Greasy Lake and Other Stories

The Overcoat II

There was a commotion near the head of the queue, people shouting, elbowing one another, wedging themselves in, and bracing for the inevitable shock wave that would pulse through the line, tumbling children, pregnant women, and unsuspecting old pensioners like dominoes. Akaky craned his neck to see what was happening, but he already knew: they were running out of meat. Two and a half hours on line for a lump of gristly beef to flavor his kasha and cabbage, nearly a hundred people ahead of him and Lenin knows how many behind, and they had to go and run out.

It was no surprise. The same thing had happened three days ago, last week, last month, last year. A cynic might have been led to grumble, to disparage the farmers, the truckers, the butchers and butchers’ assistants, to question their mental capacity and cast aspersions on their ancestry. But not Akaky. No, he was as patient and enduring as the limes along the Boulevard Ring, and he knew how vital personal sacrifice was to the Soviet socialist workers’ struggle against the forces of Imperialism and Capitalist Exploitation. He knew, because he’d been told. Every day. As a boy in school, as an adolescent in the Young Pioneers, as an adult in on-the-job political-orientation sessions. He read it in Pravda and Izvestia. heard it on the radio, watched it on TV. Whizz, whir, clack-clack-clack: the voice of Lenin was playing like a tape recording inside his head. “Working People of the Soviet Union! Struggle for a Communist attitude toward labor. Hold public property sacred and multiply it!”

“Meat,” cried a voice behind him. He squirmed round in disbelief — how could anyone be so insensitive as to voice a complaint in public? — and found himself staring down at the shriveled husk of an old woman, less than five feet tall, her babushkaed head mummy-wrapped against the cold. She was ancient, older than the Revolution, a living artifact escaped from the Museum of Serf Art. Akaky’s mouth had dropped open, the word “Comrade” flying to his lips in gentle remonstrance, when the man in front of him, impelled by the estuarine wash of the crowd, drove him up against the old woman with all the force of a runaway tram. Akaky clutched at her shoulders for balance, but she was ready for him, lowering her head and catching him neatly in the breastbone with the rock-hard knot in the crown of her kerchief. It was as if he’d been shot. He couldn’t breathe, tried to choke out an apology, found himself on the pavement beneath a flurry of unsteady feet. The old woman towered over him, her face as stolid and impassive as the monumental bust of Lenin at the Party Congress. “Meat,” she cried, “meat!”

Akaky stayed on another quarter of an hour, until a cordon of policemen marched up the street and superintended the closing of the store. It was 9:00 P.M. Akaky was beat. He’d been standing in one line or another since 5:30, when he left the ministry where he worked as file clerk, and all he had to show for it was eight russet potatoes, half a dozen onions, and twenty-six tubes of Czechoslovakian toothpaste he’d been lucky enough to blunder across while looking for a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Resigned, he started across the vacant immensity of Red Square on his way to Herzen Street and the Krasnaya Presnya district where he shared a communal apartment with two families and another bachelor. Normally he lingered a bit when crossing the great square, reveling in the majesty of it all — from the massive blank face of the Kremlin wall to the Oriental spires of Pokrovsky Cathedral — but now he hurried, uncommonly stung by the cold.

One foot after the next, a sharp echo in the chill immensity, ice in his nostrils, his shoulders rattling with the cold that clutched at him like a hand. What was it: twenty, twenty-five below? Why did it seem so much colder tonight? Was he coming down with something? One foot after the next, rap-rap-rap, and then he realized what it was: the overcoat. Of course. The lining had begun to come loose, peeling back in clumps as if it were an animal with the mange — he’d noticed it that morning, in the anteroom at the of fice — balls of felt dusting his shoes and trouser cuffs like snow. The coat was worthless, and he’d been a fool to buy it in the first place. But what else was there? He’d gone to the Central Department Store in response to a notice in the window—“Good Quality Soviet Made Winter Coats”—at a price he could afford. He remembered being surprised over the shortness and sparseness of the line, and over the clerk’s bemused expression as he handed him the cloth coat. “You don’t want this,” the clerk had said. The man was Akaky’s age, mustachioed. He was grinning.

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.

