In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  He got up in annoyance and walked away.

  The glass door to the balcony looked out on the restlessness of the Kaluga Road. Headlights, car horns sounding warnings, traffic lights flashing red, yellow, green under the steadily falling snow.

  The girl without tact picked up her spoon, put down her cup, crossed the room quietly, unnoticed both by Klara and by the hostess, went through the dining room where tea and cakes were being gotten ready, put her street things on in the hallway, and made for the door.

  Galakhov, Innokenty, and Dotnara stood aside as the despondent girl passed through the dining room. Golovanov, in high spirits after his talk with Dinera, greeted his patron with his old playfulness.

  “Nikolai Arkadievich! Stop! Confess, now! In the bottommost depths of your soul you are not a writer, but . . . what?” (This sounded like a repetition of Innokenty’s question, and Galakhov looked embarrassed). “A soldier, that’s what!”

  Galakhov smiled bravely. “Yes, of course, I’m a soldier!”

  He screwed up his eyes like a man staring into the distance. Not even the most triumphant day in his career as a writer had left such proud memories or, more important, such a feeling of purity as the day when he had impulsively taken off in a reckless endeavor to reach the headquarters of a half-surrounded battalion, landed in a raging storm of heavy-artillery and mortar fire, and later that evening eaten out of the same mess tin as the three officers of the battalion staff, in a dugout shaken by gunfire, and felt himself the equal of those hard-baked warriors.

  “So allow me to present my army friend Captain Shchagov.”

  Shchagov stood erect, refusing to lower himself by a show of respect for a superior. He was pleasantly tipsy; he had drunk just enough not to feel the pressure of his feet on the floor. And as he had become more relaxed, his present surroundings had become more manageable, more welcoming—the bright, warm room, the luxurious carpeting and solid furniture that spoke of assured affluence, a milieu he had entered with his nagging wounds and unslaked hunger merely to reconnoiter but that promised to become his future.

  Shchagov had been feeling ashamed of his modest decorations in this company, where a beardless boy wore the ribbon of the Order of Lenin pinned casually askew. But as soon as the famous writer saw those campaign medals and the two wound stripes, he swung his hand at Shchagov’s and shook it heartily.

  “Major Galakhov!” he said, smiling. “Which front were you on? Come and sit down and tell me about it.”

  They moved to the settee, making Innokenty and Dotty move up. They invited Ernst to join them, but he made a sign and disappeared, rightly assuming that this meeting of old warriors should not be a dry occasion. Shchagov told them how he and Golovanov had become friends in Poland, one mad day in 1944 (September 5), when Soviet troops had broken through to the Narev and their impetus had carried them over the river, fording it on planks almost, because they knew that it was easy enough on the first day but that on the second they wouldn’t have a dog’s chance. They had cheekily pushed their way through the Germans along a corridor no more than a kilometer wide, and the Germans had tried to cut them off, throwing in three hundred tanks from the north and two hundred from the south.

  As soon as they began exchanging wartime memories, Shchagov forgot the language he used every day in the university, and Galakhov forgot not only the language of publishing houses and writers’ committees but even more completely the carefully calculated and controlled idiom in which books are written. It was impossible to convey the full-blooded drama, the smoky tang of life at the front in those well-worn, smoothly polished literary locutions. Before they had spoken a dozen words, they felt a desperate need for oaths that were quite unthinkable in that place.

  Golovanov reappeared with three glasses and a half-empty bottle of cognac. He moved a chair up so that he could see both of them and filled the three glasses.

  “To soldiers’ friendship!” Galakhov said, screwing up his eyes.

  “To those who didn’t come back!” was Shchagov’s toast.

  They drank. The empty bottle went behind the settee.

  Golovanov steered the conversation his own way. He told them how on that memorable day he, a newly fledged war correspondent two months out of the university, had traveled to a forward position for the first time, got a ride on a truck (carrying antitank mines to Shchagov), and sped from Dlugosiedlo to Kabat along a corridor so narrow that the “Northern Germans” were lobbing mortar bombs onto the “Southern German” positions, and how on that same day one Soviet general returning to the front from home leave drove straight into the German lines in his Jeep. That was the end of him.

