Cancer Ward (35 page)

“I don't remember you having felt boots. Did you?”

“You wouldn't remember, because I sold my boots to a guy at the station. I reckoned I'd be spending the rest of the winter in the clinic and wouldn't live to see the next one. Then I went back to the
komendatura.
I'd already spent ten roubles on trolleys alone. From the carstop I had to wade a whole kilometer more through mud, in such pain I could hardly drag myself along. And everywhere I went I had to lug my duffel bag with me. But, thank God, the
komendant
was back. I deposited the permit from the
komendatura
at my place of exile with him and showed him the admission chit I'd got from your outpatients. He marked up the permission for me to be hospitalized. So I came … no, not back here to the clinic, not yet. First I went into town. I'd seen a poster saying
Sleeping Beauty
was on.”

“So you decided to go to the ballet? If I'd known that, I'd never have let you in. Definitely not!”

“Vera Kornilyevna, it was like a miracle. I wanted to see a ballet for the last time before I died. Even if I wasn't going to die, I knew I'd never see a ballet in my perpetual exile. But damn it all, they'd changed the program. Instead of
Sleeping Beauty,
they were showing
Agu-Baly.
”
*

With a soundless laugh she shook her head. This dying man's venture into the ballet appealed to her, of course. It appealed to her strongly.

“What could I do? There was a graduate giving a piano recital in the
Conservatoire,
but that's a long way from the station, and I knew I'd never be able to get even the corner of a bench at the hospital. And the rain was lashing down, really whipping me. There was only one thing to do—go and give myself up at the clinic. I arrived. There's no room,' they said. ‘You'll have to wait a few days.' The other patients told me that sometimes people waited as long as a week. But where was there for me to wait? What could I do? Without the tenacity I'd picked up in the camps, I'd have been completely lost. And then you wanted to take my chit away from me, didn't you?… How do you expect me to talk to you after all that?”

It all seemed rather amusing in retrospect; they both found it funny.

There'd been no mental effort in telling the story and all the time he'd been thinking about something else: if she'd finished medical school in 1946, she couldn't be less than thirty-one now; she must be roughly the same age as he. Why, then, did she strike him as younger-looking than the twenty-three-year-old Zoya? It wasn't her face, it was her manner—her timidity, her shyness. With a woman like that one always wonders if she has yet.… If you look closely you can always spot them from elusive hints in the way they behave. Yet Gangart was married. Why, then…?

She looked at him, wondering why he'd made such an uncouth and unpleasant impression on her at their first meeting. True, he had harsh lines on his face and a dark way of looking at you, but he knew how to look and speak cheerfully and like a friend, as he was now for instance. Or rather, he kept both styles of behavior at the ready, using either as the need arose.

“Well, I know all about the felt boots and the ballerinas now.” She smiled at him. “But what about your ordinary boots? You realize your boots are an unheard-of breach of the rules?” She narrowed her eyes.

“Rules, more rules.” Kostoglotov screwed up his face, and his scar moved with the grimace. “Even in prison a man's allowed exercise, isn't he? I can't go without my walk, I won't get better without it. You wouldn't want to deprive me of fresh air, would you?”

Yes, he liked walking. He spent a lot of time strolling along the lonely remote pathways of the Medical Center; Gangart had noticed. He looked extremely odd on these occasions in the badly made woman's dressing gown which he had begged from the housekeeper (the men weren't issued dressing gowns, there weren't enough). He gathered it in under an army belt with a star buckle, pushing the voluminous folds away from his belly to the sides, but it still flapped open at the hem. He wore army boots but no cap, and his shaggy black head stood out conspicuously as he paced along with great deliberate strides, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, looking down at the stones at his feet. When he reached the limit he had set for himself, he always turned back. He always kept his hands folded behind his back. And he was always alone, never with anyone else.

“Nizamutdin Bahramovich will be making his rounds in a few days, and you know what'll happen if he sees your boots? I'll get a reprimand.”