Akaky took his afternoon break in the window of a gloomy downstairs hallway rather than endure the noisy, overcrowded workers’ cafeteria. He munched a dry onion sandwich (he hadn’t seen butter in weeks), drank weak tea from a thermos, and absently scanned the Izvestia headlines: RECORD GRAIN HARVEST; KAMA RIVER TRUCK PLANT TRIPLES OUTPUT; AMERICAN NEGROES RIOT. When he got back to his desk he knew immediately that something was wrong — he sensed it, and yet he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. The others were watching him: he looked up, they looked down. What was it? Everything was in place on his desk — the calendar, the miniature of Misha the Olympic bear, his citation from the Revolutionary Order of United Soviet File Clerks for his twenty-five years of continuous service. . and then it occurred to him: he was late. He’d dozed over lunch, and now he was late getting back to his desk.

Frantic, he jerked round to look at the clock, and saw in that instant both that he was as punctual as ever and that a terrible, shaming transformation had come over the lifesize statue of Lenin that presided over the room like a guardian angel. Someone, some jokester, some flunky, had appropriated Akaky’s overcoat and draped it over the statue’s shoulders. This was too much. The bastards, the thoughtless, insensitive bastards. Akaky was on his feet, his face splotched with humiliation and anger. “How could you?” he shouted out. A hundred heads looked up. “Comrades: how could you do this to me?”

They were laughing. All of them. Even Turpentov and Moronov, so drunk they could barely lift their heads, even Rodion Mishkin, who sometimes played a game of chess with him over lunch. What was wrong with them? Was poverty a laughing matter? The overcoat clung to Lenin’s shoulders like a growth, the underarm torn away, a long tangled string of felt depending from the skirts like a tail. Akaky strode across the room, mounted the pedestal and retrieved his coat. “What is it with you?” he sputtered. “We’re all proletarians, aren’t we?” For some reason, this fired up the laughter again, a wave of it washing over the room like surf. The blond tough, the punk, was smirking at him from the safety of his desk across the room; Moronov was jeering from beneath his red, vodka-swollen nose. “Citizens!” Akaky cried. “Comrades!” No effect. And then, shot through with rage and shame and bewilderment, he shouted as he had never shouted in his life, roared like an animal in a cage: “Brothers!” he bellowed.

The room fell silent. They seemed stunned at his loss of control, amazed to see that this little man who for twenty-five years had been immovable, staid as a statue, was made of flesh and blood after all. Akaky didn’t know what he was doing. He stood there, the coat in one hand, the other clutching Lenin’s shoulder for support. All at once something came over him — he suddenly felt heroic, an orator, felt he could redeem himself with words, shame them with a spontaneous speech, take to the pulpit like one of the revolutionary sailors of the Potemkin. “Brothers,” he said, more softly, “don’t you realize—”

There was a rude noise from the far side of the room. It was the blond tough, razzing him. The tall one took it up — his accomplice — and then Turpentov, and in an instant they were all laughing and jeering again. Akaky stepped down from the pedestal and walked out the door.

As rooms go — even in apartment-starved Moscow — Akaky’s was pretty small, perhaps half a size larger than the one that drove Raskolnikov to murder. Actually, it was the foyer of the gloomy four-room apartment he shared with the eight Yeroshkins, five Romanovs, and old Studniuk. The room’s main drawback, of course, was that anyone entering or leaving the apartment had to troop through it: Sergei Yeroshkin, on the tail end of a three-day drunk; Olga Romanov, necking with her boyfriend at the door while a whistling draft howled through the room and Akaky tried fitfully to sleep; old Studniuk’s ancient, unsteady cronies lurching through the door like elephants on their way to the burial ground. It was intolerable. Or at least it would have been, had Akaky given it any thought. But it never occurred to him to question his lot in life or to demand that he and Studniuk switch rooms on a rotating basis or to go out and look for more amenable living quarters. He was no whining, soft-in-the-middle bourgeois, he was a hard-nosed revolutionary communist worker and an exemplary citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When industrial production goals were met, the party leaders would turn their attention to housing. Until then, there was no sense in complaining. Besides, if he really wanted privacy, he could duck into the coat closet.

Now, coming up the steps and into the still, darkened apartment, Akaky felt like an intruder in his own home. It was two-fifteen in the afternoon. He hadn’t been home at this hour in thirteen years, not since the time he’d come down with a double attack of influenza and bronchitis, and Mother Gorbanyevskaya (she’d had Studniuk’s room then) had nursed him with lentil soup and herb tea. He closed the door on silence: the place was deserted, the dying rays of the sun suffusing the walls with a soft eerie light, the samovar a lurking presence, shadows in the corners like spies and traducers. Without a pause, Akaky unfolded his bed, undressed, and pulled the covers up over his head. He had never felt more depressed and uncertain in his life: the injustice of it, the pettiness. He was a good man, true to the ideals of the Revolution, a generous man, inoffensive, meek: why did they have to make him their whipping boy? What had he done?

