Cancer Ward (60 page)

Unseeing, without looking at him, she came alongside, and in spite of his resolutions Oleg found himself speaking to her, quietly, as though asking a favor. “Vera Kornilyevna…”

(It was a ludicrous tone to adopt, but he enjoyed using it.)

She raised her cold eyes, and she saw him.

(No, really, why was he forgiving her?)

“Vera Kornilyevna … wouldn't you like to … to give me another blood transfusion…?”

(It sounded as if he was groveling. Still, he was enjoying it.)

“I thought you were refusing to take them,” she said, looking at him with the same unforgiving sternness. But a kind of uncertainty trembled in her eyes, in those dear, dark-brown eyes.

(All right, according to her own lights she wasn't to blame. And they couldn't go on living in the same clinic together like complete strangers.)

“But I liked it
then.
I want more.”

He smiled. Whenever he smiled, his scar shortened and the line of it went all wavy.

(He'd forgive her now. They'd straighten it out sometime later.)

Still, something was stirring in her eyes—a sort of repentance.

“Maybe they'll bring more blood tomorrow.”

She was still resting her hand against an invisible pillar, yet it seemed to be melting or bending under the pressure.

“Only it has to be you,” he said, “it must be you.” His demand sounded heartfelt. “Otherwise I won't let them do it.”

She shook her head, trying not to look at him, to evade the whole issue. “It depends how it works out,” she said.

She walked on.

She was wonderful, in spite of everything she was wonderful.

Only what was he hoping for with her? A doomed man with a life sentence, what was he trying to achieve?

Oleg stood there in the corridor like a fool, trying to remember where he was going.

Oh yes, he was on his way to visit Dyomka.

Dyomka was lying in a tiny double room. His neighbor had been discharged and he was expecting a new one to arrive the next day from the operating theater. Meanwhile he was alone.

A week had passed, and with it had gone the first agony of his amputated leg. The operation was receding into the past, but his leg stayed with him torturing him as if it hadn't been removed. He could feel each toe separately.

Dyomka was delighted to see Oleg and greeted him like an elder brother. Of course they were like relatives, those friends of his from his former ward. Some of the women patients had sent him food too; there it was on his bedside table under a napkin. None of the new arrivals could come and visit him or bring him anything.

Dyomka was lying on his back nursing his leg (or rather what remained of a leg, less than a thigh), still with his huge turban-shaped bandage. But his head and arms were free.

“Well, hello, Oleg, how are you?” he said, taking Oleg's hand in his. “Sit down, tell me how things are in the ward.”

The upstairs ward he'd recently left was the world he was used to. Here, downstairs, the nurses and the orderlies were different and so was the routine. There was constant bickering about who had to do what.

“Well, what can you expect in the ward…?” Oleg was looking at Dyomka's yellowed face. It seemed whittled, as if grooves had been planed in his cheeks. His eyebrows, nose and chin had been planed down and sharpened. “It's still the same.”

“Is ‘Personnel' still there?”

“Oh yes, ‘Personnel's' there.”

“What about Vadim?”

“Vadim's not too good. They didn't get the gold. And they're frightened of secondaries.”

Dyomka frowned his concern in a way that made Vadim his junior. “Poor fellow,” he said.

“So, Dyomka, you ought to thank God they amputated yours in time.”

“I could still get secondaries.”

“Oh, I don't think so.”

But who could tell? Even doctors, how could they detect whether the solitary, destructive cells had or hadn't stolen through the darkness like landing craft, and where they had berthed?

“Are they giving you X rays?”

“They roll me in on a small cart.”

“You've got a clear road ahead now, my friend. You must get better and get used to using a crutch.”

“No, it'll have to be two. Two crutches.”

Poor boy, he'd already thought of everything. Even in the old days he'd frowned like a grown man. Now he seemed to have grown even older.

“Where are they going to make them for you? Right here?”

“Yes, in the orthopedic wing.”

“They'll be free of charge, at least?”

“Well, I've made an application. What have I got to pay with?”

