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 at 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 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 coryphee 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, not 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?