Cancer Ward (41 page)

The cells of the heart which nature built for joy die through disuse. That small place in the breast which is faith's cramped quarters remains untenanted for years and decays.

He had had his fill of hoping. He had had his fill of imagining his release and his return home. All he wanted was to go back to his beautiful exile, to his lovely Ush-Terek. Yes, lovely! It was strange, but that was how he saw his remote little place of banishment now, from this hospital in the big city, this world with its complicated rules, to which Oleg felt unable, or perhaps unwilling, to adapt.

“Ush-Terek” means “Three poplars” and is named after three ancient poplars which are visible for ten kilometers or more across the steppe. The trees stand close together, not straight and slender as most poplars are, but slightly twisted. They must have been about four hundred years old. Once they'd reached their present height they'd stopped trying to grow any higher and branched out sideways, weaving a dense shadow across the main irrigation channel It was said that there had been more of them in the
aul
once, but that they had been cut down in 1931. Trees like that wouldn't take root these days. No matter how many the Young Pioneers planted, the goats picked them to bits as soon as they sprouted. Only American maple flourished—in the main street in front of the regional Party committee building.

Which place on earth should you love more? The place where you crawled out of the womb, a screaming infant, understanding nothing, not even the evidence of your eyes or ears? Or the place where they first said to you, “All right, you can go without a guard now, you can go
by yourself
”?

On your own two legs. “Take up thy bed and walk!”

Ah, that first night of half-freedom! As the
komendatura
was still keeping an eye on them, they weren't allowed into the village. But they were permitted to sleep on their own in a hay shelter in the yard of the security police building. They shared the shelter with horses who spent the night motionless, quietly munching hay! Impossible to imagine a sweeter sound!

Oleg could not sleep for half the night. The hard ground of the yard lay white in the moonlight. He walked back and forth across the yard like a man possessed. There were no watchtowers, no one to see him stumbling happily over the bumpy ground, head thrown back, and face upturned to the white sky. He walked on and on, not knowing or caring where, as though he were afraid of being late, as though tomorrow he would emerge not into a mean, remote
aul,
but into the wide, triumphant world. The warm, southern early-spring night was far from silent. It was like a huge, rambling railway station where the locomotives call and answer one another all night. From dusk to dawn donkeys and camels brayed and honked in yards and stables throughout the village—solemn, trumpet-like sounds, vibrant with desire, telling of conjugal passion and faith in the continuation of life. And this marital din merged with the roar in Oleg's breast.

Can any place be dearer than one where you spent such a night?

That was the night when he began to hope and believe again, in spite of all his vows to the contrary.

After the camps, the world of exile could not really be called cruel, although here too people fought with buckets to get water during the irrigation season, some of them getting their legs slashed. The world of exile was much more spacious and easier to live in. It had more dimensions. Nevertheless it had its cruel side. It wasn't easy to make a plant take root and to feed it. He had to dodge being sent by the
komendant
a hundred and fifty kilometers or more deeper into the desert. He had to find a straw-and-clay roof to put over his head and pay a landlady, although he had nothing to pay her with. He had to buy his daily bread and whatever he ate in the canteen. He had to find work, but he'd had enough of heaving a pick for the last seven years and didn't feel like taking up a bucket and watering the crops. Although there were women in the village with mud-wall cottages, kitchen gardens and even cows who would have been prepared to take on an unmarried exile, he reckoned it was too early to sell himself as a husband. He didn't feel his life was nearly over; on the contrary, it was only beginning.

Back in the camps the prisoners used to estimate the number of men missing from the outer world. The moment you aren't under guard, they thought, the first woman you set eyes on will be yours. They imagined that all women outside were sobbing their hearts out in solitude and thinking about nothing but men. But in his village there were countless children and the women seemed absorbed in the lives they led. Neither the women who lived alone nor the young girls would go with a man just like that. They wanted to be married honorably first and to build a little house for the village to see. The morals and customs of Ush-Terek went back to the last century.

Although it was a long time now since Oleg had been under guard, he still lived without a woman, just as he had during the years behind barbed wire, even though the village was full of picture-postcard Greek girls with raven hair and hard-working, blond little Germans.

