Cancer Ward (28 page)

It is not every man who, a year before his silver wedding, still loves his wife as dearly as Pavel Nikolayevich did Kapa. Throughout his life there had truly been no one he was closer to, no one with whom he could so frankly rejoice in his successes and mull over his troubles. Kapa was a true friend, an intelligent, energetic woman. “She's got more brains than the whole village council put together,” Pavel Nikolayevich used to boast to his friends. He had never felt the need to be unfaithful to her, and she had never been unfaithful to him. It is a fallacy to say that husbands who have progressed up the social ladder always begin to feel ashamed of their youthful past. They had risen far above the level they were at when they married. She'd been a worker in the same macaroni factory where he started work in the dough-kneading shop. But even before their marriage he had risen to membership of the factory trades union committee and was working on safety arrangements. Then through his membership in the Young Communist League he'd been posted to reinforce the Soviet trade organization, and a year later he was made director of the factory's secondary school. During all these years no difference of interests had developed between himself and his wife. Their proletarian sympathies did not change. On festive occasions when they'd had a little to drink, if the people around the table were simple folk, the Rusanovs would recall their days in the factory and break into loud renderings of old workers' songs.

Kapa, with her broad figure, her two silver-fox furs, her large handbag the size of a briefcase and her shopping bag full of provisions, was taking up at least three places on the bench in the warmest corner of the hall. She got up to kiss her husband with her warm, soft lips, and spread the open flap of her fur coat for him to sit on, to make it warmer for him.

“There's a letter here,” she said, the corner of her lip twitching. It was a familiar tic and Pavel Nikolayevich immediately concluded the letter was an unpleasant one. Kapa was a cool and reasonable person except for one feminine habit which she could do nothing about: whenever there was news, good or bad, she immediately let the cat out of the bag.

“Well, come on, then,” said Pavel Nikolayevich in a hurt voice, “finish me off with it, if it's so important, finish me off.”

Now she'd blurted it out, Kapa was free of her burden and could talk like an ordinary human being.

“It's nothing much, nothing at all,” she said penitently. “Well, how are you, Pasik? How are you? I know all about the injection. I rang the nurse on Friday and again yesterday morning. If anything had been wrong, I'd have rushed along straightaway. But they told me it went very well, is that right?”

“The injection went very well,” Pavel Nikolayevich confirmed, pleased at his own fortitude. “But the conditions here, Kapelka, the conditions!” And at once everything about the place that he found galling and aggravating, starting with Yefrem and Bone-chewer, crowded into his mind. Not knowing which complaint to begin with, he finally said in a tone of agony, “If only there was a separate lavatory I could use! The lavatories here are terrible. There are no cubicles. Everyone can see you!”

(To use a public bath or lavatory inevitably subverts one's authority. In his office Rusanov went to another floor to avoid having to use the general staff lavatory.)

Kapa, realizing how offensive he found it all and that he had to get things off his chest, didn't interrupt but instead steered him on to new complaints, until gradually he'd got them out of his system, right down to the most unanswerable and desperate of them all: “What do they pay these doctors their money for?” She questioned him in detail about how he felt during the injection, and after it, and how his tumor was. She even removed the little scarf, looked at the tumor and gave it as her opinion that it was getting the tiniest bit smaller.

It was not, Pavel Nikolayevich knew this, but even so it was pleasant to hear someone say that it might be.

“Well, at least it's not any bigger, is it?”

“No, of course not, of course not.” Kapa was sure it wasn't.

“If only it would stop growing!” said Pavel Nikolayevich, as though begging it to stop. His voice was tearful. “If only it would stop! If it goes on growing like this for another week, goodness only knows.…” No, he couldn't say it, he couldn't gaze into the black abyss. How miserable he felt—it was all touch-and-go. “The next injection's tomorrow, then one on Wednesday. But what if it doesn't do any good? What shall I do?”

