlasov, the Soviet commander who defected to the Germans in World War II and fought against the Soviet regime.

  Chapter 9

  The Fifth Year in Harness

  THEY WERE SO carried away that they no longer heard the noise of the laboratory and the tiresome radio in the far corner. Nerzhin on his revolving chair had turned his back on the laboratory again. Rubin leaned sideways, folded his hands on the back of his chair, and rested his beard on them.

  Nerzhin spoke, evidently delivering thoughts long pondered.

  “When I was outside and read what wise men had to say about the meaning of life, or happiness, I always found it difficult to understand. I treated them with respect: They were sages, doing what they were supposed to do. But the meaning of life? We are alive, and that’s what it means. Happiness? When life is very good to us, that’s happiness, everybody knows. . . . Prison has my blessing! It’s made me think. To understand what happiness means, let us first consider being full. Remember the Lubyanka or your time in counterintelligence. Remember that thin, watery porridge of oats or barley, without a single sparkle of fat. Do you just eat it? Just dine on it? No—it’s Holy Communion! You receive it with awed reverence, as though it were the life’s breath of the yogis! You eat it slowly, eat it from the tip of a wooden spoon, eat it utterly absorbed in the process of eating, the thought of eating—and the pleasurable feeling suffuses your whole body, like nectar; you are dizzy with the sweetness which you discover in these mushy boiled grains and the dishwater that holds them together. And—lo and behold!—you live six months, live twelve months on a diet of next to nothing! Pigging out on choice chops can’t compare!”

  Rubin could not and never did listen for long. His idea of conversation (and this was how it usually went) was to strew before his friends the intellectual booty captured by his quick mind. As usual, he was eager to interrupt, but Nerzhin gripped the front of his overalls with five fingers and shook him to prevent him from speaking.

  “So in our own wretched persons and from our unhappy comrades, we learn what it means to eat our fill. It doesn’t depend on how much we eat, not at all, but on how we eat! It’s the same with happiness, Lyovushka, it’s exactly the same; it doesn’t depend at all on the size of the good things we’ve wrested from life. It depends solely on our attitude to them! As the Taoist ethic has it: ‘He who knows how to be content will always be content.’ ”

  Rubin laughed.

  “You’re an eclectic. You pluck pretty feathers from every bird to beautify your own tail!”

  Nerzhin’s head and hand peremptorily denied it. His hair had slipped down over his forehead. He found the argument very interesting, and he looked like a boy of eighteen.

  “Don’t try to confuse the issue, Lyovka, it isn’t like that at all! I draw my conclusions not from the philosophical works I’ve read but from the life stories I hear in prison. When I need to formulate my own views, why should I set out to discover America all over again? There are no unexplored countries on the planet Philosophy. I turn the pages of the wise men of old, and I find my own most recent thoughts. Don’t interrupt! I was about to give you an example. In the camp—and it’s even more true here in the sharashka—if a miracle happens and I get a quiet Sunday off, and in the course of the day my soul thaws out and is at ease, there may not have been any change for the better in my objective situation, but the prison yoke lies more lightly on me. And then suppose I have a really satisfying conversation or read an honest page—there I am, on the crest of the wave! I’ve had no real life for many years, but I forget it! I’m weightless, I’m suspended in space, I’m disembodied! I lie there on my top bunk, I look at the ceiling just above me, it’s bare, the plaster’s peeling, but I shudder with the sheer bliss of being! I fall asleep on the wings of happiness! No president or prime minister can go to sleep as content with the Sunday behind him!”

  Rubin grinned good-naturedly. His grin expressed a measure of agreement and a measure of indulgence for a deluded young friend.

  “And what do the great books of the Vedas have to say on the subject?” he asked, his lips protruding in a humorous funnel.

  “The Vedas—I don’t know,” Nerzhin retorted, quite sure of himself. “But the books of Sankhya say that ‘human happiness is ranked with suffering by the discerning.’ ”

  “I can see you’re an adept,” Rubin muttered into his beard.

  “Adept in what? Idealism? Metaphysics? Why aren’t you sticking labels on it?”

  “Is it Mityai who’s leading you astray?”

  “No, Mityai’s angle is quite different. Listen, shaggy beard! The happiness of continual victory, the happiness of desire triumphantly gratified, the happiness of total satisfaction . . . is suffering! It is the death of the soul; it is a sort of permanent moral dyspepsia! Never mind the philosophers of the Vedas and the Sankhya. I, Gleb Nerzhin, I myself, a prisoner in harness for five years, have risen by my own efforts to a level of development at which the bad can also be seen as the good, and it is my firm belief that people do not know themselves what they should aspire to. They squander the
ir strength in the pointless scramble for a handful of material goods and die without even discovering their own spiritual riches. When Lev Tolstoy dreamed of being put in prison, he was thinking like a genuinely clear-sighted man with a healthy spiritual life.”