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 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?

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 penny. 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 mascaraed 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.”

There were a number of courses at dinner: a clear broth; fish in cream sauce; pickled sausages, white bread, and cheese; chicken, galushki, and Brussels sprouts. Rodion poured vodka and French wine throughout the meal, and afterward served a cherry cake and coffee. Akaky recognized some of the other guests from the office — faces but not names — and found himself engaged in a conversation with a man beside him over the melodic virtues of Dixieland jazz as opposed to the dissonance of free jazz. Akaky had never heard of either variety of jazz — in fact, he only vaguely knew what jazz was, a degenerate Negro sort of thing from America, with blaring horns and saxophones — but he smiled agreeably and asked an occasional question, while the man expatiated on one school of musical thought or another. Timidly, Akaky began to sip at the glass of wine before him; each time he turned around the glass was full again, and Rodion was beaming at him from the head of the table. He began to feel a depth of warmth and gratitude toward these people gathered around him, his comrades, men and women whose interests and knowledge ranged so far, whose wit flowed so easily: at one point he realized how much he’d been missing, felt that until now life had been passing him by. When Rodion proposed a toast to Masha — it was her birthday — Akaky was the first to raise his glass.

After the coffee, there was more vodka, a few hands of cards, and a good uproarious sing-along, all the old tunes Akaky had sung as a boy rising up for some deep hollow in him to burst forth as if he rehearsed them every day. He never missed a beat. When, finally, he thought to look at his watch, he was shocked to see that it was past one in the morning. Rodion’s eyes were bloodshot, and the patch of skin on his cheek seemed to have concentrated all the color in his face; Masha was nowhere to be seen, and only one other guest remained — the jazz man — snoring peaceably in the corner. Akaky leaped to his feet, thanked Rodion profusely—“Best time I’ve had in years, in years, Rodion Ivanovich”—and hurried out into the desolate streets.

It was still snowing. Silently, stealthily, while Akaky had been pulling strips of chicken from the bone, raising his glass and singing “How high the shrubless crags!” the snow had been steadily accumulating, until now it spread a flat, even finish over streets, stairways, and rooftops and clung like dander to the hoods of automobiles and the skeletons of neglected bicycles. Whistling, Akaky kicked through the ankle-deep powder, for once unmindful of his cracked imitation plastic galoshes and disintegrating gloves, the fox collar as warm as a hand against the back of his neck. As he turned into Red Square, he was thinking how lucky he was.

It was ghostly, the square, as barren as the surface of the moon, trackless and white. Behind him, Pokrovsky Cathedral, like some shrouded Turkish dream; ahead the dark bank of the Lenin Mausoleum and the soft, snow-blurred lights of the city. He was just passing the mausoleum when two men materialized before him. The one was tall, cheekbones like slashes, with a fierce Oriental mustache that disappeared in the folds of his muffler; the other was hooded and slight. “Comrade,” snarled the taller man, rushing at him out of the gloom, “that’s my coat you’ve got there.”

“No,” Akaky said, “no, you must be mistaken,” but the man had already taken hold of his collar and presented him with a bare fist the size of a football. The fist wavered under Akaky’s nose for an instant, then dropped into the darkness and hammered him three or four times in the midsection. Suddenly Akaky was on the ground, crying out like an abandoned infant, while the big man rolled him over and his accomplice tugged at the sleeve of the overcoat. Ten seconds later it was over. Akaky lay on the ground in his standard-brown serge suit and imitation plastic galoshes, doubled up in the fetal position, gasping for breath. The thugs were gone. In the near distance, the Kremlin wall drew a white line across the night. The snow sifted down with a hiss.

How he made it home that night, Akaky will never know. For a long while he merely lay there in the snow, stunned by the enormity of the crime against him, some last fiber of his faith and conviction frayed to the breaking point. He remembered the feel of the snowflakes brushing his lips and melting against his eyelids, remembered feeling warm and cozy despite it, remembered the overwhelming, seductive craving for oblivion, for sleep and surcease. As he lay there, drifting between consciousness and absence, the words of the First Secretary began to echo in his ears, over and over, a record stuck in the groove: “Our goal is to make the life of the Soviet people still better, still more beautiful, and still more happy.” Oh yes, oh yes, he thought, lying there on the ground. And then the man and woman had come along — or was it two men and a woman? — practically tripping over him in the dark. “My God,” the woman had gasped, “it’s a poor murdered man!”