  Innokenty had been listening, and he asked them what the fear of death felt like. Golovanov, in full flow, answered promptly that at such desperate moments you don’t fear death; you simply don’t think about it. Shchagov raised his eyebrows and demurred.

  “You aren’t afraid of death until you get really shaken up. I was never afraid of anything until I experienced that. I got in the way of a heavy air raid, and for some time after, I was afraid of bombs and nothing else. Then I got shell-shocked and became afraid of artillery. People say you needn’t be afraid of the whistling bullet; of course not, the one you hear isn’t meant for you. You won’t hear the one that kills you. Death needn’t really concern you; while you exist, death doesn’t; when death comes, you’re no more.”

  They had put “Baby Come Back to Me” on the record player.

  Shchagov’s and Golovanov’s reminiscences did not interest Galakhov. He had not witnessed the operation they were talking about; he did not know Dlugosiedlo and Kabat; and, what was more, he had not been a small-time correspondent like Golovanov but a strategic commentator. Battles, in his mind, did not take place around a rotten plank bridge or a shattered water tower; his was the wider vision, the field marshal’s view of the overall logic of events.

  So Galakhov gave the conversation a new twist.

  “War, war, war. We go into it ridiculous civilians and come back with hearts of bronze. Erik, did they sing ‘The Song of the Front-Line Correspondents’ in your sector?”

  “Didn’t they, though!”

  “Nera!” Galakhov called out. “Come over here, Nera. Come and help us sing the ‘Front-Line Correspondents’ song.”

  Dinera came closer, nodding eagerly. “Whatever you say, my friends. I was a front-line girl myself!”

  They turned the record player off and began singing, the three of them. What they lacked as musicians they made up for in sincerity.

  From Moscow to the border

  We advance in battle order. . . .

  An audience gathered around them. The younger guests stared curiously at Galakhov. You didn’t meet a celebrity like him every day.

  From vodka and rough weather

  Our throats are like cracked leather

  But we’ll thank you kindly not to say a word. . . .

  The moment they began singing, Shchagov went cold inside. He kept on smiling, but he felt guilty toward those who could not be present, those who had swallowed the waters of the Dnieper back in 1941 or taken a mouthful of Novgorod pine needles in 1942. These wordsmiths didn’t really know the front line, which they had now turned into a holy place. There was an unbridgeable gulf between even the most daring of war correspondents and the front-line soldier, a gulf as wide as that between an aristocrat who cultivated his land and a peasant plowman. War correspondents were not tied by service regulations and officers’ orders to the immediate business of fighting, so nobody could call it treason if they showed fright, refused to lay down their lives, and fled from the battle zone. Hence the psychological gulf that yawned between the front-line soldier, whose legs had taken root in some outpost, who had no escape and might die right there, and the war correspondent who had wings and who could be back in his Moscow apartment the day after tomorrow. And anyway, where did they get all that vodka that made them so hoarse? From the C in C’s ration? A soldier got 200, or as lit
tle as 150, grams before going into an attack.

  In the places where they sent us

  No tanks were ever lent us.

  If a newsman should get killed, then never mind.

  In a worn-out Moskvich roadster

  Armed with an empty holster

  We entered cities first—and the rest behind.

  This “entered first” referred to two or three anecdotal occasions when war correspondents who couldn’t read a relief map properly rushed along a good road (a Moskvich couldn’t manage a bad one), landed in some town in no-man’s-land, and tore out again like scalded cats back the way they had come.

