Cancer Ward (79 page)

He touched the door with the knuckle of his middle finger.

But he didn't have time to knock properly. The door was already beginning to open. (Could
she
have noticed him already through the window?) It opened and out came a great loutish, snout-faced young man with a flat, bashed-in nose, pushing a bright red motorcycle straight at Oleg. It looked enormous in that narrow doorway. He did not even ask what Oleg was doing or whom he had come to see. He wheeled it straight on as if Oleg wasn't there (he wasn't the sort to give way) and Oleg stepped to one side.

Oleg tried to figure it out but couldn't: what was the young man doing here if Vega lived on her own? Why should he be coming out of her apartment? Surely he couldn't have forgotten, even though it was years ago, that people didn't usually live by themselves, they lived in communal apartments? He couldn't have forgotten, and yet there was no reason why he should have remembered. In the labor camp barracks room one forms a picture of the outside world that is the barracks room's complete opposite, certainly not a communal apartment. Even in Ush-Terek people lived on their own, they didn't have communals there.

“Er, excuse me…” he said, addressing the young man. But he had pushed his motorcycle under the hanging sheet and was already taking it down the steps, the wheels bumping hollowly.

He had left the door open, though. Down the unlit depths of the corridor Kostoglotov could now see a door, and another, and a third. Which one? Then he made out a woman in the half-darkness. She didn't turn on the light.

“Who do you want?” she asked him aggressively.

“Vera Kornilyevna.” Oleg spoke shyly, in a voice quite unlike his own.

“She's not here,” the woman snapped back at him with sharp, confident hostility, without bothering to look or to try the door. She walked straight at Kostoglotov, forcing him to squeeze backward.

“Will you knock, please?” Kostoglotov recovered his old self. The expectation of seeing Vega had softened him, but he could still yap back at yapping neighbors. “She's not at work today,” he said.

“I know. She's not here. She was, but she's gone out.” The woman looked him over. She had a low forehead and slanting cheekbones.

She had already seen the violets, it was too late to hide them.

If it weren't for the violets in his hand he'd be able to stand up for himself. He'd be able to knock by himself, assert his independence, insist on asking how long she had gone out for, whether she would be back soon, and leave a message for her. Perhaps she had already left one for him?

But the violets had turned him into a suppliant, a bearer of gifts, a lovesick fool …

The assault of the woman with the slanting cheekbones was so intense that he retreated onto the veranda.

She drove him from his bridgehead, pressing hard at his heels and observing him. There seemed to be a bulge in the old bum's bag. He might pinch something. (In here too!)

Out in the yard the motorcycle gave a number of impudent, explosive bursts. It had no silencer. The motor died, roared out and died again.

Oleg hesitated.

The woman was looking at him with irritation.

How could Vega not be there? She had promised. But what if she had waited earlier on and then gone out somewhere? What a disaster! It wasn't a mere misfortune or a disappointment, it was a disaster.

Oleg drew his hand with the violets back into his overcoat sleeve, so that it looked as if his hand had been cut off.

“Excuse me, will she come back or has she gone to work?”

“She's gone,” the woman cut him short.

It was no sort of an answer.

It would be equally absurd just to stand there opposite her, waiting.

The motorcycle twitched, spat, barked and then died away.

Lying on the railings were heavy pillows, mattresses, and blankets inside envelope-shaped covers, out to dry in the sun.

“What are you waiting for then, citizen?” Those enormous bastions of bedding had made Oleg's mind go blank.

The woman with the slanting cheekbones was staring at him. He couldn't think.

And that damn motorcycle was tearing him to shreds. It wouldn't start.

Oleg edged away from the bastions of pillows and retreated down the steps to where he'd come from. He was repulsed.

If it hadn't been for that pillow—one corner of it all crumpled, two corners hanging down like cows' udders and the fourth sticking up like an obelisk—if it hadn't been for that pillow he could have collected himself and decided something. He couldn't leave suddenly like this. Vega might be coming back soon. And she'd be sorry he'd left. She'd be sorry.

