Cancer Ward (77 page)

It was the collar size that really stunned Oleg. He could not imagine a collar possibly having its own special number. Stifling a wounded groan, he walked right away from the shirts. Collar size too—really! What good was this refined sort of life? Why go back to it? If you remember your collar size, doesn't it mean you're bound to forget something else, something more important?

That collar size had made him feel quite weak …

In the household goods department Oleg remembered how Elena Alexandrovna had dreamed of owning a lightweight steam iron, even though she had not actually asked him to bring her one. He hoped there would not be one, just as none of the other household necessities were available. Then both his conscience and his shoulders would be free of a great burden. But the assistant showed him just such an iron there on the counter.

“This iron, is it really a lightweight one, miss?” Kostoglotov was weighing it doubtfully in his hand.

“Why should I tell you a lie?” said the assistant, curling her lips. There was something metaphysical about her gaze. She was plunged deep in faraway thought, as if the customers hanging around the counter were not real people but shadows detached from this world.

“I don't mean you'd lie to me, but you might be making a mistake,” suggested Oleg.

The assistant returned unwillingly to this mortal life. Undertaking the intolerable effort of shifting a material object, she put another iron down in front of him. After that she had no strength left to explain anything in words. Once again she floated off into the realm of the metaphysical.

Well, comparison reveals the truth. The lightweight one was in fact a full kilo lighter. Duty demanded that he buy it. She was quite exhausted after carrying the iron, yet her weary fingers still had to write him out a bill, her weakening lips to pronounce the word “Control.” (What control was this? Who were they going to check? Oleg had completely forgotten. Goodness, it was difficult getting back into this world!)

But wasn't it she who was supposed to carry this lightweight iron all the way to the control point, her feet barely touching the floor? Oleg felt quite guilty at having distracted the assistant from her drowsy meditations.

He tucked the iron away in his duffel bag and immediately his shoulders felt the weight. Already he was beginning to feel hot and stuffy in his thick overcoat. He must get out of the store as soon as possible.

But then he saw himself in a huge mirror reaching from floor to ceiling. He knew it wasn't right for a man to stand gazing at himself, but the fact was there wasn't a mirror like that in the whole of Ush-Terek, he hadn't seen himself in a mirror that large for ten years. So, not caring what people thought, he just stood gazing at himself, first from a distance, then a little closer, then closer still.

There was no trace of the military man he considered himself to be. His greatcoat and boots only vaguely resembled a greatcoat and boots. His shoulders had drooped long ago and his body was incapable of holding itself straight. Without a hat and without a belt, he looked less like a soldier than a convict on the run or a young lad from the country in town for the day to do a bit of buying and selling. But for that you needed a bit of bravado, and Kostoglotov looked exhausted, devastated, fearfully neglected.

It was a pity he had caught sight of himself. Until then he had been able to imagine himself a bold, soldierly figure who could look condescendingly down on the passers-by and ogle a woman as an equal. This terrible duffel bag on his back had stopped looking soldierly long ago, it now looked like a beggar's bundle. In fact, he could have sat there in the street and held out his hand and people would have thrown kopecks to him.

But he had to be going …

Only how could he go to her looking like this?

He walked on a bit further and found himself in the haberdashery or gifts department. They were selling women's costume jewelry.

The women were twittering, trying things on, going through things and rejecting them, when this half-soldier, half-beggar, with the scar low down on his cheek stopped among them and stood dully on the spot, gazing around.

The assistant smiled. What did this chap want to buy for his country sweetheart? She kept an eye on him, too, in case he pinched anything.

But he did not ask to be shown anything or pick anything up. He just stood there looking dully round.

The whole department was glittering with glass. Precious stones, metals and plastic. He stood before it, his head lowered like an ox before a road barrier smeared with phosphorus. Kostoglotov's head could not break through this barrier.

