Cancer Ward (15 page)

“Don't you think it's a pity to wear it every day?” Dontsova nodded at the dress.

“Why should I keep it?… What have I got to keep it for?” Gangart tried to smile but the result was pitiful.

“All right, Verochka, in that case we'll give him a full dose next time—ten milligrams.” Ludmila Afanasyevna pushed the point home, in her usual quick-fire manner. She felt that words did nothing but take up time. She continued writing her letter to the
feldsher
as she spoke.

“What about Kostoglotov?” Gangart asked quietly. She was already at the door.

“There was a battle, but he was defeated and he surrendered.” Ludmila Afanasyevna chuckled, and once again from the sharp intake of breath when she laughed she felt a cutting pain near her stomach. She even felt the urge to complain about it to Vera there and then, making her the first to know. She narrowed her eyes and raised them to Vera's. But then in the twilight depths of the room she saw her in a stylish dress and high heels, as if she were going to the theater.

And she decided—some other time.

Everyone had gone, but she stayed on. It really wasn't good for her to spend even an extra half-hour in these rooms that were daily filled with radiation, but that was the way it always worked out. By the time her annual leave came round her complexion was a pallid gray. Her white corpuscles diminished monotonously throughout the year, going as low as 2,000. It would be criminal to reduce a patient to such a count. Three “stomachs” was the normal daily quota for an X-ray specialist to examine, but she did ten and during the war it had been twenty-five. Before her annual leave she always had to have blood transfusions, and after her leave what had been lost in the past year was never fully restored.

The compelling momentum of her work was very difficult to escape. As each day drew to its end she would note with annoyance that once again she hadn't had time to do everything. In the middle of today's business she had recalled the cruel case of Sibgatov. She had made a note to ask Dr. Oreshchenkov's advice about it when she met him at the society. Just as she had led her interns through their work, so before the war Dr. Oreshchenkov had once led her by the hand, carefully directing her and forming her into a professional all-rounder like himself. “Ludochka,” he would warn her, “never overspecialize. Let everyone else specialize to their heart's content, but you stick to what's yours, on the one hand X-ray diagnosis, on the other X-ray therapy. Be that sort of doctor, even if you have to be the last one in the world!” He was still alive, living here in town.

She put out the lamp, but turned back from the door to make a note of some things that needed doing next day. She put on her blue overcoat, no longer new, but on the way out turned aside to call at the senior doctor's office—it was locked.

At last she walked down the steps between the poplars and along the pathways of the Medical Center. Her thoughts, though, remained with her work: she did not even try or want to try to rid herself of them. The weather was nondescript, she didn't notice what it was like. It was just before twilight. On the pathways she passed many people she didn't know, but even here she didn't feel the natural feminine interest in how others were dressed, what they wore on their heads or their feet. She walked on, her brows knit, glancing penetratingly at all these people as if guessing the location of tumors which gave no sign of life today but might appear tomorrow.

So she walked on past the Medical Center's cafeteria, past a little Uzbek boy persistently hawking newspaper cones of almonds, until she reached the main gate.

The unsleeping, bad-tempered, fat old female gatekeeper allowed only the free and healthy through, turning back the patients with loud yells. Once Ludmila Afanasyevna was through the gate, she ought to have made the transition from the working part of her life to the domestic, to her family. But no, her time and energy were not equally divided between work and home. Inside the Medical Center she spent the better and fresher half of her waking hours. Ideas about her work were still circling around her head like bees long after she had left the gates, and in the morning long before she reached them.

She posted the letter to Tahta-Kupir and crossed the road to the streetcar circle. A trolley with the right number swung round with a slight clank. There was a rush through both front and back doors. Ludmila Afanasyevna hurried to grab a seat—and this was the first tiny thought apart from the hospital that began to transform her from an oracle of human destinies into a simple passenger on a trolley jostled like anyone else.

