Cancer Ward (46 page)

I am not asking for Leningrad or for Rio de Janeiro, all I want is our little place out in the wilds, humble Ush-Terek, Soon it will be summer, and this summer I want to sleep on a folding bed under the stars, to wake up at night and know by the positions of Cygnus and Pegasus what time it is, to live just this one summer and see the stars without their being blotted out by camp searchlights—then afterward I would be quite content never to wake again.

Yes, and one other thing, Nikolai Ivanovich, I want to walk with you (and with Beetle and Tobik, of course) after the heat has abated, along the steppe track to the Chu River. Then where the water's deepest, where it comes above your knees, I shall sit on the sandy bottom, legs floating in the current, sit hour after hour, as still as the heron on the opposite bank.

Our Chu reaches no sea, no lake, no expanse of water at all. It is a river that ends life in the sands, a river flowing nowhere, shedding the best of its water and strength haphazardly along its path.

My friends, isn't this a fine picture of our lives as prisoners? We are given nothing to accomplish, doomed to be stifled in ignominy, while the best left to us is a single reach of water which has not yet dried up, and the only memory of us will be the two little handfuls of water we hold out to each other, as we held out human contact, conversation and help.

A river flowing into the sands! But the doctors even want to deprive me of this last stretch of water. By some right (it never enters their heads to question this right) they have decided, without my consent and on my behalf, on a most terrible form of treatment—hormone therapy. It is a piece of red-hot iron with which they brand you just once and make you a cripple for the rest of your life. But what an everyday event that is in the routine of the clinic.

Even before this I thought a lot about the supreme price of life, and lately I have been thinking about it even more. How much can one pay for life, and how much is too much? It's like what they teach you in schools these days, “A man's most precious possession is his life. It is only given to him once.” This means we should cling to life at any cost. But the camps have helped many of us to establish that the betrayal or destruction of good and helpless people is too high a price, that our lives aren't worth it. As for bootlicking and flattery, the voters in the camp were divided. Some said it was a price one could pay, and maybe it is. But what about this price? To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion, respiration, muscular and brain activity—and nothing more? Become a walking blueprint? Is not this an exorbitant price? Is it not mockery? Should one pay? Seven years in the army and seven years in the camp, twice seven years, twice that mythical or biblical term, and then to be deprived of the ability to tell what is a man and what is a woman—is not such a price extortionate?

I wouldn't have hesitated for a minute, I'd have quarreled with them and left long ago, but then I'd lose their certificate, the great Goddess Certificate! The
komendant
or security chief may want to send me another three hundred kilometers into the desert tomorrow. I can stop that happening as long as I have my certificate. Please, sir, I'm in need of constant observation and medical treatment, sir! Thank you, sir! Get an old prisoner to give up his medical certificate? It's unthinkable!

So once more I have to be cunning, pretend, deceive, drag things out—and one gets so sick of it after a lifetime! (Incidentally, too much cunning makes one tired and prone to error. I brought everything down on my own head with that letter from the Omsk lab. assistant I asked you to send me. I handed it in. They seized it, wove it into my case history, and when it was too late I realized how the senior doctor had deceived me about it Now she can be confident about giving me hormone treatment, whereas otherwise she would probably have had doubts.)

When I get back to Ush-Terek I'll give my tumor another pummeling with that mandrake root from Issyk Kul, just to make sure it doesn't start throwing secondaries about. There's something noble about treating oneself with a strong poison. Poison doesn't pretend to be a harmless medicine, it tells you straight out, “I'm poison! Watch out! Or else!” So we know what we're in for.

I was quite excited by your last letter (it got here pretty quickly—five days; all the ones before have taken eight). Is it true? A geodetic expedition in our area? What a joy that would be, getting behind a theodolite, working like a human being for a year or so, even if no more. But will they take me on? It would be bound to go beyond the limits of my place of exile, wouldn't it? And anyway, these things are top secret, without exception, and I'm a man with a record.

