Cancer Ward (40 page)

He was glad, therefore, when Podduyev was discharged and tow-haired Federau moved from the corner to take his bed. He was a quiet guy, the quietest in the ward. He might not say a word all day, he just lay there watching mournfully, an odd sort of fellow. He made an ideal neighbor. However, the day after tomorrow, Friday, they were due to take him away for his operation.

Yes, they were usually silent, but today they started talking about disease. Federau told him how he'd fallen ill and nearly died of meningeal inflammation. “I see. Did you get a knock?”

“No, I caught a chill. I got very overheated one day and when they took me home from the factory in a car my head was in a draft. I got meningeal inflammation. I couldn't see any more.”

He told the story quietly, with a faint smile, without stressing the tragedy and horror of it.

“Why did you get overheated?” Vadim asked, already reading out of the corner of his eye: time was flying. A conversation about disease always finds an audience in a hospital ward. Federau could see Rusanov looking at him from across the room. He looked much milder today, so Federau told his story for him to hear as well.

“There was an accident with the boiler, you see. It was a complicated soldering job. To let out all the steam, cool the boiler and then start it up all over again would have taken a whole day, so the works manager sent a car for me during the night. He said, ‘Federau, we don't want all work to come to a stop, do we? Put on your protective suit and get into the steam. OK?' ‘All right,' I said. ‘If one must, one must!' It was before the war, we were on a tight schedule, it had to be done. So I got into the steam and did it, about an hour and a half's work … how could I have refused? I'd always been top of the factory roll of honor.”

Rusanov, who had been listening, looked at him approvingly. “An act, I would say, worthy of a Bolshevik,” he commented.

“I am a member of the Party.” Federau gave him another smile, fainter and even more modest this time.

“You mean you
were,
” Rusanov corrected him. (Give them a pat on the back and they take it seriously.)

“I still am,” said Federau very quietly.

Rusanov wasn't in the mood for analyzing other people's lives, arguing with them or putting them in their places, his own had been tragic enough, but when he heard complete and utter nonsense he had to stamp on it. The geologist was lost in his books. Rusanov's voice was weak, low, but perfectly distinct (he knew they'd all be straining their ears and that they'd bear) as he said, “That can't be true. You're a German, aren't you?”

“Yes.” Federau nodded. He seemed distressed by the fact.

“Well then?” (I've made it clear enough, but he still won't give in.) “When you were all taken into exile they must have taken away your Party cards.”

“No, they didn't.” Federau shook his head.

Rusanov screwed up his face. He found it difficult to talk. “Well, they must have made a mistake. They were in a hurry, obviously there was some muddle. You'd better hand it in yourself now.”

“No, I won't.” Federau was a shy man, but this time he dug his toes in. “I've had my card more than thirteen years, there's no mistake about that. We were brought before the district committee and they explained everything. ‘You'll still be members of the Party,' they said, ‘but we are making a distinction between you and the masses. A note in the
komendatura
records is one thing, but Party dues are Party dues, they're a different matter altogether. You won't be allowed to hold any important job, but you'll have to set an example as ordinary workers.' That's how it was.”

“Well, I don't know,” sighed Rusanov. He'd been longing to close his eyelids. Talking was very difficult.

His second injection, the day before yesterday, hadn't done any good. His tumor hadn't gone down or softened, it was still pressing him under the chin like an iron fist. He lay there weakly, anticipating the delirium that would rack him after the third injection. He and Kapa had agreed that after the third injection he should go to Moscow, but he had lost all energy for the struggle. He bad only just realized what it meant to be doomed. Three injections or ten, here or in Moscow, what did it matter? If the tumor wasn't going to yield, nothing could be done. Of course, a tumor did not necessarily mean death; it might stay with him, disfiguring him or turning him into an invalid. However, Pavel Nikolayevich had not directly connected the tumor with death until yesterday, when Bone-chewer, who had read all those medical books, had started explaining to someone how a tumor spreads poison throughout the body, and so cannot be allowed to remain.

