Cancer Ward (16 page)

They did the third operation on him, a deeper and more painful one, but afterwards, when they were bandaging him up, the doctors didn't look any more cheerful. They babbled to each other, not in Russian, either, and bandages got thicker and higher, knitting his head tightly to his torso. The shooting pains in his head got stronger and stronger, more and more frequent, almost nonstop.

So why pretend? With cancer he had to take what came after, too. He'd spent two years turning his back on it, shutting his eyes to it: it was time for Yefrem to drop dead. When he said it like that, maliciously, it didn't sound so bad. It wasn't dying, it was dropping dead.

It was easy enough to say, but his mind and his heart couldn't take it in. How could it happen to him, to Yefrem? What would happen and what should be done?

Up to now he had hidden behind work and among other people, but now it was right there, and he had to face it alone. It was strangling him with this bandage round his neck.

There was nothing his neighbors could tell him that would help, in the wards or the corridors, on the lower floor or the upper. It had all been said many times, and it was all wrong.

Then he started stomping up and down between the door and the window and back again, five hours a day, sometimes six. He was running for help.

All Yefrem's life, wherever he'd been (he'd been everywhere except the big cities, he'd combed all the provinces), he and everyone else had always known what was asked of a man. He had to have a good trade or a good grip on life. Both would get you money. When people meet up, “What d'you do?” and “How much d'you earn?” come straight after “What's your name?” If the earnings aren't up to scratch—well, he's either a fool or he's unlucky, and on the whole he's not much of a man.

It was this sort of life, which he understood so well, that Podduyev had seen in Vorkuta, on the Yenisei, in the Far East and in Central Asia. People earned big money, and then spent it on Saturdays or else blew the lot on holiday.

This was all right, it suited them fine, until they got cancer or something fatal like that. But when they did, none of it was worth a kopeck—their trade, their grip on life, their job, their pay. They all turned out so helpless, wanting to kid themselves to the end that they hadn't got cancer, that they showed up like a lot of poor saps who missed out on life.

But what was it they missed?

When he was young Yefrem had heard, and knew it was right about himself and his friends, that they, the young people, were growing up smarter than the old folk, who never even made it to town, they were scared, while Yefrem rode horses and fired pistols at thirteen, and by the time he was fifty had pawed the whole country about like a woman. But now, as he paced up and down the ward, he remembered how the old folk used to die back home on the Kama—Russians, Tartars, Votyaks or whatever they were. They didn't puff themselves up or fight against it or brag that they weren't going to die—they took death calmly. They didn't stall squaring things away, they prepared themselves quietly and in good time, deciding who should have the mare, who the foal, who the coat and who the boots. And they departed easily, as if they were just moving into a new house. None of them would be scared by cancer. Anyway, none of them got it.

But here in the clinic, sucking an oxygen balloon, eyes hardly able to roll, the tongue keeps on arguing, “I'm not going to die! I haven't got cancer!”

Just like chickens. A knife was ready and waiting for them, but they all carried on cackling and scratching for food. One was taken away to have its head chopped off, but the rest just carried on scratching.

So day after day, Podduyev marched up and down the old floor, rattling the floorboards, without getting it any clearer in his mind how to meet death. He couldn't work it out, and there was no one to tell him. He would never have believed he'd find the answer in a book.

A long time ago he'd done four years in school, and he'd taken a construction course, but he'd never had an urge to read. He didn't read the papers, he listened to the radio, and he couldn't see the use of books in his everyday life. Anyway, in the wild, remote parts of the country where he'd knocked about all his life because they paid a lot, bookworms were thin on the ground. Podduyev read only when he had to—booklets on production experience, descriptions of hoisting mechanisms, operating instructions, administrative orders and the
Short History
*
as far as chapter four. He thought spending money on
books
or dragging himself off to a library for them was simply ridiculous. If he was going on a long journey or waiting somewhere and a book came his way, he might read twenty or thirty pages, but he'd always drop it: he never found anything for a man with an intelligent turn of mind.

