Cancer Ward (21 page)

Life was for happiness.

“Have you been here long?”

“How long?” Dyomka thought to himself. “Three weeks.”

“How awful!” Asya shook her shoulders. “How boring! No radio, no accordion! And I can imagine the sort of talk there is in the ward!”

Again Dyomka did not want to admit he'd spent whole days reading books and studying. All his values were tottering under the breeze of Asya's words; they seemed exaggerated, cardboard even.

He grinned, although inside he was not grinning at all, and went on, “Well, for instance, we were discussing what men live by.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, why they live, that sort of thing.”

“Pah!” Asya had an answer for everything. “We had an essay about that at school: ‘What does man live for?' They gave us study material full of cotton growers, milkmaids, Civil War heroes. ‘What is your attitude to the brave deed of Pavel Korchagin?' ‘What is your attitude to the heroism of Matrosov?'”
*

“What
is
your attitude?”

“Well what? Should we do what they did? The teachers said we should. So we all wrote that we would. Why spoil things just before the exams? But Sashka Gromov said, ‘Do I have to write all that? Can't I write what I really think?' Our teacher said, ‘I'll give you what you really think. You'll get the worst mark you've ever known.' And one girl wrote—you should have been there, ‘I don't know yet whether I love my country or not.' Our teacher quacked like a duck: ‘What a lousy idea! How dare you
not
love your country?' ‘Perhaps I do love it but I don't know. I must find out for myself.' ‘What is there to find out? You ought to drink in love for your country with your mother's milk. Write it all out again by the next lesson.' We call her ‘Toad.' She comes to class and never smiles. Everyone knows why. She's an old maid. She hasn't made much of her private life, so she takes it out on us. Most of all she hates the pretty girls.”

Asya was throwing the words out casually. She reckoned she knew all right what a pretty face was worth. It was obvious she hadn't been through the disease at all; the pain, the suffering, the loss of appetite and sleep. She hadn't yet lost her freshness or the color in her cheeks. She'd just popped in from one of her gyms or dance floors for a three-day examination.

“But there are
some
good teachers, aren't there?” Dyomka asked, only because he did not want her to fall silent, because he wanted her to keep talking while he sat and looked at her.

“No, not one. They're a lot of puffed-up turkeys. Anyway, school … who wants to talk about school?”

Her cheerful healthiness broke over Dyomka. He sat there grateful to her for her chattering, no longer inhibited, relaxed. He did not want to argue with her, he wanted to agree with everything she said in spite of his own beliefs. He'd have felt easier and more at peace with his leg too if it had stopped gnawing at him and reminding him he had done it an injury and that it was about to get its own back on him. Would it be halfway up the shin? Or up to the knee? Or half the thigh? Because of his leg the question, “What do men live by?” remained one of the most important things in his life. So he asked her, “No, but seriously, what do you think? What … what
do
people live for?”

Oh yes, this little girl understood a thing or two. She turned her greenish eyes toward Dyomka, as if not quite sure whether he was playing a joke on her or being serious.

“What for? What do you mean? For love, of course.”

For love! Tolstoy had said “For love” too, but in what sense? And the girl's teacher had made them write “For love” too, but in what sense? After all, Dyomka was used to having things precise in his mind, to working them out for himself.

“But…” he began hoarsely. (It was simple enough, perhaps, but rather embarrassing to say.) “After all, love is … love isn't the whole of your life. It only happens … sometimes. From a certain age, and up to a certain age.…”

“What age? From what age?” Asya interrogated him angrily as though he had offended her. “It's best at our age. When else? What is there in life except love?”

Sitting there with her little raised eyebrows, she seemed so certain, it wasn't possible to object. Dyomka didn't object. He just wanted to listen to her, not to argue.

She turned toward him and leaned forward, and, without stretching out either of her arms, it was as if she were stretching them across the ruins of all the walls in the world.

