In the First Circle

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  With his head in his hands, Nerzhin puzzled over his enigmatic friend. He could neither look up to this peasant, this victim of events, nor look down on him. He could only sit shoulder to shoulder with him, and eye to eye. Their conversations seemed to be compelling Nerzhin, more and more insistently, to ask one question. The whole pattern of Spiridon’s life demanded an answer to that question. The time to ask it seemed to have come.

  Was the complexity of Spiridon’s life, his repeated abandonment of one warring side for the other, simply a matter of self-preservation? Or was it somehow an illustration of Tolstoy’s belief that in this world no one is ever right and no one is ever to blame? That the Gordian knots of history cannot be cut with a presumptuous sword? Perhaps the more or less instinctive actions of this redheaded peasant exemplified the universal philosophical system known as skepticism?

  The social experiment that Nerzhin had mounted seemed to be yielding, that very day, there under the staircase, surprising and brilliant results.

  “I’m worried to death, Gleb,” Spiridon was saying, rubbing his unshaved cheek hard with a gnarled and work-worn hand as though he were trying to skin it. “It’s four months since I had a letter from home.”

  “I thought you said the Snake had a letter for you?”

  Spiridon looked at him reproachfully. (His eyes might be dim, but they were fixed in a meaningless stare like those of a man born blind.)

  “What good is a letter four months late?”

  “If you get it tomorrow, bring it along, and I’ll read it to you.”

  “There’s no hurry now.”

  “Maybe a letter got lost in the mail? Maybe the godfathers have kept you waiting deliberately? Don’t worry yourself for nothing, Danilych!”

  “What do you mean, for nothing? My heart’s aching for Vera. The poor girl’s only twenty-one, and she’s there without her father and brother, and her mother’s nowhere near.”

  Nerzhin had seen a photograph of this Vera, taken the previous spring. A big, buxom girl with large, trusting eyes. Her father had brought her safely through a world war. When she was fifteen, thugs had tried to rape her in the forests around Minsk, and he had saved her with a hand grenade. But what could he do now, from prison?

  Nerzhin imagined the dense Perm forest, the power saw chattering away like a machine gun, the hideous roar of tractors hauling logs, the trucks with their rear wheels bogged down and their radiators raised to heaven as if in prayer, the grimy, foul-tempered tractor drivers who had forgotten the difference between obscene words and others—and among them a girl in overall jacket and trousers provocatively emphasizing her womanly shape. She would be sleeping around the campfire with them. Nobody would pass by without pawing her. No wonder Spiridon’s heart ached for her.

  Words of comfort would be worse than useless. Try to take his mind off it, and seek in him a counterbalance to your intellectual friends! Perhaps, Gleb thought, this is when I will learn the fundamentals of homespun peasant skepticism, so that I can base myself on it in the future.

  He laid his hand on Spiridon’s shoulder, still leaning back against the sloping underside of the stairs, and began hesitantly framing his question: “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time, Spiridon Danilych. Don’t misunderstand me. . . . I’ve heard so much about your ups and downs. . . . You’ve had a hell of a life . . . like many others, I suppose . . . very many . . . you’ve been shoved around from pillar to post always looking for something that may not exist . . . but there must have been some point in it. What I mean is . . . I would like to hear what you think . . . when we try to understand life, what”—he nearly said “criterion”—“what yardstick should we use? For example, are there really people on this earth who deliberately set out to do evil things? Who say to themselves, I want to hurt people, to inflict all the pain I can, to make their lives impossible? I don’t really think so, do you? That saying of yours about sowing rye and goosegrass coming up. . . . At least it was rye they sowed, or so they thought. It may be that all human beings want to do good or think they’re acting for the best, but nobody is infallible, we all make mistakes, and some people are quite brazen about it, which is why they do each other so much harm. They can convince themselves that they’re doing good, but the results are bad.”

