Cancer Ward (75 page)

He took out his rough-paper notebook and found the number. He looked out through the window again, and as the trolley car slowed down he spotted the house itself—two-story, with irregular-shaped windows and gates either permanently open or broken. There were a few outbuildings in the yard.

He could get out here, somewhere here.

He was by no means homeless in this town. He had an invitation, an invitation from a girl.

He didn't move from his seat. He sat there, almost enjoying the jolts and rumblings of the trolley car. It was not yet full. Opposite Oleg sat an old Uzbek in glasses—no ordinary Uzbek but a man with an air of ancient learning about him.

The lady conductor gave the man a ticket, which he rolled into a tube and stuck in his ear, and on they went, the twist of pink paper jutting out of his ear. It was an elementary touch that made Oleg feel gayer and more at ease as they entered the Old Town.

The streets grew even narrower. The tiny houses were crowded together, pushed shoulder to shoulder. Later on, even the windows disappeared. High clay walls rose blindly from the street. Some houses were built up higher than these walls; their backs were smooth, windowless and smeared all over with clay. There were a few gates or little tunnels in the walls, so low that you'd have to stoop to enter. It was only a jump from the runningboard of the trolley car to the pavement, and only another step across the pavement before it ended. The whole street seemed to be falling under the trolley car.

So this must be the Old Town, where Oleg wanted to be. But there were no trees growing in the naked streets, let alone a flowering apricot.

Oleg couldn't let the streets go by any more. He got off.

What he saw now was the same scene as before, except that he was moving at walking pace. Without the rattle of the trolley car he could hear, he was sure he could hear, a sort of iron knocking noise. A moment later he spotted a Uzbek in a black and white skullcap and a long black quilted coat with a pink waist sash. He was squatting in the middle of the street hammering a hoe into a circle against one of the rails of the single trolley track.

Oleg stood there. He was touched—atomic age indeed! Even now in places like this, and in Ush-Terek, metal was such a rarity that there was nothing better than a trolley rail to use as an anvil. Oleg watched to see if the Uzbek would finish before the next trolley came. But he was in no hurry whatever. He hammered on carefully. When the oncoming trolley car sounded its horn he moved half a step to one side, waited for it to pass and then squatted down again.

Oleg watched the Uzbek's patient back and the pink sash (which had drained the blue sky of its previous pinkness). He couldn't exchange two words with this Uzbek, but he still felt for him as a brother worker.

Hammering out a hoe on a spring morning—a real restoration of life that would be, wouldn't it?

Very good!

He walked slowly on, wondering where all the windows were. He wanted to peep behind the walls and look inside, but the doors, or rather the gates, were shut and it would be awkward just to walk in.

Suddenly Oleg saw light emerging from a small passageway in the wall. He bent down and walked along a dampish tunnel into a courtyard.

The courtyard hadn't yet woken up, but one could see that people lived here. Under a tree stood a bench dug into the ground and a table. Some toys were scattered about, quite modern ones, there was a water pump to provide the moisture of life, and a washtub too. There were many windows all around, all looking out in this direction, onto the courtyard. There wasn't one that faced the street.

He walked a bit further down the street and went into another courtyard through a similar sort of tunnel. Everything was the same, but there was also a young Uzbek woman looking after her little children. She wore a lilac shawl and her hair hung down to her waist in long, thin black braids. She saw Oleg and ignored him. He left.

It was completely un-Russian. In Russian villages and towns all the living-room windows looked straight onto the street, so that the housewives could peer through the curtains and the windowbox flowers, like soldiers waiting in a forest ambush, to see the stranger walking down the street, and who was visiting who and why. Yet Oleg immediately understood and accepted the Oriental way: I don't want to know how you live, and don't you peep in on me!

What better way of life could an ex-prisoner choose for himself after years in the camps, constantly exposed, searched and examined, under perpetual observation?

He was getting to like the Old Town more and more.

