Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  It would be difficult to find anyone who lived so much in his work as Akaky Akakiyevich. It is not enough to say he served zealously; no, he served with love. There, in his copying, he found a delightful and varied world of his own. His pleasure could be seen on his face; some letters of the alphabet were his especial favourites, and when he came to one of them he was transported: he chuckled and winked and helped it on with his lips, so that it seemed as if one could read on his face each letter being traced by his pen. Had he been rewarded in accord with his zeal, he might perhaps, to his own astonishment, even have been promoted to state councillor,4 but all he got for his pains, in the words of his witty comrades, was a badge for his buttonhole and a haemorrhoid for his butt. Still, it would be wrong to say that no notice at all was taken of him. One director, being a kind man and wanting to reward him for his long service, ordered him to be given something rather more important than his usual copying – he was asked, in fact, to rewrite an already existing file, addressing it to another government office; it was simply a matter of writing out the new heading and changing a verb here and there from the first to the third person. This was such a struggle for him that he came out all in a sweat, kept rubbing his brow and finally said, ‘No, it would be better if you could find me something to copy.’ After that he was left to go on copying forever. Beyond this copying, nothing seemed to exist for him. He gave no thought at all to his clothes: his uniform was not green but some reddish-browny-mealy colour. The collar was so narrow and short that his neck, in reality also quite short, appeared unusually long, like the necks of those head-nodding plaster-of-Paris kittens that foreigners peddle, carrying them about in whole trayfuls on their heads. And then there was always something clinging to his uniform, a wisp of straw or a bit of thread; he possessed, moreover, a particular knack, as he walked down a street, of passing under a window just at the moment that rubbish of all kinds was being thrown out, which is why he was eternally carrying bits of melon rind or watermelon rind or other such nonsense on the top of his hat. Not once in his life had he paid any attention to the daily goings-on out on the street, to the many happenings which, as we know, never escape the attention of his brother-clerks, young men who have so sharpened their sharp eyes that they even notice a loose ankle-strap on the trousers of a man on the other side of the street – a sight which never fails to bring a sly grin to their faces.

  But if Akaky Akakiyevich ever did look at anything, all he saw everywhere was his own neat, evenly written lines, and only if a horse’s muzzle, suddenly appearing from goodness knows where, placed itself on his shoulder and its nostrils directed a whole gale at his cheek – only then did he realize that he was not in the middle of a line, but rather in the middle of a street. When he got home, he would immediately sit at the table, quickly spoon up his cabbage soup and eat a piece of beef with onions, not noticing how anything tasted; he swallowed all this down along with the flies and whatever else God had sent at that time. Noticing that his stomach was beginning to bulge, he would rise from the table, take out a bottle of ink, and start copying papers he had brought home with him. If there happened to be no more papers to copy, he would copy something just for himself, for his own pleasure, especially if the document was remarkable not for its beauty of style but for being addressed to some new or important figure.

  Even at those hours when the grey Petersburg sky has completely faded and all clerical folk have eaten their fill, each dining as best he can, according to the salary he receives and his personal fancy; when everything and everyone has come to a rest after the departmental scraping of pens, after all the rush and bustle, after the conclusion both of all the business necessary to oneself and others and of all the business that indefatigable man takes upon himself by choice, above and beyond what is necessary; when civil servants are hastening to devote to pleasure what remains of their time (one hurrying briskly off to the theatre, another going out to gaze at silly hats of one kind or another, another intending to spend the evening paying compliments to some pretty young woman, the star of a small clerical circle, another – and this is what happens most often – going to visit a colleague who lives on some second or third floor in two small rooms with an ante-room or a kitchen and fashionable pretensions of one kind or another, perhaps a lamp or some other little article, obtained at the cost of many a sacrificed dinner or evening’s entertainment); in a word, even at that time when all clerks are scattered about their friends’ little apartments, playing knockout whist, sipping tea from glasses and nibbling one-kopek rusks, drawing on their long chibouks5 and, as the cards are dealt, retelling some scandal that has filtered down from high society – for no Russian, regardless of his condition, can ever renounce high society – or even, should there be nothing to talk about, retelling the age-old joke about the commandant who received word that the tail had been cut off the horse of Falconet’s Peter the Great;6 in a word, even then, when everything and everyone is eagerly seeking to be entertained, Akaky Akakiyevich did not give himself up to any entertainment at all. No one could claim ever to have seen him at an evening gathering. After copying to his heart’s content, he would lie down to sleep, smiling in anticipation of the day to come and wondering what God would send him to copy. Thus flowed the peaceful life of a man who, with a salary of four hundred roubles a year, knew how to be content with his lot, and so, perhaps, his life might have flowed on, deep into old age, were it not for the various calamities that lie scattered across the path not only of titular, but also of privy, state, court and all other councillors, even those who never give counsel to anyone or receive it themselves.