Then he understood. He understood how wonderful it is to buy something pretty for a woman, to pin it on her breast or hang it round her neck. So long as he had not known or remembered, he had been innocent. But he was conscious now, very acutely, that from this moment on he could not go to Vega without taking her a present.

He couldn't give her anything, he just didn't dare. He couldn't give her anything at all. There was no point in even looking at the expensive gifts. And as for the cheap stuff, what did he know about it? Those brooches, for instance—no, not brooches, those decorated pendants with pins, especially that hexagonal one with the sparkling glass crystals—wasn't that a good one?

But perhaps it was trashy and vulgar?… Perhaps a woman of taste would be ashamed even to take such a thing in her hand?… Perhaps they had given up wearing that type of thing long ago, it might be out of fashion?… How was he to know what they were not wearing?

How could he possibly manage it—arrive to spend the night and then offer her a brooch, tongue-tied and blushing?

Waves of confusion were battering him like a succession of balls in a bowling-alley.

The dense complexity of this world was too much for him, a world where one had to know women's fashions, be able to choose woman's jewelry, look respectable in front of a mirror and remember one's collar size …

Yet Vega actually lived in this world, she knew everything about it and felt at home in it.

He felt embarrassed and depressed. If he was going to see her the time to go was now, now!

But … he couldn't.

He … he had lost the impulse. He … he was afraid.

They were separated by this department store …

And so Oleg staggered out of the cursed temple into which, obedient to the idols of the market place, he had run so recently and with such coarse greed. He was weighed down by depression, as exhausted as if he had spent thousands of roubles, as if he had tried something on in every single department, had it all wrapped up for him and was now carrying on his bent back a mountain of boxes and parcels.

But he only had the iron.

He was so tired, it was as if he had spent hours buying one vain object after another. And what had become of the pure, rosy morning promising him a completely new, beautiful life? Those feathery clouds which took centuries to design? And the diving vessel of the moon?

Where was it he had traded in his untouched soul of this morning? In the department store … No, earlier on, he had drunk it away with that wine. Or even earlier, he had eaten it away with the
shashlik.

What he should have done was to take one look at the flowering apricot and rush straight off to see Vega …

Oleg began to feel nauseous, not only from gaping at the shop-windows and signs, but also from jostling his way along the streets among that ever-thickening swarm of worried or cheerful people. He wanted to lie down somewhere in the shade by a stream, just lie there and purify himself. The only place in town he could go to was the zoo, the place Dyomka had asked him to visit.

Oleg felt that the animal world was more understandable anyway, more on his own level.

He was feeling weighed down too because he was appallingly hot in the heavy greatcoat. He didn't feel much like dragging it along with him separately, though. He started to ask people the way to the zoo, and was led there by a succession of well-laid-out streets, broad and quiet, with some paving slabs and spreading trees. No stores, no photographs, no theaters, no wineshops—nothing like that here. Even the trolley cars were rumbling somewhere far away. Here it was a nice, peaceful, sunny day, warming him through even under the trees. Little girls were jumping about playing hopscotch on the sidewalks. Householders were planting their front gardens or putting in sticks for climbing plants.

Near the zoo gates it was a veritable children's kingdom. It was a school holiday, and what a day!

The first thing Oleg saw as he walked into the zoo was the spiral-horned goat. There was a towering rock in its enclosure with a sharp slope and then a precipice. Right there, its front legs on the edge of the precipice, the proud goat stood motionless on its strong, slender legs, with its fantastic horns—long and curved, as though wound spiral after spiral out of a ribbon of bone. It wasn't a beard it had, but a luxuriant mane hanging low on each side to its knees, like a mermaid's hair. Yet the goat had such dignity that the hair did not make it look either effeminate or comic.

Anyone who waited by the spiral-horn goat's cage in the hope of seeing its self-assured little hoofs change position on the smooth rock would have despaired. It had stood there a long time just like a statue, like a continuation of the rock itself. And when there was no breeze to make its straggly hair flutter it was impossible to prove it was alive, that it wasn't just a trick.