“It is
ours
forever. And it is
today.
Don't listen to them wagging their tongues about whether this'll happen or that'll happen. It's love! That's all!”

She was so frank with him, it was as if they'd spent a hundred evenings talking, talking and talking. And if it hadn't been for the orderly with her sunflower seeds, the nurse, the two checkers players, the patients shuffling along the corridors, she really might have been ready, there and then, in that little corner, at the finest age of their lives, to help him understand what men live by.

His leg had gnawed at him constantly, even in his sleep, even a second ago, but he had forgotten it now, it was as if it didn't exist. He looked at the open collar of Asya's dressing gown and his lips parted a little. What had repelled him so much when his mother did it, now for the first time struck him as innocent before the whole world, unstained, capable of outweighing all the evil on earth.

“What about you?” Asya half-whispered sympathetically, but ready to burst into laughter. “Haven't you ever…? You silly, haven't you ever…?”

A red-hot wave struck Dyomka, in the ears, the face and the forehead. It was as if he had been caught stealing. In twenty minutes this little girl had knocked him clean off all he had held fast to for years. His throat was dry as he asked her, like a man begging for mercy, “What about you…?”

Just as behind her dressing gown there was nothing but her nightdress, her breasts and her soul, so behind her words there was nothing hidden from him. She saw no reason to hide.

“Oh, me … since the ninth … There was one in our
eighth class
who got pregnant! And one got caught in an apartment; she was … for money, can you imagine? She had her own savings book. How did it come out? She left it in her exercise book and a teacher found it. The earlier you start, the more exciting it is.… Why wait? It's the atomic age!”

11. Cancer of the Birch Tree

In spite of everything, Saturday evening came as a sort of invisible relief to everyone in the cancer wing, no one quite knew why. Obviously the patients were not released for the weekend from their illness, let alone from thinking about it; but they
were
freed from talking to the doctors and from most of their treatment, and it was probably this which gladdened some eternally childish part of the human make-up.

After his conversation with Asya, Dyomka managed to climb the stairs, although the nagging pain in his leg was growing stronger, forcing him to tread more carefully. He entered the ward to find it more than usually lively. All those who belonged to the ward were there, Sibgatov too, and there were also some guests from the first floor—new arrivals as well as a few he knew like the old Korean, Ni, who had just been allowed out of the ward. (So long as the radium needles were in his tongue they had kept him under lock and key, like a valuable in a bank vault.) One of the new people was a Russian, quite a presentable man with fair, swept-back hair who had something wrong with his throat. He could only speak in a whisper. As it happened, he was sitting on Dyomka's bed, taking up half of it. Everyone was listening, even Mursalimov and Egenberdiev, who didn't understand Russian.

Kostoglotov was making a speech. He was sitting not on his bed but higher up, on his window sill, emphasizing thereby the importance of the moment. (If any of the strict nurses had been on duty he wouldn't have been allowed to sit there, but Turgin was in charge, a male nurse whom the patients treated as one of themselves. He rightly judged that such behavior would hardly turn medical science upside down.) Resting one stockinged foot on the bed, Kostoglotov put the other leg, bent at the knee, across the knee of the first leg like a guitar. Swaying slightly, he was discoursing loudly and excitedly for the whole ward to hear:

“There was this philosopher Descartes. He said, ‘Suspect everything.'”

“But that's nothing to do with our way of life,” Rusanov reminded him, raising a finger in admonition.

“No, of course it isn't,” said Kostoglotov, utterly amazed by the objection. “All I mean is that we shouldn't behave like rabbits and put our complete trust in doctors. For instance, I'm reading this book.” He picked up a large, open book from the window sill. “Abrikosov and Stryukov,
Pathological Anatomy,
medical school textbook. It says here that the link between the development of tumors and the central nervous system has so far been very little studied. And this link is an amazing thing! It's written here in so many words.” He found the place. “‘It happens rarely, but there are cases of self-induced healing.' You see how it's worded? Not recovery through treatment, but actual healing. See?”