I'll never see
Waterloo Bridge
or
Open City
now, those movies you thought were so good. They won't come back to Ush-Terek a second time, and to go to the cinema here I'd have to find somewhere to stay the night after being discharged from hospital. Where could I stay? Anyway, I probably won't be discharged till I'm crawling on all fours.

You offer to send me a little money. Thank you very much. First of all, I wanted to refuse; all my life I have tried to avoid being in debt, and I have succeeded. But then I remembered that I shan't die with nothing to bequeath. There is an Ush-Terek sheepskin jacket—that's something, after all! And what about a two-meter length of black cloth I use as a blanket? And a feather pillow, a gift from Melchuk? And three packing cases nailed together to make a bed? And two saucepans? My camp bowl? And my spoon? Not to mention my bucket! There's still some
saksaul
*
for the stove! An ax! And lastly a paraffin lamp! It was just an oversight that I forgot to make a will.

And so I would be most grateful if you could send me 150 roubles (no more than that). I will undertake your commission to try to find some manganate, soda, and cinnamon. Write to me if you think of anything else. Perhaps you would like a portable iron after all? I'll get it home, don't be afraid to ask.

I see from your weather report, Nikolai Ivanovich, that it's still quite cold at home, the snow hasn't gone yet. It's such a wonderful spring here, it's almost indecent and incomprehensible.

By the way, about the weather report. If you see Inna Ström please give her my best wishes. Tell her I often think about her and …

Or maybe you'd better not …

There are such vague feelings singing inside me, I don't know what I want myself. Or what I have the right to want.

But when I remember our consolation, that great saying “Things have been worse,” I always cheer up straightaway. We aren't ones to hang our heads! We'll muddle along somehow!

Elena Alexandrovna says she has written ten letters in two evenings. It made me think what a wonderful thing it is—this sympathetic, steadfast consideration for people you have. Who nowadays remembers distant friends and gives up evening after evening for them? This is why it's so pleasant writing you long letters, because I know you will be reading them aloud, and then reading them again, and then going over them sentence by sentence and answering each point.

So may you continue to flourish, my friends, and may your light shine.

Your

O
LEG.

23. Why Not Live Well?

March 5 was a murky sort of day outside, with a fine cold drizzle, but in the ward it was a day of surprises and events. The evening before Dyomka had signed his agreement to the operation, so he was moving down to the surgical ward. That day they also moved in two new patients.

The first took Dyomka's bed, the one in the corner by the door. He was a tall man, but he had a terrible stoop, a crooked spine and a worn face like a very old man's. His eyes were so swollen, his lower eyelids so pulled down that instead of the horizontal oval everyone has in their eyes he had something more like a circle, and in each circle the white had an unhealthy reddish tinge. They were bright, brownish iridescent rings larger looking than usual because of the distended lower eyelids. With these great round eyes the old man seemed to be examining everyone with an unpleasant, attentive gaze.

During the past week Dyomka had not been himself; he had had unceasing aches and shooting pains in his leg so that he could no longer sleep or take part in anything. It was a real effort holding himself together so as not to cry out and disturb his neighbors. All this had worn him out to the point where he no longer thought of his leg as precious, but as a cursed burden he ought to get rid of as quickly and easily as possible. A month ago the operation had seemed like the end of life, but now it seemed like salvation. Thus do our standards change.

Dyomka had taken the advice of every single man in the ward before signing his agreement Still, even today, as he was tying up his bundle of belongings and saying his goodbyes, he was trying to turn the conversation, to make people calm him down and reassure him. So Vadim had to repeat what he had already said, that Dyomka was lucky to get off so easily, that he, Vadim, would have taken his place with pleasure.

Dyomka still managed to find objections. “But the bone—they saw it through with a saw. They just saw it through like a log. They say you can feel it under any anesthetic.”

But Vadim was unable to console anyone for long, nor did he wish to. “Come on now,” he said, “you're not the first one it's happened to. Others have to put up with it, you'll put up with it too.”

