Cancer Ward (42 page)

Their life blossomed into steady joy on the day they bought their own tumble-down mud hut with kitchen garden, their last haven, they knew, the roof under which they would live and die. (They decided to die together. When one went, the other would go too: what was there to stay for?) They had no furniture, so they asked Khomratovich, an old man who was also an exile, to fix them an adobe platform in a corner, which became their conjugal bed—beautifully wide and comfortable! Perfect! They stuffed a big, broad sack with straw and sewed it up for a mattress. Next, they ordered a table from Khomratovich, a round one into the bargain. Khomratovich was puzzled. Over sixty years he'd lived in this world, and he'd never seen a round table. Why make it round? “Please!” said Nikolai Ivanovich, rubbing his deft, white gynecologist's hands. “It simply
must
be round!” Their next problem was to get hold of a paraffin lamp. They wanted a glass lamp, not a tin one, with a tall stand, the wick had to have ten strands, not seven, and they insisted on spare globes too. Since no such lamp existed in Ush-Terek, it had to be assembled piecemeal, each part brought by kind people from a long way off. Finally, there stood the lamp, with its homemade shade, on the round table. In Ush-Terek in the year 1954, when the hydrogen bomb was already invented and people were chasing after standard lamps in the capitals, this paraffin lamp on the round homemade table transformed the little clay hovel into a luxurious drawing room of two centuries ago. What a triumph! As the three of them sat round it, Elena Alexandrovna would remark with feeling, “You know, Oleg, life is so good. Apart from childhood, these have been the happiest days of my life.”

And obviously she was right. It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

Before the war they had lived near Moscow with her mother-in-law. She had been so uncompromising and obsessed by detail, and Nikolai Ivanovich had stood in such awe of her, that Elena Alexandrovna had felt crushed. She was already a middle-aged woman with her own life to lead, and this wasn't her first marriage. She called those years her Middle Ages now. It would take some terrible disaster to let a gust of fresh air into that family.

Disaster descended, and it was her mother-in-law who set the wheels turning. During the first year of the war a man with no documents came to their door, asking for shelter. Her mother-in-law considered it her duty to give refuge to the deserter without even consulting the “young couple”: she combined sternness toward her family with general Christian principles. The deserter spent two nights in the flat and then left. He was captured somewhere and under interrogation revealed the house which had harbored him. The mother-in-law being nearly eighty, they left her alone, but it was thought convenient to arrest her fifty-year-old son and forty-year-old daughter-in-law. During the investigation they tried to discover whether the deserter was a relative. Had he been, they'd have taken a far more lenient view of the case: a family looking after its own, quite understandable, excusable even. But since he had been a mere passer-by, nothing to them, the Kadmins got ten years apiece, not for harboring a deserter but as enemies of their country who were deliberately undermining the might of the Red Army. The war ended and the deserter was released in Stalin's Great Amnesty of 1945. (Historians will rack their brains, wondering why deserters should have been pardoned before anyone else—and unconditionally.) He'd forgotten in whose house he'd spent two nights on the run, and that he'd dragged others into prison after him. The Kadmins were not affected by the amnesty: they were enemies, not deserters. They'd served their ten years but they were still not allowed to go home: after all, they hadn't acted as individuals, they were a
group,
an
organization
—husband and wife! Therefore they must be exiled in perpetuity. Knowing in advance that this would happen, the Kadmins had made an application to be exiled to the same place. No one seemed to have any particular objection, the request was legitimate enough. All the same, they sent the husband to the south of Kazakhstan and the wife to the Krasnoyarsk region. Did they perhaps want to separate them as members of the same organization? No, it wasn't done out of malice or as a punishment, but simply because there was no one on the staff at the Ministry of the Interior whose job it was to keep husbands and wives together. So they had stayed separated. The wife was nearly fifty, her arms and legs were swelling, yet they sent her out into the
taiga
*
where the only work was lumber jacking, so familiar from the camps. (Yet she often reminisced about the Yenisei
taiga
—wonderful countryside!) They spent a year bombarding Moscow with complaints until in the end a special guard was sent to bring Elena Alexandrovna out to Ush-Terek.

Of course they enjoyed life now! They loved Ush-Terek and their mud-and-clay hovel! What more could they wish for in the way of worldly goods?

