Cancer Ward (59 page)

“Then why do you work as a librarian?” Rusanov called after him triumphantly.

But once Shulubin stopped talking, he stopped talking. He was silent as a tree stump.

Pavel Nikolayevich had no respect for such men who had come down in the world instead of going up.

28. Bad Luck All Round

The first time Kostoglotov saw Lev Leonidovich in the clinic, he recognized him as a man who meant business. Having nothing better to do during rounds, Oleg spent the time sizing him up. There was much that disposed him in his favor. That cap he always wore on top of his head had obviously not been put on in front of a mirror. His arms were too long, and sometimes he shoved his fists into the front pockets of his blind-fronted white coat. His lips were pinched at the corners, which made him look as if he was about to whistle. And in spite of his obvious strength and ferocity he had a joking, facetious way of talking to the patients. It all made Kostoglotov think he would like to have a heart-to-heart talk with him and ask him a few of the questions that the women doctors would be neither able nor willing to answer.

But there was no time to ask them. During rounds Lev Leonidovich noticed no one except his surgical cases. The radiotherapy patients' beds he passed by as though they were empty. When people said “Good morning” to him in the corridors or on the stairs his answer would be light enough, but his face was never free of care and he was always in a hurry.

One day Lev Leonidovich had been talking about a patient who had confessed to some offense after first denying everything. Lev Leonidovich had laughed and said, “Ah! So he ‘sang' in the end, did he?” This really staggered Oleg; it wasn't every man who knew this sense of the word and was capable of using it.

Kostoglotov bad spent less time lately wandering round the clinic, so his and the senior doctor's paths had crossed even less than before. One day, though, he saw Lev Leonidovich unlock the door of the little room next to the operating theater and go in. This meant there couldn't be anyone else in the room. Oleg knocked on the white-painted glass door and opened it.

Lev Leonidovich had sat down on the stool. He was sitting sideways, as people do when they're only going to sit for a few minutes, but already he was writing something.

“Yes?” He raised his head, but didn't look particularly surprised. Evidently he was still busily thinking what to write next.

Everybody always in a hurry! Whole lives to be decided in a single minute!

“Excuse me, Lev Leonidovich.” Kostoglotov was trying to be as polite as he could contrive. “I know you're in a hurry, only there's nobody except you … Can you give me two minutes?”

The surgeon nodded. But he was still thinking about his own problems, that was obvious.

“They're giving me a course of hormone therapy by reason of.… Intramuscular Sinestrol injections, in doses of…” (Kostoglotov took pride in his ability to talk to doctors in their language, with full precision. It was the basis of his claim that they should talk to him with complete frankness.) “What interests me is this: is the effect of hormone therapy cumulative or not?”

Of the one hundred and twenty seconds he obtained he had spent less than twenty on this introductory speech. From now on the number of seconds no longer depended on him. He stood there in silence, hands behind his back, looking down at the sitting man. It made Oleg look humpbacked in spite of his lankiness.

Lev Leonidovich furrowed his forehead, screwing up his whole face.

“No, I don't think so. It shouldn't be,” he replied. But it didn't sound very decisive.

“Somehow I feel it may be cumulative,” said Kostoglotov, continuing to press his point home. It sounded as though he wanted the effect to be cumulative, or else as though by now he didn't really believe Lev Leonidovich.

“No, not really, it oughtn't to be,” the surgeon replied, sounding as uncategorical as before. Either it wasn't his particular field or else he hadn't yet been able to switch his mind over to the subject.

“It's very important for me to understand,” said Kostoglotov. He looked and talked as if he was threatening the other. “After this treatment will I lose the ability to … well, I mean, as far as women are concerned? Or will it be just for a limited period? Will the injected hormones leave my body or will they stay forever? Or perhaps the therapy can be reversed after a while by cross injections?”

