My Life in the Dromokaiteion

Abstract

Translated by Andrew Mellas

When I entered into the Dromokaiteion that first evening, I felt immediately my misery deepen,boredom with her black wings covering me entirely, all over my body and all over my soul.I strode over its doorstep like a dead man, as I would stride with my feelings incorruptibleover the threshold of Hades. The nurses and the doctors with their white camisoles who werecoming down to the front gate to collect me and were searching me with their gaze, a gazeexamining and amusing to my very bones, which unstitched seam by seam – krak, krak, krak –like the drill of the coroner my skin and my bones and was bringing to the surface with his fine investigating drill-point my heart and the recesses of my brain, gave to me the impression – Iremember it as if it were now – of white-winged pall-bearing angels, who were weighing me onthe dreadful scales of the implacable judgment, I wonder to which circle of purgatory or of hellthey will have to classify me.