Oleg stood there for five minutes and departed in admiration. The goat had not even stirred. That was the sort of character a man needed to get through life.

Walking across to the beginning of another path, Oleg saw a lively crowd, children mostly, gathered round one of the cages. There was something charging frantically about inside, rushing around, but always on the same spot. It turned out to be a squirrel in a wheel—exactly like the one in the proverb. But the proverb was by now a bit stale—and one had never really been able to picture it. Why a squirrel? And why in a wheel? But here was the squirrel, acting it out. It had a tree trunk inside its cage too and dry branches spreading out at the top. But someone had perfidiously hung a wheel next to the tree, a drum with one side open to the viewer. Along the inside rim were fixed cross pieces so that the whole rim was in fact a continuous, endless staircase. And there, quite oblivious of its tree and the slender branches up above, stood the squirrel in its wheel—even though no one had forced it there or enticed it with food—attracted only by the illusion of sham activity and movement. It had probably begun by running lightly up the steps out of curiosity, not knowing then what a cruel, obsessional thing it was. (It hadn't known the first time, but now at the thousandth time it knew well enough, yet it made no difference.)

The wheel was revolving at a furious pace. The squirrel's russet, spindly body and smoky-red tail unfurled in an arc of mad galloping. The cross pieces of the wheeled staircase rippled until they melted together with speed. Every ounce of the animal's strength was being used. Its heart was nearly bursting, but still it couldn't raise its front paws higher than the first step.

The people who had been standing there before Oleg saw it running just as Oleg did during those few minutes. Nothing ever changed. There was no external force in the cage to stop the wheel or rescue the squirrel. There was no power of reason to make it understand. “Stop! It's all in vain!” No, there was clearly only one inevitable way out, the squirrel's death. Oleg didn't want to see that, so he walked on. Here were two meaningful examples, on the right and left of the entrance, two equally possible modes of existence with which the zoo greeted young and old alike.

Oleg walked past the silver pheasant, the golden pheasant, and the pheasant with red and blue feathers. He admired the indescribably turquoise neck of the peacock, the meter-wide spread of its tail and its pink and gold fringe. After his monochrome exile and life in hospital, his eye feasted on the colors.

It wasn't particularly hot here. The zoo was spaciously laid out and the trees were beginning to give shade. Oleg felt more and more rested as he walked past a whole poultry farm—Andalusian hens, Toulouse and Kholmogory geese—and climbed up the hill where they kept the cranes, hawks and vultures. Finally, on a rock covered by a tentlike cage towering high over the whole zoo, he came to where the white-headed vultures lived. If it hadn't been for the sign, they might have been taken for eagles. They had been housed as high up as possible, but the roof of the cage was quite low over the rock, and these great, gloomy birds were in torment, spreading their wings and beating them although there was nowhere to fly.

When Oleg saw the tormented vultures he moved his shoulder-blades as if about to spread his wings. (Or was it just the iron beginning to press into his back?)

Everything round him he explained in his own way. One of the cages had a notice on it: “White owls do not thrive in captivity.” So they know that! And they still lock them up! What sort of degenerate owls, he wondered, did thrive in captivity?

Another notice read: “The porcupine leads a nocturnal life.” We know what that means: they summon it at half-past nine in the evening and let it go at four in the morning.

Again: “The badger lives in deep, complicated burrows.” Aha—just like us! Good for you, badger; how else can one live? He's got a snout of striped ticking, like an old bum's clothes.

Oleg had such a perverse view of everything that it was probably a bad idea for him to have come, just as he shouldn't have gone into the department store.

Much of the day had already gone by, but the promised joys had still not appeared.

Oleg emerged at the bears' den. A black one with a white “tie” was standing poking its nose into the wiring between the bars. Suddenly it jumped up and hung by its forepaws from the grill. It wasn't so much a white tie as a kind of priest's chain with a cross over the chest. It jumped up and hung there. What other way did it have of showing its despair?