Cancer Ward (32 page)

Rusanov started. His spectacles flashed amicably as he asked loudly, “Tell me, young man, are you a Communist?”

In his simple, easy way Vadim turned his eyes toward Rusanov. “Yes,” he said gently.

“I was sure you were,” declared Rusanov triumphantly, raising one finger. He looked exactly like a teacher.

Vadim clapped Dyomka on the shoulder. “All right, off you go. I've got work to do.”

He bent over his
Geochemical Methods.
In it was a piece of paper he was using as a marker, covered with finely written notes and big exclamation and question marks. He began to read, the black, fluted mechanical pencil moving almost imperceptibly between his fingers.

He became absorbed. It was as if he was no longer there. But Pavel Nikolayevich, encouraged by the support Vadim had given him, wanted to bolster himself up before his second injection, and decided to break Yefrem once and for all, to stop him spreading gloom and despondency. He looked at Yefrem straight across the room, from wall to wall, and began to address him:

“It's a good lesson the comrade's just given you, Comrade Podduyev. It's wrong to give in to illness as you've done. And it's wrong to give in to the first priest-ridden booklet that comes your way. It means in effect that you're playing into the hands of…” He wanted to say “of the enemy.” In ordinary life there was always some enemy to point to, but who could the enemy be here, in a hospital bed? “You should look deep into life, you know, and above all study the nature of achievement. What motivates people to achieve high productivity? What made people fight heroically in the last war against Germany? Or in the Civil War, to take another example? They were hungry, without shoes, clothes or proper arms.…”

Podduyev had been strangely immobile all day. He had not got out of bed to stomp up and down the aisle and, what's more, several of his usual movements seemed to have gone. He'd always taken care not to move his neck, and had only turned his body reluctantly, but today he'd moved neither hand nor foot, all he'd done was tap one finger against his book. They had tried to make him take some breakfast, but he said, “It's no good licking the dishes if you haven't eaten enough at the table.” Before breakfast and ever since, he had lain there quite motionless. If he hadn't blinked every now and again you might have thought he'd turned to stone.

But his eyes were open.

His eyes were open, and, as it happened, he didn't have to move an inch to see Rusanov. Rusanov with his whey face was the only thing in his line of vision except for the wall and the ceiling.

He heard Rusanov lecturing him. His lips moved and out came that unfriendly voice, but this time the words were more blurred than ever. “What's that? Civil War? You fought in the Civil War, did you?”

Pavel Nikolayevich sighed. “You and I, Comrade Podduyev,” he said, “are not of an age to have been able to fight in that particular war.”

Yefrem sniffed vigorously. “I don't know why you didn't fight. I did.”

Pavel Nikolayevich politely raised his eyebrows behind his glasses. “How can that be possible?”

“Quite simple,” said Yefrem slowly, taking a little rest between each phrase. “I picked up a pistol and went and fought. It was quite something. I wasn't the only one.”

“And where was it you say that you fought?”

“Near Izhevsk. We were sorting out the Constituent Assembly.
*
I shot seven Izhevsk chaps with my own hand. I remember it well.”

Yes, he really thought he could remember all seven of them, grown men, and exactly where he, a mere boy, had brought each of them down in the streets of a rebel town.

The fellow in the glasses was still lecturing him about something. But today he felt as if his ears were blocked up, and if he surfaced at all it was not for long.

That morning at dawn, when he'd opened his eyes and looked at a patch of bare, white ceiling, for no particular reason a long-forgotten and quite insignificant event had come into his mind with a jolt.

