Cancer Ward (30 page)

Possibly, too, Rodichev's wife had guessed the truth. Was she alive, though? Kapa's plan had been to wait till Rodichev was arrested, then have Katka Rodicheva evicted and take over the entire apartment, The whole terrace would then be theirs. (Looking back, it now seemed quite ludicrous that they should have regarded a fourteen-square-meter room in a flat without gas as so important. But they did; the children were growing up.) The operation was all agreed and ready, but when they came to evict Katka she pulled a fast one on them. She claimed she was pregnant. They insisted on a checkup, and she produced a certificate. Perfect! As if she had foreseen it all: it is illegal to evict a pregnant woman. So it was only the following winter that they managed to get her out. And for many long months they had to put up with her, living side by side with her while she carried the child and bore it, and afterwards right to the end of her maternity leave. Of course, Kapa kept her well down in the kitchen and Ava, who was four years old by this time, was very funny the way she teased her and spat in her saucepans.

What about Rusanov's fear? He lay on his back in the darkness of the gently breathing, gently snoring ward. Only a faint gleam from the nurse's table lamp in the lobby penetrated the frosted glass of the door. His mind was clear and sleepless as he wondered why the shades of Rodichev and Guzun had rattled him so much. Would he be frightened if other people came back whose guilt he had also helped to establish? That man Eduard Christoforovich, for instance, whom Rodichev had happened to mention on the terrace. He was an engineer with a bourgeois upbringing who had called Pavel a fool and a rogue in front of the workers (later he confessed that his one dream was the restoration of capitalism). And that stenographer who had been found guilty of distorting the speech of a certain important official, Pavel Nikolayevich's patron, who had in fact used quite different words in his address. And that pigheaded accountant (what's more, it emerged that his father was a priest; it only took them a minute to pin him down after that). Yelchanski and his wife, too … and what of the others?…

Pavel Nikolayevich was not afraid of any of them. He had helped to establish the guilt of them all, more boldly and openly as time went on. On two occasions he had even gone to the confrontation, raised his voice and denounced them. At that time it was not considered in the least shameful to do such a thing! In that excellent and honorable time, the years 1937 and 1938, the social atmosphere was noticeably cleansed and it became easier to breathe. The liars and slanderers, those who had been too bold in their criticism, the clever-dick intellectuals, all of them disappeared, shut up or lay low, while the men of principle, the loyal and stable men, Rusanov's friends and Rusanov himself, were able to walk with dignity, their heads held high.

Now times had changed, things were bewildering, unhealthy, the finest civic actions of earlier days were now shameful. Would he now have to fear for his own skin?

Fear? What nonsense! Looking back over his whole life, Rusanov could not find a single instance of cowardice to reproach himself with. Indeed, had there ever been anything for him to be afraid of? As a man he was not particularly brave, perhaps, but he could not call to mind an occasion when he had behaved like a coward. There was no ground whatever for suggesting he'd have been afraid if he'd had to fight in the front line. It was simply that he'd been a valuable, experienced official, and so had not been sent to the front. It was impossible to say he'd have lost his head under bombing or in a burning building. He'd left K—— before the bombing started and he'd never been in a fire. Likewise he had never been afraid of justice or the law, because he had never broken the law and justice had always defended and supported him. He had never feared public exposure because the public also had always been on his side. An improper article attacking Rusanov would never have appeared in the local newspaper, because either Kuzma Fotievich or Nil Prokofich would have stopped it, while a national newspaper would never have stooped to Rusanov's level. So he had never been afraid of the press either.

When he traveled by boat across the Black Sea, he was not the least bit afraid of the depths beneath him. Whether or not he was afraid of heights it was impossible to say, because he'd never been such a fathead as to try climbing rocks or mountains, while the nature of his work did not involve bridge building.

