Cancer Ward (19 page)

“I don't understand.” Proshka poked at it with his finger. “What does it say?”

“Just let me think.” Kostoglotov screwed up his eyes. “Take it away, I can think better without it.”

Proshka took his precious certificates and went to pack his things.

Kostoglotov leaned over the banisters, a lock of hair from his forehead dangling over the stairs.

He had never studied Latin properly, or any other foreign language for that matter, or any subject at all except topography, and then only military topography for sergeants. But although he'd never missed a chance to scoff at education in general, he'd always used his eyes and ears to pick up the smallest thing that might broaden his own. He'd done one year in geophysics in 1938 and one incomplete year in geodesy from 1946 to 1947. Between them there had been the army and the war, circumstances hardly suitable for success in the sciences. But Kostoglotov always remembered his dear grandfather's motto: “A fool loves to teach, but a clever man loves to learn.” Even during his years in the army he had always tried to take in useful knowledge and to lend an ear to intelligent conversation, whether it was an officer from another regiment talking or a soldier from his own platoon. True, he lent his ear in such a way that his pride was saved. He would listen as keenly as he could, but pretending all the time there was no real reason for doing so. When he met someone for the first time, he never made an effort to push himself forward or to strike a pose. He first tried to find out who his new friend was, from what background and what part of the world he came, and what sort of a man he was. He would listen and learn a lot like this. But the place where he found he could really get his fill was Butyrka Prison, where the cells were crammed to overflowing after the war. Every evening there were lectures given by professors, doctors of philosophy and people who were experts on some subject, whether it was atomic physics, Western architecture, genetics, poetry or beekeeping. And at all these Lectures Kostoglotov was the most eager listener. Under the bunks at Krasnaya Presnya Prison, on the unplaned boards of the prison transport wagons, sitting on his bottom on the ground at the stopping places, or in the marching column in camp—wherever he was he tried to follow his grandfather's motto and acquire what he had never had the chance of learning in academic lecture halls.

In the camp too he cross-questioned the man who kept the records, a shy, aging little man, a penpusher in the hospital department who was sometimes sent to fetch hot water as well. He turned out to be a teacher of classical philology and ancient literature at Leningrad University. Kostoglotov conceived the idea of taking Latin lessons from him. For this they had to go out and walk up and down the camp area in the freezing weather, with no pencil or paper to be had. The recordkeeper would sometimes take off his glove and write something in the snow with his finger. (There was no self-interest in giving these lessons. It was just that for a brief time they made him feel like a human being. Kostoglotov would have had nothing to pay him with anyway. But they both nearly had to pay for it. The chief camp security officer sent for them separately and interrogated them, suspecting they were preparing an escape and drawing a map of the area in the snow. He never believed a word about the Latin. The lessons had to stop.)

Kostoglotov remembered from these lessons that the word
“casus”
meant case
*
and that
“in-”
was the negative prefix.
“Cor, cordis”
he also knew from the camp, and even if he hadn't, it would not have required great imagination to guess that the word “cardiogram” came from the same root. And the word
“tumor”
he had met on every page of
Pathological Anatomy,
which he had borrowed from Zoya.

So it had not been very difficult to work out Proshka's diagnosis: “Tumor of the heart, case inoperable.”

Not only inoperable, but untreatable too, if they were prescribing ascorbic acid.

Kostoglotov, still leaning over the banisters, was not thinking about his translation from Latin, but about his principle, the one he had put forward to Ludmila Afanasyevna the day before—that a patient has the right to know everything.

But this was a principle for people who had seen a bit of the world, like himself.

What about Proshka?

Proshka had hardly anything to carry. He had no property. Sibgatov, Dyomka and Ahmadjan saw him off. They had to go carefully, all three of them. One had to watch out for his back and one for his leg, and the third had a little crutch to help him along. But Proshka walked along cheerfully, his white teeth sparkling.

