Cancer Ward (25 page)

Most of Zoya's girl friends, especially the medical students, believed that everything possible should be grabbed from life immediately and with both hands. In the face of this prevailing philosophy it was absolutely impossible to survive the first, second and third years as a sort of old maid with an excellent knowledge of theory and nothing more. Zoya had been through it all. Several times with different young men she had passed through the various stages of intimacy, gradually permitting more and more, then capture and finally domination. She had experienced the overwhelming moments, when a bomb might have dropped on the house without making any difference, as well as the calm and sluggish moments when pieces of clothing are picked up from the floor or the chair where they've been thrown—garments which otherwise should never be seen together. Yet they both looked at them, and by now there was nothing at all surprising in it, or in putting hers on in front of him.

Indeed all this was a strong sensation, and by her third year Zoya was well out of the “old maid” category. Still, it was never the real thing. It all lacked that stable, deliberate continuity which gives stability to life, indeed gives life itself.

Zoya was only twenty-three, but she had seen and could remember quite a lot: the long, frenzied evacuation of Smolensk, first in a freight car, then in a barge, then in another freight car. For some reason she remembered particularly the man next to her in the car taking a little piece of string to measure everyone's strip on the plank bed and proving that Zoya's family was taking up two centimeters more than it should. She remembered the hungry, tense life of the war years, when people spoke of nothing but ration cards and prices on the black market, when Uncle Fedya would steal her bread ration from her bedside table. And now there was this malignant suffering from cancer, these lost lives, these wearisome stories from the patients, and their tears.

Compared to all this, the squeezing, hugging and the rest were no more than drops of fresh water in the salt sea of life. But there were never enough to quench the thirst.

Did this mean that marriage was the only alternative, that that was where happiness lay? The young men she met all danced and went for walks with the same aim in mind: to warm themselves up a bit, have their fun and then clear out. They used to say among themselves, “I could get married, but it never takes me more than an evening or two to find a new ‘friend,' so why should I bother?”

Indeed, why marry when women were so easy to get? If a great load of tomatoes suddenly arrived in the market, you couldn't just triple the price of yours, they'd rot. How could you be inaccessible when everyone around you was ready to surrender?

A registry office wedding didn't help either. Zoya had learned this from the experience of Maria, a Ukrainian nurse she did alternate shifts with. Maria had relied on the registry office, but a week after the marriage her husband left her, went away and completely disappeared. For seven years she'd brought up her child on her own, and to top it all, she was trapped by her marriage.

When Zoya went to parties and drank wine, and if her unsafe days were coming up, she was as alert as a sapper walking through a minefield.

Zoya had another example, even closer to her than Maria's. She had seen the rotten lives of her own father and mother. She'd watched them quarreling and making up, separating to live in different towns and then coming together again, tormenting each other all their lives. Zoya would sooner have drunk a glass of sulphuric acid than repeat her mother's mistake.

Theirs was yet another example of a registry office marriage turning out worse than useless.

Zoya felt a certain balance and harmony in her body, in the relation of each part of it to the rest, and in her temperament and her outlook on life. Any extension or broadening of her life could only take place within that harmony.

Any man who, in the intervals between sliding his hands over her body, said silly, vulgar things or repeated bits from a film script, as Kolya had done last night, immediately destroyed the harmony, and there was no chance whatever of Zoya really falling for him.

Jolted to and fro by the movement of the trolley, Zoya stood on the rear platform while the conductress railed at a young man who hadn't bought a ticket (he just stood there listening to her, he still wouldn't buy one). She stayed there till the car reached the terminus. Then it began to turn round. On the other side of the turntable a waiting crowd had already gathered. The young man the conductress had scolded jumped down while the trolley was still moving, followed by a young boy, and Zoya, too, jumped smartly from the moving car. It made it less far to walk.

It was one minute past eight. Zoya broke into a run along the winding asphalt path of the medical center. As a nurse she was not supposed to run, but in a student it was forgivable.

By the time she'd reached the cancer wing, taken off her overcoat, put on her white coverall and run upstairs it was already ten past eight, and things might have been awkward for her if Olympiada Vladislavovna or Maria had been on duty. Maria would have scolded her for being ten minutes late as severely as if she'd missed half the shift. But luckily it was the student Turgun who was on. Turgun was a Karakalpak,
*
and always indulgent, especially toward her. He tried to punish her by smacking her bottom, but she wouldn't let him, and they both laughed as she pushed him away toward the staircase.

He was still a student, but because he was a Karakalpak he had already been appointed senior doctor of a village hospital in that area. In fact, these were his last few months of irresponsible freedom.

Turgun gave Zoya the treatment book. They also had a special task assigned to them by Mita, the matron. On Sundays there were no rounds, treatments were cut short, and there were no post-transfusion patients. Instead there was the added worry of having to see that relatives did not slip into the wards without the duty doctor's permission, but in spite of this Mita usually reallocated to whoever was on day duty on Sunday some of the endless statistical work that she could not manage to complete herself.

Today the task was to go through a thick stack of patients' cards from December of the previous year, 1954. Pouting her lips almost into a whistle, and snapping the corners of the cards, Zoya flicked through the pile. She was working out how many there were and whether there'd be any time left over to do a bit of embroidery, when she sensed a tall shadow beside her. Not in the least surprised, she turned her head (heads can be turned in all sorts of different ways) and saw Kostoglotov. Clean-shaven, his hair almost tidy, only the scar on his chin reminded her as always that he had been a cutthroat.

“Good morning, Zoyenka,” he said, the perfect gentleman.

“Good morning.” She shook her head, as if dissatisfied or doubtful about something, but in fact for no reason at all.

His great dark brown eyes looked at her.

“I can't see, did you do what I asked you?”

