Cancer Ward (73 page)

“Come on, come on, hurry up!” Nellya commanded.

It wasn't just her new coat, she had her hair curled differently as well.

“Well, look at you now!” said Kostoglotov in amazement.

“Well, I mean to say, what a fool I was crawling round the floor for three-fifty a month. What a job! No free grub either…!”

34. … and One a Bit Less Happy

It is time, it is time for me too to depart. Like an old man who has outlived his contemporaries and feels a sad inner emptiness, Kostoglotov felt that evening that the ward was no longer his home, even though the beds were all occupied and there were the same old patients asking the same old questions again and again as though they had never been asked before: Is it or isn't it cancer? Will they cure me or won't they? What other remedies are there that might help?

Vadim was the last to leave, toward the end of the day. The gold had arrived and he was being transferred to the radiological ward.

Oleg was left on his own to survey the beds, to remember who had originally occupied them and how many of those had died. It turned out that not very many had.

It was so stuffy in the ward and warm outside that Kostoglotov went to bed leaving the window half-open. The spring air flowed across the window sill and over him. The fresh, lively sounds of spring could he heard from the little courtyards of the tiny old houses, huddled right up against the wall on the other side of the Medical Center. He couldn't see what was happening in these little courtyards beyond the brick wall, but the sounds were now clearly audible—doors slamming, children yelling, drunks roaring, records screeching, and then, after lights out, the deep, powerful voice of a woman singing the lines of a song, in anguish or in pleasure, one couldn't tell which:

So this yo-u-ung and handsome mi-i-ner

She esco-o-orted to her ho-o-ome …

All the songs were about the same thing. So were the thoughts everyone was thinking. But Oleg needed to divert his mind.

On this night of all nights, when he had to get up early and save his energy, Oleg couldn't get to sleep. A succession of thoughts, idle as well as important, kept running through his head: the unresolved argument with Rusanov; the things Shulubin hadn't got round to saying to him; the points he should have made during his talks with Vadim; the head of murdered Beetle; the faces of the Kadmins, animated in the yellow light of the paraffin lamp, as he described to them his million impressions of the town and they told him the news of the
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and what concerts they had heard on the radio while he'd been away. The three of them would feel as if that little low hut contained the whole universe. He lay there imagining the supercilious, absentminded look on the face of eighteen-year-old Inna Ström, whom Oleg would not now dare to approach, and those two invitations to spend the night from two different women. It was something new for him to rack his brains about—how was he supposed to interpret them?

The icy world which had shaped Oleg's soul had no room for “unpremeditated kindness,” He had simply forgotten that such a thing existed. Simple kindness seemed the most unlikely explanation of their having invited him.

What did they have in mind? And what was he expected to do? He had no idea.

He turned from side to side, then back again, while his fingers kept rolling an invisible cigarette.

Oleg got up and dragged himself out for a walk.

The landing was in half-darkness. Just by the door Sibgatov was sitting, as usual, in the tub, struggling to save his sacrum. He was patient and hopeful no longer. Hopelessness had cast its spell over him.

Sitting at the duty nurse's table with her back to Sibgatov was a short, narrow-shouldered woman in a white coat bending under the lamp. She wasn't one of the nurses, though. Tonight was Turgun's night for duty and presumably he was already asleep in the conference room. It was the remarkably well-mannered orderly who wore glasses, Elizaveta Anatolyevna. She had managed to complete all her jobs for the evening and was sitting there, reading.

During the two months Oleg had spent in hospital, this painstaking orderly with the quick, intelligent expression had often crawled under their beds to wash the floor while they lay above her. She would always move Kostoglotov's boots, which he kept secretly in the dark depths under his bed, carefully to one side, and never cursed him for it. She wiped the wall panels, cleaned the spittoons and polished them until they shone. She distributed jars with labels to the patients. Anything heavy, inconvenient or dirty that the nurses were not supposed to touch she had to carry to and fro.

The more uncomplainingly she worked, the less notice they took of her in the wing. As the two-thousand-year-old saying goes, you can have eyes and still not see.

But a hard life improves the vision. There were some in the wing who immediately recognized each other for what they were. Although in no way distinguished by uniform, shoulder insignia or armband, they could still recognize each other easily. It was as if they bore some luminous sign on their foreheads, or stigmata on their feet and palms. (In fact there were plenty of clues: a word dropped here and there; the way it was spoken; a tightening of the lips between words; a smile while others were serious or while others laughed.) The Uzbeks and the Kara-Kalpaks had no difficulty in recognizing their own people in the clinic, nor did those who had once lived in the shadow of barbed wire.

Kostoglotov and Elizaveta Anatolyevna had long ago recognized each other, and since then they had always greeted one another understandingly. There had never been a chance for them to have a talk, though.

Oleg walked up to her table, slapping with his slippers so as not to alarm her. “Good evening, Elizaveta Anatolyevna.”

She was reading without glasses. She turned her head in some indefinably different way from usual, ready to answer the call of duty.

“Good evening.” She smiled with all the dignity of a lady of a certain age receiving a welcome guest under her own roof.

Agreeably and without hurry they regarded one another. The look meant that they were always ready to give one another help.

But there was no help either of them could give.

Oleg inclined his shaggy head to get a better view of the book. “Another French one, is it?” he asked. “What is it?”

“Claude Farrère,” replied the strange orderly, pronouncing the “I” softly.

“Where do you get all these French books?”

“There's a foreign-language library in town. And there's an old woman I borrow them from too.”

Kostoglotov peered sideways at the book as a dog might examine a stuffed bird. “Why always French?” he asked.

The crow's-feet round her eyes and lips revealed her age, her intelligence, and the extent of her suffering.

“They don't hurt you so much,” she answered. Her voice was never loud; she enunciated each word softly.

