Cancer Ward (29 page)

One might well ask, in a whisper, “Why was that business handled like that?” This was the way the Shendyapins thought too, although they didn't mention the subject to people they didn't know. All right, let's suppose Beria
was
a double-dealer, a bourgeois nationalist and a seeker after power, Very well, put him on trial and shoot him behind closed doors, but why tell the ordinary people anything about it? Why shake their faith? Why create doubt in their minds? When it was all over, one might perhaps send out a confidential circular down to a certain level to explain the details, but as for the newspapers, wouldn't it be better to say he died of a heart attack and bury him with full honors?

They talked about Maika, their youngest, as well. This year Maika was not getting her usual “five out of five.” She was no longer the star pupil, her name had been taken off the roll of honor, and often she wasn't even getting four out of five now. It was all because they'd moved her up to the fifth year. At her elementary school there'd been one teacher looking after her the whole time, who knew her and knew her parents, and Maika had got on superbly. But this year she'd had a dozen different teachers, specialists in various subjects, taking her class for one lesson a week. They didn't know their pupils by sight, all they thought about was the timetable. Did it never occur to them what a shock a change like that could cause a child, or how her character might be damaged? Kapitolina Matveyevna would spare no effort; she would act through the parents' committee and see that things were put right at the school. Though order in the school was being undermined by that new reform as well. Why introduce coeducation, why give up the old system of separate schools for boys and girls—one of the best achievements of mature, Soviet pedagogical science.

And so they talked about this, that and the other for several hours. But there was a listless quality to their gossip. Though neither of them said as much, each realized there was something unpractical about their conversation. Pavel Nikolayevich's spirits had sunk to rock bottom. He could not believe in the reality of the people and events they were discussing. There was nothing he felt like doing. What he wanted most now was to lie down on his bed, rest his tumor against the pillow and cover his head with the blankets.

But Kapitolina Matveyevna was forcing herself to keep up the conversation. This was because the letter was burning a hole in her handbag. She had received it that morning from her brother Minai in K——, the city where the Rusanovs had lived before the war, where they'd spent their youth and married, and where their children had been born. But during the war they'd been evacuated here, and they'd never gone back to K——. They managed to have their flat transferred to Kapa's brother.

She realized that her husband wasn't up to receiving that sort of news at the moment, but at the same time it was the kind of news that she couldn't share with a mere friend. There wasn't a soul in the whole town she could tell this thing to, in its full implications. After all, she had done her best to console her husband, and she was the one who needed support. She could not go home and live on her own, keeping this piece of knowledge all to herself. Of her children, Aviette was the only one she could possibly explain it to. Yuri was out of the question. But before she told Aviette she'd have to ask her husband's advice.

As for him, the longer he sat with her, the wearier he grew, and the more impossible it seemed to discuss the vital subject with him.

It was getting nearer and nearer the time for her to go. She began to take some things out of her shopping bag, to show her husband what she had brought him to eat. The sleeves of her fur coat, with their silver-fox cuffs, were so wide they would hardly go into the open jaws of her bag.

At this point Pavel Nikolayevich saw the provisions, realized he still had plenty left in his bedside table, and suddenly remembered that there was something else far more important than food and drink that he ought to have brought up first of all today: he remembered the
chaga,
the birch fungus. He became animated as he began to tell his wife about this miracle, about the letter and this doctor (although maybe he was a charlatan), and how vital it was to lose no time in thinking of someone to collect this fungus for him back in Central Russia.

“What about back home, around K——? The place is full of birch trees. Minai could arrange it for me. It wouldn't be much trouble. We must write to Minai straightaway. And to other people, too, to some of our old friends. They can join in. Let them all realize the position I'm in.”

Well, that made things easier. He'd mentioned Minai and K——, he'd brought the subject up himself! She didn't get out the letter itself, because her brother had written in somewhat gloomy terms. She sat there, clicking open and shut the clasp of her handbag.

“You know, Pasha,” she said, “I'm not sure we ought to spread your name about in K——. Minai writes, of course it may not be true, but he says Rodichev has turned up in town. Apparently he's been … re-hab-il-it-at-ed. Could he possibly have been?”

While she was enunciating that long, repulsive word “re-hab-il-it-at-ed,” staring down at the clasp of her handbag on the point of getting out the letter as well, she missed the moment when Pasha turned whiter than the sheets of his bed.

“What's the matter?” she cried, more alarmed than she had been by the arrival of the letter itself. “What's the matter?”

His body was pressed rigid against the back of the bench. With a feminine gesture he wrapped her shawl more tightly around himself.

“It still may not be true.” Her powerful hands were gripping his shoulders. One hand was still holding her handbag, so that it looked as if she were trying to hang it on his shoulder. “It still may not be true. Minai didn't see himself. But people are saying…”

Pavel Nikolayevich's pallor gradually subsided, but a weakness had gripped his whole body—his hips, his shoulders; his arms too had grown weak, and the tumor seemed to wrench his head sideways.

“Why did you tell me that?” he moaned in a miserable, feeble voice. “Haven't I had enough misfortune?” And twice his head and chest shuddered with tearless sobs.

“Forgive me, Pashenka! Forgive me, Pasik!” She still held him by the shoulders, shaking her curly copper hair, styled like a lion's mane. “I'm going out of my mind, I really am! Do you think he'll be able to take Minai's room away from him? Goodness knows what all this is going to lead to. You remember we've already heard of two cases like this?”

“What's the room got to do with it? Damn the room! Let him take it!” His voice was a sobbing whisper.

“What do you mean, damn the room? How will Minai like having less space to live in?”

“You'd do better to think about your husband. You'd do better to think of what's going to happen to me. And what about Guzun? Does he mention him in the letter?”

“No, not Guzun … But what if they all start coming back? What's going to happen then?”

