Cancer Ward (37 page)

She did not stop. Not wishing to be left behind, he walked beside her, stretching his long legs up the staircase, two steps at a time. He could move like that without difficulty now.

“Well, what's new?” she asked him as she climbed, as if he were her aide-de-camp.

What was new? The changes in the Supreme Court were new all right. But she would need years of education to understand that, and it wasn't that kind of understanding that Zoya needed at the moment.

“I've found a new name for you. At last I've realized what your name ought to be.”

“Really? What?” She continued briskly up the stairs.

“I can't tell you while we're walking. It's too important.”

They were at the top now. He lagged back on the last few steps and, looking at her from behind, noted that her legs were a bit thick and heavy, although they seemed to go well with her compact figure. Still, they had a charm of their own, though light and springy legs, like Vega's, put you in a better mood.

He was surprised at himself. He never used to think or look at things that way before; he found it coarse and vulgar. He'd never flitted from woman to woman. His grandfather would have called it “skirt mad.” Still, as the saying went, “Eat when you're hungry, love when you're young.” Oleg had missed out in his youth, though. Now he was like an autumn plant in haste to extract the last juices from the earth so as not to regret the lost summer. During his short return to life—and his life was already going downhill, yes, downhill—he was impatient to see women and absorb them, in a way which he could never mention to them. He was more sensitive than others to their nature, since for years he hadn't seen one, been near one, or heard a woman's voice: he had forgotten what it sounded like.

Zoya took over the shift and it was as if she'd started whirling like a top. She whirled around her table, around the treatment list and the medicine cabinet, then she'd suddenly spin off sideways toward one of the doors, just like a top.

Oleg watched her and, as soon as he saw she had a moment to herself, was at her side.

“So there's nothing else new in the clinic?” asked Zoya in her delicious voice, meanwhile sterilizing syringes on an electric stove and opening ampoules.

“Oh, there was a great event today at the clinic. Nizamutdin Bahramovich himself made his rounds.”

“Did he? That's good. I'm glad I wasn't there … So what happened? Did he take away your boots?”

“No, it wasn't the boots. But there
was
a bit of a clash.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, it was a grand occasion. Fifteen white coats walked into the ward all at once—heads of departments, registrars, interns, doctors I've never even seen before. The senior doctor pounced on the bedside tables like a tiger. But we'd already had reports from our secret agents. We'd done a little preparation, so there was nothing for him to get his teeth into. He frowned and looked very dissatisfied. At that moment they brought up my case, and Ludmila Afanasyevna made a bit of a gaffe. She was reading out my file.…”

“What file?”

“I mean my case history, I always make these mistakes … She mentioned my first diagnosis and where it had been made, and it came out I was from Kazakhstan. ‘What?' said Nizamutdin. ‘He's from another republic? We haven't enough beds; why should we treat foreigners? Discharge him at once!'”

“But half the patients in the ward are ‘foreigners.'”

“I know, but he just happened to pick on me. You should have seen Ludmila Afanasyevna. I was amazed: she stuck up for me like a real old mother hen. Her feathers got quite ruffled. ‘Scientifically it's an important and complicated case,' she said. ‘We need him for fundamental conclusions…' It was an idiotic situation for me to be in. A few days ago I argued with her myself, and demanded to be discharged, and she screamed at me, but now she's sticking up for me. All I had to do was say yes to Nizamutdin, and by lunchtime you wouldn't have seen me for dust! I'd never have seen you again either…”

“So it was all because of me you didn't say yes?”

“Well, what do you think?” Kostoglotov's voice was muffled. “You hadn't even left me your address. How would I have been able to look for you?”

But she was busy with something, so he couldn't tell how seriously she had taken him.

