Cancer Ward (22 page)

Pavel Nikolayevich flashed his spectacles with their glinting frames; he held his head straight and rigid, as if the tumor wasn't pushing it under the right of the jaw. “There are questions on which a definite opinion has been established, and they are no longer open to discussion.”

“Why can't I discuss them?” Kostoglotov glared at Rusanov with his large dark eyes.

“Come on, that's enough,” shouted the other patients, trying to make peace.

“All right, comrade,” whispered the man without a voice from Dyomka's bed. “You were telling us about birch fungus…”

But neither Rusanov nor Kostoglotov was ready to give way. They knew nothing about one another, but they looked at each other with bitterness.

“If you wish to state your opinion, at least employ a little elementary knowledge.” Pavel Nikolayevich pulled his opponent up, articulating each word syllable by syllable. “The moral perfection of Leo Tolstoy and company was described once and for ail by Lenin, and by Comrade Stalin, and by Gorky.”

“Excuse me,” answered Kostoglotov, restraining himself with difficulty. He stretched one arm out toward Rusanov. “No one on this earth ever says anything ‘once and for all.' If they did, life would come to a stop and succeeding generations would have nothing to say.”

Pavel Nikolayevich was taken aback. The tops of his delicate white ears turned quite red, and round red patches appeared on his cheeks.

(He shouldn't be expostulating, entering into a Saturday afternoon argument with this man. He ought to be
checking up
on who he was, where he came from, where his background was, and whether his blatantly false views weren't a danger in the post he occupied.)

“I am not claiming,” Kostoglotov hastened to unburden himself, “that I know a lot about social science. I haven't had much occasion to study it. But with my limited intelligence I understand that Lenin only attacked Leo Tolstoy for seeking moral perfection when it led society away from the struggle with arbitrary rule and from the approaching revolution. Fine! But why try to stop a man's mouth”—he pointed with both his large hands to Podduyev—“just when he has started to think about the meaning of life, when he himself is on the borderline between life and death? Why should it irritate you so much if he helps himself by reading Tolstoy? What harm does it do? Or perhaps you think Tolstoy should have been burned at the stake? Perhaps the Government Synod
*
didn't finish its work?”

(Kostoglotov, not having studied social science, had mixed up “holy” and “government.”)

Both Pavel Nikolayevich's ears had now ripened to a full, rich, juicy red. This was a direct attack on a government institution (true, he had not quite heard
which
institution). The fact that it was made in front of a random audience not hand-picked made the situation more serious still. What he had to do now was stop the argument tactfully and
check up
on Kostoglotov at the first opportunity. So he did not make an issue of it. Instead he said in Podduyev's direction, “Let him read Ostrovsky.
**
That'll do him more good.”

But Kostoglotov did not appreciate Pavel Nikolayevich's tact. Without listening or taking in anything the other said, he continued recklessly putting forward his own ideas to an unqualified audience.

“Why stop a man from thinking? After all, what does our philosophy of life boil down to? ‘Oh, life is so good!… Life, I love you. Life is for happiness!' What profound sentiments. Any animal can say as much without our help, any hen, cat, or dog.”

“Please! I beg you!” Pavel Nikolayevich was warning him now, not out of civil duty, not as one of the great actors on the stage of history, but as its meanest extra. “We mustn't talk about death! We mustn't even remind anyone of it!”

“It's no use begging!” Kostoglotov waved him aside with a spade-like hand. “If we can't talk about death
here,
where on earth can we? Oh, I suppose we live forever?”

“So what? What of it?” pleaded Pavel Nikolayevich. “What are you suggesting? You want us to talk and think about death the whole time? So that the potassium salts get the upper hand?”

“Not all the time,” Kostoglotov said rather more quietly, seeing he was beginning to contradict himself. “Not all the time, only sometimes. It's useful. Because what do we keep telling a man all his life? ‘You're a member of the collective! You're a member of the collective!' That's right. But only while he's alive. When the time comes for him to die, we release him from the collective. He may be a member, but he has to die alone. It's only he who is saddled with the tumor, not the whole collective. Now you, yes, you!”—he poked his finger rudely at Rusanov—“come on, tell us, what are you most afraid of in the world now? Of dying! What are you most afraid of talking about? Of death! And what do we call that? Hypocrisy!”