“Then you'll have to go to Moscow,” said Kapa resolutely. “Let's decide that if another two injections don't help, we'll put you on the plane to Moscow. You rang them there on Friday and then changed your mind, but now I've telephoned Shendyapin and been to see Alymov, and Alymov rang Moscow himself. Apparently until recently your illness could only be treated in Moscow, everybody was sent there, but then they started treating it here, you see, to improve the standard of the local specialists. Doctors are a detestable race, anyway. How dare they talk about production achievement when it's living people they're processing? I don't care what you say, I hate doctors.”

“Yes, yes,” Pavel Nikolayevich agreed bitterly. “Yes, that's just what I told them here.”

“I hate teachers too! I'm sick and tired of them because of what's happened to Maika. And what about Lavrik?”

Pavel Nikolayevich wiped his glasses. “I could understand it in my day, when I was a school director. All the trained teachers were hostile to our authority, none of them were on our side. The main problem was to keep them in check. But now we're supposed to be able to count on them and expect things of them.”

“All right, now listen! There's nothing particularly complicated about sending you to Moscow, our road isn't completely overgrown with weeds yet, grounds for it can still be found. Alymov got them to agree to make special arrangements. They'll find somewhere good to put you. So what do you think? Shall we wait for the third injection?”

The plans they made were definite, and they raised Pavel Nikolayevich's spirits. Anything so long as he didn't have to sit passively waiting for death in this musty old hole. All their lives the Rusanovs had been people of action and initiative; it was only when they took the initiative that they found inner calm.

There was no reason to hurry today. The longer Pavel Nikolayevich could sit here with his wife without returning to the ward, the happier he would be. He shivered a little as the outside door kept opening and shutting. Kapitolina Matveyevna took off the shawl that was around her shoulders under her coat and wrapped it around him. As it happened, the other people on the bench were clean, cultivated people too. They could sit there for quite a long time.

Moving slowly from subject to subject, they discussed some of the aspects of their life that had been interrupted by Pavel Nikolayevich's illness. The only topic they avoided was the one big possibility hanging over them: that the worst might come to the worst. For this they had no plans, no measures, no guidance ready. They were totally unprepared for such an outcome, and if only for this reason they regarded it as out of the question. (True, now and again it crossed Kapa's mind to wonder what the position of her home and property would be if her husband were to die, but they had both been brought up in such a spirit of optimism that they felt it was better to leave all these problems in a state of confusion than to depress themselves by analyzing the possibilities or by making a morbid last will and testament.)

They talked about the telephone calls she had received, inquiries and good wishes from colleagues on the Board of Industry to which Pavel Nikolayevich had been transferred from the factory's “special department”
*
the year before last. (He didn't deal in industrial matters himself, of course, he was not such a narrow specialist. Engineers and economists coped with the technical side: his job was to exercise special control over them.) His colleagues all liked him, and it was nice to know how concerned they were.

They also talked about his pension prospects. Somehow or other, in spite of his long, irreproachable service in responsible positions in personnel and special departments, he would probably not achieve his life's dream, the “personal” pension awarded to high officials. He would not even be eligible for the civil servant's lucrative pension, with its high level of payment and favorable starting age, and all because he hadn't made up his mind to put on military uniform in 1939, even though it was offered him. It was a pity, but, considering the unstable situation during the last two years, then again maybe it wasn't. Perhaps it was the price one had to pay for peace.

They also discussed the general desire of the people for a higher standard of living, a trend which had become more marked in recent years, and was now revealing itself in new tastes in clothes, furniture and interior decoration.

At this point Kapitolina Matveyevna mentioned that if her husband's treatment was going to be successful but long-drawn-out (they had been warned it might last six weeks or two months), it might be a good opportunity to have some alterations made in the apartment. One of the pipes in the bathroom ought to have been moved long ago, the kitchen sink would have to be put somewhere else, the wall in the lavatory needed tiling, and the dining room and Pavel Nikolayevich's room absolutely must have a new coat of paint. They would have it a different color (she was already thinking about the exact shade) and it would be overlaid with gilding, which was all the rage now. Pavel Nikolayevich made no objection to this, but immediately a vexing question arose. Although the workers would be assigned by state warrant and paid by the state, they would be bound to extort—not ask for but actually extort—additional payment from the owners. It was not that he begrudged them the money (although it would be a shame to see it go), it was the principle of the thing that was far more important and annoying. Why
should
he pay them? Why was it that all he got was the proper salary for his job, with added bonuses, of course, and that he never asked for tips or additional payments? And why were these unscrupulous workers, common as they were, such money-grubbers? A concession here would be a breach of principle, an inadmissible concession to the whole petty-bourgeois world and its elements. Pavel Nikolayevich was upset every time the question came up.

