Cancer Ward (67 page)

“Don't judge, you're sure to be wrong,” Shulubin answered. At last he turned his head and peered at Oleg with his disturbingly expressive round bloodshot eyes. “The people who drown at sea or dig the soil or search for water in the desert don't have the hardest lives. The man with the hardest life is the man who walks out of his house every day and bangs his head against the top of the door because it's too low … As far as I can gather, you fought in the war and then you were in the labor camps, is that right?”

“Yes, and a few more things: no higher education, no officer's commission, exile in perpetuity”—Oleg listed the points thoughtfully and uncomplainingly—“Oh yes, and one more thing: cancer.”

“Well, let's call it quits about the cancer. As regards the other things, young man…”

“Who the hell's the young man! I suppose you think I'm young just because I've got my original head on my shoulders or because I haven't had to get a new skin?”

“As regards the other things, I'll tell you something. You haven't had to do much lying, do you understand? At least you haven't had to stoop so low—you should appreciate that! You people were arrested, but we were herded into meetings to ‘expose' you. They executed people like you, but they made us stand up and applaud the verdicts as they were announced. And not just applaud, they made us demand the firing squad,
demand
it! Do you remember what they used to write in the papers? ‘As one man the whole Soviet nation arose in indignation on hearings of the unprecedented, heinous crimes of…' Do you know what ‘as one man' meant for us? We were individual human beings, and then suddenly we were ‘as one man'! When we applauded we had to hold our big strong hands high in the air so that those around us and those on the platform would notice. Because who doesn't want to live? Who ever came out in your defense? Who ever objected? Where are they now? I knew one—Dima Olitsky—he abstained. He wasn't opposed, good heavens no! He
abstained
on the vote to shoot the Industrial Party members.
*
‘Explain!' they shouted. ‘Explain!' He stood up, his throat was dry as a bone. ‘I believe,' he said, ‘that in the twelfth year of the Revolution we should be able to find alternative methods of repression…' Aaah, the scoundrel! Accomplice! Enemy agent! The next morning he got a summons to the G.P.U.,
**
and there he stayed for the rest of his life.”

Shulubin twisted his neck and turned his head from side to side in that strange motion of his. Bent both forward and backward, he sat on the bench like a large bird on a perch it wasn't accustomed to.

Kostoglotov tried not to feel flattered by what Shulubin had said. “Aleksei Filippovich,” he said, “it all depends on the number you happen to draw. If the position had been reversed it would have been just the opposite: you'd have been the martyrs, we'd have been the time-servers. But there's another point: people like you who understood what was happening, who understood early enough, suffered searing agonies. But those who believed were all right. Their hands were bloodstained, but then again they weren't bloodstained because they didn't understand the situation.”

The old man flashed him a sidelong scorching glance. “Who are these people, the ones who believed?” he asked.

“Well, I did. Right up to the war against Finland.”
*

“But how many are they, these people who believed, the ones who didn't understand? I know you can't expect much from a young boy, but I just cannot accept that our whole people suddenly became weak in the head. I can't believe it, I won't! In the old days the lord of the manor stood on the porch of his mansion and talked a lot of nonsense, but the peasants only smirked quietly into their beards. The lord of the manor saw them, so did the bailiffs standing at his side. And when the time came to bow down, true, they all bowed ‘as one man.' But does that mean the peasants believed the lord of the manor? What sort of person do you have to be to believe?” Shulubin began to grow more and more angry. He had the kind of face which is violently changed and distorted by strong emotion, not one feature remaining calm. “What sort of man are we talking about?” he continued. “Suddenly all the professors and all the engineers turn out to be wreckers, and he believes it! The best Civil-War divisional commanders turn out to be German and Japanese spies, and he believes it! The whole of Lenin's old guard are shown up as vile renegades, and he believes it! His own friends and acquaintances are unmasked as enemies of the people, and he believes it! Millions of Russian soldiers turn out to have betrayed their country, and he believes it all! Whole nations, old men and babies, are mown down, and he believes it! Then what sort of man is he, may I ask? He's a fool. But can there really be a whole nation of fools? No, you'll have to forgive me. The people are intelligent enough, it's simply that they wanted to live. There's a law big nations have—to endure and so to survive. When each of us dies and History stands over his grave and asks ‘What was he?' there'll only be one possible answer, Pushkin's:

“In our vile times

… Man was, whatever his element,

Either tyrant or traitor or prisoner!”

