Cancer Ward (82 page)

The attendant was still not letting through the maniac, who was pushing him in the chest and using foul language, quite naturally, as though they were the most ordinary words in the world. The people in the line were murmuring sympathetically, “Let him through! He's a sick man!”

Oleg lurched forward. In a few enormous strides he was beside the maniac. Then he yelled right in his ear, without sparing his eardrums, “Hey! You! I'm from ‘out there' too!”

The maniac jumped back, rubbing his ear. “Where's that?” he said.

Oleg knew he was too weak to fight, he was at his last gasp. But at least he had both hands free; the maniac had a basket in one. Towering over the maniac, he measured out his words quite softly: “The place where ninety-nine weep but one laughs.”

The people in the line could not understand how the maniac was so suddenly cured. They saw him cool down, wink, and say to the tall chap in the overcoat, “I'm not saying anything. I don't mind. All right, get in first if you like.”

But Oleg stayed there beside the maniac and the car attendant. If the worst came to the worst he could get on from here, but the ones who had been pushing were beginning to go back to their places in the line.

“That's all right by me,” the maniac said with reproachful sarcasm. “I don't mind waiting.”

On they came, carrying their baskets and their buckets. Under a sacking cover one caught the occasional glimpse of a long lilac-pink radish. Two out of three presented tickets to Karaganda. So these were the people Oleg had arranged the line for! The ordinary passengers were getting in too, including a respectable-looking woman in a blue jacket. Oleg got in and the maniac climbed confidently in behind him.

Oleg walked quickly along the car. He spotted a luggage rack—not one of the uncomfortable ones along the windows—which was still almost empty.

“Right,” he announced. “We'll have to shift that basket.”

“Where to? What's going on?” a man asked in alarm. He was lame but a sturdy fellow.

“Here's what's going on,” Oleg replied. He was already up in the rack. “There's nowhere for people to lie down.”

At once he made himself at home on the rack. He put his duffel bag under his head as a pillow, but only after removing the iron. He took off his overcoat and spread it out. He threw off his army jacket too. A man could do what he liked up here. Then he lay down to cool off. His feet and large-sized boots hung down over the corridor. They jutted out almost to calf length, but they were high enough not to get in anyone's way.

People were sorting themselves out down below as well, cooling off and getting to know each other.

The lame man seemed a sociable type. He told them he'd once been a vet's assistant. “Why did you give it up?” they asked him in surprise.

“What do you mean? Why should I get run in for every little sheep that dies? I'm better off on an invalid's pension carrying vegetables,” he explained in a loud voice.

“Yes, what's wrong with that?” said the woman in the blue jacket.

“It was in Beria's day they rounded people up for fruit and vegetables. They only do it for household goods now.”

The sun's last rays would be shining on them if they hadn't been hidden by the station.

It was still quite light down below, but up where Oleg was it was twilight. The “soft”- and “hard”-class sleeper passengers were strolling along the platform, but in here they were sitting wherever they had managed to grab seats, arranging their things. Oleg stretched out full length. That was good! It was terrible traveling forty-eight hours with your legs tucked under you in those converted freight cars. Nineteen men in a car like this would be terrible. Twenty-three would be even worse.

The others hadn't survived. But he had. He hadn't even died of cancer. And now his exile was cracking ilke an eggshell.

He remembered the
komendant
advising him to get married. They'd all be giving him advice like that soon.

It was good to lie down. Good.

The train shuddered and moved forward. It was only then that in his heart, or his soul, somewhere in his chest, in the deepest seat of his emotion, he was seized with anguish. He twisted his body and lay face down on his greatcoat, shut his eyes and thrust his face into the duffel bag, spiky with leaves.

The train went on and Kostoglotov's boots dangled toes down over the corridor like a dead man's.

An evil man threw tobacco in the Macaque Rhesus's eyes.

Just like that …

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 1968 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Translation copyright © 1968, 1969 by The Bodley Head Ltd.

All rights reserved

Original Russian edition of Part I first published by The Bodley Head in May 1968, and of Part II in September 1968, under the titles Pa
к
o
в
ъ
i
й
К
op
п
yc,
ч
act
ъ
I, and Pa
к
o
в
ъ
i
й
К
op
п
yc,
ч
act
ъ
II

Published in 1969 in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 1974

This edition, 1991

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918–

Cancer ward [by] Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg.

p. cm.

Translation of Rakovy
Ä­
korpus.

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-11848-8

ISBN-10: 0-374-11848-5

1. Cancer—Patients—Fiction. 2. Soviet Union—Fiction. I. Title.

 

PZ4.S69 Can3 PG3488.O4

891.7'3'44

68008813

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-51199-9

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-51199-3

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466839601

First eBook edition: February 2013

*
 This is a mark of disrespect in Russian. An older man would normally be addressed by his first name and his patronymic, as in Pavel Nikolayevich, meaning Pavel, son of Nikolai. (Translators' note)

*
 
Kosloglot
in Russian means “bone-swallower.”

*
 
Aksakal
in Uzbek means “village elder,” here used mockingly.

*
 A twenty-five rouble note. Ahmadjan, an Uzbek, is making a joke to prove how well he speaks Russian.

*
 In Central Asia there is a shortage of cotton pickers. Every fall students are sent to help, so the school year starts later than in Leningrad, where Kostoglotov had studied, thus making the holidays later too.