They helped him to his feet, brushed the snow from his clothes. He was mad with the cold, with the hunger for justice — who said the world was fair or that everyone played by the same rules? — delirious with the fever of purpose. “The police!” he sputtered as a gloved hand held a flask of vodka to his lips. “I’ve been robbed.” They were solicitous, these people, faces and voices emerging dreamlike from the banks of swirling snow, but they were cautious too — distant even. (It was as though they weren’t quite sure what to make of his story — was he the victimized citizen he claimed to be, or merely a gibbering kopeck wheedler on the tail end of a drinking spree?) They guided him to the nearest precinct station and left him on the steps.

Pockets and cuffs heavy with snow, his eyebrows frosted over and lower lip quivering with indignation, Akaky burst through the massive double doors and into the cavernous anteroom of the Bolshaya Ordynka police station. It was about 3:00 A.M. Four patrolmen stood in the corner beneath the Soviet flag, drinking tea and joking in low tones; another pair sat together in the front row of an interminable file of benches, playing backgammon. At the far end of the chamber, on a dais, a jowly officer with thickly lidded eyes sat behind a desk the size of a pickup truck.

Akaky trotted the length of the room, a self-generated wind flapping round him, bits of compacted snow flying from his suit. “I’ve been beaten and robbed!” he cried, his voice strangely constricted, as if someone had hold of his windpipe. “In a public place. In Red Square. They took, they took”—here he felt himself racked by deep quaking bursts of sorrow so that he had to fight back the tears—“they took my overcoat!”

The desk sergeant looked down at him, immense, inscrutable, his head as heavy and shaggy as a circus bear’s. Behind him, a great faded mural depicted Lenin at the helm of the ship of state. After a long moment of absolute, drenching silence, the sergeant pressed a chubby hand to his eyes, then rattled some papers and waited for the clerk to appear at his side. The clerk, also in uniform, looked to be about eighteen or nineteen, his face cratered with acne. “You will fill out this form, comrade, delineating the salient details,” the clerk said, handing Akaky eight or ten pages of printed matter and an imitation ballpoint pen, “and then you will return at ten o’clock sharp tomorrow morning.”

Akaky sat over the form — Place of Employment, Birthdate, Mother’s Name and Shoe Size, Residence Permit Number, Previous Arrest Record — until past four in the morning. Then he handed it to the clerk, absently gathered up his hat and gloves, and wandered out into the teeth of the storm, as dazed and unsteady as the sole survivor of a shipwreck.

Akaky woke with a start at quarter past nine the following morning, the Ukrainian-made alarm clock having failed to go off on schedule. He was late for work, late for his appointment at the police station; his throat ached, a phlegmy cough clenched at his chest, and, worst of all, his overcoat was gone — gone, vanished, pilfered, three months’ salary down the drain. It hit him all at once, in the instant of waking, and he fell back against the pillow, paralyzed, crushed under the weight of catastrophe and loss of faith. “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!” he cried, taking the great man’s name in vain as the six smirking Yeroshkin brats trundled by his bed on their way to school, “what am I going to do now?”

If he could have buried himself then and there, piled the dirt eight feet high atop his bed, he would have done it. What was the sense in going on? But then he thought of the police — perhaps they’d apprehended the thieves, put them behind bars where they belonged; perhaps they’d recovered his overcoat. He pictured the bearlike sergeant handing it to him with his apologies, and then commending him for his alert description of the crime’s perpetrators and the swift and unhesitating way in which he’d filled out the crime report. As he pulled on the standard-brown serge trousers and imitation plastic boots, the image of the coat filled his consciousness and for a minute he was lost in reverie, remembering its softness, its lines, its snug and simple elegance. How long had he owned it — less than twenty-four hours? He wanted to cry.

His hand trembled as he knotted the olive-drab tie, finger-combed his hair, and tried to reach the office on Irina Yeroshkina’s telephone. “Hello? Kropotkin’s Laundry. May I be of assistance?” He hung up, dialed again. A voice immediately came over the wire, no salutation or identification, reading a list of numbers in a harsh, consonant-thick accent: “dva-dyevyat-odin-chyetirye-dva-dva—” Akaky’s stomach was on fire, his head pumped full of helium. He slammed down the receiver, snatched up the sad, ragged tatters of his Soviet-made overcoat, and hurried out the door.

