Cancer Ward (63 page)

“It makes no difference if you had ten proletarian grandfathers, if you're not a worker yourself you're no proletarian,” boomed Kostoglotov. “He's not a proletarian, he's a son of a bitch. The only thing he's after is a special pension, I heard him say so himself.” He saw Rusanov opening his mouth, so he decided to give it to him straight in the guts. “You don't love your country, you love your pension, and the earlier you get it the better. Why not when you're forty-five? And here am I, wounded at Voronezh, and all I've got is a pair of patched boots and a hole in a doughnut. But I love my country! I'm not getting a kopeck in sick benefits for these two months, but I still love my country!”

He waved his long arms until they nearly reached Rusanov. Suddenly furious, he threw himself raging into debate just as he'd done dozens of times in prison. His mind overflowed with phrases and arguments he'd heard from other men who were probably no longer alive.

In the heat of the fray the scene seemed to shift in his mind. The crowded, enclosed room, crammed with beds and people, became a prison cell, which made it easier for him to use obscene language. And if it came to a fight, he was ready for that too.

Kostoglotov was now in such a state that he might easily have punched Rusanov in the face. Rusanov, sensing this, cringed away and fell silent under the fury of the assault, but his eyes burned with rage.

“I don't need any pension,” shouted Kostoglotov, finishing what he had to say. “I haven't got a bean, and I'm proud of it. I'm not trying to get anything, I don't want a huge salary, I
despise
such things.”

“Sh-sh,” hissed the philosopher, trying to stop him. “Socialism provides for differentiation in the wage structure.”

“To hell with your differentiation!” Kostoglotov raged, as pigheaded as ever. “You think that while we're working toward communism the privileges some have over others ought to be increased, do you? You mean that to become equal we must first become unequal, is that right? You call that dialectics, do you?” He was shouting, but his shouts echoed painfully above his stomach. His voice was shaken with pain.

Several times Vadim tried to intervene, but Kostoglotov managed to draw on a hidden reserve. He threw more and more arguments into the field, like balls in a bowling game, and Vadim had no time to dodge them all.

“Oleg!” Vadim cried, trying to stop him. “Oleg! It's the easiest thing in the world to criticize a society which is still establishing itself, but you must remember it's only forty years old, it's not yet forty.”

“I'm no older than that,” Kostoglotov retorted insistently. “I'll always be younger than this society. What do you expect me to do, keep silent all my life?”

Again the philosopher tried to check him with a gesture of his hand. Beseeching him to have mercy on his stricken larynx, he whispered a few reasonable sentences about people making different contributions to the national product and the need to distinguish between those who washed hospital floors and the men in charge of the health service.

Kostoglotov was about to roar something incoherent in reply when suddenly Shulubin, whom everyone had forgotten, began to move in on them from his far corner by the door. He hobbled toward them awkwardly, looking as slovenly and disheveled as ever, his dressing gown in such disorder that he looked like a man roused from sleep in the middle of the night. They all saw him and looked at him in surprise. He stood in front of the philosopher, raised a finger and waited till the room was silent. “Are you familiar with the April Theses?”
*
he asked.

“Why, aren't we all?” The philosopher smiled.

“Can you list them point by point?” continued Shulubin, interrogating him in his guttural voice.

“My dear sir, there's no need to go through them one by one. The April Theses discussed the methods of transition from the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the socialist revolution. In this sense…”

“There's one point I remember,” said Shulubin, moving the bushy brows above his unhealthy, tired, tobacco-colored, bloodshot eyes. “It runs, ‘No official should receive a salary higher than the average pay of a good worker.' That's what they began the Revolution with.”

“Is that so?” said the professor in surprise. “I don't remember that.”

“Go home and check it. The regional health service director shouldn't get any more than Nellya here.”

He wagged his finger reprovingly in front of the philosopher's face, then limped back to his corner.

