Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cancer Ward

First published in 1968

Contents

Part One

1. No cancer whatsoever 9

2. Education doesn't make you smarter 17

3. Teddy-bear 34

4. The patients' worries 48

5. The doctors' worries 65

6. The story of an analysis 76

7. The right to treat 92

8. What men live by 106

9. Tumor cordis 120

10. The children 133

11. Cancer of the birch tree 147

12. Passions return ... 168

13.... and so do the spectres 191

14. Justice 203

15. To each man his own 216

16. Absurdities 229

17. The root from Issyk-Kul 238

18. At the grave's portals 254

19. Approaching the speed of light 266

20. Of beauty reminiscing ... 282

21. The shadows go their way 298

Part Two

1. The river that flows into the sands

2. Why not live well? 322

3. Transfusing the blood 347

4. Vega 363

5. Superb initiative 378

6. Each has his own interests 395

7. Bad luck all round 410

8. Hard words, soft words 425

9. The old doctor 442

10. Idols of the market-place 460

11. The other side of the coin 477

12. Happy ending... 493

13.... and one a bit less happy 506

14. The first day of creation... 517

15.... and the last day 544

Part One

1. No cancer whatsoever

On top of it all, the cancer wing was 'number thirteen'. Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov had never been and could never be a superstitious person but his heart sank when they wrote 'Wing 13' down on his admission card. They should have had the ingenuity to give number thirteen to some kind of prosthetic or obstetric department.

But this clinic was the only place where they could help him in the whole republic.

'It isn't, it isn't cancer, is it, Doctor? I haven't got cancer?' Pavel Nikolayevich asked hopefully, lightly touching the malevolent tumour on the right side of his neck. It seemed to grow almost daily, and yet the tight skin on the outside was as white and inoffensive as ever.

'Good heavens no, of course not.' Dr Dontsova soothed him, for the tenth time, as she filled in the pages of his case history in her bold handwriting. Whenever she wrote, she put on her glasses with rectangular frames rounded at the edges, and she would whisk them off as soon as she had finished. She was no longer a young woman; her face looked pale and utterly tired.

It had happened at the outpatients' reception a few days ago. Patients assigned to a cancer department, even as outpatients, found they could not sleep the next night. And Dontsova had ordered Pavel Nikolayevich to bed immediately.

Unforeseen and unprepared for, the disease had come upon him, a happy man with few cares, like a gale in the space of two weeks. But Pavel Nikolayevich was tormented, no less than by the disease itself, by having to enter the clinic as an ordinary patient, just like anyone else. He could hardly remember when last he had been in a public hospital, it was so long ago. Telephone calls had been made, to Evgeny Semenovich, Shendyapin, and Ulmasbaev, and they rang other people to find out if there were not any "VIP wards' in the clinic, or whether some small room could not be converted, just for a short time, into a special ward. But the clinic was so cramped for space that nothing could be done.

The only success that he had managed to achieve through the head doctor was to bypass the waiting-room, the public bath and change of clothing.

Yuri drove his mother and father in their little blue Moskvich right up to the steps of Ward 13.

In spite of the slight frost, two women in heavily laundered cotton dressing-gowns were standing outside on the open stone porch. The cold made them shudder, but they stood their ground.

Beginning with these slovenly dressing-gowns, Pavel Nikolayevich found everything in the place unpleasant: the path worn by countless pairs of feet on the cement floor of the porch; the dull door-handles, all messed about by the patients' hands; the waiting-room, paint peeling off its floor, its high olive-coloured walls (olive seemed somehow such a dirty colour), and its large slatted wooden benches with not enough room for all the patients. Many of them had come long distances and had to sit on the floor. There were Uzbeks in quilted, wadded coats, old Uzbek women in long white shawls and young women in lilac, red and green ones, and all wore high boots with galoshes. One Russian youth, thin as a rake but with a great bloated stomach, lay there in an unbuttoned coat which dangled to the floor, taking up a whole bench to himself. He screamed incessantly with pain. His screams deafened Pavel Nikolayevich and hurt him so much that it seemed the boy was screaming not with his own pain, but with Rusanov's. Pavel Nikolayevich went white around the mouth, stopped dead and whispered to his wife, 'Kapa, I'll die here. I mustn't stay. Let's go back.'

Kapitolina Matveyevna took him firmly by the arm and said, 'Pashenka! Where could we go? And what would we do then?'

'Well, perhaps we might be able to arrange something in Moscow.' Kapitolina Matveyevna turned to her husband. Her broad head was made even broader by its frame of thick, clipped coppery curls.

'Pashenka! If we went to Moscow we might have to wait another two weeks. Or we might not get there at all. How can we wait? It is bigger every morning!'

His wife took a firm grip of his arm, trying to pass her courage on to him. In his civic and official duties Pavel Nikolayevich was unshakable, and therefore it was simpler and all the more agreeable for him to be able to rely on his wife in family matters. She made all important decisions quickly and correctly.

The boy on the bench was still tearing himself apart with his screams.

'Perhaps the doctors would come to our house? We'd pay them,' Pavel Nikolayevich argued, unsure of himself.

'Pasik!' his wife chided him, suffering as much as her husband. 'You know I'd be the first to agree. Send for someone and pay the fee. But we've been into this before: these doctors don't treat at home, and they won't take money. And there's their equipment, too. It's impossible.'

Pavel Nikolayevich knew perfectly well it was impossible. He had only mentioned it because he felt he just had to say something.

According to the arrangement with the head doctor of the oncology clinic, the matron was supposed to wait for them at two o'clock in the afternoon, there at the foot of the stairs which a patient on crutches was carefully descending. But the matron was nowhere to be seen, of course, and her little room under the stairs had a padlock on the door.

'They're all so unreliable!' fumed Kapitolina Matveyevna. What do they get paid for?'

Just as she was, two silver-fox furs hugging her shoulders, she set off down the corridor past a notice which read: 'No entry to persons in outdoor clothes.'

Pavel Nikolayevich remained standing in the waiting-room. Timidly he tilted his head slightly to the right and felt the tumour that jutted out between his collar-bone and his jaw. He had the impression that in the half-hour since he had last looked at it in the mirror as he wrapped it up in a muffler, in that one half-hour it seemed to have grown even bigger. Pavel Nikolayevich felt weak and wanted to sit down. But the benches looked dirty and besides he would have to ask some peasant woman in a scarf with a greasy sack between her feet to move up. Somehow the foul stench of that sack seemed to reach him even from a distance.

When will our people learn to travel with clean, tidy suitcases! (Still, now that he had this tumour it didn't matter any longer.)

Suffering miserably from the young man's cries and from everything that met his eyes and entered his nostrils, Rusanov stood, half-leaning on a projection in the wall. A peasant came in carrying in front of him a half-litre jar with a label on it, almost full of yellow liquid. He made no attempt to conceal the jar but held it aloft triumphantly, as if it were a mug of beer he had spent some time queuing up for. He stopped in front of Pavel Nikolayevich, almost handing him the jar, made as if to ask him something but looked at his sealskin hat and turned away. He looked around and addressed himself to a patient on crutches: 'Who do I give this to, brother?' The legless man pointed to the door of the laboratory. Pavel Nikolayevich felt quite sick.