“Why fear pain?” Oleg objected. It was hard for him to stand for any length of time. She noticed this and pulled up a chair.

“How many years is it? For the last two hundred years, I suppose, we Russians have been oohing and ahing, ‘Paris! Paris!' It's enough to burst your eardrums,” Kostoglotov growled. “We're supposed to know every street, every little café by heart. Just to be spiteful, I don't want to go to Paris at all!”

“Not at all?” She laughed, and he laughed with her. “You'd rather be an exile?”

They laughed identically: a laugh which began but then seemed to trail off.

“It's true, though,” grumbled Kostoglotov. “They're always twittering, blowing themselves up into rages and going in for trivial repartee. It makes you want to take them down a peg or two and ask them, ‘Hey, friends, how would you make out at hard labor? How would you do on black bread without hot food, eh?'”

“That's not fair. I mean, they managed to avoid black bread, and deservedly so.”

“Well, maybe. Maybe I'm just jealous. But I still want to put them down.”

Kostoglotov was shifting from side to side as he sat there. It was as though his body was too tall and a burden to him. Making no attempt to bridge the gap, he suddenly asked her easily and directly, “Was it … because of your husband, or you yourself?”

She answered at once and as straightforwardly as if he was asking her about tonight's duty, “It was the whole family. As for who was punished because of whom—I haven't any idea.”

“Are you all together now?”

“No, my daughter died in exile. After the war we moved here and they arrested my husband for the second time. They took him to the camps.”

“And now you're alone?”

“I have a little boy. He's eight.”

Oleg looked at her face. It hadn't trembled with pity.

Why should it? It was a purely businesslike conversation. “The second time was in '49, was it?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“As one would expect. Which camp?”

“Taishet station.”

Again Oleg nodded. “I know,” he said, “that'll be Camp Lake. He might be right up by the Lena River, but the postal address is Taishet.”

“You've been there, have you?” she asked, unable to restrain her hope.

“No, I've only heard about it. Everyone bumps into everyone else.”

“His name's Duzarsky. You didn't meet him? You never met him anywhere?”

She was still hoping. He must have met him somewhere … he'd tell her about him … Duzarsky … Oleg smacked his lips. No, he hadn't met him. You can't meet everyone.

“He's allowed two letters a year!” she complained.

Oleg nodded. It was the old story.

“Last year there was only one, in May. I've had nothing since then…”

Look, she was hanging on a single thread, a single thread of hope. She was only a woman, after all.

“It doesn't mean anything,” Kostoglotov explained confidently. “Everyone's allowed two letters a year, and you know how many thousands that makes? The censors are lazy. At Spassk camp when a prisoner was checking the stoves during the summer he found a couple of hundred unposted letters in the censors' office stove. They'd forgotten to burn them.”

He'd done his best to explain it gently. It had been going on for so long she ought to be accustomed to it by now. But she was still looking at him in that wild, terrified way.

Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.

“You mean your son was born in exile?”

She nodded.

“And now you have to bring him up on your own salary? And no one will give you a skilled job? They hold your record against you everywhere? You live in some hovel?”

They were framed as questions, but there was no element of curiosity in his questions. It was all so clear, clear enough to make you sick. Elizaveta Anatolyevna's small hands, worn out from the everlasting washing, the floorcloths and the boiling water, and covered in bruises and cuts, were now resting on the little book, soft-covered and printed in small, graceful format on foreign paper, the edges a bit ragged from being cut many years ago.

“If only living in a hovel was my only problem!” she said. “The trouble is, my boy's growing up, he's clever and he asks about everything. How ought I to bring him up? Should I burden him with the whole truth? The truth's enough to sink a grown man, isn't it? It's enough to break your ribs. Or should I hide the truth and bring him to terms with life? Is that the right way? What would his father say? And would I succeed? After all, the boy's got eyes of his own, he can see.”

“Burden him with the truth!” declared Oleg confidently, pressing his palm down on the glass tabletop. He spoke as though he had brought children up himself, as though he had never made a single slip.

She propped up her head, cupping her temples in her hands, which were tucked under her headscarf. She looked at Oleg in alarm. He had touched a nerve.

“It's so difficult, bringing up a son without his father,” she said. “A boy constantly needs something to lean on, an indication where to go, doesn't he? And where is he to get that from? I'm always doing the wrong thing, doing this or doing that when I shouldn't…”

Oleg was silent. It wasn't the first time he had heard this point of view, but he couldn't understand it.

“That's why I read old French novels, but only during night duty, by the way. I have no idea whether these Frenchmen were keeping silent about more important things, or whether the same kind of cruel life as ours was going on outside the world of their books. I have no knowledge of the world and so I read in peace.”

“Like a drug?”

“A blessing,” she said, turning her head. It was like a nun's in that white headscarf. “I know of no books closer to our life that wouldn't irritate me. Some of them take the readers for fools. Others tell no lies; our writers take great pride in that achievement. They conduct deep research into what country lane a great poet traveled along in the year 1800 and something, or what lady he was referring to on page so-and-so. It may not have been an easy task working all that out, but it was safe, oh yes, it was safe. They chose the easy path! But they ignored those who are alive and suffering today.”

In her youth she might have been called “Lily,” There could have been no hint then of the spectacle marks on the bridge of her nose. As a girl she had made eyes, laughed and giggled. There had been lilac and lace in her life, and the poetry of the Symbolists. And no Gypsy had ever foretold that she would end her life as a cleaning woman somewhere out in Asia.

“These literary tragedies are just laughable compared with the ones we live through,” Elizaveta Anatolyevna insisted. “Aïda was allowed to join her loved one in the tomb and to die with him. But we aren't even allowed to know what's happening to them. Even if I went to Camp Lake…”

“Don't go. It won't do any good.”