Cancer Ward (52 page)

The odd bubble was still gurgling. Offstage perhaps it was her breathing one could hear.

“I must admit,” he said. “I read them at a very early age. I was probably about twelve. Of course I didn't let the grownups see me. Reading them made a shattering impression on me, but it was somehow emptying as well. I had the feeling I didn't really want to live any more…”

Suddenly she answered his question. “I … read them too,” she said expressionlessly.

“You did, did you? You too?” said Oleg delightedly. He said the words “You too?” as though he still felt he was the first to make that particular point. “Such consistent, logical, irrefutable materialism and the result was … the point of living? Everything totted up in exact percentages, how many women experience nothing at all, how many women experience ecstasy? Those stories about how women … move from category to category in search of their own identity…” As he remembered more and more he drew in his breath as though he had been hit or had hurt himself. “… Such heartless certainty that psychology is of secondary importance in marriage. The writer makes the point that physiology is the sole cause of incompatibility. But, of course, you remember, don't you? When did you read them?”

She didn't answer.

He shouldn't have interrogated her like that. He'd probably put it much too crudely and bluntly. He had absolutely no experience of talking to women.

The strange patch of pale sunlight on the ceiling suddenly began to ripple. A flashing cluster of silver spots appeared from somewhere. They began to move about. Oleg watched the fast-moving ripples and wavelets. He had finally realized that the mysterious flash high up on the ceiling was no more than a reflection of a puddle, a patch of ground outside the window by the fence that hadn't dried up yet. The image of an ordinary puddle. But now a little breeze had begun to blow.

Vega was silent.

“Please forgive me,” Oleg begged. He found it agreeable, almost a delight, to plead with her. “Somehow I don't think I put it right…” He tried to twist his head toward her but still he couldn't see her. “You see, that sort of attitude destroys everything human on earth. If you give in to it, if you accept it and everything it entails…” He was now surrendering joyfully to his former faith. He was trying to persuade
her!

Vega came back. She returned on stage, her face showing none of the despair or harshness he had thought he detected in her voice. There was the usual friendly smile. “I don't want you to accept it either,” she said. “I was sure you didn't accept it.”

She shone. She actually shone.

Yes, she was that little girl from his childhood, his school friend. Why hadn't he recognized her before?

He felt like saying something quite simple and friendly to her, something like “Let's shake hands on it.” Then he would take her hand and—“My God, it's wonderful just talking to you!”

His right arm was under the needle, though.

If only he could call her Vega. Or Vera.

But it wasn't possible.

The blood in the bottle had already dropped by more than half. It had once flowed in someone else's body, a body with its own personality, its own ideas, and now it was pouring into him, a reddish-brown stream of health. Surely it must be bringing some of its own characteristics?

Oleg watched Vega bustling about. She straightened the little pillow under his elbow and the absorbent cotton under the tip. She stroked the rubber tube with her fingers and began to raise the upper part of the stand which held the bottle.

He wanted to do more than shake that hand, he wanted to kiss it, even though it would have been a contradiction of everything he had said.

25. Vega

She was in a festive mood as she left the clinic, humming quietly to herself, her mouth closed so that only she could hear. She was wearing a light-gray spring coat, but no rubbers because the streets were quite dry. She felt light and springy. Everything was light, especially her legs. Walking was so easy, a girl could cross the whole town when she felt like this.

The evening was just as sunny as the day had been. One could feel it was spring even though it was getting cooler. It would be silly to climb onto a crowded bus. She felt much more like walking.

So she walked.

There was no time more beautiful than when the apricot trees were in bloom in town. All of a sudden she felt she had to see one, now, before spring came, just one apricot tree in bloom, for luck, even if from a distance, or perhaps sheltered behind a fence or a clay wall. You could always tell them by their airy pinkness.

But it was too early. The trees were only just beginning to change from gray to green. The moment had come when the trees already had some green on them, but gray still predominated. Behind the clay walls, the few patches of garden that had managed to assert their rights against the stones of the city showed their dried, reddish earth, but nothing more.

It
was
early.

Vera always seemed to be in a hurry, but when she got into a bus she would sit herself down as comfortably as possible on the broken springs of the seat, or else reach out for a strap, hang onto it and think to herself, “I don't want to do
anything.
”

In spite of common sense she knew that she merely had to kill the hours of the evening, then hurry back to work the next morning in an identical bus.

But today she walked unhurriedly, and she wanted to do everything, everything there was to do. A lot of things had suddenly appeared that needed doing: at home, in the shops or the library, or perhaps sewing or some other pleasant task. There was nothing forbidden or banned about them, they were just things she had for some reason avoided doing. She felt like doing them all now, immediately. On the other hand, she didn't feel like rushing to get home, or doing any single one of them straightaway. Instead she walked slowly along, delighting in every step her little shoes took along the dry pavement. She walked past shops that were not yet locked up, but she didn't go into any of them to buy the food or the things she needed. She walked past some theater placards but didn't read a single one, even though in her present mood she wanted to read them.

And so she just walked, walked on and on. This was her delight. It was all there was to her pleasure.

And occasionally she smiled.

She'd have liked to have seen an apricot tree in bloom, but there wasn't one; it was too early.

Yesterday had been a holiday, but she had felt downtrodden and despised. Today was an ordinary working weekday, and she was in such a carefree, happy mood.

She had this holiday feeling because she felt she was in the right. Suddenly your powerful arguments, unspoken because everywhere ridiculed and rejected, which are the little thread by which you hang all alone over a terrible chasm, turn out to be a rope of steel wire. And its reliability is recognized by a worldly-wise, suspicious, hard-headed man who is ready to hang by it himself in complete confidence.

