Cancer Ward (70 page)

They peered at each other in silence, defeated but staunch allies, knowing that the conqueror's lash was soon to drive them to different corners of the earth.

“You see, Sharaf,” Dontsova's eyes were saying, “I did everything I could. But now I'm wounded, I'll soon be falling too.”

“I know that, Mother,” the Tartar's eyes answered. “The man who gave me life did no more for me than you did. But now here I am, I can do nothing to save you.”

In the case of Ahmadjan they had had a brilliant success. There had been no neglect there; they had acted exactly according to theory and everything had come out precisely as it should. They totted up how much radiation he had had and Ludmila Afanasyevna announced, “We're discharging you.”

They should have told him in the morning so that he could have let the nurse know and allow time for his uniform to be brought from the clothes store. Nevertheless, disdaining the use of his crutches, he dashed down the stairs to see Mita. The idea of spending one night longer than necessary here was intolerable. His friends were waiting for him that same evening in the Old Town.

Vadim also knew that Dontsova was handing over her department and going to Moscow. This was how it had happened. The previous evening a telegram had arrived from his mother, addressed to Ludmila Afanasyevna and himself, announcing that the colloidal gold was being dispatched to the clinic. Immediately, Vadim hobbled downstairs. Dontsova was at the Ministry of Health, but Vera Kornilyevna had already seen the telegram. She congratulated him and introduced him there and then to Ella Rafailovna, their radiologist, whose job it would be to start his treatment as soon as the gold reached the radiological room. At that moment Dontsova appeared and read the telegram. She looked crushed and defeated, yet she did her best to give Vadim an encouraging nod.

The previous night Vadim had been so overwhelmed with joy he'd been unable to sleep. But toward morning he began to have second thoughts. When would the gold arrive? If they had actually handed it over to Mama, it would have come that morning. Would it take three days? Or a week? This was the question Vadim asked as soon as the doctors approached him. “It'll take a few days, just a few days,” Ludmila Afanasyevna told him. (But she knew what these “days” were like. She recalled a case where a Moscow institute had asked for a medical preparation to be sent to a clinic in Ryazan, but in the covering letter the girl in the office had written “Kazakh” and sent the parcel to Alma-Ata.
*

Good news can do a lot for a human being. Vadim's dark eyes, so gloomy of late, now shone with hope. Those pouting lips with the indelible furrow had became smooth and young again. Vadim was clean-shaven, neat, collected and polite. He glowed as if it were his birthday and he had awakened to find all his presents around him.

How could he have become so depressed? How could he have let his will power slide so far during the last two weeks? After all, his will was his salvation, his will was everything! And now, the race was on! Only one thing mattered: the gold had to fly its three thousand kilometers faster than the secondaries could crawl their thirty centimeters. Then the gold would clear his groin and protect the rest of his body. As for the leg, well, the leg would have to be sacrificed. Or perhaps the radioactive gold might move down (since in the final resort science can never destroy faith entirely) and cure his leg as well?

After all, it was only rational and fair that he should be the one to survive! To accept death, to let the black panther tear him to pieces, was stupid, weak, unworthy. Because of his brilliant talent, he believed more and more that he would survive, that he would survive come what may. Half the night he could not sleep for the joyous excitement welling up inside him. He was picturing the lead container bringing the gold. Was it in the baggage car? Was it on its way to the airport? Or was it already in the airplane? His eyes moved up toward those three thousand kilometers of dark, nocturnal space, and with all his will he hastened the gold on its way. He would have summoned angels to his aid, if angels had existed.

But during the rounds he watched the doctors suspiciously to see what they would do. They said nothing bad, in fact they were doing their best to keep any expression out of their faces, but—they kept prodding him. True, it wasn't only his liver; they prodded him in several places, exchanging casual remarks. Vadim tried to calculate whether they were prodding his liver more than they prodded the other places.

