Cancer Ward (51 page)

He nodded his head toward it.

“It's not old. But it's not for you either. We'll give you two hundred and fifty grams. Here!” Vera Kornilyevna brought it over from the other table and showed it to him. “Read this, check the label for yourself.”

“You know, Vera Kornilyevna, it's a miserable, cursed life I lead: never believe anything, check everything. Don't you think I'm happier when I
don't
have to check?”

He said this in a weary voice, like a dying man. But his alert eyes couldn't restrain themselves from making sure. They took in the words “
GROUP A. YAROSLAVTSEVA, IRENA L. MARCH
5.”

“Aha, March 5! That'll be just right!” Oleg cheered up. “That's bound to do us good.”

“So, you
do
realize what good it does you. At last! And you made such a fuss before.” She didn't understand what he meant. Oh well, never mind.

He rolled his shirt sleeve up over his elbow and let his arm fall relaxed alongside his body.

It was true. For a man like Oleg who had to be permanently suspicious and watchful it was the greatest pleasure in the world to be able to trust, to give himself to trust. And he trusted this woman, this gentle ethereal creature. He knew she'd move softly, thinking out her every action, and that she wouldn't make the slightest mistake.

And so he lay there and felt as though he was having a rest.

The large patch of sunlight on the ceiling, weak as though filtered through lace, formed an uneven circle. This patch, reflected off he didn't know what, was contributing to his happiness and beautifying the clean, quiet room.

Vera Kornilyevna had perfidiously drawn some blood out of his vein with a needle. She was turning the centrifuge and breaking up the blood into four sectors.

“Why four?” He only asked because all his life, everywhere he went, he had been in the habit of asking questions. In fact at the moment he felt he couldn't even be bothered to know.

“One for compatibility, and three to check the distribution center for group accuracy. Just in case.”

“But if the group's the right one, why check the compatibility?”

“In case the patient's serum congeals after contact with the donor's blood. It's rare, but it does happen.”

“I see. But why do you turn it?”

“To push back the red corpuscles. You have to know everything, don't you?”

Of course he didn't really have to know everything. Oleg looked at the patch hovering on the ceiling. You can't know everything in the world. Whatever happens you'll die a fool.

The nurse with the white tiara inserted the upturned March 5 bottle into the clamps on the stand. Then she put a little pillow under his elbow. She pulled tight the red rubber sling over his arm above the elbow and began to twist it. Her Japanese eyes gauged how far she could go.

It was strange that he had seen some sort of an enigma in this girl. There just wasn't one. She was a girl like any other.

Up walked Vera Gangart with the syringe. It was an ordinary one full of a colorless liquid, but the needle was unusual, a tube rather than a needle, a tube with a triangular end. There was nothing wrong with a tube in itself, just so long as no one was going to drive it into you.

“Your vein stands out well,” Vera Kornilyevna began to say. One of her eyebrows twitched as she looked for it. Then, with concentration, puncturing the skin so that he could scarcely feel it, she introduced the monstrous needle. And that was all.

There was still a lot he didn't understand. Why did they twist the sling above his elbow? What was that water-like liquid in the syringe for? He could ask, of course, but he could also try to work it out for himself. It was probably to stop air rushing into the vein and blood rushing into the syringe.

Meanwhile the needle remained in his vein. The pressure of the sling was released and it was taken off. The syringe was skillfully removed and the nurse shook the tip of the instrument over a little bowl to get rid of the first drops of blood. Now Gangart was fixing this tip to the needle instead of the syringe. She held it in place, at the same time slightly opening the screw on the top.

Inside the widening glass pipe of the instrument a number of transparent bubbles began to rise slowly, one by one, through the transparent liquid.

Questions kept occurring to him, floating up like the bubbles, one after the other. Why such a wide needle? Why did they shake off the blood? What did those bubbles mean? One fool can ask enough questions to keep a hundred wise men too busy to answer them all.

If he was going to ask questions, he wanted to ask them about something else.

There was a festive air about everything in the room, especially that sun-bleached patch on the ceiling.

