Little Apples

TROUBLING THOUGHTS

Aclassics instructor of severe, inflexible, bilious aspect but a secret dreamer and freethinker, complained to me that whenever he oversaw student presentations or attended teachers’ meetings, he was tortured by troubling and unsolvable questions. Invariably, he complained, his mind was assailed by matters such as: What would happen if the floor were the ceiling, and the ceiling the floor? Are ancient languages profitable or unprofitable? How would instructors be called before the director if his office were located on the moon? These and similar questions, if they persistently preoccupy one’s mind, are referred to by psychiatrists as “obsessive thoughts.” It is a troubling, incurable ailment, but fascinating for the onlooker. The other day, the instructor approached me and said he was preoccupied by the issue of what would happen if men dressed like women. An incongruous, even uncouth question perhaps, though not one particularly difficult to answer. The classics instructor himself provided the following response. If men dressed like women, then:

Low-ranking members of the civil service, such as collegiate registrars, would appear in calico dresses, though on high feast days perhaps in muslin ones. They would wear one-ruble corsets and striped stockings made of paper. Décolletés would only be permitted when they were among themselves;

Postmen and reporters who raise their skirts to step over ditches and puddles would be called to account for outraging public decency;

Moscow’s great littérateur, Sergey Andreyevich Yuriev, would walk about in crinolines and a cotton bonnet;

School guards Mikhei and Makar would appear before the director every morning to lace him into his corset;

Officers on special assignments and secretaries of charitable societies would dress beyond their means;

Maikov the poet would wear his hair in ringlets, and appear in a green dress with red ribbons and a cap;

The ample frame of the Pan-Slavist leader Ivan Aksakov would be draped in the flowered smock of a village babushka;

The directors of the Lozovo-Sevastopol Railways would, on account of their poverty, strut about in petticoats.

And as for the conversations:

“Your bodice is above all criticism, Your Excellency, and the bustle is excellent. Your décolleté might, however, be a little low.”