Cancer Ward (26 page)

“Thank you,” said Zoya, “thank you very much, Oleg Filimonovich.”

“Oh no! Please! Call me what you did before. Call me Oleg!”

“Now you must have a rest after lunch…”

“I never have rests.”

“You
are
ill, you know.”

“It's a funny thing, Zoya. As soon as you climb those stairs and come on duty, I'm back in the best of health.”

“All right then.” Zoya gave in easily (she would rather be with him really). “This time I'll receive you in the drawing room.”

She nodded her head toward the doctors' conference room.

After lunch she had to take round the medicines again, and then there were some urgent matters to be seen to in the large women's ward. Zoya was aware of how clean and healthy she was, down to the last pore of skin and the tiniest toenail—in contrast to the decline and disease that surrounded her. She sensed with joy her twin, tightly supported breasts, their weight as she leaned across the patients' beds and their tremor when she walked quickly.

At last the pressure of work eased. Zoya asked an orderly to sit at the table, to admit no visitors to the wards, and to call her if anything happened. She took her embroidery, and Oleg followed her into the doctors' room.

It was a bright corner room with three windows. No one could call the furnishings particularly lavish. The hand of the accountant of the senior doctor could be seen everywhere. There were two upright sofas, not in the collapsible style but strictly in accordance with official taste. They were straight-backed enough to give you a crick in the neck, and the built-in mirrors in the backs were so high that only a giraffe could have seen its face in them. The tables were arranged in the usual depressing institutional way: the huge chairman's writing table, covered with thick plate glass, then, at an angle to it, the long narrow table where people sat during meetings, the two together forming the inevitable letter T. The second table was covered
à la
Samarkand with a cloth of sky-blue plush which brightened the room with a splash of color. There were also some small, comfortable armchairs standing apart from the table in a little random group. These too added a pleasant touch.

There was nothing to remind one that this was a hospital except for a newsletter,
The Oncologist,
pinned to the wall. It was dated November 7.
*

Zoya and Oleg sat down in the soft comfortable armchairs in the brightest part of the room. Some flowerpots with agaves in them were standing on pedestals, while beyond the great glass pane of the main window an oak tree spread its branches and strained upward to the next floor.

Oleg did not merely sit. He savored the comfort of the chair with his whole body, its curves fitting his back, his head and neck reclining at ease.

“What luxury!” he said. “I haven't put my weight on anything like this for, oh, fifteen years.”

(If he likes the chair so much, why doesn't he go out and buy himself one?)

“Now then, what was your bet?” Zoya asked, with the tilt of the head and expression in the eyes that goes with such questions.

They were now alone in the room, sitting in the chairs with one sole aim in view—to talk together. What turn the conversation took would depend on a word, a tone, a look. Was it going to be just chit-chat, or the kind of conversation that delves right to the heart of things? Zoya was quite prepared for the former, but she had come with the feeling it would be the latter.

Oleg did not let her down. He spoke solemnly, without lifting his head from the back of the chair, directing his voice over her head towards the window.

“I have made a bet about whether or not a certain girl with golden bangs is going to join us in the virgin lands.”

Then he looked straight at her—for the first time.

Zoya bore his gaze.

“What will happen to the girl out there?”

Oleg sighed. “I've told you. Nothing particularly cheerful. There's no running water. We heat the iron on charcoal, run the lamps off paraffin. When it's wet, there's nothing but mud. When it's dry there's nothing but dust. There's never any chance to wear nice clothes.”

He omitted no unpleasant detail. It was as though he was trying to make it impossible for her to say yes. After all, what sort of life is it if you can never dress decently? But Zoya knew that, however comfortably you can live in a big town, it isn't the town you live with. She would rather understand the man than visualize his village.

“I don't understand what keeps you there.”

Oleg laughed. “The Ministry of the Interior, what else?”

He was still lying back enjoying himself, his head resting on the back of the chair. Zoya frowned. “I thought so. But you aren't a Chechen, are you, or a Kalmuck?”

“Oh no, I'm a hundred per cent Russian. Aren't I allowed to have dark hair?” He smoothed it down.

