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!”