Once again it was not so much a demand as a request, almost as though she were complaining to him. The tone she used with him wasn't even one of equality but almost of deference. She was surprised herself that it had risen between them. She had never used it with any other patient.

Trying to convince her, Kostoglotov touched her hand with his paw. “Vera Kornilyevna, I give you a one hundred per cent guarantee he'll never find them. He won't even see me wearing them in the hallway.”

“What about outside, on the paths?”

“He won't realize I'm from his wing. I've got an idea. Just for fun we'll write an anonymous letter denouncing me for having a pair of boots. Then he'll bring two orderlies in to ransack the place and they won't find a thing.”

“That's not a very nice idea, is it—writing anonymous letters?” She narrowed her eyes again.

There was another thing bothering him: why did she use lipstick? It coarsened her, it spoiled her delicacy. He sighed. “People still write them, Vera Kornilyevna. My word, how they write them. And it works! The Romans used to say, ‘One witness is no witness,' but in the twentieth century even one witness is superfluous, unnecessary.”

She averted her eyes. It was a difficult subject to discuss.

“Where will you hide them?”

“My boots? Oh, I can think of dozens of places. It all depends on the time of day. I might put them in the stove when it's not lit, or I might hang them on a string out of the window. Don't worry about that.”

It was impossible not to laugh. He probably
would
manage to pull it off.

“However did you get out of handing them in your first day?”

“Oh, that was easy. I was in that dog kennel where they make us change into pajamas, and I put them behind one of the doors. The orderly collected all the rest of my stuff into a bag with a label and took it away to the central store. I had my bath, came out of the bathroom, wrapped them up in a newspaper and took them along with me.”

They went on talking about this, that and the other. It was the middle of the working day. What was she doing sitting there? Rusanov was restlessly asleep, covered in sweat, but at least sleeping and he hadn't vomited. Gangart took his pulse again and was on the point of going when she remembered something and turned back to Kostoglotov. “Oh yes, you're not getting supplementary diet, are you?”

“No, ma'am.” Kostoglotov pricked up his ears.

“You will as from tomorrow. Two eggs a day, two glasses of milk and fifty grams of butter.”

“What's this? I can't believe my own ears! I've never had food like that in my whole life! I suppose it's only fair, though. You know, I'm not even getting sick benefits while I'm here.”

“Why not?”

“Quite simple. It seems I haven't been a member of a trade union for the required six months. Consequently I'm not entitled to anything.”

“That's terrible! How did that happen?”

“I'm just not used to life outside any more. When I got to my place of exile I should have known that I ought to join a trade union as soon as possible.”

Strange, he was so clever in some things, but so helpless in others. It was Gangart herself who'd insisted on the extra food for him. It hadn't been easy either.… But it was time to be off, she couldn't sit chattering all day.

She was almost at the door when he called after her laughingly, “Just a minute. You're not trying to bribe me now that I'm senior patient, are you? You've got me really worried. My first day in the job and I'm corrupted already!”

Gangart left the room.

But after the patients' lunch she had to visit Rusanov again. By that time she'd learned that the senior doctor's rounds would definitely be tomorrow. This meant there was an extra job to be done in the wards: she had to check all the bedside tables, because if there was one thing Nizamutdin Bahramovich kept a zealous eye open for, it was crumbs or illicit food in the bedside tables. Ideally there should be nothing in them except hospital bread and sugar. He would also check on cleanliness, and in that department he was more ingenious than any woman.

Vera Kornilyevna went up to the second floor and, craning her head back, looked alertly around the tops of the walls and the ceiling. In a corner above Sibgatov's bed she thought she spotted a cobweb (there was more light now, the sun had just come out). She called one of the orderlies—it was Elizaveta Anatolyevna; somehow or other she was always around in an emergency—explained to her that everything had to be clean for tomorrow, and pointed at the cobweb.