  Perhaps he hadn’t expressed himself very clearly. Spiridon was looking askance, frowning as though he suspected a trap.

  “Suppose you make a glaring mistake, and I want to correct you. I speak to you about it, but you ignore me, gag me, try to shove me in jail. What am I to do? Hit you over the head with a stick? It’s all very well if I am right, but suppose I just imagine I am, suppose it’s just a stubborn idea I’ve gotten into my head. What if I push you off your perch and take your place, and then if things don’t go the way I want, it’s my turn to pile up corpses? What I mean is, if you can’t be sure that you’re always right, should you or shouldn’t you intervene at all? When we’re at war, we always think we’re in the right, and the other side thinks they are. Can anybody on this earth possibly make out who’s right and who’s wrong? Who can tell us that?”

  Spiridon’s frown had disappeared, and he answered as readily as if he’d been asked which guard would be on duty next morning. “I can tell you: Killing wolves is right; eating people is wrong.”

  “What? What’s that you say?”

  The simplicity and certainty of Spiridon’s answer took Nerzhin’s breath away.

  “Just that,” Spiridon said. “The wolf killer is in the right; the man-eater is not.”

  Gleb’s face felt warm breath from under that mustache as Spiridon leaned close to whisper: “Gleb, if somebody told me right now there’s a plane on the way with an atom bomb on board—d’you want it to bury you like a dog here under the stairs, wipe out your family and a million other people, only old Daddy Whiskers and their whole setup will be pulled up by the roots so that our people won’t have to suffer anymore in prison camps and collective farms and logging teams”—Spiridon braced himself, pressing his tensed shoulders against the stairs as though they threatened to collapse on him, with the roof itself and all Moscow to follow—“believe me, Gleb, I’d say, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I’ve run out of patience,’ and I’d say”—he looked up at the imaginary bomber—“I’d say, ‘Come on, then! Get on with it! Drop the thing!’ ”

  Spiridon’s face was contorted with fatigue and suffering. A single tear ran over the reddened rim of each unseeing eye.

  Chapter 69

  Behind a Closed Visor

  THE OFFICER WHO CAME ON DUTY LATE that Sunday evening was a trim young lieutenant with two token squares of mustache under his nostrils. After lights out, he paraded in person along the upper and lower hallways of the special prison, chasing the prisoners, always reluctant to turn in on Sundays, to bed. He would have made a second sally if he could have torn himself away from the buxom little nurse in the sickbay. She had a husband in Moscow, but he could not reach her in the restricted area during the twenty-four hours she would be on duty. The lieutenant had high hopes that this was his night to get somewhere with her, though so far she had eluded his grasp, laughingly telling him over and over again to “stop playing the fool.”

  So instead of chasing the prisoners a second time, he sent his aide, the sergeant major. Knowing that the lieutenant would not check up on him, indeed would not set foot outside the sickbay before morning, the sergeant major made no great effort to put them all to bed. For one thing, after many years of service he had finally tired of being a police dog, and for another, he knew that grown men who had to go to work the next day would not forget that they needed sleep.

  Extinguishing the lights in the hallways and on the stairs of the special prison was not allowed because it might help escapers or rioters.

  So Rubin and Sologdin had twice avoided dismissal and still stood hugging the wall in the main hallway. It was after midnight, but they had no thought of sleep.

  It was one of those fur
ious, unresolvable arguments with which Russians, unless they come to blows instead, like to conclude a convivial evening.

  But it was also the sort of ferocious argument that can take place only in jail; outside, a single view, that of the regime, reigns unchallenged.

  The duel on paper had proved a failure. In the past hour or so, Rubin and Sologdin had taken the other two laws of the hapless dialectic apart, but the arguments they bounced off each other, finding no snag, no salutary ledge to slow their descent, rolled rapidly into the mouth of the volcano.

  “If there are no contradictions, then there is no unity either?”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean, So? You’re afraid of your own shadow! Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “Right, of course.”

