T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key turning in the lock. What now? he thought, stealing a glance at the door. The lock rattled, the bolt slid back, and old Studniuk was standing there in the doorway, blinking in bewilderment, a swollen string bag over his shoulder. “Akaky Akakievich?” he said. “Is that you?”
From beneath the blankets, Akaky grunted in assent.
“Blessed Jesus,” the old man shouted, “what is it: have you gone rotten in the stomach, is that it? Have you had an accident?” Studniuk had shut the door and was standing over the bed now: Akaky could feel the old man’s trembling fingertips on the bedspread. “Talk to me, Akaky Akakievich—are you all right? Should I call a doctor?”
Akaky sat up. “No, no, Trifily Vladimirovich, no need. I’m ill, that’s all. It’ll pass.”
With a crack of his ancient knees, old Studniuk lowered himself to the corner of the bed and peered anxiously into Akaky’s face. The string bag lay at his feet, bulging with cabbages, carrots, cheese, butter, bread, bottles of milk, and squarish packages wrapped in butcher’s paper. After a long moment, the old man pulled a pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket and began to roll a cigarette. “You don’t look sick,” he said.
All his life, Akaky had put a premium on truthfulness. When he was fifteen and assistant treasurer of the Young Pioneers, two of his co-workers had misappropriated the funds from a collection drive and no one in the group would expose them until Akaky came forward. The group leader had given him a citation for revolutionary rectitude which he still kept in a box with his school diploma and a photograph of his mother at the Tolstoi Museum. He looked Studniuk in the eye. “No,” he said. “I’m not sick. Not physically anyway.”
The old man rolled another cigarette with his clonic fingers, tucked the finished product behind his ear along with the first, and produced a handkerchief the size of a dish towel. He thoughtfully plumbed his nostrils while Akaky, in a broken voice, narrated the sad tale of his humiliation at the office. When Akaky was finished, the old man carefully folded up the handkerchief, tucked it in his shirt pocket, and extracted a paring knife from his sleeve. He cut the rind from a round of cheese and began sucking at bits of it while slowly shaking his head back and forth. After a while he said, “I’ve got some advice for you.”
Studniuk was the patriarch of the apartment complex, ageless, a man who didn’t have to look at newsreels to see history: it played in his head. He’d been there. For fifty-two years he’d worked in the First State Bearing Plant, present at its opening, a face in the crowd while successive generations of leaders came and went—Kerensky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchev. No one knew how old he was, or how he managed to live so well. He was jaunty, big-shouldered, bald as a fire hydrant; his nose had been broken so many times it looked like a question mark. Suddenly he was laughing, a sound like wind in the grass.
“You know,” the old man said, fighting for control, “you’re a good man, Akaky Akakievich, but you’re an ass.” Studniuk looked him full in the face, as hard and squint-eyed as a snapping turtle. “An ass,” he repeated. “Don’t you know that nobody gives half a shit about all this party business any more? Huh? Are you blind, son, or what? Where do you think I got all this?” he said, nodding at the sack of food with a belligerent jerk of his neck.
Akaky felt as if he’d been slapped in the face. The words were on his lips—“Betrayer, backslider”—but the old man cut him off. “Yes, that’s right: wheeling and dealing on the black market. And you’re a damn fool and an ass if you don’t go out there and get everything you can, because it’s for shit sure there ain’t no comrade commissioner going to come round and give it to you.”
“Get out of my room, Studniuk,” Akaky said, his heart pounding wildly at his rib cage. “I’m sorry. But, please get out.”
Wearily, the old man got to his feet and gathered up his things. He hesitated in the hallway, the ravaged nose glowing in the shadows like something made of luminescent wax. “I’ll tell you why they hate you, Akaky Akakievich, you want to know why? Because you’re a stick in the mud, because you’re a holier-than-thou, because you’re a party tool, that’s why. Because you go around in that goddamned flapping overcoat like a saint or something, that’s why.” The old man shook his head, then turned and receded into the gloom of the hallway.
Akaky didn’t hear him leave. He was biting his lip and pressing his hands to his ears with a fierce, unrelenting pressure, with the strict stoic rectitude of saints and martyrs and revolutionary heroes.
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 ca
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.”
Mishkin was grinning broadly, his gold fillings glistening in the light, grinning as if he and Akaky had just signed some nefarious pact together. “The overcoat, Akaky, the overcoat.”
“Do you like it?”
Mishkin blew on his fingers. “It’s first-rate.”
Akaky was grinning now too. “You wouldn’t believe it—I had it custom-made, but I suppose you can see that in the lines and the distinction of it. A tailor I know, lives in squalor, but he put it together for me in less than a week.”
It was as if Mishkin’s fingertips had suddenly exploded in flame: he was puffing vigorously at them and waving his hands from the wrist. “Oh come off it, Akaky—you don’t have to put on a show for me,” he said, simultaneously flailing his fingers and nudging Akaky with a complicitous elbow.
“It’s the truth,” Akaky said. And then: “Well, I guess it wouldn’t be fair to say less than a week—it took him a full seven days, actually.”
“All right, all right,” Mishkin snapped, bending to his sandwich, “have it any way you want. I don’t mean to pry.”