It was a day in November after the war. Snow was falling, turning to slush as soon as it touched the ground, and melting completely on the warmer earth just thrown up from the trench. They were digging for a gas main. The depth had been specified as 1 meter 80 centimeters. Podduyev, walking past, saw it wasn't yet dug to the proper depth. But the foreman came up to him and swore blind that the whole length of the trench had been properly dug. “Very well, do you want us to measure it? It'll be the worse for you!” Podduyev took a measuring stick with a burn mark across it every ten centimeters, every fifth mark longer than the rest, and they went off together to measure, getting continually stuck in the sodden, soggy clay as they went, he in high officers' boots, the foreman in ordinary soldiers' ones. They stopped at one place and measured—1 meter 70. They went on. In the next place three men were digging. One was a tall, thin peasant with a black growth of beard all over his face. Another was an ex-officer, who still wore his army cap although the little red star had been torn off long ago; it had a patent-leather rim and peak, and the crimson band was caked with lime and clay. The third was a young guy in a cloth cap and a townsman's overcoat (in those days there was a lot of difficulty about providing prison clothes; they weren't issued with regulation ones). What's more, the overcoat must have been made for him when he was a schoolboy because it was short, tight and threadbare. (It seemed to Yefrem now that he was seeing the overcoat clearly for the first time.) The first two were still digging the ground wearily, dragging up the earth with their spades although the sodden clay stuck to the iron. But the third, just a stripling, was leaning his chest against his spade, as though transfixed by it. White with snow, his hands tucked deep into his wretched short sleeves, he was hanging from it like a scarecrow. They'd given the men no gloves. The ex-soldier had a pair of high boots, but the other two had nothing but improvised shoes made out of car tires. “Why are you standing there gaping?” the foreman shouted at the boy. “Do you want to go on punishment rations? OK, that's fine by me!” The young fellow just sighed and sagged. It looked as if the spade handle were going deeper and deeper into his chest. The foreman gave him a clout on the back of the head, and he shook himself, starting to poke about with his spade again.

They began to measure. The earth had been chucked out on both sides of the trench, close beside it. You had to lean right over the ditch to get an accurate view of where the top notch on the measuring stick came. The ex-soldier stood around pretending to help, but in fact he was holding the stick at an angle to gain an extra ten centimeters, Podduyev swore at him obscenely and held the stick up straight himself. The result was quite clear—1 meter 65.

“Citizen commander,” the ex-soldier pleaded softly, “please let us off the last few centimeters. We can't manage them. Our bellies are empty, our strength's gone, and the weather—well, look at it.”

“And get myself put on a charge just because of you, eh? Think up another one! Those are the specifications. All the sides must be straight, and no dip at the bottom.”

As Podduyev straightened up, pulled up the stick and hauled his feet out of the clay, the three turned their faces toward him—the first black-stubbled, the second looking like a winded hound, the third with fluffy down, untouched by a razor. Looking up at him, the three faces no longer seemed alive as the snow fell on them. The young fellow forced his lips open and said, “All right, chief. It'll be your turn to die one day.”

Podduyev had not written a report that would have them thrown in the cooler. He merely recorded what they'd earned, so as not to bring their bad luck down on his own head. Looking back, he could think of plenty of people he'd been harder on than them. All that had been ten years ago. Podduyev didn't work in the camps any more, the foreman had been released, that gas main had only been installed temporarily. Probably it wasn't carrying gas any more and the pipes were being used for something else. But what had been said then had stuck in his mind, coming to the surface today. It had been the first sound in his ear that morning: “All right, chief. It'll be your turn to die one day.”

There was nothing for Yefrem to set off against this memory and screen him from it. Did he want to go on living? That young fellow had wanted to as well. Did Yefrem have an iron will? Had he learned something new and did he want to live differently? The disease took no notice of any of this. It had its own “specifications.”

There was of course the little blue book with the gilt signature, which had already spent four nights under Yefrem's mattress. It was humming to him about the Hindus and their belief that none of us die completely and our souls transmigrate into animals or other people. These “specifications” appealed to Podduyev now: if only he could take something of his own with him, not let the lot go down the drain. If only he could take something of his own through death.

Only to him this “transmigration” of souls was just a lot of hog-wash.