Perpetual exile? Very well. Perpetuity was long enough to make a thorough study of the climate of Ush-Terek. Nikolai Ivanovich hung three thermometers outside his house, put out a jar to collect precipitation and consulted Inna Ström, the senior schoolgirl in charge of the state weather station, about the force of the wind. By now Nikolai Ivanovich had a journal full of meticulously kept statistics, whatever happened to the weather station.

His father had been a communications engineer. From him he had imbibed in childhood a passion for constant activity and a love of order and accuracy. Although no one could call Korolenko
*
a pedant he had frequently observed (and Nikolai Ivanovich liked to quote his words) that “order in affairs maintains peace of mind.” Dr. Kadmin's favorite proverb was “Things know their place.” Things know themselves where they belong, and we shouldn't get in their way.

Nikolai Ivanovich's favorite hobby for winter evenings was bookbinding. He liked to take torn, tattered, wilting books and make them blossom anew in fresh covers. Even in Ush-Terek he managed to have a binding press and an extra-sharp guillotine made for him.

As soon as the Kadmins had paid for the mud hut they started economizing, they scraped month after month, wearing out old clothes to save up for a battery radio. First they had to arrange with the Kurd who was the assistant in the cultural-goods store to put some batteries on one side for them. Batteries came separately from the sets, if they came at all. Then they had to overcome the horror that all exiles have of radios. What would the security officer say? Did they want the set for listening in to the BBC? The horror was overcome, the batteries were obtained, the set was switched on—and out came music, sheer heaven to a prisoner's ear, with no disturbances because the battery supplied an even current. Puccini, Sibelius, Bortnyanski were chosen daily from the programs and switched on in the Kadmins' hovel. The radio filled their world and more than filled it: they had no need now to take from the outside world, they could give from their own plenty.

When spring came, there was less time in the evenings to listen to the radio. Instead, they had their little kitchen garden to look after. Nikolai Ivanovich divided up his quarter-acre plot with such energy and ingenuity that old Prince Bolkonski
**
with his private architect at Bald Hills estates would have had to run to keep up with him. At the age of sixty he was still going strong at the hospital, working time-and-a-half and ready to rush out any night to deliver a baby. He never walked in the village, he rushed along with no concern for the dignity of his gray beard, the flaps of the canvas jacket Elena Alexandrovna had made fluttering behind him. When it came to digging, though, he hadn't the strength now. Half an hour in the morning was all he could manage before he was winded. Heart and hands might lag, yet the plan was masterly, barely short of perfection. Boastfully, he would take Oleg around his bare kitchen garden, the boundary carelessly marked by two saplings.

“Oleg,” he would say, “I'm going to have an avenue running through it. On the left here there'll be three apricot trees one day. They've already been planted. On the right I'm going to start a vineyard. It'll take root, I'm sure of it. Then at the end of the avenue I'm going to put a summerhouse, a real summerhouse, something Ush-Terek has never seen the like of. I've already laid the foundations, look, over there, that semicircle of adobes”—Khomratovich would have asked, “Why a semicircle?”—“and over here are the hop poles. I'll put tobacco plants next to them, they'll give off a wonderful smell. We'll hide from the heat of the day here, and in the evenings we'll drink tea out of the samovar.” (In fact, they hadn't got it yet.) “You'll be welcome whenever you want.”

What their garden would grow one day was anybody's guess, but what it
hadn't
got to date—potatoes, cabbages, cucumbers, tomatoes and pumpkins—their neighbors had. “But you can buy all those things,” the Kadmins would protest. The Ush-Terek settlers were a businesslike lot; they kept cows, pigs, sheep and hens. The Kadmins were no strangers to livestock breeding either, but they farmed unpractically: they kept dogs and cats and nothing else. They saw it this way—you can get milk and meat in the bazaar, but where can you buy the devotion of a dog? Would lop-eared Beetle, black and brown and big as a bear, or sharp-nosed, pushing little Tobik, white but for two quivering black ears, leap up to greet you for money?

Nowadays we don't think much of a man's love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving humans too?

The Kadmins loved their animals not for their fur but for themselves, and the animals absorbed their owners' aura of kindness instantly, without any training. They deeply appreciated the Kadmins' talking to them and could listen to them for hours. They valued their company and took pride in escorting them wherever they went. As soon as Tobik lying in the room (the dogs had the run of the house) saw Elena Alexandrovna putting on her coat and picking up her purse he knew they were going for a walk around the village and, what's more, would jump up, rush off into the garden to fetch Beetle, and be back with him in a trice. He had told Beetle about the walk in dog language, and up would run Beetle, excited and raring to go.

