“Well it’s a long story. Next day I hauled him back onto the number 17 tram, and off we went; a hearse would have done better, but where were we to find one? As we were getting off at Teatralnaya, the people behind us begun to shove and shout: ‘Get off, will you!’ ‘ You’re holding everyone up!’ ‘The man moves like a corpse!’ I turned around and I said, ‘Right you are, because he is a corpse.’ Again they begun shouting and elbowing me in the back: ‘And now you!’ ‘Get off this tram, you so-and-so!’ Well, I understand, people are busy and rushing about with their absent eyes, what do they care that a person hasn’t been properly buried?
“I struggled along with my unlucky-come-lately—hugging one wall then another—all the way to the employment office. There, in Rakhmanny Lane, it got easier: I stood him in line—when the person ahead gave way, the person behind pushed—and saw things were looking up. I poked his certificate between my fingers and said to myself, ‘Think I’ll run out for some tobacco and then look up an acquaintance nearby, he may have some advice.’ And off I went. Well that acquaintance, he told me: ‘Listen,’ he says ‘you better get rid of your stiff because this kind of thing hasn’t been decrimiligaturitized.’ (That’s what he said.) And that word—decrim… can’t even pronounce it a second time— I tell you, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Wasn’t scared before, but now…
“As I dragged myself back—along Rakhmanny—I just hoped his certificate would do the trick. I begun looking for him among the backs behind back behind backs, all so rigid and stock-still you couldn’t tell which was dead and which was alive. I climbed the steps, went inside, and there he was jammed up against the wall with his head stuck fast in the window: couldn’t budge. So I went up to the window—the clerk, he was fuming: ‘What are you, citizen, deaf or dumb? That’s the wrong certificate, we can’t register you. Stop holding everyone up! Next!’ I yanked my laggard out elbows, my old arms could barely support him—he’d gotten so heavy with wanting to pitch over—and then people begun to talk: ‘They didn’t register him? Why? What certificate? Show us!’ I showed ‘em. ‘Good people,’ I says, ‘what is this? He’s got his death certificate, and suddenly they won’t register him. Now if it was irregular, that I could… but this one’s got a number, and a stamp, and everything. How can that be?’ Straightaway we had, you know, acres of elbow room.
“So back I got with my graveless good-for-nothing out into the hurly-burly and the hubbub: motorcars hootering on all sides, people rushing this way and that, briefcases banging into briefcases, eyes absent. In my anger, I gave the thing up as hopeless—that acquaintance’s ‘regrim…’ Drat! I still can’t pronounce it.”
“Recrimiligaturitized,” I prompted.
“That’s it… that ‘turitized’ had shook me up. ‘Goodbye, Uninvited,’ I says. But by now he couldn’t open his mouth. Then a wave of people swept us up and tumbled us apart—him to one side, me to another—and I saw my come-lately go bobbing off like a bubble in the gutter, being carried farther and farther away by the crowding crowds. I took my cap off and I crossed myself: God rest his soul. Amen.
“After that, anytime I chanced to be in town, any man I met, I stared: might he be the graveless wanderer? But I never did see him again, fate willed otherwise. Don’t suppose you ever came across him?”