(They had spotted how tense and attentive the patient was and so, quite unnecessarily, they ran their fingers over his spleen. But the real aim of their skillful probing was to test whether there had been any change in his liver.)

There was no chance of their slipping past Rusanov. He expected his special “officer's ration” of attention. He had lately begun to develop a liking for these doctors. It was true they weren't Honored Scientists or professors, but the fact was they had cured him. The tumor on his neck hung loosely, unswollen, small now. Even at the beginning, the danger had probably not been as great as they had made out.

“You know something, comrades,” he announced to the doctors. “I'm tired of these injections. I've had more than twenty of them, isn't that enough, eh? Maybe I could finish off the treatment at home?”

In fact his blood was in a bad way, even though they had given him four transfusions. He looked sallow, exhausted and shriveled. Even the skullcap seemed too large for his head.

“I mean to say, doctor, I know I ought to thank you. It's true, I was wrong in the beginning,” Rusanov announced candidly to Dontsova. He enjoyed admitting his errors. “You've cured me, and I thank you.”

Dontsova nodded vaguely, not out of modesty or embarrassment, but because she didn't understand what he was talking about. They still expected an outbreak of tumors in many of his glands, and it depended on the speed of the process whether or not he would live out the year.

In fact, he and she were in the same position.

She and Gangart prodded him hard in the armpits and round the collarbones. They pressed so hard they made him twitch.

“Honestly, there's nothing there!” he assured them. It was quite clear now that they had merely been trying to frighten him with the disease. But he had kept his nerve and had come through easily. He was particularly proud of his new-found strength of character.

“So much the better, but you must be very careful and look after yourself, Comrade Rusanov,” Dontsova warned him. “We'll give you another injection or two and then we'll probably discharge you. But you'll have to come every month for a checkup. And if you notice anything yourself, come along immediately.”

But the delighted Rusanov knew from his own experience that these compulsory checkups were only for the record. They were merely to enable the people in charge to put a mark in the appropriate column. Off he went to telephone the good news to his family.

It was Kostoglotov's turn. He was awaiting the doctors with mixed feelings. In one sense they saved him, in another sense they had destroyed him. Oil and water was what they offered, in equal proportions, and the resulting mixture was no good either for drinking or for oiling the wheels.

When Vera Kornilyevna came to his bedside on her own she was Vega. Whatever she said to him in the course of her duties, whatever she prescribed for him, he would look at her and the sight would gladden him. Since last week, he had managed to forgive her for the part she had played in damaging his body. He had begun to take it for granted that she had some sort of right over his body, and this gave him an obscure satisfaction. Whenever she came to see him on her rounds he felt a desire to stroke her little hands or rub his muzzle against them like a dog.

But now here they were, two of them, a team of doctors bound by their own regulations, and Oleg could not rid himself of his sense of bewilderment and injury.

“How are you?” Dontsova asked, sitting down on his bed.

Vega stood behind her. She gave him the slightest of smiles. By inclination, or perhaps necessity, she had resumed her habit of smiling at him, if only very faintly, whenever she met him. But this morning her smile seemed shrouded.

“Not so good,” Kostoglotov replied wearily, lifting his dangling head and letting it rest on the pillow. “I've started feeling a sort of pressure, here in my diaphragm, whenever I move clumsily. All in all, I feel I've been doctored to death. I want you to let me go.”

He did not press the demand with his old fire and fury. He spoke with indifference, as though the problem were really not his and the solution too obvious to need restating.

Indeed Dontsova did not even bother to restate the case herself. Besides, she was tired. “It's your decision,” she said; “you do what you want. But the treatment's not yet finished.”

She started examining the irradiated part of his skin. The skin virtually screamed that it was time to stop the treatment. The surface reaction could increase even after the end of the radiation sessions.

“We aren't giving him two a day any more, are we?” Dontsova asked.

“No, it's one now,” answered Gangart.

(She pronounced those simple words “It's one now” pushing her thin neck forward. She sounded as though she was making some tender declaration to touch the heart!)