They sighed. The sighs came easily from them, two men who year in, year out had had very little to cheer them.

“How are you going to finish school next year, then?”

“I'll finish or bust.”

“What'll you live on? You can't work in a factory now.”

“They've promised me a disability rating. I don't know if it'll be Group 2 or Group 3.”

“Which one is Group 3, then?” asked Kostoglotov. He didn't understand these disability groups, or any other civil regulations for that matter.

“It's one of these groups—enough to buy you bread, but not enough for sugar.”

He was a real man, Dyomka, he'd thought of everything.

The tumor was trying hard to sink him, but he was still steering his course.

“Will you go to the university?”

“I'll do my best.”

“You'll study literature?”

“That's it.”

“Listen to me, Dyomka, I'm talking seriously, you'll just ruin yourself. Why don't you work on radio sets? It's a quiet life, and you can always earn something on the side.”

“Oh, to hell with radio sets!” Dyomka blinked. “Truth is what I love.”

“Well, you can repair radio sets and tell the truth at the same time, you old fool!”

They couldn't agree. They argued it this way and that. They talked about Oleg's problems as well. That was another grown-up thing about Dyomka, he was interested in others. Normally, youth is only concerned with itself. Oleg spoke to him about his own situation as he might to an adult.

“Oh, that's awful…” Dyomka mumbled.

“I don't reckon you'd change places with me, would you?”

“G-g-god knows.”

The upshot of it all was that, what with the X rays and the crutches, Dyomka would have to spend another six weeks lounging about the hospital. He would get his discharge in May.

“Where will you go first?”

“I'll go straight to the zoo,” said Dyomka, cheering up. He'd already spoken to Oleg several times about this zoo. They would stand together on the clinic porch and Dyomka would describe exactly where the zoo was, how it was lurking over there, across the river, behind those thick trees. He had spent years reading about animals and listening to stories about them on the radio, but he had never actually seen a fox or a bear, let alone a tiger or an elephant. He had always lived in places where there was no menagerie, circus or forest. His cherished dream was to go out and meet the animals, and it was a dream that did not fade as he grew older. He expected something extraordinary from this encounter. On the very day he'd come to hospital with his aching leg, the first thing he'd done was visit the zoo, only it happened to be the one day of the week it was closed. “Listen, Oleg,” he said, “you will be discharged soon, won't you?”

Oleg sat there, hunching his back. “Yes, I expect so. My blood won't take any more. The nausea's wearing me out.”

“But you will go to the zoo, won't you?” Dyomka couldn't let the matter go. He would have thought the worse of Oleg otherwise.

“Yes, I may.”

“No, you must. I'm telling you, you must go! And you know what? Send me a postcard afterwards, will you? It'll be easy enough for you, and it'll give me such pleasure. Write and tell me what animals they have now and which is the most interesting, all right? Then I'll know a month before they let me out. You will go, won't you? And write to me? They say they have crocodiles and lions and…”

Oleg promised.

He left the room to go and lie down himself, leaving Dyomka alone in the small room with the door closed. For a long time Dyomka didn't pick up his book, he just looked at the ceiling and through the window, and thought. He couldn't see anything through the window. Its bars converged into one corner and it looked out on a nondescript corner of the yard bounded by the wall of the Medical Center. There was not even a strip of direct sunlight on the wall now. But it wasn't an overcast day either. The sun was slightly veiled, not completely covered by clouds, and gave out a sort of diffused, angular light. It must have been one of those dullish days, not too hot and not too bright, when Spring was doing her work without undue fuss or noise.

Dyomka lay motionless, thinking pleasant thoughts: how he'd learn to walk on crutches, briskly and smartly; how one really summery day shortly before May Day he'd go out and explore the zoo from morning until the evening train; how he'd have plenty of time now to get quickly through his subjects at school and do well and read all the essential books he'd hitherto missed. There would be no more wasted evenings with the other boys, going off to a dance hall after tormenting himself about whether to go or not, even though he couldn't dance anyway. No more of that. He would just turn on his light and work at his books.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Dyomka.

