sixth ward one In the backyard of the hospital there is a small side house surrounded by dense burdocks, nettles and wild hemp.The tin roof of the house was rusted, the chimney was half-collapsed, the front steps had rotted and grown grass, and the plaster on the walls was only mottled.The front of the side house faces the hospital, and the back faces the field; a gray fence with nails separates the side house from the field.These upward-pointing nails, the walls, and the side-houses themselves all have an eerie, peculiar look that only our hospitals and prisons have. If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, then you walk along a narrow path leading to the side house, let us have a look inside.Opening the first door, we came to the outer room.Here piles of hospital junk lie under the walls and by the stove.Mattresses, battered patient gowns, trousers, blue-and-white striped shirts, useless worn-out shoes—all these crumpled rags mingled, piled up, moldy, giving off a smell. The choking stench.

The caretaker, Nikita, was always lying on this filthy pile of rubbish with a pipe in his mouth.He is a retired veteran, and the red collar badge on his old military uniform has long faded to brown.His face was stern and haggard, with the look of a prairie sheepdog given to his face by drooping eyebrows, and his nose was red.He is not tall, looks thin and bony, with protruding veins, but has a majestic demeanor and thick fists.He was one of those simple-minded, submissive, dutiful, obtuse men who love order above all else, and are convinced that they shall be beaten.He beat them on the face, chest, back, wherever they went, believing that order could not be maintained otherwise.

Going further inside, you enter a spacious great room, which takes up the whole house if you don't count the outer rooms.Here the walls were painted a dull blue and the ceiling was sooted, like a farmhouse without a chimney—apparently, in winter, the stoves here smoked day and night, and the gas was heavy.There are iron bars on the inside of the windows, which look ugly.The floors are dull and rough.The house smells of sour cabbage, burnt wicks, bedbugs and ammonia, the first impression of this cloudy smell is that you have entered a corral where animals are kept. There were several beds in the room, the feet of which were nailed to the floor.The people sitting and lying on the beds were all dressed in blue patient gowns and old-fashioned pointed hats.These people are crazy.

There are five people here.Only one was of noble origin, the rest were all petty bourgeois.Sleeping near the door was a tall and thin citizen with a shiny brown mustache and blurred eyes, sitting on the bed with his head supported, staring at a place in a daze.He worried day and night, shook his head, sighed, and smiled wryly.He seldom participates in other people's conversations, even if he is asked, he usually does not answer.When food was brought to him, he ate and drank mechanically.Judging from his severe and painful cough, his bony appearance and the flushing of his cheeks, he was suffering from hemorrhoids.

After him came a little, lively, very active old man, with a pointed moustache, and curly black hair, like a Negro.During the day he paced back and forth between the two windows of the ward, or sat cross-legged on his bed like a Turk, while whistling endlessly, singing like a bullfinch, singing softly, and snickering.This boyish gaiety and vivaciousness of his character showed itself even at night: he used to get up and pray to God, that is to say, beating his breast with his fists and picking at the cracks of the door with his fingers.He is the Jew Mosieka, who was deranged and mad about twenty years ago when his hat workshop burned down.

Among all the patients in the sixth ward, only Mosheyka was allowed to go out, and he was even allowed to leave the hospital and go to the streets.He had enjoyed this privilege for a long time, probably because he was a long-term resident of the hospital, and he was a harmless literary lunatic, and because he was a buffoon in the city.As soon as he appeared, he was immediately surrounded by a group of children and dogs, and people were used to it.Dressed in an ugly hospital gown, a funny peaked cap, and slippers, sometimes barefoot and even without trousers, he walked up and down the streets, stopping at the doors of houses and shops, begging for a little money.Some gave him kvass, some bread, and others a small coin, so that when he came back he usually had enough to eat and a small fortune.All the things he brought back were confiscated by Nikita for his own enjoyment.The old soldier did this kind of thing rudely, he turned every pocket of his in a rude, angry way, and he called God to testify that he would never let a Jew into the streets again, that he was the worst man in the world. What I hate is the lack of order.

Mosheika likes to help people.He brought water to his companions, tucked them in when they were asleep, promised each a penny when they came back from the street, and sewed each a new hat.He also fed his neighbor on the left, a paralyzed patient, with a spoon.He did this neither out of pity, nor out of any humanitarian considerations. He was just invisibly influenced by his neighbor on the right, Gromov, and imitated him. Ivan Dmitry Gromov was a thirty-three-year-old man of noble birth, a former court executor, civil servant of the twelfth rank, and suffering from persecution delusions①.He either lay curled up on the bed, or kept walking up and down the room, as if exercising his muscles and bones, and rarely sat down.A panicky, inexplicable waiting made him always very excited, impatient, and nervous.As long as there is a slight movement in the outer room, or someone calls out in the yard, he immediately raises his head and listens carefully: Could it be that someone is looking for him?When he was about to be taken away, a look of extreme panic and disgust appeared on his face.

① A kind of mental illness, who thinks he is being persecuted by others. I love his square face with prominent cheekbones, always pale and sad, like a mirror reflecting his frightened and struggling soul.His face is strange and sickly, but although deep and sincere pain is engraved on that delicate face, it shows reason and the cultural accomplishment of intellectuals, and his eyes shine with a warm and healthy light.I also like him in person, polite, helpful and extraordinarily polite to everyone except Nikita.If anyone dropped a button or a teaspoon, he always jumped out of bed and picked it up.Every morning he would say good morning to his companions, and wish them good night when he lay down to sleep.

In addition to his usual tense mood and sick face, his madness also had the following manifestations: sometimes in the evening, he would wrap up his worn-out hospital gown tightly, trembling all over, with chattering teeth, and began to crawl between the corners of the walls and between the beds. Walk up and down quickly.It seemed that he was suffering from severe cold and fever.Sometimes he would stop suddenly and look at his companions. He must have something very important to say, but he obviously thought that they would not listen to him, or if they did, he would not understand him, so he shook his head impatiently. Head, keep walking up and down.But presently the desire to speak overwhelmed all scruples, and he let himself go, vehemently and impassionedly speaking.His speech was incoherent, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, like a dream, sometimes too fast for people to understand, but there was something extraordinarily beautiful in his words and in his tone of voice.Listening to him, you can feel that he is both crazy and normal.His madness is hard to put on paper.He talked about the despicableness of man, the violence that trampled on the truth, the better life in the future, and these bars always reminded him of the stupidity and cruelty of the powerful.The result was a rambling ensemble of his words, which, though rehash, was far from being finished.