Cancer Ward (74 page)

“Children write essays in school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed, and I-don't-know-what-else life of Anna Karenina. But was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion and she paid for her passion—that's happiness! She was a free, proud human being. But what if during peacetime a lot of greatcoats and peaked caps burst into the house where you were born and live, and order the whole family to leave house and town in twenty-four hours, with only what your feeble hands can carry?”

Her eyes had shed all the tears that could be shed. No drop would ever flow from them now. Yet perhaps they could still flare up with a tense, dry flame—her last curse upon the world.

“You open your doors, call in the passers-by from the streets and ask them to buy things from you, or, rather, to throw you a few pennies to buy bread with. Then those sharp black marketeers arrive who knew everything except that the thunder and lightning are going to strike them down too one day. A ribbon in her hair, your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read
Anna Karenina
again? Maybe it's enough—what I've experienced. Where can people read about us?
Us?
Only in a hundred years' time?”

She was almost shouting now, but her years of training by fear didn't desert her. It wasn't a real shout, she didn't cry out. The only one who had heard her was Kostoglotov.

And perhaps Sibgatov in his tub.

There weren't many points of reference in her story, but there were enough. “Leningrad?” Oleg asked her. “Nineteen thirty-five?”

“You recognize it?”

“What street did you live in?”

“Furshtadskaya,” Elizaveta Anatolyevna replied, lingering plaintively but with a hint of pleasure over the word. “What about you?”

“Zakharyevskaya. Just next door!”

“Just next door … How old were you then?”

“Fourteen.”

“Do you remember anything about it?”

“Very little.”

“You don't remember? It was like an earthquake. Apartment doors were flung wide open, people went in and took things and left. No one asked any questions. They deported a quarter of the city. Don't you remember?”

“Yes, I do. But the shameful thing is, at the time it didn't seem the most important thing in the world. They explained it to us at school—why it was necessary, why it was expedient.”

Like a tightly reined mare, the aging orderly shook her head up and down. “Everyone talks about the Siege,” she said. “They write poems about it. That's allowed. But they behave as if nothing ever happened before the Siege.”

Yes, he remembered. Sibgatov had been there as usual in his tub, Zoya was sitting there in that chair and Oleg in this one. It had been at this table, by the light of this lamp, that they had talked about the Siege. What else were they supposed to talk about? The time before the Siege?

Kostoglotov sat there, propping his head sideways on one elbow and looking despondently at Elizaveta Anatolyevna. “It's shameful,” he said quietly. “Why are we so calm? Why did we just wait quietly until it struck down our friends, our relatives and ourselves? Why is human nature like that?”

He suddenly felt ashamed of having exaggerated his own misery and blown it up out of all proportion. What does a woman need of a man? What is her minimum need? He had behaved as though this problem was all that life hinged on, as though apart from this his country had endured no torment, enjoyed no happiness. He was ashamed, but at the same time more at peace. Another person's misery had rolled over him and washed his own away.

“A few years before that,” Elizaveta Anatolyevna recalled, “they deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. There were a hundred thousand of them, I suppose. But did we pay much attention? What kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained? Old people and children, the helpless ones. We knew this, we looked on and did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims.”

“You bought their pianos?”

“We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we bought them.”

Oleg could now see that this woman was not yet even fifty. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman. A lock of smooth old-woman's hair, quite uncurlable, hung down from under her white headscarf.

“But when you were deported, what was it for? What was the charge?”

“Why bother to think up a charge? ‘Socially harmful' or ‘Socially dangerous element'—‘S.D.E.' they called it. Special decrees, just marked by letters of the alphabet. So it was quite easy, no trial necessary.”

“And what about your husband? Who was he?”

“Nobody. He played the flute in the Philharmonic. He liked to talk when he'd had a few drinks.”

Oleg remembered his late mother, just as prematurely aged, just as meticulous and ladylike, just as helpless without her husband.

If they'd lived in the same town he might have been able to help this woman to put her son on the right track.

But they were like insects pinned inside separate compartments, each in its own set place.

“One family we knew…” she went on. Poor soul, she had been silenced for so long and now it had broken through, she was ready to talk and talk. “… We knew one family with grown-up children, a son and a daughter, both keen Komsomol members. Suddenly the whole family was put down for deportation. The children rushed to the Komsomol district office. ‘Protect us!' they said. ‘Certainly we'll protect you,' they were told. ‘Just write on this piece of paper:
As from today's date I ask not to be considered the son, or the daughter, of such-and-such parents. I renounce them as socially harmful elements and I promise in future to have nothing whatever to do with them and to maintain no communication with them.
'”

Oleg slumped forward. His bony shoulders stuck out and he hung his head. “Many people signed letters like that…” he said.

“Yes, but this brother and sister said, ‘Well think about it.' They went home, threw their Komsomol cards into the stove and started to pack their things for exile.”

Sibgatov stirred. He grasped the bed and began to raise himself out of his tub. The orderly hurried over to take the tub and carry it out.

Oleg got up too. Before going back to bed he walked down the inevitable staircase.

In the lower corridor he passed the door of the room where Dyomka was lying. The second occupant had been a postoperative case who had died on Monday. They had moved him out and put Shulubin in after his operation.

The door was usually shut tight, but at the moment it was slightly ajar. It was dark inside. In the darkness he could hear a heavy gasping noise. There was no nurse in sight. Either they were with other patients or they were asleep.

Oleg opened the door a bit more and edged his way in.

Dyomka was asleep. Shulubin was the one gasping and groaning.

Oleg went right into the room. Now the door was open there was a little light coming in from the corridor. “Aleksei Filippovich…” he said.

The gasping stopped.

