Cancer Ward (81 page)

But the law of supply and demand was an iron one, and so was the law of transport planning. The kind woman behind him, who had tried to persuade him to take a reservation, was already pushing her money over his shoulder. That policeman who had only just sent him to the front of the line was already lifting a hand to take him to one side.

“The one I want is thirty kilometers from where I live, the other's seventy.” Oleg went on complaining into the window, but his words had become, in camp language, mere belly-aching. He was now eager to agree. “All right, give me one to Chu Station.”

The girl recognized the station straightaway and knew what the price was. And there was a ticket left. All Oleg had to do was bless his good luck. He moved a little away from the window, checked the punchholes on the ticket against the light, checked the car number, checked the price, checked his change and walked slowly away.

The further he got from the people who knew him as a post-operation case, the straighter he stood up. He took off his wretched little hat and put it back into his duffel bag. There were two hours before the train left and it was wonderful to be able to spend them with a ticket in his pocket. Now he could really celebrate: eat an ice cream (there was no ice cream in Ush-Terek), drink a glass of
kvas
*
(there was no
kvas
either), and buy some black bread for the journey. Sugar too, he mustn't forget that. He'd also have to line up patiently and pour some boiled water into a bottle (it was a great thing, having your own water!). As for salt herrings, he knew he mustn't take any. How much more free and easy it was than traveling in those prison transports, in converted freight cars. They wouldn't search him before he got on, they wouldn't take him to the station in a paddy wagon, they wouldn't sit him on the ground surrounded by guards and make him spend forty-eight hours tormented by thirst. And if he managed to grab the luggage rack above the two bunks, he'd be able to stretch his whole length along it. This time there wouldn't be two or three people in the rack, there'd be just one! He'd lie down and feel no more pain from his tumor. This was happiness! He was a happy man. What was there to complain about?

That
komendant
had blabbed out something about an amnesty … It was here, his long-awaited happiness, it was here! But for some reason Oleg hadn't recognized it.

After all, he'd heard Vega calling the surgeon “Lyova,” speaking quite familiarly to him. And if not him, there might be someone else. There were so many opportunities. It's like an explosion when a man enters another person's life.

When he'd seen the moon this morning, he'd had faith! But that moon had been on the wane …

He ought to go out onto the platform now, a good long time before they started letting passengers onto the train. When the train came in empty he'd have to watch out for his car, run to it and get to the head of the line.

Oleg went to look at the timetable. There was a train going in the opposite direction, Number 75. The passengers must already be getting in. Pretending to gasp for breath, he pushed his way quickly toward the door, asking everyone he met, including the ticket collector, half-hiding the ticket with his fingers, “Seventy-five, is this it? Is this it?”

He was terrified of being late for Number 75. The ticket collector didn't bother to check his ticket, he just pushed him on, slapping the heavy, bulging bag on his back.

Oleg began to walk quietly up and down the platform. Then he stopped and threw his duffel bag down on a stone ledge. He remembered another equally funny occasion in Stalingrad in 1939 during his last days of freedom. It was after the treaty with Ribbentrop had been signed, but before Molotov's speech and before the order to mobilize nineteen-year-olds.

He and a friend had spent the summer going down the Volga in a boat. In Stalingrad they sold the boat and had to get back by train to where they studied. But they had quite a lot of stuff left over from the boat trip, so much that they could hardly carry it in their four hands. And on top of that, Oleg's friend had bought a loudspeaker in some out-of-the-way village store. You couldn't buy them in Leningrad at that time.

The loudspeaker was a large, cone-shaped funnel without a case, and his friend was frightened it would get crushed as they got on the train. They went into the station at Stalingrad and immediately found themselves at the end of a long, bulky line that took up the whole station hall, cluttering it with wooden trunks, bags and boxes. It was quite impossible to get through to the platform before their train came in, and it looked as if they would have to spend two nights without anywhere to lie down. Also a close watch was being kept to see they didn't get through onto the platform.

