Cancer Ward (39 page)

Perhaps it was his father who had made him so greedy for time: he hadn't liked inactivity, either. Vadim could remember his father dandling him between his knees and saying, “Vadka, if you don't know how to make use of a minute, you'll fritter away an hour, then a day, and then your whole life.”

No, it wasn't only that. From his earliest days this demonic, insatiable hunger for time had been part of his make-up, quite apart from his father's influence. The moment he was bored playing a game with the other boys, he never hung around the gate with them but left at once, paying scant attention to their mockery. If a book struck him as vapid, he would throw it down and go and find something meatier. If the opening scenes of a film were a bit stupid (you can never find out in advance what a film's going to be like, they don't let you know on purpose), disdaining the waste of money, he'd bang his seat behind him and leave, to save time and prevent his mind from being contaminated. He was driven frantic by teachers who spent ten minutes droning at the class and then were unable to cope with the explanations, padding them out or making a complete mess of them, and finally setting the homework after the bell had gone. They just couldn't conceive of one of their pupils planning his break more exactly than they'd planned their lesson.

As a child, without being conscious of it, perhaps he had sensed a vague danger. Totally innocent, from the very beginning he had been under attack from this pigmented patch. As a boy he was always saving time, and he passed on this miserliness to his brothers. He was reading grown-up books before he went to school, and by the sixth grade he'd built himself a chemical laboratory at home. All the time he was running a race against the tumor to come, but racing in the dark, since he couldn't see where the enemy was. But the enemy was all-seeing, and at the best moment of his life it pounced on him with its fangs. It wasn't a disease, it was a snake. Even its name was snakelike—melanoblastoma.

Vadim did not even notice when it began. It was during an expedition to the Altai Mountains. The patch began to harden, then it gave him pain. It burst and seemed to get better, then it started hardening again. It rubbed against his clothes until walking became almost intolerable. But he didn't write to Momma and he didn't give up his work, because he was collecting the first batch of materials which it was essential to take to Moscow.

Their expedition was to investigate radioactive water; their brief did not include work on ore deposits. But Vadim, unusually well read for his age and especially well up in chemistry, a subject not all geologists are versed in, either foresaw or else knew intuitively that a new method of discovering ore deposits was about to be hatched. The expedition leader started to cut up rough over the trend of his work: he had to stick to his brief.

Vadim asked to be sent to Moscow on business, but the leader refused to send him. Then Vadim produced his tumor. He got a sick-leave certificate and turned up at the clinic, where he learned about the diagnosis and was ordered straight to bed. Although they told him his case couldn't wait, he took his hospitalization certificate and at once flew to Moscow, in the hope of seeing Cheregorodtsev at a conference taking place at the time. Vadim had never met Cheregorodtsev, he'd merely read his textbook and other books. People warned him that Cheregorodtsev wouldn't listen to more than one sentence: one sentence was all he needed to decide whether or not to speak to someone. Vadim spent the whole journey to Moscow planning his sentence. He was introduced to Cheregorodtsev on his way into the cafeteria in the interval. He fired off his sentence, and Cheregorodtsev turned back from the cafeteria, took him by the elbow and led him away. Their conversation seemed extremely intense to Vadim. It lasted five minutes and was complicated: he had to rush through his piece without missing a word of the answers, and display his erudition without explaining the idea in detail, since he wanted to keep the main secret to himself. Cheregorodtsev poured out objections, all of them going to show that radioactive water was not a direct indication of ore deposits and that it would be pointless to use it as a basis for search. In spite of what he said, though, he seemed very ready to be persuaded otherwise. He waited a minute for Vadim to persuade him, but when he didn't he let him go. Vadim had the impression that an entire Moscow institute had latched onto the problem while he was pottering about on his own trying to solve it among the pebbles of the Altai Mountains.

He couldn't expect anything better for the time being. He had to get down to the real work now.