  There is in Petersburg a mighty enemy of all who receive a salary of four hundred roubles a year or thereabouts. This enemy is none other than our northern frost, although there are some who say it is very beneficial to the health. Between eight and nine o’clock in the morning, just when the streets are crowded with people walking to their departments, it starts to deliver such mighty and stinging nips to every nose, quite indiscriminately, that the poor clerks well and truly don’t know what to do with their noses. At a time when even those who occupy senior positions have aching brows and tears welling up in their eyes, poor titular councillors are often without defence. The whole of salvation lies in running as fast as you can, in your wretched little greatcoat, the length of five or six streets, and then having a good stamp in the porter’s lodge until all your talents and capacities for official duties, which have become frozen stiff on the way, have thawed out again. For some time now Akaky Akakiyevich had been beginning to feel that his back and shoulders were being burnt especially fiercely, even though he tried to scurry across the decreed space as quickly as he possibly could. It occurred to him in the end to wonder whether it might not be his greatcoat that was to blame. After giving it a thorough examination at home, he discovered that in two or three places – namely, on the back and shoulders – it had become just like cheesecloth: it was so worn as to be threadbare, and the lining had fallen to pieces. It has to be said that Akaky Akakiyevich’s greatcoat was also an object of mockery to the other civil servants; it had even been deprived of the noble title of greatcoat and become known as his dressing gown. And its structure was indeed rather peculiar: the collar had been growing smaller year by year, since bits of it now served as patches for other parts of the coat. The patching was no advertisement of the tailor’s art and the general effect was, in fact, baggy and far from beautiful. Seeing how things were, Akaky Akakiyevich decided the greatcoat would have to be taken to Petrovich, a tailor who lived somewhere up a back staircase on a third floor and who, despite having only one eye and pockmarks all over his face, was doing rather well for himself mending the trousers and frock coats of clerks and all manner of people – when he was sober, that is, and not entertaining any other project in his head. I should not, of course, be saying much about this tailor, but, since it is now the rule that the character of every person in a tale be fully delineated, well, there’s nothing for it: let’s hav
e a look at Petrovich too. At first he had simply been called Grigory and he had been a serf belonging to some landowner or other; he took to using the name Petrovich7 when he got his freedom and began drinking pretty heavily on all holidays, at first only on the most important holidays, but then on all church holidays indiscriminately, as long as there was a little cross in the calendar.8 In this respect, he was true to the customs of his forefathers and, when he quarrelled with his wife, he would call her a depraved woman and a German. Since we have now mentioned the wife, it will be necessary to say a few words about her too; but unfortunately not much was known about her, only that Petrovich had a wife, and that she even wore a bonnet rather than a headscarf;9 but beauty, so it seems, was not something of which she could boast – at any rate, it was only guardsmen who tried to peep under her bonnet when they met her, winking their moustaches and mouthing a rather peculiar sound.