  Rubin guffawed. He always guffawed when he completely rejected the views of his opponent in a debate (and that was his normal experience in prison).

  “Harken, child! Your words come from an unformed youthful mind. You prefer your own experience to the collective experience of mankind. You are poisoned by the odors of the prison night bucket, and you expect to see the world clearly through its exhalations. We ourselves have come to grief; our own fate is all awry. But how can a man allow his convictions to be changed or swayed one little bit just by that?”

  “So you’re proud of your consistency?”

  “I am! ‘Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders.’ ”

  “Of all the pigheadedness! That’s what I call metaphysics. Instead of learning from prison, instead of absorbing this new life . . .”

  “Absorbing what? The toxic bile secreted by life’s losers?”

  “. . . you have willfully sealed your eyes, stopped your ears, adopted a pose—and you think that shows intelligence? Is refusal to develop intelligent? You struggle to believe in the triumph of your infernal Communism, but try as you may, you don’t believe—”

  “It isn’t a matter of belief, you dunderhead, but of scientific knowledge! And objectivity!”

  “What? You call yourself objective?”

  “Ab-solutely!” Rubin said loftily.

  “Never in my life have I known a more biased man than you!”

  “Just try to rise above your own molehill! Try to look at things in historical perspective! Historical necessity. Do you know the meaning of it? The inevitability of conforming to the inherent laws of history. Everything goes the way it must! Historical materialism could not cease to be true just because you and I are in prison. Don’t root in the mud, just to grub up the moldering corpse of skepticism.”

  “Try to understand, Lev! It gave me no pleasure, it made me sick at heart to part with that doctrine! It was the clarion call, the ruling passion of my youth; I forsook and cursed all other things for its sake! Now I’m like a blade of grass in the crater where a bomb has uprooted the tree of faith. I’ve lost so many arguments since I’ve been in prison—”

  “Because you weren’t clever enough, fathead.”

  “—that I was bound in all honesty to jettison your rickety constructions and look for others. It isn’t easy. My skepticism may be a shelter by the wayside, to sit out the storm—”

  “Bunk! Absolute garbage! You’ll never make a real skeptic! Skeptics are supposed to suspend judgment, and you’re in a hurry to pronounce on everything! Skeptics are supposed to cultivate ataraxia, imperturbability, and you boil over at the slightest excuse!”

  “Yes, you’re right.” Gleb buried his head in his hands. “I train my mind to soar above it all . . . but the world around me makes me giddy, I lose control, I snap at people, get indignant.”

  “Above it all? And you’re at my throat because there’s a shortage of drinkable water at Dzhezkazgan.”

  “I would like to see you packed off to Dzhezkazgan! You might change your tune there!”

  “Fathead, idiot! You might at least try reading what great men have to say about skepticism. Lenin, for instance.”

  “Well? What about Lenin?” Nerzhin had lowered his voice.

  “Lenin said: ‘To the paladins of liberal logorrhea à la russe, skepticism is a stage on the way from democracy to vile lackey liberalism.’ ”

  “What, what, what? Sure you aren’t misquoting?”

  “His precise words. It’s from Remembering Herzen and it refers to . . .”

  Nerzhin hid his head in his hands, as though conceding defeat.

  “Well,” said Rubin mildly. “Satisfied?”

  “Oh yes.” Nerzhin’s whole body rocked. “You couldn’t have found anything better. To think that I once worshipped him!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean? Is that the language of a great philosopher? That’s simply the sort of wild abuse people go in for when they have no arguments! ‘Paladins of logorrhea’! It makes you sick to say it. Liberalism means love of freedom, so it has to be slavish and dirty. Whereas applause on command is a leap into the realm of freedom, I suppose?”

  In the heat of argument, the friends had forgotten the need for caution, and their exclamations were now loud enough for Simochka to hear. She had been darting glances of stern disapproval at Nerzhin for some time. The late shift was drawing to an end, and she felt hurt that Nerzhin wasn’t taking advantage of these convenient evening hours and hadn’t even looked around at her.

  “No, your brain is simply out of kilter,” Rubin said in despair. “Can’t you put it more clearly?”

  “Well, it might make more sense this way: Skepticism is a way of silencing fanaticism; skepticism is a way of liberating dogmatic minds.”