Zoya shrugged her shoulders. “Then why did they send you there?”

Oleg sighed. “Really, modern youth is so uninformed. Where I was brought up we knew nothing about the Penal Code, all those paragraphs, clauses and their extended interpretations. But you, living right in the middle of this district, haven't you even grasped the elementary difference between an exiled settler and an administrative exile?”

“What is the difference?”

“I'm an administrative exile. I wasn't exiled because of my nationality,
*
I was exiled
personally,
as me, Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov. Do you see?” He laughed. “It's like an individual being made an honorary citizen, except that I'm not even allowed to live with honorable citizens.”

His dark eyes flashed at her.

But she wasn't frightened. Or, rather, she was a little afraid, but somehow she knew it wouldn't last.

“And … how long were you exiled for?” she asked gently.

“In perpetuity.” The words seemed to ring out. They tolled like a bell in her ears.

“You mean a life sentence?” she asked again, half-whispering.

“No.
In perpetuity,
” Kostoglotov insisted. “Those were the words used on the documents. If it was a life sentence, well, I suppose my coffin could be brought back home to Russia, but since it's perpetual, it means even that won't be allowed back. I won't be allowed back even after the sun goes out. Perpetuity is longer.”

Only now did her heart contract. Now she understood, that scar of his, the cruel look he sometimes had. He might be a murderer, some terrifying monster who would strangle her at the slightest provocation.

But Zoya did not turn her chair to make it easier to run away. She just put her embroidery to one side (she hadn't even started on it) and looked boldly at Kostoglotov, who was sitting calm and relaxed in the armchair as comfortably as before. It was she who was excited as she asked him, “Don't tell me if it's difficult to. But if you can, do. Why were you given such a terrible sentence?”

Kostoglotov seemed not a bit shattered by the recollection of his crime. There was even a carefree smile on his face as he answered her. “Zoyenka, there
was
no sentence. I was exiled perpetually ‘by order.'”

“By … order?”

“Yes, that's what it's called. Something like an invoice. Like when they write a list of goods to be sent from a wholesale to a retail store: so many sacks, so many barrels…”

Zoya put her head in her hands. “Wait a minute … I understand now. But … is it possible? Were you…? Was everyone…?”

“No, one can't say everyone. The people charged under paragraph ten alone weren't exiled; it was only those charged under paragraphs ten and eleven.”
*

“What's paragraph eleven?”

“Paragraph eleven?” Kostoglotov thought for a moment. “Zoyenka, I seem to be telling you a great deal. You must be careful what you do with this stuff or you might get into trouble yourself. My basic sentence was seven years in the labor camp, according to paragraph ten—and, believe me, anyone who got less than eight years had done nothing: the accusations were based on thin air. But then there was paragraph eleven, which applies to ‘group' activity. Paragraph eleven by itself doesn't prolong the term in the camp, but because we were a group we were all
exiled perpetually,
scattered in different places, to stop us meeting together again in the old place. Do you understand now?”

No, she still didn't understand a thing.

“So you were a member of what they call”—she tried to find a milder word for it—“a gang?”

Kostoglotov burst into peals of laughter, stopped and just as suddenly frowned.

“It's wonderful, you're just like my interrogator, you can't be content with the word ‘group.' He liked to call us a ‘gang' too. Yes, we were a gang of students, boys and girls in our first year.” He looked at her threateningly. “I know smoking's forbidden here and regarded as a crime, but I am still going to smoke, all right? We used to meet, flirt with the girls, dance, and the boys used to talk about politics. And sometimes we talked about … about
him!
Well, you know, there were some things we were dissatisfied with. We weren't, so to speak, ecstatic about everything. Two of us had fought in the war, and afterwards we expected things to be different somehow. In May, before the exams, they pulled the lot of us in, including the girls.”

Zoya was panic-stricken. She picked up her embroidery. On the one hand he was saying dangerous things, things it was wrong to repeat or even listen to: her ears ought to be closed to such stuff. On the other hand it was an enormous relief to hear that he'd never lured anyone into dark backstreets and murdered him.

