Cancer Ward (17 page)

“Anyone else?” Yefrem croaked. The book's riddle had taken him by surprise, and now the rest were finding it difficult too. “Anyone else? What do men live by?”

Old Mursalimov did not understand Russian, otherwise perhaps he'd have given a better answer than any of them. But just then the medical assistant Turgun, who was still a student, came along to give him an injection. “By their pay, that's what,” he replied.

The swarthy Proshka, in the corner, stared as if into a shop window. Even his mouth gaped, but he didn't say anything.

“Well? Come on,” Yefrem demanded.

Dyomka put down his book and frowned over the question. He had in fact brought Yefrem's book into the ward, but he hadn't managed to read much of it, none of what it said seemed right, it was like talking to a deaf man who gives the wrong answers to your questions. It weakened him and confused everything when what he needed was advice on what to do. And so he hadn't read
What Men Live By
and didn't know the answer that Yefrem was waiting for. He was thinking up his own.

“Well, big boy?” Yefrem prodded him.

“Yes … in my opinion,” Dyomka announced slowly, as if answering a teacher at the blackboard, trying not to make a mistake, and still thinking it out between the words, “… In the first place, air. Then—water. Then—food.”

This was the answer Yefrem would have given before, if anyone had asked him. The only thing he might have added was booze. But this was not at all what the book was getting at.

He smacked his lips. “Anyone else?”

Proshka decided to speak. “Professional skill,” he said.

Again this was something Yefrem had thought all his life.

Sibgatov sighed and said shyly, “Your homeland.”

“What's that?” asked Yefrem in surprise.

“You know, the place you were born in … living in the place you were born.”

“Ah! Oh no, you don't
have
to have that. I left the Kama when I was a young man, and now I don't give a damn whether it still exists. One river's the same as another, eh?”

“In the place you were born,” Sibgatov insisted quietly, “you don't even get ill. Everything's much easier in the place you were born.”

“All right. Anybody else?”

“What, what's this?” asked Rusanov, cheerful again. “What's the problem?”

Yefrem grunted and turned himself round to the left. The beds by the windows were empty, except for Whey-face. He was eating a chicken leg, holding one end of the bone in each hand.

There they sat facing each other, as if the Devil had put them there for his own malicious pleasure. Yefrem screwed up his eyes.

“It's this, Professor. What do people live by?”

Pavel Nikolayevich did not put himself out in the least. He barely looked up from the chicken. “There's no difficulty about that,” he said. “Remember: people live by their ideological principles and by the interests of their society.” And he bit off the sweetest piece of gristle in the joint. After that all there was left on the bone was the rough skin of the foot and the dangling tendons. These he put on a piece of paper on top of his bedside table.

Yefrem did not answer. He was annoyed that this pipsqueak had managed to wriggle out of it so cleverly. When it came to ideology it was better to keep your trap shut.

He opened the book and stared at it again. He wanted to find the right answer for himself.

“What's the book about? What does it say?” asked Sibgatov, turning from his game of checkers.

“Here, listen…” Podduyev read the first few lines: “‘A cobbler, with his wife and children, once lodged at a peasant's. He had neither house nor land of his own…'”

But reading aloud was a long and difficult business, so he propped himself up with some pillows and began to tell Sibgatov the story in his own words, trying once again to grasp its meaning.

“Anyway, the shoemaker started hitting the bottle. One night he was going home full of drink when he ran into a guy called Mikhailo who was freezing to death and took him home. His wife scolded him. ‘What? Another mouth to feed?' she said. But Mikhailo started working for all he was worth, and learned to sew better than the shoemaker. One winter's day the squire came to see them. He brought a piece of expensive leather and gave them an order—one pair of boots that wouldn't warp or rip. And if the shoemaker spoiled the leather, he'd have to replace it with his own skin. Mikhailo gave a strange smile because he'd seen something over there in the corner behind the squire's back. The squire had just gone out of the door when Mikhailo went and cut the leather and spoiled it. It wasn't big enough now for a pair of welted stretch boots, only for something like a pair of slippers. The shoemaker clapped his hand to his head. ‘You've ruined me,' he said, ‘you've cut my throat. What have you done?' Mikhailo said, ‘A man lays down stores for a year, when he doesn't even know whether he'll be alive that evening.' Sure enough, the squire kicked the bucket on the way home. And the squire's wife sent a boy to the shoemaker to say, ‘No need to make the boots. But we want a pair of slippers as quickly as you can. For the corpse.'”