“Within limits that's true.” The nice geologist spoke quietly, but everyone heard him. “We're so afraid of death, we drive away all thought of those who have died. We don't even look after their graves.”

“Well, that's right,” Rusanov agreed. “Monuments to heroes should be properly maintained, they even say so in the newspapers.”

“Not only heroes, everyone,” said the geologist gently in a voice which, it seemed, he was incapable of raising. It wasn't only his voice that was thin, he was too. His shoulders gave no hint of physical strength. “Many of our cemeteries are shamefully neglected. I saw some in the Altai Mountains and over toward Novosibirsk. There are no fences, the cattle wander into them, and pigs dig them up. Is that part of our national character? No, we always used to respect graves…”

“To revere graves,” added Kostoglotov.

Pavel Nikolayevich had stopped listening. He had lost interest in the argument. Forgetting himself, he had made an incautious movement and his tumor had given him such a jab of reverberating pain in the neck and head that he was no longer concerned with enlightening these boobies and exploding their nonsense. After all, it was only by chance he had landed in this clinic. He shouldn't have had to live through such a crucial period of his illness in the company of people like this. But the main, the most terrible thing was that the tumor had not subsided or softened in the least after his injection the day before. The very thought gave him a cold feeling in the belly. It was all very well for Bone-chewer to talk about death.
He
was getting better.

Dyomka's guest, the portly man without a voice, sat there holding his larynx to ease the pain. Several times he tried to intervene with something of his own or to interrupt the unpleasant argument, but nobody could hear his whisper and he was unable to talk any louder. All he could do was lay two fingers on his larynx to lessen the pain and help the sound. Diseases of the tongue and throat, which made it impossible to talk, are somehow particularly oppressive. A man's whole face becomes no more than an imprint of this oppression. Dyomka's guest now tried to stop the argument, making wide sweeps of his arms. Even his tiny voice was now more easily heard. He moved forward along the passageway between the beds.

“Comrades! Comrades!” he wheezed huskily. Even though the pain in his throat was not your own, you could still feel it. “Don't let's be gloomy! We're depressed enough by our illnesses as it is. Now you, comrade”—he walked between the beds and almost beseechingly stretched out one hand as if to a deity (the other was still at his throat) toward the disheveled Kostoglotov sitting on high—“you were telling us such interesting things about birch fungus. Please go on!”

“Come on, Oleg, tell us about the birch fungus. What was it you said?” Sibgatov was asking.

The bronze-skinned Ni could only move his tongue with difficulty because part of it had dropped off during his previous course of treatment and the rest had now swollen, but indistinctly he too was asking Kostoglotov to continue.

The others were asking him to as well.

A disturbing feeling of lightness ran through Kostoglotov's body. For years he had been used to keeping his mouth shut, his head bowed and his hands behind his back in front of men who were
free.
It had become almost a part of his nature, like a stoop you are born with. He hadn't rid himself of it even after a year in exile. Even now it seemed the natural, simple thing to clasp his hands behind his back when he walked along the paths of the hospital grounds. But now these free men, who for so many years had been forbidden to talk to him as an equal, to discuss anything serious with him as one man to another or—even more bitter—to shake hands with him or take a letter from him—these free men were sitting in front of him, suspecting nothing, while he lounged casually on a window sill playing the schoolmaster. They were waiting for
him
to bolster up their hopes. He also realized that he no longer set himself apart from free men, as he used to, but was joining them in the common misfortune.

In particular he had grown out of the habit of speaking to a lot of people, of addressing any kind of conference, session or meeting. And yet here he was, becoming an orator. It all seemed wildly improbable to Kostoglotov, like an amusing dream. He was like a man charging full-tilt across ice, who has to rush forward, come what may. And so carried by the cheerful momentum of his recovery, unexpected but, it seemed, real, he went on and on.