The nature of Rusanov's work had been for many years, by now almost twenty, that of personnel records administration. It was a job that went by different names in different institutions, but the substance of it was always the same. Only ignoramuses and uninformed outsiders were unaware what subtle, meticulous work it was, what talent it required. It was a form of poetry not yet mastered by the poets themselves. As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions. A man's answer to one question on one form becomes a little thread, permanently connecting him to the local center of personnel records administration. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses, trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence. The point is that a so-called completely clean record was almost unattainable, an ideal, like absolute truth. Something negative or suspicious can always be noted down against any man alive. Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is to look hard enough to find out what it is.

Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads, who manage personnel records administration, that most complicated science, and for these people's authority.

To use yet another analogy, this time a musical one, Rusanov's special position put a set of xylophone keys at his disposal. By choice, desire or necessity he might strike any one of them. Although they were all made of wood, each gave out a different note.

There were keys, that is to say devices, that could be used with gentle precision. For example, if he wished to let a comrade know he was dissatisfied with him, or simply to give him a warning or put him in his place, Rusanov knew well how to say good morning in different tonalities.

When the other man said good morning to him (he had to do it first, of course), Rusanov might reply in a cold, businesslike tone, without a smile. Or he might draw his eyebrows together (he would rehearse this in front of the mirror in his office) and be a little slow about replying, as if he was in doubt as to whether he ought to say good morning to this particular person, whether he was worthy of it. Only then would he say good morning, turning his head toward the man either completely, or only halfway, or even not at all. This small pause, however, always had considerable effect. Every member of the staff who was greeted with this hesitation or coolness would begin to rack his brain for all the sins he might be guilty of. The seed of doubt once sown, the man might well refrain from some false step which he was on the point of taking, but which Pavel Nikolayevich would only have learned about later.

There was another stronger method he sometimes used. He would meet a man (or else call him up or have him specially fetched) and say, “Will you please come and see me at ten o'clock tomorrow morning?” “Can't I come now?” the man would always ask, anxious to find out why he was being summoned and to get the interview over. “No, you can't come now,” Rusanov would say blandly but severely. He wouldn't say that he had other business or was on his way to a conference; not for anything in the world would he give a simple, straightforward reason that might set the man's mind at rest. This was the whole point of the device. He would pronounce the words, “You can't come now,” as though they were fraught with various meanings, not all of them favorable. “What's it about?” the man might ask, either through nerve or sheer lack of experience. “You'll find out tomorrow.” The velvet voice of Pavel Nikolayevich would evade the tactless question. But from then until ten o'clock tomorrow was a long time, so many things could happen in between. The man had to finish his day's work, travel home, talk to his family, perhaps go to the movies or to a parents' meeting at his children's school, and finally get to sleep (some did, some didn't), then choke down his breakfast the next morning, while all the time the question was drilling and gnawing at him, “Why does he want to see me?” The long hours would give the man plenty of time for remorse and general misgiving, and he would no doubt vow never again to cross his bosses at meetings. When ten o'clock finally came, it might turn out that nothing more was wanted than to check his date of birth or the number on his diploma.

Like xylophone keys, these devices would mount the wooden scale until they came to the driest and shrillest note of all: “Sergei Sergeivich” (the director of the whole enterprise, the local boss) “would like you to fill out this form by such-and-such a date.” Rusanov would hand the man a form. But this was no ordinary form, it was the most detailed and unpleasant of all the forms and questionnaires kept in Rusanov's cabinet. For example, it was the one that had to be filled out before a man was given access to secret files. There might be no question of the man having access to secrets, and Sergei Sergeivich might not know anything about it all, but who was going to check up when everyone went in mortal fear of Sergei Sergeivich? The man would take the form and try to put on a bold front, but the fact was that if there was anything he had ever concealed from the records center, his insides would be churning. With this questionnaire, it was impossible to conceal anything. It was an excellent questionnaire, the best of the whole lot.