Elizaveta Anatolyevna took her glasses out of her coat pocket, put them on and said, “Good heavens, you're absolutely right. How disgraceful!” She put away her glasses again and went off to find a brush and a stepladder. She never wore glasses while she was doing her cleaning.

From there Gangart went into the men's ward. Rusanov was in the same position, and running with sweat; however, his pulse had slowed down. Just before she came in Kostoglotov had donned his boots and dressing gown, ready for his walk. Vera Kornilyevna informed the ward of tomorrow's important inspection and asked the patients to take a look inside their bedside tables before she checked them herself.

“We'll begin with our senior patient,” she said.

There was no good reason why she should begin with the senior patient, or why she should have gone again to his corner of the room, for that matter.

Vera Kornilyevna's figure resembled two triangles, set apex to apex, the upper one narrow, the lower one broader. Her waist was so narrow that one's hands itched to get one's fingers around it and toss her into the air. But Kostoglotov did no such thing. He obligingly opened the door of his bedside table for her inspection. “Help yourself,” he said.

“Now, let's see, let's see.” She tried to get to the table and he moved to one side. She sat down on his bed right next to the table and began to look through it.

She was sitting there, he was standing behind her. Now he had a good view of her neck with its tracery of thin, defenseless lines, and her hair, which was fairly dark and tied in a little knot at the back without the slightest attempt at fashion.

Really, he ought to break free of this torment. It was ludicrous that every woman who came along should so utterly cloud his head. She'd just sat with him for a bit, chatted to him and gone away. But in the hours between he couldn't stop thinking about her. While as for her? In the evening she'd be going home to her husband's embraces.…

He'd have to break free. But there was only one way to do it—with a woman.

He stood there staring fixedly at the back of her head. The collar of her coat was turned up behind, pouched out like a little hood, over which he could see the little round bone at the top of her spine. He felt like running his fingers around it.

“Of course, your bedside table is one of the most disgraceful in the whole clinic,” Gangart was commenting. “Crumbs, bits of greasy paper, shreds of dirty old tobacco, a book and a pair of gloves. Aren't you ashamed of yourself? You must clean it up today, all of it.”

He continued to stare at her neck and said nothing.

She pulled out the drawer at the top of the table. In it, among some loose change, was a tightly corked bottle full of brown liquid, about forty milliliters, a small plastic glass, the sort you find in traveling kits, and a medicine dropper.

“What's this? Medicine?”

Kostoglotov whistled under his breath. “Oh, it's nothing,” he said.

“What sort of medicine? We didn't issue it, did we?”

“Well, I'm allowed to have my own, aren't I?”

“Of course not, not while you're a patient in our clinic and without our knowledge.”

“You see, it's a bit awkward to explain … it's for corns.”

She started to twist the unlabeled, anonymous bottle in her fingers, to open it and sniff it. At once Kostoglotov intervened. He clamped his two coarse hands onto hers and pushed aside the one attempting to pull out the cork.

(This constant joining of hands which inevitably continues conversations.)

“Careful,” he warned her very quietly. “You have to know how to handle that stuff. You mustn't let it get on your fingers, and you mustn't sniff it.”

Gently he took the bottle away from her.

Well, really, this is taking a joke a bit too far.

“What is it?” said Gangart, frowning. “Something strong?”

Kostoglotov sat down on the bed next to her. His voice was businesslike but quiet. “Extremely strong,” he said. “It's a root from Issyk Kul. You mustn't ever sniff it, either as an infusion or in its dry state. That's why it's so firmly corked. If you got some on your hands, didn't wash it off, forgot about it and licked it later, you might easily die.”

Vera Kornilyevna was alarmed. “What do you keep it for?” she demanded.

“That's torn it,” Kostoglotov growled. “Now you've found it, I'll be in for trouble, I suppose. I ought to have hidden it … I've been taking it for treatment, I still am now and then.”

“Purely for treatment?” She questioned him with her eyes, but this time she didn't narrow them, she wore her most professional air.

Yes, she was wearing her most professional air, but her eyes were the same light brown.