He had to get down to the hospital business too, and confide in Momma. He could have gone to Novocherkassk, but he liked it here, and it was closer to his mountains.

Radioactive water and ore deposits weren't the only things he learned about in Moscow. He learned too that people with melanoblastoma died—invariably. They rarely lived as much as a year, usually only eight months.

He became like a moving body approaching the speed of light. His “time” and his “mass” were becoming different from those of other people. His time was increasing in capacity, his mass in penetration. His years were being compressed into weeks, his days into minutes. All his life he'd been in a hurry, but now he was really starting to run. Any fool can become a doctor of science if he lives sixty years in peace and quiet. But what can one do in twenty-seven?

Twenty-seven had been Lermontov's
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age. Lermontov hadn't wanted to die either. (Vadim knew he looked a bit like Lermontov: they were both short, both had pitch-black hair, a slight, slender build and small hands, but Vadim had no mustache.) Still, Lermontov had carved himself a niche in our memory not just for a hundred years, but forever.

Being an intellectual, Vadim had to find a formula for living with the panther of death couched beside him in the same hospital bed, for living next to it like a neighbor. How could he live through the remaining months and make them fruitful if they were only
months?
He had to analyze death as a new and unexpected factor in his life. After the analysis he noticed that he was beginning to get used to the fact, even to absorb it as part of himself.

The falsest line of reasoning would be to treat what he was losing as a premise: how happy he'd have been, how far he'd have got, what he'd have attained if only he'd lived longer. The right view was to accept the statistics which stated that some people are bound to die young. By dying young, a man stays young forever in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time. In his musings during the past few weeks Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point: a man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none—yet the former has more to lose. A man of no talent craves long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it.

Of course it was tempting to imagine that if only he managed to last out three or four years, our age of universal, rapid, scientific discovery was bound to find the remedy even for melanoblastoma. But Vadim had resolved to dismiss all daydreams of recovery or life prolonged. He refused even to waste odd moments of the night on such fruitless speculation. He would clench his teeth, work hard and bequeath the people a new method of discovering ore deposits.

Thus he would atone for his early death, and he hoped to die reconciled.

Throughout his twenty-six years he had found no greater fulfillment, no more satisfying and harmonious feeling than the consciousness of time usefully spent. This, he thought, would be the most sensible way to spend his last months.

Filled with the urge to work, then, Vadim had walked into the ward, clutching his few books under his arm.

The first enemy he was prepared for in the ward was the radio, the loudspeaker. He was ready to fight it by all means, legal or illegal. He planned to begin by trying to convert his neighbors, and go on from there to short-circuiting the wires with a needle or even tearing the socket out of the wall. Compulsory loudspeakers, for some reason generally regarded in our country as a sign of cultural breadth, are on the contrary a sign of cultural backwardness and an encouragement to intellectual laziness. Vadim rarely succeeded in convincing anyone else of this. The permanent mutter—information you hadn't asked for alternating with music you hadn't chosen (and quite unrelated to the mood you happened to be in)—was a theft of time, a diffusion and an entropy of the spirit, convenient and agreeable to the inert but intolerable to those with initiative. Epicurus's fool with eternity in hand would probably find listening to the radio the only way to bear it.

But as Vadim entered the ward he was happily surprised to discover there was no radio. Indeed, there wasn't one anywhere on this floor. (The reason for this omission was that for years they had been planning to move the clinic into better-equipped quarters, and the new place, of course, was going to be wired for rediffusion points throughout.)

The second enemy Vadim expected was darkness—windows miles away from his bed, lights switched off early and turned on late. But the generous Dyomka had let him have his place by the window, and from the first day Vadim had gone to sleep with the others pretty early, awakened and worked from dawn on, during the best and quietest hours of the day.

The third potential enemy was chattering in the ward. As it turned out, there was a little, but on the whole Vadim liked the setup, especially from the point of view of peace and quiet.

The nicest of them all, in his opinion, was Egenberdiev. He spent most of the time in silence, stretching his fat lips and plump cheeks at one and all in his epic hero's smile.