Still, as the trolley clattered down the old, one-way track, or waited long minutes in sidings for another to pass, Ludmila Afanasyevna was looking blankly out of the window, turning over in her mind Mursalimov's pulmonary secondaries or the possible effect of the injections on Rusanov. His offensively didactic manner and the threats he had uttered on her rounds that morning had been overlaid during the day with other impressions. But now, at the end of the day, the oppressive sediment had been uncovered for her to contemplate all evening and all night.

Many of the women in the trolley, like Ludmila Afanasyevna, were carrying not handbags but big bags like small suitcases that could hold a live piglet or four large loaves of bread. At every stop and with every shop that flashed by the window, Ludmila Afanasyevna's thoughts turned more and more to her housework and her home. Home was her responsibility and hers alone, because what can you expect from men? Her husband and son, whenever she went to Moscow for a conference, would leave the dishes unwashed for a whole week. It wasn't that they wanted to keep them for her to do, they just saw no sense in this repetitive, endlessly self-renewing work.

Ludmila Afanasyevna also had a daughter, already married and with a little one on her hands, but now on the point of being unmarried because divorce was in the air. This was the first time today she had remembered her daughter, and the thought did not cheer her.

Today was Friday. On Sunday she absolutely must get through a lot of washing that had piled up. This meant that dinner for the first half of the week had to be got ready and cooked, come what may, on Saturday evening (she prepared it twice a week). As for putting the washing to soak, that had to be done today, whatever time it meant getting to bed. Even though it
was
getting late, now was the only time left to go to the main market. The stalls there were not packed up until later in the evening.

She got out to change trolleys, but, looking through the plate-glass window of a nearby grocery store, decided to go in. The meat department was empty and the assistant had already gone. In the fish department there was nothing worth taking—herring, salt plaice, tinned fish. She walked past the picturesque pyramids of wine bottles and the brown cylindrical rods of cheese that looked just like sausages, on her way to the grocery department. She wanted to get two bottles of sunflower-seed oil (before there had only been cottonseed oil), and some barley concentrate. From the grocery counter she cut across the quiet shop, paid at the cash desk and went back to collect them.

She was standing in line behind two men when suddenly there was a hubbub in the shop. People were pouring in from the street, forming lines at the delicatessen counter and at the cashier. Ludmila Afanasyevna started, and without waiting to collect her goods in the grocery department hurried across to line up at the delicatessen counter and at the cashier. So far there was nothing to be seen behind the curved glass cover of the counter, but the jostling women were absolutely confident. Minced-ham sausage was going to be sold, one kilo for each buyer.

What a stroke of luck! It was worth going to the back of the line a bit later for a second kilo.

8. What Men Live By

If it hadn't been for the grip of cancer on his throat, Yefrem Podduyev would have been a man in the prime of life. He was on the right side of fifty, firm on his feet, strong shouldered and sound of mind. He was tough, not so much like a carthorse, but more like a two-humped camel; after an eight-hour shift he could put in another just like the first. In his youth on the Kama he used to lug two-hundredweight sacks about, and since then his strength had hardly ebbed. Even now he wouldn't quit when he had to help workmen roll a concrete mixer out on a platform. He had been all over the place and done a mountain of work—pulling down here, digging there, here delivering, and there building. He would think it cheap to take change for ten roubles, he wouldn't reel on a bottle of vodka but wouldn't reach for a third. Yefrem Podduyev knew no end, no bounds, he felt, he would always be the way he was. In spite of his brawn he'd never served at the front; wartime rush construction jobs had kept him back, so he'd never known the taste of wounds and military hospitals. And he'd never had a day's illness in his life—nothing serious, no flu, no epidemic touched him, and he never even had a toothache.

He'd fallen ill for the first time the year before last—and bang! It was this.

Cancer.

“Cancer.” Now he could blurt it out just like that; but for years he had been telling himself it was nothing, not worth a damn. While he could bear it, he put off going to the doctor. But once he had gone, they shoved him round from pillar to post until they sent him to the cancer clinic; but the patients there were always told they didn't have cancer, and Yefrem wasn't going to figure out what he had. He couldn't trust the wits he was born with, he believed what he wanted to believe: that he didn't have cancer, that he'd be all right in the end.

