Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

high-heeled shoes (she never dressed carelessly), and looked at him severely, trying to shame him with her stare and make him get up. But although he saw her, he looked back at her quite unconcernedly. He didn’t move an inch, in fact it looked as if he’d even closed his eyes.
    â€œWho are you?” she asked him.
    â€œA human being,” he answered quietly, unperturbed.
    â€œDo you have an admission card?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhen did you get it?”
    â€œToday.”
    The marks on the floor beside him showed that his coat must be wet through. So must his boots and his duffel bag.
    â€œWell, you can’t lie here. It’s … it’s not allowed. Besides, it’s not seemly…”
    â€œIt’s seemly enough,” he answered faintly. “This is my country. Why should I be ashamed?”
    Vera Kornilyevna was confused. She felt she couldn’t possibly shout at him and order him to get up. And anyway, it wouldn’t have any effect.
    She cast a look in the direction of the waiting room. During the day it was crowded with visitors and people waiting. There were usually three garden benches for relatives to use as they talked to patients. But at night, when the clinic was locked up, people who had come a long way and had nowhere to go were put up in there. There were only two benches in there at the moment. An old woman was lying on one of them, and a young Uzbek woman in a colorful scarf had laid her child on the other and was sitting beside it.
    She could permit him to lie on the waiting-room floor, but it was covered with mud from all the shoes that had trodden on it, and on this side of the glass everything had been sterilized and anyone who came here had to wear hospital dress or white coats.
    Once again Vera Kornilyevna glanced at this wild-looking patient. His sharp, emaciated face already registered the indifference of death.
    â€œThere’s no one in town you can go to?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHave you tried the hotels?”
    â€œYes, I’ve tried.” He was tired by now of answering her.
    â€œThere are five hotels here.”
    â€œThey wouldn’t even listen to me.” He closed his eyes, as if to indicate that the audience was over.
    If only he’d come earlier, thought Gangart. “Some of our nurses let patients stay the night at their homes. They don’t charge much.”
    He lay there with his eyes closed.
    â€œHe says, ‘I don’t mind if I have to lie here a week,’” the duty orderly went into the attack. “Right in everybody’s way! ‘Until they give me a bed,’ he says! It’s disgraceful! Get up, stop playing the fool! This floor’s been sterilized! ” The orderly advanced upon him.
    â€œWhy are there only two benches? Wasn’t there a third?” said Gangart with surprise in her voice.
    â€œThere—they moved the third one over there.” The orderly pointed through the glass door.
    It was true. One bench had been taken into the corridor leading to the apparatus room. It was now used for the outpatients to sit on when they came for their sessions during the day.
    Vera Kornilyevna told the orderly to unlock the door to the corridor. She said to the sick man, “I’ll move you somewhere more comfortable. Please get up.”
    He looked at her, suspiciously at first. Then, tormented and twitching with pain, he started to rise to his feet. It was obvious that every movement, every turn of his body, was an effort He got up, but left his duffel bag lying on the floor; it would be too painful for him to bend down and pick it up now.
    Vera Kornilyevna bent down easily. With her white fingers she picked up the dirty, soaking-wet duffel bag and gave it to him.
    â€œThank you.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Things have come to a pretty pass…”
    There was a damp, oblong stain on the floor where he had been lying.
    â€œYou’ve