Here in the hospital there were books on the bedside tables and on the window sills: he never touched them. And he would never have started reading this blue one with the gold signature if Kostoglotov had not palmed it off on him one empty, wretched evening. Yefrem had put two pillows under his back and begun to flip through it. He wouldn't have started reading even then if it had been a novel; but it was a collection of very short stories, you could see what they were getting at in five or six pages, sometimes in just one. Their titles were piled like gravel on the contents page. Yefrem began to read the titles; he had the feeling right away that the book meant business: “Work, Illness and Death,” “The Chief Law,” “The Source,” “Neglect a Fire and It Will Overmaster Thee,” “Three Old Men,” “Go into the Light While Light There Is.”

Yefrem opened it at the shortest one. He read it. He felt like thinking. He thought. He felt like reading the little story again. He did. He felt like thinking again. He thought again.

It was the same with the second story.

Just then they put out the lights. Yefrem shoved the book under his mattress so it wouldn't be pinched and he wouldn't have to go looking for it the next morning. In the darkness he told Ahmadjan the old fable about how Allah had shared out the years of life and how man was given many unnecessary years, (He didn't believe a word of it, of course; he couldn't imagine any years being unnecessary, so long as he was healthy.) Before he went to sleep he thought again about what he had read.

Except that the shooting pains kept going through his head, getting in the way of his thoughts.

Friday morning was dull and, like every other morning in hospital, heavy. Each morning in the ward began with a few of Yefrem's gloomy speeches. If anyone spoke up with a hope or a wish, Yefrem poured cold water on it straightaway and crushed the man. But this morning he wouldn't even open his mouth; instead he settled down to read his calm, quiet book. There wasn't much point in washing, because even his jowls were bandaged. He could eat his breakfast in bed, and there would be no rounds for the surgical patients today. Yefrem slowly turned the rough thickish pages of the book, kept quiet and did his bit of reading and thinking.

The radiotherapy patients' rounds were over. That fellow in the gold-rimmed glasses had barked at the doctor, then got cold feet and had an injection. Kostoglotov pushed for his rights, kept leaving the room and coming back. Azovkin was discharged, said goodbye and left, doubled up and clutching his stomach. Other patients were called—for X rays and blood transfusions. And still Podduyev didn't creep out to stomp up and down the aisle between the beds; he just read to himself and kept silent. The book was talking to him. It was unlike any he had ever read. It really held him.

He had lived his whole life without such a serious book ever coming his way.

Still, it was unlikely he'd ever have started reading if he hadn't been in a hospital bed with this neck shooting pain through his head. These little stories would hardly have got through to a healthy man.

Yefrem had already noticed the title yesterday:
What Men Live By.
The title was so put together that Yefrem felt as though he had made it up himself. Stomping about the hospital floors, thinking his nameless thoughts, he had been thinking that very question during the past few weeks: “What do men live by?”

The story was not very short, but it read easily from the start, speaking softly and simply to the heart:

“A cobbler, with his wife and children, once lodged at a peasant's. He had neither house nor land of his own, and he supported himself and his family by his cobbling. Bread was dear and work was cheap, and what he made by his work went in food. The cobbler and his wife had one fur coat between them, and that was falling into rags.”

All this was quite clear, and what followed was clear too: Semyon was gaunt, Mikhailo the apprentice was thin and haggard, but the squire—

“was like a man from another world, with a great red snout, a neck like a bull's, his whole frame was as if of cast iron … He could not help getting hard and smooth with the life he led. Even death had no hold upon a clod like that.”

Yefrem had seen a lot of people like that. Karashchuk, the boss at the coal complex—he was one, and Antonov was another, and Chechev, and Kukhtikov. And hadn't Yefrem himself started pulling up on them?

Slowly, almost syllable by syllable, Yefrem read the whole story through to the end.

It was then almost time for lunch.