  “And who’s the dogmatist here? Me, I suppose? Am I really a dogmatist?” Rubin’s big warm eyes looked at him reproachfully. “I’m a prisoner, one of the 1945 intake, like you. I’ve got four years of war lodged like shrapnel in my side and five years of prison around my neck, so I can see things just as clearly as you. And if I was convinced that the whole thing was rotten to the core, I would be the first to say we must publish another Kolokol! We must sound the alarm! We must destroy! You wouldn’t find me hiding in the shrubbery, refusing to pass judgment! Covering my nakedness with the fig leaf of skepticism! . . . But I know that the decay is only apparent, only superficial, that the root is sound, the stem is sound, so that we must come to the rescue, not destroy!”

  The internal telephone rang on the vacant desk of Engineer Major Roitman, head of the Acoustics Lab. Simochka rose and went over to it.

  “Try to understand, try to get the iron law of our age into your head: There are two worlds, two systems! And there is no third way! There can be no Kolokol uselessly ringing into the wind. It’s impossible! You cannot avoid choosing: Which of the two world forces are you for?”

  “Be off with you! It just suits the Big Chief to reason that way. That ‘two worlds’ nonsense has helped him to make doormats of us all.”

  “Gleb Vikentich!”

  “Listen to me now!” It was Rubin’s turn to seize Nerzhin by his overalls with a commanding hand. “He is a very great man!”

  “Blockhead! Hog’s brain!”

  “One of these days you’ll understand! He is at once the Robespierre and the Napoleon of our Revolution. He is . . . wise! He is truly wise! He sees further than our blunted vision can reach—”

  “And has the nerve to consider us all fools! He foists his ready-chewed cud on us. . . .”

  “Gleb Vikentich.”

  “Eh?” Nerzhin came to himself and abandoned Rubin.

  “Didn’t you hear? There was a phone call.” It was the third time Simochka had called him, standing at her desk stern and frowning, her folded arms drawing the brown mohair shawl tight around her shoulders. “Anton Nikolaevich wants you in his office.”

  “Oh?” The excitement of argument had faded from Nerzhin’s face, and the wrinkles had returned. “Right, thank you, Serafima Vitalievna. Hear that, Lyovka? Anton wants me. Wonder what for?”

  A summons to the office of the director of the institute at ten o’clock on Saturday evening was an extraordinary event. Although Simochka was trying to look official and indifferent, Nerzhin could see that she was alarmed.

  Their heated exchanges were forgotten. Rubin looked at his friend with concern. When his eyes were not dilated by polemical passion, they were almost feminine in their gentleness.

  “I don’t like it when the top brass starts taking an interest in us,” he said.

  Nerzhin shrugged. “Why worry? Ours is such an unimportant piffling little job, all this voice business—”

  “We will ge
t it in the neck from Anton before long. We will live to regret Stanislavsky’s memoirs and the speeches of famous lawyers!” said Rubin with a laugh. “Maybe it’s Number Seven’s articulation tests?”

  “The results have been signed already; there’s no going back on them. Anyway, if I don’t come back—”

  “Don’t be silly!”

  “What’s silly about it? Life here is like that. But burn you-know-what.” Gleb pulled down the rolltop quietly, put the keys in Rubin’s hand, and went off at his usual leisurely pace. A prisoner five years between the shafts never hurries. He knows that what comes next can only be worse.

  Chapter 10

  The Rosicrucians

  NERZHIN MADE HIS WAY UP THE BROAD, red-carpeted stairway, deserted at this hour, with bronze candlesticks and an ornate stucco ceiling overhead, to the third floor. Trying to look carefree, he strolled past the desk of the “free employee” manning the outside telephones and knocked at the door of the director of research, MGB Engineer Colonel Anton Nikolaevich Yakonov.

  The office was spacious, carpeted wall to wall, and furnished with armchairs and sofas. The azure patch in the middle was the dazzling cloth on a long conference table, contrasting with the brownness of Yakonov’s elegant desk and armchair in the far corner. Nerzhin had viewed this magnificence before, but not very often, and usually not alone but in group discussions.

  Engineer Colonel Yakonov was over fifty but still in his prime. His stature, the hint of powder on his face after shaving, his gold-rimmed pince-nez, his soft, princely plumpness—an Obolensky or a Dolgoruky?* —his majestic, self-assured movements, made him a conspicuous figure among the grandees of his ministry.

  “Take a seat, Gleb Vikentich!” An expansive wave accompanied the invitation. He sat hunched in his outsize armchair, twiddling a fat colored pencil over the polished brown desktop.

  Addressing him by his first name and patronymic was a mark of courtesy and goodwill that cost the engineer colonel no effort, since he had a list of all the prisoners, with their full names, under glass on his desk. (Those unaware of this were amazed at Yakonov’s memory.) Nerzhin bowed silently. (He did not hold his hands along the seams of his trousers but did not wave them about either.) He sat down expectantly at the imposing, highly polished desk.