Beetle was an excellent judge of time. After he had escorted the Kadmins to the movies, instead of lying down outside he disappeared, but he was always back before the end of the program. Once there'd been only five reels in the film, and he was late. He was miserable at first, but he jumped for joy after all had been forgiven.

The dogs accompanied Nikolai Ivanovich everywhere except to work, for they realized that wouldn't be very tactful. If they saw the doctor coming out of the gate with his light, youthful step late in the afternoon, they knew unerringly, as if by telepathy, whether he was off to visit a woman in labor, in which case they stayed behind, or going for a swim, in which case they joined him. He used to swim in the Chu River a good five kilometers away. Locals and exiles alike, young or middle-aged, considered it too far to go for a daily trip, but small boys went, so did Dr. Kadmin and his dogs. Actually, this was the one walk that failed to give the dogs complete satisfaction. The track across the steppe was hard and thorny. Beetle's paws got painfully cut, while Tobik, who had once been ducked, was terrified of finding himself in the river again. But their sense of duty was paramount; they followed the doctor all the way. Once within three hundred meters of the river, a safe distance, Tobik would begin to lag behind, to make quite sure that nobody grabbed him. First he would apologize with his ears, then with his tail, and then he sat down. But Beetle went right up to the sloping bank, planted his great body there and like a monument surveyed the people bathing below.

Tobik extended his escort duties to cover Oleg, who was always at the Kadmins. (So much so that the security officer became worried and interrogated them in turn: “Why are you so friendly?”, “What do you have in common?”, “What do you talk about?”) Beetle had a choice in the matter, but Tobik had to escort Oleg, come rain or shine. When it was raining and the streets were muddy and his paws got cold and wet, he hated the idea of going out. He would stretch his forepaws, then his hind paws—but he'd go out all the same. Tobik also acted as postman between Oleg and the Kadmins. If they wanted to let Oleg know that there was an interesting movie on or a good program of music on the radio or something useful for sale in the grocery or the general store, they tied a cloth collar around Tobik with a message inside, pointed in the right direction and announced firmly, “Go to Oleg!” Whatever the weather, off he would trot obediently on his long, stalky legs, and if he didn't find Oleg at home he would wait by the door. It was extraordinary. Nobody had ever taught him, he wasn't trained to do it; but he understood instructions instantaneously, as if by thought waves, and carried them out. (It has to be admitted, though, that on his postal trips Oleg used to strengthen Tobik's ideological loyalty with some material incentive.)

What intrigued Oleg about Tobik were his permanently sad eyes. He never smiled with his teeth, only with his ears.

Beetle was about the size and build of a German shepherd, but he had none of the shepherd's wariness or malice. He overflowed with the goodheartedness of most large, powerful creatures. He had lived a fair number of years and known many owners, but the Kadmins he had chosen himself. Before that he had belonged to Vasadze, a tavernkeeper who had kept him on a chain to guard the crates of empties. Sometimes, for a joke, he unleashed him and set him on the neighbors' dogs. A doughty fighter, Beetle struck terror into the flabby, yellow street dogs, but in fact he was a kindly and peace-loving fellow. On one of the occasions when he was let loose, he attended a dogs' wedding near the Kadmins': the local dogs had all been wooing Dolly, Tobik's mother. Beetle bad been rejected because of his ludicrous size and so never became Tobik's stepfather. He sensed sincerity and kindness in the Kadmins' house and garden and began to frequent them, although they never fed him. Then Vasadze left the village and gave Beetle to Emilia, an exile girlfriend of his. Although she gave Beetle plenty to eat, he kept breaking free and going to the Kadmins. Emilia got quite cross with them. She took Beetle back to her house and chained him up again, but he still kept breaking free and running off. Finally she chained him to a car tire. It was then that Beetle saw Elena Alexandrovna walking down the street one day. She deliberately turned her head aside, but he gave a huge jerk, like a drayhorse, and, wheezing as he went, dragged the tire around his neck a hundred meters or so before collapsing. After that Emilia surrendered Beetle. He soon adopted the humane principles of his new owners as a code of behavior. The street dogs no longer went in fear of him, and he began to be friendly toward passers-by, although he was never ingratiating.