Cancer Ward (53 page)

The light in the room was already gray. The radio's green-lit dial stood out clearly.

It was a suite from
The Sleeping Beauty.
First the Adagio, then “The Entry of the Fairies.”

Vera listened to it, but not for herself. She was trying to imagine how that Adagio would have struck the doomed man who had never known what human happiness was, as he listened from the opera-house balcony, soaked with rain and isolated by the pain of his disease.

She put it on again.

And yet again.

She began
talking,
only not aloud. She was talking to him in her imagination, as though he was sitting right there, across the round table from her in the room's greenish light. She was saying all that she should have said, and she was listening to him. She had an unerring ear for what he might have replied. He was a difficult one to foresee, the way he twisted and turned, but she felt she was getting used to him.

She was finishing the conversation they had had today, telling him what couldn't have been said, their relationship being what it was. But it could be said now. She was developing her theory about men and women. Hemingway's supermen were creatures who had not yet raised themselves to human level. Hemingway was a shallow swimmer. (Oleg would be bound to bark back at her that he'd never read any Hemingway. He would even make it into a boast: none of that stuff in the army, none of that in the camp.) This wasn't at all what a woman needed from a man. She needed attention and tenderness and a sense of security when he was with her, a feeling that he was her shield and her shelter. (And it was Oleg, a man without rights who had been deprived of all significance as a citizen, who for some reason made Vera feel protected.)

Ideas on what women should be like were even more confused. The most feminine of them all, people thought, was Carmen. They reckoned the most feminine was the one most aggressive in her search for pleasure. But this type is a pseudo-woman, a man in woman's clothes.

On this point there was a lot more that needed explaining. It seemed he'd been taken by surprise, he hadn't been ready for the idea, but he was thinking about it now.

While she put on the same record yet again.

It was quite dark by now and she had forgotten about her dusting. The green light of the dial was deepening, casting its glow further and further over the whole room.

She had no desire to turn the light on, not for anything in the world, but she simply had to have a look.

In semi-darkness her hand reached out confidently for the little framed photograph on the wall. She lifted it up with affection and brought it close to the dial. Even without its green starry light, even if it went out now, Vera could still have made out every detail: the neat face of a young boy: those unclouded, vulnerable, inexperienced eyes; the tie hanging down over the neat white shirt, the first tie he'd ever worn. It was his first suit too. Yet he still hadn't minded spoiling the lapel, for there was a severe-looking little badge screwed into it, a small white circle enclosing the black profile of a man. The photo was six by ten centimeters, so the badge was tiny, but in the daytime one could distinctly see (her memory was so clear that she could see it even now) that the profile was Lenin's.

The boy was smiling. “This is the only medal I need,” he seemed to be saying.

It was this boy who had thought up the name “Vega” for her.

The agave blooms once in its lifetime. Soon afterward it dies.

This was the way Vera Gangart had fallen in love. She had been quite young, just a schoolgirl.

But he had been killed in the war.

After that, whatever aspect—just, heroic, patriotic or holy—the war took on, for Vera Gangert it was the last war ever, the war in which she, as well as the man she loved, had been killed.

When it happened, how she had longed to be killed as well! She left medical college immediately. She would have liked to go to the front, but they wouldn't take her because she was a German.

They had still been together during the first two or three months of the war's first summer. It was obvious that he would go into the army quite soon. Now, a generation later, it would be impossible to explain how it was that they hadn't got married. How could they have wasted those months, even if they weren't married, the last and only months they were to have? Surely there should have been no barrier at such a time, when everything was cracking and falling apart?

But there was.

It was something she couldn't now justify to anyone, not even to herself.

“Vega! My Vega!” he had cried to her from the front line. “I can't die and leave you not my own. If only I could tear myself away for three days' leave, or three days in hospital, we could get married. Couldn't we? Couldn't we?”

“Don't let such thoughts break your heart. I shall never belong to anyone else. I am yours.”

This was how she wrote to him, confidently. But he was still alive then.

He wasn't wounded. He didn't go into hospital or on leave. He was simply killed.

He was dead but his star burned, it kept burning …

But its light was wasted.

It wasn't the sort of star that still gives light after being extinguished. It was the sort of star that shines, still shines with all its light, yet no one sees the light or needs it.

They wouldn't take her, they wouldn't let her be killed too. The only thing left was for her to live, to go back to medical college. She even became group monitor there.
*
She was always first to volunteer for harvesting, for cleaning up or for Sunday work. What else was there to do?

She graduated with a first-class degree. Dr. Oreshchenkov, whose practice she had worked in, was very satisfied with her. (It was he who had given her a recommendation to Dontsova.) There was now only one thing that mattered—her patients and their treatment. Here was her salvation.

Of course, if one thought on the Friedland level the whole thing was nonsense, madness, a complete anomaly. Fancy remembering a dead man instead of looking for someone who was alive!

It just wasn't possible. After all, the laws of tissues, the laws of hormones and the laws of growing old were indisputable.

Were they? But Vega knew that none of these laws applied to her. They were abolished as far as she was concerned.

It was not that she felt eternally bound by her promise, “I shall always be yours.” It was more that someone you have once been very close to never entirely dies. He is still present, seeing a little, hearing a little; in fact he exists. Helpless and wordless, he will see you betray him.

So what was the significance of the laws of cell growth, reaction or secretion? What relevance did they have if there was no other man like him? And there wasn't. So what did cells have to do with it? Or cell reactions?

It was simply that we grow dull with the passing years. We grow tired. We lose all true talent for grief or for faithfulness. We surrender to time. Yet every day we swallow food and lick our fingers—in this respect we are unyielding. If we're not fed for two days we go out of our minds, we start climbing up the wall.