Oleg started. He didn't know the lines, but there was a penetrating accuracy about them. Poet and truth became almost physically tangible.

Shulubin wagged his great finger at him. “The poet had no room in his line for ‘fool,' even though he knew that there are fools in this world. No, the fact is there are only three possibilities, and since I can remember that I've never been in prison, and since I know for sure that I've never been a tyrant, then it must mean…” Shulubin smiled, then started to cough. “It must mean…”

As he coughed he rocked back and forth on his thighs.

“Do you think that sort of life was any easier than yours? My whole life I've lived in fear, but now I'd change places with you.”

Like Shulubin, Kostoglotov was rocking forward and backward, slumped on the narrow bench like a crested bird on a perch.

Their slanting black shadows, legs tucked underneath them, lay starkly on the ground in front of the two men.

“No, Aleksei Filippovich, you're wrong, it's too sweeping a condemnation, it's too harsh. In my view, the traitors were those who wrote denunciations or stood up as witnesses. There are millions of them too. One can reckon on one informer for every, let's say, two or three prisoners, right? That means there
are
millions. But to write every single one off as a traitor is much too rash. Pushkin was too rash as well. A storm breaks trees, it only bends grass. Does this mean that the grass has betrayed the trees? Everyone has his own life. As you said yourself, the law of a nation is to survive.”

Shulubin wrinkled up his face, so much so that his eyes disappeared and there was only a trace of his mouth left. One moment his great, round eyes were there, the next they had gone, leaving only puckered, blind skin.

He let his face relax. In his eyes were the same tobacco-brown irises, the same reddened whites, but there was now a blurred look about them as well. He said, “All right, then, let's call it a more refined form of the herd instinct, the fear of remaining alone,
outside the community.
There's nothing new about it. Francis Bacon set out his doctrine of idols back in the sixteenth century. He said people are not inclined to live by pure experience, that it's easier for them to pollute experience with prejudices. These prejudices are the idols. ‘The idols of the tribe,' Bacon called them, ‘the idols of the cave'…”

When he said “idols of the cave,” the image of a real cave entered Oleg's mind, smoke-filled, with a fire in the middle, the savages roasting meat, while in the depths of the cave there stood, almost indiscernible, a bluish idol.

“… ‘The idols of the theater'…” Where was this particular idol to be found? In the lobby? On the curtains? No, a more appropriate place would probably be the square in front of the theater, in the center of the garden there.

“What are the idols of the theater?”

“The idols of the theater are the authoritative opinions of others which a man likes to accept as a guide when interpreting something he hasn't experienced himself.”

“Oh, but this happens very often.”

“But sometimes he actually has experienced it, only it's more convenient not to believe what he's seen.”

“I've seen cases like that as well…”

“Another idol of the theater is our overwillingness to agree with the arguments of science. One can sum this up as the voluntary acceptance of other people's errors.”

“That's good,” said Oleg. He liked the idea very much. “Voluntary acceptance of other people's errors! That's it!”

“Finally, there are the idols of the market place.”

This was the easiest of all to imagine: an alabaster idol towering over the swarming crowd in a market place.

“The idols of the market place are the errors which result from the communication and association of men with each other. They are the errors a man commits because it has become customary to use certain phrases and formulas which do violence to reason. For example, ‘Enemy of the people!' ‘Not one of us!' Traitor!' Call a man one of these and everyone will renounce him.”

Shulubin emphasized each of these exclamations by throwing up first one hand, then the other. Again he looked like a bird with clipped wings making crooked, awkward attempts to fly.