With its help Rusanov had succeeded in making several women divorce their husbands, who were imprisoned under Article 58.
*
However cleverly the women hid their tracks, sent off their parcels under different names and from different towns, or even sent no parcels at all, the net of questions woven by this form was so fine that further lying became impossible. The only possible way through was for the woman to be finally and legally divorced. There was a specially simplified procedure for such cases: the court did not have to ask the prisoner's agreement to the divorce or inform him that the divorce had been concluded. Rusanov was keenly concerned that such divorces should take place; that the criminals' dirty paws should not drag a woman not yet lost from society's collective path. But the questionnaires were never used and were only shown to Sergei Sergeivich by way of a joke.

The poetic side of his work lay in holding a man in the hollow of your hand without even starting to pile on the pressure.

Rusanov's mysterious, isolated, almost supernatural position in the general production system gave him a satisfyingly deep knowledge of the true processes of life. The life familiar to everybody—work, conferences, factory newssheets, local trade-union announcements pinned up at the checkpoint, applications for various benefits, the cafeteria and the factory club—was not real, it only seemed so to the uninitiated. The actual direction life took was decided without loud publicity, calmly, in quiet offices, by two or three people who understood one another, or by dulcet telephone calls. The stream of real life ran on in the secret papers that lay deep in the briefcases of Rusanov and his colleagues. For years this life might follow a man in silence, then suddenly and momentarily it would reveal itself, breathing fire from its jaws as it rose from its underground kingdom, wrenching off a victim's head or belching fire over him, then disappearing, no one know where. Afterward everything remained the same on the surface—club, cafeteria, applications for benefits, newssheets, work—yet as the workers walked past the factory checkpoint one man would be missing—dismissed, removed or eliminated.

Rusanov's office was equipped in a manner suited to the poetic and political nature of the subtle work he performed. It had always been a secluded room. In the early years it had a door upholstered with leather and studded with shiny wallpaper nails, but later on, as society became richer, it was further furnished with a sort of safety device in the doorway, a dark little cubicle like a lobby. This lobby seemed a perfectly simple invention, with nothing particularly cunning about it. It was no more than three feet across, and the caller spent only a second or two in it between closing the first door and opening the second. But to a man facing a critical interview, those few seconds seemed almost like a brief spell in prison. There was no light and no air, and he felt the full weight of his nothingness compared with the importance of the man whose office he was about to enter. If he had any bold or self-assertive ideas he would forget about them right there in the lobby.

Naturally enough, groups were never allowed to burst into Pavel Nikolayevich's office. People were only allowed in one by one after being summoned or given permission to come over the telephone.

This arrangement and admission routine greatly encouraged a properly considered and regulated execution of all duties in Rusanov's department. Without the precautionary lobby, Pavel Nikolayevich would have suffered.

Of course, a dialectic interdependence of all facets of reality
*
dictated that Pavel Nikolayevich's behavior at work inevitably had an effect on his way of life in general. Gradually with the years, he and Kapitolina Matveyevna developed an aversion to teeming human beings, to jostling crowds. The Rusanovs found streetcars, buses and trolley-buses quite disgusting. People were always pushing, especially when they were trying to get aboard. Insults were always flying around. Builders and other workers were always climbing in in dirty overalls, and you could get oil or lime all over your coat. The worst thing was their inveterate habit of clapping you familiarly on the shoulder and asking you to pass a ticket or some change along the car. It meant you were at their beck and call, endlessly passing things on. The distances were too great for going about the town on foot; and anyway it was a bit vulgar, hardly right for a man in his position. Besides, you could always come up against something unexpected among pedestrians. So the Rusanovs gradually changed over to motorcars—first office limousines and taxis, and then their own. They found it quite unbearable, of course, to travel in ordinary railway carriages or even in reserved seats, where people crammed in, wearing sheepskin coats and carrying buckets and sacks. The Rusanovs now traveled only in reserved compartments or “soft class.” Naturally, when he stayed in a hotel, he always had a room reserved for him, so there was never any danger of finding himself in a communal room. Naturally too they did not go to just
any
rest home, but only to the places where they knew and respected you, and where it was arranged for the beach and the walks to be fenced off from the general public. And when the doctors told Kapitolina Matveyevna she ought to
walk
more, she positively had nowhere to walk except inside a rest home like this, among her equals.