It was like being back at the camp, on those rare occasions when they saw off a prisoner who had been released.

Was he to tell him he'd be arrested again as soon as he set foot outside the gates?

“What does it say, then?” asked Proshka as he walked past, quite unconcerned.

“G-god knows.” Kostoglotov twisted his mouth as he spoke, and his scar twisted with it. “Doctors are so cunning these days, you can't read a word they write.”

“Here's to your recovery! All you boys, here's to your recovery! You'll all be going home! Home to your wives!” Proshka shook them all by the hand. Halfway down the stairs he turned round again and gave them a cheerful wave.

He was full of confidence as he went down.

To death.

10. The Children

All she did was run her fingers round Dyomka's tumor and hug his shoulders slightly. Then she moved on. But something fateful happened as she did it: Dyomka felt it. The twigs of his hope were snapped short.

He didn't feel it at once. First there was a lot of talk in the ward and everyone was saying goodbye to Proshka, then he started scheming about how he could move into Proshka's bed by the window, now a lucky one. The light was better there for reading; it was also nearer for talking to Kostoglotov. And then a “new boy” came in.

He was a young man, well tanned, with slightly wavy, tidy, pitch-black hair, probably over twenty years old. He was lugging three books under his left arm, and under his right three more.

“Hello, everyone!” be announced from the doorway. Dyomka took a liking to him, he looked so unassuming and sincere. “Where do I go?” he said, gazing around, for some reason not at the beds but at the walls.

“Will you be reading a lot?” asked Dyomka.

“All the time!”

Dyomka thought for a moment.

“Is it for your work or just reading?”

“For my work.”

“Well, take that bed over there by the window, all right? They'll make it up for you in a minute. What are your books about?”

“Geology, pal,” answered the newcomer.

Dyomka read one of the titles:
Geochemical Exploration of Mineral Deposits.
“Take the bed by the window, then. What's wrong with you?”

“My leg.”

“With me it's my leg too.”

Yes, the newcomer was moving one leg a bit cautiously. But his figure—it was neat as an ice skater's.

They made up the bed for him, and, as if this was the only reason he had come into hospital, he laid five of his books out on the window sill and stuck his nose into the sixth. He read for an hour or so without asking a question or telling anyone anything. Then he was summoned to see the doctors.

Dyomka too tried to read. First it was stereometry. He tried to build some models out of pencils, but the theorems wouldn't go into his head and the diagrams with their lopped-off straight lines and planes with jagged edges kept on reminding him, hinting at the same thing.

He changed to a book which was a bit easier,
The Water of Life
by someone called Kozhevnikov, which had already picked up a Stalin Prize. It was by A. Kozhevnikov, but there were also an S. Kozhevnikov and a V. Kozhevnikov. Dyomka was rather frightened at the thought of how many writers there were. In the last century there had been about ten, all of them great. In this century there were thousands; you only had to change a letter in one of their names and you had a new writer. There was Safronov and there was Safonov, more than one Safonov, apparently. And was there only one Safronov? No one could have time to read all their books, and when you did read one, it was as if you might just as well not have done. Completely unknown writers floated to the surface, won Stalin prizes, then sank back forever. Nearly every book of any size got a prize the year after it appeared. Forty or fifty prizes popped up every year.

Their titles too kept getting mixed up in Dyomka's head. A lot had been written about two films,
The Big Life
and
The Big Family,
one a very healthy influence, the other a very harmful one, but Dyomka simply couldn't remember which was which, especially as he hadn't seen either. It was the same with ideas; the more he read about them, the more confused they seemed. He had only just grasped that to analyze objectively meant to see things as they are in life. But then he read how Panova, a woman novelist, was being attacked for “treading the marshy ground of objectivism.”

Nevertheless he had to cope with it all, understand and remember it.

When Dyomka read
The Water of Life
he couldn't make out whether the book was a drag, or whether it was the mood he was in.