But those pillows, mattresses, blankets, envelope-shaped blanket covers and banner-like sheets implied such stable, tested experience that he hadn't the strength to reject it. He had no right.

Especially now. Especially him.

A man alone can sleep on planks or boards so long as his heart has faith or ambition. A prisoner sleeps on naked planks since he has no choice, and the woman prisoner, too, separated from him by force. But when a man and a woman have arranged to be together, the pillows' soft faces wait confidently for what is their due. They know they will not miss what is theirs.

So Oleg walked away from this unassailable fortress he could not enter, the lump of iron still weighing his shoulders down. He walked, one hand amputated, trudging toward the gate. The pillow bastions riddled him joyfully in the back with machine guns.

It wouldn't start, damn it.

Outside the gate the bursts sounded muffled. Oleg stopped to wait a little longer.

He still hadn't given up the idea of waiting for Vega. If she came back, she couldn't avoid passing this point. They'd smile and be so glad to see each other: “Hello…” “Do you know that…?” “Such a funny thing happened…”

Was he to produce from his sleeve those crumpled, faded violets?

He could wait for her and then they'd go back into the courtyard, but they wouldn't be able to avoid those swollen, self-confident bastions again.

They would have to pass them whatever happened.

Someday, if not today, Vega, lightfooted and ethereal with those bright dark-brown eyes, her whole being a contrast to the dust of this earth, would carry her own airy, tender, delightful little bed out onto the same veranda. Yes, Vega too.

No bird lives without its nest, no woman lives without her bed.

However immortal, however rarefied she may be, she cannot avoid those eight inevitable hours of the night, going to sleep and waking up again.

It rolled out! The crimson motorcycle drove out through the gate, giving Kostoglotov the
coup de grâce.

The lad with the bashed-in nose looked like a conqueror in the street.

Kostoglotov walked on his way, defeated.

He took the violets out of his sleeve. They were at their last gasp. In a few minutes they'd be unpresentable.

Two Uzbek schoolgirls with identical braids of black hair plaited tighter than electric wire were walking toward him. With both hands Oleg held out the two bunches.

“Here, girls, take these.”

They were amazed. They looked from one to the other. They looked at him. They spoke to each other in Uzbek. They realized he wasn't drunk and wasn't trying to molest them. They may even have realized that some misfortune had made the old soldier give them flowers.

One of the girls took her bunch and nodded.

The second girl took hers and nodded.

Then they walked quickly, rubbing shoulders and chattering excitedly.

He was left with nothing but the dirty, sweat-soaked duffel bag on his shoulder.

Where could he spend the night? He'd have to think of something all over again.

He couldn't stay in a hotel.

He couldn't go to Zoya's.

He couldn't go to Vega's.

Or rather, he could, he could. And she'd be pleased. She'd never show how disappointed she'd been.

But it was a question of “mustn't” rather than “couldn't.”

Without Vega the whole of this beautiful town with its wealth and its millions of inhabitants felt like a heavy bag on his back. Strange to think that this morning he had liked the place so much he'd wanted to stay longer.

And even stranger still, what had he been so happy about this morning? His cure no longer seemed like some special gift.

Oleg had walked less than a block when he felt how hungry he was, bow sore his feet were, how utterly physically exhausted he was, and that still unbeaten tumor rolling around inside him. All he wanted was to get away as quickly as possible.

But even returning to Ush-Terek, to which the road was now open, no longer attracted him. Oleg realized he would sink even deeper into the gloom until he drowned.

At the moment he couldn't imagine any place or thing that could cheer him up.

Except—going back to Vega.

He would have to fall at her feet: “Don't turn me out, don't turn me out! It's not my fault!”

But it was a question of “mustn't” rather than “couldn't.”

He asked a passer-by the time. After two o'clock. He ought to come to some decision.