The needle had to stay in a long time. The level of the blood in the bottle had hardly dropped, indeed it hadn't dropped at all.

“Do you need me, Vera Kornilyevna?” asked the nurse, the Japanese girl. She spoke with deference, still listening to her own voice.

“No, I don't need you,” Gangart answered quietly.

“I'll go out for a bit … Can I take half an hour?”

“Yes, as far as I'm concerned.
I
don't need you.”

The nurse with the white tiara almost ran out. They were left, just the two of them.

Slowly the bubbles rose. Then Vera Kornilyevna touched the screw and they stopped rising. Not one single bubble remained.

“You've turned it off?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“You always have to know, don't you?” She smiled at him, this time encouragingly.

It was very quiet in the dressings room. They were old walls and the doors were sturdy. One could speak in a voice slightly over a whisper, just breathe effortlessly out and talk while doing it. That was the way he wanted to speak.

“Yes, I know I'm difficult to deal with. I always want to know more than I'm allowed to know.”

“It's good you still want to…” she observed. Her lips were never uninvolved in the words they were pronouncing. Tiny movements of her mouth, quirks in the right-hand or left-hand corner, a slight pout or a slight twitch, emphasized each thought and illuminated it.

“After the first twenty-five cubic centimeters we're supposed to pause for a time and see how the patient is feeling.” One hand still held the tip against the needle, just one hand. She shifted her smile slightly, welcomingly and inquiringly, and looked into Oleg's eyes as she leaned over him. “How do you feel?”

“At this precise moment—excellent.”

“Isn't that putting it rather strongly?”

“No, I really feel excellent. Much better than ‘Well.'”

“No shivering, no unpleasant taste in the mouth, nothing of that?”

“No.”

The bottle, the needle and the transfusion formed a task that united them in a common concern for someone quite apart from themselves, someone whom they were trying to treat together and cure.

“And apart from this precise moment?”

“Apart from this precise moment?” It was wonderful just being there, looking minute after minute into each other's eyes at a time when they had a perfect right to do so, when there was no need to look away. “Well, generally I feel awful.”

“Awful? Why?”

She asked it sympathetically and anxiously, like a friend. But … she had deserved the blow. And Oleg felt that now was the time to deliver it However soft her bright, light-brown eyes were, she wouldn't escape.

“It's my morale that's awful. Awful because I know that I'm paying too high a price for my life, and that even you—yes, you—are involved in the process and arc deceiving me.”

“Me!”

When eyes gaze endlessly into each other, they acquire an entirely new quality. You see things never revealed in passing glances. The eyes seem to lose their protective-colored retina. The whole truth comes splashing out wordlessly, it cannot be contained.

“How
could
you have assured me so fervently that the injections were necessary, and that I wouldn't understand the point of them? What is there to understand? It's hormone therapy. What is there to understand about that?”

Of course it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair to take those defenseless brown eyes so unawares, but it was the only way of really asking the question. Something in her eyes jumped; she was quite staggered.

And Dr. Gangart (no, it wasn't Dr. Gangart, it was Vega) turned away her eyes.

So they withdraw a company from the field of battle before its final rout.

She looked at the bottle, but what was there to look at when the blood flow had stopped? She looked at the bubbles, but the bubbles weren't rising either.

Then she turned on the screw. The bubbles started. It was time it was done anyway.

Her fingers stroked the rubber tube that hung down from the instrument to the needle. It was as if they were helping to remove all obstructions in the tube. She put some more absorbent cotton under the tip to make sure the tube wouldn't bend. He saw she had some adhesive tape. She took a strip of it and stuck the tip to his arm. Then she threaded the rubber tube through his fingers, the fingers of the same hand. They were stuck up in the air like hooks. Thereafter, the tube held itself in position.

There was now no need for Vega to hold it, or to stand by his side, or to gaze into his eyes.

Her face was stern and clouded as she adjusted the flow of bubbles to make it more frequent. “That's the way,” she said, “just lie still.”

And she left.

