In the First Circle Read online

  Yakonov’s voice was a rich rumble. It always seemed strange that this fine gentleman did not cultivate an exquisite lisp.

  “Do you know, Gleb Vikentich, I happened to think of you half an hour ago, and I started wondering what wind exactly had blown you into the Acoustics Lab, to—er—Roitman?”

  Yakonov pronounced this name with undisguised contempt and, in the presence of Roitman’s subordinate, didn’t even prefix it with the word “Major.” Relations between the head of the Research Institute and his senior deputy had deteriorated so far that there was no longer any point in concealing it.

  Nerzhin tensed. Instinct told him that the conversation was off to a bad start. It was with the same contemptuous and ironical curve of his not-exactly-thin and not-exactly-thick lips that Yakonov had told Nerzhin some days back that he, Nerzhin, was perhaps objective about the results of the voice tests but that he treated Number Seven not like a dear departed relative but like an unidentified drunk found dead under the Marfino fence. Number Seven was Yakonov’s hobbyhorse, but it was going very badly.

  “. . . I, of course, greatly appreciate your personal contribution to the science of voice classification . . . ” (he was being sarcastic!) “. . . and I’m dreadfully sorry that your original monograph was printed only in a small, classified edition, which denied you the fame of a sort of Russian George Fletcher . . . ” (brutally sarcastic!) “. . . but I should still like to see a little more . . . profit, as the Anglo-Saxons put it, from your activities. I pay homage to the abstract sciences, but I am a practical man.”

  Engineer Colonel Yakonov had risen high enough, yet was still at a sufficient distance from the Leader of the Peoples, to permit himself the luxury of not disguising his cleverness or refraining from idiosyncratic pronouncements.

  “Well, now, let me ask you frankly, what is going on right now in the Acoustics Lab?”

  The most ruthless question imaginable! Yakonov simply didn’t have time to keep up with everything, or he would have gotten their number long ago.

  “Why the devil do you waste your time on that gibberish? ‘Styr . . . smyr . . .’ You’re a mathematician, aren’t you? A university man? Look behind you.”

  Nerzhin looked and rose from his chair. There were three of them in the office, not two! An unremarkable man in dark civilian clothes rose from a sofa to face him. His round spectacles flashed as he moved his head. In the lavish light from overhead, Nerzhin recognized Pyotr Trofimovich Verenyov, a senior lecturer in his university before the war. But true to his prison training, he remained silent and made no movement, assuming that the man before him was a prisoner and fearing to compromise him by premature recognition. Verenyov smiled but also looked embarrassed. Yakonov rumbled reassuringly.

  “I must say, this ritual restraint is one of the things I envy about the mathematical fraternity. All my life I’ve thought of mathematicians as a sort of Rosicrucian brotherhood, and I’ve always regretted that it was never my luck to be initiated into their mysteries. Don’t be shy. Shake hands and make yourselves comfortable. I shall leave you for half an hour. You can exchange fond memories, and Professor Verenyov can explain the tasks that the Sixth Administration has set us.”

  With this, Yakonov lifted himself out of his oversize chair and made light work of carrying his far-from-light frame—made more imposing by his silver-and-blue epaulets—to the exit. When Nerzhin’s hand met Verenyov’s, they were alone.

  To Nerzhin, set as he was in his prison ways, this pale man in the twinkling glasses was like a ghost unlawfully returning from a forgotten world, separated from today’s world by the forests around Lake Ilmen, the hills and ravines of the Orel region, the sands and marshes of Belorussia, prosperous Polish farms, the tiled roofs of little German towns. Other memories were engraved on this nine-year interval between meetings: the bright, bare boxes and cells of the Lubyanka, the grime and stench of transit prisons, stifling compartments in prisoner-transport trains, cold and hungry zeks out in the biting wind of the steppes. It was impossible to think back beyond all this and relive how it felt to see the formula for the functions of an independent variable written out on the pliant oilcloth surface of a blackboard.

  They lit cigarettes, Nerzhin unsteadily, and sat facing each other across a small table.