“Aha, you see!” said Kostoglotov. He'd enjoyed this unexpected support. It was just the sort of argument he'd been in need of, and the old man had rescued him. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

The philosopher straightened the toggle on his larynx. He couldn't think of anything to say. “You don't think Nellya's a good worker, do you?” he brought out finally.

“All right then, what about that orderly who wears glasses? They all get the same pay.”

Rusanov was just sitting there. He had turned his back on the whole thing. He couldn't bear the sight of Kostoglotov any more. He was shaking with disgust, but Kostoglotov's long arms and fists meant he could not take administrative action. As for that repulsive owl from the corner, he'd been right to take an immediate dislike to him. Imagine paying the health service director and the floor-scrubber the same rate! Couldn't he think of anything cleverer than that? There was absolutely nothing to be said.

Suddenly the whole debate fell apart and Kostoglotov found no one to go on arguing with. Anyway, he'd already shouted all he wanted to say. Besides, shouting had made him feel sore inside. It was now painful for him to speak.

At that point Vadim, who hadn't got up from his bed throughout the debate, beckoned Kostoglotov over to him. He asked him to sit down and began to explain quietly, “You use the wrong scale of values, Oleg. Your mistake is comparing the present day with the ideal of the future; you should rather compare it with the festering sores that plagued Russia's history before 1917.”

“I wasn't alive then, I don't know.” Kostoglotov yawned.

“You don't have to have lived then, you can find out easily enough. Read Saltykov-Shchedrin,
*
he's the only textbook you need. Or compare us with these showcase Western democracies where a man can never get his rights or justice or even lead a normal, human life.”

Kostoglotov yawned once more, wearily. The anger that had flared and thrown him into argument had subsided. The exercise of his lungs made his stomach or his tumor very sore. He mustn't talk so loudly.

“Were you in the army, Vadim?”

“No, I wasn't. Why?”

“Why weren't you?”

“We were doing an officers' training course at university,”

“Oh, I see … I was in for seven years, as a sergeant. It was called the Workers' and Peasants' Army then. The section commander made twenty roubles a month, but the platoon commander made six hundred. And at the front they gave the officers special rations: cookies and butter and tinned food. They hid somewhere where we other ranks couldn't see them, and ate the stuff there. Do you see? They did it because they were ashamed. And we had to build the officers' shelters before we built our own. I was a sergeant, I told you that, didn't I?”

Vadim frowned. He didn't know about all this, but of course there must be some reasonable explanation for it.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want to know where the bourgeois mentality comes in. Who's got the bourgeois mentality?”

Oleg had already said more than enough today, even without this remark. He felt a bitter relief that there was now very little for him to lose.

He yawned loudly again and walked back to his bed. He gave another yawn, and another.

Was it weariness or illness that gave him this urge to yawn? Or was it because these arguments, counterarguments, technical terms, bitter, angry glances suddenly seemed so much squelching in a swamp? None of this was to be compared with the disease that afflicted them or with death, which loomed before them.

He yearned for the touch of something different, something pure and unshakeable.

But where he would find that, Oleg had no idea.

This morning he'd received a letter from the Kadmins. Among other things Nikolai Ivanovich had answered his question about the origin of the expression “Soft words will break your bones.” It came from a collection of didactic fifteenth-century Russian chronicles, a sort of manuscript book. In it there was a story about Kitovras. (Nikolai Ivanovich always knew about things that were old.) Kitovras lived in a remote desert. He could only walk in a straight line. King Solomon summoned him and by a trick contrived to bind him with a chain. Then they took him away to break stones. But since Kitovras could only walk in a straight line, when they led him through Jerusalem they had to tear down the houses which happened to be in his way. One of them belonged to a widow. The widow began to weep and implore Kitovras not to break down her poor, pitiful dwelling. Her tears moved him and he gave in. Kitovras began to twist and turn to left and right until—he broke a rib.

The house remained intact, but Kitovras said, “Soft words will break your bones, hard words will rouse your anger.”

Oleg thought it over. We must be raging wolves compared to Kitovras and those fifteenth-century scribes. Who today would let himself break a rib for the sake of a few soft words?