Suddenly Oleg had an idea: “Make an effort and get these things to the car door, even if you're the last man through.” He took the loudspeaker and walked up to the staff door, which was locked. He waved the loudspeaker importantly through the glass at the girl on duty. She opened it. “Just this one to fix and I'm through,” Oleg said. The woman nodded understandingly as if he'd spent the whole day carrying loudspeakers to and fro. The train pulled in and he got on first before all the others and grabbed two luggage racks.

That was sixteen years ago and nothing had changed.

Oleg wandered along the platform and saw there were others just as cunning as himself. They had also got through for a train that wasn't theirs and were waiting with their luggage. There were quite a few of them, but still there was much less of a crush on the platform than in the station and in the gardens in front of it. There were also some people from train Number 75 walking around carefree on the platform. These well-dressed types had no worries. They had numbered places which no one could grab from them. There were women with bunches of flowers they had been given, men with bottles of beer and someone taking a photograph. It was a life quite inaccessible to Oleg. He could hardly understand it. The warm spring evening and the long platform under the awning reminded him of some place in the South he had known as a child, perhaps Mineralniye Vody.
*

Then Oleg noticed a post office with an entrance onto the platform. There was even a little four-sided sloping desk on the platform for people to write letters at.

It suddenly dawned on him. He had to. And he'd better do it now before the day's impressions got blurred and faded.

He pushed his way in with his bag and bought an envelope—no, two envelopes and two sheets of paper—yes, and a postcard as well. Then he pushed his way back onto the platform, put his bag with the iron and the black bread between his feet, leaned against the sloping table and began with the easiest task, the postcard:

Hello there, Dyomka! Well, I went to the zoo. It was quite something, I can tell you. I've never seen anything like it. You must go. There are white bears, can you imagine? Crocodiles, tigers, lions. Allow a whole day and go right round. They even sell pies in the place. Don't miss the spiral-horned goat. Don't be in a hurry, just stand and look at it—and think. And if you see the Nilgai antelope, do the same. There are lots of monkeys—they'll make you laugh. But there's one missing. An evil man threw tobacco into the Macaque Rhesus's eyes. Just like that, for no reason. And it went blind.

The train's coming, I must dash.

Get better and live up to your ideals. I'm relying on you.

Give Aleksei Filippovich all the best from me. I hope he's getting better.

Best wishes,

O
LEG.

He was writing quite easily, except that it was a very smudgy pen. The nibs were all crossed or broken, they tore the paper and dug into it like a spade, and the inkwell was a storehouse of scraps of paper. However hard he tried, the letter ended up looking terrible:

Zoyenka, my little Teddy bear, I'm so grateful for you for allowing my lips to get a taste of genuine life. Without those few evenings I should have felt absolutely, yes absolutely, robbed.

You were more sensible than I was, and I can go away now without any feelings of remorse. You asked me to come and see you but I didn't.

Thank you for that. You see, I thought—we'll stick with what we've had. We won't ruin it. I'll always remember everything about you with gratitude.

Honestly and sincerely I wish you the happiest of marriages!

O
LEG.

It had been the same in the N.K.V.D. remand prison. On official complaint days they provided the same vile rubbishy inkwell, the same sort of pen and a piece of paper smaller than a postcard. The ink swam all over the place and went through the paper. Given that, you could write to anyone you liked about anything you liked.

Oleg read through the letter, folded it and put it in the envelope. He wanted to seal the envelope—he remembered as a child reading a detective story where everything started with a mixup in some envelopes—but that wasn't so easy. There was only a dark line along the edges of the flap to mark the place where, according to State All-Union Regulations, there should have been glue—but of course there wasn't.

Oleg worked out which of the three pens had the best nib, wiped it clean and thought about what he was going to write in his last letter. Until then he had been standing there firmly enough, even smiling, but everything became unsteady now. He was sure he was going to write “Vera Kornilyevna” but instead he wrote:

Darling Vega (all the time I was dying to call you that, so I will now, just this once), I want to write to you frankly, more frankly than we've ever spoken to each other. But we have thought it, haven't we? After all, it's no ordinary patient, is it, to whom a doctor offers her room and her bed?