  It was not Verenyov’s first encounter with a former student—from Moscow or from Rostov, where he had been sent before the war to draw a firm line between conflicting schools of thought. But this meeting with Nerzhin was something out of the ordinary for him, too: this establishment so near to and so remote from Moscow, shrouded in a smokescreen of supersecrecy, wound around with ring after ring of barbed wire, those unfamiliar blue overalls instead of normal human dress. . . .

  The younger of the two, with the lines around his mouth more pronounced than ever, apparently had the right to ask the questions, while the older man answered as though ashamed of his modest academic career: evacuation, return from reevacuation, three years working with K–––, successful doctoral thesis on topology. . . . Nerzhin, boorishly casual, did not even ask the subject of his contribution to this austere field of study in which he had once himself intended to choose his degree project. He suddenly felt sorry for Verenyov. . . . Ordered magnitudes, incompletely ordered magnitudes, finite magnitudes. . . . Topology! The stratosphere of human thought! In the twenty-fourth century it might just possibly be of use to somebody, but for the present . . . For the present. . . .

  Why should I speak of suns and worlds,

  I have eyes for man’s suffering alone.

  But why had Verenyov left the university and landed in this department? Posted here, of course. But couldn’t he have refused? Well, yes, he could, only. . . . In this job his salary was doubled. . . . Did he have children? . . . Four of them. . . .

  For some reason, they started going over the students who had graduated with Nerzhin. Their final examination had taken place on the day war broke out. The most gifted of them had been killed or shell-shocked. They’re the ones who always stick their necks out, never look after themselves. While those of whom you would never have expected it were completing a higher-degree course or held lectureships. Well, and what about the pride of the department, Dmitri Dmitrich! Goryainov-Shakhovskoy! A little old man, so very old that he had become slovenly in his habits, his black velvet jacket was always smothered in chalk, and he often put the blackboard duster into his pocket instead of his handkerchief. A walking anecdote, a compendium of innumerable professorial jokes, the life and soul of the Imperial University of Warsaw, which in 1915 had moved to the commercial town of Rostov as though to a graveyard. On his golden jubilee as a scientist, he was honored with congratulatory telegrams from Milwaukee, Cape Town, Yokohama. . . . Then in 1930, when the university was revamped as an “Industrial-Pedagogical Institute,” he had been “purged” by a proletarian commission as a “hostile bourgeois element.” Nothing could have saved him had he not known Kalinin personally. It was said that Kalinin’s father had been one of the professor’s father’s serfs. Whether that was so or not, Goryainov took a trip to Moscow and brought back an order to “keep your hands off this man.”

  And they did. They took such good care not to touch him that those not in the know were sometimes quite alarmed. One minute he would be writing a scientific paper with a mathematical proof of God’s existence. The next, in a public lecture on his idol, Newton, the droning voice from under the yellowing mustache would announce that somebody had sent up a note saying, “According to Marx, Newton is a materialist, but you say that he is an idealist. My answer is that Marx misrepresented the facts. Newton believed in God, as all great scientists do.”

  Recording his lectures was a nightmare! The stenographers were in despair! Because his legs were weak, he would sit right by the blackboard, facing it, with his back to his audience, writing with his right hand, erasing with his left, and mumbling to himself incessantly. It was hopeless trying to understand his ideas during a lecture. But Nerzhin and a fellow
student, taking it in turns, sometimes managed to write it all down and went over it in the evening. They were awestruck, as though they were gazing into a sky filled with twinkling stars.

  So what had become of the old man? He had been concussed in an air raid on Rostov and evacuated half-dead to Kirghizia. Then there was some story about his sons, both lecturers—Verenyov didn’t know the details, some dirty business, something treasonable. Stivka, the younger one, was now a longshoreman on the New York waterfront, so they said.

  Nerzhin studied Verenyov closely while he was talking. Strange that good scientific minds, so agile in multidimensional space, should look at life itself with tunnel vision. A thinker is insulted by thugs and louts—that is just a symptom of immaturity, a momentary lapse; if his children remember their father’s humiliation—that is obscene, that is treason. And who really knew whether Stivka was actually a New York longshoreman or not? The secret police shape public opinion.

  What, Verenyov asked, had Nerzhin done to . . . find himself inside?

  Nerzhin laughed.