Pavel Nikolayevich felt a prickling in his eyes. He realized he could not dismiss death entirely. Death was out of the question, of course, but nevertheless it had to be considered.

Yesterday, on the ground floor, with his own eyes he'd seen a postoperative case having a sheet pulled up over his head. He understood now what the orderlies meant when they said among themselves, “This one'll be
under the sheet
pretty soon.” So that's what it was. We always think of death as black, but it's only the preliminaries that are black. Death itself is white.

Since men are mortal, Rusanov had always known that one day he too would have to hand over the keys of his office—but “one day,” not this very moment. He was not frightened of dying “one day,” he was frightened of dying now. What will it be like? What will happen afterward? How will life go on without me?

He felt sorry for himself, as he pictured the purposeful, vigorous life he had been living, a splendid life, one might almost say, knocked flat by this rock of a tumor, this thing so alien in his life which his mind refused to recognize as necessary.

Death, white and indifferent—a sheet, bodiless and void—was walking toward him carefully, noiselessly, on slippered feet. Stealing up on Rusanov, it had caught him unawares. He was not only incapable of fighting it; he could not think, make a decision or speak about it.

Its arrival was illegal, and there was no rule or instruction with which he could defend himself.

He'd grown so weak that he'd lost his civic concern about what went on in the ward. One of the lab. girls had come into the ward today to make up the electoral roll (even here they were getting ready for the elections). She was collecting passports. Everyone handed in a passport or a collective-farm certificate, except for Kostoglotov, who didn't have one. The lab girl was surprised, naturally. She kept asking for his passport, and the insolent fellow started a row. She ought to know the basic political facts—that there are different categories of exiles. Why didn't she ring such-and-such a number to find out? As for him, he
had
the right to vote, that is in principle, but if the worst came to the worst he might not vote at all.

At last it dawned on Pavel Nikolayevich what a den of thieves he'd fallen among in this clinic, and what sort of people he was sharing the ward with. And this scoundrel had the audacity to refuse to have the light off, opened the window whenever he felt like it, passed himself off to the senior doctor as a virgin-lander, and even tried to open the untouched, virgin newspaper before Rusanov. Pavel Nikolayevich's first instinct had been right: that was the sort of man he was.

A fog of indifference enveloped Pavel Nikolayevich. He hadn't enough energy to unmask Bone-chewer. Even the den of thieves somehow no longer repelled him.

The hood of the sheet loomed before him.

From the lobby the rasping voice of Nellya, the orderly, could be heard. There was only one voice like that in the clinic. There she was, asking someone twenty meters away without even having to raise her voice, “Hey, listen, how much are those patent-leather shoes?”

The answer went unheard. Instead Nellya's voice came again. “Hey, if I had a pair of those, I could get all the lover boys I wanted.”

The other girl didn't agree, and Nellya half gave in to her. Then she said, “Oh yes, that was the first time I wore nylon stockings. I really fancied them. But Sergei threw a match and burned a hole in them, the bastard.”

She came into the ward carrying a broom. “All right, boys,” she said. “They told me the place got washed and scrubbed yesterday, so today we'll just give it the once-over, OK?” She remembered something. “Hey, I've got news for you.” She pointed to Federau and announced cheerfully, “The one who was over there, he shut up shop, he bought his lunch, he did.”

Federau was extremely restrained by nature, but at this he shifted his shoulders, ill at ease.

They didn't understand what Nellya was getting at, so she explained: “You know, that poxy-faced guy, the one with all the bandages. It happened yesterday at the railway station, just by the ticket office. They've just brought him in for a post-mortem.”

“Oh God!” Rusanov said pathetically. “How can you be so tactless, comrade orderly? Why spread such dreadful news around? Can't you find something cheerful to tell us?”

Everyone in the ward became plunged in thought. True, Yefrem had spoken a lot about death, and there had been an air of doom about him. He used to stop there in the aisle and hammer on at them through his teeth. “It's a ter'ble situation we're in,” he'd say.