Several times today I set out to walk to your place. Once I actually got there. I walked along as excited as a sixteen-year-old—an indecency for a man with a life like mine behind him. I was excited, embarrassed, happy and terrified. It takes many years of tramping to realize the meaning of the words “God sent you to me.”

You see, Vega, if I'd found you in, something false and forced might have started between us. I went for a walk afterwards and realized it was a good thing I hadn't found you in. Everything that you or I tormented ourselves with at least has a name and can be put into words. But what was about to begin between us was something we could never have confessed to anyone. You and I, and between us
this thing:
this sort of gray, decrepit yet ever-growing snake.

I am older than you, I don't mean in years so much as in life. So believe me, you are right, right in everything, right in your past and in your present. Your future is the only thing you do not have the power to guess. You may disagree, but I have a prediction to make: even before you drift into the indifference of old age you will come to bless this day, the day you did not commit yourself to share my life. (I'm not just talking about my exile. There are even rumors it's going to come to an end.) You slaughtered the first half of your life like a lamb. Please spare the second half!

Now that I'm going away anyway (if they end my exile I won't come back to you for checkups or treatment, which means we must say goodbye), I can tell you quite frankly: even when we were having the most intellectual conversations and I honestly thought and believed everything I said, I still wanted all the time,
all the time,
to pick you up and kiss you on the lips.

So try to work that out.

And now, without your permission, I kiss them.

It was the same thing with the second envelope: a dark strip but no glue. Oleg had always suspected that for some reason this was done on purpose.

Meanwhile, behind his back—that was the result of all his scheming and cunning—the train had pulled into the platform and the passengers were running toward it.

He grabbed his bag, seized the envelopes, and squeezed his way into the post office. “Where's the glue? Have you got any glue, miss? Glue!”

“People are always taking it away,” the girl shouted in explanation. She looked at him, then hesitatingly offered him the glue pot. “Here you are, glue it down now while I'm watching. Don't go away.”

In the thick black glue there were dried-up lumps like those a schoolchild would make. It was almost impossible to use and he had to employ the whole body of the brush to spread the glue—moving it across the envelope flap like a saw—wipe off the extra glue with his fingers, then stick it down, then use his fingers again to remove the extra glue pressed out by the flap.

All this time the people were running.

Now—glue back to the girl, pick up the duffel bag (he'd kept it between his legs to stop it being snatched), letters into the mailbox, and run!

He might be a prisoner on his last legs, completely worn out, but, goodness, how he ran!

He cut through some people who had dashed from the main exit gates and were dragging heavy luggage from the platform down onto the tracks and then up again onto the second platform. He reached his car and joined the line. He was about twentieth in the line, but then the ones in front were joined by friends and relations and he ended up about thirtieth. He'd never get a top bunk now, but his legs were so long he didn't really want one. He should be able to get hold of a luggage rack, though. They'd all have baskets thrown up on them—all right, he'd shove them out of the way.

They all carried the same sort of baskets, buckets as well. Maybe they were all full of spring vegetables? Were they on their way to Karaganda, as Chaly had described, to make up for mistakes in the supply system?

The old gray-haired car attendant was shouting at them to stand in line along the car and not climb in because there'd be room for everyone. But the last remark did not sound too confident—the line behind Oleg was still growing. Then Oleg noticed the beginning of what he'd been afraid of, a movement to jump the line. The first one to make a move was some wild, raving creature. The ignorant eye might have taken him for a psychopath and let him go to the front of the line, but Oleg at once recognized him as a self-styled camp hoodlum. He was trying to frighten people, as his sort always does. The loudmouth was backed up by a number of ordinary quiet people: if he's allowed through, why aren't we? Of course it was a ruse Oleg could have tried, and he'd have had a proper bunk to himself. But the past years had made him tired of such tricks. He wanted things done honestly and in the proper way, just as the old car attendant did.