  No, really, what had he done?

  “Thought the wrong thoughts, Pyotr Trofimovich. The Japanese have a law that a man can be put on trial for his unspoken thoughts.”

  “The Japanese! But we have no such law, do we?”

  “Oh yes we do; it’s called 58 slash 10.”

  After this, Nerzhin listened with one ear as Verenyov told him Yakonov’s real reason for bringing them together. The Sixth Administration had sent Verenyov to intensify and systematize the work they were doing on encoding. Mathematicians were needed, lots of them, and Verenyov was delighted to see among them a former student for whom he had had high hopes.

  Nerzhin mechanically asked for details, and Pyotr Trofimovich, in a fine mathematical frenzy, set about explaining the object of the research and detailing the experiments to be made and the formulas to be reconsidered. Nerzhin’s mind, meanwhile, was on those scraps of paper which he covered with his tiny handwriting, secure and at peace behind his camouflaged defenses, while Simochka stole loving glances at him, and Lev good-naturedly bumbled.

  Those tiny pages were the first fruits of his maturity. It was preferable, of course, to reach maturity before your thirties—and in your original subject. Why, it might be asked, should he stick his head into those jaws from which historians themselves had scuttled away to ages safely over and done with? Why was he so fascinated by the riddle of the grim inflated giant who had only to flutter an eyelash and Nerzhin’s head would fly off?

  Should he, then, surrender to the tentacles of the cryptographic octopus? For fourteen hours a day they would crush him, never relaxing even during rest periods. Probability theory, number theory, the theory of error, would monopolize his thoughts. It would be brain death. Desiccation of the soul. What room would there be for meditation? For trying to make sense of life?

  Still, this was a sharashka. Not a camp. There was meat for dinner. Butter in the morning. The skin on your hands was not lacerated and callused. Your fingers weren’t frostbitten. You didn’t slump onto the bed-planks like an insensate log in your filthy rope sandals—no, you got into bed happily, under a clean white comforter.

  So what was the point of just living all your life? Living for the sake of living? With no concern beyond your physical comfort?

  Lovely comfort! But what is the point if there is nothing more?

  Reason told him to agree.

  His heart said, Get thee behind me, Satan!

  “Pyotr Trofimovich, do you know how to make shoes?”

  “What was that?”

  “I mean, can you teach me to make shoes? I want to learn to make shoes.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. . . .”

  “Pyotr Trofimovich! You live in a shell! When I’ve served my sentence, I will be going into the depths of the taiga into permanent exile. I can’t do any sort of work with my hands, so how am I going to live? There are brown bears out there. Another three Mesozoic eras will come and go before anybody out there needs Leonard Euler’s functions.”

  “What are you talking about, Nerzhin? If your work as a cryptographer is successful, you will be released early; your conviction will be annulled; you’ll be given an apartment in Moscow.”

  “My dear Pyotr Trofimovich, I don’t want any thanks from them, I don’t want their forgiveness, and I’m not interested in catching minnows for them. . . .”

  The door opened, and in came the great panjandrum with the gold-rimmed pince-nez on his fleshy nose.

  “How goes it, my Rosicrucian friends? All settled?”

  Still seated, Nerzhin looked Yakonov straight in the eye and replied:

  “With respect, Anton Nikolaevich, I consider that my work in the Acoustics Laboratory is not yet complete.”

  By now Yakonov was standing behind his desk, the knuckles of his pudgy hands resting on its glass top to take his weight. Only those who knew him well would have realized from his words that he was angry.

  “Mathematics! And articulation. You’ve traded the food of the gods for a mess of pottage. You can go.”

  And with the two-colored lead of his fat pencil, he made a note on his memo pad: “Write off Nerzhin.”

  * * *

  * Obolensky or Dolgoruky: Noble families of long-standing eminence.