  Innokenty listened, head down, and found a meaning of his own in the song. He knew nothing at all about war, but he did know about Soviet newspapermen. Your Soviet reporter was not the hard-done-by character celebrated in these verses. He did not lose his job for missing a scoop. He had only to show his press card and he was treated like a person in authority, someone entitled to issue “directives.” The information he obtained might be correct or incorrect; he might send it to his paper in good time or with some delay; his career did not depend on that but on ideological correctness. A correspondent with the correct worldview had no real need to rush off to some hellhole in the battle zone. He could write his dispatches just as well behind the lines.

  Dotty’s hand had closed around her husband’s wrist, and she sat quietly beside him, content neither to speak nor to understand the clever talk. This was her most delightful habit. She wanted just to sit there like a dutiful wife and let everybody see how happy they were together.

  Little did she know how, very soon now, she would be bullied and terrorized, whether Innokenty was picked up here or got clean away and remained over there.

  When she had thought of nothing but herself, when she had been insensitive and domineering, eager to crush him, to force her own shoddy values on him, Innokenty had thought—Very well, let her suffer, let her learn her lesson, it will do her good.

  But this was the old, the gentle Dotty, and he was acutely sorry for her. He had been unfair.

  He felt more painfully ill at ease, unhappier from one moment to the next. It was high time for him to leave this stupid party—if only he could be sure that worse did not await him at home!

  Klara emerged from the half-darkened smaller room after a perfunctory attempt to adjust an erratic television set for the benefit of would-be viewers. She stood in the doorway, amazed to see Innokenty and Dotnara sitting so close and contentedly together, and realized, not for the first time, that every marriage has unfathomable secrets best not disturbed.

  The party had really been arranged for her, but she had not enjoyed it one little bit. Indeed, she had found it painful and depressing. She had rushed around making people welcome and trying to keep them happy, but her heart was not in it. Nothing amused her; none of the guests interested her. And the new dress, green crêpe satin with brighter insets in the collar and the bodice and at the wrists, probably did no more for her than all her others.

  She had allowed a new acquaintance, the square-headed critic, to be wished on her, but their exchanges had been cool, artificial, and somehow unnatural. He had sat on the sofa for half an hour, argued about nothing with Dinera for another half hour, then started drinking with the other old soldiers. Klara felt no urge to latch onto him and lure him or drag him away.

  But she would not have many more chances. She would not be in bloom much longer. If she missed her chance now, she could expect something older and worse, or nothing at all.

  Had it been only that morning? Right there in Moscow? That thrilling conversation, the blue-eyed boy’s ecstatic look, the soul-shaking kiss, and . . . her solemn promise to wait. Was it only today that she had spent three hours braiding a basket for a New Year’s tree?

  It could not have been on planet Earth. It could not have been in the flesh. Nothing like it had happened in a quarter of a century. She must have dreamed it.

  Chapter 65

  A Duel Not by the Rules

  ALONE ON HIS UPPER BUNK, staring at a ceiling vaulted like the dome of heaven or burying his head in a feverish pillow as though it were Klara’s bosom, Rostislav felt faint with happiness. Half a day had passed since her kiss had left him dizzy, and he was still reluctant to defile his happy lips with idle speech or gross food.

  “You couldn’t wait for me,” he had said. “You couldn’t possibly. . . .”

  “Why not?” she had replied. “Of course I could.”

  From below, a rich, youthful voice, muted so that it would not carry too far, broke into his thoughts.

  “Blind faith—nothing else—keeps antediluvians like you going. Your beliefs are false, though. Your whole life long, science and you have always been strangers.”

  “Look, this argument is becoming pointless. If Marxism isn’t science, what is? The Revelations of Saint John the Divine? Khomyakov on the Slav soul?”

  “You’ve never caught as much as a whiff of real science! You people aren’t . . . creators. So you haven’t the least idea what science really is! The subjects of all your philosophizing are figments, not realities! Whereas in true science all propositions derive directly from a strictly defined starting point.”

  “Listen, old pal! It’s just the same with us. Our whole economic doctrine is deduced from the nuclear concept of commodity. And our whole philosophy stems from the three laws of the dialectic.”

  “Concrete knowledge is validated by the ability to apply its findings in practice.”