She didn't go completely offstage, she only left that part of it in his field of vision. He had to lie quite still. It meant that the only things in sight were the instrument stand, the bottle of brown blood, the shiny bubbles, the tops of the sunlit windows, the reflections of the windows with their six panes in the frosted glass of the lamp globe, and the whole expanse of ceiling with its shimmering patch of faint sunlight.

Vega was no longer there.

The question seemed to have fallen flat, like an object passed carelessly, clumsily, from hand to hand.

And she hadn't picked it up.

It was up to Oleg to go on working on it.

Looking up at the ceiling, he began slowly thinking aloud: “If my life is totally lost, if I can feel in my bones the memory that I'm a prisoner in perpetuity, a perpetual ‘con,' if Fate holds out no better prospect, if the only expectation I have is being consciously and artificially killed—then why bother to save such a life?”

Vega heard everything, but she was offstage. Perhaps it was better this way, it was easier to speak.

“First my own life was taken from me, and now I am being deprived even of the right … to perpetuate myself. I'll be the worst sort of cripple! What use will I be to anyone? An object of men's pity—or charity?…”

Vega said nothing.

That patch on the ceiling—from time to time it seemed to quiver, to contract at the edges. It was as if a frown was passing over it, as if it too was thinking but couldn't understand. Then it would become motionless once more.

The gay transparent bubbles kept gurgling. The level of blood in the bottle was falling. A quarter of it was already transfused. It was woman's blood. The blood of “Yaroslavtseva, Irena L.” Was she a girl? An old woman? A student? Or a market woman?

“Yes, charity…”

Keeping out of sight, Vega didn't start arguing with him. Instead she suddenly launched out from where she was standing: “No, it's not true! You don't really believe that, do you? I know you don't! Examine yourself—those aren't
your
ideas, you've borrowed them from somewhere else, haven't you?”

She spoke with more force than he had heard in her voice before. It was full of wounded feeling, more than he would ever have expected.

Suddenly she cut herself short and fell silent.

“What do you expect me to believe, then?” Oleg tried cautiously to draw her out.

Goodness, what a silence! You could even here the little light bubbles in the glass balloon. They made a faint ringing noise.

It was hard for her to speak. Her voice was shattered. She was trying to pull herself up out of the ditch, but it was beyond her strength.

“There must be some people who think differently! Maybe a few, maybe only a handful, but differently all the same! If everyone thought your way, who could we live with? What would we live for? Would we be able to live at all?”

She had pulled herself up and over the edge. The last words came crying from her with a new sort of despair. It was as if her protest had jolted him, as if she had jolted him with all the petty strength she possessed, moving his heavy reddened body to reach the only place of salvation possible.

Like a stone thrown boldly from a boy's sling made out of a sunflower stem that lengthens his arm, or like a shell fired out of one of those long-barreled guns in the last year of the war, a whooshing, whistling shell shuddering noisily through the air—Oleg shot up and flew in a crazy parabola, breaking loose from everything he had memorized and sweeping away everything he'd borrowed from other people, high over the wastelands of his life, one wasteland after the other, until he came to some land of long ago.

It was the country of his childhood. He didn't recognize it at once, but the moment his blinking, still-clouded eyes did recognize it he was ashamed. He remembered how he used to believe the same when he was a boy, and he was ashamed she had had to rediscover it for him instead of him telling her.

There was something else coming back to him too, out of his memory. It was perfect for the occasion. He simply had to get it into his mind. Then he remembered!

He remembered it in a flash, but when he began to speak it was slowly and reasoningly, taking one thing at a time: “In the 1920's there were some books by a certain venereologist, Dr. Friedland. They were immensely successful. In those days people thought it a good thing to open people's eyes, the eyes of the youth and the whole nation. It was medical information about the most unmentionable of subjects. And very likely it was necessary, better than hypocritical silence. There was a book called
Behind the Closed Door,
and another one called
The Sufferings of Love.
You didn't read them, by any chance, did you? Being a doctor, I thought perhaps you…”