Strange living threads, like a woman's long hair, linked her to this patient and entangled her with him. She was the one who felt pain when the threads were tugged and broken. He felt no pain. No one near them could see what was happening. The day Vera heard about his nighttime sessions with Zoya she had felt as though a tuft of hair had been torn out of her head. Perhaps it would have been better to end it then and there. This tearing of the threads reminded her of the law that men have no need for women of their own age, they need women who are younger. She shouldn't forget that her time was past, past.

But then he had started blatantly bumping into her in the corridors, hanging on her every word, talking to her and looking at her so wonderfully that those hairs, those threads, began to separate one by one and get entangled all over again.

What were these threads? They were inexplicable and inconvenient. He would have to leave now and go somewhere else, and there'd be a strong attraction to keep him there. He'd return only if he became very ill, when death bent him to the ground. The healthier he was, the less often he would come. Perhaps he never would.

“How much Sinestrol have we given him?” Ludmila Afanasyevna inquired.

“More than enough,” answered Kostoglotov aggressively before Vera Kornilyevna could speak. He stared at them dully. “Enough for a lifetime.”

At any other time Ludmila Afanasyevna wouldn't have let him get away with such a rude reply, she would have given him a good dressing down. But right now her will had sagged, she was scarcely able to complete her rounds. Outside her line of duty, to which she was now bidding farewell, she couldn't really object even to Kostoglotov. It was true, it was a barbarous treatment.

“I'll give you some advice,” she said, trying to appease him, speaking softly so that the other patients could not hear. “You shouldn't hope to achieve the happiness of a family. It'll be many more years before you can have a normal family life…” here Vera Kornilyevna lowered her eyes, “… because remember, your case was terribly neglected. You came to us very late.”

Kostoglotov knew things were bad, but hearing this straight out from Dontsova made him gape in amazement. “Er, yes,” he mumbled. Then he found a thought to console himself with. “Well, I daresay the authorities would've taken care of that anyway.”

“Carry on giving him Tezan and Pentaxil, please, Vera Kornilyevna. But you'll have to give him some time off for a rest. I'll tell you what we'll do, Kostoglotov, we'll prescribe you a three-months' supply of Sinestrol; it's in the pharmacists' now, you can buy it. Be sure and see you take it at home. If there's no one there to give you the injections, take it in tablet form.”

Kostoglotov began moving his lips to remind her that in the first place he had no “home,” in the second place he had no money, and in the third place he was not such a tool as to commit slow suicide.

But there was a gray-green look about her, she was exhausted. He thought better of it and said nothing.

And that was the end of the rounds.

Ahmadjan came running in. Everything was arranged, they had even gone to get his uniform. That same evening he'd be out drinking with his friends! Tomorrow he'd come back to get those papers of his. He was wildly excited, speaking more rapidly and loudly than anyone had heard him before. His movements were so strong and decisive that he might almost never have been ill, never spent those two months with them in the ward. He had thick black crew-cut hair and two coal-black eyebrows, under which his eyes burned like a drunkard's, and his back quivered as he scented the new life that lay just across the hospital threshold. He dashed off to get his things, decided not to, then ran off (he had to get special permission) to eat his lunch with the second-floor patients.

Kostoglotov was called out for an X-ray session. He waited his turn and then lay down under the apparatus, after which he went out to the porch to see why the weather was so gloomy.

The whole sky was boiling with fast-moving gray clouds. Behind them crawled a cloud deep violet in color, promising heavy rain. But it was very warm. It would only be a spring shower.

This was no time to go out for a walk, so he went back upstairs to the ward.

Walking down the corridor, he could hear the excited Ahmadjan telling a story in a loud voice. “Damn it,” he was saying, “they feed them better than they feed soldiers. At least, not worse. Rations—twelve hundred grams a day. They should give them shit to eat! Work? They no work! We take them out to zone, they run off, hide and sleep whole day!”