T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Petrovich was true to his word: the overcoat was ready in a week. It was a week to the day, in fact, that Akaky appeared at the tailor’s shop, full of misgivings and clutching a wad of ruble notes as if he expected them to wriggle through his fingers like worms or sprout wings and flutter up in his face. He’d exhausted his savings and sold his antique Tovstonogov Star TV set to come up with the money, a real hardship considering how inflexible his budget was. (For the past twenty-two years he’d been sending half of each paycheck to his invalid mother in the Urals. It seemed there’d been some sort of mysterious calamity in the area and the authorities had had to relocate her entire village. Ever since, she’d been pale and listless, her hair had fallen out, and she complained that her bones felt as if they’d gone hollow, like a bird’s.) The tailor was expecting him. “Akaky Akakievich,” he shouted, rubbing his hands together and ushering him into the shop, “come in, come in.”

Akaky shook Petrovich’s hand and then stood uneasily in the center of the shop while the tailor ducked into the back room to fetch the coat. Left alone, Akaky found himself surveying the place with a discerning eye, as if it were the shop he was buying and not merely an overcoat. The place was shabby, no question about it. Cracks rent the plaster like fault lines, soiled rags and odd scraps of cloth puddled up round his ankles like the aftermath of an explosion in a textile plant, a dish of roach poison glistened in the corner, pincushioned with the yellow husks of dead and dying insects. Could a man who worked in such squalor produce anything worthwhile — anything worth five hundred and fifty rubles?

There was a rustle of wrapping paper and Petrovich was at his side, holding out a loosely wrapped package in both arms, as if it were an offering. Akaky felt his stomach sink. The tailor swept an armful of half-finished garments to the floor and laid the package on the table. It was wrapped in soft white tissue paper, the sort of paper you see at Christmas, but then only in the store windows. Akaky reached out to touch it, and the tailor swept back the paper with a flourish.

Akaky was stunned. He was staring down at the overcoat of a prince, as fine as the one the Secretary himself wore, so handsome it was almost indecent. “You can’t—” he began, but he couldn’t find the words.

“Camel’s hair,” Petrovich said, winking his enormous eye. “That’s genuine fox, that collar. And look at the lining.”

Akaky looked. The lining was quilted with down.

“You don’t think you’ll be warm in that?” Petrovich said, breathing vodka fumes in his face and nudging him, “eh, Akaky Akakievich, eh?”

It’s such a small thing, an overcoat, a necessity of life — what’s to be so excited about? Akaky told himself as he slid into the coat and followed Petrovich into the back room to stand before the speckled mirror. What he saw reflected there drove the last vestige of composure from his body…. He looked … magnificent, dignified, like a member of the Politburo or the manager of the National Hotel, like one of the bigwigs themselves. He couldn’t help himself, he was grinning, he was beaming.

Akaky was late to work that morning for the first time in anyone’s memory. He strolled in at quarter past the hour, as though oblivious of the time, nodding benignly at this clerk or that. What was even more remarkable, from his fellow clerks’ point of view, was the way he was dressed — they recognized the cracked imitation vinyl gloves, the standard-brown serge trousers, and the great woolly black hat that clung to his head like an inflated rodent — but the overcoat, the fox-trimmed camel’s-hair overcoat, really threw them. Was this Akaky A. Bashmachkin, party tool and office drudge, strutting through the corridors like a coryphée with the Bolshoi, like an Olympic shot putter, like one of the apparatchiki? Had he been elevated to a supervisory position, was that it? Had he come into a fortune, held up a bank? A few heads turned toward the door, half expecting a cordon of KGB men to burst in and lead him away in disgrace.

No one had said a word to Akaky since the incident of a week before, but now, with furtive glances over their shoulders for the supervisor, Turpentov, Moronov, and Volodya Smelyakov — the elder statesman of the office, hoary-headed, toothless, and two months from retirement — gathered round Akaky’s desk. “Good morning, Akaky Akakievich,” Moronov slurred, his tongue already thickening from his morning pick-me-up, “nice day, isn’t it?” Moronov’s eyes were red as a pearl diver’s. Beyond the windows the sky was like steel wool, the wind was raging, and the temperature rapidly plunging from a high of minus twenty-eight degrees.

Akaky had no reason to be cordial to Moronov, nor did he approve of his drinking, but instead of fixing him with his usual bland and vaguely disapproving stare, he smiled, the upper lip drawing back from his teeth as if by the operation of some hidden, uncontrollable force. He couldn’t help it. He felt marvelous, felt like a new man, and not even Moronov, nor even the jeering blond tough, could sour his mood. The fact was, he was late because he’d lingered on the streets, despite the cold, to examine his reflection in shop windows and try out his new, magnanimous big-shot’s grin on strangers in Red Square. On a whim, he’d stopped in at a tourist shop for an outrageously overpriced cup of coffee and sweet bun. So what if he was late one morning out of five thousand? Would the world collapse round him?

Old man Smelyakov cleared his throat and smacked his gums amicably. “Well, well, well,” he said in the voice of a throttled bird, “what a lovely, lovely, ah”—the word seemed to stick in his throat—“overcoat you have there, Akaky Akakievich.”

“Yes,” Akaky said, slipping out of the coat and hanging it reverently on the hook beside the desk, “yes it is.” Then he sat down and began shuffling through a sheaf of papers.

Turpentov tugged at his knuckles. His voice was harsh, like a great whirring mill saw bogged down in a knotty log. “You wouldn’t want to trust that to the workers’ cloakroom, now would you,” he said, making a stab at jocularity. “I mean, it’s so ritzy and all, so expensive-looking.”

Akaky never even glanced up. He was already cranking the first report into his antiquated Rostov Bear typewriter. “No,” he said, “no, I wouldn’t.”

During the afternoon break, Akaky took his lunch amid the turmoil of the workers’ cafeteria, rather than in the solitary confines of the lower hallway. On the way in the door, he’d nearly run head-on into the surly blond youth and had stiffened, expecting some sort of verbal abuse, but the blond merely looked away and went about his business. Akaky found a spot at one of the long imitation Formica tables and was almost immediately joined by Rodion Mishkin, his sometime chess partner, who squeezed in beside him with a lunchbox in one hand and a copy of Novy Mir in the other. Mishkin was a thin, nervous man in wire-rimmed spectacles, who carried a circular yellow patch of hardened skin on his cheek like a badge and looked as if he should be lecturing on molecular biology at the Academy of Sciences. He had a habit of blowing on his fingertips as he spoke, as if he’d just burned them or applied fresh nail polish. “Well,” he said with a sigh as he eased down on the bench and removed a thickly buttered sausage sandwich from his lunchbox, “so you’ve finally come around, Akaky Akakievich.”

“What do you mean?” Akaky said.

“Oh come on, Akaky, don’t be coy.”

“Really, Rodion Ivanovich, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”