Earlier on he'd noticed an empty teahouse in a space between two houses and the man who ran it just beginning to wake up. He now came across another one on a balcony above street level. He walked up into it. There were several men inside wearing skullcaps—purple or blue and some made of rug cloth—and an old man in a white turban with colored embroidery. There wasn't a single woman there. Oleg remembered he'd never seen a woman in a teahouse. There was no sign up to say woman were forbidden, it just that they weren't invited.

Oleg thought it all over. It was the first day of his new life. Everything was new and had to be understood afresh. Did these men, by gathering together apart from women, mean to demonstrate that the most important part of life does not concern women?

He sat down by the balcony rail. It was a good point from which to observe the street. It was coming to life now, but no one seemed to be in the hurry habitual in towns. The passers-by moved along sedately, the men in the teahouse sat in endless calm.

One might imagine that Sergeant Kostoglotov, or Prisoner Kostoglotov, had served his time, had paid his debts to society, had sweated out the torment of his illness and had died in January, and that some new Kostoglotov, tottering on two uncertain legs, had emerged from the clinic “so lovely and clean you can see through him,” as they said in the camps, to live not an entire life but an extra portion, like the piece of bread they used to pin onto the main ration with a pine twig to make up the weight; it was part of the ration, but a separate bit.

As he embarked on this little additional piece of life, Oleg longed for it to be different from the main part he had lived through. He wished he could stop making mistakes now.

However, he'd already made one mistake, in choosing his tea. Instead of trying to be clever he should have chosen the ordinary black tea he knew well, but in his pursuit of the exotic he'd chosen
kok
—green tea. It turned out to have no strength, it didn't pep him up, it didn't really taste like tea at all, and when he poured some into the bowl it was full of tea leaves. He didn't want to swallow them, he'd rather pour it away.

Meanwhile the day was warming up and the sun was rising. Oleg wouldn't have minded a bite to eat, but this teahouse served nothing but two sorts of hot tea. They didn't even have sugar.

But he decided to adopt the changeless, unhurried manner of those about him. He didn't get up or set off in search of something to eat, but stayed sitting, adjusting his chair into a new position.

And then from the teahouse balcony he saw above the walled courtyard next door something pink and transparent. It looked like a puff dandelion, only it was six meters in diameter, a rosy, weightless balloon. He'd never seen anything so pink and so huge.

Could it be the apricot tree?

Oleg had learned a lesson. This was his reward for not hurrying. The lesson was—never rush on without looking around first.

He walked up to the railings and from on high gazed and gazed through this pink miracle.

It was his present to himself—his creation-day present.

It was like a fire tree decorated with candles in a room of a northern home. The flowering apricot was the only tree in this courtyard enclosed by clay walls and open only to the sky. People lived in the yard, it was like a room. There were children crawling under the tree, and a woman in a black headscarf with a green-flowered pattern was hoeing the earth at its base.

Oleg examined it—pinkness, that was the general impression. The tree had buds like candles. When on the point of opening, the petals were pink in color, but once open they were pure white, like apple or cherry blossoms. The result was an incredible, tender pink. Oleg was trying to absorb it all into his eyes. He wanted to remember it for a long time and to tell the Kadmins about it.

He'd planned on finding a miracle, and he'd found one.

There were many other joys in store for him today in this newly born world …

The vessel of the moon had now disappeared.

Oleg walked down the steps into the street. His uncovered head was beginning to feel the sun. He ought to go and buy four hundred grams or so of black bread, stuff himself with it without any water and then go downtown. Maybe it was his civilian clothes that put him in such good spirits. He felt no nausea and sauntered along quite easily.

Then he saw a stall set into a recess in the wall so that it didn't break the line of the street. It had an awning raised as a sun shield and propped up by two diagonal struts. Gray-blue smoke was blowing out from under the shield. Oleg had to bend low to get under. He stood stooping beneath, unable to straighten up.

A long iron grill ran across the whole length of the counter. In one place there was a fire of red-hot coals, the rest was full of white ashes. Across the grill and above the fire lay fifteen or so long, pointed aluminum skewers strung with pieces of meat.