“How should I know?” answered her husband in a strangled voice. “What
right
have they to let these people out now? Have they no pity? How dare they cause such traumas?”

14. Justice

Rusanov had expected Kapa's visit to cheer him up, but the news she brought sickened him so much that it would really have been better if she hadn't come at all. As he went up the stairs he reeled and clung to the banister, a chill fever sweeping over him with growing power. Kapa was not allowed to go upstairs with him in her coat and outdoor shoes. A lazy orderly was standing there specially to prevent it. So Kapa made her take Pavel Nikolayevich to the ward and carry the bag of provisions. The nurse on duty was lobster-eyed Zoya, who for some reason had caught Rusanov's fancy that first evening. There she was, sitting at her table, fenced off by a pile of registers, flirting with the uncouth Bone-chewer and paying scant attention to the patients. Rusanov asked her for an aspirin, to which she answered glibly that aspirins were given out only in the evening. Still, she took his temperature and brought him something later.

The provisions had been changed in his bedside table but he'd taken no part in it He lay down, as he had longed to do, his tumor against the pillow. It was surprising that the pillows here were soft. He hadn't even had to bring one from home. He pulled the blankets over his head.

The thoughts in his brain were tumbling and jostling, burning him so violently that the rest of his body had lost all sense of feeling. It was as though he were drugged. He could no longer hear the inane conversations going on in the room, and although both he and the floorboards were shuddering from Yefrem's pacing, he was insensible to that as well. He didn't notice that the day had brightened. It was just before sunset and somewhere the sun was creeping through, only not on their side of the building. He didn't notice the hours slipping by either. He kept falling asleep, perhaps because of the medicine he'd just taken, and then waking up again. Once he woke up and the electric light was already on; he went to sleep again. When he woke next it was the middle of the night and the place was dark and silent.

He felt that sleep had vanished forever. Its beneficent veil had slipped away from him. But terror, in full measure, clamped on to the middle of his chest and held it in a vise.

A host of ideas, gradually unraveling themselves, crowded in Rusanov's head, in the room and all around in the spacious darkness.

They weren't ideas at all really, it was just that he was terrified. He was terrified that tomorrow morning Rodichev would suddenly force his way past the nurses, past the orderlies, fling himself into the room and start beating him up. He was not afraid of being brought to justice, or of the judgment of society, or of disgrace, but simply of being beaten up. It had happened only once before in his life, at school, in the sixth class, during his last year. They'd waited for him one evening by the gate, ready to “get” him. None of them had knives, but ever since then he had had a terrible apprehension of cruel, bony fists coming at him from all directions.

When someone dies whom we haven't seen for years, we continue to see him after his death as the young man he was at our last meeting, even though he must in the years between have grown old. Rodichev had been away eighteen years and would probably be an invalid by now, deaf perhaps, or all crippled and bent. But Rusanov still saw him as the sun-tanned healthy he-man he had once been, standing on their joint balcony with his dumbbells and weights that last Sunday before he was arrested. With Kapa's help Rusanov had already written the letter, taken it to the proper authorities and handed it in. Stripped to the waist, Rodichev had called to Rusanov, “Pashka! Come here! Feel my biceps. Don't be shy, press! Now you see what our new-style engineers are made of? We're not a lot of ricket-ridden namby-pambies, like that German Eduard Christoforovich, we're well-co-ordinated men. Look at you, you've become such a weakling you'll wither away behind that leather door of yours. Come down to the factory and I'll get you a job on the shop floor, eh? What about it? Don't you want to? Ha-ha-ha…”

He burst out laughing and went off to wash, singing, “Blacksmiths are we, with hearts young and free.”

It was this great hunk of man that Rusanov imagined was about to charge into the ward, fists flailing. It was a false picture, but he could not rid himself of it.

He and Rodichev had once been friends. They'd been in the same Young Communist cell and had both been awarded this apartment by the factory. Afterward Rodichev had gone to workers' high school and later to college, while Rusanov had gone into trade-union work and personnel records administration. Then disagreements began, first of all between their wives, then between the men themselves. Rodichev often adopted a very insulting way of talking to Rusanov, generally behaving too independently and setting himself up against public opinion. Living shoulder to shoulder with them became cramped and intolerable. Well, one thing led to another, they had been hasty, of course, and Pavel Nikolayevich wrote the letter. He said they'd had a private conversation in which Rodichev had spoken up in favor of the activities of the recently liquidated Industrial Party and intended to get a group of saboteurs together at the factory.

The one thing Rusanov most particularly requested was that his name should be kept out of the proceedings and that there should be no confrontation. The very idea of such a meeting terrified him. The interrogator had guaranteed that the law would not require Rusanov's name to be mentioned and that a confrontation was not obligatory. It would be sufficient for the accused himself to confess. It would not even be necessary for Rusanov's original letter to be included in the file on the case, so that the accused would not come across his neighbor's name when he signed Article 206.

It would all have gone quite smoothly if it had not been for Guzun, who was secretary of the factory's Party committee. He received a note from the security authorities to the effect that Rodichev was an enemy of the people and must be expelled from the factory Party cell. However, he dug his toes in and started to make a fuss, saying that Rodichev was “our boy” and could he, Guzun, please be given details of the evidence. The fuss he made rebounded on his own head. Two days later he too was arrested during the night. On the third morning both Rodichev and Guzun were duly expelled as members of the same counterrevolutionary underground organization.

What put Rusanov on the spot now was the fact that during the two days when they were trying to talk Guzun round they had been forced to tell him it was Rusanov who had provided the evidence. This meant that if Guzun had met Rodichev
out there
(and since they were involved in the same case it was quite possible they
had
met), he'd have told him everything. This was why Rusanov was now worried about the man's ominous return, about this inconceivable resurrection from the dead.