She swallowed. “I don't understand.… What was it you actually
did?
”

“What did we do?” He drew on his cigarette and blew out the smoke. What a big man he was, and how tiny the cigarette looked! “I told you, we were students. If our grants allowed it, we drank wine. We went to parties. And you know, they arrested the girls as well. They all got five years.” He looked at her intently. “Imagine it happening to you, being taken away just before your second semester's exams and put in a dungeon.”

Zoya put down her embroidery.

All the horrors she'd dreaded he was going to divulge had turned out not to be horrors at all. They were almost childish.

“But you boys, why did you have to do it?”

“What do you mean?” Oleg was at a loss.

“Well, why be dissatisfied, why expect anything?”

“Well, really!” Oleg laughed resignedly. “Well, really! I'd never have imagined it possible. Zoyenka, my interrogator said that too. He used exactly those words. Isn't this a lovely little armchair? Sitting up in bed isn't nearly as comfortable as this.”

Once more Oleg arranged himself in the chair for maximum comfort. He puffed at his cigarette, gazing through the single glass pane of the great window with narrowed eyes.

Twilight was approaching, but the day, dull as ever, did not get any darker. If anything it was lightening. The layers of cloud in the west, the direction in which the room faced, were parting and thinning.

Now at last Zoya managed to get down to some serious sewing. She took obvious pleasure in the stitching. They sat in silence. Oleg did not praise her for her work as he had the last time.

“What about … your girl? Was she one of them?” asked Zoya, without raising her head.

“Y … yes,” said Oleg. It took some time to complete the word. He seemed to be thinking about something else.

“Where is she now?”

“Now? She's on the Yenisei River.”

Zoya glanced at him quickly. “Can't you find some way of joining her?”

“I'm not even trying,” he said without interest.

Zoya was watching him as he looked through the window. Why hadn't he married out there, where he lived now?

“Would it really be so difficult? I mean, to join her?” The question had only just occurred to her.

“We were never legally married, so it's practically impossible,” he said, “and anyway, there's no point.”

“Do you have a photo of her with you?”

“Photo?” he said in surprise. “Prisoners aren't allowed photographs. They get torn up.”

“Well, tell me what she looked like.”

Oleg smiled and narrowed his eyes a little. “Her hair ran straight down to her shoulders and then—whoops!—it turned up at the end. Your eyes are slightly mocking, but there was a bit of sadness in hers. Can people possibly know their future, do you think?”

“Were you together in the camp?”

“No-o.”

“When did you actually leave her?”

“Five minutes before I was arrested. It was in May. We'd been sitting together in the little garden of her house. It was after one o'clock. I said goodnight to her and walked away. They grabbed me at the next block. The car had been waiting there at the corner.”

“And her?”

“The next night.”

“And you never saw each other again?”

“Just once. The interrogators brought us together for a ‘confrontation.' They'd already shaved my head. They hoped we'd give evidence against one another. We didn't.”

He was fingering his cigarette butt, not knowing what to do with it.

“Put it over there.” She pointed to a shiny, clean ashtray on the table where the chairman sat during meetings.

The light clouds in the west were parting farther and had almost revealed the tender, yellow sun. Its light softened everything, even Oleg's permanently stubborn face.

“But why can't you see her now?” asked Zoya sympathetically.

“Zoya,” said Oleg firmly. He paused to think. “Can you imagine what happens to a girl in a labor camp if she's at all pretty? First of all she's probably raped on the way there by some of the criminals, or, if not, they do it as soon as she arrives. Then her first evening some of the camp parasites—those damn work overseers, or else the ones who give out the rations—would have her taken naked to the bathhouse and arrange to have a look at her on the way and decide on the spot who she was to belong to. Before morning they would make her a proposition—you'll live with so-and-so, and you'll get decent work in a place that's clean and warm. Well, if she refuses, they see she gets such a rough time that she'll come crawling back, begging to five with anyone they care to name.” He closed his eyes. “She didn't die, she stayed alive, she served out her term all right. I don't blame her for it, I can understand. But … that's all there is to it. She understands too.”