Read Online Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Free Book Online

because for these three months they became her patients, not pale mergings of light and shade on a screen but her own permanent, living charges who trusted her and waited on the encouragement of her voice and the comfort of her glance. And when the time came to give up her stint as house physician, she was always sorry to say goodbye to the ones she had not had the time to cure.
    Olympiada Vladislavovna, the nurse on duty, was an elderly, grayish-haired, portly woman who looked more imposing than some of the doctors. She had just gone round the wards telling the radiotherapy patients to stay in their places. But in the large women’s ward it was as though the patients had been waiting for exactly this announcement. One after the other, in their identical gray dressing gowns, they filed onto the landing and down the stairs: had the old boy come with the sour cream? Or the old woman with the milk? They would peer from the clinic porch through the theater windows (the lower halves were whitewashed, but through the upper halves they could see the nurses’ and surgeons’ caps and the bright overhead lamps) or they would wash their clothes in the sink or go and visit someone.
    It was the shabby gray dressing gowns of rough cotton, so untidy-looking even when perfectly clean, as well as the fact that they were about to undergo surgery, that set these women apart, deprived them of their womanliness and their feminine charm. The dressing gowns had no cut whatever. They were all enormous, so that any woman, however fat, could easily wrap one around her. The drooping sleeves looked like wide, shapeless smokestacks. The men’s pink and white striped jackets were much neater, but the women were never issued dresses, only those dressing gowns without buttons or buttonholes. Some of them shortened the dressing gowns, others lengthened them. They all had the same way of tightening the cotton belt to hide their nightdresses and of holding the flaps across their breasts. No woman suffering from disease and in such a drab dressing gown had a chance of gladdening anyone’s eye, and they all knew it.
    In the men’s ward everyone except Rusanov waited for the rounds quietly and without much movement.
    An old Uzbek called Mursalimov, a collective-farm watchman, was lying stretched out on his back on his neatly made bed. As usual, he wore his battered old skullcap. He must have been glad about one thing: his cough was not tearing him to pieces. He had folded his hands across his suffocating chest and was staring at one spot on the ceiling. The dark-bronze skin of his skull-like head was tightly stretched. The small bones of his nose, the jawbone and the sharp chinbone behind his pointed beard were all clearly visible. His ears had thinned and become no more than fiat pieces of cartilage. He had only to dry up a bit more and turn a little blacker and he’d be a mummy.
    Next to him Egenberdiev, a middle-aged Kazakh shepherd, was not lying but sitting on his bed, legs crossed as though he was sitting on a rug at home. With the palms of his large, powerful hands he held his big, round knees. His taut, tough body was so tightly knit that if he sometimes swayed a little in spite of his immobility, it was like the swaying of a tower or a factory chimney. His back and shoulders stretched the pink and white jacket tight, and the cuffs on his muscular forearms were on the point of tearing, The small ulcer on his lip, the reason for his entering hospital, had been turned by the rays into a large, crimson scab that obstructed his mouth and made it hard for him to eat and drink. But he did not toss about, fidget or shout. He would eat everything on his plate steadily and without fail and then sit like that for hours quite peacefully, gazing into space.
    Further down, in the bed by the door, sixteen-year-old Dyomka had his bad leg stretched out. He was continually stroking and lightly massaging the gnawing spot on his shin, his other