Cancer Ward (38 page)

Suddenly her eyes swiveled sideways. She tore herself away abruptly from him and shouted, “The tap!”

My God, the tap! His hand shot out to it and hurriedly turned it off.

By a miracle the balloon did not burst.

“You see what happens with kisses!” said Zoya. She had not yet got her breath back; she spoke jerkily. Her hair was disheveled, her cap askew.

Of course she was perfectly right. Nevertheless their mouths joined again; they wanted to drain each other dry.

The corridor had a glass door. Through it someone coming around the corner might easily have seen their raised elbows, hers white, his ruddy. But who cared?

When Oleg had finally got some breath back into his lungs, he scrutinized her, holding her by the nape of her neck, and said, “Goldilocks, that's your real name. Goldilocks.”

She repeated the word, shaping her lips to it.

“Goldilocks? Pair of socks?…”

(All right, why not?)

“It doesn't worry you that I'm an exile, a criminal?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head frivolously.

“Or that I'm old?”

“Old!”

“Or that I'm ill?”

She laid her forehead against his chest and stood quietly.

He pulled her toward him, closer and closer, wondering again whether or not the heavy ruler on her table would slide off those warm curving little shelves or not. “Seriously, you will come to Ush-Terek, won't you? We'll get married. We'll build ourselves a little house.”

It looked as if he were going to give her the continuity which she had never had before, and which was part of her Teddy-bear side, the creative stability which sets in after the dazed moment when clothes were scattered around the room. She was pressed close to him, she could feel him with her womb, and was trying to guess, “Will it come from him? Is he really the one?”

She reached up and cradled his neck with her elbow to embrace him again. “Oleg, darling,” she said, “you know what these injections are supposed to do?”

“No, what?” he said, rubbing his cheek against hers.

“They … how can I explain?… Their scientific name is ‘hormone therapy'; they're used in reverse; they give women male hormones and men female hormones. They reckon it stops the formation of secondaries. But first of all it suppresses … do you understand?”

“What's that? No. Not completely.” His voice had changed; it sounded alarmed and jagged. He was holding her by the shoulders differently now, as though trying to shake the truth out of her. “Come on, tell me, tell me!”

“They completely suppress … sexual potency. That's the first thing that happens, even before feminization or virulization. With large doses women start to grow beards and men develop breasts.”

“Wait a minute! What's all this?” Oleg roared. He was only just beginning to understand. “You mean these injections? The ones they're giving me now? What happens? Do they suppress
everything?
”

“Well, not everything. The libido lasts quite a bit longer.”

“How do you mean, the libido?”

She looked him straight in the eyes and ruffled his forelock. “Well, it's what you're feeling for me now: desire.”

“So the desire stays, but the ability doesn't? Is that right?” He was completely stunned.

“The ability becomes progressively weaker, and then the desire goes too. Do you understand?” She ran her finger along his scar and stroked his cheek, clean-shaven that morning. “That's why I don't want you to have the injections.”

“This is fantastic!” He recovered and drew himself up to his full height. “This is really fantastic! I felt it in my bones. I thought they'd try some dirty trick or other and they have.”

He wanted to curse these doctors, swear at them all obscenely for the arbitrary way they disposed of other people's lives, when suddenly he remembered Gangart's radiantly confident face yesterday, when she'd been so warm and friendly to him, when she'd looked at him and said, “They're absolutely necessary. Your life depends on them. We're trying to save your
life!
”

So much for Vega. She wanted to do the best for him, did she? So that was why she was trying to lure him toward this fate?

“That's how you're going to be, isn't it?” He swiveled his eyes toward her.

No, really, why should he blame her? She saw life as he did, she understood that life wasn't worth living without … With her avid, flame-colored lips she had just dragged him along the top of the Caucasus. There she stood, there were her lips, and as long as this “libido” flowed in his legs and his loins, he had to kiss her, and the sooner the better.

“Can't you inject me with something that'll have the opposite effect?”

“They'd throw me out if I did…”

“But aren't there injections that would do that?”

“Yes, the same sort, hormone injections. But hormones of the same sex.”

“Goldilocks, listen, let's go somewhere…”

“We've already been somewhere. And we've arrived. And now it's time to go back.”

“Let's go to the doctors' room. Come on!'

“No, we can't. There's an orderly there, and people are always coming and going, especially in the evening…”

“We can wait till night…”

“We mustn't rush things, Oleg. If we do there won't be a…”

“What sort of tomorrow can there be if I lose my libido tomorrow? Only that won't happen. Thanks to you, Zoya, I'll keep my libido, won't I? Now come on, think of something, let's go somewhere!”

“Oleg, darling, we must leave something for the future. Don't rush things … We have to take the balloon back.”

“Yes, that's right, take the balloon back. We'll take it back now…”

“… We'll take it back now…”

“Take it back … now!…”

They walked up the stairs, holding not hands but the balloon, now inflated like a football; through it each jolt was conveyed from him to her. It was as if they were holding hands.

On the landing the yellow, shriveled patient with the weak (it had always been weak) chest was sitting up in his folding bed. Day and night people hurried past him, sick or healthy, busy with their own affairs. Sitting among his pillows, traces of a neat part still left, he had stopped coughing and was beating his forehead against his raised knees as if they were a wall. He was still alive but there were no living men around him.

Today might be the day he was going to die, Oleg's brother and neighbor, abandoned and hungry for sympathy. Perhaps if Oleg sat by his bed and spent the night there, he could provide some solace for his last hours.

All they did was give him the oxygen balloon and walk on. Those last few cubic centimeters of air in the doomed man's balloon had been no more than a pretext for going off into a corner together and getting to know each other's kisses.