  Climbing the stairs leading to Petrovich – which, to do them justice, had all been anointed with water and slops and were saturated through and through with that odour of spirits which makes the eyes smart and, as is well known, is a permanent presence on all the back stairs of Petersburg buildings – climbing the stairs, Akaky Akakiyevich was already wondering how much Petrovich would ask for the job, and he had made up his mind not to give him more than two roubles. The door stood open because Petrovich’s wife, while cooking some kind of fish, had filled the kitchen with so much smoke that it was impossible to make out even the very cockroaches. Akaky Akakiyevich made his way through the kitchen, unnoticed even by the housewife herself, and finally entered a room where he saw Petrovich on a wide, unpainted wooden table, sitting cross-legged like a Turkish pasha. His feet, as is the custom with tailors sitting at their work, were bare. And the first thing to strike the eye was his big toe, which Akaky Akakiyevich already knew very well, with its somehow deformed nail that was as thick and strong as the shell of a tortoise. From Petrovich’s neck hung a skein of silk and some cotton, and on his knees lay an old piece of cloth. He had been trying for several minutes to thread his needle but had had no success and was very angry with the darkness and even with the thread itself, muttering under his breath, ‘So you barbarian, you won’t go in? Well, I’ve had it with you, you bitch!’ Akaky Akakiyevich regretted that he had come just at the moment when Petrovich was getting angry: he liked to order something from Petrovich when the latter was a little under the influence or, as his wife put it, ‘had been hitting the bottle, the one-eyed devil’. In that state, Petrovich was usually very ready to give way and be reasonable, and he would even keep bowing and saying he was grateful. Later, it’s true, his wife would come round, wailing that her husband had been drunk and had asked too little, but all you had to do was throw in another ten kopeks and you had it all sewn up. But now it seemed that Petrovich was sober – and therefore tough and intractable and the devil knows what price he’d be asking. Akaky Akakiyevich grasped this and was, as they say, about to beat a retreat, but it was too late. Petrovich looked at him very intently, screwing up his one and only eye, and Akaky Akakiyevich involuntarily came out with the words, ‘Good day, Petrovich!’

  ‘I wish you a good day, sir!’ said Petrovich, and fixed his eye on Akaky Akakiyevich’s hands, wanting to make out what kind of booty the man was bringing.

  ‘So, Petrovich, here, er, I’ve…’

  It needs to be said that Akaky Akakiyevich expressed himself for the main part through prepositions, adverbs and, finally, such little particles as have decidedly no meaning at all. And if the matter was very awkward indeed, he even had a habit of not finishing sentences at all, and so it often happened that he would begin a speech with the words, ‘That, really, er, is altogether…’ and that was the end of it, and he himself would be oblivious, thinking everything had already been said.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Petrovich, at the same time examining with his one eye the whole of Akaky Akakiyevich’s uniform, beginning with the collar and going on to the sleeves, the back, the skirts and the buttonholes; everything was familiar to him, since it was his own work. Such is the custom among tailors: it is the first thing they do on meeting someone.

  ‘I’ve come, er, Petrovich… this greatcoat, the cloth… you see, it’s quite strong everywhere in other places, it’s just got a little dusty so it seems old, but it’s new, though there’s just one place where, er, it’s a little… on the back, and here on one shoulder it’s a little worn, I know, and a little on this shoulder – that’s all, you see. Not a lot of work.’

  Petrovich took the dressing gown, laid it out on the table, examined it for a long time, shook his head, then reached out to the window sill for his round snuffbox with a portrait of some general on it – exactly which general is unknown, because a finger had been poked through the place where the face was and a rectangular scrap of paper pasted over it. After taking a pinch, Petrovich held the dressing gown up in his hands and examined it against the light and once more shook his head. Then he held it up with the lining towards him and again shook his head, again removed the lid with the papered-over general, filled his nose with snuff, closed the box, put it away and finally said, ‘No, it’s a wretched garment. It’s beyond repair!’