“What was that?” Zoya frowned in surprise. (It was an old trick and it always worked.)

“Don't you remember? I made a bet with myself about it.”

“You borrowed my
Pathological Anatomy.
I remember that all right.”

“Oh yes, I'll give it back to you in a minute. Thank you.”

“How did you get on with it?”

“I think I found out what I wanted to know.”

“Have I done you any harm?” Zoya asked, quite seriously this time. “I wished afterwards I'd never given it to you.”

“No, Zoyenka.” He touched her arm lightly to emphasize his point. “On the contrary, the book cheered me up. It was golden good of you to give it to me. But”—he looked at her neck—“could you undo the top button of your coat?”

“Whatever for?” said Zoya in astonishment (that clever trick again). “I'm not hot.”

“You are. You've gone quite red.”

“So I have.” She laughed good-naturedly. In fact she did feel like taking her coat off because she still hadn't got her breath back after running so fast and her tussle with Turgun. So she opened the neck.

The little gold threads shone through the gray.

Kostoglotov widened his eyes, looked at her and said almost in a whisper, “That's fine. Thank you. You'll show me more of it later on, won't you?”

“Depends on what your bet is.”

“I'll let you know, but later, all right? We'll have some time together today, won't we?”

Zoya rolled her eyes like a doll. “Only if you come and give me a hand. I look red because I've got so much work today.”

“Not me, not if it means sticking needles into living bodies.”

“What if it's medical statistics? They won't break your back, will they?”

“I have great respect for statistics, so long as they're not secret.”

“Well, come along after breakfast.” Zoya threw him a smile. She thought she ought to give him something in advance for his help.

They were already taking breakfast round the wards.

Last Friday morning when the day nurse came on, Zoya had been interested enough in the night's conversation to go along to the admissions register and look up Kostoglotov's record card.

It turned out his name was Oleg Filimonovich (this rather heavy patronymic was a good match for such an unpleasant-sounding last name, although his first name did something to tone the others down). He was born in 1920, and in spite of his thirty-four years was in fact unmarried, which seemed rather improbable. And he
had
lived in a place called Ush-Terek. He had no relatives whatever (in the cancer clinic there was a rule that every patient's close relatives must be listed). He was a topographer by profession but had worked as a land surveyor.

None of this shed any light on the man, it only made things more mysterious.

Then today she'd read in the treatment book that from Friday he was to receive daily intramuscular injections of Sinestrol, two cc.'s. It was the night nurse's job to give it, which meant it wouldn't be hers today. Still, the idea made Zoya twitch her pouting lips like a hedgehog.

After breakfast Kostoglotov arrived with the textbook on pathological anatomy, all ready to help. But just at that moment, Zoya was running in and out of the wards doling out medicines that had to be drunk or swallowed three or four times a day.

At last they sat down at her little table. Zoya produced a large sheet of paper for the rough of the graph. All the information had to be transferred to it by making pen strokes in different columns. She began to explain how it should be done (she'd already forgotten some of it herself) and to draw lines on the paper with a big heavy ruler.

Zoya knew just how useful these “helpers” usually were, these youngsters and unmarried men (married ones, too, sometimes). Their “help” invariably degenerated into giggles, jokes, flirting and mistakes in the register. Zoya was prepared to put up with the mistakes, because even the most unoriginal flirting was infinitely more interesting than the most impressive register. Zoya had no objection to continuing today a game that brightened her duty hours.

Consequently she was quite amazed when Kostoglotov immediately stopped ogling her, dropped his special tone of voice and quickly cottoned on to what was to be done. He even explained some of it back to her. He plunged into the cards, reading out the data on each one while she made pen marks in the columns of the big register.

“Neuroblastoma…” he dictated, “… hypernephroma … sarcoma of the nasal cavity … tumor of the spinal medulla…” He made a point of asking about everything he did not understand.

They were supposed to count the number of tumors of each type occurring during the time covered by the register, with separate categories for men and women and for each decade of their life, and to list the various types of treatment used and their volume. Then for each category they had to record the five possible results: complete cure, improvement, no change, deterioration or death. Zoya's helper took special note of these five possibilities. He immediately noticed that there were hardly any complete cures; there weren't very many deaths either, though.

“I see they don't allow them to die here. They manage to discharge them in time,” said Kostoglotov.

“What else can they do, Oleg? Judge for yourself.” (She called him Oleg as a reward for his help. He noticed it and glanced at her.) “If it's obvious a patient is beyond help, and there's nothing left for him but to live out a few last weeks or months, why should he take up a bed? There's a waiting list for beds. People could be cured are being kept waiting. And the irremediable cases…”

“The irre- … what?”

“The ones we can't cure. The way they look and the way they talk has a very bad effect on those we can cure.”

By sitting down at the nurses' table Oleg seemed to have taken a step forward in his social position and his general grasp of things. His other self, the one past help, for whom it hadn't been worth keeping a bed, one of the “irremediables”—Kostoglotov had left it all behind. It was a jump from one status to another, quite undeserved, through some whim of unexpected circumstance. It all reminded him dimly of something else, but it was a line of thought he decided for the moment not to pursue.

“Yes, I suppose it's logical. Well, they've written off Azovkin, and yesterday I was there when they discharged Proshka without a word of explanation, just like that. I even got the feeling I was part of the deception.”

As he sat now, the side of his face with the scar was turned away from Zoya, and his face had lost that cruel look.

They worked on amicably and harmoniously, and by lunchtime everything was finished.

But there was another job Mita had left to be done. The laboratory analyses had to be copied on to the patients' temperature charts. This would mean there would be fewer sheets of paper in the case-history books and it would be easier to stick them in. But it was too much if she wanted them done in a single Sunday.