But they had not seen Yefrem's last moment. He had left the clinic and so he remained alive in their memory. They had to picture someone, who the day before yesterday had been treading the floorboards which they themselves trod, lying in the morgue, slit up the midline like a burst sausage.

“I'll tell you something which will make you laugh if you like. You'll split your sides. Only it's a bit disgusting…”

“That's all right, let's have it,” begged Ahmadjan, “Let's have it.”

“Oh yes.” Nellya remembered something else. “You, pretty boy, they want you for X ray. Yes, you!” She pointed at Vadim.

Vadim put his book down on the window sill. Cautiously using his hands to help him, he lowered his bad leg on to the floor, then followed it with the other. Apart from the scarred leg which he nursed carefully, he looked like a ballet dancer as he walked toward the door.

He had heard about Podduyev, but he felt no sympathy for him. Podduyev had not been a valuable member of society. Nor was that sluttish orderly. After all, the value of the human race lay not in its towering quantity, but in its maturing quality.

The lab. girl came in with the newspaper.

Bone-chewer came in behind her. He was always grabbing the newspaper.

“Me! Give it to me!” said Pavel Nikolayevich weakly, stretching out a hand.

He managed to get it.

Even without his glasses he could see that the whole of the front page was covered with large photographs and bold headlines. Slowly he propped himself up, slowly he put on his glasses, and saw, as he'd expected, that the Supreme Soviet session had come to an end. There was a photograph of the presidium and the hall, and the important final resolutions were in large type—so large that there was no need to thumb through the paper looking for the small but significant paragraph.

“What? What?” Pavel Nikolayevich could not contain himself, though there was no one suitable in the ward for him to address and it was bad form to show such amazement at a newspaper item or to query it.

In large print, in the first column, it was announced that chairman of the Council of Ministers, G. M. Malenkov, had expressed a wish to be relieved of his duties, and that the Supreme Soviet had unanimously granted his request.

So this was the end of the session which Rusanov had expected merely to produce a budget!

He felt quite weak. His hands dropped, still holding the paper. He could read no further.

He didn't understand the reason for it. He could no longer follow the instructions now that they were plainly worded. He did realize, though, that things were taking a sharp turn, too sharp a turn.

It was as though somewhere deep in the depths geological strata were beginning to rumble, to shift slightly, shuddering through the town, the hospital and Pavel Nikolayevich's bed.

Oblivious to the quaking of the room and the floor, in through the door, with soft, even tread, walked Dr. Gangart, in a newly pressed white coat, with an encouraging smile on her face and a hypodermic syringe in her hands.

“All right, time for our injection,” she invited him coaxingly.

Kostoglotov grabbed the paper from Rusanov's feet. Immediately he spotted the big news and read it.

Then he stood up. He could not remain seated.

He did not understand the full significance of the news either. But if the day before yesterday they had changed the whole Supreme Court, and today had replaced the Premier, it meant that history was on the march.

History was on the march. Was it conceivable that the changes could be for the worse?

The day before yesterday he had held his leaping heart down with his hands, but then he had stopped himself from hoping and believing.

But two days had gone by, and now—as a reminder—the same four Beethoven chords thundered into the sky as though into a microphone.

The patients were lying quietly in their beds. They heard nothing! Vera Gangart was calmly slipping the embiquine into Rusanov's vein.

Oleg darted out of the room. He was running outside.

Into the open!

20. Memories of Beauty

No, he'd forbidden himself faith long ago. He dared not allow himself to take heart.

Only a prisoner in his first years of sentence believes, every time he is summoned from his cell and told to collect his belongings, that he is being called to freedom. To him every whisper of an amnesty sounds like the trumpets of archangels. But they call him out of his cell, read him some loathsome documents and shove him into another cell on the floor below, even darker than the previous one but with the same stale, used-up air. The amnesty is always postponed—from the anniversary of victory to the anniversary of the Revolution, from the anniversary of the Revolution to the Supreme Soviet session. Then it bursts like a bubble, or is applied only to thieves, crooks and deserters instead of those who fought in the war and suffered.