Like a chained man, Oleg followed Zoya up the stairs. He wasn't thinking about the doomed man he'd left. He'd been one himself two weeks ago and in six months' time he might be one again. He was thinking about this girl, this woman, this “bit of skirt,” and how to persuade her to go off with him again that night.

He had forgotten what it was like, and so it was all the more unexpected to feel that aching sensation again, to feel lips crushed till they were rough and swollen with kisses. It made his whole body young.

19. Approaching the Speed of Light

It is not everyone who calls his mother “Momma,” especially in front of strangers. “Boys” over fifteen and under thirty are ashamed of the word. But Vadim, Boris and Yuri Zatsyrko had never been ashamed of their Momma. While their father was alive they had all loved her, and after he was shot they loved her all the more. With only short gaps between their ages, they grew up as three equals, always busy at school and at home, and not given to fooling about in the streets. They never gave their widowed mother cause for concern. Once, when they were little boys, a photograph had been taken of the three of them with their mother, later another one was taken for comparison, then it became a rule that every two years she would take them to be photographed (later they did it with a camera of their own), and picture after picture was stuck into the family album: mother and three sons, mother and three sons. She was fair, but all three of them were dark, probably because of the captive Turk who long ago had married their great-grandmother, a Cossack girl from Zaporozhe. Strangers could not always tell which was which in the photographs. In each successive photograph they had grown noticeably taller and sturdier, overtaking her, while she aged imperceptibly; she held herself erect in front of the camera, proud of this living record of her life. She was a doctor, well known in her town, who had earned widespread gratitude, expressed in the form of pies, pastries and bouquets of flowers. If she had accomplished nothing else, to have reared these three sons would have been sufficient justification for any woman's life. All three of them had been to the same polytechnic. The eldest had studied geology, the middle one electrical engineering; the youngest was just finishing his course in constructional engineering, and his mother was living with him.

That is, she had been until she'd heard about Vadim's illness. Last Thursday she'd been within an ace of rushing away from home to come and see him. On Saturday she'd had a telegram from Dontsova saying he needed colloidal gold, and on Sunday she'd wired back that she was going to Moscow to try to get hold of some. She'd been there since Monday, and she must have spent yesterday and today trying to get interviews with ministers and other important people to whom she could appeal for some gold from the state reserves in the name of her son's fallen father. (When their town was occupied he'd been left behind to pose as an intellectual with a grudge against Soviet power, and the Germans had shot him for being in contact with the partisans and concealing our wounded.)

Soliciting of this kind repelled and offended Vadim, even from a distance. He could not bear string-pulling in any shape or form, whether it was using friends or claiming rewards for services rendered. Even the warning telegram that Momma had sent Dontsova weighed on him. However important his survival might be, he was not prepared to make use of privileges, even when faced with the bogy of death by cancer. But as soon as he saw Dontsova at work, he realized that Ludmila Afanasyevna would have given him the same amount of her time and attention even without his mother's telegram. Except that there would have been no point in sending the telegram about the colloidal gold.

If Momma managed to get the gold, she'd fly here with it, of course. And if she didn't, she'd fly here anyway. He'd written to her from the clinic about the birch fungus, not because he had suddenly come to believe in it but to give her some extra salvation work, to load her with things to do. If she really became desperate, she would even go into the mountains, in spite of her medical knowledge and convictions, to see the medicine man near Lake Issyk Kul and get some of his root. (Oleg Kostoglotov had come over to him yesterday and confessed that to please a woman he'd poured away his root infusion. There hadn't been very much of it anyway, but here was the old man's address. If the old man had already been locked up in jail, he'd give Vadim some out of his own reserve at home.)

Momma's life was a misery while her eldest son was in danger. She was ready to do everything, more than everything, far more than was necessary. She'd even go on a field trip with him, although he already had his girl Galka out there. From snatches of information about his illness, read or overheard, Vadim had come to realize that the flare up of his tumor had actually been caused by Momma's overzealous care and attention. Ever since childhood he'd had this large patch of pigmentation on his leg: as a doctor she should have understood the danger of malignancy setting in. She was always finding reasons to probe the patch, and once she'd insisted on a top surgeon carrying out a preliminary operation. Apparently this was the last thing that ought to have been done.

Although Momma was responsible for the death sentence he was now under, he could not reproach her, either to her face or behind her back. It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions. It was unfair to get annoyed at his mother's culpability just because of his unfinished work, his interrupted interests and his unfulfilled opportunities, none of which, let alone the force that drove him to work, would ever have existed if Vadim himself had not been given life—through his mother.

Man has teeth which he gnashes, grits and grinds. But look at plants—they have no teeth, and they grow and die peacefully.

Although Vadim forgave his mother, he could not forgive the circumstances. He was not prepared to concede a single inch of his epithelium. And he could not help grinding his teeth.

This damn illness had cut right across his life, mowing him down at the crucial moment.

True, ever since childhood he had had a sort of foreboding that he would be short of time. It made him nervous when guests or women neighbors came to the house and chattered, taking up Momma's time and his. It exasperated him at school and college when the students were always told to assemble for class, an excursion, a party, or a demonstration, an hour or two earlier than necessary, on the theory that they were bound to be late. Vadim could never stand the half-hour news bulletins on the radio. What was essential or important could easily have been fitted into five minutes, the rest was padding. It made him mad to think that whenever he went to a shop there was a ten-to-one chance of finding it closed for stocktaking, stock renewal or transfer of goods. You could never tell when that was going to happen. Any village council or post office might be closed on a working day, and from twenty-five kilometers away it was impossible to tell when.