  Sologdin beamed. Fired by this glimpse of a weak spot in Rubin’s defenses, he crouched, sharp-featured, ready to pounce.

  “Well, then, whatever is free of contradictions doesn’t exist? So why did you promise a classless society?”

  “ ‘Class’ is a foreign word.”

  “Don’t try to wriggle out of it. You know that a society free of contradictions is an impossibility, yet you shamelessly promised it. You. . . .”

  In 1917 they had both been five-year-olds, but each of them, in his argument with the other, was ready to answer for the whole history of mankind.

  “You crucified yourselves to do away with oppression, but you inflicted worse, far worse, oppressors on us. Was it worth killing so many millions of people for that?”

  “You’re too jaundiced to see clearly,” Rubin shouted, forgetting the need to lower his voice for fear of compromising the opponent who was so eager to throttle him. (His own arguments, however loud, could not damage him, since he was on the side of the regime.)

  “When you enter the classless society, your hatred will still prevent you from recognizing it.”

  “But right now—is it classless now? Give me a straight answer just this once! Just for once, don’t dodge the question. Is there or is there not a new class, a ruling class?”

  How difficult Rubin found it to answer that very question! He could see for himself that there was such a class. And that if it entrenched itself, it would deprive the Revolution of all sense and meaning.

  But no shadow of weakness, no hint of uncertainty, troubled the lofty brow of this true believer.

  “Do you mean it’s detached from the rest of society?” he asked loudly. “Can you really distinguish precisely between the rulers and the ruled?”

  Sologdin’s voice rang out boldly in reply: “I can indeed! Foma, Anton, and Shishkin-Myshkin are the rulers, and we—”

  “No, but are there really any fixed lines of demarcation? Class divisions resulting from inheritance of property? No, everything has to be earned by service. Prince today, in the gutter tomorrow. Isn’t that the way of it?”

  “If it is, so much the worse! If every member of society can be brought down, there’s only one way he can make sure of survival—by doing whatever he’s ordered to do. A gentleman in the old days could be as impertinent as he liked; the powers that be couldn’t take his noble birth away from him.”

  “You and your precious little gentlemen! People like Siromakha!” (Siromakha was the sharashka’s number-one stool pigeon.)

  “Or take the merchant class. The market forced them to use their heads and react to changed circumstances quickly. Not like those friends of yours! Just think what a hopeless bunch they are—no concept of honor, no breeding, no education, no imagination, they hate freedom. The only way they can hang on to their positions is by debasing themselves.”

  “It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that this is a transitional bureaucratic group, and that as the state withers away—”

  “Wither away?” Sologdin yelled. “Those people? Voluntarily? They won’t go away till they’re slung out by the scruffs of their necks! Your state wasn’t created because of the ‘moneybags’—meaning ‘capitalist’—encirclement. It was created to cement by cruelty an unnatural way of life! If you people were alone on this earth, you’d go on forever making your state stronger and stronger!”

  With so many years of repression and forced silence behind him, it was an immense relief to fling his views in the face of a companion who would listen and who was at the same time a confirmed Bolshevik and so of course responsible for all that had happened.

  For his part, Rubin had outraged all those he had encountered from his first days in the counterespionage unit’s cell at the front and through a long succession of cells elsewhere by proudly proclaiming that he was a Marxist and had no intention of renouncing his views, even in prison. He had grown used to being a sheepdog in a pack of wolves, defending himself single-handedly against forty or fifty at a time. His lips were raw and cracked from futile arguments, but it was his duty, his absolute duty, to explain to the blind their blindness, to wrestle with enemies among his cellmates in order to save them, since most of them were not really enemies but ordinary Soviet people, victims of Progress and the imperfections of the penal system. Personal grievances had clouded their consciousness, but if war with America should break out tomorrow, and these people were given weapons, they would almost to a man forget how their lives had been shattered, forgive their tormentors, think no more of the grief their sundered families had suffered, and rush to sacrifice themselves in defense of socialism, as Rubin himself would.