  “My friend! What’s this I hear? You base your epistemology on the empirical principle? So you’re one of nature’s materialists.” (Rubin pursed his lips to slur the sibilants). “A rather primitive one, at that.”

  “You always wriggle out of an honest man-to-man argument! You prefer to overwhelm your interlocutor with gobbledygook!”

  “While you as usual don’t just talk, you pontificate! Like the Delphic oracle! The oracle of Marfino! What makes you think I’m so desperately keen on arguing with you? For all you know, it may bore me as much as trying to drill it into some old troglodyte that the sun doesn’t go round the earth. Good luck to him, I say—if ignorance is bliss.”

  “You don’t want to argue with me because you don’t know how to. None of you do, because you avoid people who think differently, and you won’t risk denting your nice, tidy ideology! So you get together, with no outsiders present, to flaunt your understanding of the Founding Fathers. Each of you borrows ideas from the others, and after a little wear they fit in nicely with his own. Anyway, outside”—lowering his voice—“with the Cheka around, who dares argue with you? But when you land in jail, here in Marfino, say”—speaking normally again—“you meet people who really can argue! And you’re like fish out of water! All you can do is yell at people and abuse them!”

  “It seems to me you’ve done most of the yelling so far.”

  Sologdin and Rubin, absorbed in their eternal disagreement, were still sitting at the empty birthday table, oblivious of all else. Abramson had long since retired to read The Count of Monte Cristo, and Kondrashov-Ivanov to meditate on the greatness of Shakespeare. Pryanchikov had hurried off to page through a borrowed issue of last year’s Ogonyok; Nerzhin had left to see Spiridon the yardman; Potapov, carrying out his housewifely duties in full, had washed the pots, put back the lockers where they belonged, and was now lying with a pillow over his head to shut out light and noise. Many of those in the room were asleep already, others quietly reading or talking, and the hour had come when you begin to wonder whether the duty officer has forgotten to switch the main lights off and the blue light on. And Sologdin and Rubin were still sitting on Pryanchikov’s empty bed, hidden by the remaining locker.

  Only Sologdin really felt like arguing. The day had been a day of victories for him, and they had left him seething with excitement. In any case, Sunday evening, in his timetable, was always set aside for entertainment. And what better fun could there possibly be than shami
ng and confounding this champion of the prevailing cretinism?

  On this occasion Rubin found their debate irksome and absurd. He had unfinished work on his hands, and on top of that a new, extremely difficult task had devolved upon him, the creation of a whole new science! He had to make a start single-handedly early next morning, and he should really be conserving his strength. And then there were two letters demanding his attention, one from his wife and one from his mistress. There would never be a better time to answer them, giving his wife important advice on bringing up the children, and his mistress tender reassurances. Other things, too, had claims on him—the Mongolian-Finnish, Spanish-Arabic, and other dictionaries, ˇCapek, Hemingway, Lawrence. . . . And on top of all that—something he hadn’t been able to get around to all evening, what with the mock trial, the teasing remarks from his neighbors, and the birthday ritual—the finalization of a major project of great public importance.

  But the prison’s debating rules had him in their grip. Rubin must never let himself be defeated in argument, because in the sharashka he represented the ideology of progress. So he was forced to sit there with Sologdin, as though tied hand and foot, trying to ram into him rudimentary ideas that ought to be within the grasp of children in nursery school.

  Sologdin was now quietly and gently laying down the law.

  “I can tell you from my experience in the camps that a proper debate must be conducted like a duel. We agree on an umpire; we can call on Gleb, for instance. We take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle. Across the top of the page, we write the subject of the discussion. Then each of us, on his own half, expresses as clearly and succinctly as possible his views on the question. To prevent thoughtless slips in the choice of words, there is no time limit.”

  “You must take me for a fool,” Rubin said sleepily, his puckered eyelids half closed. His bearded face looked infinitely weary. “Are we supposed to go on arguing all night?”