Cancer Ward (27 page)

They were silent for a moment. The sun came out in its full radiance and at once the whole world was cheered and brightened. In the park the trees stood out black and distinct, while in the room the tablecloth burst into blue and Zoya's hair turned to gold.

“One of our girls killed herself. Another's alive. Three of the boys are dead … Two others I've no idea what happened to.”

He leaned sideways, tipping the chair over, and swung there, reciting:

“The hurricane swept by, few of us survived,

And many failed to answer friendship's roll call…”
*

He sat there, leaning out of the chair and looking at the floor. His hair stood up on end and stuck out at all angles on his head. Twice a day he had to dampen it and smooth it down, dampen it and smooth it down.

He was silent, but Zoya had heard all she wanted to hear. He'd explained away all the main questions. He was chained to his exile, but not because he was a murderer. He was not married, but not because of his vices. After all these years he could still speak with tenderness of his former fiancée, and clearly he was capable of genuine feeling.

He was silent, and so was she, as she looked from the embroidery to him and back again. There was nothing in the least handsome about him, but she could find nothing ugly about him either.

In the words of her grandmother, “You don't need a handsome one, you need a good one.” His stability and strength after all he had endured were what Zoya sensed in him most keenly. His strength had been put to the test. It was something she had never met before in the boys she went with.

She was stitching away when suddenly she became aware that he was scrutinizing her.

She peered at him without raising her head.

He started to speak with great expression, his eyes never leaving her face:

“Whom shall I call on? Who will share with me

The wretched happiness of staying alive?”

“You've already shared it,” she whispered, smiling to him with her eyes and mouth.

Her lips were neither pink nor painted. They were somewhere between vermilion and orange, almost like fire, the color of pale flame.

The gentle, yellow, early-evening sun put new life into the unhealthy tinge of Oleg's thin ill-looking face. In its warm light it seemed he was not going to die, that he would live.

Oleg shook his head, like a guitar player who has finished a sad song and is about to begin a gay one.

“Zoyenka, make it a real holiday for me, will you? I'm fed up with these white coats. I've had enough of nurses, I want you to show me a beautiful city girl. I'll never get the chance to see one in Ush-Terek.”

“Where can I find a beautiful girl for you?” said Zoya roguishly.

“Just take off that coat for a minute. And walk around.”

He pushed hack his chair and showed her where to walk.

“I'm on duty,” she objected, “I can't, I'm not allowed to…”

Perhaps it was because they'd spent so long talking about gloomy subjects, or perhaps it was the setting sun throwing its cheerful, sparkling rays about the room. Whatever it was, Zoya felt a surging compulsion to do as he asked. She knew it would be all right.

She thrust her embroidery aside, leaped up out of the chair like a little girl, and started to undo her buttons. In her hurry she bent slightly forward, as though she were about to run a race rather than walk through a room.

“Pull!” She flung one of her arms at him, almost as if it were someone else's. He caught hold of it and tugged off one sleeve. “And the other!” Like a dancer she spun around and turned her back on him. He pulled off the other. The white coat fell on to his knees and she … walked about the room. She paraded like a model, arching her back and straightening it again just as she should, first swinging her arms as she walked, then raising them slightly.

She took a few steps like this, then turned round and froze, her arms outstretched.

Oleg held Zoya's coat to his chest almost in an embrace, and looked at her with wide-open eyes.

“Bravo!” he boomed. “Magnificent!”

There was something about the glowing blue of the tablecloth, that inexhaustible Uzbek blue exploding in the sunlight, that prolonged in him yesterday's mood of exploration and discovery. All those wayward, tangled and conventional desires were returning to him. After an age of unsettled, shabby, unsheltered existence, the soft furniture and the cozy room were a joy to him. There was joy too in being able to look at Zoya, not simply to admire her from afar. The joy was doubled because his was no indifferent admiration, but one with a claim to her affection. He, who two weeks ago had been dying!

Zoya moved her flame-colored lips triumphantly, with an expression of sly importance, as if she knew a secret but was not telling. She walked back across the room toward the window, and again turned to face him, holding the pose.

