The House of the Dead (Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky [Dostoyevsky, Fyodor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141915869
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

1

THE HOSPITAL (1)

Shortly after Christmas I was taken ill and was admitted to the military hospital. The hospital stood on its own, about half a verst from the fortress. It was a long, single-storeyed building, painted yellow. In summer, when repair work was done, a very large quantity of ochre was used to freshen up its appearance. Offices, living quarters for the senior medical personnel, and other accommodation stretched around the enormous courtyard. The main building housed only medical wards. There were a great many wards, but only two had been set aside for the convicts, and these were always very crowded, especially in summer, so that the beds often had to be moved closer together. The convict wards were filled with all kinds of ‘unfortunates’. Our people came here, as did various soldiers awaiting court martial, who were detained in various guardhouses and were divided into three categories: sentenced, unsentenced and transit; there were also men from the corrective battalion – a strange institution, to which soldiers who had committed an offence or were thought to be unreliable were sent in order to receive corrective discipline, and from which they usually emerged some one, two or more years later as the most recondite of villains. Convicts who were taken ill generally reported the fact to the duty sergeant in the morning. Their names were immediately taken down in a book and they were sent with this book, under escort, to the battalion infirmary. There the doctor made a preliminary examination of all the sick men from the fortress’s various military commands, and admitted to hospital all those he found to be suffering from some genuine illness. My name was taken down in the book, and at some time between one and two o’clock, when all our men had left the prison for the afternoon’s work, I was admitted to hospital. A sick convict usually took with him as much money and bread as he could – he could not expect to be given any rations at the hospital that day – a tiny pipe, a pouch of tobacco, and a flint and steel. These last items he would keep carefully hidden in his boots. I entered the hospital precincts not without a certain curiosity about this new and as yet unfamiliar variation on our daily convict life.

It was a warm day, dismal and overcast, one of those days when an institution like a hospital takes on a particularly sour, depressing, workaday appearance. With my escort I went into the reception area, where there were two copper baths. Another two patients, prisoners as yet unsentenced, were already hanging around with their escorts in expectation of being seen to. A doctor’s assistant came in, looked us over in a lazy, authoritative manner and then set off in even more leisurely fashion to make his report to the doctor on duty. The doctor soon appeared; he examined us, was very kind to us and issued us each with ‘complaint sheets’ (medical charts) which were marked with our names.

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