Exhaustion and gloom pressed on him more and more heavily. Did he want someone to talk it over with? Or someone to complain to? Or just someone to have a heart-to-heart talk with, who might perhaps even show him a little pity?

Of course he had read and heard that pity is a humiliating feeling: whether you pity or are pitied.

Even so, he wanted someone to pity him.

Because throughout his life, no one had ever pitied Dyomka.

Here in the ward it was interesting listening and talking to people, but he couldn't talk to them in the way he now wanted. When you're with men you have to behave like a man.

There were women in the clinic, a lot of them, but Dyomka could not make up his mind to cross the threshold of their large, noisy ward. If they had all been healthy women there, it would have been fun to glance in on the way past on the chance of seeing something interesting, but confronted by that great nest of sick women he preferred to turn away from whatever he might see there. Their illness was like a screen of prohibition, much stronger than mere shame. Some of the women he met on the stairs or in the hallways were so depressed, so low-spirited, that they hardly bothered to pull their dressing gowns round them, and he could not avoid seeing their nightdresses round their breasts or below their waists. When this happened, though, he felt no joy, only pain.

This was why he always lowered his eyes when he saw them. It was no easy matter to make friends here.

Aunt Styofa noticed him. She began to ask questions, and they became friendly. She was a mother and a grandmother already, and had, like all grandmothers, wrinkles and an indulgent smile for human weakness. He and Aunt Styofa used to stand about near the top of the stairs and talk for hours. No one had ever listened to Dyomka so attentively and with such sympathy. It was as though she had no one nearer to her than he. And, for him, it was easy to tell her things about himself and even about his mother which he would never have revealed to anyone else.

Dyomka was two years old when his father was killed in the war. Then he had a stepfather, not affectionate but just, and quite possible to live with. His mother became—he had never spoken the word in front of Styofa although he himself had long been certain of it—a whore. His stepfather left her—quite rightly. After that his mother used to bring men to their one room. They always used to drink, and they tried to make Dyomka drink too, but he wouldn't take it. And then the men stayed with her: some till midnight, others till morning. There was no partition in the room, and no darkness because light came in from the street lamps. And it sickened Dyomka so much that the very thought of it, which his friends found so thrilling, seemed to him like so much pigswill.

And so it went on during the fifth and sixth classes. When he reached the seventh class, however, Dyomka went to live with the school watchman, an old man, and the school gave him two meals a day. His mother didn't even try to get him back. She was glad to wash her hands of him.

Dyomka spoke angrily about his mother, he couldn't speak calmly. Aunt Styofa listened to him, shook her head, and said strangely when she'd heard him out: “It takes all sorts to make a world. We're all in the world together!”

Last year Dyomka had moved into a factory housing estate. There was a night school there and they gave him a place in a hostel. He worked as a lathe-operator's apprentice, and later they made him a second-grade operator. He wasn't very good at the job, but as he wanted to be different from his devil-may-care mother, he didn't drink or yell rowdy songs. Instead he studied. He did well in the eighth class and finished the first half of the ninth.

Besides that there was only football. Sometimes he used to run about playing football with the boys. And fate punished him for this, the one little pleasure he enjoyed: in a scramble for the ball someone accidentally hacked him on the shin with his boot. Dyomka didn't even think about it at the time. He limped for a bit and then the pain was gone. But in the autumn his leg started to ache more and more. It was a long time before he went to the doctor with it. They gave him warm compresses for it but it got worse. They sent him along the usual medical obstacle course, first to the provincial center and now here.

“Why is it,” Dyomka would ask Aunt Styofa, “that there's such rank injustice in fortune itself? There are people whose lives run smooth as silk from beginning to end, I know there are, while others' are a complete louse-up. And they say a man's life depends on himself. It doesn't depend on him a bit.”

“It depends on God,” said Aunt Styofa soothingly. “God sees everything. You should submit to him, Dyomusha.”