He did not get up. He sat there, but his head, with its thick black mop of hair, strained forward and up to reach her.

There was a certain force about Zoya. There were signs, one could sense but not name them. It was not the kind of force needed to push heavy furniture, but one that demands a force in response. Oleg was happy because he seemed able to meet its challenge and to measure up to her force.

Now that his body was healing, the passions of life were returning to it. All of them!

“Zo-ya,” said Oleg liltingly, “Zo-ya! Do you know what your name means?”

“Zoya means life,” she replied crisply, as though reciting a slogan. She liked explaining it. She stood there, resting her hands on the window sill behind her back, leaning a little to one side, her weight on one leg.

“And what about the ‘zo-' in it? Don't you sometimes feel close to those ‘zo-ological' ancestors of ours?”

She laughed in the same mood as he had spoken.

“We're all a little like them. We provide food, feed our young.… Is there anything wrong in that?”

And that is probably where she ought to have ended the conversation. But she was excited by his steady, absorbing admiration. It was something she'd never encountered among the young men from the town who cuddled their girls so casually every Saturday night at the dance. Suddenly she flung out her arms, snapped the fingers of both hands, her whole body writhing to the urge of the popular song she began singing from a recent Indian film.

“A-va-rai-ya-a-a! A-va-rai-ya-a-a!”

Oleg's face instantly clouded. “No, don't! Not that song, Zoya, please!”

In a flash she assumed an air of strict decorum. No one would have thought that a moment ago she'd been singing and writhing.

“It's from
The Tramp,
” she said. “Haven't you seen it?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Isn't it a wonderful movie? I saw it twice.” (In fact she'd seen it four times, but she didn't quite like to admit it.) “Didn't you like it? After all, the tramp's life was rather like yours.”

“It wasn't at all!” Oleg frowned. His radiant expression did not return. The warmth of the yellow sun had left him, and it was obvious what a sick man he was after all.

“I mean, he'd just come out of prison too. And his whole life was ruined.”

“That was just a bluff. He was a typical grafter, a hood.
*

Zoya stretched out her hand for her white coat.

Oleg got up, smoothed the coat out and helped her into it.

“I can see you don't like people like that.” She nodded her thanks and began to do up her buttons.

“I hate them.” He looked past her, a cruel expression on his face. His jaw tightened slightly. It was a disagreeable movement. “They're predators, parasites, they live off other people. For the last thirty years we've had it drummed into us that these people are reforming, that they're now almost our social equals, but they work on the same principle as Hitler: ‘If
you're
not being'—the next word's an obscenity, it's got punch to it, but it really means—'If
you're
not being beaten, sit quiet and wait your turn.' If your neighbor's being stripped naked and you're not, sit quiet and wait your turn. They're only too happy to kick a man when he's down, and then they have the nerve to wrap themselves up in a cloak of romanticism, while we help them create a legend, and even their songs are sometimes sung on the screen.”

“What legends?” Now it was she who was looking up at him, almost as if she felt guilty about something.

“It would take a hundred years to tell you. All right, if you like, I'll tell you one.” They were standing at the window now, side by side. Oleg took her by the elbow. It was a dominant gesture, quite unconnected with the words he was uttering. He spoke as one would to a much younger person. “These grafters try to pretend they're noble outlaws. They don't steal from beggars and they never take away a prisoner's ‘sacred staff of life,' that is to say, they don't take his basic ration, but they do pinch everything else. Well, in 1947 in the Frasnoyarsk transit camp there wasn't a single beaver in our cell, which means there wasn't a soul with anything worth stealing. Half the people in it were these grafters. They got very hungry and started taking all the sugar and bread for themselves. We were an extraordinary collection in our cell: half of them hoods, half of them Japanese, and just two of us Russian politicals, me and a well-known Arctic pilot. There is still an island in the Arctic Ocean named after him, even though he's been in prison. For three days the hoods robbed the Japanese and us mercilessly, they left us with nothing. So the Japs got together and hatched a plot—of course, no one could understand a word they were saying. In the middle of the night they all got up in dead silence, took some of the planks from the beds, yelled
‘Banzai!'
and flung themselves on the hoods. They beat them up beautifully, I wish you could have seen it.”

