T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

Akaky sat over the form — Place of Employment, Birthdate, Mother’s Name and Shoe Size, Residence Permit Number, Previous Arrest Record — until past four in the morning. Then he handed it to the clerk, absently gathered up his hat and gloves, and wandered out into the teeth of the storm, as dazed and unsteady as the sole survivor of a shipwreck.

Akaky woke with a start at quarter past nine the following morning, the Ukrainian-made alarm clock having failed to go off on schedule. He was late for work, late for his appointment at the police station; his throat ached, a phlegmy cough clenched at his chest, and, worst of all, his overcoat was gone — gone, vanished, pilfered, three months’ salary down the drain. It hit him all at once, in the instant of waking, and he fell back against the pillow, paralyzed, crushed under the weight of catastrophe and loss of faith. “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!” he cried, taking the great man’s name in vain as the six smirking Yeroshkin brats trundled by his bed on their way to school, “what am I going to do now?”

If he could have buried himself then and there, piled the dirt eight feet high atop his bed, he would have done it. What was the sense in going on? But then he thought of the police — perhaps they’d apprehended the thieves, put them behind bars where they belonged; perhaps they’d recovered his overcoat. He pictured the bearlike sergeant handing it to him with his apologies, and then commending him for his alert description of the crime’s perpetrators and the swift and unhesitating way in which he’d filled out the crime report. As he pulled on the standard-brown serge trousers and imitation plastic boots, the image of the coat filled his consciousness and for a minute he was lost in reverie, remembering its softness, its lines, its snug and simple elegance. How long had he owned it — less than twenty-four hours? He wanted to cry.

His hand trembled as he knotted the olive-drab tie, finger-combed his hair, and tried to reach the office on Irina Yeroshkina’s telephone. “Hello? Kropotkin’s Laundry. May I be of assistance?” He hung up, dialed again. A voice immediately came over the wire, no salutation or identification, reading a list of numbers in a harsh, consonant-thick accent: “dva-dyevyat-odin-chyetirye-dva-dva—” Akaky’s stomach was on fire, his head pumped full of helium. He slammed down the receiver, snatched up the sad, ragged tatters of his Soviet-made overcoat, and hurried out the door.

It was three minutes past ten when he hurtled through the doors of the police station like a madman, out of breath, racked with shivers and trailing a dirty fringe of knotted felt lining. He ran headlong into a hunched old grandmother in a babushka — what was it about her that looked so familiar? — and realized with a start that the room that had been so empty just six hours ago was now thronged with people. The old woman, who called him a rude name and set down a bag of beets to give him a clean two-armed shove, was standing in an endless, snaking line that cut back on itself and circled the room twice. Akaky followed the line to the end and asked a man in knee boots and Tatar hat what was going on. The man looked up from the chess puzzle he’d been studying and fixed Akaky with a cold eye. “I assume you have a crime to report, comrade?”

Akaky bit his lower lip. “They took my overcoat.”

The man held up a closely inscribed form. “Have you picked up your report yet?”

“Well, no, I—”

“First door to your left,” the man said, turning back to his puzzle. Akaky looked in the direction the man had indicated and saw that a line nearly as long as the first was backed up outside the door. His stomach turned over like an egg in a skillet. This was going to be a wait.

At four-thirty, just when Akaky had begun to despair of gaining admission to the inner sanctum of the police headquarters or of ever seeing his overcoat again, a man in the uniform of the OBKhSS marched down the line to where Akaky was standing, snapped his heels together, and said: “Akaky A. Bashmachkin?” The OBKhSS was a branch of the Ministry of Internal Security, officially designated “The Department for the Struggle Against the Plundering of Socialist Property.” Its job, as Akaky was reminded each day in the newspapers and on TV, was to curtail black-market activities by cracking down on the pirating of the people’s goods to pay for foreign luxury items smuggled into the country. “Yes.” Akaky blinked. “I–I’ve lost an overcoat.”

“Come with me, please.” The man spun on one heel and stamped off in the direction from which he’d come, Akaky hurrying to keep up. They breezed by the sixty or so scowling citizens who made up the forward section of the line, passed through the heavy wooden door into a room swarming with victims, suspects, police officers, and clerks, and then through a second door, down a hallway, and finally into a long, low-ceilinged room dominated by a glossy conference table. A single man sat at the head of the table. He was bald-headed, clean-shaven, dressed in slippers, slacks, and sports shirt. “Have a seat,” he said, indicating a chair at the near end of the table. And then, to the OBKhSS man: “Watch the door, will you, Zamyotov?”

“Now,” he said, clearing his throat and consulting the form on the table before him, “you’re Akaky A. Bashmachkin, is that right?” His voice was warm, fraternal, spilling over the room like sugared tea. He could have been a country physician, a writer of children’s books, the genial veterinarian who’d tended the old cow Akaky’s grandmother had kept tethered outside the door when he was a boy in the Urals. “I’m Inspector Zharyenoye, Security Police,” he said.

Akaky nodded impatiently. “They’ve taken my overcoat, sir.”

“Yes,” said Zharyenoye, leaning forward, “why don’t you tell me about it.”

Akaky told him. In detail. Told him of the mockery he’d been exposed to at the office, of Petrovich’s promise, of the overcoat itself, and of the brutal, uncommunist spirit of the men who’d taken it from him. His eyes were wet when he was finished.

Zharyenoye had listened patiently throughout Akaky’s recitation, interrupting him only twice — to ask Petrovich’s address and to question what Akaky was doing in Red Square at one-thirty in the morning. When Akaky was finished, Zharyenoye snapped his fingers and the antiplunderer from the OBKhSS stepped into the room and laid a package on the table. The inspector waved his hand, and the man tore back the wrapping paper.

Akaky nearly leaped out of his chair: there, stretched out on the table before him, as pristine and luxurious as when he’d first laid eyes on it, was his overcoat. He was overjoyed, jubilant, he was delirious with gratitude and relief. Suddenly he was on his feet, pumping the OBKhSS man’s hand. “I can hardly believe it,” he exclaimed. “You’ve found it, you’ve found my overcoat!”

“One moment, Comrade Bashmachkin,” the inspector said. “I wonder if you might positively identify the coat as the one you were deprived of early this morning. Has your name been sewed into the lining perhaps? Can you tell me what the pockets contain?”

Akaky wanted to kiss the inspector’s bald pate, dance him round the room: how good the policemen were, how efficient and dedicated and clever. “Yes, yes, of course. Um, in the right front pocket there’s an article clipped from the paper on cheese production in Chelyabinsk — my grandmother used to make her own.”

Zharyenoye went through the pockets, extracting seven kopecks, a pocket comb, and a neatly folded page of newsprint. He read the headline: “‘Cheese Production Up.’ Well, I guess that proves ownership incontrovertibly, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Zamyotov? — unless Comrade Bashmachkin is a clairvoyant.” The inspector gave a little laugh; Zamyotov, humorless as a watchdog, grunted his concurrence.