“Why is it, Kapa? Don't they care about their honor as workers? When we were working in the macaroni factory, we didn't lay down conditions or try to put the touch on the foreman for money. It would never have entered our heads. Whatever happens, we must not corrupt them. It's nothing less than bribery!”

Kapa agreed with him completely, but at the same time observed that if you didn't pay them and stand them some vodka before they started and halfway through the job, they'd get their own back by doing something badly, and you'd be the one to suffer.

“A retired colonel, I was told, stood his ground and said. ‘I'm not paying you an extra kopeck!' The workmen put a dead rat in his bathroom wastepipe. The water couldn't drain away properly and it made a terrible stink.”

So they were unable to come to any definite decision about the repairs. Life is complicated, very complicated, whichever side you're on.

They talked about Yuri. He was their eldest son, but he had grown up to be too placid, without the Rusanovs' proper grip on life. They had put him through law school, and they had found him a good job after college, but they had to admit he was not really suited to this type of work. He had no idea of how to consolidate his position or acquire useful contacts. Now he was on a business trip he was probably making mistakes all the time. Pavel Nikolayevich was very worried about it. But Kapitolina Matveyevna was worried about his marriage. His father had made him learn to drive, his father would also see he got a private flat,
*
but how could they keep an eye on him to prevent him making a mistake in his marriage? He was such a naïve boy, he might be led up the garden path by some ordinary weaver girl from the textile factory. Well, perhaps not a weaver, there'd be nowhere for them to meet, they wouldn't frequent the same kind of places. But what about the danger now, while he was away on his trip? It was such an easy step to take, rashly signing your name in the marriage register, and it would ruin not only the young man's life, but his family's too, the many years of effort they'd spent on his behalf. Look at Shendyapin's daughter, how she'd very nearly married a student in her year at teachers' training college. He was only a boy from the country, and his mother was an ordinary collective farmer. Just imagine the Shendyapins' flat, their furniture and the influential people they had as guests, and suddenly there's this old woman in a white headscarf sitting at their table, their daughter's mother-in-law, and she didn't even have a passport.
*
Whatever next? Thank goodness they'd managed to discredit the fiancé politically and save their daughter.

Aviette (Ave or Alla for short) was a different matter. Aviette was the pearl of the Rusanov family. Neither her father nor mother could remember a time when she'd caused them any distress or anxiety, apart from schoolgirl pranks, of course. She was beautiful, intelligent and energetic, with a good understanding of life and how to cope with it. There was no need to check up on her or worry about her. She'd never make a false step in anything, important or unimportant. The only grudge she bore her parents was the first name they had given her. “I don't like verbal trickery,” she'd say, “just call me Alla.” But on her passport it said quite clearly “Aviette Pavlovna.” Such a pretty name! The holidays were nearly over, on Wednesday she'd be flying in from Moscow. She'd be sure to come to the hospital first thing.

Names could be such a bother. Circumstances can change, but names remain forever. Now Lavrik had started resenting his name, too. It was all right for the moment, while he was still at school, nobody picked on him. But later this year he'd be getting his own passport, and what would it say on it? Lavrenti Pavlovich.
**
At the time his parents had done it on purpose. “Give him the same name as the minister,” they'd said, “Stalin's staunch brother-in-arms. Let him be like him in every way.” But for over a year now you had to be very careful about saying the words “Lavrenti Pavlovich” aloud. The one thing that would save Lavrik was that he was going to the military academy. His first two names wouldn't be used in the army.