The sun was hotter than it should be in springtime, and it was burning their backs. The branches of the trees had not yet become interwoven, each still standing out separately in its pristine greenery, and they gave no shade, The sky had not yet been scorched pale by the southern sun; between the white flakes of the small, passing clouds of day it kept its blueness. But Shulubin didn't see it or else he didn't believe what he saw. He raised one finger above his head and shook it as he said, “And over all idols there is the sky of fear, the sky of fear overhung with gray clouds. You know how sometimes in the evenings thick low clouds gather, black and gray clouds, even though no storm is approaching? Darkness and gloom descend before their proper time. The whole world makes you feel ill at ease, and all you want to do is to go and hide under the roof in a house made of bricks, skulk close to the fire with your family. I lived twenty-five years under a sky like that. I saved myself only because I bowed low and kept silent. I kept silent for twenty-five years—or maybe it was twenty-eight, count them up yourself. First I kept silent for my wife's sake, then for my children's sake, then for the sake of my own sinful body. But my wife died. And my body is a bag full of manure—they're going to drill a hole for it on one side. And my children have grown up so callous it's beyond comprehension. And when my daughter suddenly started writing to me—in the past two years she's sent three letters up to now, I don't mean here, I mean to my home—it turned out it was because her Party organization demanded that she
normalize
her relationship with her father, do you understand? But they made no such request of my son…”

Shulubin turned toward Oleg and twitched his bushy eyebrows. His whole figure was disheveled. Oleg suddenly knew who he was—he was the Mad Miller from
The Mermaid:
“Me, a miller? I'm no miller, I'm a raven!”
*

“I don't remember any more, maybe I dreamed those children up, maybe they never existed … Listen to me, do you think a man can become like a log of wood? A log of wood doesn't mind whether it lies by itself or among other logs. The way I live, if I lose consciousness, fall down on the floor and die, no one will find me for days, not even my neighbors. But listen! Listen!” He grabbed Oleg hard by the shoulder, as if he was frightened Oleg wouldn't hear him. “I'm still on my guard, just as I was before, I keep looking behind me. I know I spoke out in the ward, but I'd never dare say anything like that in Kokand, or where I work. As for what I'm telling you now, I'm only doing it because they're wheeling in a little table to take me to my operation. Even now I'd never say it if there was a third person present. No, never! That's the way it is. This is the wall they've pushed me up against … I graduated from agricultural academy, then did advanced courses in historical and dialectical materialism. I was a university lecturer in several subjects, and in Moscow at that. But then the oak trees began to topple. There was the fall of Muratov at the agricultural academy. Professors were being arrested by the dozen. We were supposed to confess our ‘mistakes'? I confessed them! We were supposed to renounce them? I renounced them! A certain percentage managed to survive, didn't they? Well, I was part of that percentage. I withdrew into the study of pure biology, I found myself a quiet haven. But then the purge started there as well, and what a purge! The professorial chairs in the biological department got a thorough sweeping with the broom. We were supposed to give up lecturing? Very well, I gave up lecturing. I withdrew even further, became an assistant. I agreed to become a little man!”

He was always so silent in the ward, and yet now he was speaking with extraordinary ease. Words poured out of him as though public speaking were his daily occupation.

“They were destroying textbooks written by great scientists, they were changing the curricula. Very well. I agreed to that too; we would use the new books for teaching! They suggested we reshape anatomy, microbiology and neuropathology to fit in with the doctrines of an ignorant agronomist and an expert in horticulture.
*
Bravo! I agreed! I voted in favor! ‘No, that's not enough. Will you please give up your assistantship as well?' ‘All right, I'm not arguing. I'll work on methods of biology teaching in schools.' But no, the sacrifice wasn't accepted, I was sacked from that job as well. ‘Very well, I agree, I'll be a librarian, a librarian in remote Kokand.' I retreated a long, long way! Still, I was alive, and my children were university graduates. But then librarians receive secret instructions from the authorities: for the destruction of books by this or that author. Well, this was nothing new for us. Had I not declared a quarter of a century earlier from my chair of dialectical materialism that the relativity theory was counterrevolutionary obscurantism? So I draw up a document, my Party secretary and special-branch representative signs it, and we stuff the books into the stove. Into the stove with all your genetics, leftist aesthetics, ethics, cybernetics, arithmetic…”