*
 An assistant doctor, not fully qualified, who provides medical treatment in Russian rural areas.

*
 A village in the Turkic-speaking part of Russia.

**
 Greeks, Kurds and Germans were among those deported to the Kazakh steppe during and immediately after the war.

*
 
Novy mir,
the famous “liberal” monthly, in which the author's works are normally published. He deliberately does not name it although its identity would be quite clear to any educated Russian.

*
 This was the standard phrase applied to the accused in the 1953 Doctors' Plot, Stalin's last great purge.

*
 Ahmadjan is an Uzbek, Egenberdiev a Kazakh. They speak different Turkic dialects.

*
 A further allusion to the Doctors' Plot.

**
 The Ministry of State Security, the organization now known as the K.G.B., the Committee for State Security.

*
 A police office supervising the life of exiles.

*
 Stalin's history of the Soviet Communist Party, which used to be compulsory reading for every Soviet citizen as far as chapter four, the one on Marxist philosophy. Further chapters were for more advanced students.

*
 Rusanov thinks he means Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1883–1945).

**
 Allusions to Lenin's opinion of Tolstoy and to his vegetarianism.

*
 A machine and tractor station that provides collective farms with agricultural machinery.

*
 As it happens, these Latin words are easily understood by an English speaker, but they would not be by a Russian. The Russian words are quite different.

*
 Most Soviet institutions possess a “red corner”—a room with magazines and communist literature.

*
 In September 1954 coeducation was reintroduced in Russia.

*
 Korchagin is a character from Nikolai Ostrovski's
How the Steel Was Tempered.
Matrosov was a hero of World War II who threw himself on a German machine gun, covering it with his body.

*
 
Zvezda
(
Star
) is a well-known literary monthly which attracted official criticism after the war because of its “liberalism.”

*
 Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Holy Synod, the ruling body of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Tsars.

**
 Nikolai Ostrovsky, a Soviet writer whose most important character attempted to be of use to the Party even from his deathbed.

*
 They all belonged to deported nationalities and were exiles like Kostoglotov.

*
 A Turkic people who live in Central Asia.

*
 The anniversary of the 1917 Revolution.

*
 A number of small nationalities—Volga Germans, Chechens, Kalmucks and others—were deported to Central Asia
en masse
during and after the war, suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. These were called “exiled settlers.” “Administrative exiles,” like Kostoglotov, were usually political prisoners who had served their term in a labor camp but still had to live in a remote region of the country.

*
 The reference is to Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code, as it stood until 1959. Paragraph ten dealt with individual “anti-Soviet agitation,” paragraph eleven with “group” agitation.

*
 These lines and the ones below are from Sergei Yesenin, perhaps the most popular Russian poet of our century.

*
 “Grafter” and “hood” are approximate underworld equivalents of the Russian words
blatar
and
urka,
here applied to those prisoners who were professional criminals and formed an underground organization in the labor camps, terrorizing and stealing from the other prisoners.

*
 A euphemism for the K.G.B.

*
 I.e., not a
communal
flat.

*
 This is the internal identity document without which a Soviet citizen cannot move freely about the country or change his job. City-dwellers possess this passport but collective farmers usually do not, which in practice means they cannot leave their village except for short periods of time.

**
 These were the first name and patronymic of Beria, Stalin's ruthless security chief, who had recently (July 1953) been branded a “British spy” and liquidated.

*
 The main political article of the Penal Code in force at the time.

*
 This is a take-off on pseudo-Marxist Stalinist jargon.

*
 The non-Bolshevik majority of the Constituent Assembly, the Russian parliament, organized short-lived resistance to the Bolsheviks during the Civil War.

*
 A
pood
is an old-fashioned Russian measure of weight, equal to 36 lbs.

*
 An Italianized Uzbek opera composed during the Stalinist years.

*
 On November 7, the anniversary of the 1917 Revolution.

*
 The first words of a stanza from one of Alexander Pushkin's poems, which goes on: “… unrepining/May young life play, and where I lie may heedless Nature still be shining/With beauty that shall never die.”

*
 Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), the greatest writer of Russian romanticism, who was killed in a duel.

*
 A small tribe living on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

*
 Article 39 restricted work and residence rights of former camp inmates.

*
 Western films captured by the Red Army in Germany in 1945 and shown throughout Russia for many years after the war.

*
 Coniferous forest between the barren Arctic shores and the steppe.

*
 A pre-revolutionary Russian writer, popular among members of the intelligentsia eager “to serve the people.”

**
 A character from Tolstoy's
War and Peace.

*
 The Soviet label now given to the negative, criminal aspects of Stalinism. However, Stalin was also called “the great successor” to indicate his positive role as the successor of Lenin.

*
 The discussion which follows hinges on Vladimir Pomerantsev's article in the December 1953 edition of
Novy Mir.
Attacked at the time by the Communist Party press, it turned out to be the first indication of the coming “thaw.”

*
 The office which supervises the lives of exiles.

*
 An allusion to the mocking retort—well known in Russia—security police officers make to prisoners who try to call them comrade: “The wolf in the
taiga
is your comrade.”

*
 A desert tree that provides excellent fuel.

*
 A birch-tree fungus, believed by many to be a cure for cancer.

*
 
Ogonyok
is a Soviet illustrated weekly magazine;
Krokodil
is the leading Soviet satirical and cartoon journal.