Puzzled at his friend’s behavior, Akaky looked up to see that a number of heads were turned toward them. He concentrated on his sandwich: raw turnip and black bread, dry.
“Listen,” Mishkin said after a while, “Masha and I are having a few people from the office over tonight—for some dinner and talk, maybe a hand or two at cards. Want to join us?”
Akaky never went out at night. Tickets to sporting events, films, concerts, and the ballet were not only beyond his means but so scarce that only the apparatchiki could get them in any case, and since he had no friends to speak of, he was never invited for dinner or cards. In all the years he’d known Rodion Ivanovich the closest they’d come to intimacy was an occasional exchange on sports or office politics over a lunchtime game of chess. Now Rodion was inviting him to his house. It was novel, comradely. The idea of it—of dinner out, conversation, the company of women other than the dreary Romanov wife and daughter or the vituperative Mrs. Yeroshkina—suddenly burst into flower in his head and flooded his body with warmth and anticipation. “Yes,” he said finally, “yes, I’d like that very much.”
After work, Akaky spent two hours in line at the grocery, waiting to buy a small box of chocolates for his hostess. He had only a few rubles left till payday, but remembered reading somewhere that the thoughtful dinner guest always brought a little gift for the hostess—chocolates, flowers, a bottle of wine. Since he wasn’t a drinker, he decided against the wine, and since flowers were virtually impossible to obtain in Moscow at this time of year, he settled on candy—a nice little box of chocolates with creme centers would be just the thing. Unfortunately, by the time he got to the head of the line, every last chocolate in the store had been bought up, and he was left with a choice between penny bubble gum and a rock-hard concoction of peppermint and butterscotch coated in a vaguely sweet soya substance that sold for two to the kopeck. He took ten of each.
As he hurried up Chernyshevsky Street, clutching the scrap of paper on which Mishkin had scrawled his address, Akaky was surprised by a sudden snow squall. He’d thought it was too cold for snow, but there it was, driving at him like a fusillade of frozen needles. Cocking the hat down over his brow and thrusting his hands deep in his pockets, he couldn’t help smiling—the overcoat was marvelous, repelling the white crystals like a shield, and he was as warm as if he were home in bed. He was thinking of how miserable he’d have been in the old overcoat, shivering and stamping, dashing in and out of doorways like a madman, his bones rattling and nose running—when suddenly he felt an arm slip through his. Instinctively, he jerked back and found himself staring into the perfect oval of a young woman’s face; she had hold of his arm and was matching him stride for stride as if they were old acquaintances out for an evening stroll. “Cold night,” she breathed, looking up into his eyes.
Akaky didn’t know what to do. He stared into her face with fascination and horror—what was happening to him?—captivated by her candid eyes and mas-caraed lashes, the blond curls fringing her fur cap, the soft wet invitation of her Western lipstick. “I—I beg your pardon?” he said, trying to draw his hand from his pocket.
She had a firm grip on him. “You’re so handsome,” she said. “Do you work at the ministry? I love your coat. It’s so, so elegant.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve—”
“Would you like to take me out?” she said. “I’m available tonight. We could have a drink and then later—” She narrowed her eyes and squeezed his hand, still buried in the overcoat pocket.
“No, no,” he said, his voice strained and unfamiliar in his ears, as if he’d suddenly been thrust into a stranger’s body, “no, you see I can’t really, I—I’m on my way to a dinner engagement.”
They were stopped now, standing as close as lovers. She looked up at him imploringly, then said something about money. The snow blew in their faces, their breath mingled in clouds. Suddenly Akaky was running, hurtling headlong up the street as if a legion of gypsy violinists and greedy yankee moneylenders were nipping at his heels, his heart drumming beneath the standard-brown serge suit, the layers of down, and the soft, impenetrable elegance of his camel’s-hair overcoat.
“Akaky Akakievich, how good to see you.” Rodion stood at the door, blowing on his fingertips. Beside him, a short, broad-faced woman in an embroidered dressing gown, whom Akaky took to be his wife. “Masha,” Rodion said by way of confirmation, and Akaky made a quick little bow and produced the bag of sweets. To his consternation, he saw that in the confusion on the street it had gotten a bit crushed, and that some of the soya substance had begun to stain the bottom of the white confectioner’s bag. Masha’s smile bloomed and faded as quickly as an accelerated film clip of horticultural miracles. “You shouldn’t have,” she said.
The apartment was magnificent, stunning, like nothing Akaky could have imagined. Three and a half rooms, abundantly furnished, with oil paintings on the walls—and they had it all to themselves. Rodion showed him around the place. There was a new stove and refrigerator, a loveseat in the front room. Little Ludmila lay sleeping on a cot in the bedroom. “Really, Rodion Ivanovich, I’m impressed,” Akaky said, wondering how his friend managed to live so well. It was true that Rodion, as Deputy Assistant to the Chief File Clerk of the Thirty-second Bureau, made somewhat more than he did, and true too that Akaky was effectively operating on half pay because of his mother, but still, this was real opulence as far as he was concerned. Rodion was showing him the Swiss cuckoo clock. “It’s very kind of you to say that, Akaky. Yes”—puffing at his fingers—“we find it comfortable.”