There was a stir throughout the ward. It was as though “self-induced healing” had fluttered out of the great open book like a rainbow-colored butterfly for everyone to see, and they all held up their foreheads and cheeks for its healing touch as it flew past.

“Self-induced,” said Kostoglotov, laying aside his book. He waved his hands, fingers splayed, keeping his leg in the same guitar-like pose. “That means that suddenly for some unexplained reason the tumor starts off in the opposite direction! It gets smaller, resolves and finally disappears! See?”

They were all silent, gaping at the fairy tale. That a tumor, one's own tumor, the destructive tumor which had mangled one's whole life, should suddenly drain away, dry up and die by itself?

They were all silent, still holding their faces up to the butterfly. It was only the gloomy Podduyev who made his bed creak and, with a hopeless and obstinate expression on his face, croaked out, “I suppose for that you need to have … a clear conscience.”

It was not clear to everyone whether his words were linked to their conversation or were some thought of his own.

But Pavel Nikolayevich, who on this occasion was listening to his neighbor Bone-chewer with attention, even with a measure of sympathy, turned with a nervous jerk to Podduyev and read him a lecture.

“What idealistic nonsense! What's conscience got to do with it? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Comrade Podduyev!”

But Kostoglotov followed it up straightaway.

“You've hit the nail on the head, Yefrem. Well done! Anything can happen, we don't know a damn thing. For example, after the war I read something very interesting in a magazine, I think it was
Zvezda.
*
It seems that man has some kind of blood-and-brain barrier at the base of his skull. So long as the substance or microbes that kill a man can't get through that barrier into the brain, he goes on living. So what does that depend on?”

The young geologist had not put down his books since he had come into the ward. He was sitting with one on his bed, by the other window, near Kostoglotov, occasionally raising his head to listen to the argument. He did so now. All the guests from the other wards were listening too, as well as those who belonged there. Near the stove Federau, his neck still unmarked and white but already doomed, lay curled up on his side, listening from his pillow.

“… Well, it depends, apparently, on the relationship between the potassium and sodium salts in the barrier. If there's a surplus of one of these salts, I don't remember which one, let's say sodium, then nothing harmful can get through the barrier and the man won't die. But if, on the other hand, there's a surplus of potassium salts, then the barrier won't do its work and he dies. What does the proportion of potassium to sodium depend on? That's the most interesting point. Their relationship depends on a man's attitude of mind! Understand? It means that if a man's cheerful, if he is stanch, then there's a surplus of sodium in the barrier and no illness whatever can make him die! But the moment he loses heart, there's too much potassium, and you might as well order the coffin.”

The geologist had listened to him with a calm expression, weighing him up. He was like a bright, experienced student who can guess more or less what the teacher is going to write next on the blackboard.

“The physiology of optimism,” he said approvingly. “A good idea. Very good.”

Then, as if anxious not to lose time, he dived back into his book.

Pavel Nikolayevich didn't raise any objection now. Bone-chewer was arguing quite scientifically.

“So I wouldn't be surprised,” Kostoglotov continued, “if in a hundred years' time they discover that our organism excretes some kind of cesium salt when our conscience is clear, but not when it's burdened, and that it depends on this cesium salt whether the cells grow into a tumor or whether the tumor resolves.”

Yefrem sighed hoarsely. “I've mucked so many women about, left them with children hanging round their necks. They cried … mine'll never resolve.”

“What's that got to do with it?” Pavel Nikolayevich suddenly lost his temper. “The whole idea's sheer religious rubbish! You've read too much slush, Comrade Podduyev, you've disarmed yourself ideologically. You keep harping on about that stupid moral perfection!”

“What's so terrible about moral perfection?” said Kostoglotov aggressively. “Why should moral perfection give you such a pain in the belly? It can't harm anyone—except someone who's a moral monstrosity!”

“You … watch what you're saying!”