“Good God, what nonsense!” Rusanov spat the words out, with a hiss. “It's time someone changed the record. What a moral! It stinks to high heaven, it's quite alien to us. What does it say there that men live by?”

Yefrem stopped telling the story and moved his swollen eyes across to the bald pate opposite. He was furious that the bald man had almost guessed the answer. It said in the book that people live not by worrying only about their own problems but by love of others. And the pipsqueak had said it was by “the interests of society.”

Somehow they both tied up.

“What do they live by?” He could not say it aloud somehow. It seemed almost indecent. “It says here, by love.”

“
Love?
 … No, that's nothing to do with our sort of morality.” The gold-rimmed glasses mocked him. “Listen, who wrote all that, anyway?”

“What?” mumbled Podduyev. They were sidetracking him away from the point.

“Who wrote it, who's the author? There, it's up there, look, at the top of the first page.”

What's the name got to do with it? What's the name got to do with the point—with their diseases, with their lives or deaths? Yefrem was not used to reading the name at the top of the books he read, and when he did he promptly forgot it. Now he turned to the first page and read aloud, “Tol … stoy.”

“That's impossible!” Rusanov protested. “Tolstoy? Remember, Tolstoy
*
only wrote optimistic and patriotic works, otherwise he wouldn't have been printed:
The Bread, Peter the First.
And, let me tell you, he won the Stalin Prize three times!”

“It's not
that
Tolstoy,” retorted Dyomka from the corner. “Our book's by Leo Tolstoy.”

“Oh, not tha-a-a-t Tolstoy?” Rusanov drawled, relaxing a little, but curling his lip a little, too. “It's the other one, is it?… The mirror of the Russian Revolution? Rice croquettes?
**
Your namby-pamby Tolstoy, there were plenty of things
he
didn't understand. You
must
resist evil, young man, you
must
fight against it.”

“I quite agree,” answered Dyomka in a hollow voice.

9. Tumor Cordis

Yevgenia Ustinovna, senior surgeon, had none of the traits usually ascribed to members of her profession, none of the resolute look, determined lines across the forehead or iron clenching of the jaw, and her appearance as a whole lacked that straightforward wisdom. Although already in her fifties, if she piled her hair on top of her head inside her doctor's cap men who saw her from behind would call out, “Excuse me, Miss, er…” She was, as the saying is, a Young Pioneer from behind and an old-age pensioner from in front, with her drooping lower eyelids, puffed-up eyes and perpetually weary-looking face. She tried to make up for this by using lots of bright lipstick, but she had to put it on more than once a day because it always rubbed off on the cigarettes she smoked.

Every moment she was not in the operating theater, the surgical dressing room or the ward, she had a cigarette in her mouth. She would seize every opportunity to dash out and fling herself on a cigarette as though she wanted to eat it. During her rounds she would sometimes raise her first two fingers to her lips. So one might perhaps argue that she smoked even during her rounds.

Apart from the chief surgeon, Lev Leonidovich—a very tall man with long arms—this aged, stringy woman did all the operations in the clinic. She sawed off limbs, put tracheotomy tubes into the wall of the throat, took out stomachs, penetrated to every part of the intestines, plundered the inside of the pelvic girdle. And toward the end of the day's operations it might fall to her lot to remove one or two sets of cancerous lacteal glands—an uncomplicated job that she had mastered like a virtuoso. There was never a Tuesday or a Friday on which Yevgenia Ustinovna did not cut off women's breasts, and she would remark to the orderly who cleaned the theater, a cigarette between her exhausted lips, that if all the breasts she had cut off were collected together and made into a pile, the result would be quite a small mountain.