It was Yefrem's tongue that had been hit—his quick, ever-ready tongue, which he had never really noticed, but which had been so handy in his life. In fifty years he'd given it a lot of exercise. With it he'd talked his way into pay he'd never earned, sworn blind he'd done things when he hadn't, stood bail for things he didn't believe in, howled at the bosses and yelled insults at the workers. With it he piled filth on everything most dear and holy, reveling in his trills like a nightingale. He told fat-ass stories but never touched politics. He sang Volga songs. He lied to hundreds of women scattered all over the place, that he wasn't married, that he had no children, that he'd be back in a week and they'd start building a house. “God rot your tongue!” one temporary mother-in-law had cursed him, but Yefrem's tongue had never let him down except when he was blind drunk.

And suddenly it had started to bulge. To brush against his teeth. His juicy, soft pharynx had grown too small for it.

But Yefrem shook it off, grinning in front of his pals: “Podduyev? There's nothing can scare him!”

And they would say, “Ah yes, old Podduyev, he's got will power.”

But it was not will power, it was sheer blind, cold terror. It was not from will power but from fear that he clung to his job as long as he could, putting off the operation. The whole of his life had prepared Podduyev for living, not for dying. The change was beyond his strength, he did not know how to go about it; he kept pushing it away by staying on his feet, going to work every day as if nothing had happened, and listening to people praising his will power.

He refused an operation, so they started needle treatment: they pushed needles into his tongue as if he were a sinner in Hell, and kept them there for several days. How Yefrem wanted it to stop there, how he hoped! No. His tongue kept swelling. He could no longer muster that famous will power of his; he laid his bull-like head down on the white clinic table, and gave in.

The operation was performed by Lev Leonidovich—and he did it wonderfully, exactly as he had promised: the tongue was shortened and narrowed, but it was quickly getting used to twisting about again and saying all the things it had before, although perhaps not quite so clearly. They punctured him again with the needles, let him go, recalled him, and Lev Leonidovich said, “Now come back in three months and we'll do one more operation—on your neck. It'll be quite an easy one.”

But Yefrem had already seen quite enough “easy” operations on the neck, and he didn't turn up on time. They sent him summonses by post; he ignored them. He was used anyway to not living long in the same place, and could fly off to Kolyma or Khakassia at a day's notice, easy as you like. Neither property, apartment nor family held him anywhere. Two things he liked: a free life and money in his pocket. They were writing from the clinic, “If you don't come yourself the police will fetch you.” That's the sort of power the cancer clinic had, even over people who hadn't got any cancer whatever.

He went. Of course, he could still have refused to agree, but Lev Leonidovich felt his neck and gave him a real piece of his mind for putting it off so long. And they cut Yefrem up on the right and on the left of the neck, as hoodlums slash with their knives. He lay there tightly bandaged for a long time, and when they discharged him they were shaking their heads.

He no longer had a taste for the free life: he had gone off work and having a good time, off smoking and drinking. His neck was not softening; it was filling out, and it stung and shot pain right into his head. The disease was creeping up his neck almost to his ears.

Then not much more than a month ago he had returned to the same old gray-brick building, walking up between the poplars to the same porch polished by so many thousands of pairs of feet. The surgeons immediatelly grabbed him like an old friend and put him into the same striped hospital pajamas, in the same ward near the operating theater with windows that gave onto the back fence. And there he waited for a second operation on his poor neck, which would make three in all. Then Yefrem Podduyev could no longer kid himself, and he didn't. He knew he had cancer.

Now, trying to even things up, he began to push it home to all his neighbors in the ward that they had cancer too. That no one would ever escape, that they would all come back in the end. It was not that he enjoyed crushing people and hearing them crunch—only why didn't they stop kidding themselves, why didn't they face the truth?