  Chapter 11

  The Enchanted Castle

  YAKONOV HAD HELD his position of trust as chief engineer of the Special Technology Department of the MGB for several years now, during and since the war. He wore with dignity the insignia of an engineer colonel, silver epaulets with blue borders and three big stars, which his knowledge had earned him. His position was such that he could exercise general supervision from a distance, make an occasional erudite report to an audience of high officeholders, indulge in an occasional clever and colorful conversation with some engineer over his finished model, and in general enjoy the reputation of an expert, bear no responsibility, and pick up a good few thousand rubles a month. It was a post in which Yakonov had graciously bestowed his eloquence on all the department’s ingenious technical schemes in their infancy, stayed aloof from them in the days of growing pains and adolescent maladies, and honored once again with his presence the pauper’s funeral of a failure or the coronation of a hero with a crown of gold.

  Anton Nikolaevich was not young or self-confident enough to chase after the treacherous glitter of a Golden Star or the badge of a Stalin Prize winner, to snap up for himself every task set by the ministry or by the Boss himself. Anton Nikolaevich was sufficiently advanced in years and experience to avoid such excitement—and the soaring exultation and plunges into despair inseparable from it.

  Clinging to these principles, he had survived without unpleasant incidents until January 1948. Then, that January, somebody had suggested to the Father of the Peoples of East and West the idea of creating a special secret telephone. Nobody who intercepted his telephone conversations would be able to understand them! He could sit in his country home at Kuntsevo and converse with Molotov in New York! The Generalissimo’s august finger, yellowed around the nail by nicotine, picked out the Marfino establishment, which had previously been concerned with developing walkie-talkie sets for the militia. The historic words spoken on the occasion were, “Why do I need these transmitters? To catch burglars?”

  He set a deadline—January 1, 1949. Then he thought a bit and added: “Well, all right, make it May 1.”

  The job was an extremely responsible one and the schedule extraordinarily tight. After some thought, the ministry decided that Yakonov personally must bring Marfino up to snuff. He tried hard to prove that he was overloaded already and could not take on another commitment, but in vain. The head of his department, Foma Guryanovich Oskolupov, had only to turn those green cat’s eyes on him, and Yakonov remembered the blots on his record (he had been in prison for six years) and fell silent.

  That was almost two years ago, and the chief engineer’s office in the ministry building had been unoccu
pied ever since. The chief engineer spent his days and nights at the far end of town in the former seminary building with the hexagonal tower over its redundant sanctuary.

  At first he quite enjoyed running things personally: wearily slamming the door of his personal Pobeda, speeding to Marfino lulled by its purring engine, driving through the barbed-wire-festooned gates past a saluting sentry, walking with an entourage of majors and captains under the century-old limes of the Marfino copse. Yakonov’s superiors had demanded nothing of him except plan after plan after plan, and “socialist obligations.” And the MGB’s horn of plenty was inverted over the Marfino institute: equipment purchased from Britain and America; equipment captured from the Germans; homegrown convicts summoned from the camps; a technical library for twenty thousand new acquisitions; the best security officers and archivists, the old bulls of the MGB herd; and finally prison guards with the finest Lubyanka education. The old building of the seminary had to be converted, and new buildings put up for the prison staff and for the experimental workshops; so when the yellow flowers on the limes sweetened the air, you could hear in the shade of those giants the sad voices of slow-moving German war prisoners in bedraggled gray-green tunics. These slothful fascists had no appetite for work after four years of postwar imprisonment. No Russian eye could bear to watch them unloading bricks from a truck: each brick slowly passed from hand to hand, as carefully as if it were crystal, and gently stacked. While they were installing radiators under the windows and re-laying rotten floors, the Germans sauntered through super-secret rooms, squinted sullenly at the labels on equipment, some in German, some in English—a German schoolboy could have guessed what sort of work these laboratories would be doing. All of which was dealt with in a report submitted by prisoner Rubin to the engineer colonel. He was right to do so, but security officers Shikin and Myshin (“Shishkin-Myshkin” in prison vernacular) did not find the report at all helpful: What were they supposed to do about it? Report their own oversight to their superiors? In any case it was too late, because the prisoners of war had been repatriated, and those who had gone to West Germany could, if anyone was interested, report on the location of the institute and of its individual laboratories. Yet when officers from other MGB directorates had business with the engineer colonel, he was not allowed to give them the address of his outfit, and rather than risk the least little chink in his curtain of secrecy, he would travel to the Lubyanka to talk to them.