“No, I wouldn't advise that. That's not possible,” said Lev Leonidovich. He was observing this patient with the shaggy black hair. The main thing he noticed was his scar. It was an interesting scar; he could imagine it freshly cut, like a case recently brought to him in the surgical ward. He wondered what would have had to be done. “But why would you need cross injections?” he said. “I don't understand.”

“What do you mean, you don't understand?” Kostoglotov couldn't make this out. Was it simply that, being businesslike and loyal to medical etiquette, Lev Leonidovich wanted to persuade the patient to accept his lot? “You really don't understand?” Oleg asked again.

They'd already gone far beyond the two minutes, as well as beyond the doctor-patient relationship. Then suddenly Lev Leonidovich spoke to Oleg with that lack of arrogance he had already noticed and appreciated. He addressed him like an old friend, in a lowered, unofficial voice. “Listen to me,” he said, “do you really think women are the flower of life? You know, you can get fed up with them after a while … All they do is stop you achieving anything serious.”

He spoke with great sincerity. His voice sounded almost weary. He was remembering the most important moment of his life, when he had not had the strength to make one final effort, perhaps because it had been diverted in precisely this way. But Kostoglotov couldn't understand him at all. He couldn't imagine ever having more than enough. His head swung vacantly from left to right, his eyes stared vacantly too. “There's nothing more ‘serious' in my life,” he said.

But this conversation was no part of an oncological clinic's schedule. Consultative deliberations on the meaning of life, especially with a doctor from another department, were not in the timetable. That little fragile woman surgeon put her head round the door and walked straight in without asking permission. She was wearing high heels and her whole body swayed slightly as she walked. She didn't stop but crossed the room, stood close to Lev Leonidovich, put a laboratory test form in front of him and leaned over it (from where Oleg was she seemed actually to touch Lev Leonidovich). She didn't call him by his name. “Listen to this,” she said, “Ovdienko has a white-corpuscle count of ten thousand.”

The loose strands of her hair drifted in front of Lev Leonidovich's face like thin reddish smoke.

“What of it?” said Lev Leonidovich, shrugging his shoulders. “It doesn't point to a good leucocytosis. It simply means there's a process of inflammation which will have to be suppressed by X-ray therapy.”

She went on talking and talking (and it was true, her right shoulder
was
pressing against Lev Leonidovich's arm!). The paper Lev Leonidovich had begun to write on was lying there. His pen was hanging idle, upside down between his fingers.

Obviously it was time for Oleg to leave. The long and secretly planned conversation had been interrupted at the most interesting point.

Angelica turned round, surprised to see Kostoglotov still there. Lev Leonidovich glanced at him too, peering over her head, a rather humorous expression on his face. There was something indefinable in his face that made Kostoglotov decide to go on. “I'd also like to ask you, Lev Leonidovich,” he said, “whether you've heard about this birch-tree fungus, this
chaga?
”

“Yes, I have,” he confirmed quite willingly.

“What's your attitude to it?”

“It's hard to say, I accept that some particular kinds of tumor react to it, stomach tumors for example. In Moscow they're going crazy about it. They say the forests have been stripped of it for two hundred kilometers round the city.”

Angelica leaned back from the table, picked up her form and walked out of the room. She looked contemptuous and as independent as ever, and she walked with a swaying motion that was extremely attractive.

She left the room but, alas, the conversation they had begun was in ruins. To a certain extent his question had been answered, but to return to a discussion of woman's contribution to life would have been out of place.

But the light, momentary, humorous glance Lev Leonidovich had given him and the unstrained manner in which he'd been treated had paved the way for Oleg to ask a third prepared question, again one of some importance. “Lev Leonidovich,” he began, shaking his head from side to side, “forgive my lack of discretion, if I'm wrong forget what I've said, Have you ever…” he lowered his voice as Lev Leonidovich had before, and screwed up one of his eyes. “Have you ever been where there's ‘nonstop singing and dancing'?”

Lev Leonidovich came alive. “Yes, I have,” he said.

“Is that so?” said Kostoglotov, pleasantly surprised. They were now equals! “What did they get you for?”