Oleg guessed—it must be
shashlik!
Here was another discovery in his newly created world—the dish he'd heard so much about during those gastronomical discussions in prison. But in all his thirty-four years he had never had the chance to see it with his own eyes. He'd never been to the Caucasus or eaten in restaurants. In the prewar canteens they had served nothing but stuffed cabbage and pearl-barley porridge.

Shashlik!

It was an enticing smell, the mixed odor of smoke and meat. The meat on the skewers wasn't charred, it wasn't even dark brown, it was the tender pinky-gray of meat nearly just right. The stallkeeper, round and fat of face, was unhurriedly turning the sticks round or moving them away from the fire and over the ashes.

“How much?” asked Kostoglotov.

“Three,” the stallkeeper answered dreamily.

Oleg couldn't understand—three what? Three kopecks was too little, three roubles seemed too much. Perhaps he meant three sticks for a rouble? It was a difficulty he was always coming across since his release from the camp: he couldn't get the proper scale of prices into his head.

“How many for three roubles?” Oleg guessed, trying to find a way out.

The stallkeeper was too lazy to speak. He lifted one skewer up by the end, waved it at Oleg as one would to a child, and put it back on the fire.

One skewer, three roubles? Oleg shook his head. It was a scale beyond his experience. He only had five roubles a day to live on. But how he longed to try it! His eyes examined every piece of meat, selecting one for himself. Each skewer had its own special attraction.

There were three truck drivers waiting nearby, their trucks parked in the street. A woman came up to the stall, but the stallkeeper said something to her in Uzbek and she went away looking annoyed. Suddenly the stallkeeper began laying all the skewers out on a single plate. He sprinkled some chopped scallions on them with his fingers and splashed something out of a bottle. Oleg realized that the truck drivers were taking the whole stock of
shashlik,
five skewers each.

It was another example of the inexplicable, two-tiered price and wage structure that prevailed everywhere. Oleg couldn't even conceive of this second tier, let alone imagine himself climbing up to it. These truck drivers were just having a snack, fifteen roubles apiece, and very likely this wasn't their main breakfast either. No wage was enough to support such a life. Wage earners didn't buy
shashlik.

“All gone,” said the stallkeeper to Oleg.

“Gone? All gone?” asked Oleg miserably. Why on earth had he hesitated? It might be the first and last chance of a lifetime!

“They didn't bring any in today,” said the stallkeeper, cleaning up his things. It looked as if he was getting ready to lower the awning.

“Hey, boys, give me one skewer!” Oleg begged the truck drivers. “One skewer, boys!”

One of them, a heavily tanned but flaxen-haired young man, nodded to him. “All right, take one,” he said.

They hadn't paid yet. Oleg took a green note from his pocket, the flap of which was fastened with a safety pin. The stallkeeper didn't even pick it up. He just swept it off the counter into his drawer, as one sweeps crumbs or scraps off a table.

But the skewer was Oleg's! Abandoning his duffel bag on the dusty ground, he took the aluminum rod in both hands. He counted the pieces of meat—there were five of them, the sixth was a half—and his teeth began to gnaw them off the skewer, not whole chunks at a time but morsel by morsel. He ate thoughtfully as a dog eats after taking his food into a safe corner, and he thought how easy it was to whet human desires and how difficult it was to satisfy them once aroused. For years he had regarded a hunk of black bread as one of the most precious gifts on earth. A moment ago he had been ready to go and buy some for his breakfast, but then he had smelled the gray-blue smoke and the roast meat, the men had given him a skewer to gnaw and already he was beginning to feel contempt for bread.

The drivers finished their five skewers each, started up their engines and drove off, leaving Oleg still licking the last of his skewer. He was savoring each morsel with his lips and tongue—the way the tender meat ran with juice, the way it smelled, how perfectly it was cooked, not at all overdone. It was amazing the primeval pleasure, quite undulled, he derived from every mouthful. And the deeper he dug into his
shashlik
and the greater his enjoyment, the more he was struck by the cold fact that he wasn't going to see Zoya. The trolley car had been about to take him past her house, but he wouldn't get off. It was while lingering over the skewer of
shashlik
that he finally realized this.