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.
Akaky was grinning. Grinning like a cosmonaut on parade, like a schoolboy accepting the Karl Marx solidarity prize before the assembled faculty and student body. He stepped forward to thank the inspector and collect his overcoat, but Zharyenoye, suddenly stern-faced, waved him off. He had a penknife in his hand, and he was bending over the coat. Akaky looked on, bewildered, as the inspector carefully severed a number of stitches fastening the lining to the inner collar of the coat. With an impeccably manicured thumbnail, Zharyenoye prized a label from beneath the lining. Akaky stared down at it. Black thread, white acetate: MADE IN HONG KONG.
The animation had gone out of the inspector’s voice. “Perhaps you’d better sit down, comrade,” he said.
From that moment on, Akaky’s life shifted gears, lurching into a rapid and inexorable downward spiral. The inspector had finally let him go — but only after a three-hour grilling, a lecture on civic duty, and the imposition of a one-hundred-ruble fine for receiving smuggled goods. The overcoat, of course, became the property of the Soviet government. Akaky left the conference room in a daze — he felt as if he’d been squeezed like a blister, flattened like a fly. His coat was gone, yes — that was bad enough. But everything he believed in, everything he’d worked for, everything he’d been taught from the day he took his first faltering steps and gurgled over a communal rattle — that was gone too. He wandered the streets for hours, in despair, a stiff, relentless wind poking fingers of ice through the rotten fabric of his Soviet-made overcoat.
The cold he’d picked up in Red Square worsened. Virulent, opportunistic, the microbes began to work in concert, and the cold became flu, bronchitis, pneumonia. Akaky lay in his bed, ravaged with fever, unable to breathe — he felt as if someone had stuffed a sock down his throat and stretched him out on the stove to simmer. Mrs. Romanova tried to feed him some borscht; Irina Yeroshkina berated him for letting himself go. Her husband called a doctor, a young woman who’d been trained in Yakutsk and seemed to have a great deal of trouble inserting the thermometer and getting a temperature reading. She prescribed rest and a strong emetic.
At one point in his delirium Akaky imagined that three or four of the Yeroshkin children were having a game of darts over his bed; another time he was certain that the blond tough from the office was laughing at him, urging him to pull on his cracked imitation plastic galoshes and come back to work like a man. Old Studniuk was with him when the end came. The patriarch was leaning over him, his head blazing like the summer sun, his voice tense and querulous — he was lecturing: “Oh, you ass, you young ass — didn’t I tell you so? The blindness, the blindness.” The old gums smacked like thunder; the whole world shrieked in Akaky’s ears. “I suppose you think they built that wall in Berlin to keep people out, eh? Eh?” Studniuk demanded, and suddenly Akaky was crying out, his voice choked with terror and disbelief — he must have been reliving the scene in Red Square, his feet pounding the pavement, fingers clutching at the Kremlin wall, the thieves at his heels—“Faster!” he shouted, “faster! Someone get me a ladder!” And then he was quiet.
There were no ghosts haunting Moscow that winter, no vengeful, overcoat-snatching wraiths driven from uneasy graves to settle the score among the living. Nor was there any slowdown in the influx of foreign-made overcoats pouring across the Finnish border, channeled through the maze of docks at Odessa, packed like herring in the trunks of diplomats’ wives and the baggage of party officials returning from abroad. No, life went on as usual. Zhigulis hummed along the streets, clerks clerked and writers wrote, old Studniuk unearthed an antediluvian crony to take over Akaky’s room and Irina Yeroshkin found herself pregnant again. Rodion Mishkin thought of Akaky from time to time, shaking his head over a tongue sandwich or pausing for a moment over his lunchtime chess match with Grigory Stravrogin, the spunky blond lad they’d moved up to Akaky’s desk, and Inspector Zharyenoye had a single nightmare in which he imagined the little clerk storming naked into the room and repossessing his overcoat. But that was about it. Rodion soon forgot his former colleague — Grigory’s gambits were so much more challenging — and Zharyenoye opened his closet the morning after his odd little dream to find the overcoat where he’d left it — hanging undisturbed between a pair of sports shirts and his dress uniform. The inspector never had another thought of Akaky Akakievich as long as he lived, and when he wore the overcoat in the street, proud and triumphant, people invariably mistook him for the First Secretary himself.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment is made to the following in which some of the stories in this book originally appeared: Antaeus: “Caviar” and “Rara Avis;; Antioch Review: “Rupert Beersley and the Beggar Master of Sivani-Hoota” and “A Bird in Hand”; Atlantic Monthly: “The Overcoat II”; Esquire: “On for the Long Haul”; Iowa Review: “Two Ships”; Oui: “Whales Weep”; Paris Review: “Greasy Lake,” “Ike and Nina,” and “The Hector Quesadilla Story”; TriQuarterly: “Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail” and “The New Moon Party.” “Caviar” also appeared in Pushcart Prize Stories IX.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted materiaclass="underline" CBS Songs, a Division of CBS Inc.: Lyrics from “Don’t Be Cruel,” by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley. Copyright © 1956 by Unart Music Corporation. Rights assigned to CBS Catalogue Partnership. All rights controlled and administered by CBS Unart Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Chappell/Intersong Music Group—USA: Lyrics from “Hound Dog,” by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Copyright © 1956 by Elvis Presley Music and Lion Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright renewed, assigned to Gladys Music, Inc., and MCA Music. Administered in the U.S.A. by Chappell & Co., Inc. (Intersong Music, Publisher). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. King of Spades Music: Lyrics from “Stones in My Passway,” “Phonograph Blues,” and “Hellbound on My Trail,” words and music by Robert Johnson. © (1978) 1991 King of Spades Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Paramount Music Corporation: A selection from the song “That’s Amore,” by Jack Brooks and Harry Warren. Copyright © 1953 by Paramount Music Corporation and Four Jays Music. Copyright renewed 1981 by Paramount Music Corporation and Four Jays Music.
Bruce Springsteen/Jon Landau Management, Inc.: Lyrics from “Spirit in the Night,” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1972 by Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Tree Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from “Heartbreak Hotel,” by Elvis Presley, Mae Boren Axton, and Tommy Durden. Copyright © 1956 by Tree Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.