Akaky had been puzzled. “I don’t?
“Soviet means shoddy,” the man said, cocky as one of the American delinquents Akaky saw rioting on the televised news each night.
Akaky’s face went red. He didn’t like the type of person who made light of official slogans — in this case, “Soviet Means Superior”—and he was always shocked and embarrassed when he ran across one of these smug apostates.
The man rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. “I’ll have something really nice here, well made, stylish, a coat that will hold up for years after this shtampny is in the rubbish heap. If you want to meet me out back, I think I can, ah, arrange something for you — if you see what I mean?”
The shock and outrage that had seized Akaky at that moment were like an electric jolt, like the automatic response governed by electrodes implanted in the brains of dogs and monkeys at the State Lab. He flushed to the apex of his bald spot. “How dare you insinuate—” he sputtered, and then choked off, too wrought up to continue. Turning away from the clerk in disgust he snatched up the first overcoat at random and strode briskly away to join the swollen queue on the payment line.
And so he was the owner of a shabby, worthless garment that fit him about as snugly as a circus tent. The lining was in tatters and the seam under the right arm gaped like an open wound. He should have been more cautious, he should have controlled his emotions and come back another day. Now, as he hurried up Herzen Street, reflexively clutching his shoulders, he told himself that he’d go to see Petrovich the tailor in the morning. A stitch here, a stitch there, maybe a reinforced lining, and the thing would be good as new. Who cared if it was ill-fitting and outdated? He was no fashion plate.
Yes, he thought, Petrovich. Petrovich in the morning.
Akaky was up at 7:00 the next morning, the faintly sour odor of a meatless potato-onion soup lingering in unexpected places, the room numb with cold. It was dark, of course, dark till 9:00 A.M. this time of year, and then dark again at 2:30 in the afternoon. He dressed by candlelight, folded up the bed, and heated some kasha and spoiled milk for breakfast. Normally he had breakfast in his corner of the kitchen, but this morning he used the tiny camp stove in his room, reluctant to march down the hallway and disturb the Romanovs, the Yeroshkins or old Studniuk. As he slipped out the door ten minutes later, he could hear Irina Yeroshkina berating her husband in her pennywhistle voice: “Up, Sergei, you drunken lout. Get up. The factory, Sergei. Remember, Sergei? Work? You remember what that is?”
It was somewhere around thirty below, give or take a degree. Akaky was wearing two sweaters over his standard-brown serge suit (the office wags called it “turd brown”), and still the cold made him dance. If it was any consolation, the streets were alive with other dancers, shudderers, sprinters, and vaulters, all in a delirious headlong rush to get back inside before they shattered like cheap glass. Akaky was not consoled. His throat was raw and his eyelids crusted over by the time he flung himself into Petrovich’s shop like Zhivago escaped from the red partisans.
Petrovich was sitting beneath a single brown light bulb in a heap of rags and scraps of cloth, the antique pedal sewing machine rising up out of the gloom beside him like an iron monster. He was drunk. Eight o’clock in the morning, and he was drunk. “Well, well, well,” he boomed, “an early customer, eh? What’s it this time, Akaky Akakievich, your cuffs unraveling again?” And then he was laughing, choking away like a tubercular horse. Akaky didn’t approve of drinking. He lived a quiet, solitary existence (as solitary as the six Yeroshkin brats would allow), very rarely had occasion to do any social drinking, and saw no reason to drink alone. Sure, he had a shot of vodka now and again to ward off the cold, and he’d tasted champagne once when his sister had got married, but in general he found drinking repugnant and always got a bit tongue-tied and embarrassed in the presence of someone under the influence. “I… I… I was, uh, wondering if—”
“Spit it out,” Petrovich roared. The tailor had lost an eye when he was eighteen, in the Hungarian police action — he’d poked his head up through the top hatch of his tank and a Magyar patriot had nailed him with a dexterously flung stone — and his good eye, as if in compensation, seemed to have grown to inhuman proportions. He fixed Akaky with this bulging protoplasmic mass and cleared his throat.
“—wondering if you could, ah, patch up the lining of my, ah, overcoat. ”
“Trash,” Petrovich said.
Akaky held the coat open like an exhibitionist. “Look: it’s not really that bad, just peeling back a litle. Maybe you could, ah, reinforce the lining and—”
“Trash, shtampny, brak. You’re wearing a piece of Soviet-bungled garbage, a fishnet, rotten through to the very thread of the seams. I can’t fix it.”
“But—”
“I won’t. It wouldn’t last you the winter. Nope. The only thing to do is go out and get yourself something decent. ”
“Petrovich.” Akaky was pleading. “I can’t afford a new coat. This one cost me over a month’s salary as it is.”
The tailor had produced a bottle of vodka. He winked his eye closed in ecstasy as he took a long pull at the neck of it. When he righted his head he seemed to have trouble focusing on Akaky, addressing himself to a point in space six feet to the left of him. “I’ll make you one,” he said, pounding at his rib cage and belching softly. “Down-lined, fur collar. Like they wear in Paris.”
“But, but. . I can’t afford a coat like that—”
“What are you going to do, freeze? Listen, Akaky Akakievich, you couldn’t get a coat like this for five hundred rubles on the black market.”
Black market. The words made Akaky cringe, as if the tailor had spouted some vile epithet: faggot, pederast, or CIA. The black market was flourishing, oh yes, he knew all about it, all about the self-centered capitalist revisionists who sold out the motherland for a radio or a pair of blue jeans or — or an overcoat. “Never,” he said. “I’d rather wear rags.”
“Hey, hey: calm down, Akaky, calm down. I said I could get you one, not that I would. No, for five-fifty I’ll make you one.”
Five hundred and fifty rubles. Nearly three months’ salary. It was steep, it was outrageous. But what else could he do? Go back to the department store for another piece of junk that would fall apart in a year? He stepped back into the tailor’s line of vision. “Are you absolutely sure you can’t fix this one?”
Petrovich shook his massive head. “No way.”
“All right,” Akaky said, his voice a whisper. “When could you have it done?”
“One week from today.”
“One week? Isn’t that awfully fast work?”
The tailor grinned at him, and winked his bloated eye. “I have my methods,” he said. “Rely on me.”
At the office that morning, while he crouched shuddering over the radiator in his worn overcoat, ragged sweaters, and standard-brown serge suit, Akaky became aware of a disturbance at his back: strident whispers, giggling, derisive laughter. He turned to look up into the grinning, wet-lipped faces of two of the younger clerks. They were wearing leather flight jackets with fur collars and blue jeans stamped prominently with the name of an American Jewish manufacturer, and they were staring at him. The shorter one, the blond, tossed his head arrogantly and made an obscene comment, something to do with mothers, sexual intercourse, and Akaky’s Soviet-made overcoat. Then he put a finger to his head in a mock salute and sauntered through the main door, closely tailed by his tall cohort. Akaky was puzzled at first, then outraged. Finally, he felt ashamed. Was he really such a sight? Shoulders hunched, he ducked down the hallway to the lavatory and removed overcoat and sweaters in the privacy of one of the stalls.