“Did they beat you up too?”

“No, why should they? We hadn't been pinching their bread. We were neutral that night, but our sympathies were right behind the ‘glorious Japanese army.' In the morning order was restored and we got our full ration of bread and sugar again. But you know what the prison administration did? They took half the Japs out of the cell and reinforced the hoods who'd been beaten up with other hoods who hadn't been. Now that the Japs were completely outnumbered, the hoods threw themselves at them. They'd got knives, they'd got everything, that lot. They were like savages, they fought to kill. The pilot and I couldn't stand it any longer. We joined forces with the Japs.”

“Against the Russians?”

Oleg let go of her elbow and drew himself up to his full height. His jaw was working.

“I don't count grafters as Russians.”

He raised one hand and ran a finger along his scar, as though he were wiping it clean. It stretched from his chin across the lower part of his cheek and down to his neck.

“That's where they carved me up.”

13. … and So Do the Specters

Pavel Nikolayevich's tumor still showed no sign of having gone down or softened during Saturday night. He realized this even before he got out of bed. He had been awakened early by the old Uzbek coughing disgustingly into his ear. It started at dawn and went on all through the morning.

Outside the dull, windless day dawned white, like frosted glass, just as it had yesterday and the day before, increasing the melancholy. The Kazakh shepherd had got up early and was sitting cross-legged, aimlessly, on his bed. He looked like a tree stump. The doctors were not expected today, no one was due to be called for an X ray or to have bandages changed, so he could sit there all day if he liked. Yefrem, sinister as ever, was once again immersed in his mournful Tolstoy. Sometimes he would get up and stamp up and down the passageway, making the beds shake, but at least he was no longer picking on Pavel Nikolayevich, or anyone else for that matter.

Bone-chewer had gone. He hadn't been seen in the ward all day. The geologist, that pleasant, well-mannered young man, was reading his geology, not disturbing anyone. The other patients in the ward were behaving quite quietly.

It cheered Pavel Nikolayevich to think that his wife was coming to see him. There was nothing concrete she could do to help him, of course, but it would mean a lot to be able to unburden himself, to tell her how terrible he felt, how the injection hadn't done him any good, and how horrible the people in the ward were. She would sympathize with him, and he would feel better. He might ask her to bring him a book, some cheerful modern book, and his fountain pen, so there'd be no recurrence of that ridiculous situation yesterday when he'd had to borrow the young boy's pencil to write down the prescription. Yes, and most important of all, he could get her to find out about that fungus for him, the birch fungus.

After all, it wasn't the end of the world. If medicines failed, there were other things he could try. The main thing was to feel a Man, with a capital M, to be optimistic.

Gradually Pavel Nikolayevich was becoming acclimatized even here. After breakfast he finished reading the budget report of Minister of Finance Zverev in yesterday's paper. Today's paper had been brought in without any delay. Dyomka had got hold of it first, but Pavel Nikolayevich had requested him to hand it over and derived great pleasure from reading about the fall of Mendès-France's government. (Serves him right for his machinations, and for forcing through the Paris agreements!) He decided he'd keep a long article by Ehrenburg in reserve (he greatly valued Ehrenburg's social significance since the war in spite of some of his deviations which had been put right in good time by the national press); and he buried himself in another article about the fulfillment of the resolutions of the Central Committee's January plenum on sharply increasing the output of meat and dairy products.

Thus Pavel Nikolayevich whiled away the day until the orderly came and told him his wife had arrived. Generally speaking, bed patients' relatives were allowed into the ward, but right now Pavel Nikolayevich could not summon the strength to go and argue that he was a bed patient. Also he knew he would feel freer if he went out into the hall away from these dismal, dispirited people. So he wrapped a little warm scarf around his neck and went downstairs.