Fine progress we've made, we human beings.

Vega had not changed, but she was crushed. Her mother had died too; she used to live with her mother, just the two of them. Her mother died because she too was crushed. Her son, Vera's elder brother, had been an engineer. In 1940, he'd been arrested. For a few years he still wrote. For a few years they sent him parcels somewhere out in Buryat-Mongolia. Then one day they received a strange notification from the Post Office, and they gave Mother her parcel back. It was ink-stamped all over and the writing was crossed out. She carried the parcel home like a coffin. When he was born he would just have fitted that little box.

It crushed Vera's mother. Then to cap it all, shortly afterwards her daughter-in-law remarried. Mother could not understand at all. She understood Vera.

So Vera stayed on all alone.

Not exactly alone, of course, she wasn't the only one. She was alone among millions. There were so many lonely women in the country, it made one want to count up those who knew—who were there more of, those on their own or those who were married? These lonely women were all about her age, all born in the same decade, the same age as the men who were killed in the war.

The war was merciful to the men, it took them away. The women it left to suffer to the end of their days.

The bachelors who managed to drag themselves back from the ruins of war did not choose wives of their own age, but younger girls. As for those who were a few years younger still, they were a whole generation younger, like children. War hadn't crawled over them like a tank.

So there they were, those millions of women. No one ever formed them into an army. They had come into the world to accomplish nothing. They were a fallow patch left behind by history.

Those among them who could take life as it came were not the doomed ones.

Long years of ordinary peaceful life went by. Vera lived and went about like someone in a permanent gas mask. It was as if her head was enclosed by a skin of tight, hostile rubber. The gas mask drove her mad, it made her weak. So she tore it off.

It looked then as though her life had become more human. She allowed herself to be agreeable. She dressed carefully and did not avoid meeting people.

There is great satisfaction in remaining faithful; perhaps it is the greatest satisfaction of all. Even if no one knows about your faithfulness, even if no one values it.

If only it made some impression!

But what if it made no impression, if no one needed it?

However large the round goggles of a gas mask are, you see very little through them and what you see you see badly. Now without the goggles in front of her eyes, she might be able to see more clearly.

But she didn't. She was inexperienced and she hurt herself badly. She was incautious and made false steps. Short, unworthy intimacy brought no light or relief into her life. It soiled and humiliated her, it smashed her wholeness and destroyed her harmony.

To forget was by now impossible. To obliterate was out of the question.

No, taking life as it comes was not her forte. The more fragile a person was, the more dozens and hundreds of coincidences were needed to bring him closer to another. Each new coincidence can only fractionally increase this closeness, whereas a single discrepancy can destroy everything in a flash. With her this discrepancy always managed to appear early and to stand out clearly. There was no one at all to advise her what to do or how to live.

Each man has his own path in life.

She was strongly urged to adopt a child. She talked about this at length and in detail with a number of women. They persuaded her. She warmed to the idea and was already going round visiting children's homes.

But in the end she gave it up. She couldn't start loving a child just like that, out of despair or because she had decided to. There was a great danger—she might stop loving it later. And a greater danger still—it might grow up a stranger to her.

If only she had a daughter, a real daughter of her own. (A daughter, because then she could bring her up in her own image: she wouldn't be able to do that with a little boy.)

She couldn't bring herself to walk along that long, miry road again and with a complete stranger.

She sat in the armchair until midnight. She hadn't done any of the things crying to be done since early evening. She didn't even turn on the light. She had enough light from the dial on the radio. Her thoughts flowed freely as she watched the green of its light and the black markings of the dial.

She listened to a great many records and was not upset even by the most melancholy. She listened to marches too. Marches were like a triumph unfolding before her in the dark, while she sat like a victor in her old armchair with its high thronelike back, her delicate legs curled underneath her.

She had crossed fourteen deserts, but now she had come home. She had crossed fourteen years of insanity, and she had been right all along!

It was on this day that her years of faithfulness had acquired a new, final meaning.

Near-faithfulness. One could regard it as faithfulness—faithfulness in what counted.

Today, too, she became aware that the one who had died was a boy, that he wasn't her age now, not a man. He hadn't had that unwieldy heaviness men have, which is a woman's only refuge. He hadn't seen either the war as a whole or its end, or the many difficult years that followed. He had remained a young boy with unclouded, vulnerable eyes.

She went to bed, but although she didn't fall asleep straightaway she wasn't worried that she wouldn't get enough sleep that night. After she fell asleep, however, she woke up several times and had a great many dreams, too many perhaps for a single night. Some of them were merely disturbing, but others she tried to keep in her mind for the next morning.

She woke up in the morning and she smiled.

She was squeezed, jostled and pushed all over the bus. People stepped on her feet, but she put up with it all without taking offense.

She put on her white coat. On her way to the daily five-minute conference, she was pleased to see a powerful, amiable, awkward, gorilla-like figure in the distance coming toward her along the lower corridor. It was Lev Leonidovich; she hadn't seen him since his return from Moscow. His large arms seemed too heavy for him, they hung down, almost dragging his shoulders down with them. It looked as if there was something wrong with them, but in fact they were the most handsome thing about him. His head was modeled with bold strokes on many different levels, its crown set well back and topped by a funny white cap like the ones pilots wear. As always it had been slapped on carelessly: it looked rather useless with its two pig ears sticking up at the back and its hollow, crumpled top. His chest under the tight white coat with no opening at the front was like the front of a tank camouflaged for snow conditions. His eyes were narrowed as usual and he walked along looking stern and threatening, but Vera knew he only had to shift his features slightly and they would turn into a grin.