War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [262]
The hospital was housed in a stone buidling with a portion of its windows and window frames broken, which stood in a yard with the remains of a dismantled fence. Several soldiers, bandaged, pale, and swollen, were walking about or sitting in the yard in the sun.
As soon as Rostov went through the door of the house, he was enveloped by the stench of rotting flesh and hospital. On the stairs he met a Russian military doctor with a cigar in his mouth. The doctor was followed by a Russian assistant.
“I can’t tear myself in two,” said the doctor. “Come to Makar Alexeevich’s in the evening, I’ll be there.” The assistant asked him about something else.
“Eh! do it your own way! Isn’t it all the same?” The doctor saw Rostov coming up the stairs.
“What do you want here, Your Honor?” asked the doctor. “What do you want here? The bullet missed you, so you want to catch typhus? This is a pest-house, old boy.”
“How so?” asked Rostov.
“Typhus, my lad. Anyone who comes here is a dead man. There’s only the two of us, me and Makeev” (he pointed to the assistant) “still hanging on here. Five of our fellow doctors have already died. A new one comes, after one little week he’s finished,” the doctor said with visible pleasure. “Prussian doctors were invited, but our allies don’t find it to their liking.”
Rostov explained to him that he would like to see the hussar major Denisov, who was a patient there.
“I don’t know, I can’t say, my lad. Just think, I’ve got three hospitals to myself, four hundred and some patients! It’s a good thing some Prussian charitable ladies send us two pounds of coffee and lint24 a month, otherwise we’d have perished.” He laughed. “Four hundred, my lad, and they keep sending new ones. It is four hundred? Eh?” he turned to the assistant.
The assistant looked exhausted. He was clearly waiting with vexation for the garrulous doctor to leave.
“Major Denisov,” Rostov repeated, “he was wounded at Moliten.”
“Seems he died. Eh, Makeev?” the doctor asked the assistant indifferently.
The assistant, however, did not confirm the doctor’s words.
“What, a tall man, with reddish hair?” asked the doctor.
Rostov described Denisov’s appearance.
“There was one, there was one like that,” the doctor said as if joyfully. “Must have died, but anyhow I’ll check, I had lists. Do you have them, Makeev?”
“Makar Alexeich has the lists,” said the assistant. “But if you’d be pleased to go to the officers’ ward, you can see for yourself there,” he added, turning to Rostov.
“Eh, you’d better not, my lad,” said the doctor, “or you may wind up staying yourself!” But Rostov took leave of the doctor and asked the assistant to accompany him.
“Just don’t go blaming me!” the doctor shouted from the bottom of the stairs.
Rostov and the assistant went into the corridor. The hospital stench in this dark corridor was so strong that Rostov held his hand to his nose and had to stop and gather his strength to go further. A door to the right opened, and a thin, yellow man on crutches stuck himself out, barefoot and in nothing but his underwear. Leaning against the door frame, he looked at the passing men with glittering, envious eyes. Glancing through the door, Rostov saw sick and wounded men lying there on the floor, on straw and overcoats.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“The soldiers’ wards,” the assistant replied. “Nothing to be done,” he added, as if apologizing.
“May I go in and look?” asked Rostov.
“What’s there to look at?” said the assistant. But precisely because the assistant obviously did not want to let him go in, Rostov entered the soldiers’ wards. Here the stench, which he had managed to get used to in the corridor, was still stronger. The stench here was slightly different: it was sharper, and one could sense that it was coming precisely from here.
In the long room, brightly lit by the sun through the large windows, sick and wounded men lay in two rows, their heads towards the walls, leaving a passage