They were gliding, as in a cable car, over an unimaginable abyss of human incomprehension, and they had trust in each other.

This absolutely entranced her!

She knew now she was normal and not insane, but knowing this is not enough. She needed to hear she was normal and not insane, which she had now heard—and what a man to hear it from! All she really wanted to do was to say “thank you” to him for saying it, for thinking it and for having remained himself through all the setbacks in his life.

He deserved to be thanked, but in the meantime it was her duty to make excuses to him. She had to make excuses for the hormone therapy. He rejected Friedland, but he rejected hormone therapy as well. There was a logical contradiction here. Still, one expects logic from a doctor, not from a patient.

Whether or not there was a contradiction here, she had to persuade him to submit to this treatment. She couldn't give him up, surrender him to the tumor. She was becoming more and more passionately concerned. This was a patient she had to outdo in persuasiveness and stubbornness, until she finally cured him. But to spend hours trying to convince such an unruly, pigheaded man she would have to have great faith.

When he attacked her about the hormone therapy she had suddenly remembered that it had been introduced into their clinic to conform with a general nationwide instruction, which applied to a broad range of tumors. She couldn't for the moment remember the actual scientific paper that described how hormone therapy should be used to combat seminoma. There might be more than one such paper, foreign ones too. To persuade him she had to read them all. Normally she didn't have time to read very many.

But now she'd have time for everything! She'd certainly read them now!

Kostoglotov had once thrown out the argument that he didn't see why his medicine man with the roots was any less of a doctor than she was. He told her that he hadn't noticed anything very mathematical about medicine. Vera had taken slight offense at the time, but later it occurred to her he was partly right. When they used X rays to destroy cells did they know, approximately even, what percentage of healthy cells as compared to diseased ones would be destroyed? Was this method any more certain than the medicine man's way of scooping up his dried root by the handful, without using scales? Or to take another example—everyone was furiously prescribing penicillin treatment because penicillin produced results. But who in the medical world had actually succeeded in explaining why penicillin acted as it did? These were dark waters, weren't they? One had to keep following the medical journals, reading them and pondering them.

But she'd have time for all that now.

And now—it was amazing, she just hadn't noticed how quickly she'd walked—here she was home in the courtyard outside her apartment block. She walked up the few steps to a spacious communal veranda with railings thickly hung with rugs and doormats. She walked across the dented cement floor and, not in the least depressed, unlocked the outside door to her communal apartment. The floor-covering was torn in places. Then she walked down a corridor. It was rather dark; she couldn't turn on all the lights because they were on different meters.

She used another key to open the door to her room. It didn't depress her in the least, this convent cell. It had bars in the window to protect it from thieves, like all ground-floor windows in town. The room was by now almost in twilight. It never had any bright sunlight except briefly in the morning. Vera stopped in the doorway, and without taking off her coat looked round the room in amazement, as if it was all new to her. In a room like this, life could be fine and enjoyable! All there was to do was to change the tablecloth straightaway, flick a dustcloth around, and perhaps rehang the pictures on the wall—one of Petropavlovsk Fortress during a white night, and one of some black Crimean cypresses.

But first she took off her coat, put on an apron and went into the kitchen. She vaguely remembered she had to begin by doing something in the kitchen. Oh yes, she had to light the oil stove and cook herself something.

But her neighbor's son, a big strong lad who had dropped out of school, had installed his motorcycle in the kitchen like a kind of barrier. He was in there taking it to bits, whistling as he laid the parts all over the floor and oiled them. The room had the benefit of the setting sun and was still quite light. There was space to squeeze through and get to her table, but Vera suddenly felt she didn't want to bother about things in the kitchen: she just wanted to be alone in her room.

She wasn't hungry either, not hungry at all. So she went back to her room and snapped the lock shut with satisfaction. There was no reason for her to leave it again today. There were some chocolates in one of the tins, she could nibble at them.

She squatted down in front of the chest, the one she'd got from her mother, and pulled out the heavy drawer that contained her other tablecloth.

But no, first of all the dusting had to be done.

And before that she ought to change into something simpler.

Vera took delight in every new movement. It was like changing step during a dance. Each new movement delighted her, because that was what the dance was about.

Or perhaps she ought to rehang the fortress and the cypresses? No, that would mean getting a hammer and some nails, and there was nothing more unpleasant than a man's work. Let them hang the way they were for a while.

So she shook the dustcloth and went around the room with it, humming softly to herself.

Almost at once she came upon a colored postcard she had received the day before, propped up against a pot-bellied bottle of scent. It had red roses, green ribbons and a blue figure 8 on the front of it, while on the back there was a typewritten message of greeting. Her trade-union committee were sending her their best wishes on the occasion of International Women's Day.
*

National holidays are hard for a lonely person to live through, but a women's holiday, for lonely women whose years are slipping away, is quite unbearable. Widowed or unmarried, they get together to drink a lot of wine, sing songs and pretend how merry they are. Last night there had been a crowd of them celebrating uproariously out in the yard. There was one husband among them, and when they got drunk they all lined up to kiss him.

Her trade-union committee, without in the least trying to be amusing, were wishing her success in her work and happiness in her private life.

What private life?

She tore the postcard into four pieces and threw it into the waste-basket.

She went on dusting, first some bottles of scent, then the little glass cabinet with views of the Crimea in it, then the box of records by the radio, then the electric phonograph in its angular plastic case.

Now she could listen to any of the records she possessed, and they no longer hurt. She could put on that intolerable tune, “So now I'm alone, alone as before…” But she was looking for another one. She put it on, turned the knob for the phonograph part, withdrew herself into her mother's deep armchair and curled her stockinged legs up underneath her. Her hand was still idly clutching one corner of the dustcloth. It hung down from her hand to the floor.