(Saying “Come in” gave him a feeling of satisfaction. He had never known a situation where people had to knock at his door before entering.)

The door was flung open, letting in Asya.

Asya came in, or rather burst in. She rushed into the room as though someone was chasing her, pushed the door shut behind her and stood there by the door, one hand on the knob, the other holding the front of her dressing gown together.

She was no longer the Asya who had dropped in for a “three-day checkup,” who was expected back in a few days' time by her track friends at the winter stadium. She had sagged and faded. Even her yellow hair, which couldn't change as quickly as the rest of her, hung down pitifully now.

She was wearing the same dressing gown, an unpleasant one without buttons that had covered many shoulders and been boiled in goodness knows what boilers. It looked more becoming on her now than before.

Asya looked at Dyomka and her eyelashes trembled a little. Had she come to the right place? Would she have to rush on somewhere else?

She was utterly crushed now. No longer Dyomka's senior by a full year in school, she had lost her advantage of extra experience, her knowledge of life and the three long journeys she had made. She seemed to Dyomka almost like part of him. He was very pleased to see her. “Aysa, sit down! What's the matter?” he said.

They had had many talks together in hospital. They had discussed his leg (Asya had come out firmly against giving it up). After the operation she had come to see him twice, brought him apples and cookies. Natural though their friendship had been that first evening, it had since then become even more so. And she'd told him, although not all at once, exactly what was wrong with her. She had had a pain in her right breast, they had found some sort of hard lumps in it, they were giving her X-ray treatment for it and making her put pills under her tongue.

“Sit down, Asya. Sit down.”

She let go of the dooknob and walked the few steps to the stool at the head of Dyomka's bed, dragging her hand behind her along the door, along the wall. It was as though she had to hold onto them and grope her way.

She sat down.

She sat down, and she didn't look Dyomka in the eye. She looked past him at the blanket. She wouldn't turn to face him, and he couldn't twist his body round to see her directly either.

“Come on now, what's the matter?” He had to play the “older man” again, that was his role. He threw his head back, craning his neck over the pile of pillows so that he could see her, still lying on his back.

Her lip trembled. Her eyelashes fluttered.

“As-asyenka!” Dyomka just had time to say the word. He was overcome with pity for her, he wouldn't have dared call her “Asyenka” otherwise. Suddenly she threw herself onto his pillow, her head against his, her little sheaf of hair tickling his ear.

“Please, Asyenka!” he begged her, fumbling over the blanket for her hand. But he couldn't see her hands and so he didn't find it.

She sobbed into the pillow.

“What is it? Come on, tell me, what is it?”

But he'd almost guessed what it was.

“They're going to c-c-cut it off…!”

She cried and she cried. And then she started to groan, “O-o-oh!”

Dyomka couldn't remember ever hearing such a long-drawn-out moan of grief, such an extraordinary sound, as this “O-o-oh.”

“Maybe they won't do it after all,” he said, trying to soothe her. “Maybe they won't have to.” But he knew somehow that his words wouldn't be enough to comfort her sorrow.

She cried and cried into his pillow. He could feel the place beside him; it was already quite wet.

Dyomka found her hand and began to stroke it. “Asyenka,” he said, “maybe they won't have to.”

“They will, they will! They're going to do it on Friday…”

And she let out such a groan that it transfixed Dyomka's soul.

He couldn't see her tear-stained face. A few locks of hair found their way through to his eyes. It was soft hair, soft and ticklish.

Dyomka searched for words, but they wouldn't come. All he could do was clasp her hand tighter and tighter to try to stop her. He had more pity for her than he had ever had for himself.

“What have I got to live for?” she sobbed.

Dyomka's experiences, vague as they were, provided him with an answer to this question, but he couldn't express it. Even if he could have done, Asya's groan was enough to tell him that neither he, nor anyone, nor anything at all would be able to convince her. Her own experience led to only one conclusion: there was nothing to live for now.