He caught sight of a trolley car, the number that went toward the
komendatura.
He started to look around for a nearby stop.

With an iron screech, especially on the bends, as though gravely ill itself, the trolley car dragged him along the narrow stone streets. Oleg held onto the leather strap and bent his head to try and see something out of the window, but they were going through a part of town that had no greenery, no boulevards, only sidewalks and shabby houses. They flashed past a billboard poster advertising matinee shows at an outdoor moviehouse. It would have been interesting to see how it worked, but something had snuffed out his interest in the world's novelties.

She was proud to have withstood fourteen years of loneliness. But she didn't know what six months of the other thing could do to them; together, yet not together.

He recognized his stop and got off. He would now have to walk one and a half kilometers along a wide, depressing street in a factory neighborhood. A constant stream of trucks and tractors rumbled along both sides of the roadway. The footpath was lined by a long stone wall, then cut across a factory railway track and a coal-slack embankment, ran past a wasteland pitted with hollows, then across some more rails, then along another wall, and finally past some wooden, one-story barracks blocks—the sort described in official files as “temporary civilian accommodation” but which had remained standing for ten, twenty or even thirty years. At least there was none of the mud there had been in January during the rain, when Kostoglotov was looking for the
komendatura
for the first time. All the same, it was a depressing, long walk. One could hardly believe this street was in the same town as those ring boulevards, huge-girthed oak trees, buoyant poplars and wondrous pink apricots.

However hard she tried to convince herself she ought to do it, that it was the right thing to do, it would merely mean that when it did break through the surface it would be all the more heartrending.

Whose idea could it have been to place the
komendatura,
the office that decided the fate of all the city's exiles, in such a tucked-away corner of town? But here it was, among the barracks blocks and the muddy pathways, the windows broken and boarded up with plywood, among the endless lines of washing. Here it was.

Oleg remembered the repulsive expression on the face of the
komendant,
who hadn't even been at work on a weekday, and how he had been received the last time. As he walked along the corridor of the
komendant's
barracks block, he slowed down and composed his features into a close, independent look. Kostoglotov would never permit himself to smile at his jailers even if they smiled at him. He considered it his duty to remind them that he remembered everything.

He knocked and went in. The first room was bare and empty: only two long, wobbly, backless benches and, behind a board partition, a desk where presumably twice every month they performed the sacred rite of registering the local exiles.

There was no one there now, but further on was a door wide open with a notice on it:
Komendant.

Oleg walked across so he could see through the door. “Can I come in?” he asked anxiously.

“Certainly, certainly!” A pleasant, welcoming voice invited him in.

Unbelievable! Oleg had never heard an N.K.V.D. man use such a tone. He went in. There was no one in the room but the
komendant,
sitting at his desk. But it wasn't the same one, not that enigmatic idiot with the wise-looking expression; it was an Armenian with the soft face of a well-educated man, not at all arrogant, wearing no uniform but a good suit that looked out of place in the barracks surroundings. The Armenian gave him a merry look, as if his job was selling theater tickets and he was glad to see that Oleg had come with a big order.

After his years in the camps Oleg couldn't be very well disposed toward Armenians. Few in number, they had looked after one another jealously and always taken the best jobs—in the storeroom or the bread room, or even where they could get at the butter. But to be fair, Oleg couldn't object to them because of that. It wasn't they who had invented the camps, they hadn't invented Siberia either. After all, what high ideal forbade them to help and save one another? Why should they give up commerce and peck away at the earth with pickaxes?

Seeing this merry-looking, friendly Armenian sitting behind his official desk, Oleg thought warmly that informality and enterprise must be the Armenians' special qualities.

Oleg gave him his name and that he was here on a temporary registration. The
komandant
got up eagerly and with ease, although he was a heavily built man, and began flipping through the cards in one of the files. At the same time, as though trying to provide Oleg with some diversion, he kept up a constant chatter: sometimes meaningless interjections, but occasionally naming people, which the most stringent instructions prohibited him from doing.