The “invoice” sending him into exile had said in perpetuity, and in his mind Oleg was resigned to the exile being perpetual. He could not imagine it otherwise, yet there was something deep inside him that wouldn't allow him to marry out here. Beria had been overthrown, falling with a tinny clang, like a hollow idol. Everyone had expected sweeping changes, but they had come slowly, and were small. Oleg discovered where his old girlfriend was—in exile in Krasnoyarsk—and they exchanged letters. He also started writing to a girl he'd known in Leningrad. For months he had clung to the hope that she'd come out here. (But who was going to throw up an apartment in Leningrad to come and stay with him in this hole in the ground?) At that point his tumor had appeared, and his life was shattered by continual, overpowering pain. Women ceased to attract him any more than other nice people.

Oleg knew, as everyone had known, if not from experience, from books ever since Ovid, that exile was not simply oppressive (you are neither in the place you love best, nor with the people you most want to see), but he also perceived, as few have, that exile can also bring release—from doubts and responsibilities. The true unfortunates were not the exiles, but the ones who had been given passports with the sordid “Article 39”
*
conditions. They spent their time blaming themselves for all the false moves they made, constantly on the move looking for somewhere to live, trying to find work and being thrown out of places. This prisoner, on the other hand, entered exile with all his rights intact. As he hadn't picked the place, no one could throw him out. The authorities had planned it all for him; he had no need to worry about whether he was missing a chance of living somewhere else or whether he ought to look for a better setup. He knew he was treading the only road there was, and this gave him a cheerful sort of courage.

Now that he was beginning to recover and was faced once more with the raveled tangle of his life, Oleg enjoyed the knowledge that there was a blessed little place called Ush-Terek, where his thinking was done for him, where everything was clear-cut, where he was regarded almost as a citizen and to which he would soon be going home. For it would be
home.
Threads of kinship were drawing him there, and he wanted to call it “my place.”

During the three quarters of a year he'd spent in Ush-Terek, Oleg had been ill. He hadn't observed nature or daily life in much detail, or derived any pleasure from them. To the sick man the steppe seemed too dusty, the sun too hot, the kitchen gardens scorched, the doughy adobe mixture uncomfortably heavy to carry.

But now, as he strolled along the pathways of the Medical Center with its abundant trees, people, bright colors and stone houses, life was trumpeting inside him, like those donkeys braying in the spring. Deeply stirred, he was reconstructing in imagination every trivial, humble feature of the Ush-Terek world. That humble world was dearer to him for being his own, his own till death, his own
in perpetuity:
the other was temporary, as if rented.

He remembered the
jusan
of the steppe with its bitter smell: it was as if it was an intimate part of him. He remembered the
jantak
with its prickly thorns, and the
jingil,
even pricklier, that ran along the hedges, with violet flowers in May that were as sweet-smelling as the lilac, and the stupefying
jidu
tree, whose scented blossom was as strong and heady as a lavishly perfumed woman.

Wasn't it extraordinary that a Russian, attached with every fiber of his being to the glades and little fields of Russia, to the quiet privacy of the Central Russian countryside, who had been sent away against his will and forever, should have become so fond of that scraggy open plain, always too hot or too windy, where a quiet, overcast day came as a respite and a rainy day was like a holiday? He felt quite resigned to living there until he died. Men like Sarymbetov, Telegenov, Maukeyev and the Skokov brothers had increased his respect for their race, even though he couldn't yet understand their language. Under their veneer of waywardness, in which false and real emotions were mixed, behind their naїve devotion to ancient clans, he saw a fundamentally simple-hearted people who would always answer sincerity with sincerity, good will with good will.