Yevgenia Ustinovna had been a surgeon all her life: without surgery she would be nothing. Still, she remembered and understood the words of Tolstoy's Cossack, Yeroshka, who said about West European doctors, “All they can do is cut. Well, they're fools. But up in the mountains you get real doctors. They know about the herbs.”

And if tomorrow some other kind of therapy were invented—radiation, chemical or herbal, or even something worked by light, color or telepathy—which could save her patients without the knife and would mean that surgery would completely vanish from human practice, Yevgenia Ustinovna would not have defended her craft even for a day, not because of her convictions but simply because she had spent all her life cutting, cutting, all her life had been blood and flesh. It is one of the tiresome but unavoidable facts about humanity that people cannot refresh themselves in the middle of their lives by a sudden, abrupt change of occupation.

They would usually go on their rounds in groups of three or four: Lev Leonidovich, she and the interns. But a few days ago Lev Leonidovich had gone to Moscow for a seminar on thorax operations. For some reason this Saturday she was quite alone when she went into the upper men's ward—without an attendant physician, or even a nurse.

She didn't go right in, she just stood quietly in the doorway, leaning back against the door with a girlish movement. A very young girl can lean against a door and know it looks good, better than standing with a straight back, level shoulders and head erect.

She stood there pensively watching Dyomka playing a game. Dyomka had his bad leg stretched out along the bed and the foot of his good leg laid under it to make a little table. On this he had placed a book, and on the book he was making something out of four long pencils which he held in both hands. He was contemplating this figure and seemed likely to go on doing so for a great while, but just then he heard someone call him. He raised his head and gathered the splayed pencils together.

“What are you building, Dyomka?” Yevgenia Ustinovna asked him sadly.

“A theorem!” he answered cheerfully, louder than necessary.

Those were the words they used, but the looks they gave each other were keen and it was clear that they were really concerned with something quite different.

“Time's slipping away,” added Dyomka by way of explanation, but not so cheerfully or loudly.

She nodded, She was silent for a moment, still leaning against the doorway—no, not girlishly but through sheer tiredness.

“Come on, let me have a look at you.”

Dyomka was always quite mild, but this time his protest was livelier than usual: “Ludmila Afanasyevna examined me yesterday! She said we'd carry on with the radiation.”

Yevgenia Ustinovna nodded. There was a sort of sad elegance about the way she looked.

“Well, that's good, but I'll still take a look at you.”

Dyomka frowned. He put away his stereometry, drew himself up in the bed to make room, and bared his bad leg to the knee.

Yevgenia Ustinovna sat down beside him. Without effort she jerked up the sleeves of her coverall and dress almost to the elbow. Her slender, supple hands began to move up and down Dyomka's leg like two live creatures.

“Does it hurt? Does it hurt?” she kept asking.

“Yes … Yes, it hurts,” he confirmed, frowning more and more.

“Can you feel your leg during the night?”

“Yes … but Ludmila Afanasyevna…”

Yevgenia Ustinovna again nodded her head understandingly and patted him on the shoulder.

“All right, my friend. Carry on with the radiation.”

And once again they looked into each other's eyes.

The ward had fallen quite silent. Every word they spoke could be heard.

Yevgenia Ustinovna got up and turned to the others. Proshka should have been in the bed over there by the stove, but yesterday evening he had moved to the bed by the window (even though there was a superstition against taking the bed of someone who had left the ward to die). In the bed by the stove there was now a short, quiet man with flaxen hair called Friedrich Federau. He was not an entirely new face in the ward since he had already spent three days lying out on the staircase. He stood up, thumbs down the seams of his trousers, and gave Yevgenia Ustinovna a glance of welcome and respect. He was not as tall as she was.

He was in the best of health! He had no pain anywhere! The first operation had completely cured him. He had reported back to the cancer clinic not on account of any complaint but because he was so exact in everything he did. It was written on his certificate: “Checkup on February 1, 1955.” And so he had come hundreds of miles, across difficult roads and via awkward connections, first in a sheepskin coat and felt boots in the back of a truck, then from the station to here wearing shoes and a light overcoat, and arrived not on January 31 nor on February 2, but with the exact punctuality with which the moon reports for her scheduled eclipses.