In this case, as in every other, he was being just and impartial. He had asked for no consolation himself, and if offered it, he would not have accepted it. There was something spineless, religious even, about every attempt to console.

Vadim was just as proud, collected and courteous as he had been during his first days in the hospital. The only difference was that his swarthy mountaineer's skin had started to turn yellow. Occasionally, too, his lips would tremble with pain, his forehead twitch with impatience and bewilderment. So long as he had just been
saying
he was doomed to die in eight months, but had still gone riding, and flying to Moscow and meeting Cheregorodtsev, he had been convinced at the bottom of his heart that he would escape the trap. But now here he was, he had been here a month—one month out of the eight he had left, and maybe not the first, but the third or the fourth out of the eight. And every day walking became more painful. Already he found it difficult even to imagine mounting a horse and riding out into the field. Already the pain had spread to his groin. He had by now read three of the books he had brought with him, but he was losing his conviction that the discovery of ores by radioactive water was the only essential thing in his life. Therefore he was reading less intently than before, making fewer question and exclamation marks.

Vadim had always reckoned life was at its best when he was so busy that there were not enough hours in the day. But now, somehow, he found the days quite long enough, too long even, only there was not enough life. His tightly strung capacity for work had begun to sag. Seldom now did he wake early and read his books in the quiet of the morning. Sometimes he would just lie there, the blankets pulled up over his head, and the idea would seep into his mind that perhaps to give in and end it all would be easier than to struggle. He began to feel the terrifying absurdity of these paltry surroundings and idiotic conversations, and the urge to rip apart his polished self-control and howl as a wild animal howls at its snare, “All right, stop playing the fool, let go of my leg!”

Vadim's mother had been to see four highly placed officials but had still not managed to get any colloidal gold. She had brought some
chaga
*
from Russia and arranged for the nurse to bring him jugs of infusion every other day. Then she went back, to Moscow for more interviews to try to get some gold. She could not come to terms with the possibility that radioactive gold might exist somewhere and yet her son's secondaries were still penetrating his groin.

Dyomka went up to Kostoglotov to say or to hear some word of farewell, Kostoglotov was lying diagonally across his bed, his feet up on the rail and his head hanging over the mattress into the aisle. They saw each other upside down. Oleg held out his hand and said quietly in parting (he now found it hard to speak loudly, he could feel something reverberating under his lungs): “Don't lose your nerve, Dyomka. Lev Leonidovich is here. I saw him. He'll have it chopped off in no time.”

“Is he?” Dyomka's face lit up. “Did you see him yourself?”

“That's right.”

“Well, that's something! What a good thing I held out!” Indeed, it was enough for this lanky surgeon with his over-long drooping arms to appear in the clinic corridors and immediately the patients began to take heart, as though realizing that this long-legged fellow was just the man they had been missing all month. If they had paraded all the surgeons in front of the patients and let the patients take their pick, there is little doubt that each one would have signed on for Lev Leonidovich. He always looked so bored the way he walked about the clinic, but this expression they interpreted as a sign that it was not the day for operations.

Although Yevgenia Ustinovna was quite good enough for Dyomka, although little, fragile Yevgenia Ustinovna was a splendid surgeon, still it was an entirely different feeling lying underneath the hairy, apelike hands of Lev Leonidovich; because however it turned out, whether he saved you or not, it wouldn't be because he'd made a mistake. Of this Dyomka was somehow quite convinced.

The intimacy between patient and surgeon is short-lived, but closer than between a son and his own father.

“He's a good surgeon, is he?” came a muffled question from the “new boy” with the swollen eyes in the bed that had once been Dyomka's. He looked absentminded, and as if someone had taken him by surprise. He was shivering. Even inside the ward he wore a fustian dressing gown over his pajamas, unfastened and unbelted. The old man stared about him as if, alone in a house, he had been awakened by a knock on the door in the middle of the night, had got out of bed and couldn't make out what was threatening him.