Oleg was thirty-four. Colleges do not accept students over thirty-five. He would never get an education. Well, that was the way it was. Recently he had managed to elevate himself from brickmaker to be land surveyor's assistant. (He'd told Zoya a lie; he wasn't a surveyor, merely an assistant on 350 roubles a month.) His boss, the district surveyor, was only dimly aware of the value of the divisions on a surveyor's pole, and if there had been any work, Oleg could have had all he wanted. In fact he had almost no work at all. The collective farms had deeds assigning them the land they were using “in perpetuity” (there it was again!) and all he had to do was occasionally slice off a plot of land from the farms for the expanding industrial settlements. He could never hope to equal the skill of the
mirab,
the sovereign master of irrigation (his profession was eternal too), who could feel the slightest incline in the soil as he leaned over it with his bucket; oh well, he would probably find himself something better in a few years' time. But why was it that even now he was thinking so warmly of Ush-Terek, longing for the end of his treatment so that he could go back, ready to drag himself back there even if he was only half cured?

Wouldn't it be more natural to become embittered, to hate and curse one's place of exile? No, wrongs that seemed to cry out for the crack of the satirist's whip were for Oleg no more than funny stories, worth a smile. Take, for example, the new headmaster Aben Berdenov who had torn Savrasov's “Rooks” from a classroom wall and tossed it behind a cupboard. (He'd spotted a church in the picture, and thought it was religious propaganda.) Or the local chief health officer, a pert little Russian girl, who used to deliver lectures to the local intelligentsia from a rostrum and then sell
crêpe-de-Chine
of the latest design to the ladies of the village on the quiet at double the retail price, before it appeared in the local shop. And the ambulance that used to bowl along in a cloud of dust, often without any patients inside, requisitioned by the Party secretary for his own use or even for the delivery of noodles and fresh butter around the flats. He remembered the “wholesale” trade run by the small retailer Orembayev. There was never anything to be had in his little general store. It was always piled to the roof with empty boxes of goods already sold, he was continually getting bonuses for overfulfilling his trade plan, and yet he spent the whole time dozing by the door. He was too lazy to use the scales, too lazy to pour out measures, too lazy to wrap anything up. He would supply all the bigwigs first, then make a note of what he thought were the other worthies and put quiet little suggestions to them. “Take a box of macaroni,” he would say, “a whole box,” or “Take a sack of sugar, a whole sack.” The sack or the box would be delivered to the customer's flat straight from the depot, but it would be included in Orembayev's turnover. Finally, there was the third secretary of the district Party committee who, eager to take exams as an extramural student at the high school but ignorant in every branch of mathematics, one night crept up to the teacher's house (he was an exile) and presented him with an Astrakhan pelt as a bribe.

After the wolfish existence of the camps this sort of thing could be taken with a smile. Indeed, what wasn't a joke after the camps? What didn't seem like a rest?

What a joy it was to pull on his white shirt at twilight (it was the only one he had: the collar was frayed, and his trousers and boots were unmentionable) and walk along the village street. The wall under the rush roof of the community center would have a poster announcing a new “Trophy”
*
film, and the village idiot, Vasya, would be urging all and sundry to come into the cinema. Oleg would try to buy the cheapest ticket in the house—two roubles, right in the front row with all the kids. Once a month he'd have a binge, buy a mug of beer for two and a half roubles and drink it in the teahouse with the Chechen truck drivers.

To Oleg exile was full of laughter and elation, and for that the Kadmins, an old couple he knew, were mainly responsible. The husband, Nikolai Ivanovich, was a gynecologist and his wife was called Elena Alexandrovna. Whatever happened to the exiled Kadmins, they kept saying, “Isn't that fine? Things are so much better than they used to be. How lucky we are to have landed in such a nice part of the world!”

If they managed to get hold of a loaf of white bread—how wonderful! If they found a two-volume edition of Puastovsky in the bookshop—splendid! There was a good movie on at the center that day—marvelous! A dental technician had arrived to provide new dentures—excellent! Another gynecologist had been sent there, a woman, an exile too—very good! Let
her
do the gynecology and the illegal abortions; Nikolai Ivanovich would take care of the general practice. There'd be less money but more peace of mind. And the sunsets over the steppe, orange, pink, flame-red, crimson and purple—superlative! Nikolai Ivanovich, a small, slender man with graying hair, would take his wife by the arm (she was plump and growing heavy, partly through ill-health; he was as quick as she was slow) and they would march off solemnly past the last house of the village to watch the sun go down.