“They didn't get me for anything. I was a free man. I just worked there.”

“Oh, a free man!” Kostoglotov sounded disappointed. It seemed they weren't equals after all.

“How did you guess?” the surgeon asked curiously.

“It was a word you used. You said someone ‘sang,' meaning he confessed. You also described someone else as a ‘fence.'”

Lev Leonidovich laughed. “I'll never get out of the habit,” he said.

Equal or not, they already had much more in common than a moment ago.

“Were you there long?” asked Kostoglotov unceremoniously. He even managed to straighten up; he didn't look so sickly now.

“About three years. They sent me after I was demobilized—I couldn't get out of it.”

He needn't have added the last remark, but he had. It was a job like any other, an honorable and respectable one. Why did decent people think they had to make excuses for it? Men still have an indicator somewhere inside them; even if it is short-circuited, it works in spite of everything.

“What did you do exactly?”

“I was in charge of the sick bay.”

Aha! The same job as Madame Dubinskaya's—lord over life and death. Only she'd never have felt she had to make excuses, whereas this man had given up the job.

“So you managed to finish medical school before the war?” Kostoglotov stuck to him like a burr. He didn't really need the information, it was just a habit he'd picked up in prison, reviewing the life of any stranger he happened to meet between one rattle of the cell-door feeding hatch and the next. “How old are you, then?”

“No, I didn't qualify. After my fourth year I volunteered to go to the front as an ordinary doctor.” Lev Leonidovich stood up, leaving his writing unfinished, walked up to Oleg and began to feel his scar with interest, kneading it between his fingers. “Did you get this ‘out there'?”

“That's right.”

“They did a good job on it, a very good job. Was the doctor a prisoner?”

“That's right.”

“You don't remember his name? It wasn't Koryakov?”

“I don't know, we were in transit. This Koryakov, what was he in for?” Oleg was getting onto Koryakov now, eager to try to sort out his life story as well.

“They locked him up because his father was a colonel in the Tsarist army.”

But just then the nurse with the Japanese eyes and the white crown came in to call Lev Leonidovich to the dressings room.

Kostoglotov resumed his stoop and wandered down the corridor.

Here was another life story, drawn in outline, two life stories, in fact. The missing parts he could imagine for himself. There were so many different ways of being sent ‘out there' … No, it wasn't
that
he was thinking about, it was something else. Here you are, he thought, in your bed in the ward, you walk down the corridor or stroll in the garden and next to you, or coming toward you, there's a man, just a man, and it never occurs to either of you to say, “Hey, you, turn back the lapel of your jacket!” That's where it would be, the badge of their secret society. And he was one of them, he belonged, he was part of it and knew about it! How many of them were there? It was no good asking, they were all struck dumb. You couldn't guess anything from the outside. How well it was all concealed!

What an absurd idea, to live to see the day when women seem superfluous! Surely a man could never get his fill of women? It was impossible to imagine.

But basically there was nothing to be overjoyed about. Lev Leonidovich's denial had not been insistent enough to make one believe him.

So he must presume that he had lost everything.

Everything …

Kostoglotov felt as if his death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment.

He would live, only God knows for what purpose.

He had forgotten where he was going. He hesitated in the lower corridor, then stood there idly.

A little white coat appeared out of one of the doors, three doors away from him. It was very narrow at the waist, it was immediately familiar.

Vera!

She was coming his way! It wasn't far in a straight line, but she had to walk round two beds by the wall. Oleg, however, hadn't moved toward her; he had to think—one second, two seconds and a third.

For three days since her last rounds her manner with him had been dry and official. Not one single friendly glance.

At first he thought: To hell with her! He'd give as good as he got. He had no desire to bow and scrape, to look for explanations.

It was a pity, though. It seemed a pity to hurt her. He was sorry for his own sake too. Were they supposed to walk past one another like strangers?

Was it his fault? It was her fault: she had deceived him about the injections, she had wished him ill. He was the one who might be unable to forgive.