Pain was shooting from his neck right into his head, ceaselessly. It had started to throb evenly, in four-beat time, and each beat of the bar was hammering out: “Yefrem—Podduyev—Dead—Stop. Yefrem—Podduyev—Dead—Stop.”

There was no end to it. He began to repeat the words to himself, and the more he repeated them, the more remote he felt from the Yefrem Podduyev who was condemned to die. He was getting used to the idea of his own death, as one does to the death of a neighbor. But whatever it was inside him that thought of Yefrem Podduyev's death as of a neighbor's—this, it seemed, ought not to die.

But what about the neighbor? It looked as if he couldn't escape except perhaps by drinking the birch-tree fungus brew. Only it said in the letter you had to drink it regularly for a whole year. For that you'd need two
poods
*
of dried fungus, four if it was wet. That would mean eight parcels. The fungus should be fresh off the tree, too, it shouldn't have been lying around. So the parcels couldn't be sent all at once, they would have to go one by one, once a month. Who was there who could pack them up and send them off at the right time? Who did he have back there in Russia?

It would have to be someone close to you, a member of your family.

Hundreds of people had passed through Yefrem's life, but no one he'd got close enough to call a member of his family.

That first wife of his, Amina, might be the one to get the stuff together and send it. There was no one on the other side of the Urals he could write to except her. But she'd only write back, “Just drop dead wherever you like, you old wolf.” And she'd be right.

She'd be right according to the book of rules. Not according to the little blue book, though. The blue book said Amina ought to pity him, love him even, not as her husband but simply as a man suffering. She ought to send the parcels of fungus.

The book was very right, of course, so long as everyone started living by it at the same time.

Then Yefrem's ears cleared and it got through to him how the geologist was saying he lived for his work, and Yefrem tapped the blue book with his fingernail again.

Once more he sank back into his own thoughts: he didn't hear or see anything and the same shooting pains continued in his head.

All that bothered him now was the shooting pain. If it hadn't been for that it would have been so easy and comforting for him to lie back without moving, without treatment, without eating, talking, hearing, seeing.

Simply to stop existing.

But someone was shaking him by the foot and the elbow. It seemed the girl from the surgical ward had been standing over him for some time, trying to get him to come and have his dressings changed. Now Ahmadjan was helping her.

So for no good reason at all, Yefrem had to get out of bed. He had to pass on the will to stand to all 210 pounds of his body, the will to tense his legs, his arms and his back, to force his flesh-laden bones out of the torpor into which they'd begun to sink, to make their joints work and lever their bulk upright, to become a pillar, to robe that pillar in a jacket and shift it along corridors and down a staircase to be uselessly tormented, to have dozens of meters of bandage unwound and replaced …

It took so long and was so painful. All around him there was a sort of gray noise. With Yevgenia Ustinovna were two surgeons who never did operations on their own. She was explaining and demonstrating something to them, and talking to Yefrem too. But he did not answer her.

He felt that they had nothing worth talking about. The indifferent gray noise blanketed all their words.

They wound a hoop around his neck, even mightier than the last, and he returned to the ward with it. His head was now smaller than the bandages wrapped around it. Only the top of it stuck out of the hoop. He ran into Kostoglotov, who was on the way out with a tobacco pouch in his hand.

“Well, what have they decided?”

Yefrem thought to himself, “What
have
they decided?” It seemed as if nothing had got through to him, but by now he understood what they had meant and replied as if he'd known all along, “They said, ‘Hang yourself where you like, but don't do it in
our
house.'”

Federau gazed in horror at the monstrous neck, which might be his fate too, and asked, “Are they discharging you?”

It was only when he heard the question that Yefrem realized he couldn't do as he wanted and go back to bed. He had to get himself ready for discharge.

After that, although he couldn't even bend down, he had to put on his everyday clothes.

And after that, although it was beyond his strength, he had to trundle his pillar of a body through the streets of the town.

It seemed intolerable to have to bring himself to do all these things, goodness knows who or what for.