“I couldn't possibly have let Ludmila Afanasyevna down,” he continued, raising his voice again. “I was sitting there like a log saying nothing, while Nizamutdin went on, ‘I can go into outpatients' now and find five men as ill as he is, all of them ours. Discharge him!' And I suppose it was then that I behaved like a fool, missing a wonderful chance of getting away. I was sorry for Ludmila Afanasyevna, she blinked as if she'd been hit and didn't say another word. So I leaned forward with my elbows against my knees, cleared my delicate little throat and asked him quietly, ‘How can you think of discharging me? I'm from the virgin lands.' ‘Oh, you're a virgin-lander? Really!' said Nizamutdin. He was afraid he'd made a bad political blunder. There's nothing our country won't do for the virgin lands.' And they all moved on to the next bed.”

“You're a crafty one,” said Zoya, shaking her head.

“I never used to be, Zoya. It was the camps, they made me as sharp as an ax. There are plenty of traits in my character that aren't really me, that come from the camps.”

“What about your cheerfulness? You didn't acquire that in the camps, did you?”

“Why not? I'm cheerful because I'm used to losing everything. It always strikes me as strange when people here cry during visiting time. What are they crying about? No one's sending them into exile or confiscating their belongings…”

“So you'll be staying with us a month or so?”

“God forbid! But I may be here a couple of weeks. It looks as if I've given Ludmila Afanasyevna a blank check. I'll have to put up with anything now…”

The hypodermic syringe was now full of warm liquid, and Zoya shot off. She was faced with an awkward problem today and didn't know what to do. She had to give Oleg his new injection, in the usual place, the part of the body that has to put up with every indignity. But the mood that had set in between them made the injection impossible now. It would have wrecked the game. Zoya did not want to spoil the game or the mood, neither did Oleg. The wheel would have to roll some way yet before she was close enough to him to inject him with easy familiarity.

She came back to the table and, while she was preparing one of the new injections for Ahmadjan, asked him, “What about you? Have you come round to the idea of injections? You're not kicking against them any more!”

What a question to ask a patient, especially Kostoglotov! He was just waiting for an opportunity to explain his views.

“You know what I think, Zoyenka. If possible I always prefer to avoid them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. With Turgun it's fine. His one ambition is to learn how to play chess. We've made a pact: if I win, no injection; if he wins, injection. The trouble is that when we play I give him odds of a rook. But you can't swing that one with Maria. When she comes up with the syringe her face looks like a block of wood. Sometimes I try to joke with her, but it's always ‘Patient Kostoglotov, time for your injection. Turn back your pajamas.' She never says a single kind or unnecessary word.”

“She hates you.”

“Me?”

“All of you. Men.”

“Well, perhaps we deserve it, generally speaking. Now there's a new nurse with whom I can't make any headway either. And when Olympiada comes back it'll be even worse. She doesn't give an inch.”

“That's how I'm going to be, too,” said Zoya, carefully measuring out two cubic centimeters, but she didn't make it sound very forceful. Off she went to inject Ahmadjan, leaving Oleg alone by the table again.

There was another and more important reason why Zoya did not want Oleg to have injections. Ever since Sunday she had been wondering whether she should tell him what they would do to him.

Supposing something serious suddenly emerged from their banter? It was perfectly possible. What if this time it didn't all end in a depressing search for articles of clothing scattered around a room? What if it developed into something strong and lasting, if Zoya decided to become his Teddy bear and go with him into exile? (And he was right, of course. Who knows in what back-of-beyond happiness may be waiting?) If this happened, the injections prescribed for Oleg would affect not only him, but her too.

And she was against them.

“Well,” she said gaily, returning with an empty syringe. “Have you plucked up your courage? Go to the ward. Turn back your pajamas, Patient Kostoglotov. I'll be with you in a minute.”

He sat there and gazed at her with eyes that were not the eyes of a patient. He wasn't even thinking about the injection. They had already made a pact.

He looked at her eyes, which bulged slightly, asking to be freed from their sockets.

“Let's go somewhere, Zoya.” It was more like a low rumble than speech. The more muffled his voice became, the more hers rang out.

“Where?” Surprised, she laughed. “Into town?”