“Friends!” he said, with uncharacteristic volubility. “This is an amazing tale. I heard it from a patient who came in for a checkup while I was still waiting to be admitted. I had nothing to lose, so straightaway I sent off a postcard with this hospital's address on it for the reply. And an answer has come today, already! Only twelve days, and an answer! Dr. Maslennikov even apologizes for the delay because, it seems, he has to answer on an average ten letters a day. And you can't write a reasonable letter in less than half an hour, can you? So he spends five hours a day just writing letters—and he doesn't get a thing for it!”

“No, and what's more, he has to spend four roubles a day on stamps,” Dyomka interjected.

“That's right, four roubles a day. Which means a hundred and twenty a month. And he doesn't
have
to do it, it's not his job, he just does it as a good deed. Or how should I put it?” Kostoglotov turned maliciously toward Rusanov. “A
humane
act, is that right?”

But Pavel Nikolayevich was finishing reading a newspaper report of the budget, He pretended not to hear.

“And he has no staff, no assistants or secretaries. He does it all on his own time. And he doesn't get any honor and glory either! You see, when we're ill a doctor is like a ferryman: we need him for an hour and after that we forget he exists. As soon as he cures you, you throw his letters away. At the end of his letter he complains that his patients, especially the ones he's helped, stop writing to him. They don't tell him about the doses they take or the results. And then
he
goes on to ask
me
to write to him regularly—he's the one who asks me, when we should be bowing down before him.”

In his heart Kostoglotov was convincing himself that he had been warmly touched by Maslennikov's selfless industry, that be wanted to talk about him and praise him, because it would mean he wasn't entirely spoiled himself. But he was already spoiled to the extent that he would not have been able to put himself out like Maslennikov day after day for other people.

“Tell us everything in the proper order, Oleg!” said Sibgatov, with a faint smile of hope.

How he wanted to be cured! In spite of the numbing, obviously hopeless treatment, month after month and year after year—suddenly and finally to be cured! To have his back healed again, to straighten himself up, walk with a firm tread, be a fine figure of a man! “Hello, Ludmila Afanasyevna! I'm all right now!”

They all longed to find some miracle doctor, or some medicine the doctors here didn't know about. Whether they admitted as much or denied it, they all without exception in the depths of their hearts believed there was a doctor, or a herbalist, or some old witch of a woman somewhere, whom you only had to find and get that medicine from to be saved.

No, it wasn't possible, it just wasn't possible that their lives were already doomed.

However much we laugh at miracles when we are strong, healthy and prosperous, if life becomes so hedged and cramped that only a miracle can save us, then we clutch at this unique, exceptional miracle and believe in it!

And so Kostoglotov identified himself with the eagerness with which his friends were hanging on his lips and began to talk fervently, believing his own words even more than he'd believed the letter when he'd first read it to himself.

“Well, to start from the beginning, Sharaf, here it is. One of our old patients told me about Dr. Maslennikov. He said that he was an old pre-Revolutionary country doctor from the Alexandrov district near Moscow. He'd worked dozens of years in the same hospital, just like they used to do in those days, and he noticed that, although more and more was being written about cancer in medical literature, there was no cancer among the peasants who came to him. Now why was that?”

(Yes, why
was
that? Which of us from childhood has not shuddered at the mysterious? At contact with that impenetrable yet yielding wall behind which there seems to be nothing, yet from time to time we catch a glimpse of something which might be someone's shoulder, or else someone's hip? In our everyday, open, reasonable life, where there is no place for mystery, it suddenly flashes at us, “Don't forget me! I'm here!”)

“So he began to investigate, he began to investigate,” repeated Kostoglotov. He never repeated anything, but now found pleasure in doing so. “And he discovered a strange thing; that the peasants in his district saved money on their tea, and instead of tea brewed up a thing called
chaga,
or, in other words, birch fungus…”