Yefrem just did not feel like walking about or talking. It was as if something had been stuck into him and twisted inside. Where his eyes had once been, there were now no eyes, and where his mouth had been, there was now no mouth.

The hospital had already planed Yefrem down roughly, it was easy to smooth him off now.

Sitting in the same position, supported by pillows, his knees pulled up to his body, the closed book on his knees, he stared at the blank white wall. Outside the day was cheerless.

In the bed opposite that whey-faced holidaymaker was sleeping off his jab. They'd piled blankets on top of him because of his fever.

On the next bed Ahmadjan was playing checkers with Sibgatov. Their languages weren't much alike, and they were talking to each other in Russian. Sibgatov sat carefully so as not to have to bend or twist his bad back. He was still a young man, but his hair was very thin on top.

As for Yefrem, he hadn't lost a single tiny hair. He had a great, wild, fox-colored thatch, so thick you couldn't pull a comb through it. He had almost his full force for women still. Not that that was any good to him now.

No man could tell how many women Yefrem had gone through. In the beginning he had kept a count of them with a separate one for his wives, but later on he hadn't bothered. His first wife was Amina—a white-faced Tartar girl from Yelabuga. She was a very sensitive girl. The skin on her face was so fine you only had to touch it with your knuckles and you'd draw blood. She was unruly too: she left him, taking their little girl. After that Yefrem made up his mind he wasn't going to be disgraced like that again: he always left his women first. His life was footloose and free. He'd take a job in one place, then sign a contract for somewhere else, and if he had to drag a family along too, it would only get in the way. In every new place he found himself a woman to keep house. As for the others he met by the way, willing or unwilling, he didn't even always ask their names, just paid the agreed price. By now faces, habits and the way it happened were all mixed up in his memory, and he could only remember the unusual ones. That was why he remembered Yevdoshka, the engineer's wife, how she had stood under his carriage window on the platform at Alma-Ata One, wiggling her bottom and asking for it. It was during the war and the whole of his gang was going to Ili to open up a new construction site; there was a crowd from work seeing them off. Yevdoshka's husband, a shabby little man, was standing nearby, arguing with somebody over nothing. The engine gave a warning jolt. “Hey, you!” Yefrem shouted, and held out his arms. “If you love me, jump in, let's go!” She grabbed hold of his arms and scrambled through the carriage window in full view of her husband and the whole crowd, and went and lived with him for a couple of weeks. This was what stuck in his memory, how he'd dragged Yevdoshka into the carriage.

One thing about women Yefrem had found out in his life: they cling. It was easy enough to get a woman, but difficult to see the back of her. Nowadays the word “equality” was being bandied about a lot, and Yefrem never said anything against it; still, deep down he never thought of women as fully fledged people—except for his first wife Amina, that is. And he'd been amazed if some other fellow had seriously tried to tell him he treated women badly.

But according to this curious book it turned out that Yefrem was the one to blame for everything.

They put the lights on earlier than usual.

The scrubbed little man with the lump under his jaw woke up, poked his small, bald head out from under the blankets and quickly fitted on the glasses that made him look like a professor. He told everyone the good news right away: the injection had not been too bad, he'd thought it was going to be worse. Then he dived into his bedside table, to get out his bits of chicken.

Milksops like him, Yefrem had noticed, always ask for chicken. Even lamb they call “strong meat.”

Yefrem would rather have watched somebody else. To do that he'd have to turn his whole body round, but if he looked straight ahead, all he could see was this shithead wolfing a chicken bone.

Podduyev let out a grunt and gingerly turned himself to the right. “Listen, here's a story,” he announced in a loud voice. “It's called ‘What Men Live By.'” He grinned. “Who can know a thing like that? What do men live by?”

Sibgatov and Ahmadjan raised their heads from their checkers. Ahmadjan replied confidently and happily, because he was getting better, “Their rations. Uniform and supplies.”

Before joining the army he had always lived in the
aul
and spoken only Uzbek. All his Russian words and ideas, his discipline and familiarity with friends, came from his days in the army.