“The doctors' room,”

She absorbed his relentless glance. There was no game in her voice as she said, “I can't, Oleg. I've got too much work.”

It was as if he understood her. “Let's go,” he repeated.

“Oh yes.” She remembered something. “I have to fill an oxygen balloon for…” She nodded toward the stairs, she may have mentioned the name of the patient, but he didn't hear. “The trouble is the oxygen cylinder tap's so hard to turn. You can help me. Come on.”

She marched down the stairs to the lower landing with him at her heels.

That pitiful, yellow-looking patient with the pinched nose who was being eaten away with cancer of the lungs sat in bed, panting as he breathed through his balloon—you could hear the wheezing in his chest. Had he always been as small as that, or was it the disease that had shriveled him? He was in such a bad way that the doctors on their rounds no longer talked to him or asked him questions. He'd always been in a bad way, but today he was much worse; even an inexperienced eye could see that. He was just finishing one balloon, and another, already empty, was lying beside him.

He was in such a bad way that he didn't even notice people, whether they came up to him or just passed by.

They took the empty balloon from his bedside and went on down the stairs.

“What treatment are you giving him?”

“We're not. He's an inoperable case. And irradiation didn't help.”

“Can't you open the thorax?”

“They don't do that here yet, not in this town.”

“So he'll die?”

She nodded.

And although the balloon in her hands was needed for the sick man, to prevent him suffocating, they'd already forgotten about him. They were on the verge of something quite out of the ordinary.

The tall oxygen cylinder was standing in a separate corridor which was now locked. It was here, next to the X-ray rooms, that Gangart had once found a soaking-wet and dying Kostoglotov some place to sleep when they first met. (“Once” was only three weeks ago …) As long as the second corridor light was not on (and they'd only switched on the first), the corner where the wall jutted out and the cylinder stood would be in half-darkness.

Zoya was shorter than the cylinder, Oleg taller.

She began to fit the valve of the balloon to the valve of the cylinder. He stood behind her, breathing in the scent of her hair, which was straying from under her cap.

“This is the tap that's stiff,” she complained.

He grasped the tap and managed to turn it on at once. The oxygen started to flow. There was a gentle hissing sound.

Then, without any pretext at all, Oleg's hand, the one he'd just used on the tap, grasped Zoya's wrist, the one that wasn't holding the oxygen balloon.

She didn't start. She wasn't surprised. She just watched the balloon inflate.

Gripping her arm, his hand slid upward over the wrist and higher, to the forearm, then beyond the elbow toward the shoulder.

It was an unsubtle reconnaissance, but necessary for them both. It was a test to see whether they had interpreted each other's words rightly.

They had.

He ruffled her hair with two fingers. She did not protest or recoil. She went on watching the balloon.

He grasped her strongly around the shoulders, tilting her whole body toward him, finally reaching her lips, the lips that had smiled at him so often, lips that never stopped chattering.

As they met his, Zoya's lips were not open, soft or slack. They were taut, ready and eager, as he realized in a single flash. A moment before, he hadn't remembered, he'd forgotten that all lips are not the same, that kisses can be different, that one can be worth a hundred others.

It began as a peck, then prolonged itself as they clung to each other, merging. Nothing in the world could end it, and there was no need for it to end. They could have stayed like that forever, their lips crushed together.

But after a time, after two centuries, their lips tore apart and Oleg saw Zoya for the first time and heard her say, “Why do you shut your eyes when you kiss?”

Had he shut his eyes? He had no idea. He hadn't noticed.

“Were you trying to imagine someone else?”

Who else? He couldn't remember anyone …

As a diver snatches a quick breath and plunges back to find the pearl lurking on the ocean bed, they kissed again. But this time he noticed that he'd shut his eyes, and he opened them. Close, unbelievably close, he saw two tawny eyes, almost predatory-looking, and each of his eyes looked separately into hers. She was kissing with those confidently taut, experienced lips, never letting them go loose, rocking slightly on her feet and gazing at him steadily as though to judge from his eyes how eternity would sentence him.