Mursalimov and Ahmadjan were pleasant, unobtrusive people too. When they spoke Uzbek together it didn't disturb Vadim at all, for they did it quietly and soberly. Mursalimov looked like a real old sage; Vadim had met others like him in the mountains. The two had disagreed only once and then they had argued quite angrily. Vadim had asked them to translate what it was all about. It seemed that Mursalimov didn't like the way people had started messing around with first names, joining several words to make a single name. He declared that there were only forty authentic first names, the ones handed down by the Prophet. All others were incorrect.

Ahmadjan wasn't the sort of fellow to cause trouble. He would always lower his voice if you asked him. Once Vadim told him some stories about the Evenki
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which fired his imagination. He spent two days thinking about their inconceivable way of life. Every now and again he would suddenly turn up with a question: “Hey, those Evenki, what sort of uniform do they have?”

Vadim would answer briefly, and Ahmadjan would sink back into thought for several hours. Then he would hobble up again and ask, “What sort of standing orders and timetable do they have, those Evenki?”

And the next morning: “Hey, those Evenki, what set tasks do they have?”

He wouldn't accept the explanation that the Evenki “just live that way.”

Sibgatov was also quiet and polite. He often came into the ward to play checkers with Ahmadjan. It was obvious he hadn't had much education, but he seemed to understand that talking loudly was bad manners and unnecessary. Even when he and Ahmadjan argued, he always spoke soothingly. “You don't get real grapes here. You don't get real melons.”

“Where do you get real ones then?” asked Ahmadjan fiercely.

“In the Crimea, of course, where else? You ought to see them…”

Dyomka was a good boy too. Vadim could tell he was no idle chatterbox. Dyomka spent his time thinking and studying; he wanted to understand the world. True, there was no shining talent stamped on his face: he always looked a bit gloomy when an unexpected idea was entering his head. Study and intellectual work would never come easily to him; still, often it was the plodders who turned out to be powerhouses.

Vadim had no objection to Rusanov either. He'd been a good solid worker all his life, although he would never set the world alight, His opinions were basically correct, only he didn't know how to express them flexibly. He stated them as if he'd learned them by heart.

Vadim didn't like Kostoglotov at first. He struck him as coarse and loud-mouthed. But this turned out to be only the surface. He wasn't really arrogant, he could be quite accommodating; it was just that his life had worked out unhappily, which made him irritable. He had rather a difficult temperament, and this, it seemed, was responsible for his failures. His disease was on the mend now, and his life could be too if only he'd concentrate more and make up his mind what he wanted. His prime defect was lack of concentration, and it showed in the way he wasted his time dashing about the place. Sometimes he'd wander aimlessly around the garden smoking cigarettes or he'd pick up a book only to put it down again, and he was too fond of chasing skirts. You didn't have to be particularly observant to notice that something was going on between him and Zoya, and between him and Gangart.

They were both nice enough girls, but Vadim, on the borderline of death, had no desire to chase girls. Galka was with the expedition waiting for him. She dreamed of marrying him, but he no longer had the right to marry. She wouldn't get much of him now.

No one would get any of him now.

That was the price you had to pay. Once a single passion got a grip on you it ousted all others.

The one man in the ward who'd really irritated Vadim was Podduyev. He was a vicious fellow and very strong, and yet he'd cracked and given in to a lot of clerical, Tolstoyan flummery, Vadim couldn't abide mind-sapping fairy tales about humility and loving your neighbor, and your duty to deny yourself and stand around with your mouth open looking for ways to help any Tom, Dick or Harry who came along, any slap-happy Harry or clever-dick Dick or anyone. Such dim, watery little truths contradicted the youthful thrust and fiery impatience in Vadim, his urge to unleash his energies and give of himself. He had sternly set himself not to take but to give, not to fritter himself away, not to falter, but to burn himself out in one great heroic deed for the benefit of the people and all mankind.