It was three minutes past ten when he hurtled through the doors of the police station like a madman, out of breath, racked with shivers and trailing a dirty fringe of knotted felt lining. He ran headlong into a hunched old grandmother in a babushka — what was it about her that looked so familiar? — and realized with a start that the room that had been so empty just six hours ago was now thronged with people. The old woman, who called him a rude name and set down a bag of beets to give him a clean two-armed shove, was standing in an endless, snaking line that cut back on itself and circled the room twice. Akaky followed the line to the end and asked a man in knee boots and Tatar hat what was going on. The man looked up from the chess puzzle he’d been studying and fixed Akaky with a cold eye. “I assume you have a crime to report, comrade?”

Akaky bit his lower lip. “They took my overcoat.”

The man held up a closely inscribed form. “Have you picked up your report yet?”

“Well, no, I—”

“First door to your left,” the man said, turning back to his puzzle. Akaky looked in the direction the man had indicated and saw that a line nearly as long as the first was backed up outside the door. His stomach turned over like an egg in a skillet. This was going to be a wait.

At four-thirty, just when Akaky had begun to despair of gaining admission to the inner sanctum of the police headquarters or of ever seeing his overcoat again, a man in the uniform of the OBKhSS marched down the line to where Akaky was standing, snapped his heels together, and said: “Akaky A. Bashmachkin?” The OBKhSS was a branch of the Ministry of Internal Security, officially designated “The Department for the Struggle Against the Plundering of Socialist Property.” Its job, as Akaky was reminded each day in the newspapers and on TV, was to curtail black-market activities by cracking down on the pirating of the people’s goods to pay for foreign luxury items smuggled into the country. “Yes.” Akaky blinked. “I–I’ve lost an overcoat.”

“Come with me, please.” The man spun on one heel and stamped off in the direction from which he’d come, Akaky hurrying to keep up. They breezed by the sixty or so scowling citizens who made up the forward section of the line, passed through the heavy wooden door into a room swarming with victims, suspects, police officers, and clerks, and then through a second door, down a hallway, and finally into a long, low-ceilinged room dominated by a glossy conference table. A single man sat at the head of the table. He was bald-headed, clean-shaven, dressed in slippers, slacks, and sports shirt. “Have a seat,” he said, indicating a chair at the near end of the table. And then, to the OBKhSS man: “Watch the door, will you, Zamyotov?”

“Now,” he said, clearing his throat and consulting the form on the table before him, “you’re Akaky A. Bashmachkin, is that right?” His voice was warm, fraternal, spilling over the room like sugared tea. He could have been a country physician, a writer of children’s books, the genial veterinarian who’d tended the old cow Akaky’s grandmother had kept tethered outside the door when he was a boy in the Urals. “I’m Inspector Zharyenoye, Security Police,” he said.

Akaky nodded impatiently. “They’ve taken my overcoat, sir.”

“Yes,” said Zharyenoye, leaning forward, “why don’t you tell me about it.”

Akaky told him. In detail. Told him of the mockery he’d been exposed to at the office, of Petrovich’s promise, of the overcoat itself, and of the brutal, uncommunist spirit of the men who’d taken it from him. His eyes were wet when he was finished.

Zharyenoye had listened patiently throughout Akaky’s recitation, interrupting him only twice — to ask Petrovich’s address and to question what Akaky was doing in Red Square at one-thirty in the morning. When Akaky was finished, Zharyenoye snapped his fingers and the antiplunderer from the OBKhSS stepped into the room and laid a package on the table. The inspector waved his hand, and the man tore back the wrapping paper.

Akaky nearly leaped out of his chair: there, stretched out on the table before him, as pristine and luxurious as when he’d first laid eyes on it, was his overcoat. He was overjoyed, jubilant, he was delirious with gratitude and relief. Suddenly he was on his feet, pumping the OBKhSS man’s hand. “I can hardly believe it,” he exclaimed. “You’ve found it, you’ve found my overcoat!”

“One moment, Comrade Bashmachkin,” the inspector said. “I wonder if you might positively identify the coat as the one you were deprived of early this morning. Has your name been sewed into the lining perhaps? Can you tell me what the pockets contain?”

Akaky wanted to kiss the inspector’s bald pate, dance him round the room: how good the policemen were, how efficient and dedicated and clever. “Yes, yes, of course. Um, in the right front pocket there’s an article clipped from the paper on cheese production in Chelyabinsk — my grandmother used to make her own.”

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.