“Aleksei Filippovich … Do you feel bad?”

“What?” The word came out in another gasp.

“Do you feel bad? Do you want your medicine? Shall I turn the light on?”

“Who is it?” Terrified, the man breathed out and coughed. Then the groaning began again because coughing was too painful.

“It's Kostoglotov. Oleg.” He was now right by the bed, bending over it. He was beginning to distinguish Shulubin's great head lying on the pillow. “What can I get you? Shall I call a nurse?”

“No-thing.” Shulubin breathed the word out.

He didn't cough or groan again. Oleg could distinguish more and more detail. He could even make out the little curls of hair on the pillow.

“Not all of me shall die,”
*
Shulubin whispered. “Not all of me shall die.”

He must be delirious.

Kostoglotov groped for the man's hot hand lying on the blanket. He pressed it lightly. “Aleksei Filippovich,” he said, “you're going to live! Hang on, Aleksei Filippovich!”

“There's a fragment, isn't there?… Just a tiny fragment,” he kept whispering.

It was then it struck Oleg that Shulubin was not delirious, that he'd recognized him and was reminding him of their last conversation before the operation. He had said, “Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There's something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the universal spirit. Don't you feel that?”

35. The First Day of Creation …

Early in the morning while everyone was still asleep Oleg got up quietly, made his bed, folding the four corners of the blanket cover into the middle, as regulations required, and walked on tiptoe in his heavy boots out of the ward.

Turgun was asleep at the duty nurse's table, his head of thick black hair resting on folded arms over an open textbook.

The old orderly on the lower floor opened the bathroom for Oleg. The clothes he changed into there were his own, but they felt strange after two months in store, his old trousers, his army riding breeches, his cotton-and-wool blouse and his greatcoat. They had also been kept in store for him in the camps, so there was something left of them, they weren't completely worn. His winter hat was a civilian one he'd bought in Ush-Terek; it was too small for him and squeezed his head. The day promised to be a warm one, so Oleg decided not to put his hat on at all, it made him look too like a scarecrow. His belt he tied not round his greatcoat but round the blouse he wore under his greatcoat. To the ordinary passer-by he must have looked like a demobilized soldier, or one who had escaped from the guardroom. He tucked his hat into his old duffel bag, which was covered with grease stains and had a sewn-up shrapnel hole and a burn hole as well. He had had it in the front line and had asked his aunt to bring it to the prison in a parcel. He didn't want to take anything good with him to the camp.

After what he'd worn in hospital even clothes like these gave him a cheerful bearing. They made him feel healthy.

Kostoglotov was in a hurry to leave, afraid something might crop up to detain him. The old orderly removed the bar from across the handle of the outer door, and let him out.

He walked onto the porch and stood still. He breathed in. It was young air, still and undisturbed. He looked out at the world—it was new and turning green. He raised his head. The sky unfolded, pink from the sun rising somewhere unseen. He raised his head higher. Spindle-shaped, porous clouds, centuries of laborious workmanship, stretched across the whole sky, but only for a few moments before dispersing, seen only by the few who happened to throw back their heads that minute, perhaps by Oleg Kostoglotov alone among the town's inhabitants.

Through the lace, the cutout pattern, the froth and plumes of these clouds sailed the shining, intricate vessel of the old moon, still well visible.

It was the morning of creation. The world had been created anew for one reason only, to be given back to Oleg. “Go out and live!” it seemed to say.

But the pure, mirror-bright moon was not young. It was not the moon that shines on those in love.

His face radiated happiness. He smiled at no man, only at the sky and the trees, but it was with that early-morning springtime joy that touches even the old and the sick. He walked down the well-known pathways, meeting no one but an old street sweeper.

He turned round and looked at the cancer ward. Half hidden by the long brooms of the pyramidal poplars, the building was a towering mass of bright gray brick, brick upon brick and none the worse for seventy years of age.

Oleg walked on, bidding farewell as he went to the trees in the Medical Center. Already tassels hung in bunches from the maple trees, already the first flowers had appeared on the wild plum trees—white blossoms but given a greenish tinge by the leaves.

But there wasn't a single apricot tree, although he'd heard that they would be in flower by now. He might see one in the Old Town.

The first morning of creation—who can act rationally on such a day? Oleg discarded all his plans. Instead, he conceived the mad scheme of going to the Old Town immediately, while it was still early morning, to look at a flowering apricot tree.

He walked through the forbidden gates and came to the half-empty square where the trolley cars turned round, the same gates he had once entered as a hopeless, despondent man, soaked by the January rain, expecting only to die.

He walked out through the hospital gates thinking to himself, It's just like leaving prison.

Last January, when he had been struggling to make his way to the hospital, the screeching, jolting, overcrowded trolley cars had shaken him almost to death, but sitting there now with a window to himself he even began to enjoy the rattle of the machine. Going by trolley was a sort of life, a sort of freedom.

The trolley car dragged its way along a bridge across the river. Down below, weak-legged willow trees were bending over, their branches hanging into the tawny swift-moving water, already green, trusting in nature.

The trees along the sidewalk had also turned green, but not enough to hide the houses—one-story houses of solid stone, built unhurriedly by men who were in no hurry. Oleg looked at them enviously—lucky people who had actually lived in them! It was an amazing part of town flashing past the window now; very wide sidewalks and spacious boulevards. But what town does not look wonderful in the rosy early morning?

Gradually the style changed. The boulevards ended, the two sides of the street began to converge and hastily constructed buildings to flash by. They made no pretense to beauty or strength. Probably they had been built before the war. Oleg read the name of the street; it seemed familiar.

Then he knew why he recognized it—it was the street where Zoya lived!