The Kadmins' letter hadn't begun with this story, though. Oleg groped for it on his bedside table and found it. They had written:

Dear Oleg,

We are in great distress.

Beetle has been killed.

The village council hired two hunters to roam the streets and shoot dogs. They were walking down the streets, shooting. We hid Tobik, but Beetle broke loose, went out and barked at them. He'd always been frightened even when you pointed a camera lens at him, he had a premonition. They shot him in the eye. He fell down beside an irrigation ditch, his head dangling over the edge. When we came up to him he was still twitching—such a big body, and it was twitching. It was terrifying to watch.

You know, the house seems empty now. We feel guilty about Beetle, for not keeping him in, for not biding him.

We buried him in the corner near the summerhouse.

Oleg lay there imagining Beetle. But he didn't picture him shot to death with one bleeding eye, his head dangling into the irrigation ditch. He saw two paws and a great kind, affectionate head with bearlike ears hanging like the drapes over the tiny window of Oleg's hut, just as he was when he came to see him and wanted him to open the door.

So now they had killed the dog as well.

Why?

30. The Old Doctor

In his seventy-five years of life and half century of treating disease Dr. Oreshchenkov had raised himself no stone mansion, but he had bought himself, back in the twenties, a one-story wooden house with a small garden. He had lived in it ever since. The little house stood in one of the quiet streets, a wide boulevard with a spacious sidewalk which put a good fifteen meters between the street and the houses. Back in the last century, trees with thick trunks had taken root in the pavement. In the summertime their tops met to make a continuous green roof. The base of each tree was dug round, cleared and protected by a neat cast-iron grill.

However scorching the sun, the people walking along the sidewalk felt none of its severity. Cool irrigation water ran along in a tiled ditch. This arch-shaped street ran round the most solid, attractive part of town, and was itself one of the town's finest adornments. (However, the town council grumbled that these one-story houses weren't close enough together, and this made the public utility models too expensive. It was time to pull them down and build five-story apartment blocks.)

The bus did not stop near Oreshchenkov's house, so Ludmila Afanasyevna went there on foot. It was a very warm evening, dry and not yet twilight, and she could see the trees preparing themselves for the night. The first tender fuzz of leaves had appeared on their branches, denser on some, thinner on others, while there was as yet no green at all in the candle-shaped poplars. But Dontsova was looking not upward but down at her feet. This year spring brought her no joy. Joy had been suspended as far as she was concerned, and no one knew what was going to happen to Ludmila Afanasyevna while all these trees were breaking into leaf, and while the leaves turned yellow and were finally shed. Even before her illness she'd been so busy the whole time that she'd never had a chance to stop, throw back her head, crinkle her eyes and look upward.

Dr. Oreshchenkov's house was guarded by a wooden-slatted door, alongside which stood an old-fashioned front door with a brass handle and heavy pyramid-shaped panels. In houses like these the old doors were usually nailed up and one entered by the new door. But here the two stone steps that led up to the old door were not overgrown with grass and moss. There was a copper plate with sloping calligraphic writing on it. “Dr. D. T. Oreshchenkov” it read, and it was polished as brightly as it had been in the old days. The electric bell was set in a little cup. It did not look unused.

Ludmila Afanasyevna pressed the button. She heard a few steps and the door was opened by Oreshchenkov himself. He had on a well-worn brown suit (it had once been a good one) and an open-necked shirt.

“Aha, Ludochka!” he said, raising the corners of his lips slightly. But with him this was the broadest of smiles. “Come in, I've been waiting, I'm very glad to see you. I'm glad, but I'm also not glad. You wouldn't come visiting an old man if it was something good.”

She had telephoned him and asked permission to call. She could have told him what it was about on the telephone, but that wouldn't have been very polite. She was now guiltily trying to convince him that she would have called anyway, even if she hadn't been in trouble, while he was refusing to let her take off her coat by herself. “Please, allow me,” he said. “I'm not an old ruin yet.”