  At the critical moment, Sologdin would obviously do the same; it could not be otherwise! Only dogs and traitors would behave differently!

  Their argument bounded over sharp, lacerating stones until it reached this very point.

  “Where, I ask you, is the difference? According to you, a former zek who’s done ten years for squat and turns his weapons against his jailers is a traitor to his country! Whereas the German whom you have processed and sent back to his own lines to break his oath of loyalty and betray his fatherland you call a ‘progressive’!”

  “How can you compare the two?” Rubin sounded astonished. “Objectively, my German is for socialism, and your zek is against it. Can you really say there’s any comparison?”

  If the hot fury expressed in them could melt the substance eyes are made of, Sologdin’s eyes would have gushed out in blue streams.

  “It’s no good talking to you! For thirty years you’ve lived by this device”—in the heat of the moment, he let slip the foreign word, but it was a good one, from the age of chivalry—“ ‘the end justifies the means.’ But if you were asked point-blank whether that’s what you believe, I’m sure you’d deny it! Oh yes you would!”

  “What makes you think so?” Rubin asked, cool and conciliatory. “In my personal affairs I don’t acknowledge it, but if we’re talking about society as a whole, that’s another matter. For the first time in human history, our aim is so lofty that we can say just that: The end justifies the means employed for its attainment.”

  “So you’re prepared to go that far!” Sologdin’s rapier sang as he lunged at a vulnerable spot. “Just remember this, then—that the loftier your aim, the nobler must be your means. Treacherous means destroy the end itself!”

  “What do you call treacherous means? Are you perhaps denying the legitimacy of Revolutionary means?”

  “When did you ever have a Revolution? Mayhem isn’t Revolution; axes dripping blood aren’t Revolution! Who could even begin counting those massacred or executed? The world would be horror-struck!

  Like an express train rushing through the night, stopping nowhere, past rural stops, past wayside signal lights, across empty steppes, and through brightly lit towns, their argument sped over light and dark places in their memories, and everything that briefly loomed threw an uncertain light on, elicited a muffled echo from, their uncontrollably swaying, coupled thoughts.

  “To pass judgment on a country, you must first know at least a little about it,” Rubin said angrily. “You’ve been moldering in camps for twelve years. And how much did y
ou see before that? The Patriarch’s Ponds? Did you go on Sunday outings to Kolomenskoye?”

  “What gives you the right to judge?” Sologdin kept his voice down to a muffled cry, as though he were being strangled. “Shame on you! You should be ashamed! Remember all those who went through Butyrki Prison when you were there—Gromov, Ivantyev, Yashin, Blokhin—they told you the sober truth, told you their life stories; don’t tell me you weren’t listening. And what about this place? What about Vartapyetov? Or that other man, what’s his name, now. . . ?”

  “Who? Who? Why should I listen to them? Blind men, all of them! All they do is howl like beasts with their paws caught in a trap. As they see it, their own failure in life means that socialism is a flop. Their observatory is the slop bucket; the aromas of the slop bucket are the breath of life to them.”

  “Is there anybody, then, anybody at all you’re capable of listening to? If so, who?”

  “The young! The young are on our side! And they are the future!”

  “The young? You’re imagining things! They couldn’t care less about your shining lights!” (meaning “ideals”).

  “What gives you the right to speak for the young? I fought in the front line with them, went on reconnaissance with them, and all you know is what you’ve heard from some wretched émigré in a transit prison. How can you say the young have no ideology when there are ten million Komsomols in the country?”

  “Komsomols! Kom-somols! Are you a halfwit or something? What you call the League of Communist Youth is just a device for the conversion of wrapping paper into membership books.”

  “Watch your mouth! I was a member myself. The Komsomol was our banner! Our conscience! Our selfless, romantic dream! The Komsomol movement was all that to us!”

  “Gone, and best forgotten!”